Notable British Novelists, 3 vol. set (Magill's Choice)

Notable British Novelists

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MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Notable British Novelists

Volume 1 Richard Adams — Ford Madox Ford 1 – 350

edited by

Carl Rollyson

SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Copyright © 2001, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Essays originally appeared in Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Second Revised Edition, 2000; new material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Notable British novelists / editor, Carl Rollyson p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89356-204-1 (set : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-208-4 (v. 1 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-209-2 (v. 2 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-237-8 (v. 3 : alk. paper) 1. English fiction-—Bio-bibliography-—Dictionaries. 2. Novelists, English—Biography—Dictionaries. 3. English fiction— Dictionaries I. Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund) II. Series. PR821.N57 2001 820.9′0003—dc21 [B] 00-046380

First Printing

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Contents — Volume 1 Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Richard Adams Kingsley Amis . Martin Amis . . Jane Austen . .

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J. G. Ballard . . . Julian Barnes . . Aphra Behn . . . Arnold Bennett . Elizabeth Bowen Charlotte Brontë Emily Brontë . . Anita Brookner . John Bunyan . . . Anthony Burgess Fanny Burney . . Samuel Butler . .

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Lewis Carroll . . . . Angela Carter . . . . Joyce Cary . . . . . . G. K. Chesterton . . Agatha Christie . . . Arthur C. Clarke . . Wilkie Collins . . . . Ivy Compton-Burnett Joseph Conrad . . . . A. J. Cronin . . . . .

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139 145 152 164 171 180 186 195 204 219

Daniel Defoe . . . . Walter de la Mare . . Charles Dickens . . . Arthur Conan Doyle Margaret Drabble . . Daphne Du Maurier Lawrence Durrell . .

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231 245 251 264 277 291 296

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Notable British Novelists

Maria Edgeworth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 George Eliot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Henry Fielding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 Ford Madox Ford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

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Publisher’s Note Notable British Novelists consists of biographical sketches and analyses of 104 of the best-known English, Scottish, and Irish writers of long fiction from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. The set’s three volumes, which are a combination of new essays and updated essays from The Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2000), examine the works most often studied in high school and undergraduate literature classes. Notable British Novelists profiles eighty-nine English, six Scottish, and nine Irish writers. The Irish writers chosen for this set lived under British rule before the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 or had careers that were closely associated with Great Britain; therefore, such modern Irish masters as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are not included. Notable British Novelists examines novelists from the early fifteenth century, such as Sir Thomas Malory, to the present. Seventeenth century writers include Aphra Behn and Samuel Butler, and eighteenth century authors Fanny Burney, Henry Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, and Laurence Sterne are featured. Included in the discussions of nineteenth century writers are Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Anthony Trollope. Authors of the twentieth century include Margaret Drabble, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Powell, and Virginia Woolf. A range of genres and styles is explored in this set, from the gothicism of Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Matthew Gregory Lewis to the postmodernism of Anthony Burgess. Fantasy fiction is represented by Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, and the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and H. G. Wells is included. Among the detective and mystery writers featured are Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and P. D. James, and writers of satire include Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, and Martin Amis. Also featured are the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Graves and the feminist fiction of Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Fay Weldon. Each essay provides reference information at its beginning: the novelist’s birth and death dates and a list of the principal works of long fiction, with publication dates. This is followed by “Other literary forms,” which briefly looks at the author’s works of drama, poetry, nonfiction, or short fiction, and “Achievements,” which notes principal honors and awards. The major sections of the text follow: “Biography” offers a summary of the writer’s personal and professional life, and “Analysis” looks at the author’s work in detail. The longest section in the article, “Analysis” is divided into subsections focusing on the major individual works. These subsections offer a short summary of the work and illustrate the themes and techniques used by the novelist. “Other major works” follows “Analysis” and is a categorized list of major works in genres other than long fiction, with publication dates. Each essay ends with an updated, annotated bibliography. The majority of essays are accompanied by a portrait of the author. The three-volume set is arranged alphabetically. Three helpful reference tools are featured at the end of volume 3: a glossary of “Terms and techniques,” a time line of the novelists’ birth dates and places, and an index. A list of contributing scholars and their affiliations appears at the beginning of volume 1. vii

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List of Contributors McCrea Adams Independent scholar

John R. Clark University of South Florida

Michael Adams CUNY Graduate Center

Samuel Coale Independent scholar

Patrick Adcock Henderson State University

David W. Cole University of Wisconsin Center-Baraboo

S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal Indian Institute of Technology

Deborah Core Eastern Kentucky University

Jane Anderson Jones Manatee Community College

Carol I. Croxton University of Southern Colorado

Stanley Archer Texas A&M University

Marsha Daigle-Williamson Spring Arbor College

Gerald S. Argetsinger Rochester Institute of Technology

Diane D’Amico Independent scholar

Bryan Aubrey Independent scholar

J. Madison Davis Pennsylvania State University

James Barbour Independent scholar

Frank Day Clemson University

Carol M. Barnum Southern College of Technology

Paul J. deGategno North Carolina Wesleyan Colllege

David Barratt Independent scholar

DeVitis, A. A. Purdue University

Kirk H. Beetz Independent scholar

Henry J. Donaghy Kansas State University

Todd K. Bender University of Wisconsin, Madison

David B. Eakin University of Mississippi

K. Bhaskara Rao Physical Research Laboratory

Grace Eckley Independent scholar

Mary A. Blackmon Hardin-Simmons University

Wilton Eckley Colorado School of Mines

Steve D. Boilard Independent scholar

Robert P. Ellis Independent scholar

Mitzi M. Brunsdale Mayville State College

Ann Willardson Engar Independent scholar

C. F. Burgess Independent scholar

Kenneth Friedenreich Independent scholar ix

Notable British Novelists Kristine Ottesen Garrigan DePaul University

Sarah B. Kovel Independent scholar

Peter W. Graham Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Lawrence F. Laban Independent scholar Eugene Larson Pierce College

John R. Griffin University of Southern Colorado

William Laskowski Jamestown College

Stephen I. Gurney Bemidji State University

Michael Lowenstein Harris-Stowe State College

Angela Hague Middle Tennessee State University

R. C. Lutz University of the Pacific

Richard A. Spurgeon Hall Methodist College

James J. Lynch Independent scholar

Melanie Hawthorne Texas A&M University

Fred B. McEwen Waynesburg College

William J. Heim University of South Florida

Richard D. McGhee Arkansas State University

Greig E. Henderson University of Toronto

David W. Madden California State University, Sacramento

Erwin Hester East Carolina University

Lois A. Marchino University of Texas at El Paso

Faith Hickman Brynie Independent scholar

Patricia Marks Valdosta State College

Nika Hoffman Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences

John L. Marsden Indiana University of Pennsylvania

John R. Holmes Franciscan University of Steubenville

Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach

Mary Anne Hutchinson Utica College of Syracuse University

Laurence W. Mazzeno Alvernia College

Betty H. Jones Rutgers University

Sally Mitchell Temple University

Anna B. Katona Independent scholar

Carole Moses Independent scholar

Anne Kelsch Breznau Independent scholar

Brian Murray Youngstown State University

Catherine Kenney Independent scholar

Allan Nelson Caldwell College

John V. Knapp Independent scholar

Martha Nochimson Independent scholar

Grove Koger Boise Public Library x

List of Contributors William Peden University of Missouri, Columbia

Katherine Snipes Independent scholar

Robert C. Petersen Middle Tennessee State University

George Soule Carleton College

Charles H. Pullen Queens University

Brian Stableford Independent scholar

Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Charleston Southern University

Isabel Bonnyman Stanley East Tennessee State University

Samuel J. Rogal Illinois State University

William B. Stone Independent scholar

Joseph Rosenblum University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Christopher J. Thaiss George Mason University

Dale Salwak Citrus College

Ronald G. Walker Western Illinois University

Vasant A. Shahane University of New Hampshire

John Michael Walsh Hofstra University

John C. Shields Independent scholar

Gary Westfahl University of California, Riverside

Marjorie Smelstor University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire

Roger E. Wiehe Independent scholar

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Complete List of Contents Contents—Volume 1 G. K. Chesterton, 164 Agatha Christie, 171 Arthur C. Clarke, 180 Wilkie Collins, 186 Ivy Compton-Burnett, 195 Joseph Conrad, 204 A. J. Cronin, 219 Daniel Defoe, 231 Walter de la Mare, 245 Charles Dickens, 251 Arthur Conan Doyle, 264 Margaret Drabble, 277 Daphne Du Maurier, 291 Lawrence Durrell, 296 Maria Edgeworth, 305 George Eliot, 317 Henry Fielding, 330 Ford Madox Ford, 343

Richard Adams, 1 Kingsley Amis, 6 Martin Amis, 21 Jane Austen, 29 J. G. Ballard, 41 Julian Barnes, 51 Aphra Behn, 58 Arnold Bennett, 65 Elizabeth Bowen, 76 Charlotte Brontë, 83 Emily Brontë, 92 Anita Brookner, 98 John Bunyan, 107 Anthony Burgess, 114 Fanny Burney, 123 Samuel Butler, 132 Lewis Carroll, 139 Angela Carter, 145 Joyce Cary, 152

Contents—Volume 2 Arthur Koestler, 525 D. H. Lawrence, 534 John le Carré, 559 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 572 Doris Lessing, 580 C. S. Lewis, 591 Matthew Gregory Lewis, 601 Penelope Lively, 609 Malcolm Lowry, 614 Rose Macaulay, 626 Sir Thomas Malory, 632 Charles Robert Maturin, 641 W. Somerset Maugham, 649 George Meredith, 658 Iris Murdoch, 667 George Orwell, 687 Walter Pater, 696

E. M. Forster, 351 John Fowles, 366 John Galsworthy, 380 Elizabeth Gaskell, 389 George Gissing, 399 William Golding, 407 Oliver Goldsmith, 418 Robert Graves, 423 Graham Greene, 435 Thomas Hardy, 445 L. P. Hartley, 461 Aldous Huxley, 468 P. D. James, 481 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 490 Samuel Johnson, 499 Elizabeth Jolley, 509 Rudyard Kipling, 516 xiii

Notable British Novelists

Contents—Volume 3 Robert Louis Stevenson, 883 Jonathan Swift, 891 William Makepeace Thackeray, 899 J. R. R. Tolkien, 912 Anthony Trollope, 925 John Wain, 936 Evelyn Waugh, 948 Fay Weldon, 959 H. G. Wells, 966 Paul West, 973 T. H. White, 983 Oscar Wilde, 988 A. N. Wilson, 994 Angus Wilson, 1001 P. G. Wodehouse, 1010 Virginia Woolf, 1019

Thomas Love Peacock, 707 Anthony Powell, 716 J. B. Priestley, 729 Barbara Pym, 737 Ann Radcliffe, 745 Mary Renault, 754 Jean Rhys, 762 Dorothy Richardson, 769 Samuel Richardson, 777 Susanna Rowson, 787 Dorothy L. Sayers, 796 Sir Walter Scott, 807 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 824 Tobias Smollett, 835 C. P. Snow, 843 Muriel Spark, 855 Laurence Sterne, 870

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Richard Adams RichardA dams

Born: Newbury, England; May 9, 1920 Principal long fiction · Watership Down, 1972; Shardik, 1974; The Plague Dogs, 1977; The Girl in a Swing, 1980; Maia, 1984; Traveller, 1988. Other literary forms · Richard Adams has written two collections of short fiction, one of which, Tales from Watership Down (1996), is in part a sequel to his most famous novel. His other works include several illustrated children’s books in verse; an illustrated series of nature guides; an account of a journey to Antarctica, Voyage Through the Antarctic (1982), cowritten with Ronald M. Lockley, the author of the factual basis for Watership Down; and an autobiography covering the first part of his life through his demobilization after World War II, The Day Gone By (1990). Achievements · Called by English writer A. N. Wilson “the best adventure-storywriter alive,” Richard Adams is most famous for taking the talking-animal story out of the genre of children’s literature and informing it with mature concerns and interests, as in his first great success, Watership Down, which won the Carnegie Award and the Guardian award for children’s fiction in 1972. He continued this transformation in The Plague Dogs and Traveller. Adams also made his mark in fantasy literature; his imaginary kingdom of Bekla is the backdrop for Shardik and Maia, novels whose main concerns, slavery and warfare, definitely remove them from the realm of children’s literature. He also wrote a less successful full-length ghost story, The Girl in a Swing. Biography · The youngest of three children, Richard Adams spent an idyllic childhood (“the happiest [days] of my life”) growing up on the outskirts of Newbury, England. His father, a local doctor, transmitted his knowledge of and love for the flora and fauna of the region to his son, whose later devotion to animal welfare was also inspired by Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle books. Adams’s father also instilled in his son a lifelong interest in storytelling, which Adams later honed in bedtime tales told to roommates at prep school. Other important influences included the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910) by Walter de la Mare, and the silent Rin-Tin-Tin films. All would later echo in his fiction. While his time at prep school was often unpleasant, Adams thoroughly enjoyed his public school experience at Bradfield. The school put on a yearly play in its open-air theater, often a classical Greek drama, and Adams called the theater the place where he was “more consistently happy than anywhere else.” Bradfield also encouraged his love of literature, the Greek and Roman classics, and history, the subject in which Adams won a scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1938. Adams was grateful to Oxford for its acceptance of what he called one’s “fantasy potential.” Adams’s Oxford years were interrupted, like those of so many others, by World War II. Adams chose to serve in the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), which is mainly concerned with transport and communication duties, but later he volunteered 1

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for the airborne arm of the RASC and served in the Middle East and in Singapore. On his return to England, Adams was shocked to learn how many of his Oxford companions had died during the war. After demobilization, Adams soon met Elizabeth Acland, whom he would later marry and with whom he would have two daughters. In 1948 he joined the British Civil Service, but he never abandoned his love for storytelling. Watership Down began, like many other “children’s” classics, as a story initially told by the author to his children (in this case to entertain them on a long car trip); two years after its publication, Adams was able to retire from the Civil Service and write full-time at his various homes in the south of England. Analysis · In each of his novels, Richard Adams adopts a different individual narrative voice: easygoing and colloquial in Watership Down and Maia, stately and epic in Shardik, ironic and densely allusive in The Plague Dogs, and the very different first-person voices in The Girl in a Swing and Traveller. On the surface, Adams’s natural gift as a storyteller is his strongest talent. Yet his novels deserve to be read more for his habitual concerns: a love for “the surface of the earth,” as George Orwell called it, as manifested in the English countryside and the creatures who inhabit it; a hatred for the cruelties that human beings inflict on the other inhabitants of this world, as well as on themselves; and an acute awareness of the transitory nature of existence and the evanescence of friendship and love. Watership Down · Watership Down burst on the literary scene in 1972, as unlikely a success as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1955) had been two decades earlier. Its plot and character seemed those of a children’s book: A group of rabbits leave their threatened burrow and make a dangerous journey to find a new home, as well as enough new rabbits to ensure its continuation. Yet in its length and often violent action it certainly went beyond the boundaries of a children’s work, and it succeeded with many adults. It even led to some shameless imitations, such as William Horwood’s mole epic, Duncton Wood (1980), but none had the imagination and freshness of the original. As Tolkien did with the hobbits, Adams made his exotic characters familiar by giving them an easily identifiable demotic speech. Hazel, Bigwig, and the others speak much like what the originals they are modeled on must have sounded like: Adams’s companions in the 205th company of the RASC during World War II. (Hazel, according to Adams, is his commanding officer, John Gifford, and Bigwig is Paddy Kavanagh, who was killed in battle.) The rabbits, like their soldier counterparts, are believable everyday heroes. Their persistence in the face of daunting odds, their relatively unflappable demeanor as they are introduced into new and dangerous surroundings, their ingenuity in overcoming their difficulties—all recall the best qualities of those soldiers in the war. The familiar speech is also reproduced in the novel’s narrative voice, which is often that of a good oral storyteller; as Adams said, “A true folk-tale teller is usually rather colloquial.” This informality helps to disguise the classical underpinnings of the work, the main one of which is Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.). There are also echoes of Xenophon’s Anabasis (fourth century b.c.e.) and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (both c. 800 b.c.e.), with Hazel as a more trustworthy Odysseus and Bigwig a less belligerent Achilles. These archetypal characters and plot devices are also supported by the scientific accuracy of the details of the rabbits’ lives, which Adams culled from The

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Private Life of the Rabbit by R. M. Lockley (1964). Familiar yet exotic characters, an epic story, and verisimilitude of milieu contribute to the lasting and deserved appeal of Watership Down. (Tales from Watership Down, in its latter half a sequel to the novel, also serves as an answer to those who accused the original of, among other charges, sexism.) Shardik · Adams’s next novel, Shardik, disappointed many of his readers, for while on the surface, like Watership Down, a fantasy, it was far removed from the first novel in setting, characters, and plot. Adams constructs the mythical land of Bekla, whose precarious peace is shattered by the emergence of a great bear, which is taken by many to be the avatar of the god Shardik. After a short rule by the bear’s chief follower, Kelderek, the bear escapes, and Kelderek must learn the real meaning of the irruption of Shardik into the lives of so many people. For much of the book, the characters are unlikable, the setting is foreign without being exotic, and the plot seems to be nothing but one violent incident after another. The narration is also different from that in Watership Down, in this case, much more stately and epic in tone, with self-consciously Homeric similes interrupting the narrative flow. Yet, in the end Shardik is satisfying, once the reader grasps the greater themes of the novel. Shardik’s reign has allowed slavery to flourish once again in Bekla, and only by suffering and death can Shardik and Kelderek redeem themselves and society. Adams’s own horror at slavery, both literary and real, echoes in the plot: The evil slaver Genshed is consciously modeled on Stowe’s great villain in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Simon Legree, and the mutilated beggar boys seen by Adams from a troop train in India are reproduced in some Beklan slaves. Adams’s own hatred of war causes the first half of the book almost to be anti-epic in its drive: The religious war it depicts is nasty, brutish, and long. Once the arc of the plot is evident, Shardik can be seen as an epic indictment of the horrors of epic war. The Plague Dogs · The Plague Dogs is the most tendentious of Adams’s novels. The title characters are trying to escape from a laboratory in England’s Lake Country, where they have been subjected to cruel and unnecessary experiments. Although seemingly a return to the mode of his greatest success, the grown-up animal novel, it is much more a satire filled with savage indignation at the lengths to which humans will use and abuse other species, a satire which gains effect from Adams’s experience working in government bureaucracies. Like Shardik, it is an investigation of cruelty, this time toward what the novel calls “animal slaves”: “It’s a bad world for the helpless,” as one of its characters says. Once again Adams adopts a new narrative voice, particularly in the sections concerning humans, this one arch and packed with literary allusions. The novel is not totally one-sided, the case being made near the end for useful animal medical experimentation. Yet again it is in his animal portrayals that Adams best succeeds, particularly those of the dog Snitter, whose nonsense language, caused by a brain operation, echoes that of dramatist William Shakespeare’s fools, and of the wild fox, whose feral otherness seems to be an answer to criticisms of Adams’s cozy rabbits. The Girl in a Swing · Adams’s next two novels are major departures, explorations of the themes of sexuality and love, subjects he only tangentially touched on previously. The Girl in a Swing is nominally a ghost story, but more a depiction of the obsessive love that the hero, Alan Desland, feels for Käthe, a German girl whom he meets in

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Copenhagen and swiftly marries, not knowing that she is trying to escape a ghost from her past. There are echoes of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)—Käthe as Cathy Earnshaw—but Alan is no Heathcliff, and while Adams’s depictions of local scenery remain one of his strengths—much of the locale is again borrowed from Adams’s childhood—the end of the novel is more deflationary than chilling. Adams said that ghosts in English horror writer M. R. James’s short stories are knowingly artificial, but the one in Girl in a Swing is unfortunately no less an umbra ex machina, a ghost from the machine. Maia · Maia returns to the fantasy world of Bekla which Adams created in Shardik to tell the story of the eponymous heroine who undergoes a transformation from literal sex slave to country matron, all described at sometimes tedious length, in more than twelve hundred pages. Adams’s narrative style here is more familiar than that in Shardik, his similes shorter, homelier, and less epic. However, the reproduction of the girl’s countrified speech becomes irritating, and anachronisms such as discussions of infection and primitive vaccination are annoying. The plot is basic: Girl meets boy; girl loses boy; girl gets boy. However, the girl does not even meet the boy until almost halfway through the novel, making for difficult reading. The underlying theme is much the same as Shardik’s, as the good side attempts to eradicate slavery in the Beklan empire, but this time the scenes of sadism that Adams describes become extremely uncomfortable. In Shardik such scenes had a moral point, but here their purpose seems cloudier: We know these characters are villains, so several scenes explicitly depicting their villainy are uncalled for. On the positive side, Adams once again depicts actions that undercut fantasy epic conventions: Maia’s most heroic actions are undertaken to prevent, and not to further, violence and warfare. Yet at the end, when Maia has become a contented country wife and mother, the reader wonders how this matron grew out of the girl who, some nine hundred pages earlier, had realized she possessed “an exceptional erotic attitude” and proceeded to use and enjoy it. Traveller · Traveller is basically the story of the Civil War seen through the eyes and told by the voice of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s famous horse. In this novel, Adams plays to all his strengths, including a new narrative voice, this one a modification of Joel Chandler Harris’s in the Uncle Remus stories; a singular, believable animal persona through which the action is described; and a depiction of his favorite themes: hatred of war, admiration for those who must suffer through it, and sorrow over the ephemerality of comrades and friendship. The bravery of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia is, as Adams elsewhere said, a reflection of Adams’s own pride in the gallantry of the British 1st Airborne Division in the battle of Arnhem. Lee is Adams’s quintessential hero because he treats both animals and people with dignity and respect. Traveller, like satirist Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms (Gulliver’s Travels, 1726), is aghast at humankind’s capacity for cruelty, but he is not keen enough (or anachronistic enough) to see the cruelty that slavery commits. Traveller is, as another horse calls him, “thick”: At Gettysburg, he thinks Pickett’s charge succeeds, and at Appomattox, he thinks the Federals have surrendered to “Marse Robert.” However, he gets the basic truth right: “Horses [are] for ever saying goodbye.” It was the lesson Adams learned when he returned to Oxford after the war to learn of his friends’ deaths, and it is the grave lesson that has informed his best fiction. William Laskowski

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Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Unbroken Web: Stories and Fables, 1980 (originally The Iron Wolf and Other Stories); Tales from Watership Down, 1996. NONFICTION: Nature Through the Seasons, 1975 (with Max Hooper); Nature Day and Night, 1978 (with Hooper); Voyage Through the Antarctic, 1982 (with Ronald M. Lockley); A Nature Diary, 1985; The Day Gone By, 1990. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Tyger Voyage, 1976; The Adventures of and Brave Deeds of the Ship’s Cat on the Spanish Maine: Together with the Most Lamentable Losse of the Alcestis and Triumphant Firing of the Port of Chagres, 1977; The Legend of Te Tuna, 1982; The Bureaucats, 1985. EDITED TEXT: Sinister and Supernatural Stories, 1978. Bibliography Bridgman, Joan. “The Significance of Myth in Watership Down.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 6, no. 1 (1993): 7-24. Demonstrates the influence of Walter de la Mare’s The Three Mulla-Mulgars on the novel. Chapman, Edgar. “The Shaman as Hero and Spiritual Leader: Richard Adams’ Mythmaking in Watership Down and Shardik.” Mythlore 5 (August, 1978): 7-11. Solid treatment of Shardik and myth; less reliable on Watership Down. Kitchell, Kenneth. “The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: From Homer to Richard Adams’s Watership Down.” Classical and Modern Literature 7 (Fall, 1986): 13-30. Convincing argument that Adams’s novel is a modern epic. Meyer, Charles. “The Power of Myth and Rabbit Survival in Richard Adams’ Watership Down.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3, no. 4 (1994): 139-150. Shows the connections between the novel and R. M. Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit. Miltner, Robert. “Watership Down: A Genre Study.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 6, no. 1 (1993): 63-70. Traces the various literary genres to which the novel belongs.

Kingsley Amis Kingsley Amis

Born: London, England; April 16, 1922 Died: London, England; October 22, 1995 Principal long fiction · Lucky Jim, 1954; That Uncertain Feeling, 1955; I Like It Here, 1958; Take a Girl Like You, 1960; One Fat Englishman, 1963; The Egyptologists, 1965 (with Robert Conquest); The Anti-Death League, 1966; Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure, 1968 (as Robert Markham); I Want It Now, 1968; The Green Man, 1969; Girl, 20, 1971; The Riverside Villas Murder, 1973; Ending Up, 1974; The Crime of the Century, 1975 (serial), 1987 (book); The Alteration, 1976; Jake’s Thing, 1978; Russian Hide-andSeek, 1980; Stanley and the Women, 1984; The Old Devils, 1986; Difficulties with Girls, 1988; The Crime of the Century, 1988; The Folks That Live on the Hill, 1990; The Russian Girl, 1992; You Can’t Do Both, 1994; The Biographer’s Moustache, 1995. Other literary forms · Kingsley Amis is best known as a novelist, but readers have turned often to his other writings for the insight they give into the man and his fiction. Many of the themes that are explored in depth in his novels are expressed indirectly in the peripheral works. He published several collections of short stories, entitled My Enemy’s Enemy (1962), Collected Short Stories (1980), and Mr. Barrett’s Secret and Other Stories (1993). Dear Illusion, a novella, was published in 1972 in a limited edition of five hundred copies. His collections of poetry include: Bright November (1947), A Frame of Mind (1953), A Case of Samples: Poems, 1946-1956 (1956), The Evans Country (1962), A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957-1967 (1967), and Collected Poems: 1944-1979 (1979). Amis published his opinionated Memoirs in 1991. His criticism covers an extremely wide range; in addition to studies of figures as diverse as Jane Austen and Rudyard Kipling, he published one of the first significant critical books on science fiction, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), a work that has done much to encourage academic study of the genre and to win recognition for many gifted writers. The James Bond Dossier (1965), Lucky Jim’s Politics (1968), several volumes of collected science fiction, edited with Robert Conquest and entitled Spectrum: A Science Fiction Anthology (1961-1965), and The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997) offer further evidence of the extraordinary range of his work. Achievements · Almost from the beginning of his career, Amis enjoyed the attention of numerous commentators. Because his works have been filled with innovations, surprises, and variations in techniques and themes, it is not surprising that critics and reviewers alike found it difficult to make a definitive statement about his achievements. The range of his work is extraordinary: fiction, poetry, reviews, criticism, humor, science fiction, and biography. Of all of his writings, however, his achievement depends most upon his novels. Amis’s early novels are considered by many critics to be “angry” novels of protest against the contemporary social, political, and economic scene in Britain. The themes include resentment of a rigid class stratification, rejection of formal institutional ties, discouragement with the economic insecurity and low status of those without money, loathing of pretentiousness in any form, and disenchantment with the past. Because 6

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many of Amis’s contemporaries, including John Wain, John Osborne, John Braine, and Alan Sillitoe, seemed to express similar concerns, and because many came from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, went to Oxford or Cambridge Universities, and taught for a time at a provincial university, journalists soon spoke of them as belonging to a literary movement. The “Angry Young Men,” as their fictional heroes were called, were educated men who did not want to be conventional gentlemen. Kenneth Allsop called them “a new, rootless, faithless, classless class” lacking in manners and morals; W. Somerset Maugham called them “mean, malicious and envious . . . scum” and warned that these men would some day rule England. Some critics even confused the characters with the writers themselves. Amis’s Jim Dixon (in ©Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library Lucky Jim) was appalled by the tediousness and falseness of academic life; therefore, Dixon was interpreted as a symbol of anti-intellectualism. Dixon taught at a provincial university; therefore, he became a symbol of contempt for Cambridge and Oxford. Amis himself taught at a provincial university (Swansea); therefore, he and Dixon became one and the same in the minds of many critics. Like all literary generalizations, however, this one was soon inadequate. The most that can be said is that through Amis’s early heroes there seemed to sound clearly those notes of disillusionment that were to become dominant in much of the literature of the 1950’s. Because it seems so artless, critics have also found Amis’s fiction difficult to discuss. His straightforward plotting, gift for characterization, and ability to tell a good story, they say, are resistant to the modern techniques of literary criticism. Because Amis lacks the obscurity, complexity, and technical virtuosity of James Joyce or William Faulkner, these critics suggest that he is not to be valued as highly. In many of the early reviews, Amis is described as essentially a comic novelist, an entertainer, or an amiable satirist not unlike P. G. Wodehouse, the Marx Brothers, or Henry Fielding. Furthermore, his interest in mysteries, ghost stories, James Bond thrillers, and science fiction confirms for these critics the view that Amis is a writer lacking serious intent. Looking beyond the social commentary and entertainment found in Amis’s work, other critics find a distinct relationship between Amis’s novels and the “new sincerity” of the so-called Movement poets of the 1950’s and later. These poets (including Amis himself, Philip Larkin, John Wain, and D. J. Enright, all of whom also wrote fiction) saw their work as an alternative to the symbolic and allusive poetry of T. S. Eliot and his followers. In a movement away from allusion, obscurity, and excesses of style, the Movement poets encouraged precision, lucidity, and craftsmanship. They concentrated on honesty of thought and feeling to emphasize what A. L. Rowse calls a

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“businesslike intention to communicate with the reader.” Amis’s deceptively simple novels have been written with the same criteria he imposed on his poetry; one cannot read Amis with a measure suitable only to Joyce or Faulkner. Rather, his intellectual and literary ancestors antedate the great modernist writers, and the resultant shape is that of a nineteenth century man of letters. His novels may be appreciated for their commonsense approach. He writes clearly. He avoids extremes or excessive stylistic experimentation. He is witty, satirical, and often didactic. Amis’s novels after 1980 added a new phase to his career. One of the universal themes that most engaged Amis is the relation between men and women, both in and out of marriage. After 1980, he moved away from the broad scope of a society plagued by trouble to examine instead the troubles plaguing one of that society’s most fundamental institutions—relationships—and the conflicts, misunderstandings, and drastically different responses of men and women to the world. Most of his characters suffer blighted marriages. Often they seem intelligent but dazed, as if there were something they had lost but cannot quite remember. Something has indeed been lost, and loss is at the heart of all of Amis’s novels, so that he is, as novelist Malcolm Bradbury calls him, “one of our most disturbing contemporary novelists, an explorer of historical pain.” From the beginning of his canon, Amis focused upon the absence of something significant in modern life: a basis, a framework, a structure for living, such as the old institutions like religion or marriage once provided. Having pushed that loss in societal terms to its absolute extreme in the previous novels, Amis subsequently studied it in personal terms, within the fundamental social unit. In The Old Devils, for example (for which he won the 1986 Booker Fiction Prize), his characters will not regain the old, secure sense of meaning that their lives once held, and Amis does not pretend that they will. What success they manage to attain is always partial. What, in the absence of an informing faith or an all-consuming family life, could provide purpose for living? More simply, how is one to be useful? This is the problem that haunts Amis’s characters, and it is a question, underlying all of his novels, that came to the forefront near the end of his life. In looking back over Amis’s career, critics have found a consistent moral judgment quite visible beneath the social commentary, entertainment, and traditional techniques that Amis employs. Beginning in a world filled with verbal jokes, masquerades, and incidents, Amis’s view of life grew increasingly pessimistic until he arrived at a fearfully grim vision of a nightmare world filled with hostility, violence, sexual abuse, and self-destruction. Critics, therefore, view Amis most significantly as a moralist, concerned with the ethical life in difficult times. Amis’s response to such conditions was to use his great powers of observation and mimicry both to illuminate the changes in postwar British society and to suggest various ways of understanding and possibly coping with those changes. For all these reasons, one can assert that Amis has achieved a major reputation in contemporary English fiction, and, as is so often the case today, his is an achievement that does not depend upon any single work. It is rather the totality of his work with which readers should reckon. Biography · Kingsley William Amis was born in London on April 16, 1922. His father, William Robert, was an office clerk with Coleman’s Mustard and fully expected his only child to enter commerce. His son’s intention, however, was to be a writer—a poet, really—though it was not until the publication of his rollicking and irreverent first novel, Lucky Jim, in 1954, that Amis achieved his goal. By Amis’s own account, he had been writing since he was a child. Writing became

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for him a means of coming to terms with certain fears. As a boy he suffered from the routine terrors of childhood, fear of the dark, fear of the future, fear of other children, fear of his parents’ disapproval, but as he grew older the subjects of his fears changed. He was a complicated individual; depression alternated with laughter, and an inner loneliness counterbalanced his social charm. Typically, one fear involved his health. Like many of his characters, one of his strongest fears was the fear of loneliness. “Being the only person in the house is something I wouldn’t like at all,” he said, years later. “I would develop anxiety. By this I mean more than just a rational dislike of being alone and wanting company but something which means, for me, becoming very depressed and tense. I’ve always been terribly subject to tension. I worry a lot.” Kingsley Amis as an author and his characters themselves often seem to be running scared, playing out their lives while always looking over their shoulders, afraid that the truth of life’s meaninglessness will catch up to them. Amis admitted that writing fiction encourages the illusion that there is some sense in life. “There isn’t,” he said, “but if that’s all you thought, you’d go mad.” In his fiction, if not in life, he was able to pretend that there is a pattern in events and that the suffering of his characters could be justified, or explained, or atoned for, or made all right. Such power to conjure up meaning where it otherwise may not exist brought with it the “wonderful feeling of being Lord of Creation.” Long before Amis was to experience this power, he was merely a schoolboy at St. Hilda’s local fee-paying school. At St. Hilda’s he learned French from Miss Crampton, and he also developed a crush on his English teacher, Miss Barr, “a tall, Eton-crowned figure of improbable eloquence.” It is in these inauspicious surroundings, he said, humorously, that perhaps “we can date my first education into the glories of our literature.” Perhaps because of Miss Barr but more probably because of his temperament and interests, he developed a fascination for anything to do with writing—pens, paper, and erasers. His interest may have been piqued at St. Hilda’s, but his first literary efforts occurred at Norbury College. There he was exposed to the vast entertainment that the days held for a British public school boy in the 1930’s: Under the tutelage of his teachers, he began to write stories and poems. His first published work of fiction, a three-hundred-word adventure story called “The Sacred Rhino of Uganda,” appeared in the school magazine. In the fall of 1934, he entered the “really splendid” City of London School, a day school of seven hundred boys that overlooked the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge. Amis read much during this period. He specialized in the classics until he was sixteen, then switched to English, but later would wish that he had been more interested in Scripture and divinity at the time and had been touched by the wings of faith, a wish that his fiction would ultimately demonstrate. He also read French. Early artistic delights included watercolors, Dadaism, and architecture. He especially loved to read poetry, and with his keen mind and quick sensibilities he could take in a considerable amount of material quickly. In the prewar year of 1939, while he was in the sixth form, Amis and many of his school chums were suddenly surprised to find themselves being sent to Marlborough College in Wiltshire as evacuees; there he spent the next five terms. He found himself in the small country town of Marlborough, one of the most undisturbed countrysides remaining in the southwest of England. There, in vivid contrast to the suburbia he knew in Clapham, Amis was initiated into the beauties and mysteries of nature, and for the rest of his life he would carry images of Marlborough with him and re-create them in his fictional country scenes.

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Amis’s first novel, The Legacy, written while he attended St. John’s College at the University of Oxford (1941-1942, 1945-1947), was rejected by fourteen publishers. Eventually Amis abandoned it altogether, having come to regard it as boring, unfunny, and derivative. Although his studies at Oxford were interrupted by the war, Amis persisted, earning his B.A. (with honors) and M.A. degrees in English. Several factors influenced Amis’s development into a writer whose stories and style are unique. His comic proclivities were encouraged by his father, a man with “a talent for physical clowning and mimicry.” Amis described himself as “undersized, law-abiding, timid,” a child able to make himself popular by charm or clowning, who found that at school he could achieve much by exploiting his inherited powers of mimicry. His school friends testified to Amis’s capacity for making people laugh. Philip Larkin’s description of their first meeting (1941), in the 1963 introduction to his own novel, Jill, suggests that it was Amis’s “genius for imaginative mimicry” that attracted him: “For the first time I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own.” John Wain also recalled how, in the “literary group” to which they both belonged, Amis was a “superb mimic” who relished differences of character and idiom. This period of “intensive joke swapping,” as Larkin called it, continued when Amis entered the army in 1942. He became an officer, served in the Royal Signals, and landed in Normandy in June, 1944. After service in France, Belgium, and West Germany, he was demobilized in October, 1945. This period was to provide material for such stories as “My Enemy’s Enemy,” “Court of Inquiry,” and “I Spy Strangers,” but its immediate effect was to open his eyes to the world, to all sorts of strange people and strange ways of behaving. Amis’s status as an only child also contributed to his development as a writer, for he found himself looking at an early age for “self-entertainment.” He satisfied this need by reading adventure stories, science fiction, and boys’ comics. During these years, too, Amis became interested in horror tales. He recalled seeing the Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932) and the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932). After that time, Amis was interested in what might be called the minor genres on grounds of wonder, excitement, and “a liking for the strange, the possibly horrific.” Amis became aware that the detective story, various tales of horror or terror, and the science-fiction story provided vehicles for both social satire and investigation of human nature in a way not accessible to the mainstream novelist. Along with his natural comic gifts, his interest in genre fiction, and his war experiences, Amis’s development was influenced by his early exposure to an English tradition that has resisted the modernist innovations so influential in America and on the Continent at the time. His dislike for experimental prose may be traced in part to the influence of one of his tutors at Oxford, the Anglo-Saxon scholar Gavin Bone, and to his readings of certain eighteenth century novelists whose ability to bring immense variety and plentitude to their work without reverting to obscurity or stylistic excess appealed to the young Amis. Amis attributed his personal standards of morality both to his readings in Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson and to the training in standard Protestant virtues he received while growing up at home. Both of his parents were Baptists, but in protest against their own forceful religious indoctrination, their visits to church became less and less frequent as they grew older. Any reader of Amis’s works soon becomes aware that there is in his writings a clear repudiation of traditional Christian belief. Nevertheless, from his parents he received certain central

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moral convictions which crystallized a personal philosophy of life and art. Hard work, conscientiousness, obedience, loyalty, frugality, and patience—these lessons and others were put forward and later found their way into his novels, all of which emphasize the necessity of good works and of trying to live a moral life in the natural—as opposed to the supernatural—world. Despite these convictions, however, Amis was not able to live his private life impeccably, as he himself would ultimately testify. His long-standing marriage to Hilary (“Hilly”) Bardwell, which produced a daughter and two sons, including novelist Martin Amis, was marred by frequent infidelities and was ultimately destroyed by his romantic involvement with fellow novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis and Hilly were divorced in 1965. Amis’s subsequent marriage to Howard was not happy, however, and the two separated in 1980. Misogynistic novels such as Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women mirror his dissatisfaction with his relationship with Howard in particular and with relations between the sexes in general. The sunnier aspect of Amis’s final novels, especially The Old Devils and The Folks That Live on the Hill, owes its character to Amis’s reconcilement (of sorts) with his first wife. In 1981 Amis, Hilly, and her third husband, Alistair Boyd (Lord Kilmarnock), set up housekeeping together. The arrangement was to last until Amis’s death in late 1995. During this final period Amis was to win Britain’s highest literary award, the Booker Prize, for The Old Devils. His unusual domestic arrangements are described in detail in Eric Jacobs’s Kingsley Amis: A Biography (1995). Amis’s final novel, The Biographer’s Moustache, reflected his somewhat uneasy feelings over having his biography written. According to Jacobs, Amis remained a writer until his death in 1995. During his last illness he was busy compiling notes about hospital routines to be incorporated into yet another novel. Analysis · Kingsley Amis’s fiction is characterized by a recurring preoccupation with certain themes and concepts, with certain basic human experiences, attitudes, and perceptions. These persistent themes are treated with enormous variety, however, particularly in Amis’s novels which draw on the conventions of genre fiction—the mystery, the spy thriller, the ghost story, and so on. Of the twenty novels Amis has published, his development as a seriocomic novelist is especially apparent in Lucky Jim, Take a Girl Like You, The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, The Old Devils, The Folks That Live on the Hill, and The Russian Girl, his most substantial and complex works, each of which is representative of a specific stage in his career. All these novels are set in contemporary England. Drawing upon a variety of traditional techniques of good storytelling—good and bad characters, simple irony, straightforward plot structure, clear point of view—they restate, in a variety of ways, the traditional pattern of tragedy: A man, divided and complex, vulnerable both to the world and to himself, is forced to make choices that will determine his destiny. Built into this situation is the probability that he will bring down suffering on his head and injure others in the process. In Lucky Jim, for example, Amis establishes a comic acceptance of many of life’s injustices in the academic world. The novel is distinguished by clear-cut cases of right and wrong, a simple irony, and knockabout farce. Because he has neither the courage nor the economic security to protest openly, the hero lives a highly comic secret life of protest consisting of practical jokes and rude faces, all directed against the hypocrisy and pseudointellectualism of certain members of the British establishment. While only hinted at in Lucky Jim, Amis’s moral seriousness becomes increasingly evident

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beginning with Take a Girl Like You. Whereas in Lucky Jim the values are “hidden” beneath a comic narrative, gradually the comedy is submerged beneath a more serious treatment. Thus, Take a Girl Like You is a turning point for Amis in a number of ways: The characterization is more complex, the moral problems are more intense, and the point of view is not limited to one central character. Distinguished also by a better balance between the comic and the serious, the novel is more pessimistic than its predecessors, less given to horseplay and high spirits. In later novels such as The Anti-Death League and The Green Man, Amis continues to see life more darkly, shifting to an increasingly metaphysical, even theological concern. Contemporary England is viewed as a wasteland of the spirit, and his characters try vainly to cope with a precarious world filled with madness and hysteria, a world in which love and religion have become distorted and vulgarized. Threatened with death and ugly accidents by a malicious God, Amis’s characters feel powerless to change, and in an attempt to regain control of their lives, act immorally. Amis’s ultimate vision is one in which all of the traditional certainties—faith, love, loyalty, responsibility, decency—have lost their power to comfort and sustain. Humanity is left groping in the dark of a nightmare world. In the later The Old Devils, Amis’s study of a Wales and a Welshness that have slipped out of reach forever clearly shows a culmination of his increasing damnation of Western society, portrayed through the microcosm of human relationships. The final picture is one of the aimlessness of old age, the meaninglessness of much of life itself. Lucky Jim · In Lucky Jim, a bumbling, somewhat conscientious hero stumbles across the social and cultural landscape of contemporary British academic life, faces a number of crises of conscience, makes fun of the world and of himself, and eventually returns to the love of a sensible, realistic girl. This is the traditional comic course followed by Amis’s first three novels, of which Lucky Jim is the outstanding example. Beneath the horseplay and high spirits, however, Amis rhetorically manipulates the reader’s moral judgment so that he or she leaves the novel sympathetic to the hero’s point of view. By triumphing over an unrewarding job, a pretentious family, and a predatory female colleague, Dixon becomes the first in a long line of Amis’s heroes who stand for common sense and decency, for the belief that life is to be made happy now, for the notion that “nice things are nicer than nasty things.” To develop his moral concern, Amis divides his characters into two archetypal groups reminiscent of the fantasy tale: the generally praiseworthy figures, the ones who gain the greatest share of the reader’s sympathy; and the “evil” characters, those who obstruct the good characters. Jim Dixon (the put-upon young man), GoreUrquhart (his benefactor or savior), and Christine Callaghan (the decent girl to whom Dixon turns) are among the former, distinguished by genuineness, sincerity, and a lack of pretense. Among the latter are Professor Welch (Dixon’s principal tormentor), his son, Bertrand (the defeated boaster), and the neurotic Margaret Peele (the thwarted “witch”), all of whom disguise their motives and present a false appearance. One example should be enough to demonstrate Amis’s technique: the introduction to the seedy, absentminded historian, Professor Welch. In the opening chapter, Amis establishes an ironic discrepancy between what Welch seems to be (a scholar discussing history) and what he is in reality (a “vaudeville character” lecturing on the differences between flute and recorder). Although he tries to appear a cultured, sensitive intellecutal, all of the images point to a charlatan leading a boring, selfish life. His desk is “misleadingly littered.” Once he is found standing, “surprisingly

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enough,” in front of the college library’s new-books shelf. Succeeding physical description undercuts his role-playing: He resembles “an old boxer,” “an African savage,” “a broken robot.” What is more, his speech and gestures are mechanized by cliché and affectation. Professing to worship “integrated village-type community life” and to oppose anything mechanical, he is himself a virtual automaton and becomes more so as the novel progresses. Although Amis does not term Welch a ridiculous phony, the inference is inescapable. Central to the novel’s theme is Dixon’s secret life of protest. Although he hates the Welch family, for economic reasons he dares not rebel openly. Therefore, he resorts to a comic fantasy world to express rage or loathing toward certain imbecilities of the Welch set. His rude faces and clever pranks serve a therapeutic function, a means by which Dixon can safely release his exasperations. At other times, however, Dixon becomes more aggressive: He fantasizes stuffing Welch down the lavatory or beating him about the head and shoulders with a bottle until he reveals why he gave a French name to his son. In Amis’s later novels, when the heroes’ moral problems become more intense, even life-threatening, such aggressive acts become more frequent and less controlled. In this early novel, however, what the reader remembers best are the comic moments. Dixon is less an angry young man than a funny, bumbling, confused individual for whom a joke makes life bearable. There are, of course, other ways in which to react to an unjust world. One can flail at it, as does John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter (Look Back in Anger, 1956). One can try to escape from it, as will Patrick Standish in Take a Girl Like You, or one can try to adapt to it. Like Charles Lumley’s rebellion against middle-class values in John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), Dixon’s rebellion against the affectations of academia ends with an adjustment to the society and with a partial acceptance of its values. By remaining in the system, he can at least try to effect change. Take a Girl Like You · Ostensibly another example of the familiar story of initiation, Amis’s fourth novel, Take a Girl Like You, contains subtleties and ironies that set it apart from Lucky Jim. The characterization, the balance between the comic and the serious, and the emphasis on sexual behavior and the pursuit of pleasure blend to make this novel a significant step forward in Amis’s development as a novelist. The plot of this disturbing moral comedy is built around a variety of motifs: the travelogue and the innocent-abroad story, the theme of love-in-conflict-with-love, and the country-mouse story of an innocent girl visiting the big city for the first time. Jenny Bunn, from whose point of view more than half the novel is narrated, is the conventional, innocent young woman who has not been touched by deep experience in worldly matters. Like Jim Dixon, she finds herself in an unfamiliar setting, confronting people who treat her as a stranger with strange ideas. Out of a simpleminded zeal for the virtues of love and marriage, she becomes the victim of a plausible, nasty man. Jenny carries out several artistic functions in the story. She is chiefly prominent as the perceptive observer of events close to her. Again like Dixon, she is able to detect fraud and incongruities from a considerable distance. When Patrick Standish first appears, for example, she understands that his look at her means he is “getting ideas about her.” Amis draws a considerable fund of humor from Jenny’s assumed naïveté. His chief device is the old but appropriate one of naïve comment, innocently uttered but tipped with truth. Jenny, a young girl living in a restrictive environment and ostensibly deferential toward the attitudes and opinions of the adults who compose

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that environment, yet also guided by her own instinctive reactions, may be expected to misinterpret a great deal of what she observes and feels. The reader follows her as she is excited, puzzled, and disturbed by Patrick’s money-mad and pleasure-mad world—a world without fixed rules of conduct. Many of the “sex scenes” between them are built upon verbal jokes, comic maneuvers, digressions, and irrelevancies, all of which give life to the conventional narrative with which Amis is working. Patrick Standish is the antithesis of the good, moral, somewhat passive Jenny. Like the masterful, selfish Bertrand Welch, he is a womanizer and a conscious hypocrite who condemns himself with every word he utters. In spite of Patrick’s intolerable behavior and almost crippling faults, Amis maintains some degree of sympathy for him by granting him more than a surface treatment. In the earlier novels, the villains are seen from a distance through the heroes’ eyes. In Take a Girl Like You, however, an interior view of the villain’s thoughts, frustrations, and fears allows the reader some measure of understanding. Many scenes are rhetorically designed to emphasize Patrick’s isolation and helplessness. Fears of impotence, cancer, and death haunt him. He seeks escape from these fears by turning to sex, drink, and practical jokes, but this behavior leads only to further boredom, unsatisfied longing, and ill health. Also contributing to the somber tone of the novel are secondary characters such as Dick Thompson, Seaman Jackson, and Graham MacClintoch. Jackson equates marriage with “legalised bloody prostitution.” MacClintoch complains that, for the unattractive, there is no charity in sex. Jenny’s ideals are further diminished when she attends a party with these men. The conversation anticipates the emotional barrenness of later novels, in which love is dead and in its place are found endless games. Characters speak of love, marriage, and virtue in the same tone as they would speak of a cricket game or a new set of teeth. With Take a Girl Like You, Amis leaves behind the hilarity and high spirits on which his reputation was founded, in order to give expression to the note of hostility and cruelty hinted at in Lucky Jim. Drifting steadily from bewilderment to disillusionment, Jenny and Patrick signal the beginning of a new phase in Amis’s moral vision. Life is more complex, more precarious, less jovial. The simple romantic fantasy solution at the end of Lucky Jim is not possible here. The Anti-Death League · The Anti-Death League represents for Amis yet another extension in philosophy and technique. The conventions of the spy thriller provide the necessary framework for a story within which Amis presents, from multiple viewpoints, a worldview that is more pessimistic than that of any of his previous novels. A preoccupation with fear and evil, an explicit religious frame of reference, and a juxtaposition of pain and laughter, cruelty and tenderness all go to create a sense of imminent calamity reminiscent of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). No longer does Amis’s world allow carefree, uncomplicated figures of fun to move about, relying upon good luck and practical jokes to see them through their difficulties. Life has become an absurd game, and the players are suffering, often lonely and tragic individuals, caught in hopeless situations with little chance for winning the good life, free from anxieties, guilt, and doubts. As the controlling image, the threat of death is introduced early in the novel in the form of an airplane shadow covering the principal characters. Related to this scene is an elaborate metaphor drawn from the language of pathology, astronomy, botany, and thermonuclear war. Part 1 of the three-part structure is entitled “The Edge of a Node”—referring to Operation Apollo, an elaborate project designed to destroy the

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Red Chinese with a horrible plague. As the narrative progresses, the characters are brought to the edge or dead center of the node. Related to this preoccupation with death is the sexual unhappiness of the characters. Jim Dixon’s romps with Margaret are farcical and at times rather sad. Patrick Standish’s pursuit and conquest of Jenny Bunn are disgusting and somewhat tragic. In The Anti-Death League, the characters’ pursuit of love and sex leads only to unhappiness and even danger. Two disastrous marriages and several unhappy affairs have brought Catherine Casement to the brink of madness. An unfaithful husband and a possessive lover have caused Luzy Hazell to avoid any emotional involvement whatsoever. A desire to get away from love impels Max Hunter, an alcoholic and unabashed homosexual, to join the army. Along with the inversion of love, Amis dramatizes an inversion of religion. In place of a benevolent, supreme being, Amis has substituted a malevolent God whose malicious jokes lead to death and tragic accidents. In protest, Will Ayscue, the army chaplain, declares war on Christianity as the embodiment of the most vicious lies ever told. Max Hunter writes a poem against God (“To a Baby Born Without Limbs”), organizes the Anti-Death League, and demolishes the local priory. James Churchill cites Max Hunter’s alcoholism, the death of a courier, and Catherine’s cancer as reasons for retreating from a world gone bad. While, in the preceding novels, laughter helps the heroes cope with specific injustices, in The Anti-Death League, laughter only intensifies the horror, the pain. Sometimes Amis shifts abruptly from laughter to pain to intensify the pain. A lighthearted moment with Hunter in the hospital is followed by a depressing scene between Catherine and Dr. Best. News of Catherine’s cancer is juxtaposed with Dr. Best’s highly comic hide-and-seek game. Hysteria, depression, boredom: These are some of the moods in the army camp, bespeaking a malaise and a loss of hope from which neither sex nor religion nor drink offers any escape. Although the reader both condemns and laughs at the characters’ foibles, he feels a personal involvement with them because he sees the suffering through the sufferers’ eyes. Alone, trying to regain control of their lives, they act irresponsibly and immorally. Only Moti Naidu, like Gore-Urquhart, a moral voice in the novel, speaks truth in spite of the other characters’ tragic mistakes. His recommendations that they aspire to common sense, fidelity, prudence, and rationality, however, go unheeded. The Green Man · Although The Green Man offers the same preoccupation with God, death, and evil as The Anti-Death League, the novel is different from its predecessor in both feeling and technique. The work is, to begin with, a mixture of social satire, moral fable, comic tale, and ghost story. Evil appears in the figure of Dr. Thomas Underhill, a seventeenth century “wizard” who has raped young girls, created obscene visions, murdered his enemies, and now invaded the twentieth century in pursuit of the narrator’s thirteen-year-old daughter. God also enters in the person of “a young, well-dressed, sort of after-shave lotion kind of man,” neither omnipotent nor benevolent. For him, life is like a chess game whose rules he is tempted to break. A seduction, an orgy, an exorcism, and a monster are other features of this profoundly serious examination of dreaded death and all of its meaningless horror. The novel is narrated retrospectively from the point of view of Maurice Allington. Like Patrick Standish and James Churchill, he spends most of his time escaping, or trying to escape, from himself, and for good reason. Death for him is a fearful mystery. Questions of ultimate justice and human destiny have been jarred loose of any religious or philosophical certainties. He suffers from “jactitations” (twitching of the

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limbs) as well as unpleasant and lengthy ”hypnagogic hallucinations.” What is more, problems with self extend to problems with his family and friends: He is unable to get along well with his wife or daughter, and his friends express doubts about his sanity. In fact, the only certainty Maurice has is that as he gets older, consciousness becomes more painful. To dramatize Maurice’s troubled mind, Amis also employs supernatural machinery as an integral part of the narrative. The windowpane through which Maurice sees Underhill becomes a metaphor for the great divide between the known, seen world of reality and the unknown, hence fearful world of the supernatural. Dr. Underhill, a Doppelgänger, reflects Maurice’s own true nature in his selfish, insensitive manipulation of women for sexual ends. Also, Underhill’s appearances provide Maurice with an opportunity to ennoble himself. In his pursuit and eventual destruction of both Underhill and the green monster, Maurice gains self-knowledge—something few of Amis’s characters ever experience. He realizes his own potential for wickedness, accepts the limitations of life, and comes to an appreciation of what death has to offer as an escape from earthbound existence. For the first time in his life, Maurice recognizes and responds to the loving competence of his daughter, who looks after him when his wife leaves. On one level, this elaborately created story is a superbly entertaining, fantastic tale. On another level, it is a powerful and moving parable of the limitations and disappointments of the human condition. Unlike Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You, both of which are rooted in the real world and are guided by the laws of nature, The Green Man—and to some extent The Anti-Death League—employs fantastic and surreal elements. Ravens, specters, vague midnight terrors, all associated with guilt and despair, provide fitting emblems for Maurice’s self-absorbed condition. The Old Devils · The Old Devils is not an easy book to read, but it is an almost irresistibly easy book to reread. It is one of Amis’s densest novels, its many different characters and their stories diverging, interweaving, and dovetailing with a striking precision that requires the utmost concentration of the reader. The novel has no central hero-narrator; each of the major characters claims his (or her) own share of reader attention. Though their talks and thoughts wander from topic to topic casually, appearing aimless and undirected, actually the inner workings of the characters are carefully regulated, as are the descriptive comments by the omniscient narrator, to support, define, develop, and ultimately embody the novel’s themes. In terms of narrative, the story itself is painted in muted tones. Alun Weaver has chosen to retire from his successful television career in London as a kind of “professional Welshman” and third-rate poet and return after thirty years with his beautiful wife, Rhiannon, to South Wales. The novel explores, over a span of a few months, the effect of this return on their circle of old friends from university days. The old devils—a group of Welsh married couples all in their sixties and seventies—include Malcolm Cellan-Davies, an unsung local writer, and his wife, Gwen; Peter Thomas, a chemical engineer, and his wife, Muriel; Charlie Norris, the proprietor of a restaurant, and his wife, Sophie; Percy and Dorothy Morgan; and Garth Pumphrey, a former veterinarian who with his wife, Angharad, now attends to business at a local pub. Of the five couples, the first three have never left their hometown or accomplished anything very remarkable; their lives have passed them by. They are old now, retired from their professions, and do little else but drink heavily, a device Amis has often used to lower his characters’ defenses and reveal their true emotional states. As Sophie says of her

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husband, “I never realised how much he drank till the night he came home sober. A revelation, it was.” The physical ill health the cronies worry about extends to the spiritual health of their marriages. With the exception of Rhiannon, her daughter Rosemary, and a few minor characters, the women in this novel not only are plain, hard, sharp, critical, or cross but also lack any reasonable relation with their husbands that would make significant communication possible. Only Alun and Rhiannon, married for thirty-four years, still seem to have an appetite for life and love as well as drink, and most of their misunderstandings lead only to teasing, not to disaster. Their arrival, however, arouses conflict among their old friends. “You know,” says Muriel early in the novel, “I don’t think that news about the Weavers is good news for anyone.” The conflict comes in part because their return revives memories of various youthful liaisons and indiscretions, and also because the egotistical Alun immediately sets out to re-woo the three women with whom he had affairs in the old days. Yet The Old Devils is about more than an aging present; it is also very much about the past and its impingements upon everyone. Many of the characters in The Old Devils are carrying scars from bitterness and regret because of something that happened in their lives long ago, something they hide carefully from the world, but on which their conscious attention is fixed. Past choices weigh heavily on all of them. These memories, like the memories of the aging characters in earlier novels, touch various notes, some sweet, some sour, some true, and others a bit off pitch. Indeed, these old devils are bedeviled by worries and fears of all kinds that deepen their uncertainty about life and increase their preoccupation with the past. Amis points out that one of the reasons old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there. When that, too, is gone, what is left? In this novel, what remains is only the sense of lost happiness not to be regained, only the awareness of the failure of love, only the present and its temporary consolations of drink, companionship, music, and any other diversions they might create, only a blind groping toward some insubstantial future. Neither human nor spiritual comfort bolsters their sagging lives and flagging souls; Malcolm speaks for all the characters, and probably for Amis himself, when he responds to a question about believing in God: “It’s very hard to answer that. In a way I suppose I do. I certainly hate to see it all disappearing.” As in earlier novels, Amis finds in the everyday concerns of his ordinary folk a larger symbolic meaning, which carries beyond the characters to indict a whole country. By the end of the novel, one character after another has uncompromisingly attacked television, the media, abstract art, trendy pub decor, rude teenagers, children, shoppers, rock music, Arab ownership of shops and pubs, and anything that smacks of arty or folksy Welshness. The point, says Malcolm, sadly, is that Wales is following the trends from England and has found a way of destroying the country, “not by poverty but by prosperity.” The decline and the decay, he says, are not the real problem. “We’ve faced that before and we’ve always come through.” What he abominates is the specious affluence. “It’s not the rubble I deplore,” he says, “it’s the vile crop that has sprung from it.” Both extremes—decay and affluence—are suggested by the homes the characters occupy, and unhappiness characterizes either extreme. Amis’s awareness of rooms, of houses, and of what they reveal about their inhabitants is a critical commonplace. Here, in each instance, the description of a character’s personal environment is a means of rendering his or her appalled and irritated perception of the world. Amis’s characterization in The Old Devils, however, goes beyond a study of that

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final form of human deterioration. Rather, the novel examines an often debilitating process of moral and spiritual decay, a lessening of these people as human beings as life goes on and their hopes have dimmed along with their physical and mental powers. Perhaps Rhiannon, the most well-rounded of Amis’s female characters in the novel, has kept her spiritual core more intact than any of the old devils. Without a doubt she holds a certain moral superiority over her husband in a way that is reminiscent of Jenny Bunn (in Take a Girl Like You), and the differences in husband and wife are played against each other. Rhiannon emerges as the voice of common sense in the novel, serene and utterly down-to-earth; Alun is condemned, by his actions and words, as a shallow, worldly, selfish man. In the end, he meets death, while Rhiannon survives and, in fact, looks ahead to future happiness. The two are unreconciled at Alun’s death, no mention is made of her mourning, no homage is paid to his memory, and at the end of the novel she turns to Peter, her lover of forty years before. She finally forgives him for his long-ago abandonment, and the two begin to look forward to spending their last years together. That event is one of two at the end of the novel that vitiate its undertone of pain, despair, and anxiety. The other positive event is the wedding of Rosemary, the Weavers’ daughter, to William, the son of Peter and Muriel, suggesting the replacing of the older generation by the new, which in one sense is heralded by the author as a sign of progress and fulfillment. The reader feels that they will go on to live somewhat happy, placid lives. Despite the overriding negativism in the novel, there is some possibility of redemption. In The Old Devils, Amis pictures two relatively attractive people who show promise of living and working together peacefully, using their energy to make a new world instead of destroying an existing one. The Folks That Live on the Hill · The Folks That Live on the Hill appeared only four years after The Old Devils, and while the two share certain similarities, especially the deployment of a wide, even panoramic, cast of characters, the latter novel exhibits a greater degree of acceptance of humankind’s foibles. This attitude is displayed in particular by the novel’s protagonist, Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian who cannot help caring about—and caring for—other people. These include a widowed sister who keeps house for him in the London suburb of Shepherd’s Hill, a niece by marriage whose alcoholism is reaching catastrophic proportions, and a brother whose mediocre poetry Harry nevertheless shepherds toward publication. Providing a kind of running commentary on the novel’s hapless characters are two immigrant brothers, a pair of bemused outsiders who see the follies of the “folks” all too clearly. When offered an attractive job in the United States, Harry chooses to remain where he is, partly through inertia but largely because he knows he is needed where he is. Yet Harry is recognizably an Amis character, and a distinctly male one at that. Twice-married and twice-divorced, he is largely intolerant of women, other classes, and their annoying patterns of speech. The Russian Girl · The Russian Girl encapsulates many of Amis’s perennial motifs and patterns, yet the gentler note sounded in The Folks That Live on the Hill remains. The novel’s protagonist is Richard Vaisey, an opinionated professor of Russian literature and language, who is fighting to maintain the integrity of his subject in the face of academic progress. (It seems that Richard’s considerable knowledge of his subject “dates” him.) Richard’s wife Cordelia is perhaps the most harpy-like of all Amis’s female characters, a rich, sexually attractive but wholly villainous creation noted for

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her absurd but attention-getting accent. The “girl” of the title is Anna Danilova, a visiting Russian poet who becomes involved with Richard. Their affair propels Richard from his comfortable, sheltered existence into a life of possibility. Saving the novel’s plot from a certain predictability is the fact that Anna, like Harry’s brother Freddie in The Folks That Live on the Hill, is not a good poet. (To drive the point home, Amis reproduces an embarrassingly poor poem Anna has written in loving tribute to Richard.) This is a situation that Richard understands, yet ultimately chooses to accept. In turn, Anna senses Richard’s true opinion of her work and accepts it as well. Although not his final novel, The Russian Girl represents in many ways the culmination of Amis’s fictional career. More sharply focused than many of its predecessors, it forces its protagonist through very difficult moral and intellectual choices. Anna too achieves a kind of dignity because of, not despite, her very lack of talent and emerges as one of Amis’s most gratifyingly complex female characters. In retrospect, it is clear that Kingsley Amis is a moralist as well as a humorist. The early novels exhibit a richly comic sense and a considerable penetration into character, particularly in its eccentric forms. With Take a Girl Like You, Amis begins to produce work of more serious design. He gives much deeper and more complex pictures of disturbing and distorted people, and a more sympathetic insight into the lot of his wasted or burnt-out characters. In all of his novels, he fulfills most effectively the novelist’s basic task of telling a good story. In his best novels—Lucky Jim, Take a Girl Like You, The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, The Old Devils, The Folks That Live on the Hill, and The Russian Girl—Amis tries to understand the truth about different kinds of human suffering, then passes it on to the reader without distortion, without sentimentality, without evasion, and without oversimplification. His work is based on a steadying common sense. Dale Salwak, updated by Grove Koger Other major works SHORT FICTION: My Enemy’s Enemy, 1962; Collected Short Stories, 1980; We Are All Guilty, 1991; Mr. Barrett’s Secret and Other Stories, 1993. POETRY: Bright November, 1947; A Frame of Mind, 1953; A Case of Samples: Poems, 1946-1956, 1956; The Evans Country, 1962; A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957-1967, 1967; Collected Poems: 1944-1979, 1979. NONFICTION: New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, 1960; The James Bond Dossier, 1965 (with Ian Fleming); What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions, 1970; On Drink, 1972; Tennyson, 1973; Kipling and His World, 1975; An Arts Policy?, 1979; Everyday Drinking, 1983; How’s Your Glass?, 1984; Memoirs, 1991; The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage, 1997. EDITED TEXTS: Spectrum: A Science Fiction Anthology, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 (with Robert Conquest); Harold’s Years: Impressions from the “New Statesman” and the “Spectator,” 1977; The Faber Popular Reciter, 1978; The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, 1978; The Golden Age of Science Fiction, 1981; The Great British Songbook, 1986 (with James Cochrane); The Amis Anthology, 1988; The Pleasure of Poetry: From His “Daily Mirror” Column, 1990; The Amis Story Anthology: A Personal Choice of Short Stories, 1992. Bibliography Bradbury, Malcolm. No, Not Bloomsbury. London: Deutsch, 1987. Bradbury devotes a chapter to the comic fiction through The Old Devils, charting Amis’s course from

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anger to bitterness. Bradbury notes Amis’s moral seriousness, honesty, and humor. Includes a chronology and an index. Bradford, Richard. Kingsley Amis. London: Arnold, 1989. This key study shows how Amis confounds customary distinctions between “popular” and “literary” fiction. Bradford argues that it is time to readjust the criteria for judging literary worth. Includes secondary bibliography and index. Fussell, Paul. The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. An appreciation of Amis’s versatile talents and accomplishments by a personal friend. Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis. Boston: Twayne, 1981. This first full-length study of Amis’s life and career treats his novels (through Jake’s Thing) and nonfiction, paying particular attention to the recurrence of certain themes and character types, to his modes of comedy, and to the relationship between his life and fiction. Supplemented by a chronology, notes, selected primary and annotated secondary bibliographies, and an index. Jacobs, Eric. Kingsley Amis: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. A readable, sometimes painfully candid biography written with Amis’s full cooperation. Includes photographs, notes, a primary bibliography, and an index. This American edition includes material that did not appear in the first (British) edition of 1995. Laskowski, William. Kingsley Amis. New York: Twayne, 1998. Laskowski stresses Amis’s overall accomplishment as a man of letters, divides his output into letters, genre fiction, and mainstream novels, and devotes equal consideration to each category. Published soon after Amis’s death, this volume surpasses the coverage of Gardner’s study (above), but does not replace it. Supplementary material is updated but otherwise similar. McDermott, John. Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1989. This first British book-length study of Amis’s work seeks to show that the novels are serious as well as funny, that they are distinctively English, and that they offer a wide range of approaches to significant aspects of human behavior. Includes substantial primary and secondary bibliographies and an index. Mosley, Merritt. Understanding Kingsley Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. A short survey stressing Amis’s accomplishments as a professional man of letters. Includes an annotated secondary bibliography and an index. Salwak, Dale, ed. Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Brings together the impressions, reminiscences, and judgments of twenty of Amis’s friends and readers. The essays cover Amis’s novels and poetry, his interest in science fiction, his tenures at various colleges and universities, his style, his changing social and moral attitudes, and his personality. Includes primary and secondary bibliographies, an index, and photographs.

Martin Amis Martin Amis

Born: Oxford, England; August 25, 1949 Principal long fiction · The Rachel Papers, 1973; Dead Babies, 1975 (also known as Dark Secrets, 1977); Success, 1978; Other People: A Mystery Story, 1981; Money: A Suicide Note, 1984; London Fields, 1989; Time’s Arrow: Or, The Nature of the Offence, 1991; The Information, 1995; Night Train, 1997. Other literary forms · Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982), a history of video games; The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986), a collection of journalistic pieces on America; and Einstein’s Monsters (1987), a collection of short stories reflecting life in the shadow of nuclear weapons are among Martin Amis’s other works. He also produced Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), essays on literature, politics, sports, and popular culture; Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998), another collection of short stories; and the nonfiction Experience (2000). Achievements · Martin Amis has been a force on the modern literary scene since his first novel, The Rachel Papers, won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1974. Critical and popular acclaim accompanied his sixth novel, London Fields, which was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Amis has a powerfully comic and satiric vision of the ills of contemporary society, which he caricatures in a way that has reminded many reviewers of Charles Dickens. Amis spares his reader little in his depiction of low-life characters in all their physical grossness and emotional aridity. The emptiness and corruption inherent in a materialistic culture are recurring themes of his work. Yet in spite of the often-sordid subject matter, Amis’s novels are illuminated by their stylistic exuberance and ingenuity. More than one critic has remarked on the American flavor of his work, and he is regularly compared to Tom Wolfe and Saul Bellow. Biography · The son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis spent his early years in Swansea, in south Wales, where his father held a teaching position at Swansea University. The family spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1959, and then moved to Cambridge, England. Amis’s parents were divorced when Amis was twelve, and this had a disruptive effect on his schooling: He attended a total of fourteen schools in six years. As a teenager he had a brief acting career, appearing in the film A High Wind in Jamaica (1965). In 1968 he entered Exeter College, Oxford, and graduated in 1971 with first-class honors in English. He immediately became editorial assistant for The Times Literary Supplement and began writing his first novel, The Rachel Papers. In 1975 Amis became assistant literary editor of the New Statesman, and his second novel, Dead Babies, was published in the same year. In 1980, when Amis was a writer and reviewer for the London newspaper The Observer, he reported his discovery that the American writer Jacob Epstein had plagiarized as many as fifty passages from The Rachel Papers for his own novel Wild Oats (1979). The accusation created a storm in the literary world. Epstein quickly conceded that he had indeed copied passages from Amis’s novel and others into a notebook which he had then inadvertently used for his own novel. Thirteen deletions 21

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were made for the second American edition of Epstein’s book, but Amis was infuriated because he thought that the revisions were not sufficiently extensive. Martin Amis married Antonia Phillips, an American professor of aesthetics, in 1984, and they had two sons, Louis and Jacob. The controversy that has often accompanied Amis’s writings spilled over into his private life from 1994 to 1996. First, he left his wife for American writer Isabel Fonseca. Then Amis fired his agent, Pat Kavanagh, when Kavanagh was unable to obtain a large advance from his publisher, Jonathan Cape, for his next novel, The Information. His new agent, the American Andrew Wylie, eventually made a deal with HarperCollins, and the whole proceedings were reported in the British press with an intensity rarely given literary figCheryl A. Koralik ures such as Amis. The controversy was compounded by the report that Amis spent part of his new earnings for extensive dental work in the United States. In 1996 it was revealed that he was the father of a twenty-year-old daughter from a 1975 affair. In 1999 he agreed to write three books and a screenplay for the multimedia company Talk Miramax. Analysis · Martin Amis remarked in an interview that he wrote about “low events in a high style,” and this comment gives a clue to the paradox his work embodies. Although the content of his novels is frequently sordid and nihilistic—dictated by the depressing absence in his characters of traditional cultural values—Amis’s rich, ornate, and continually inventive style lifts the novels to a level from which they give delight. “I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase, for a paragraph that has a spin on it,” Amis has commented. The result is that Amis’s novels, in spite of the fact that they are often uproariously hilarious, do not make easy or quick reading. Indeed, Kingsley Amis has remarked that he is unable to get through his son’s novels because of their ornate style, which he attributes to the influence of Vladimir Nabokov. The Rachel Papers · Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers, set the tone for most of his subsequent work, although his later novels, beginning with Money, have exhibited greater depth and range, as the force of his satire—his immense comic hyperbole—has steadily increased. Furthermore, one senses a sharp moral awareness in Money and London Fields, although Amis chooses not to offer any solutions to the individual and social ills he identifies so acutely. The Rachel Papers is a lively but fairly innocuous satire about the turbulent adoles-

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cence of Charles Highway, the first-person narrator. Highway is a rather obnoxious young man, a self-absorbed intellectual studying for his Oxford examinations and aspiring to become a literary critic. The action takes place the evening before Highway’s twentieth birthday and is filled out by extensive flashbacks. A substantial portion of Highway’s intellectual and physical energy is devoted to getting his girlfriend Rachel into bed and to writing in his diary detailed descriptions of everything that happens when he succeeds. Amis’s hilarious and seemingly infinitely inventive wordplay is never more effectively displayed than when Highway is describing his sexual adventures. Dead Babies · Dead Babies, which chronicles the weekend debaucheries of a group of nine privileged young people, is considerably less successful than Amis’s first novel, and Amis has since declared his own dislike for it. The theme seems to be a warning about what happens when traditional values (the dead babies of the title) are discarded. For the most part, however, the characters are too repulsive, and their indulgence in drugs, sex, alcohol, and violence too excessive, for the reader to care much about their fate. Success · In Success, Amis chronicles a year in the lives of two contrasting characters. The handsome and conceited Gregory comes from an aristocratic family and appears to have all the worldly success anyone could want. He shares a flat in London with his foster brother Terry, who from every perspective is Gregory’s opposite. Terry comes from the slums, he is physically unattractive and has low self-esteem, and he is stuck in a boring job which he is afraid of losing. The two characters take turns narrating the same events, which they naturally interpret very differently. As the year progresses, there is a change. Gregory is gradually forced to admit that his success is little more than an illusion. He has been fooling himself most of the time, and realization of his true ineptitude and childlike vulnerability causes him to go to pieces. Meanwhile, Terry’s grim persistence finally pays off: He makes money, loses his self-hatred, and finally acquires a respectable girlfriend. For all of his crudity and loutishness, he is more in tune with the tough spirit of the times, in which traditional values are no longer seen to be of any value, and those who in theory represent them (like Gregory) have become effete. Success is a clear indication of Amis’s pessimism about life in London in the 1970’s. Frequently employing extremely coarse language, the novel depicts some of the least attractive sides of human nature, and although this grimness is relieved (as in almost all Amis’s books) by some ribald humor, on the whole Success is a depressing and superficial book. Indeed, it had to wait nine years after publication in Great Britain before an American publisher would take it on. Other People · In Amis’s fourth novel, Other People: A Mystery Story, he appears to have been trying to write something with more philosophical and existential depth than the satires that came before. This time the protagonist is a young woman, who suffers from total amnesia. Released from hospital, she wanders alone through alien city streets, viewing other people as a separate species and virtually unable to distinguish between animate and inanimate things. Taking the name Mary Lamb, she experiences life in complete innocence, having to relearn everything that being alive involves: not only who she is but also the purpose of everyday things such as shoes and money. She mixes with a range of people from drunks and down-and-outs to upper-class degen-

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erates, at the same time edging closer to a discovery of her real identity. It transpires that her real name is Amy Hide and that everyone thinks that she was killed after being brutally attacked by a man. Adding to the surreal atmosphere of the novel is a mysterious character called Prince, whom Mary/Amy keeps encountering. Prince seems to fulfill many roles: He is a policeman, perhaps also the man who attacked her, and a kind of tutelary spirit, an awakener, under whose guidance she discovers her own identity. Other People was written according to what is known in Great Britain as the Martian school of poetry, a point of view in which no knowledge about human life and society is assumed. This technique is intended to allow the most mundane things to be examined in a fresh light. Although Amis achieves some success in this area, the novel is spoiled by excessive obscurity. The novelist has simply not left enough clues to his intention, and the reader is left to grasp at bits of a puzzle without being able to construct an intelligible whole. Realizing that few people had grasped his meaning, Amis explained in an interview what his intention had been: Why should we expect death to be any less complicated than life? Nothing about life suggests that death will just be a silence. Life is very witty and cruel and pointed, and let us suppose that death is like that too. The novel is the girl’s death, and her death is a sort of witty parody of her life. This may not be of much help to readers who are especially puzzled by the novel’s concluding pages. Perhaps the most rewarding parts of the novel are Amis’s depictions of the characters Mary encounters; their physical and mental deformities are captured with merciless wit. Money · In Money: A Suicide Note, Amis continued to devote attention to what he undoubtedly depicts best: people who have been deformed, who have failed to reach their full human growth, by the shallow materialism of the age. Yet the scope of Money is far wider and more impressive than anything Amis had produced before: Not only is it much longer, but it also fairly rocks with vulgar energy. Clearly, Amis has finished his writing apprenticeship and is moving into top gear. The protagonist is John Self, a wealthy, early-middle-aged maker of television commercials who is visiting New York to direct what he hopes will be his first big motion picture. Yet the project runs into every difficulty imaginable, and after a series of humiliating experiences Self ends up back in London with nothing. The problem with Self is that although he is wealthy, he is uneducated and lacks all culture. He lives at a fast pace but spends his money and his time entirely on worthless things—junk food, alcohol, pornography, television. Satisfying pleasures continually elude him. Amis himself has commented on Self: “The world of culture is there as a sort of taunting presence in his life, and he wants it but he doesn’t know how to get it, and all his responses are being blunted by living in the money world.” London Fields · Amis’s attack on the “money world” continues in London Fields, although Amis’s finest novel is far more than that. It is at once a comic murdermystery and a wonderfully rich and varied evocation of the decline of civilization at the end of the millennium. Many of the comic scenes are worthy of Charles Dickens, and the plot is acted out against a cosmic, apocalyptic background, as the planet itself seems to be on the brink of disintegration. Set in post-Thatcherite London in 1999, the plot centers on three main characters.

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The first is the antiheroine Nicola Six. Nicola has a gift for seeing the future, and she has a premonition that on her next birthday, which happens to be her thirty-fifth, she will be murdered by one of two men she meets at a London pub called the Black Cross. She sets out to avenge herself in advance by using her sexual power to entice them and draw them to ruin. Nicola is a temptress of the first magnitude, and Amis employs comic hyperbole (as he does throughout the novel) to describe her: “Family men abandoned sick children to wait in the rain outside her flat. Semi-literate builders and bankers sent her sonnet sequences.” The second character, the possible murderer, is Keith Talent. Talent is probably Amis’s finest creation, a larger-than-life character who might have stepped out of the pages of Dickens. He is a petty criminal, compulsive adulterer, wife-beater, and darts fanatic. He makes a living by cheating people, whether it be by selling fake perfume, running an outrageously expensive taxi service, or doing botched household repair jobs. He earns more money than the prime minister but never has any, because he loses it each day at the betting shop. Keith is not totally bad but wishes that he were: He regards his redeeming qualities as his tragic flaw. Obsessed with darts and television (which for him is the real world), his driving ambition is to reach the televised finals of an interpub darts competition. The miracle of the novel is that Amis has succeeded, as with John Self in Money, in making such a pathetic character almost likable. The second possible murderer is Guy Clinch. Clinch is quite different from Keith Talent. He is a rich, upper-class innocent “who wanted for nothing and lacked everything.” One of the things he lacks is a peaceful home life, after his wife, Hope, gives birth to Marmaduke, a ferocious infant who almost from birth is capable of acts of quite stunning malice and violence. (The only nurses who can cope with him are those who have been fired from lunatic asylums.) Once more the comedy is irresistible. The convoluted plot, with its surprise ending, is narrated by a terminally ill American writer named Samson Young, who is in London on a house swap with the famous writer Mark Asprey. That the absent Asprey’s initials are the same as those of Martin Amis is perhaps no coincidence. Young is in a sense the author’s proxy, since he is himself gathering the material and writing the story of London Fields for an American publisher. To make matters even more subtle, a character named Martin Amis also makes an appearance in the novel, just as there had been a Martin Amis character in Money. Deconstructing his own fictions in this manner, Amis reminds the reader that in the manipulative world he depicts, he himself is the chief manipulator, but his own novel is only one fiction in a world of fictions. The setting of London Fields is integral to the plot. The London of the near “future” (which 1999 was at the time of the novel’s publication in 1989) possesses an oppressive, almost Blakean apocalyptic atmosphere. Not only has urban prosperity evaporated—parts of the city have sunk back into squalor—but the natural environment is in rapid decay also. Everyone is talking about the weather, but it is no longer simply small talk. Weather patterns are violently unstable; the sun seems to hang perpetually low in the sky, and rumors of impending cosmic catastrophe abound. The threat of a nuclear holocaust remains. When Nicola Six was a child, she invented two imaginary companions and called them Enola Gay and Little Boy. Enola Gay is the name of the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, on Hiroshima in 1945. Yet Samson Young, the narrator, calls nuclear weapons “dinosaurs” when compared to the environmental disasters that now threaten the earth. Eventually

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Young refers to the situation simply as “The Crisis,” a term that also well describes the human world that Amis ruthlessly exposes, in which love, decency, and genuine feeling have been superseded by violence, greed, and lust. Microcosm and macrocosm are joined in a kind of horrible, frenzied dance of death. The world of London Fields, in which people and planet hurtle helplessly toward disaster, is where all Amis’s fiction has been leading. Time’s Arrow · Time’s Arrow is an unusual departure for Amis. Not only does this most contemporary of writers deal with the past, but he also does so with a less realistic and more overtly moralistic approach than in his other novels. A Nazi doctor’s life is told in reverse order from his death in the United States to his birth in Germany, though his true identity is not apparent until more than half of the way through the narrative. While many of Amis’s narrators may not be completely reliable, the narrator of Time’s Arrow is relatively innocent. The physician’s reverse life is told by his alter ego, who stands outside the action until finally merging with the protagonist near the end. Time’s Arrow also deals with the question of identity in the twentieth century, as Tod Friendly progresses from an elderly, rather anonymous man into a Massachusetts physician; into another physician, this time in New York City, named John Young; into an exile in Portugal named Hamilton de Souza; into his true identity as Odilo Unverdorben, a concentration-camp doctor and protégé of the ominous Auschwitz monster he calls Uncle Pepi. In telling Friendly’s increasingly complicated tale, Amis tries to encompass much of the history of the twentieth century, with particular attention to the Vietnam War era and the Cold War. By telling the story backward, Amis also explores such themes as the banality of human communication, exemplified by conversations appearing with the sentences in reverse order: answers coming before questions. Amis gets considerable comic mileage out of the horrifying images of such acts as eating and excreting depicted backward. In this ironic, perverse universe, suffering brings about joy. The narrator, one of several Amis Doppelgängers, is alternately irritated and disgusted by Friendly’s behavior, particularly his crude treatment of his longtime American lover, Irene. The narrator also professes his affection for and admiration of Jews before finally admitting that he and Unverdorben are one, a highly ironic means of accepting responsibility for one’s actions. Many critics have dismissed Time’s Arrow as a narrative stunt. In an afterword, Amis acknowledges that other writers have also employed reverse narratives, mentioning the famous account of a bomb traveling backward to its origins underground in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as a particular influence. Time’s Arrow is most notable for presenting less subtly Amis’s moral concerns, which have often been compared to those of Saul Bellow. The Information · With The Information, Amis returns to more typical themes. Two writers, best friends, are contrasted by their success, fame, and sex lives. Richard Tull, author of two little-read novels, edits The Little Magazine, a minor literary journal, serves as director of a vanity press, and writes reviews of biographies of minor writers. Gwyn Barry, on the other hand, has published a best-seller and is a major media figure. Married, with twin sons, Richard lusts after Lady Demeter, Gwyn’s glamorous wife. Richard is not jealous of Gwyn’s success so much as resentful that Gwyn’s book is so universally beloved when it is completely without literary merit, an assessment with which both their wives agree. All of Richard’s plans for revenge backfire,

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including hiring Steve Cousins, a mysterious criminal known as “Scozzy,” to assault Gwyn. In addition to addressing his usual topics—sex, violence, greed, and chaos—Amis presents a satirical view of literary infighting and pretensions. Richard creates primarily because of his need for love and attention. He perceives the world as an artist would, but he is unable to transform his vision into accessible literature: When editors read his latest effort, they become ill. Only the psychotic Scozzy seems to understand what he is trying to say. Richard cannot give up writing, however, because then he would be left with nothing but the tedium of everyday life. Gwyn is equally ridiculous. Obsessed by his fame, he reads newspaper and magazine articles about all subjects in hopes of seeing his name. The two writers are like a comic pair of mismatched twins. The Information is also a typical Amis work in that it is highly self-conscious. The narrator who explains the warped workings of Scozzy’s mind makes occasional appearances, first as “I,” then as “M. A.,” and finally as “Mart,” yet another of Amis’s cameo roles in his fiction. The narrator seems, as when he tries to explain that he cannot control Scozzy, to call attention to the artifice of the novel and to force the reader, as a willing participant in this satire, to share responsibility for the world’s chaos. Although some feminists have reservations about Amis’s work (and it is true that most of his male characters treat their women with contempt), he is a formidable and critically acclaimed writer, certainly one of the most accomplished of the generation of English writers who came of age in the 1970’s. Few others could have attempted a work on the scale of London Fields. Together with Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Peter Ackroyd—in their different ways—Amis has broken through the neat, middleclass boundaries of much contemporary English fiction and reached out toward a fiction that is more challenging and comprehensive in its scope. Bryan Aubrey, updated by Michael Adams Other major works NONFICTION: Invasion of the Space Invaders, 1982; The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America, 1986; Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions, 1993; Experience, 2000. SHORT FICTION: Einstein’s Monsters, 1987; Heavy Water and Other Stories, 1998. Bibliography Alexander, Victoria N. “Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov.” Antioch Review 52 (Fall, 1994): 580-590. Traces the influence of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov on Amis, showing how Amis’s style represents a hybrid of Bellow’s passion and Nabokov’s coolness. Like his mentors, Amis is concerned with the decline of Western civilization. Diedrick, James. Understanding Martin Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. The first book-length study of Amis examines his works through The Information. Argues that Amis’s bad-boy image results from his challenging the genteel tradition dominating contemporary British fiction. Finney, Brian. “Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields.” Critique 37 (Fall, 1995): 3-15. Argues that in these two novels, by using manipulative, self-conscious narrators who victimize the other characters, Amis forces his readers to recognize how the characters are immersed both in and outside of the action.

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Marowski, Daniel G., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 38. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1986. Includes a summary of Amis’s work and achievements up to Money, as well as extensive extracts from reviews of Dead Babies, Success, Other People, and Money, from both Great Britain and the United States. Volume 4 (1975) and volume 9 (1978) in the same series also have sections on Amis. Moyle, David. “Beyond the Black Hole: The Emergence of Science Fiction Themes in the Recent Work of Martin Amis.” Extrapolation 36 (Winter, 1995): 305-315. Shows how Amis adapts traditional science-fiction themes, such as time travel, concern about the end of the world, and a Doctor Frankenstein-like lack of regard for conventional morality, in Time’s Arrow and London Fields. Stout, Mira. “Martin Amis: Down London’s Mean Streets.” The New York Times Magazine, February 4, 1990, 32. A lively feature article, in which Amis, prodded by Stout, discusses a range of topics, including London Fields, his interest in the environment, his early life and career, his relationship with his father, the state of the novel as a form, the Thatcher government, middle age, and his daily work routine.

Jane Austen Jane Austen

Born: Steventon, England; December 16, 1775 Died: Winchester, England; July 18, 1817 Principal long fiction · Sense and Sensibility, 1811; Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Mansfield Park, 1814; Emma, 1815; Northanger Abbey, 1818; Persuasion, 1818; Sanditon, 1871 (fragment); The Watsons, 1871 (fragment). Other literary forms · In addition to writing novels, Jane Austen was the author of various short juvenile pieces, most of them literary burlesques mocking the conventions of the eighteenth century novel. Her other works are Lady Susan, a story told in letters and written c. 1805; The Watsons, a fragment of a novel written about the same time; and Sanditon, another fragmentary novel begun in 1817 (all appended by J. E. Austen-Leigh to his 1871 Memoir of Jane Austen). All these pieces appear in Minor Works (vol. 6 of the Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, 1954, R. W. Chapman, editor). Jane Austen’s surviving letters have also been edited and published by Chapman. Achievements · Austen, who published her novels anonymously, was not a writer famous in her time, nor did she wish to be. From the first, though, her novels written in and largely for her own family circle, gained the notice and esteem of a wider audience. Among her early admirers were the Prince Regent and the foremost novelist of the day, Sir Walter Scott, who deprecated his own aptitude for the “big Bow-Wow” and praised her as possessing a “talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.” Since the days of Scott’s somewhat prescient praise, her reputation has steadily grown. The critical consensus now places Jane Austen in what F. R. Leavis has termed the “Great Tradition” of the English novel. Her talent was the first to forge, from the eighteenth century novel of external incident and internal sensibility, an art form that fully and faithfully presented a vision of real life in a particular segment of the real world. Austen’s particular excellences—the elegant economy of her prose, the strength and delicacy of her judgment and moral discrimination, the subtlety of her wit, the imaginative vividness of her character drawing—have been emulated but not surpassed by subsequent writers. Biography · Jane Austen’s life contained little in the way of outward event. Born in 1775, she was the seventh of eight children. Her father, the Reverend George Austen, was a scholarly clergyman, the rector of Steventon in rural Hampshire, England. Mrs. Austen shared her husband’s intelligence and intellectual interests, and the home they provided for their children was a happy and comfortable one, replete with the pleasures of country life, genteel society, perpetual reading, and lively discussion of ideas serious and frivolous. Jane Austen, who never married, was devoted throughout her life to her brothers and their families, but her closest relationship was with her older sister Cassandra, who likewise remained unmarried and whom Austen relied upon as her chief critic, cherished as a confidante, and admired as the ideal of feminine virtue. 29

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On the rector’s retirement in 1801, Austen moved with her parents and Cassandra to Bath. After the Reverend George Austen’s death in 1804, the women continued to live for some time in that city. In 1806, the Austens moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Captain Francis Austen, Jane’s older brother, and his wife. In 1808, Edward Austen (who later adopted the surname Knight from the relations whose two estates he inherited) provided his mother and sisters with a permanent residence, Chawton Cottage, in the Hampshire village of the same name. At this house, Austen was to revise her manuscripts that became Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Library of Congress and Northanger Abbey and to write Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. In 1817, it became evident that she was ill with a serious complaint whose symptoms seem to have been those of Addison’s disease. To be near medical help, she and Cassandra moved to lodgings in Winchester in May, 1817. Austen died there less than two months later. Analysis · Jane Austen’s novels—her “bits of ivory,” as she modestly and perhaps half-playfully termed them—are unrivaled for their success in combining two sorts of excellence that all too seldom coexist. Meticulously conscious of her artistry (as, for example, is Henry James), Austen is also unremittingly attentive to the realities of ordinary human existence (as is, among others, Anthony Trollope). From the first, her works unite subtlety and common sense, good humor and acute moral judgment, charm and conciseness, deftly marshaled incident and carefully rounded character. Austen’s detractors have spoken of her as a “limited” novelist, one who, writing in an age of great men and important events, portrays small towns and petty concerns, who knows (or reveals) nothing of masculine occupations and ideas, and who reduces the range of feminine thought and deed to matrimonial scheming and social pleasantry. Though one merit of the first-rate novelist is the way his or her talent transmutes all it touches and thereby creates a distinctive and consistent world, it is true that the settings, characters, events, and ideas of Austen’s novels are more than usually homogeneous. Her tales, like her own life, are set in country villages and at rural seats, from which the denizens venture forth to watering places or travel to London. True, her characters tend to be members of her own order, that prosperous and courteous

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segment of the middle class called the gentry. Unlike her novel-writing peers, Austen introduced few aristocrats into the pages of her novels, and the lower ranks, though glimpsed from time to time, are never brought forward. The happenings of her novels would not have been newsworthy in her day. She depicts society at leisure rather than on the march, and in portraying pleasures her literary preference is modest: Architectural improvement involves the remodeling of a parsonage rather than the construction of Carlton House Terrace and Regent’s Park; a ball is a gathering of country neighbors dancing to a harpsichord, not a crush at Almack’s or the Duchess of Richmond’s glittering fête on the eve of Waterloo. These limitations are the self-drawn boundaries of a strong mind rather than the innate restrictions of a weak or parochial one. Austen was in a position to know a broad band of social classes, from the local lord of the manor to the retired laborer subsisting on the charity of the parish. Some aspects of life that she did not herself experience she could learn about firsthand without leaving the family circle. Her brothers could tell her of the university, the navy in the age of Horatio Nelson, or the world of finance and fashion in Regency London. Her cousin (and later sister-in-law) Eliza, who had lost her first husband, the Comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine, could tell her of Paris during the last days of the old regime. In focusing on the manners and morals of rural middle-class English life, particularly on the ordering dance of matrimony that gives shape to society and situation to young ladies, Austen emphasizes rather than evades reality. The microcosm she depicts is convincing because she understands, though seldom explicitly assesses, its connections to the larger order. Her characters have clear social positions but are not just social types; the genius of such comic creations as Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, and Miss Bates is that each is a sparkling refinement on a quality or set of qualities existing at all times and on all levels. A proof of Austen’s power (no one questions her polish) is that she succeeds in making whole communities live in the reader’s imagination with little recourse to the stock device of the mere novelist of manners: descriptive detail. If a sparely drawn likeness is to convince, every line must count. The artist must understand what is omitted as well as what is supplied. The six novels that constitute the Austen canon did not evolve in a straightforward way. Austen was, memoirs relate, as mistrustful of her judgment as she was rapid in her composition. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, for example, readers can be grateful that when the Reverend George Austen’s letter offering the book’s first incarnation, First Impressions (1797), to a publisher met with a negative reply, she was content to put the book aside for more than a decade. Sense and Sensibility was likewise a revision of a much earlier work. If Austen was notably nonchalant about the process of getting her literary progeny into print, one publisher with whom she had dealings was yet more dilatory. In 1803, Austen had completed Northanger Abbey (then entitled Susan) and, through her brother Henry’s agency, had sold it to Crosby and Sons for ten pounds. Having acquired the manuscript, the publisher did not think fit to make use of it, and in December, 1816, Henry Austen repurchased the novel. He made known the author’s identity, so family tradition has it, only after closing the deal. For these various reasons the chronology of Austen’s novels can be set in different ways. Here, they will be discussed in order of their dates of publication. Sense and Sensibility · Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s first published novel, evolved from Elinor and Marianne, an epistolary work completed between 1795 and 1797. The novel is generally considered her weakest, largely because, as Walton Litz convinc-

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ingly argues, it strives but fails to resolve “that struggle between inherited form and fresh experience which so often marks the transitional works of a great artist.” The “inherited form” of which Litz speaks is the eighteenth century antithetical pattern suggested in the novel’s title. According to this formula, opposing qualities of temperament or mind are presented in characters (generally female, often sisters) who despite their great differences are sincerely attached to one another. In Sense and Sensibility, the antithetical characters are Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, the respective embodiments of cool, collected sense and prodigal, exquisite sensibility. In the company of their mother and younger sister, these lovely young ladies have, on the death of their father and the succession to his estate of their half brother, retired in very modest circumstances to a small house in Devonshire. There the imprudent Marianne meets and melts for Willoughby, a fashionable gentleman as charming as he is unscrupulous. Having engaged the rash girl’s affections, Willoughby proceeds to trifle with them by bolting for London. When chance once again brings the Dashwood sisters into Willoughby’s circle, his manner toward Marianne is greatly altered. On hearing of his engagement to an heiress, the representative of sensibility swoons, weeps, and exhibits her grief to the utmost. Meanwhile, the reasonable Elinor has been equally unlucky in love, though she bears her disappointment quite differently. Before the family’s move to Devonshire, Elinor had met and come to cherish fond feelings for her sister-in-law’s brother Edward Ferrars, a rather tame fellow (at least in comparison with Willoughby) who returns her regard—but with a measure of unease. It soon becomes known that Ferrars’s reluctance to press his suit with Elinor stems from an early and injudicious secret engagement he had contracted with shrewd, base Lucy Steele. Elinor highmindedly conceals her knowledge of the engagement and her feelings on the matter. Mrs. Ferrars, however, is a lady of less impressive self-control; she furiously disinherits her elder son in favor of his younger brother, whom Lucy then proceeds to ensnare. Thus Edward, free and provided with a small church living that will suffice to support a sensible sort of wife, can marry Elinor. Marianne—perhaps because she has finally exhausted her fancies and discovered her latent reason, perhaps because her creator is determined to punish the sensibility that throughout the novel has been so much more attractive than Elinor’s prudence—is also provided with a husband: the rich Colonel Brandon, who has long loved her but whom, on account of his flannel waistcoats and his advanced age of five-and-thirty, she has heretofore reckoned beyond the pale. The great flaw of Sense and Sensibility is that the polarities presented in the persons of Elinor and Marianne are too genuinely antithetical to be plausible or dynamic portraits of human beings. Elinor has strong feelings, securely managed though they may be, and Marianne has some rational powers to supplement her overactive imagination and emotions, but the young ladies do not often show themselves to be more than mere embodiments of sense and sensibility. In her second published novel, Pride and Prejudice, Austen makes defter use of two sisters whose values are the same but whose minds and hearts function differently. This book, a complete revision of First Impressions, the youthful effort that had, in 1797, been offered to and summarily rejected by the publisher Cadell, is, as numerous critics have observed, a paragon of “classic” literature in which the conventions and traditions of the eighteenth century novel come to full flowering yet are freshened and transformed by Austen’s distinctive genius.

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Pride and Prejudice · The title Pride and Prejudice, with its balanced alliterative abstractions, might suggest a second experiment in schematic psychology, and indeed the book does show some resemblances to Sense and Sensibility. Here again, as has been suggested, the reader encounters a pair of sisters, the elder ( Jane Bennet) serene, the younger (Elizabeth) volatile. Unlike the Dashwoods, however, these ladies both demonstrate deep feelings and perceptive minds. The qualities alluded to in the title refer not to a contrast between sisters but to double defects shared by Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy and well-born young man she meets when his easygoing friend Charles Bingley leases Netherfield, the estate next to the Bennets’ Longbourn. If so rich and vital a comic masterpiece could be reduced to a formula, it might be appropriate to say that the main thread of Pride and Prejudice involves the twin correction of these faults. As Darcy learns to moderate his tradition-based view of society and to recognize individual excellence (such as Elizabeth’s, Jane’s, and their Aunt and Uncle Gardiner’s) in ranks below his own, Elizabeth becomes less dogmatic in her judgments, and in particular more aware of the real merits of Darcy, whom she initially dismisses as a haughty, unfeeling aristocrat. The growing accord of Elizabeth and Darcy is one of the most perfectly satisfying courtships in English literature. Their persons, minds, tastes, and even phrases convince the reader that they are two people truly made for each other; their union confers fitness on the world around them. Lionel Trilling has observed that, because of this principal match, Pride and Prejudice “permits us to conceive of morality as style.” Elizabeth and Darcy’s slow-growing love may be Pride and Prejudice’s ideal alliance, but it is far from being the only one, and a host of finely drawn characters surround the heroine and hero. In Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley, whose early mutual attraction is temporarily suspended by Darcy and the Bingley sisters (who deplore, not without some cause, the vulgarity of the amiable Jane’s family), Austen presents a less sparkling but eminently pleasing and well-matched pair. William Collins, the half-pompous, half-obsequious, totally asinine cousin who, because of an entail, will inherit Longbourn and displace the Bennet females after Mr. Bennet’s demise, aspires to marry Elizabeth, but, when rejected, gains the hand of her plain and practical friend Charlotte Lucas. Aware of her suitor’s absurdities, Charlotte is nevertheless alive to the advantages of the situation he can offer. Her calculated decision to marry gives a graver ring to the irony of the novel’s famous opening sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The last of the matches made in Pride and Prejudice is yet more precariously based. A lively, charming, and amoral young officer, George Wickham, son of the former steward of Pemberley, Darcy’s estate, and source of many of Elizabeth’s prejudices against that scrupulous gentleman, first fascinates Elizabeth, then elopes with her youngest sister, mindless, frivolous Lydia. Only through Darcy’s personal and financial intervention is Wickham persuaded to marry the ill-bred girl, who never properly understands her disgrace—a folly she shares with her mother. Mrs. Bennet, a woman deficient in good humor and good sense, is—along with her cynical, capricious husband—the ponderous Collins, and the tyrannical Lady Catherine De Bourgh, one of the great comic creations of literature. Most of these characters could have seemed odious if sketched by another pen, but so brilliant is the sunny intelligence playing over the world of Pride and Prejudice that even fools are golden. Mansfield Park · Mansfield Park, begun in 1811 and finished in 1813, is the first of Austen’s novels to be a complete product of her maturity. The longest, most didactic,

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least ironic of her books, it is the one critics generally have the most trouble reconciling with their prevailing ideas of the author. Although Mansfield Park was composed more or less at one stretch, its conception coincided with the final revisions of Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, the critics who offer the most satisfying studies of Mansfield Park tend to see it not as a piece of authorial bad faith or self-suppression, a temporary anomaly, but as what Walton Litz calls a “counter-truth” to its immediate predecessor. Pleased with and proud of Pride and Prejudice, Austen nevertheless recorded her impression of its being “rather too light, and bright, and sparkling”—in need of shade. That darkness she found wanting is supplied in Mansfield Park, which offers, as Trilling observes in his well-known essay on the novel, the antithesis to Pride and Prejudice’s generous, humorous, spirited social vision. Mansfield Park, Trilling argues, condemns rather than forgives: “its praise is not for social freedom but for social stasis. It takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life.” Most of the action of Mansfield Park is set within the little world comprising the estate of that name, a country place resembling in large measure Godmersham, Edward Austen Knight’s estate in Kent; but for her heroine and some interludes in which she figures, Austen dips into a milieu she has not previously frequented in her novels—the socially and financially precarious lower fringe of the middle class. Fanny Price, a frail, serious, modest girl, is one of nine children belonging to and inadequately supported by a feckless officer of marines and his lazy, self-centered wife. Mrs. Price’s meddling sister, the widowed Mrs. Norris, arranges for Fanny to be reared in “poor relation” status at Mansfield Park, the seat of kindly but crusty Sir Thomas Bertram and his languid lady, the third of the sisters. At first awed by the splendor of her surroundings, the gruffness of the baronet, and the elegance, vigor, and high spirits of the young Bertrams—Tom, Edmund, Maria, and Julia—Fanny eventually wins a valued place in the household. During Sir Thomas’s absence to visit his property in Antigua, evidence of Fanny’s moral fineness, and the various degrees in which her cousins fall short of her excellence, is presented through a device that proves to be one of Austen’s most brilliant triumphs of plotting. Visiting the rectory at Mansfield are the younger brother and sister of the rector’s wife, Henry and Mary Crawford, witty, worldly, and wealthy. At Mary’s proposal, amateur theatricals are introduced to Mansfield Park, and in the process of this diversion the moral pollution of London’s Great World begins to corrupt the bracing country air. Just how the staging of a play—even though it be Lovers’ Vows, a sloppy piece of romantic bathos, adultery rendered sympathetic—can be morally reprehensible is a bit unclear for most twentieth century readers, especially those who realize that the Austens themselves reveled in theatricals at home. The problem as Austen here presents it lies in the possible consequences of role-playing: coming to feel the emotions and attitudes one presents on the stage or, worse yet, expressing rather than suppressing genuine but socially unacceptable feelings in the guise of mere acting. In the course of the theatricals, where Fanny, who will not act, is relegated to the role of spectator and moral chorus, Maria Bertram, engaged to a bovine local heir, vies with her sister in striving to fascinate Henry Crawford, who in turn is all too ready to charm them. Mary Crawford, though it is “her way” to find eldest sons most agreeable, has the good taste to be attracted to Edmund, the second son, who plans to enter the Church. Mary’s vivacity, as evidenced by the theatricals, easily wins his heart.

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Time passes and poor Fanny, who since childhood has adored her cousin Edmund, unintentionally interests Henry Crawford. Determined to gain the affections of this rare young woman who is indifferent to his charms, Crawford ends by succumbing to hers. He proposes. Fanny’s unworldly refusal provokes the anger of her uncle. Then, while Fanny, still in disgrace with the baronet, is away from Mansfield Park and visiting her family at Portsmouth, the debacle of which Lovers’ Vows was a harbinger comes about. The homme fatal Henry, at a loss for a woman to make love to, trains his charms on his old flirt Maria, now Mrs. Rushworth. She runs away with him; her sister, not to be outdone in bad behavior, elopes with an unsatisfactory suitor. Mary Crawford’s moral coarseness becomes evident in her casual dismissal of these catastrophes. Edmund, now a clergyman, finds solace, then love, with the cousin whose sterling character shines brightly for him now that Mary’s glitter has tarnished. Fanny gains all she could hope for in at last attaining the heart and hand of her clerical kinsman. Emma · Austen’s next novel, Emma, might be thought of as harmonizing the two voices heard in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. For this book, Austen claimed to be creating “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” an “imaginist” whose circumstances and qualities of mind make her the self-crowned queen of her country neighborhood. Austen was not entirely serious or accurate: Emma certainly has her partisans. Even those readers who do not like her tend to find her fascinating, for she is a spirited, imaginative, healthy young woman who, like Mary Crawford, has potential to do considerable harm to the fabric of society but on whom, like Elizabeth Bennet, her creator generously bestows life’s greatest blessing: union with a man whose virtues, talents, and assets are the best complement for her own. Emma’s eventual marriage to Mr. Knightley of Donwell Abbey is the ultimate expression of one of Austen’s key assumptions, that marriage is a young woman’s supreme act of self-definition. Unlike any other Austen heroine, Emma has no pressing need to marry. As the opening sentence of the book implies, Emma’s situation makes her acceptance or rejection of a suitor an act of unencumbered will: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” Free though circumstance allows her to be, Emma has not been encouraged by her lot in life to acquire the discipline and self-knowledge that, augmenting her innate intelligence and taste, would help her to choose wisely. Brought up by a doting valetudinarian of a father and a perceptive but permissive governess, Emma has been encouraged to think too highly of herself. Far from vain about her beauty, Emma has—as Mr. Knightley, the only person who ventures to criticize her, observes—complete yet unfounded faith in her ability to judge people’s characters and arrange their lives. The course of Emma is Miss Woodhouse’s education in judgment, a process achieved through repeated mistakes and humiliations. As the novel opens, the young mistress of Hartfield is at loose ends. Her beloved governess has just married Mr. Weston, of the neighboring property, Randalls. To fill the newly made gap in her life, Emma takes notice of Harriet Smith, a pretty, dim “natural daughter of somebody,” and a parlor-boarder at the local school. Determined to settle her protégé into the sort of life she deems suitable, Emma detaches Harriet from Robert Martin, a young farmer who has proposed to her, and embarks upon a campaign to conquer for Harriet the heart of Mr. Elton, Highbury’s unmarried

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clergyman. Elton’s attentiveness and excessive flattery convince Emma of her plan’s success but at the same time show the reader what Emma is aghast to learn at the end of book 1: that Elton scorns the nobody and has designs upon the heiress herself. With the arrival of three new personages in Highbury, book 2 widens Emma’s opportunities for misconception. The first newcomer is Jane Fairfax, an elegant and accomplished connection of the Bates family and a girl whose prospective fate, the “governess trade,” shows how unreliable the situations of well-bred young ladies without fortunes or husbands tend to be. Next to arrive is the suave Mr. Frank Churchill, Mr. Weston’s grown son, who has been adopted by wealthy relations of his mother and who has been long remiss in paying a visit to Highbury. Finally, Mr. Elton brings home a bride, the former Augusta Hawkins of Bristol, a pretentious and impertinent creature possessed of an independent fortune, a well-married sister, and a boundless fund of self-congratulation. Emma mistakenly flatters herself that the dashing Frank Churchill is in love with her, and then settles on him as a husband for Harriet; she suspects the reserved Miss Fairfax, whose cultivation she rightly perceives as a reproach to her own untrained talents, of a clandestine relationship with a married man. She despises Mrs. Elton, as would any person of sense, but fails to see that the vulgar woman’s offensiveness is an exaggerated version of her own officiousness and snobbery. Thus, the potential consequences of Emma’s misplaced faith in her judgment intensify, and the evidence of her fallibility mounts. Thoroughly embarrassed to learn that Frank Churchill, to whom she has retailed all her hypotheses regarding Jane Fairfax, has long been secretly engaged to that woman, Emma suffers the deathblow to her smug self-esteem when Harriet announces that the gentleman whose feelings she hopes to have aroused is not, as Emma supposes, Churchill but the squire of Donwell. Emma’s moment of truth is devastating and complete, its importance marked by one of Jane Austen’s rare uses of figurative language: “It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” Perhaps the greatest evidence of Emma’s being a favorite of fortune is that Mr. Knightley feels the same as she does on this matter. Chastened by her series of bad judgments, paired with a gentleman who for years has loved and respected her enough to correct her and whom she can love and respect in turn, Emma participates in the minuet of marriage with which Austen concludes the book, the other couples so united being Miss Fairfax and Mr. Churchill and Harriet Smith (ductile enough to form four attachments in a year) and Robert Martin (stalwart enough to persist in his original feeling). Emma Woodhouse’s gradual education, which parallels the reader’s growing awareness of what a menace to the social order her circumstances, abilities, and weaknesses combine to make her, is one of Austen’s finest pieces of plotting. The depiction of character is likewise superb. Among a gallery of memorable and distinctive characters are Mr. Woodhouse; Miss Bates, the stream-of-consciousness talker who inadvertently provokes Emma’s famous rudeness on Box Hill; and the wonderfully detestable Mrs. Elton, with her self-contradictions and her fractured Italian, her endless allusions to Selina, Mr. Suckling, Maple Grove, and the barouche landau. Life at Hartfield, Donwell, and Highbury is portrayed with complexity and economy. Every word, expression, opinion, and activity—whether sketching a portrait, selecting a dancing partner, or planning a strawberry-picking party—becomes a gesture of self-revelation. Emma demonstrates how, in Austen’s hands, the novel of manners can become a statement of moral philosophy.

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Northanger Abbey · Northanger Abbey was published in a four-volume unit with Persuasion in 1818, after Austen’s death, but the manuscript had been completed much earlier, in 1803. Austen wrote a preface for Northanger Abbey but did not do the sort of revising that had transformed Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions into Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. The published form of Northanger Abbey can therefore be seen as the earliest of the six novels. It is also, with the possible exception of Sense and Sensibility, the most “literary.” Northanger Abbey, like some of Austen’s juvenile burlesques, confronts the conventions of the gothic novel or tale of terror. The incidents of her novel have been shown to parallel, with ironic difference, the principal lines of gothic romance, particularly as practiced by Ann Radcliffe, whose most famous works, The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), had appeared several years before Jane Austen had begun work on her burlesque. Like Emma, Northanger Abbey is centrally concerned with tracing the growth of a young woman’s mind and the cultivation of her judgment. In this less sophisticated work, however, the author accomplishes her goal through a rather schematic contrast. As an enthusiastic reader of tales of terror, Catherine Morland has gothic expectations of life despite a background most unsuitable for a heroine. Like the gothic heroines she admires, Catherine commences adventuring early in the novel. She is not, however, shipped to Venice or Dalmatia, but taken to Bath for a six-week stay. Her hosts are serenely amiable English folk, her pastimes the ordinary round of spa pleasures; the young man whose acquaintance she makes, Henry Tilney, is a witty clergyman rather than a misanthropic monk or dissolute rake. Toward this delightful, if far from gothic, young man, Catherine’s feelings are early inclined. In turn, he, his sister, and even his father, the haughty, imperious General Tilney, are favorably disposed toward her. With the highest expectations, Catherine sets out to accompany them to their seat, the Abbey of the novel’s title (which, like that of Persuasion, was selected not by the author but by Henry Austen, who handled the posthumous publication). At Northanger, Catherine’s education in the difference between literature and life continues. Despite its monastic origins, the Abbey proves a comfortable and wellmaintained dwelling. When Catherine, like one of Radcliffe’s protagonists, finds a mysterious document in a chest and spends a restless night wondering what lurid tale it might chronicle, she is again disappointed: “If the evidence of her sight might be trusted she held a washing-bill in her hand.” Although Catherine’s experience does not confirm the truth of Radcliffe’s sensational horrors, it does not prove the world a straightforward, safe, cozy place. Catherine has already seen something of falseness and selfish vulgarity in the persons of Isabella Thorpe and her brother John, acquaintances formed at Bath. At Northanger, she learns that, though the general may not be the wife-murderer she has fancied him, he is quite as cruel as she could imagine. On learning that Catherine is not the great heiress he has mistakenly supposed her to be, the furious general packs her off in disgrace and discomfort in a public coach. With this proof that the world of fact can prove as treacherous as that of fiction, Catherine returns sadder and wiser to the bosom of her family. She has not long to droop, though, for Henry Tilney, on hearing of his father’s bad behavior, hurries after her and makes Catherine the proposal which he has long felt inclined to offer and which his father has until recently promoted. The approval of Catherine’s parents is immediate, and the general is not overlong in coming to countenance the match. “To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well,” observes the facetious narrator, striking a literary pose even in the novel’s

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last sentence, “and . . . I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.” Persuasion · Persuasion, many readers believe, signals Austen’s literary move out of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. This novel, quite different from those that preceded it, draws not upon the tradition of the novelists of the 1790’s but on that of the lionized poets of the new century’s second decade, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. For the first time, Austen clearly seems the child of her time, susceptible to the charms of natural rather than improved landscapes, fields, and sea cliffs rather than gardens and shrubberies. The wistful, melancholy beauty of autumn that pervades the book is likewise romantic. The gaiety, vitality, and sparkling wit of Pride and Prejudice and Emma are muted. The stable social order represented by the great estate in Mansfield Park has become fluid in Persuasion: here the principal country house, Kellynch Hall, must be let because the indigenous family cannot afford to inhabit it. Most important, Persuasion’s heroine is unique in Jane Austen’s gallery. Anne Elliott, uprooted from her ancestral home, spiritually isolated from her selfish and small-minded father and sisters, separated from the man she loves by a long-standing estrangement, is every bit as “alienated” as such later nineteenth century heroines as Esther Summerson, Jane Eyre, and Becky Sharp. Anne’s story is very much the product of Austen’s middle age. At twenty-seven, she is the only Austen heroine to be past her first youth. Furthermore, she is in no need of education. Her one great mistake—overriding the impulse of her heart and yielding to the persuasion of her friend Lady Russell in rejecting the proposal of Frederick Wentworth, a sanguine young naval officer with his fortune still to make and his character to prove—is some eight years in the past, and she clearly recognizes it for the error it was. Persuasion is the story of how Anne and Frederick (now the eminent Captain) Wentworth rekindle the embers of their love. Chance throws them together when the vain, foolish Sir Walter Elliott, obliged to economize or rent his estate, resolves to move his household to Bath, where he can cut a fine figure at less cost, and leases Kellynch to Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who turn out to be the brother-in-law and sister of Captain Wentworth. Initially cool to his former love—or rather, able to see the diminution of her beauty because he is unable to forgive her rejection—the Captain flirts with the Musgrove girls; they are sisters to the husband of Anne’s younger sister Mary and blooming belles with the youth and vigor Anne lacks. The old appreciation of Anne’s merits, her clear insight, kindness, high-mindedness, and modesty, soon reasserts itself, but not before fate and the Captain’s impetuosity have all but forced another engagement upon him. Being “jumped down” from the Cobb at Lyme Regis, Louisa Musgrove misses his arms and falls unconscious on the pavement. Obliged by honor to declare himself hers if she should wish it, Wentworth is finally spared this self-sacrifice when the susceptible young lady and the sensitive Captain Benwick fall in love. Having discovered the intensity of his devotion to Anne by being on the point of having to abjure it, Wentworth hurries to Bath, there to declare his attachment in what is surely the most powerful engagement scene in the Austen canon. Though the story of Persuasion belongs to Anne Elliott and Frederick Wentworth, Austen’s skill at evoking characters is everywhere noticeable. As Elizabeth Jenkins observes, all of the supporting characters present different facets of the love theme. The heartless marital calculations of Mr. Elliott, Elizabeth Elliott, and Mrs. Clay, the domestic comforts of the senior Musgroves and the Crofts, and the half-fractious,

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half-amiable ménage of Charles and Mary Musgrove all permit the reader more clearly to discern how rare and true is the love Anne Elliott and her captain have come so close to losing. The mature, deeply grateful commitment they are able to make to each other is, if not the most charming, surely the most profound in the Austen world. Peter W. Graham Other major works SHORT FICTION: Minor Works, 1954 (vol. 6 of the Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen; R. W. Chapman, editor). NONFICTION: Jane Austen’s Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, 1952 (R. W. Chapman, editor). Bibliography Bush, Douglas. Jane Austen. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Addressed to students and general readers, this survey by an eminent scholar provides a straightforward introduction to Austen’s work. Overviews of Austen’s England, her life, and her early writings set the stage for chapter-length discussions of her six novels; two unfinished works, The Watsons and Sanditon, also receive a chapter each. Copeland, Edward, and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997. This collection of thirteen new essays on Austen is divided between those concerning her own world and those that address modern critical discourse, such as Claudia L. Johnson’s “Austen Cults and Cultures.” While some essays focus on Austen’s novels, others deal with broad issues such as class consciousness, religion, and domestic economy. This excellent overview includes a chronology and concludes with an assessment of late twentieth century developments in Austen scholarship. Grey, J. David, ed. The Jane Austen Companion. New York: Macmillan, 1986. An encyclopedic guide to Austen’s life and works. Among the topics covered are “Characterization in Jane Austen,” “Chronology of Composition,” and “Editions and Publishing History.” There are brief essays on “Dancing, Balls, and Assemblies,” “Dress and Fashion,” “Post/Mail,” and many other aspects of everyday life in Austen’s time. Each essay includes a bibliography. An indispensable resource. Hardy, Barbara. A Reading of Jane Austen. New York: New York University Press, 1976. A thematic approach to Austen’s fiction (Hardy does not discuss Austen’s juvenilia or her fragmentary works). In the first chapter, “The Flexible Medium,” Hardy argues that while Austen was not, on the surface, a radical innovator, she nevertheless transformed the genre in which she worked: “Indeed she may be said to have created the modern novel.” Two later chapters provide a valuable study of Austen’s handling of narrative point of view and of “telling and listening” in her novels. Lacks an index. Lane, Maggie. Jane Austen’s England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. This fascinating book is full of illustrations which give Austen’s readers a look at the world of her novels. Arranged chronologically, taking the reader to the places Austen would have gone, usually through contemporary paintings. The text is useful; the first chapter, “The England of Jane Austen’s Time,” gives a good basic summary of social conditions around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Includes references to the novels; for example, Lane quotes the Box Hill episode from Emma and

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provides a painting of Box Hill. Also includes a map, a short bibliography, and an index. Mooneyham, Laura G. Romance, Language, and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Covers all six of Austen’s complete novels, theorizing that a relationship exists among language, education, and romance. Asserts that the romance between heroine and hero is in itself educational for the heroine because romance offers the opportunity for open communication. This approach is provocative and useful, especially because it emphasizes Austen’s own preoccupations. Each chapter discusses a separate novel, which may be useful for the study of one of Austen’s works. Myer, Valerie Grosvenor. Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997. This biography of Jane Austen emphasizes her self-consciousness, born of an inferior social position and constant money worries. Still, she would refuse the proposal of a wealthy suitor because, as Myer states, Austen’s “obstinate heart” would only allow her to marry for love. Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Nokes attempts to uncover a more authentic Jane Austen than the saintly, censored image that her family presented to the public after her early death. His method is novelistic, in that he attempts, as much as possible, to present Austen’s life from her own perspective. Sulloway, Alison. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Attempts to place Austen into a framework of “women-centered” authors from the tract-writers Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Catharine Macaulay, to novelists Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith. Counters early views of Austen as a conservative woman upholding the status quo in her novels. Suggests that Austen was a moderate feminist who sought reforms for women rather than outright revolution. Instead of reading Austen’s novels separately, Sulloway focuses on themes which she calls “provinces”: the ballroom (dancing and marriage), the drawing room (debate), the garden (reconciliation). A valuable book which is thought-provoking and not overly theoretical. Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1998. This compelling account of Austen’s life is exceedingly well written and, like Nokes’s biography, attempts to tell the story from the subject’s own perspective. Proceeding in chronological order, the book concludes with a postscript on the fates of Austen’s family members and two interesting appendixes: a note of Austen’s final illness and an excerpt from the diary of Austen’s niece, Fanny.

J. G. Ballard J. G. Ballard

Born: Shanghai, China; November 15, 1930 Principal long fiction · The Wind from Nowhere, 1962; The Drowned World, 1962; The Drought, 1964 (later published as The Burning World); The Crystal World, 1966; Crash, 1973; Concrete Island, 1974; High Rise, 1975; The Unlimited Dream Company, 1979; Hello America, 1981; Empire of the Sun, 1984; The Day of Creation, 1987; Running Wild, 1988 (novella); The Kindness of Women, 1991; Rushing to Paradise, 1994; Cocaine Nights, 1996; Super-Cannes, 2000. Other literary forms · J. G. Ballard has been a prolific short-story writer; there are more than twenty collections of his stories, though some are recombinations of stories in earlier collections, and the American and British collections constitute two series in which the same stories are combined in different ways. He has written occasional essays on imaginative fiction, and also on surrealist painting—he contributed an introduction to a collection of work by Salvador Dalí. Many of these essays are collected in A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996). The best of his short fiction is to be found in two retrospective collections: Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) and The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978). Achievements · Ballard is one of a handful of writers who, after establishing early reputations as science-fiction writers, subsequently achieved a kind of “transcendence” of their genre origins to be accepted by a wider public. This transcendence was completed by the success of Empire of the Sun, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Prize before being boosted to best-seller status by a film produced by Steven Spielberg. In 1997, maverick director David Cronenberg turned Ballard’s cult classic Crash into an equally disturbing film noir, which quickly found a dedicated audience. For a time in the early 1960’s, Ballard seemed to constitute a one-man avant-garde in British science fiction, and his influence was considerable enough for him to become established as the leading figure in the movement which came to be associated with the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. His interest in science-fiction themes was always of a special kind; he is essentially a literary surrealist who finds the near future a convenient imaginative space. His primary concern is the effect of environment, both “natural” and synthetic—upon the psyche—and he has therefore found it appropriate to write about gross environmental changes and about the decay and dereliction of the artificial environment; these interests distance him markedly from other modern science-fiction writers and have helped him to become a writer sui generis. Biography · James Graham Ballard was born and reared in Shanghai, China, where his father, originally an industrial chemist, was involved in the management of the Far East branch of a firm of textile manufacturers. The Sino-Japanese war had begun, and Shanghai was effectively a war zone by the time Ballard was seven years old; all of his early life was affected by the ever-nearness of war. After Japan’s entry into World War II and its invasion of Shanghai, Ballard was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. 41

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This was in the summer of 1942, when he was eleven; he was there for more than three years. Ballard has said that his experience of the internment camp was “not unpleasant”—it was simply a fact of life which, as a child, he accepted. Children were not generally mistreated by the guards, and the adults made sure that the children were adequately fed, even at their own expense. He has observed that his parents must have found the regime extremely harsh. Although his family was among the fortunate few who avoided malaria, his sister nearly died of a form of dysentery. After his release, Ballard went to England in 1946. His family stayed in the Far East for a while, and his father did not return until 1950, when he was driven out of China by the Communist victory. Ballard has recalled that after spending his early years in “Americanized” Shanghai, England seemed very strange and foreign. He went to Leys’ School in Cambridge for a while, then went to King’s College, Cambridge, to study medicine. His ultimate aim at this time was to become a psychiatrist. At Cambridge he began writing, initially intending to maintain the activity as a hobby while he was qualifying. In fact, though, he dropped out of his course after two years and subsequently went to London University to read English. The university seems to have found him unsuitable for such a course, and he left after his first year. He then embarked upon a series of short-term jobs, including working for an advertising agency and selling encyclopedias. Eventually, to end this aimless drifting, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force and was sent for training to Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. He was not suited to the air force either, but while in Canada he began reading magazine science fiction, and while waiting for his discharge back in England he wrote his first science-fiction story, “Passport to Eternity” (it was not published for some years). Shortly after this, in 1955, he married and worked in public libraries in order to support his family. In 1956, Ballard began submitting short stories to Ted Carnell, editor of the British magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy. Carnell was not only enthusiastic about Ballard’s work but also helpful in finding Ballard a new job working on a trade journal. Eventually, Ballard became assistant editor of Chemistry and Industry, a job which he held for four years. He moved in 1960 to the small Thames-side town of Shepperton, where he would make his permanent home. By this time he had three children and was struggling to find time to devote to his writing. During a two-week annual holiday he managed to write The Wind from Nowhere, whose publication in America represented something of a breakthrough for him—the same publisher began to issue a series of short-story collections, and the income from these books allowed him to become a full-time writer. His wife died in 1964, when his youngest child was only five years old. As a result, he began to combine his career as a writer with the exacting pressures of being a single parent. The fame that followed the success of Empire of the Sun seems not to have disturbed his lifestyle at all. For a reader curious about Ballard’s life upon his move from China to England, his 1991 novel, The Kindness of Women, offers an enticing mix of autobiography and imagination. While real-life events are covered and include details such as Ballard’s car crash, his subsequent exhibition of crashed cars at an avant-garde gallery in London, and his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1970’s, the novel should not be mistaken for a genuine autobiography. Composite characters and imagined or greatly exaggerated events abound, and most real-life characters are given new names, with the prominent exception of the protagonist, called Jim Ballard. Unlike this novel’s character, J. G. Ballard seems to have spent a lot of his creative

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energy on his imaginative writing. In addition to producing a steady output of original novels and short stories, Ballard has also been an active writer of essays and book reviews, which have made his a familiar voice in British literary circles. Analysis · J. G. Ballard’s first seven novels can be easily sorted into two groups. The first four are novels of worldwide disaster, while the next three are stories of cruelty and alienation set in the concrete wilderness of contemporary urban society. All of his novels are, however, linked by a concern with the disintegration of civilization on a global or local scale. Ballard’s early disaster stories follow a well-established tradition in British imaginative fiction. British science-fiction writers from H. G. Wells to John Wyndham always seem to have been fascinated by the notion of the fragility and vulnerability of the human empire, and have produced many careful and clinical descriptions of its fall. The earlier works in this tradition are didactic tales, insisting on the vanity of human wishes and reveling in the idea that when the crunch comes, only the tough will survive. Ballard, in contrast, is quite unconcerned with drawing morals—his disaster stories are not at all social Darwinist parables. His main concern is with the psychological readjustments which the characters are forced to make when faced with the disintegration of their world: He sees the problem of catastrophic change largely in terms of adaptation. In one of his earliest essays on science fiction, a “guest editorial” which he contributed to New Worlds in 1962, Ballard committed the heresy of declaring that H. G. Wells was “a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction.” He suggested that the vocabulary of ideas to which science-fiction writers and readers had become accustomed should be thrown overboard, and with them its customary narrative forms and conventional plots. It was time, he said, to turn to the exploration of inner space rather than outer space, and to realize that “the only truly alien planet is Earth.” He offered his opinion that Salvador Dalí might be the most pertinent source of inspiration for modern writers of science fiction. The rhetorical flourishes which fill this essay caution readers against taking it all too seriously, but in the main this is the prospectus which Ballard has tried to follow. He has practiced what he preached, shaking off the legacy of H. G. Wells, dedicating himself to the exploration of inner space and the development of new metaphysical (particularly metapsychological) systems, and steering well clear of the old plots and narrative formulas. In so doing, he made himself one of the most original writers of his generation; such novels as Empire of the Sun and The Day of Creation do indeed demonstrate the essential alienness of the planet on which we live. The Wind from Nowhere · In The Wind from Nowhere, which is considerably inferior to the three other disaster novels, a slowly accelerating wind plucks the human-made world apart. No one can stand firm against this active rebellion of nature—neither the American armed forces nor the immensely rich industrialist Hardoon, who seeks to secrete himself within a gigantic concrete pyramid, which the wind eventually topples into an abyss. The Wind from Nowhere has a whole series of protagonists and shows the catastrophe from several viewpoints. This was one of the well-tried methods of retailing disaster stories, but it was unsuited to Ballard’s particular ambitions, and in the other novels of this early quartet he employed single protagonists as focal points—almost as measuring devices to analyze in depth the significance of parallel physical and psychological changes.

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The Drowned World · In The Drowned World, Earth’s surface temperature has risen and is still gradually rising. Water released by the melting of the ice caps has inundated much of the land, and dense tropical jungle has spread rapidly through what were once the temperate zones, rendering them all but uninhabitable. Ballard suggests that the world is undergoing a kind of retrogression to the environment of the Triassic period. The novel’s protagonist is Robert Kerans, a biologist monitoring the changes from a research station in partly submerged London. The psychological effects of the transfiguration first manifest themselves as dreams in which Kerans sees “himself” (no longer human) wandering a primitive world dominated by a huge, fierce sun. These dreams, he concludes, are a kind of memory retained within the cellular heritage of humankind, now called forth again by the appropriate stimulus. Their promise is that they will free the nervous system from the domination of the recently evolved brain, whose appropriate environment is gone, and restore the harmony of primeval proto-consciousness and archaic environment. Kerans watches other people trying to adapt in their various ways to the circumstances in which they find themselves, but he sees the essential meaninglessness of their strategies. He accepts the pull of destiny and treks south, submitting to the psychic metamorphosis that strips away his humanity until he becomes “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun.” The Drowned World was sufficiently original and sophisticated to be incomprehensible to most of the aficionados of genre science fiction, who did not understand what Ballard was about or why. A minority, however, recognized its significance and its import; its reputation is now firmly established as one of the major works of its period. The Drought · In The Drought (later published as The Burning World), the pattern of physical change is reversed: Earth becomes a vast desert because a pollutant molecular film has formed on the surface of the world’s oceans, inhibiting evaporation. The landscape is gradually transformed, the concrete city-deserts becoming surrounded by seas of hot sand instead of arable land, while the seashore retreats to expose new deserts of crystalline salt. The soil dies and civilization shrivels, fires reducing forests and buildings alike to white ash. Ransom, the protagonist, is one of the last stubborn few who are reluctant to join the exodus to the retreating sea. From his houseboat he watches the river dwindle away, draining the dregs of the social and natural order. He lives surrounded by relics of an extinguished past, bereft of purpose and no longer capable of emotional response. Eventually, Ransom and his surviving neighbors are driven to seek refuge in the “dune limbo” of the new seashore and take their places in a new social order dominated by the need to extract fresh water from the reluctant sea. Here, he finds, people are simply marking time and fighting a hopeless rear-guard action. In the final section of the story, he goes inland again to see what has become of the city and its last few inhabitants. They, mad and monstrous, have found a new way of life, hideous but somehow appropriate to the universal aridity, which is an aridity of the soul as well as of the land. The Crystal World · In The Crystal World, certain areas of the earth’s surface are subjected to a strange process of crystallization as some mysterious substance is precipitated out of the ether. This is a more localized and less destructive catastrophe than those in The Drowned World and The Drought, but the implication is that it will continue until the world is consumed. The initially affected area is in Africa, where

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the novel is set. The central character is Dr. Sanders, the assistant director of a leper colony, who is at first horrified when he finds his mistress and some of his patients joyfully accepting the process of cystallization within the flesh of their own bodies. Eventually, of course, he comes to realize that no other destiny is appropriate to the new circumstances. What is happening is that time and space are somehow being reduced, so that they are supersaturated with matter. Enclaves from which time itself has “evaporated” are therefore being formed—fragments of eternity where living things, though they cannot continue to live, also cannot die, but undergo instead a complete existential transubstantiation. Here, metaphors developed in The Drought are literalized with the aid of a wonderfully gaudy invention. The transformation of the world in The Crystal World is a kind of beautification, and it is much easier for the reader to sympathize with Sanders’s acceptance of its dictates than with Kerans’s capitulation to the demands of his dreams. For this reason, the novel has been more popular within the science-fiction community than either of its predecessors. It is, however, largely a recapitulation of the same theme, which does not really gain from its association with the lush romanticism that occasionally surfaces in Ballard’s work—most noticeably in the short stories set in the imaginary American west-coast artists’ colony Vermilion Sands, a beach resort populated by decadent eccentrics and the flotsam of bygone star cults who surround themselves with florid artificial environments. Crash · Seven years elapsed between publication of The Crystal World and the appearance of Crash. Although Ballard published numerous retrospective collections in the interim, his one major project was a collection of what he called “condensed novels”—a series of verbal collages featuring surreal combinations of images encapsulating what Ballard saw as the contemporary zeitgeist. In the world portrayed in these collages, there is a great deal of violence and perverted sexual arousal. Ubiquitous Ballardian images recur regularly: dead birds, junked space hardware, derelict buildings. Mixed in with these are secular icons: the suicide of entertainer Marilyn Monroe, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and other personalities whose fates could be seen as symbolic of the era in decline. The theme of Crash is already well developed in the condensed novels (collected in the United Kingdom under the title The Atrocity Exhibition, 1969, and in the United States under the title Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.). Cars, within the novel, are seen as symbols of power, speed, and sexuality—a commonplace psychoanalytic observation, to which Ballard adds the surprising further representation of the car crash as a kind of orgasm. The protagonist of the novel, who is called Ballard, finds his first car crash, despite all the pain and attendant anxiety, to be an initiation into a new way of being, whereby he is forced to reformulate his social relationships and his sense of purpose. Ballard apparently decided to write the book while considering the reactions of members of the public to an exhibition of crashed cars which he held at the New Arts Laboratory in London. Although it is mundane by comparison with his previous novels—it is certainly not science fiction—Crash is by no means a realistic novel. Its subject matter is trauma and the private fantasization of alarming but ordinary events. The hero, at one point, does bear witness to a transformation of the world, but it is a purely subjective one while he is under the influence of a hallucinogen. He sees the landscapes of the city transformed, woven into a new metaphysics by the attribution of a new context of significance derived from his perverted fascination with cars and expressway architecture.

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Concrete Island · The two novels which followed Crash retain and extrapolate many of its themes. Concrete Island and High Rise are both robinsonades whose characters become Crusoes in the very heart of modern civilization, cast away within sight and earshot of the metropolitan hordes but no less isolated for their proximity. In Concrete Island, a man is trapped on a traffic island in the middle of a complex freeway intersection, unable to reach the side of the road because the stream of cars is never-ending. Like Crusoe, he sets out to make the best of his situation, using whatever resources—material and social—he finds at hand. He adapts so well, in the end, that he refuses the opportunity to leave when it finally arrives. High Rise · The high-rise apartment block which gives High Rise its title is intended to be a haven for the well-to-do middle class, a comfortable microcosm to which they can escape from the stressful outside world of work and anxiety. It is, perhaps, too well insulated from the world at large; it becomes a private empire where freedom from stress gives birth to a violent anarchy and a decay into savagery. If Concrete Island is spiritually akin to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), then High Rise is akin to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), though it is all the more shocking in translocating the decline into barbarism of Golding’s novel from a remote island to suburbia, and in attributing the decline to adults who are well aware of what is happening rather than to children whose innocence provides a ready excuse. As always, Ballard’s interest is in the psychological readjustments made by his chief characters, and the way in which the whole process proves to be ultimately cathartic. A major theme in the condensed novels, which extends into the three novels of the second group, is what Ballard refers to as the “death of affect,” a sterilization of the emotions and attendant moral anesthesia, which he considers to be a significant contemporary trend induced by contemporary lifestyles. The greatest positive achievement of the characters in these novels is a special kind of ataraxia, a calm of mind rather different from the one Plato held up as an ideal, which allows one to live alongside all manner of horrors without being unusually moved to fear or pity. The Unlimited Dream Company · Another gap, though not such a long one, separates High Rise from The Unlimited Dream Company, a messianic fantasy of the redemption of Shepperton from suburban mundanity. Its protagonist, Blake, crashes a stolen aircraft into the Thames River at Shepperton. Though his dead body remains trapped in the cockpit, he finds himself miraculously preserved on the bank. At first he cannot accept his true state, but several unsuccessful attempts to leave the town and a series of visions combine to convince him that he has a specially privileged role to play: He must teach the people to fly, so that they can transcend their earthly existence to achieve a mystical union with the vegetable and mineral worlds, dissolving themselves into eternity as the chief characters did in The Crystal World. Though the name of the central character is significant, the book also appears to be closely allied with the paintings of another artist: the eccentric Stanley Spencer, who lived in another Thames-side town (Cookham) and delighted in locating within its mundane urban scenery images of biblical and transcendental significance. The kind of redemption featured in The Unlimited Dream Company is as ambivalent as the kinds of adaptation featured in earlier novels, and its promise does not carry the same wild optimism that similar motifs are made to carry in most science-fiction and fantasy novels. It is perhaps best to view The Unlimited Dream Company as one more novel of adaptation, but one which reverses the pattern of the earlier works.

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Here, it is not Blake who must adapt to changes in the external world, but Shepperton which must adapt to him—and he, too, must adapt to his own godlike status. Blake is himself the “catastrophe” which visits Shepperton, the absolute at large within it whose immanence cannot be ignored or resisted. If the novel seems to the reader to be upbeat rather than downbeat, that is mainly the consequence of a change of viewpoint—and had the readers who thought The Drowned World downbeat been willing to accept such a change, they might have been able to find that novel equally uplifting. Hello America · Although The Unlimited Dream Company does not represent such a dramatic change of pattern as first appearances suggest, Hello America is certainly, for Ballard, a break with his own tradition. There is little in the novel that seems new in thematic terms, although it recalls his short stories much more than previous novels, but there is nevertheless a sense in which it represents a radical departure. The plot concerns the “rediscovery” in the twenty-second century of a largely abandoned America by an oddly assorted expedition from Europe. What they find are the shattered relics of a whole series of American mythologies. The central character, Wayne, dreams of resurrecting America and its dream, restoring the mythology of technological optimism and glamorous consumerism to operational status. He cannot do so, of course, but there is a consistent note of ironic nostalgia in his hopeless ambition. What is remarkable about the book is that it is a confection, an offhand entertainment to be enjoyed but not taken seriously. From Ballard the novelist, this is totally unexpected, though his short fiction has frequently shown him to be a witty writer, and a master of the ironic aside. Empire of the Sun · This change of direction proved, not unexpectedly, to be a purely temporary matter—a kind of brief holiday from more serious concerns. Empire of the Sun recovered all the mesmeric intensity of Ballard’s earlier work, adding an extra turn of the screw by relating it to historically momentous events through which the author had actually lived. Although the book’s young protagonist is named Jim and is the same age as Ballard was when he was interned by the Japanese, Empire of the Sun is—like Crash before it—by no means autobiographical in any strict sense. Jim’s adventures are as exaggerated as the fictional Ballard’s were, but the purpose of the exaggeration is here perfectly clear: What seems from an objective point of view to be a horrible and unmitigated catastrophe is to Jim simply part of the developing pattern of life, to which he must adapt himself, and which he takes aboard more or less innocently. From his point of view, given that the internment camp is the world, and not (as it is from the point of view of the adult internees) an intolerable interruption of the world, it is the behavior of the British prisoners which seems unreasonable and hostile, while the Japanese guards are the champions of order. The world does not begin to end for Jim until the war comes toward its close and the orderliness of camp life breaks down; that which others see as a source of hope and a possibility of redemption from their living hell is for Jim something else entirely, to which he reacts in characteristically idiosyncratic fashion. The frightful irony of all this is, as usual, overlaid and disguised by a straight-faced matter-of-factness which forbids the reader to cling to the conventional verities enshrined in an older, inherited attitude toward the war with Japan. The Day of Creation · The Day of Creation returns to the Africa of The Crystal World, this time disrupted by the seemingly miraculous appearance of a new river whose

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“discoverer,” Dr. Mallory of the World Health Organization, hopes that it may restore edenic life to territory spoiled for millennia by drought and ceaseless petty wars. Mallory’s odyssey along the river upon which he bestows his own name might be seen as an inversion of Marlow’s journey in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), in which the mysteriously silent girl Noon is the hopeful counterpart of the soul-sick Kurtz; but the redemption promised by the river is a temporary illusion, and Noon herself may only be a figment of Mallory’s imagination. Running Wild · The novella Running Wild, thinly disguised as a mass-murder mystery in which the entire adult population of a small town is massacred, is another playfully ironic piece, though rather less gaudy than Hello America—appropriately, in view of its setting, which is a cozy suburban landscape of the Home Counties; it is a long short story rather than a short novel, but it carries forward the argument of High Rise as well as brief black comedies such as “The Intensive Care Unit.” The Kindness of Women · The Kindness of Women revisits Ballard’s semiautobiographical subject matter, which he introduced with Empire of the Sun. The novel opens amid the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937, an event Ballard himself witnessed as a boy. His protagonist’s carefree adolescence is literally shattered by a bomb blast, when the Japanese air raid surprises a boy, again named Jim Ballard, as he strolls down the middle of Shanghai’s amusement quarters. Moving from 1937 directly to Jim’s arrival in post-World War II Great Britain, The Kindness of Women accompanies its protagonist to way stations modeled after significant events in the author’s life, mixing imagination and autobiographical material. While The Kindness of Women covers terrain familiar to readers of Ballard’s work, it nevertheless manages to shed fresh light on the author’s recurring obsessions, themes, and symbols, such as the ubiquitous instances of downed aircraft, drained swimming pools, and concrete flyovers encircling Heathrow airport. Rushing to Paradise · Ballard’s next novel, Rushing to Paradise, has been marketed as a satire on the follies of the environmentalist movement, but it is a more complicated text than that. Antihero Dr. Barbara Rafferty is on a quest to establish a South Sea sanctuary for the albatross on an island wrested from the French government. The novel suggests that this is really a private attempt to build a murderous playground to live out psychosexual needs of her own. This boldly unconventional idea is obviously linked to Ballard’s familiar suggestion of the dominance of the psychological over the material. The novel’s invention of new psychological disorders and obsessions, and its iconoclastic depiction of an environmentalist physician who develops into a quasi commandant presiding over a disused airfield and ruined camera towers, clearly gives Rushing to Paradise the surrealist streak common to Ballard’s fiction. Perhaps not surprisingly, Rushing to Paradise largely failed to connect with a larger audience. Even though the novel’s premise of renewed French nuclear testing in the South Seas uncannily anticipated the real-life development of such tests in the mid-1990’s and thus predicted the future, something rarely accomplished by traditional science-fiction texts, many readers apparently did not forgive Ballard his choice of an environmentalist woman as the novel’s surreal centerpiece. Ballard’s idiosyncratic characters, who had alienated science-fiction fans when The Drowned World was published, managed again to distance his work from readers unwilling to engage the author on his own unique artistic grounds.

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Cocaine Nights · Cocaine Nights, however, won great critical acclaim from British reviewers, who hailed the novel as Ballard’s masterpiece for its fusion of surrealism and detective story. Ostensibly, Cocaine Nights tells of Charles Prentice’s quest to exonerate his brother Frank, who is held in a Spanish jail and charged with a murder to which he has confessed. Utterly unconvinced that his brother has killed a wealthy family at a posh resort on the coast of southern Spain and believing his confession absurd, Charles tries to find the real culprit. His investigation quickly draws him into the orbit of Bobby Crawford, a rogue tennis instructor and self-appointed leader of a group of thrill-seeking English who fight terminal boredom by committing highly imaginative crimes and outrageous acts of vandalism. With its emerging thesis that only the existence of crime can energize the somnolent resort community of terminally exhausted upper-middle-class retirees, Ballard’s novel flies again in the face of the commonsense reader used to realistic fiction. Like his best work before, Cocaine Nights entices by its outrageously absurd proposal of the criminal as benefactor to humanity, and it confirms Ballard’s position as one of England’s most imaginative, original, and creative novelists. Brian Stableford, updated by R. C. Lutz Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Voices of Time, 1962; Billenium, 1962; The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, 1963; Passport to Eternity, 1963; The Terminal Beach, 1964; The Impossible Man, 1966; The Disaster Area, 1967; The Overloaded Man, 1967; The Atrocity Exhibition, 1969 (also known as Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.); Vermilion Sands, 1971; Chronopolis and Other Stories, 1971; The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, 1978; Myths of the Near Future, 1982; Memories of the Space Age, 1988; War Fever, 1990. NONFICTION: A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, 1996. Bibliography Jones, Mark. “J. G. Ballard: Neurographer.” In Impossibility Fiction, edited by Derek Littlewood. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1996. Jones sees Ballard’s fiction as characterized by the recurring theme of the author’s description of the human mind as a kind of geographic landscape. Praises Ballard for his radical, surrealist descriptions of a new relationship between mind and reality. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Angle Between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Most comprehensive study of Ballard’s work. Thorough discussion and analysis of his fiction. Well-researched and extremely informative. ____________. “Petition, Repetition, and ‘Autobiography’: J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 4 (Winter, 1994): 688-708. Useful study of the historical veracity of Ballard’s two novels. Luckhurst tries to discover methods and thematic and aesthetic strategies that have organized and informed Ballard’s fictional work along with his autobiographical source material. Pringle, David. Earth Is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1979. A monograph in Borgo’s Milford series, featuring a biographical sketch and an excellent analysis of Ballard’s work, by a critic who has followed the author’s career very closely. Re-Search: J. G. Ballard. San Francisco: Re-Search, 1983. A special issue of a periodical publication devoted to Ballard and his works, including an interview, critical

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articles, and some unusual items by Ballard; it views Ballard as an avant-garde literary figure rather than a science-fiction writer. Stableford, Brian. “J. G. Ballard.” In Science Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982. A competent overview of the author’s work.

Julian Barnes Julian Barnes

Dan Kavanagh Born: Leicester, England; January 19, 1946 Principal long fiction · Metroland, 1980; Duffy, 1980 (as Dan Kavanagh); Fiddle City, 1981 (as Kavanagh); Before She Met Me, 1982; Flaubert’s Parrot, 1984; Putting the Boot In, 1985 (as Kavanagh); Staring at the Sun, 1986; Going to the Dogs, 1987 (as Kavanagh); A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, 1989; Talking It Over, 1991; The Porcupine, 1992 (novella); England, England, 1998; Love, etc., 2000. Other literary forms · Julian Barnes has served as a journalist and columnist for several British newspapers and magazines. He has also published numerous essays and book reviews. Achievements · Barnes is one of a number of British writers born after World War II who gravitated toward London and its literary scene. Reacting to the certainties and assumptions of the previous generation, they have often resorted to irony and comedy in viewing the contemporary world. Some have experimented with the form of the traditional novel. Barnes’s early novels were narrative and chronological in approach, but his fifth book, Flaubert’s Parrot, combined fact and fiction, novel and history, biography and literary criticism. For that work he was nominated for Great Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, and was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has also won literary prizes in Italy and France, and he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In Staring at the Sun and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes continued his exploration of the novel and its form. Biography · Born in the English Midlands city of Leicester just after World War II to parents who were French teachers, Julian Patrick Barnes studied French at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he was graduated with honors in 1968 with a degree in modern languages. After leaving Oxford, his abiding interest in words and language led him to a position as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement. In 1972 Barnes became a freelance writer, preferring that parlous profession to the law. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, he wrote reviews for The Times Literary Supplement and was contributing editor to the New Review, assistant literary editor of New Statesman, and deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times of London. For a decade he served as a television critic, most notably for the London Observer, where his comments were witty, irreverent, and provocative. Influenced by the French writer Gustave Flaubert, particularly his concern for form, style, and objectivity, Barnes’s serious novels continued to exhibit his fascination with language and literary experiments, in contrast with the more traditional narrative approach and narrow subject matter of many twentieth century English novelists. Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, Barnes also published a number of detective novels. 51

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By the 1990’s Barnes had become one of Britain’s leading literary figures. His literary reviews appeared in many of the leading publications in both his own country and the United States. He also wrote brilliant journalistic pieces on various topics— political, social, and literary—some of them appearing in The New Yorker. Many of these essays were collected and published in Letters from London (1995). His long-standing fascination with France was revealed in his collection of short stories Cross Channel (1996), a series of tales about English men and women and their experiences of living and working in France. In the mid-1990’s Barnes accepted a one-year teaching position at The Johns Hopkins University, in part, he said, to increase his knowledge of American society, the United States being second only to France among Barnes’s foreign fascinations. After a several-year novelistic hiatus, in 1998 he published England, England, which was widely reviewed and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Britain’s premier literary award, evidence that Barnes continued to be recognized as one of the most interesting novelists writing in English. Analysis · In all of his works Barnes has pursued several ideas: Human beings question, even though there can be no absolute answers; humanity pursues its obsessions, often resulting in failure. Yet his novels have at the same time evolved in form and approach—the earliest are more traditional and conventional, the latter more experimental. Barnes’s wit and irony, his use of history, literary criticism, myth, and fable, his melding of imagination and intellect, and his continuing risk in exploring new forms and methods make him one of the most significant English novelists of his generation. Metroland · Barnes’s first novel, Metroland, is orthodox in technique and approach; divided into three parts, it is a variation on the traditional Bildungsroman, or comingof-age novel. In part 1, the narrator, Christopher Lloyd, and his close friend, Toni, grow up in 1963 in a north London suburb on the Metropolitan rail line (thus the title), pursuing the perennial adolescent dream of rebellion against parents, school, the middle class, and the establishment in general. Convinced of the superiority of French culture and consciously seeking answers to what they believe to be the larger questions of life, they choose to cultivate art, literature, and music in order to astound what they see as the bourgeoisie and its petty concerns. Part 2, five years later, finds Christopher a student in Paris, the epitome of artistic bohemianism, particularly when compared to Metroland. It is 1968, and French students are demonstrating and rioting in the streets for social and political causes. None of this touches Christopher: He is more concerned about his personal self-discovery than about changing or challenging the wider world. Nine years later, in part 3, set in 1977, Christopher is back in Metroland, married to Marion, an Englishwoman of his own class, with a child, a mortgaged suburban house, and a nine-to-five job. Toni, still a rebel, chides Christopher for selling out to the enemy. Ironically, however, Christopher is contented with life in Metroland. He consciously examines and questions his present circumstances but accepts their rewards and satisfactions. Questioning and irony are continuing themes in all Barnes’s novels, as is the absence of significant character development except for the leading figure. Toni, Christopher’s French girlfriend Annick, and Marion, his English wife, are not much more than supporting figures. Relationships are explored through Christopher’s narration alone, and Christopher finds himself, his questions, and his life of most concern and interest to him.

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Before She Met Me · Before She Met Me is also a story of an individual’s attempt to relate to and understand his personal world. Graham Hendrick, a forty-year-old professor of history, has recently remarried. Now beginning a new life, happy with Ann, his new wife, and outwardly contented, both personally and professionally, Hendrick seems to be an older variation of Christopher and his self-satisfied middle-class existence. As in his first novel, Barnes has included a bohemian writer, Jack Lupton, as a foil for Hendrick’s respectable conformity. Before they were married, Ann acted in several minor films, and after viewing one of them, Hendrick, the historian, begins to search out his wife’s past. At first his quest seems based on simple curiosity; soon, however, Ann’s history begins to take over Hendrick’s present life. Losing his professional objectivity as a historian, succumbing to jealousy, compulsively immersing himself in Ann’s past, blurring the distinction between the real Ann and her image on the screen, Hendrick becomes completely obsessed. Seeing the present as a world without causes, Hendrick finds his crusade in the past, and that crusade is no longer public but private. Bordering on the melodramatic, Before She Met Me is the story of the downward spiral of an individual who can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. Did the love affairs Ann had on the screen replicate her private life off camera? Were her love affairs in the past continuing in the present? Barnes poses the question, not only for Hendrick, caught up in his obsession, but also for the reader: What is reality, and can one discover the truth? Like Metroland, this novel has many comic and witty moments but ultimately ends tragically. Ann and Lupton had an affair that has since ended, but Hendrick, in his obsessive quest, falsely concludes that it continues; he murders Lupton and then, in Ann’s presence, he takes his own life. Although told in the third person, Before She Met Me centers on the plight of a single figure questioning his world. Hendrick and his compulsions dominate the novel: His first wife, their child, Ann, and Lupton are figures perceived through his persona. Flaubert’s Parrot · With his third novel published under his own name, Flaubert’s Parrot, Barnes received considerable praise as a significant writer of fiction, less parochial in form and technique than most English novelists of his time. His first book published in the United States, Flaubert’s Parrot was the recipient of numerous prizes. It too is a novel of questions and obsessions, which unite the past and present. Yet in its collage of literary techniques, it is not a traditional narrative novel, including as it does fiction, biography, history, and literary criticism. As in his earlier works, here Barnes focuses upon a single individual, Geoffrey Braithwaite, an English medical doctor in his sixties, a widower, with a long-standing interest in the French writer Gustave Flaubert. Barnes also has been a student of French and admirer of Flaubert, and early in Metroland Christopher reads a work by Flaubert; several critics have examined the possible relationships between the fictional figures, Braithwaite, Christopher, Hendrick, and the author. Told in the first person, Flaubert’s Parrot examines Braithwaite’s attempt to discover which of two different stuffed parrots on exhibit in competing Flaubert museums is the one that sat on Flaubert’s desk when he wrote his short story “Un Cœur simple” (“A Simple Heart”). In the story, an old servant, Félicité, is left after fifty years of service with only a parrot as a companion. When the parrot dies, Félicité has it stuffed. As her health fails, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost, traditionally represented as a dove. On her deathbed she believes that she sees a giant parrot above her head. Braithwaite’s quest to determine the real parrot allows him, and Barnes, to

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pursue with wit and irony numerous aspects of Flaubert’s biography; his published works, including Madame Bovary (1857); his ideas for works he did not write; his travels; his use of animals in his writings; and his lovers. The novel includes chronologies, a dictionary, and an examination paper. Yet the work is not concerned only with Braithwaite’s interest in Flaubert’s past and the two surviving stuffed parrots. As the doctor pursues Flaubert and his parrot, he also begins to reveal his own history. Braithwaite’s wife had been frequently unfaithful to him, as Emma Bovary was to her husband Charles, and she had eventually committed suicide. As Braithwaite explores the relationship between Flaubert and his fiction, seeking to know which is the real parrot, he also attempts to understand the realities of his own life and his connection with the fictional Charles Bovary. He becomes obsessive about discovering the truth of the parrots, but he is also obsessive about discovering his own truth. The difficulty, however, is that truth and reality are always elusive, and the discovery of a number of small realities does not result in the illumination of absolute truth. In the course of his discussions, Braithwaite muses upon the incompetence even of specialists in ferreting out the truth; he criticizes a prominent Flaubertain scholar, whom he accuses of pronouncing French badly, of mistakenly identifying a portrait as Flaubert, and of being unable to specify the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes. Flaubert’s parrot, too, is seen as a symbol of this dichotomy of fact and fiction. The parrot can utter human sounds, but only by mimicking what it hears; still, there is the appearance of understanding, regardless of whether it exists. Is a writer, such as Flaubert, merely a parrot, writing down human sounds and observing human life without understanding or interpretation? At the end of Braithwaite’s search for the real stuffed parrot used by Flaubert while writing his short story, the doctor discovers that dozens of stuffed parrots exist which Flaubert could have borrowed and placed upon his desk. Thus Braithwaite’s has been one of many quests with no resolutions, questions without final answers. Staring at the Sun · Staring at the Sun, Barnes’s fourth novel published under his own name, exhibits a stronger narrative line than Flaubert’s Parrot, but as in the story of Braithwaite, narrative here is not the primary concern of the author; questions remain paramount. The central figure is a lower-middle-class woman, Jean Serjeant, significantly unlike earlier Barnes protagonists because she is naïve and unsophisticated, lacking any intellectual pretensions. The tone of Barnes’s portrayal of Jean contrasts sharply with the wit and irony featured throughout Flaubert’s Parrot. Yet even Jean asks questions, such as what happened to the sandwiches Charles Lindbergh did not eat when he flew over the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, and why the mink is so tenacious of life (a statement from a print that hung in her bedroom when she was a child). Those questions have no answers, and Jean muses that questions that do have answers are not real questions. The novel begins in 1941, with a prologue set during World War II. Sergeant-pilot Prosser is flying back across the Channel to his English base from France, just before dawn. The sun rises from the waves on the eastern horizon, captivating Prosser’s attention. Shortly after, he reduces his altitude when he sees the smoke from a steamship far below. As he flies at the lower altitude, the sun comes up again from the sea into his view, and for the second time in a single morning he watches the sun’s ascent. He calls this event an ordinary miracle, but he never forgets it. Neither does Jean, after Prosser relates it to her a few months later while temporarily billeted in her

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parents’ home. Prosser soon disappears from Jean’s life but not from her memories: He kills himself, she later discovers, by flying directly into the sun. She marries Michael, a policeman who has no time for or interest in questions. After twenty years of marriage, at the age of forty, Jean becomes pregnant for the first time. She leaves Michael in order to discover what she calls a more difficult, first-rate life; she is more on a quest for self than seeking an escape from her unsatisfactory husband. When her son, Gregory, is old enough to be left alone, Jean begins to travel widely, often by airplane. She pursues her own Seven Wonders of the World. While visiting Arizona’s Grand Canyon, she observes an airplane flying below the canyon’s rim. At first it seems to her to be against nature, but she concludes instead that it is against reason: Nature provides the miracles, such as the Grand Canyon and the double rising of the sun. As the novel proceeds, Jean becomes more like Barnes’s other figures and less like her naïve and unsophisticated young self. Gregory also parallels Barnes’s earlier intellectual characters and their questions that can yield no conclusive answers. Afraid of death but contemplating suicide, he meditates upon God and His existence. He posits fourteen possible answers, but no final truth. The last part of the novel is set in the future, a world of intrusive and obtrusive computers. All the world’s knowledge has been incorporated into the General Purposes Computer (GPC), open to everyone. Yet it cannot answer why minks are so tenacious of life. A special informational program, TAT (The Absolute Truth), is added to the GPC, but when Gregory asks TAT whether it believes in God, the computer answers that his question is not a real question, and when he asks why it is not a real question, TAT again responds that Gregory’s second question is also not a real question. Only “real” questions, it appears, can be answered by computers. In what she believes will be the last incident in her long life, in 2021, Jean, at the age of ninety-nine, accompanied by Gregory, makes a final flight, observing the sun this time as it sets in the west rather than rising in the east, as it had done twice during Prosser’s “ordinary miracle” so many years before. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters · In A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes continued his experimentation in form and style. Unlike his earlier novels, this one has no central character. Instead, the reader is presented with a number of chapters or stories, ostensibly historical, which are loosely connected by several common themes. The first tale or fable is a revisionist account of the story of Noah and the ark. Narrated by a woodworm, the story portrays Noah as a drunk, humanity as badly flawed, and God and His plan as leaving much to be desired. Human beings fare equally poorly in the other chapters, and the ark returns in later stories: A nineteenth century English woman searches for the ark on Mount Ararat; a twentieth century American astronaut, also seeking the ark, finds a skeleton that he identifies as Noah’s but that is really the bones of the woman explorer; another chapter discusses the ark in the form of the raft of the Medusa, painted by Théodore Géricault. In this novel Barnes raises the question of how one turns disaster into art, or how one turns life into art. In a half chapter, or “Parenthesis,” he discusses history and love: “History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. . . . The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark, images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections.” Barnes connects love to truth, but truth, objective truth, can never be found. Still, Sisyphus-like, one must constantly toil to find it. So it is with love: “We must believe in it, or we’re lost.” A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

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does not always succeed: The stories do not always successfully relate to one another, and the tone at times fails to achieve the ironic brilliance of Flaubert’s Parrot. Talking It Over · Talking It Over is superficially a less ambitious novel than A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. The novel features three characters: Stuart, a decent, dull banker; his wife, Gillian; and Stuart’s old friend, Oliver, a flashy, “cultured” language instructor who falls in love with Gillian, who eventually leaves Stuart for Oliver. The characters are somewhat predictable, as is the eventual outcome, but Barnes’s technique reveals the same events narrated by all three characters, who speak directly in monologues to the reader. Considered something of a minor work by critics, the novel again shows considerable verbal felicity, and in spite of the seeming predictability of the plot and the ordinariness of the characters, by the end the reader comes to appreciate their quirks and foibles. England, England · It was several years before Barnes’s next full-length novel appeared, in 1998, with England, England. In the interim he had written a novella, The Porcupine, set in an Eastern European country in the aftermath of the fall of Communism. In it Barnes notes how difficult it is to escape from the past, from history, and from its illusions and delusions, and he asks what one will escape to—to what new illusions and imaginings. England, England is also a meditation on history. A serious novel with a comedic and satirical core, it features Sir Jack Pitman, a larger-than-life, egocentric businessman who builds a historical Disneyland-style theme park on the Isle of Wight, off England’s southern coast. Here tourists can enjoy and experience all of England’s past and present at the same place, from the real king and queen, who have moved from the real England to “England, England,” to a new Buckingham Palace, a half-sized Big Ben, cricket matches, William Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway’s cottage, Stonehenge, poet William Wordsworth’s daffodils, and every other event or place that in popular belief represents the English past. In time, this new England—“England, England”—becomes more successful, economically and in all other ways, than the country that inspired it. Parallel to Pitman’s story is that of Martha Cochrane, a leading member of his staff who briefly replaces him after discovering Pitman’s unusual sexual proclivities. She, too, has had a difficult relationship with history, realizing that even personal reminiscences, like broader history, lack objective reality, and that even memories are constructs. The past becomes, perhaps, what we want it to be, or what we fear it was. Eventually, in old age, Cochrane escapes the present, returning to the former England, which itself has retreated into a largely preindustrial, rural past and is now called Anglia. The question becomes, can history go backward? Is Cochrane’s Anglia any more authentic than Pitman’s theme park; was old England itself ever more “real” than Pitman’s “England, England,” or was it too just an assembly of illusions and delusions? Eugene Larson Other major works SHORT FICTION: Cross Channel, 1996. NONFICTION: Letters from London, 1995 (essays).

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Bibliography Carey, John. “Land of Make-Believe.” The Sunday [London] Times, August 23, 1998, p. 1. Carey, a leading British academic and a literary critic, discusses England, England as an unusual combination of the comic and the serious, a philosophical novel which posits important questions about reality. Hulbert, Ann. “The Meaning of Meaning.” The New Republic 196 (May 11, 1987): 37-39. Reviewing Staring at the Sun, Hulbert notes Barnes’s continuing interest in the relationship between life and art; she comments on the differences in tone and technique between that novel and his earlier works, particularly Flaubert’s Parrot. Jenkins, Mitch. “Novel Escape.” The [London] Times Magazine, January 13, 1996, p. 18. An interview with Barnes and a wide-ranging discussion of his life and works. Kermode, Frank. “Obsessed with Obsession.” The New York Review of Books 32 (April 25, 1985): 15. Kermode, an English literary critic, in his favorable review of Flaubert’s Parrot, discusses some of the social and literary background of the younger generation of English novelists. Locke, Richard. “Flood of Forms.” The New Republic 201 (December 4, 1989): 40-43. Locke, a professor of comparative literature, places Barnes’s interest in form and style in the context of modern literature, beginning with Flaubert. He summarizes all the novels, focusing particularly upon A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Lodge, David. “The Home Front.” The New York Review of Books 34 (May 7, 1987): 21. Lodge is an English novelist, of the same generation as Barnes but generally less experimental in form. He finds Staring at the Sun less successful than Flaubert’s Parrot and argues that Barnes attempted to incorporate too many elements into the former work. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. One of the volumes in the Understanding Contemporary British Literature series. Moseley finds Barnes to be one of the most intriguing and significant of modern British authors.

Aphra Behn Aphra Behn

Born: England; July (?), 1640 Died: London, England; April 16, 1689 Principal long fiction · Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 1683-1687 (3 volumes); Agnes de Castro, 1688; The Fair Jilt: Or, The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda, 1688; Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave, 1688; The History of the Nun: Or, The Fair Vow-Breaker, 1689; The Lucky Mistake, 1689; The Nun: Or, The Perjured Beauty, 1697; The Adventure of the Black Lady, 1698; The Wandering Beauty, 1698. Other literary forms · As a truly professional writer, perhaps the first British female to have written for profit, Aphra Behn moved easily through the various literary genres and forms. Her plays include The Forced Marriage: Or, The Jealous Bridegroom (1670); The Amorous Prince: Or, The Curious Husband (1671); The Dutch Lover (1673); The Town Fop: Or, Sir Timothy Tawdry (1676); Abdelazar: Or, The Moor’s Revenge (1676); The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Parts I and II (1677, 1681); Sir Patient Fancy (1678); The Roundheads: Or, The Good Old Cause (1681); The City Heiress: Or, Sir Timothy Treat-All (1682); The Lucky Chance: Or, An Alderman’s Bargain (1686); The Emperor of the Moon (1687); The Widow Ranter: Or, The History of Bacon of Virginia (1689); and The Younger Brother: Or, The Amorous Jilt (1696). Although she enjoyed only mild success as a poet, her verse was probably no better or worse than that of a large number of second-rank versifiers of the Restoration. Behn’s best poetry can be found in the song “Love in fantastic triumph sate” (1677), from her tragedy of Abdelazar, and in a metrical “Paraphrase on Oenone to Paris” for Jacob Tonson’s volume of Ovid’s Epistles (1680). The remainder of her verse includes a long, amorous allegory, A Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684); an adaptation of Bernard de Fontenelle’s epic which she entitled A Discovery of New Worlds (1688); and two occasional pieces: “A Pindarick on the Death of Charles II” (1685) and “A Congratulatory Poem to Her Most Sacred Majesty” (1688). Achievements · Behn’s achievement as a novelist should be measured principally in terms of the modest gains made by that form in England during the seventeenth century. Prior to Oroonoko, the English novel lingered in the shadows of the theater. Thus, the small reading public contented itself with works such as John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579), Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler: Or, The Life of Jack Wilton (1594), and Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1597)—all long, episodic stories, sprinkled with overly dramatic characterization and improbable plot structures. In Oroonoko, however, Behn advanced the novel to the point where her more skilled successors in the eighteenth century could begin to shape it into an independent, recognizable form. Behn possessed the natural gifts of the storyteller, and her narrative art can easily stand beside that of her male contemporaries. A frankly commercial writer, she simply had no time, in pursuit of pleasure and the pen, to find a place in her narratives for intellectual substance. Nevertheless, she told a story as few others could, and the 58

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force of her own personality contributed both reality and a sense of immediacy to the still inchoate form of seventeenth century British fiction. Biography · The details of Aphra Behn’s birth are not known. The parish register of the Sts. Gregory and Martin Church, Wye, England, contains an entry stating that Ayfara Amis, daughter of John and Amy Amis, was baptized on July 10, 1640. Apparently, John Johnson, related to Lord Francis Willoughby of Parham, adopted the girl, although no one seems to know exactly when. Ayfara Amis accompanied her stepparents on a journey to Suriname (later Dutch Guiana) in 1658, Willoughby having appointed Johnson to serve as deputy governor of his extensive holdings there. Unfortunately, the new deputy died on the voyage; his widow and children proceeded to Suriname and took up residence at St. John’s, one of Lord Willoughby’s plantations. Exactly how long they remained is not clear, but certainly the details surrounding the time spent at St. John’s form the background for Oroonoko. Biographers have established the summer of 1663 as the most probable date of Behn’s return to England. At any rate, by 1665 Behn was again in London and married to a wealthy merchant of Dutch extraction, who may well have had connections in, or at least around, the court of Charles II. In 1665 came the Great Plague and the death of Behn’s husband; the latter proved the more disastrous for her, specifically because (again for unknown reasons) the Dutch merchant left nothing of substance for her—nothing, that is, except his court connections. Charles II, in the midst of the first of his wars against Holland, hired Aphra Behn as a secret government agent to spy upon the Dutch, for which purpose she proceeded to Antwerp. There she contacted another British agent, William Scott, from whom she obtained various pieces of military information, which she forwarded to London. Though she received little credit for her work, and even less money, Behn did conceive of the pseudonym Astrea, the name under which she published most of her poetry. The entire adventure into espionage proved a dismal failure for her; she even had to borrow money and pawn her valuables to pay her debts and obtain passage back to England. Once home, early in 1667, she found no relief from her desperate financial Library of Congress situation. Her debtors threat-

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ened prison, and the government refused any payment for her services. Prison followed, although the time and the exact length of her term remain unknown. Some of Behn’s biographers speculate that she was aided in her release by John Hale (d. 1692)—a lawyer of Gray’s Inn, a wit, an intellectual, a known homosexual, the principal subject of and reason for Behn’s sonnets, and the man with whom she carried on a long romance. When she did gain her release, she determined to dedicate the rest of her life to writing and to pleasure, to trust to her own devices rather than to rely upon others who could not be trusted. Behn launched her career as a dramatist in late December, 1670, at the new Duke’s Theatre in Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Her tragicomedy The Forced Marriage ran for six nights and included in the cast the nineteen-year-old Thomas Otway (1652-1685), the playwright-to-be only recently arrived from Oxford. Because of the length of the run, Behn, as was the practice, received the entire profit from the third performance, which meant that she could begin to function as an independent artist. She followed her first effort in the spring of 1671 with a comedy, The Amorous Prince, again at the Duke’s; another comedy, The Dutch Lover, came to Drury Lane in February, 1673, and by the time of her anonymous comedy The Rover, in 1677, her reputation was secure. She mixed easily with the literati of her day, such as Thomas Killigrew, Edward Ravenscroft, the earl of Rochester, Edmund Waller, and the poet laureate John Dryden, who published her rough translations from Ovid in 1683. With her reputation came offers for witty prologues and epilogues for others’ plays, as well as what she wanted more than anything—money. A confrontation with the earl of Shaftesbury and the newly emerged Whigs during the religious-political controversies of 1678, when she offended Charles II’s opponents in a satirical prologue to an anonymous play, Romulus and Hersilia, brought her once again to the edge of financial hardship, as she was forced to abandon drama for the next five years. Fortunately, Behn could fall back upon her abilities as a writer of popular fiction and occasional verse, although those forms were not as profitable as the London stage. Her series Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683-1687) and Poems upon Several Occasions (1684) were well received, but the meager financial returns from such projects could not keep pace with her personal expenses. When she did return to the stage in 1686 with her comedy The Lucky Chance, she met with only moderate success and some public abuse. The Emperor of the Moon, produced the following season, fared somewhat better, although by then the London audience had lost its stomach for a female playwright—and a Tory, at that. She continued to write fiction and verse, but sickness and the death of her friend Edmund Waller, both in October, 1688, discouraged her. Five days after the coronation of William III and Mary, on April 16, 1689, Behn died. She had risen high enough to merit burial in Westminster Abbey; John Hoyle provided the fitting epitaph: “Here lies proof that wit can never be/ Defense enough against mortality.” Analysis · In the early twentieth century, Vita Sackville-West, in trying to estimate Aphra Behn’s contribution to English fiction, asked “what has she left behind her that is of any real value?” Sackville-West bemoaned Behn’s failure in her fiction to reflect fully London life, London characters, London scenes; attention to exotic themes, settings, and characters merely debased and wasted her narrative gifts. Such a judgment, while plausible, fails to consider Behn’s fiction in its historical and biographical context. Her tales abound with German princes, Spanish princesses, Portuguese kings, French counts, West Indian slaves, and various orders of bishops, priests, and nuns, yet, Behn’s real world was itself highly artificial, even fantastic: the intrigue

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of the Stuart court, the ribaldry of the London stage, the gossip of the drawing room, the masquerade, and the card parlor. Behn, in her real world, took in the same scenes as did John Dryden, Samuel Pepys, and the earl of Rochester. Thus, to assert that her fiction neglects her actual experience in favor of fantastic and faraway window dressing may be too hasty a conclusion. In Agnes de Castro, Behn lets loose various powers of love, with the result that her heroines’ passions affect the fortunes of their lovers. Thus, Miranda (The Fair Jilt) reflects the raving, hypocritical enchantress whose very beauty drives her lovers mad; Ardelia (The Nun) plays the capricious lover, whose passion carries her through a series of men, as well as a nunnery; and Agnes de Castro presents a slight variation from the preceding, in that the titled character is a product of circumstance: She is loved by the husband of her mistress. Another primary theme in Behn’s work is the often discussed noble savage that has traditionally been assigned to Oroonoko, as has the subordinate issue of antislavery in that same novel. In 1975, Professor George Guffey suggested a withdrawal from the feminist-biographical positions (those from which the noble savage/antislavery ideals spring) and a movement toward “a hitherto unperceived level of political allusion.” Guffey did not label Oroonoko a political allegory but did suggest that readers should look more closely at events in England between 1678 and 1688. Guffey maintains that the novelist deplores not the slavery of a black, noble savage but the bondage of a royal prince—again a reference to the political climate of the times. The interesting aspect of Guffey’s analysis is that his approach lends substance to Behn’s principal novel and to her overall reputation as a literary artist, and it parries the complaint that she failed to echo the sound and the sense of her own age. In 1678, Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616-1704) published Five Love Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, a translation of some fictional correspondence by the minor French writer Guilleraques. Behn used the work as a model for at least three of her prose pieces— Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, The History of the Nun, and The Nun. For the latter two, the novelist took advantage, at least on the surface, of the current religious and political controversies and set forth the usual claims to truth. The History of the Nun · There may be some validity to the claim that The History of the Nun exists as one of the earliest examinations by a novelist into the psychology of crime and guilt. The events, at the outset, proceed reasonably enough but become less believable, and, by the novel’s conclusion, the events appear to be exceedingly unreal. Despite this difficulty, the novel does have some value. Behn demonstrates her ability to develop thoroughly the key aspects of the weaknesses and the resultant sufferings of the heroine, Isabella. Behn immediately exposes the concept that “Mother Church” can take care of a girl’s problems, can easily eradicate the desires of the world from her heart and mind, can readily transform a passionate maiden into a true, devoted sister of the faith. In addition, despite her wickedness, Isabella is still very much a human being worthy of the reader’s understanding. At every step, the girl pays something for what she does; with each violation against the Church and each crime of passion, she falls deeper into the darkness of her own guilt. What she does, and how, is certainly contrived; how she reacts to her misdeeds reflects accurately the guilty conscience of a believable human being. The Nun · The second “Nun” novel, not published until 1697, certainly leads the reader through a more complicated plot entanglement than the 1688 story, but it

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contains none of the virtue exhibited in the earlier work. The interesting aspect of The Nun’s plot is that Behn kills the heroine, Ardelia, first; only afterward do the principal rivals, Don Sebastian and Don Henriques, kill each other in a fight. The interest, however, is only fleeting, for those events do not occur until the end of the novel. All that remains of the bloody situation is Elvira, Don Sebastian’s unfaithful sister. After weeping and calling for help, she is seized with a violent fever (in the final paragraph) and dies within twenty-four hours. Certainly, Behn’s ingenuity in this piece demands some recognition, if for no other reason than her adeptness, according to James Sutherland, at “moving the pieces around the board.” Agnes de Castro · Because of the relative sanity of its plot, in contrast to the two previous tragedies, Agnes de Castro comes close to what Behn’s feminist supporters expect of her. In other words, in this piece, pure evil or a series of tragic events cannot be blamed entirely on love or upon reckless female passion. Although Don Pedro genuinely loves his wife’s maid-of-honor, Agnes, she, out of loyalty to her mistress, refuses to yield to his passion. Such action encourages the other characters to exhibit equal degrees of virtue. Constantia, Don Pedro’s wife, seems to understand that the power of Agnes’s charms, although innocent enough, is no match for her husband’s frailty of heart over reason. Thus, she resents neither her husband nor her maid; in fact, she is willing to tolerate the presence of Agnes to keep her husband happy. The novel, however, does not exist as a monument to reason. Something must always arise, either in politics or romance, to disrupt reasonable people’s attempts at harmony. In the novel, a vengeful woman lies to Constantia and plants the rumor in her mind that Agnes and Don Pedro are plotting against her. Such a report breaks Constantia’s trust in her husband and her maid, and the honest lady dies of a broken heart. The novel, however, remains believable, for Behn simply emphasizes the frailty of honor and trust in a world dominated by intrigue and pure hatred. Given the political and religious climates of the decade, the setting and the plot of Agnes de Castro are indeed flimsy façades for the court and coffeehouse of seventeenth century London. The Fair Jilt · Although in The Fair Jilt, Behn continued to develop the conflict between love and reason, the novel has attracted critical attention because of its allusions to the writer’s own experiences. Again, she lays claim to authenticity by maintaining that she witnessed parts of the events and heard the rest from sources close to the action and the characters. In addition, the events occur in Antwerp, the very city to which the novelist had been assigned for the performance of her spying activities for Charles II’s ministers. From the outset of the novel, Behn establishes the wickedness of Miranda, who uses her beauty to enchant the unsuspecting and even tempts the weak into commiting murder. Obviously, had Behn allowed her major character to succeed in her evil ways, nothing would have been gained from the novel. What results is the triumph of the hero’s innate goodness; as weak as he is, he has endured. His loyalty and devotion have outlasted and, to a certain extent, conquered Miranda’s wickedness. Oroonoko · Behn’s literary reputation today rests almost totally upon a single work, Oroonoko. The novel succeeds as her most realistic work, principally because she recounts the specifics of Suriname with considerable detail and force. Behn installs her hero amid the splendor of a tropical setting, a Natural Man, a pure savage

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untouched by the vices of Christian Europe, unaware of the white man’s inherent baseness and falsehood. In lashing out at the weaknesses of her society, Behn does not forget about one of her major concerns—love. Thus, Oroonoko loves the beautiful Imoinda, a child of his own race, but the prince’s grandfather demands her for his own harem. Afterward, the monarch sells the girl into slavery, and she finds herself in Suriname, where Oroonoko is brought following his kidnapping. The prince embarks upon a term of virtuous and powerful adventures in the name of freedom for himself and Imoinda, but his captors deceive him. Thereupon, he leads a slave revolt, only to be captured by the white scoundrels and tortured. Rather than see Imoinda suffer dishonor at the hands of the ruthless white planters and government officers, Oroonoko manages to kill her himself. At the end, he calmly smokes his pipe—a habit learned from the Europeans—as his captors dismember his body and toss the pieces into the fire. The final judgment upon Behn’s fiction may still remain to be formulated. Evaluations of her work have tended to extremes. Some critics assert that her novels, even Oroonoko, had no significant influence on the development of the English novel, while others argue that her limited attempts at realism may well have influenced Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and others to begin to mold the ostensibly factual narrative into the novel as the twentieth century recognizes it. From Behn came the background against which fictional plots could go forward and fictional characters could function. Her problem, which her successors managed to surmount, was the inability (or refusal) to make her characters and events as real as their fictional environment. That fault (if it was a fault) lay with the tendencies and the demands of the age, not with the writer. Indeed, it is hardly a failure for a dramatist and a novelist to have given to her audience exactly what they wanted. To have done less would have meant an even quicker exit from fame and an even more obscure niche in the literary history of her time. Samuel J. Rogal Other major works PLAYS: The Forced Marriage: Or, The Jealous Bridegroom, pr. 1670; The Amorous Prince: Or, The Curious Husband, pr., pb. 1671; The Dutch Lover, pr., pb. 1673; Abdelazer: Or, The Moor’s Revenge, pr. 1676; The Town Fop: Or, Sir Timothy Tawdry, pr. 1676; The Rover: Or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part I, pr., pb. 1677, Part II, pr., pb. 1681; Sir Patient Fancy, pr., pb. 1678; The Feigned Courtesans: Or, A Night’s Intrigue, pr., pb. 1679; The Young King: Or, The Mistake, pr. 1679; The Roundheads: Or, The Good Old Cause, pr. 1681; The City Heiress: Or, Sir Timothy Treat-All, pr., pb. 1682; The Lucky Chance: Or, An Alderman’s Bargain, pr. 1686; The Emperor of the Moon, pr., pb. 1687; The Widow Ranter: Or, The History of Bacon of Virginia, pr. 1689; The Younger Brother: Or, The Amorous Jilt, pr., pb. 1696. POETRY: Poems upon Several Occasions, with a Voyage to the Island of Love, 1684 (including adaptation of Abbé Paul Tallemant’s Le Voyage de l’isle d’amour); Miscellany: Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands, 1685 (includes works by others). TRANSLATIONS: Aesop’s Fables, 1687 (with Francis Barlow); Of Trees, 1689 (of book 6 of Abraham Cowley’s Sex libri plantarum). MISCELLANEOUS: La Montre: Or, The Lover’s Watch, 1686 (prose and poetry); The Case for the Watch, 1686 (prose and poetry); Lycidus: Or, The Lover in Fashion, 1688 (prose and poetry; includes works by others); The Lady’s Looking-Glass, to Dress Herself By: Or,

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The Art of Charming, 1697 (prose and poetry); The Works of Aphra Behn, 1915, 1967 (6 volumes; Montague Summers, editor). Bibliography Goreau, Angeline. Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn. New York: Dial Press, 1980. Draws on Behn’s own writings as well as contemporary comments about her, re-creating the life of the first professional female writer. Like Virginia Woolf, Behn is praised for providing a model for later women who took up the pen. The thirty-seven illustrations contribute to the reconstruction of the age. Little discussion of the fiction and later plays. Guffey, George. “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment.” In Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, May 11, 1974. Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1975. Argues that Oroonoko is not an attack on slavery or a celebration of the natural man but rather a defense of James II, who is the model for the hero, as Suriname is made to resemble England. Link, Frederick M. Aphra Behn. New York: Twayne, 1968. After a brief account of Behn’s life, this book provides a critical survey of her works, devoting about half to her drama. Concludes with a survey of Behn’s reputation since her death and includes a useful annotated bibliography of criticism. O’Donnell, Mary Ann. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. New York: Garland, 1986. After a detailed description of more than one hundred primary works, O’Donnell annotates 661 books, articles, essays, and dissertations written about Behn after 1666. These works are listed chronologically. Indexed. Sackville-West, Vita. Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea. New York: Viking Press, 1928. Sackville-West admires the woman more than the writing, though she finds the lyrics praiseworthy. Sympathetic and well written. Todd, Janet, ed. Aphra Behn Studies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Part 1 concentrates on Behn’s plays, part 2 on her poetry, part 3 on her fiction, and part 4 on her biography. Includes an introduction outlining Behn’s career and the essays in the volume and an index. ____________. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. The introduction summarizes efforts to study Behn’s work and life, her place in literature, her ability to write in all the genres (except the sermon), and the biographer’s efforts to overcome the paucity of biographical facts. In addition to a long, speculative narrative, Todd includes a bibliography of works written before 1800 and a bibliography of work published after 1800. Woodcock, George. The Incomparable Aphra. London: Boardman, 1948. Behn is not only a good writer but also “a revolutionary influence on the social life and literature of her age.”

Arnold Bennett Arnold Bennett

Born: Shelton, near Hanley, England; May 27, 1867 Died: London, England; March 27, 1931 Principal long fiction · A Man from the North, 1898; Anna of the Five Towns, 1902; The Grand Babylon Hotel, 1902 (pb. in U.S. as T. Racksole and Daughter); The Gates of Wrath, 1903; Leonora, 1903; A Great Man, 1904; Teresa of Watling Street, 1904; Sacred and Profane Love, 1905 (pb. in U.S. as The Book of Carlotta); Hugo, 1906; Whom God Hath Joined, 1906; The Sinews of War, 1906 (with Eden Phillpotts; pb. in U.S. as Doubloons); The Ghost, 1907; The City of Pleasure, 1907; The Statue, 1908 (with Phillpotts); Buried Alive, 1908; The Old Wives’ Tale, 1908; The Glimpse, 1909; Helen with the High Hand, 1910; Clayhanger, 1910; The Card, 1911 (pb. in U.S. as Denry the Audacious); Hilda Lessways, 1911; The Regent, 1913 (pb. in U.S. as The Old Adam); The Price of Love, 1914; These Twain, 1915; The Lion’s Share, 1916; The Pretty Lady, 1918; The Roll-Call, 1918; Lilian, 1922; Mr. Prohack, 1922; Riceyman Steps, 1923; Elsie and the Child, 1924; Lord Raingo, 1926; The Strange Vanguard, 1928 (pb. in U.S. as The Vanguard, 1927); Accident, 1928; Piccadilly, 1929; Imperial Palace, 1930; Venus Rising from the Sea, 1931. Other literary forms · Besides fifteen major novels, Arnold Bennett published thirty-three other novels generally considered potboilers by his critics. Some of them Bennett himself regarded as serious works; others he variously called “fantasias,” “frolics,” “melodramas,” or “adventures.” His total published work exceeds eighty volumes, including eight collections of short stories, sixteen plays, six collections of essays, eight volumes of literary criticism, three volumes of letters, six travelogues, and volumes of autobiography, journals, and reviews, as well as miscellaneous short articles, introductions, pamphlets, “pocket philosophies,” and a few poems. Much of his journal has never been published. Bennett collaborated in the production of five films and operas, three of which were adapted from his plays and novels. Four of his plays and novels were adapted for film by other screenwriters, and two of his novels were adapted for the stage. Achievements · Although Arnold Bennett won only one major literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Riceyman Steps, his contribution to the history of the novel exceeds that accomplishment. Bennett’s early novels played an important role in the transition from the Victorian to the modern novel. A somewhat younger contemporary of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, he helped to displace the “loose, baggy” Victorian novel and to develop the realistic movement in England. With fine detail he portrayed the industrial Five Towns, his fictional version of the six towns of pottery manufacturing in Staffordshire County. His early career was strongly influenced by the aestheticism in form and language found in works by Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Ivan Turgenev, and he admired the naturalism of Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Later, however, he rejected what he called the “crudities and . . . morsels of available misery” of naturalism, and, while retaining an interest in form and beauty, he came to feel that aesthetics alone is an empty literary goal and that the novelist must combine 65

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“divine compassion,” believability, and the creation of character with the “artistic shapely presentation of truth” and the discovery of “beauty, which is always hidden.” With these aims in mind, he chose as the subject of his best works that which is beautiful and remarkable about the lives of unremarkable, middle-class people. Although his novels rarely sold well enough to earn his living, his best novels were highly regarded by critics and fellow authors. He carried on a correspondence of mutual encouragement and criticism with Conrad and H. G. Wells; some of these letters have been published. Conrad, a master of style, wrote: “I am . . . fascinated by your expression, by the ease of your realization, the force and delicacy of your phrases.” Despite their acclaim for Bennett’s best work, however, even his admirers regretted his propensity to write potboilers for money. Because of the volume of his work, Bennett is remembered today as a novelist, but in his lifetime his income derived from his equally prodigious output of plays and journalism; his “pocket philosophies” and critical reviews also won him an enormous public prestige. During the 1920’s he was virtually the arbiter of literary taste, a reviewer who could make or break a book’s sales or a newcomer’s career. He was among the first to praise the literary merits of such controversial newcomers as D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Bennett regarded himself less a novelist than a professional writer who should be able to, and did, undertake any genre with competence and craftsmanship. (The exception was poetry; he never wrote poetry to meet his own standards.) His reputation suffered in the latter part of his career for those very qualities, which too often fell short of genius and inspiration. He did reach the level of greatness occasionally, however, and his literary reputation is firmly established with the inclusion of The Old Wives’ Tale in most lists of the great English novels. Biography · Enoch Arnold Bennett was born on May 27, 1867, in Shelton, Staffordshire County, England, near the six towns that constitute the Potteries region in central England, the scene of much of Bennett’s early work. His father, Enoch Bennett, was successively a potter, a draper, a pawnbroker, and eventually, through hard work and study, a solicitor. Bennett attended the local schools, where he passed the examination for Cambridge University. He did not attend college, however, because his autocratic father kept him at home as clerk in the solicitor’s office. As a means of escape from the grime and provincialism of the Potteries district, Bennett began writing for the Staffordshire Sentinel and studying shorthand. The latter skill enabled him to become a clerk with a London law firm in 1888. In London, he set about seriously to learn to write. He moved to Chelsea in 1891 to live with the Frederick Marriott family, in whose household he was introduced to the larger world of the arts. His first work published in London was a prizewinning parody for a competition in Tit-Bits in 1893; this work was followed by a short story in The Yellow Book and, in 1898, his first novel, A Man from the North. He became the assistant editor and later the editor of the magazine Woman, writing reviews pseudonymously as “Barbara,” a gossip and advice column as “Marjorie,” and short stories as “Sal Volatile.” It is generally thought that this experience provided a good background for female characterization. As he became better known as a journalist, Bennett began writing reviews for The Academy and giving private lessons in journalism. His journalistic income allowed him in 1900 to establish a home at Trinity Hall Farm, Hockliffe, in Bedfordshire. He brought his family to Hockliffe after his father had been disabled by the softening of the brain which eventually killed him. Bennett wrote prodigiously

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there, producing not only his admired Anna of the Five Towns but also popular potboilers and journalism, including the anonymous “Savoir-Faire Papers” and “Novelist’s Log-Book” series for T. P.’s Weekly. This production financed some long-desired travel and a move to Paris in 1903. Bennett lived in France for eight years, some of the busiest and happiest of his life. Shortly after his arrival, he observed a fat, fussy woman who inspired the thought that “she has been young and slim once,” a thought that lingered in his mind for five years and inspired his masterwork, The Old Wives’ Tale. Meanwhile, he continued writing for newspapers and magazines, including the first of his series “Books and Persons,” written under the nom de plume “Jacob Tonson” for The New Age. Between 1903 and 1907 he also wrote ten novels. In 1907, he married Marguerite Soulié, an aspiring actress who had worked as his part-time secretary. From the beginning of the marriage, it was evident that the two were incompatible, but she did provide him with an

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atmosphere conducive to his undertaking the novel which had germinated for so long and which he felt beforehand would be a masterpiece. He determined that The Old Wives’ Tale should “do one better than” Guy de Maupassant’s Une Vie (1883), and his careful crafting of the book was recognized by critics, who immediately acclaimed it as a modern classic. Before moving back to England in 1913, he wrote six more novels, three of which are among his best: Clayhanger, The Card, and Hilda Lessways. In 1911, he traveled in the United States, where his books were selling well and were highly respected. After the tour, he moved to the country estate Comarques at Thorpe-leSoken, Essex, where he had access to the harbor for a yacht, his means of gaining what relaxation he could. The yacht was important to Bennett, because he had suffered since youth from a variety of ailments, mostly resulting from his high-strung temperament. He had a serious stammer or speech paralysis, which exhausted him in speaking; compulsive personal habits; and a liver ailment and chronic enteritis which restricted his diet and caused great discomfort when he ate incautiously. As he grew older, he suffered increasingly from excruciating neuralgia, headaches, and insomnia, almost without relief near the end of his life. Except for the yacht, his recreation was to write; he probably wrote his light works as a relief from the tension of the serious novels, yet he demanded good style from himself even for them. His craftsmanship was conscious and intense, and his drive to produce great quantity while still maintaining quality undoubtedly sapped his strength, both physically and psychologically, and contributed to his death at the age of sixty-three. Bennett’s physical maladies were probably exacerbated by World War I and the collapse of his marriage. Although he continued his usual pace of writing during the war—five more novels between 1914 and 1919—much of his energy was spent in patriotic activities ranging from entertaining soldiers to frontline journalism. From May 9, 1918, until the end of the war, he served as volunteer director of British propaganda in France. He refused knighthood for his services. After the war, he tried to restore his depleted finances by writing plays, which had been more remunerative than novels, but the later ones were unsuccessful. In 1921, he and Marguerite separated. He gave her a settlement so generous that for the rest of his life he was under pressure to publish and sell his writing. Contemporary critics believed that these years of low-novel production marked the end of his creativity. Bennett surprised his critics, however, with Riceyman Steps, which was critically acclaimed and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Bennett’s only literary award. This was followed by Lord Raingo and Imperial Palace, as well as six less distinguished novels and one unfinished at his death. This creative resurgence may have resulted in part from his relationship with Dorothy Cheston, who bore his only child, Virginia, in 1926. His journalistic career had never waned, and in the 1920’s he continued his “Books and Persons” series in the Evening Standard, with a prestige that influenced the reading public and allowed him to promote the careers of many young authors. Bennett’s health was steadily deteriorating, however, and in 1931 he died in his Chiltern Court flat from typhoid fever. Analysis · As a self-designated professional author, Arnold Bennett not only wrote an extraordinary quantity in a great variety of genres but also created a broad range of themes and characters. A common approach or theme is difficult to detect in a corpus of forty-eight novels, which include fantasy, realism, romance, naturalism, satire, symbolism, comedy, tragedy, melodrama, Freudian psychology, allegory,

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economics, regionalism, cosmopolitanism, politics, medicine, and war. Nevertheless, in spite of this diversity, Bennett is generally esteemed for his realistic novels, which are considered his serious work. In most, if not all, of these fifteen novels, certain related themes recur, rising from his youthful experiences of growing up in Burslem under the domination of his father. His desire to escape the intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual stultification of his Burslem environment led to a cluster of themes related to escape: rebellion against the ties of the home conflicting with love for one’s roots, aspiration versus complacence and philistinism, fear of failure to escape and fear of failure after escape, and the problem of coping with success if it comes. Another cluster of themes relates to his conflict with his father and the shock of his father’s debilitating illness and death: the generation gap, emotional repression by dominating parents, the cyclical influence of parents on their children, a soul parent who vies in influence with the natural parent, degeneration and illness, the pathos of decrepitude in old age, and awe at the purpose or purposelessness of life. A Man from the North · A Man from the North, Bennett’s first novel, includes the themes of aspiration, emotional repression, the soul parent, illness and death, and failure after escape. It is the story of Richard Larch, an aspiring writer from the Potteries, who goes to London to experience the greater intellectual and moral freedom of a cosmopolis. There he meets his soul father, Mr. Aked, a journalist and failed novelist who introduces Larch to the drama—the “tragedy”—of ordinary lives. Aked, however, is an unsuccessful guide; he dies. Larch is also unable to succeed; he eventually marries a woman he does not love and settles down to the sort of life Aked had described. It is the story of what Bennett himself might have been if he had not succeeded after leaving Burslem. Anna of the Five Towns · Anna of the Five Towns, on the other hand, is the story of the failure to escape. Anna is repressed by her overbearing and miserly father; under the influence of her soul mother, Mrs. Sutton, she learns to aspire to a few amenities, such as new clothes for her wedding, but these aspirations come too late to change her life significantly. Accepting the values of the community rather than escaping them, she marries Henry Mynors, her more prosperous suitor, rather than Willie Price, the man she loves in her own way. While the themes of these books are similar, they differ in that Anna stays and copes with her environment with some success. She does not escape Bursley (Bennett’s fictional name for Burslem), but she escapes her father’s control and improves her perceptions of beauty and human relationships to some degree. The books also differ in that A Man from the North presents an unrelentingly grim memory of Burslem. Later, however, Bennett read George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1884), and its section on Burslem showed him that “beauty, which is always hidden,” could be found in the lives of its people and in art expressing those lives. Thus, Bennett returned to the locale for Anna of the Five Towns, and although the portrayal is still grim, Anna’s life has tragic beauty. Anna rebels against the ties of home, but she also has some love for her roots there, in the person of Willie Price. The Old Wives’ Tale · Between Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives’ Tale, Bennett wrote eleven minor novels, some of which were serious and some not, but all taught him something that contributed to the greatness of The Old Wives’ Tale. Several of them were light comedies, and in writing these Bennett developed the assured comic touch which marks even his serious novels. Three of them were Five Towns novels about

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female characters from various segments of Bursley society; in these he developed those skills in characterizing women which were so admired in his finest novels. These skills were honed in France, where Bennett learned a great deal about the literary presentation of sex. During these years, Bennett said, he learned more about life than he had ever known before. When Bennett was ready to write his masterpiece, The Old Wives’ Tale, he had reached full artistic maturity and was at the height of his literary power. He had published one critically acclaimed novel and several others that had allowed him to improve his characterization, especially of women, to temper his realism with humor, and to perfect his themes in various plots. His dislike of Burslem’s grime and provincialism had been balanced by compassion for its inhabitants and awareness of what beauty and aspiration could be found there. His personal involvement in the town had been modified by experience in London and Paris, so that he could be objective about the sources of his material. This balance of technique and emotion is reflected in the structure of The Old Wives’ Tale. The novel counterpoints the lives of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, the first of whom stays in Bursley, while the second leaves but later returns. Their stories parallel not only each other but also those of preceding and succeeding generations. In fact, the first section of the book is subtitled “Mrs. Baines” (the mother). In section one, The Old Wives’ Tale takes up in midcareer one generation’s old wife, with a husband so ill that the wife is running his draper’s business and rearing two young daughters. As the girls grow up, Mrs. Baines finds them increasingly hard to handle. During a town festival in which an elephant has to be executed for killing a spectator, Mr. Baines dies. Shortly afterward, Sophia elopes with Gerald Scales, a traveling salesman, and Constance marries Samuel Povey, the former shop assistant, whom Mrs. Baines considers “beneath” her. When Samuel and Constance take over the business, introducing progressive marketing methods, Mrs. Baines retires to live with her elder sister, and dies there. The story of Mrs. Baines, then, is the end of the life of a woman who “was young and slim once,” although she is not depicted so and that part of her life is understood only by later comparison with the stories of her daughters. The cycle of Mrs. Baines continues with Constance, who represents the person who stays in Bursley, held by the roots of the past. As Mrs. Baines’s successor, Constance marries a husband whose aspiration is to improve, not to leave, Bursley, and they run the business with a combination of youthful progressiveness and family tradition. Constance and Samuel have a son, Cyril. After a scandal in which Samuel’s cousin is executed for murdering his alcoholic wife, Samuel dies. Constance continues the business for a while, unresponsive to further progressive business practices, and spoils her son until he becomes hard for her to manage. She is finally forced to retire from business by changes in the business structure of Bursley, and Cyril escapes from her and Bursley to London to study art. As a result, Constance comes to depend emotionally on Cyril’s cousin, Dick. Sophia, the rebel against Bursley, finds a soul mother in the schoolteacher, who introduces her to a world of wider intellectual aspiration. In her eagerness to experience more than Bursley offers, however, she elopes with a salesman, who represents sophistication and romance to her. They go to France, where they squander their money and slip into mutual disillusionment and recrimination. After observing the public execution of the murderer of a courtesan, Sophia becomes ill and is abandoned by Gerald. She eventually acquires a boardinghouse in Paris, where she supports

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several dependents and survives the siege of Paris through single-minded hoarding and hard work. She becomes a reclusive fixture on her street, much like Constance on her square in Bursley. When she becomes ill and the business becomes hard for her to manage, she sells it and returns to Bursley to grow old and die. Each daughter’s life recapitulates Mrs. Baines’s in certain respects. Each marries, loses a husband, succors children or other dependents, runs a business, gradually loses control over her life (the change marked in each case by a symbolic execution), loses health and strength, and retires to die as a burdensome old woman like the one Bennett saw in the Paris restaurant. Further, although they are not women, the two Povey young men, Cyril and his cousin Dick, recapitulate the early years of Sophia and Constance: Cyril, the rebel who leaves Bursley but does not succeed; and Dick, the stay-at-home progressive idealist. At the end, Dick is engaged to marry a slim, young counterpart to Constance, who will no doubt carry on the cycle. The thematic repetitions are not so obvious as they appear here, of course; the variations of individual character allow the reader a sense of more difference than similarity. The variations also mark a further step in Bennett’s use of his themes. Constance and Sophia are not so warped by Bursley as was Anna in Anna of the Five Towns; in fact, Sophia, who escapes, is warped more than Constance, who stays. Both have strength derived from their roots, and while neither can be said to escape or to achieve happiness or grace in living, both transcend Bursley more successfully than other townspeople. The theme of their decrepitude in old age is a separate one, also used in other novels, but not related to the escape and success themes. The Baineses are grouped in other Five Towns stories with those who succeed on Bursley’s terms. Beginning in 1906 in Whom God Hath Joined, in the collection of short stories The Matador of the Five Towns (1912), and in The Old Wives’ Tale, there is a growing emphasis upon those members of Burslem society who have some education, culture, and sophistication. Perhaps Bennett had been reassured by his personal success that his childhood in Burslem could be accepted. Clayhanger · Whether it is true that Bennett had come to accept his past, it is certainly true that his next serious book, Clayhanger, was his most nearly autobiographical. After the completion of the trilogy of which Clayhanger was the first volume, Bennett turned from the Five Towns to London as the setting for his novels. The Clayhanger trilogy is the story of a man who at first is defeated in his desire to escape Bursley. Having been defeated, however, he learns from his soul father to rise above Bursley’s philistinism. Over the years, he breaks one after another of his bonds to Bursley until he has succeeded in escaping intellectually, and, eventually, he completely abandons the Five Towns. Much of this story occurs in the third volume of the trilogy, These Twain. Clayhanger itself is the story of the generational conflict between Edwin Clayhanger and his father Darius. The conflict is similar to the one between Anna and her father in Anna of the Five Towns and between Sophia and Mrs. Baines in The Old Wives’ Tale, but in Clayhanger it is much more intense and more acutely observed. Edwin is sensitively introduced in the first two chapters; he has within him “a flame . . . like an altar-fire,” a passion “to exhaust himself in doing his best.” He is rebelling against his father, whose highest aspiration for his son is to have him take over his printing business. The advancement of the theme in Clayhanger over its treatment in the earlier novels is that the generational conflict is presented sympathetically on both sides. In chapters 3 and 4, Darius is portrayed as sensitively as Edwin has been previously. In an

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intensely moving chapter, his childhood of promise, stifled at seven years by poverty and abusive child labor, is described. Because Darius as a “man of nine” was unable to “keep the family,” they were sent to the poorhouse. They were rescued from this degradation by Darius’s Sunday school teacher (his soul father), who had recognized Darius’s promise and who secured Darius a decent job as a printer’s devil. This background of deprivation and emotional sterility prevents Darius from expressing his softer emotions, such as his love for Edwin; his total dedication to the business which he built and by which he supports his family is thoroughly empathetic to the reader. It is no wonder that he can conceive nothing nobler for Edwin than to carry on this decent business. Because Darius can never discuss these traumatic childhood experiences, Edwin never understands him any more than Darius understands Edwin. In his desire to hold onto his son and keep him in the family business, Darius simply ignores and overrides Edwin’s inchoate talent for architecture. Later, he uses Edwin’s financial dependence to squelch his desire to marry Hilda Lessways, whom Edwin has met through the architect Osmond Orgreave. Although Edwin resents his father’s domination, he cannot openly rebel; he feels inadequate before his father’s dominance, and he looks forward to the day when he will have his vengeance. This day comes when Darius becomes ill with softening of the brain, the same ailment that killed Bennett’s own father. The progression of the illness and Edwin’s emotions of triumph, irritation, and compassion are exquisitely detailed. Even after Darius’s death, however, Edwin is not free from his father’s presence, for he becomes increasingly like his father, learning to take pride in the business and to tyrannize over his sisters and Hilda, with whom he is reconciled at the end of the book. Clayhanger thus concludes with the apparent defeat of aspiration by the cycle of parental influence. Hilda Lessways · The hope of eventual success has been raised, however, by the death of Darius, that primary symbol of Bursley repression, and the return of Hilda, the symbol of aspiration. In Hilda Lessways, the second book of the trilogy, Bennett picks up her parallel story of generational conflict with her mother and cultural conflict with Turnhill, another of the Five Towns. Hilda’s story is far less compelling than Edwin’s, though, and adds little to the plot development. More important, its structure repeats what Bennett did successfully in The Old Wives’ Tale: It contrasts two efforts to cope with Bursley, which provide for a double perspective on the problem, and then brings them together for the denouement made possible by that combined perspective. The double perspective also allows Bennett to maintain his characteristic objectivity and touch of humor. These Twain · These Twain was the last Five Towns novel; it presents the marriage of Edwin and Hilda. Through a series of adjustments and small victories, the two are able to achieve a social success in the Five Towns, which allows them to wean themselves emotionally from the Potteries and leave forever. The Clayhanger trilogy thus deals with escape and success, rather than some aspect of failure as in the earlier novels. In changing his fictional settings from Bursley to London or the Continent, Bennett also extended his themes from success or failure in escaping poverty and provincialism to success or failure in handling the accomplished escape. Perhaps that is another reason, besides the ones usually offered, for Bennett’s long period of low productivity and substandard potboilers from 1915 to 1922. Between Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives’ Tale, one should remember, there had been a similar period of low-quality

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work during which Bennett perfected skills that made the Five Towns novels great. Similarly, in his postwar characters Audrey Moze, George Cannon, G. J. Hoape, Lilian Share, and Mr. Prohack, Bennett experimented with stories of people who must cope with financial or social responsibilities for which they may have been poorly prepared. Also in these stories he experimented more boldly with varieties of sexual relationships: in The Lion’s Share, implied lesbianism; in The Pretty Lady, prostitution; in Lilian, a mistress. Furthermore, although these next qualities do not show up clearly in the low-quality work of this period, the use of symbols and psychological insight must have been developing in Bennett’s mind. These qualities emerge rather suddenly and very effectively in the novels beginning with Riceyman Steps. They may account for some of the high acclaim which that novel received after the period of reorientation, but the adapted themes were perfected by 1923, as well. Riceyman Steps · The themes in Riceyman Steps are variations on those of the Five Towns novels, not departures which might seem necessary to a metropolitan setting. The decayed and grimy industrial area of Clerkenwell is in many respects Bursley resituated in London. Henry Earlforward, the miser, represents Bursley’s industrial materialism. Henry, like Edwin Clayhanger, has succeeded in that environment; he has a well-respected bookstore that offers him financial self-sufficiency. Unlike Edwin, however, Henry’s complacent rootedness to Clerkenwell progressively cuts him off from grace, beauty, then love, and finally even life. His wife, Violet, also has financial security, but because she fears the loss of her success, she has become almost as miserly as he. Both are described as sensual; Henry’s rich red lips are mentioned several times, and Violet, formerly a widow, wears red flowers in her hat. Money, however, is the chief object of their eroticism. Henry’s miserliness is his passion, and he gives Violet her own safe as a wedding gift. Violet becomes “liquid with acquiescence” after seeing the hoarded disorder of his house, and she urges him to bed after he has shown her the gold coins in his private safe. The passion for money soon overrides the related passion of human love. Henry especially, and Violet in acquiescence, lock doors more tightly about themselves to protect their treasures until each is figuratively shut into a private, iron-walled safe. Starving emotionally and intellectually in their isolation, they finally starve themselves physically as well, rather than spend money for adequate food. Here, aspiration gone awry, the fear of failure and the inability to cope with success become literally debilitating diseases. Violet dies of a tumor and malnutrition and Henry of cancer. After death, they are scarcely missed, the ultimate symbols of the stultification which Bennett’s characters strive with varying success to escape. Final Years · After Riceyman Steps, the next few novels—Lord Raingo, Accident, and Imperial Palace—continue the themes of coping with success, and the protagonists are given increasing ability to handle it. Much as Clayhanger finally overcomes the problems of escape, Evelyn Orcham in Imperial Palace is the culminating figure in the second cluster of themes. Ironically, Bennett died shortly after he had resolved the problems underlying the themes of his serious novels. All of Bennett’s serious works are firmly rooted in the realistic tradition (although he used more symbolism than has generally been recognized), and he excelled in the presentation of detail that makes his themes and characters credible. In the late years of his career, he was criticized by Virginia Woolf for portraying people’s surroundings, rather than the people themselves, and forcing his readers to do his imagining for him, even though he believed that character creating was one of the

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three most important functions of a novel. Woolf’s criticism was sound enough to seriously damage Bennett’s standing as a major novelist, and it has been the keystone of critical opinion ever since. Yet, a sense of environmental impact has always been accepted as an important means of characterization in realistic literature. Woolf’s criticism says as much about changing styles in literature as it does about the merits of Bennett’s fiction. More important, it was a criticism aimed at Bennett’s total canon, since his potboilers had not yet died of their natural ailments when Woolf wrote. Sophia and Constance Baines, Edwin and Darius Clayhanger, and Henry Earlforward are finely articulated, memorable characters. It is, after all, for his best work that any artist is remembered. Bennett’s sense of place, characters, and universality of themes combine to make his finest novels memorable; The Old Wives’ Tale is sufficient to secure Bennett’s stature as one of the outstanding novelists of his era. Carol I. Croxton Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Loot of Cities, 1905; Tales of the Five Towns, 1905; The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, 1907; The Matador of the Five Towns, 1912; The Woman Who Stole Everything, 1927; Selected Tales, 1928; The Night Visitor, 1931. PLAYS: Polite Farces, pb. 1899; Cupid and Commonsense, pr. 1908; What the Public Wants, pr., pb. 1909; The Honeymoon: A Comedy in Three Acts, pr., pb. 1911; Milestones: A Play in Three Acts, pr., pb. 1912 (with Edward Knoblock); The Great Adventure: A Play of Fantasia in Four Sets, pr. 1912; The Title, pr., pb. 1918; Judith, pr., pb. 1919; Sacred and Profane Love, pr., pb. 1919; Body and Soul, pr., pb. 1922; The Love Match, pr., pb. 1922; Don Juan, pb. 1923; London Life, pr., pb. 1924 (with Knoblock); Flora, pr. 1927; Mr. Prohack, pr., pb. 1927 (with Knoblock); The Return Journey, pr., pb. 1928. NONFICTION: Journalism for Women, 1898; Fame and Fiction, 1901; The Truth About an Author, 1903; How to Become an Author, 1903; Things That Interested Me, 1906; Things Which Have Interested Me, 1907, 1908; Books and Persons: Being Comments on a Past Epoch, 1908-1911; Literary Taste, 1909; Those United States, 1912 (pb. in U.S. as Your United States); Paris Nights, 1913; From the Log of the Velsa, 1914; The Author’s Craft, 1914; Over There, 1915; Things That Have Interested Me, 1921, 1923, 1926; Selected Essays, 1926; Mediterranean Scenes, 1928; The Savour of Life, 1928; The Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1929, 1930, 1932-1933. Bibliography Batchelor, John. The Edwardian Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. After quoting Virginia Woolf’s reservations about Bennett’s fiction, Batchelor goes on to compare the two novelists, especially in terms of their treatment of women as being socially conditioned. In addition to discussing Clayhanger, A Man from the North, Anna of the Five Towns, and The Old Wives’ Tale, Batchelor examines Bennett’s acclaimed short story “The Death of Simon Fuge.” Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. Drawing from Bennett’s Journals and letters, this biography focuses on Bennett’s background, childhood, and environment, which she ties to his literary works. Profusely illustrated, containing an excellent index (the entry under Bennett provides a capsule summary of his life) and a bibliography of Bennett’s work. Lucas, John. Arnold Bennett: A Study of His Fiction. London: Methuen, 1974. After a brief review of Bennett criticism, Lucas examines Bennett’s fiction, devoting

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lengthy treatments to his major novels which are discussed in terms of character and plot. Ardently defends Bennett’s realism, which is regarded as equal to that of D. H. Lawrence. This impressionistic study lacks documentation, except for copious quotations from Bennett’s work. Roby, Kinley. A Writer at War: Arnold Bennett, 1914-1918. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Although primarily biographical, this book also offers valuable insights into Bennett’s work during and after World War I. Defends Bennett’s post-1914 work, contending that it was influenced by Bennett’s exhaustion of his Five Towns material, by his steadily deteriorating relationship with his wife, Marguerite, and by the war itself. Contains works cited and an excellent index. Squillace, Robert. Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Squillace argues that Bennett saw more clearly than his contemporary novelists the emergence of the modern era, which transformed a male-dominated society to one open to all people regardless of class or gender. Very detailed notes and a bibliography acknowledge the work of the best scholars. Wright, Walter F. Arnold Bennett: Romantic Realist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971. Sees Bennett as vacillating between the two extremes of Romanticism and realism and describes his novels as mildly experimental.

Elizabeth Bowen Elizabeth Bowen

Born: Dublin, Ireland; June 7, 1899 Died: London, England; February 22, 1973 Principal long fiction · The Hotel, 1927; The Last September, 1929; Friends and Relations, 1931; To the North, 1932; The House in Paris, 1935; The Death of the Heart, 1938; The Heat of the Day, 1949; A World of Love, 1955; The Little Girls, 1964; Eva Trout, 1968. Other literary forms · The first seven of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels were republished by Jonathan Cape in Cape Collected Editions between the years 1948 and 1954, when Cape also republished four of her short-story collections: Joining Charles (1929), The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934), Look at All Those Roses (1941), and The Demon Lover (1945). Other books of short stories are Encounters (1923), Ann Lee’s and Other Stories (1926), Stories by Elizabeth Bowen (1959), and A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965). The Demon Lover was published in New York under the title Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories (1946) and, as the original title indicates, has supernatural content which scarcely appears in the novels. Bowen’s nonfiction includes Bowen’s Court (1942), a description of her family residence in Ireland; Seven Winters (1942), an autobiography; English Novelists (1946), a literary history; Collected Impressions (1950), essays; The Shelbourne: A Center of Dublin Life for More than a Century (1951), a work about the hotel in Dublin; A Time in Rome (1960), travel essays; and Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (1962), broadcasts and reviews. A play, coauthored with John Perry and entitled Castle Anna, was performed in London in March, 1948. Achievements · Considered a great lady by those who knew her, Bowen draws an appreciative audience from readers who understand English gentility, the calculated gesture and the controlled response. Bowen’s support has come from intellectuals who recognize the values of the novel of manners and who liken her work to that of Jane Austen and Henry James. Her contemporaries and colleagues included members of the Bloomsbury Group and of Oxford University, where the classical scholar C. M. Bowra was a close friend. Many readers know Bowen best through her novel The Death of the Heart and her short stories, especially “The Demon Lover,” “Joining Charles,” and “Look at All Those Roses,” which are frequently anthologized in college texts. Bowen was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1948, and she was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1949, and at Oxford University in 1957. She was made a Companion of Literature in 1965. Biography · Although born in Ireland, Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen came from a pro-British family who received land in County Cork as an award for fighting with Oliver Cromwell in 1649. The family built Bowen’s Court in 1776—what the Irish call a “big house”—as a Protestant stronghold against the mainly Catholic Irish and lived there as part of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Bowen was educated in England and spent some summers at Bowen’s Court. Not until after the Irish Rising in 1916 did she come to realize the causes of the Irish struggle for independence; and in writing 76

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Bowen’s Court, she admitted that her family “got their position and drew their power from a situation that shows an inherent wrong.” Her barrister father, when aged nineteen, had disobeyed warnings and carried home smallpox, which eventually killed his mother and rendered his father mad. Preoccupied with the desire for a son, the attempt to have one nearly killed his wife in 1904, and burdened with the debts of Bowen’s Court, he suffered severe mental breakdowns in 1905 and 1906 and again in 1928. He was the cause of Elizabeth’s removal to England, where, as an Irish outcast, her defense was to become excessively British. Living in a series of locations with her mother, she was kept uninformed of family circumstances; as an adult, her novels provided for her an outlet for her sense Library of Congress of guilt, the result of feeling responsible for the unexplained events around her. Her lack of roots was intensified with the death of her mother in 1912. Bowen studied art, traveled in Europe, and worked as an air-raid warden in London during World War II. In 1923, she married Alan Charles Cameron, who was employed in the school system near Oxford, and they lived there for twelve years. She inherited Bowen’s Court in 1928 when her father died, and in 1952, she and her husband returned there to live. Bowen’s husband, however, died that year. She sold the home in 1960 and returned to Oxford. Bowen’s career as novelist spanned years of drastic change, 1927 to 1968, and, except for The Last September, she wrote about the present; her war experiences are reflected in the short-story collection The Demon Lover and in the novel The Heat of the Day. After 1935, she also wrote reviews and articles for The New Statesman and other publications, the Ministry of Information during World War II, and The Tatler (in the 1940’s), and she helped edit the London Magazine in the late 1950’s. Afflicted with a slight stammer, Bowen lectured infrequently but effectively; two of her BBC broadcasts, “left as they were spoken,” may be read in Afterthought. After a visit to Ireland in 1973, she died in London, leaving an unfinished autobiographical work, Pictures and Conversations (1975).

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Analysis · Elizabeth Bowen had a special talent for writing the conversations of children around the age of nine, as she did in The House in Paris. Somewhat corresponding to her personal experience, her novels often present a homeless child (usually a girl), orphaned and shunted from one residence to another, or a child with one parent who dies and leaves the adolescent in the power of outwardly concerned but mainly selfish adults. Frequently, management by others prolongs the protagonist’s state of innocence into the twenties, when the woman must begin to assert herself and learn to manage her own affairs. (At age twenty-four, for example, Eva Trout does not know how to boil water for tea.) On the other side of the relationship, the controlling adult is often a perfectly mannered woman of guile, wealthy enough to be idle and to fill the idleness with discreet exercise of power over others. The typical Bowen characters, then, are the child, the unwanted adolescent, the woman in her twenties in a prolonged state of adolescence, and the “terrible woman” of society. Young people, educated haphazardly but expensively, are culturally mature but aimless. Genteel adults, on the other hand, administer their own selfish standards of what constitutes an impertinence in another person; these judgments disguise Bowen’s subtle criticism of the correct English. Typical Bowen themes follow as “loss of innocence,” “acceptance of the past,” or “expanding consciousness.” The pain and helplessness attendant upon these themes and the disguise of plentiful money make them unusual. Although she writes about the privileged class, three of her four common character types do not feel privileged. To handle her themes, Bowen frequently orders time and space by dividing the novels into three parts, with one part set ten years in the past and with a juxtaposition of at least two locations. The ten-year lapse provides a measure of the maturity gained, and the second location, by contrast, jars the consciousness into reevaluation of the earlier experience. The Hotel · The fact that the Bowen women often have nothing to do is very obvious in The Hotel, set in Bordighera on the Italian Riviera, but, of greater interest, it is, like Ireland, another place of British occupancy. Guests’ activities are confined to walking, talking, taking tea, and playing tennis. Mrs. Kerr is the managing wealthy woman who feeds on the attentions of her protégé, Sydney Warren, and then abandons Sydney when her son arrives. At age twenty-two, Sydney, for lack of better purpose, studies for a doctorate at home in England. Back in Italy, she gets engaged to a clergyman as a means of achieving an identity and popularity, but her better sense forces reconsideration, and she cancels the engagement and asserts her independence. The Last September · The Last September, set in 1920 when the hated British soldiers (the Black and Tans) were stationed in Ireland to quell rebellion, shows Sir Richard and Lady Myra Naylor entertaining with tennis parties at their big house. Like Bowen, who wrote in Afterthought that this novel was “nearest my heart,” Lois Farquar is a summer visitor, aged nineteen, orphaned, asking herself what she should do. An older woman tells her that her art lacks talent. Almost engaged to a British soldier, Gerald Lesworth, she might have a career in marriage, but Lady Naylor, in the role of graceful-terrible woman, destroys the engagement in a brilliant heart-to-heart talk, in which she points out that he has no prospects. As September closes the social season, Gerald Lesworth is killed in ambush, and as Lois—much more aware now and less innocent—prepares to depart for France, her home Danielstown is burned down, which signals her separation from the protected past.

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To the North · After Friends and Relations, Bowen entered the most fruitful part of her career. Her next four novels are generally considered to be her best work. To the North has rather obvious symbolism in a protagonist named Emmeline Summers whose lack of feeling makes her “icy.” She runs a successful travel agency with the motto “Travel Dangerously” (altering “Live Dangerously” and “Travel Safe”); the motto reflects both her ability to understand intellectually the feelings of others through their experience and her orphan state in homelessness. Emmeline tries to compensate for her weaknesses by imposing dramatic opposites: Without a home of her own, she overvalues her home with her widowed sister-in-law, Cecilia Summers; frequently called an angel, she has a fatal attraction to the devil-like character Markie Linkwater. When Cecilia plans to remarry (breaking up the home), when Markie (bored with Emmeline) returns to his former mistress, and when Emmeline’s travel business begins to fail rapidly because of her preoccupation with Markie, she smashes her car while driving Markie north; “traveling dangerously” at high speeds, she becomes the angel of death. The cold of the North suggested by the novel’s title also touches other characters. Lady Waters, who offers Emmeline weekends on her estate as a kind of second home, feeds mercilessly on the unhappiness of failed loves and gossip. Lady Waters tells Cecilia to speak to Emmeline about her affair with Markie and thereby initiates the fateful dinner party, which leads to the accident. Pauline, the niece of Cecilia’s fiancé, is the orphaned adolescent character on the verge of becoming aware of and embarrassed by sex. Bowen describes Emmeline as the “stepchild of her uneasy century,” a century in which planes and trains have damaged the stability and book knowledge of sexual research (indicated by the reading of Havelock Ellis), thereby freeing relationships but failing to engage the heart. The travel and the lack of warmth make the title a metaphor for the new century’s existence. With her tenuous hold on home, love, and career, Emmeline commits suicide. The House in Paris · The House in Paris is set in three locations, which reflect different aspects of the protagonist, Karen Michaelis: England, the land of perfect society; Ireland, the land of awareness; and France, the land of passion and the dark past. Parts 1 and 3 take place in a single day in Paris; part 2 occurs ten years earlier, during four months when Karen was age twenty-three. The evils of the house in Paris become apparent in the flashback and can be appreciated only through recognition of the terrible woman who runs it, Mme Fisher, and the rootlessness of the foreign students who stay there. Among other students, Mme Fisher has had in her power Karen and her friend Naomi Fisher (Mme Fisher’s daughter), and the young Max Ebhart, a Jew with no background. Ten years later, when Max wants to break his engagement with Naomi to marry another, Mme Fisher interferes, and he commits suicide. The book begins and ends in a train station in Paris. In part 1, Leopold—age nine and the illegitimate child of Karen and Max Ebhart—and Henrietta Mountjoy, age eleven and the granddaughter of a friend of Mme Fisher, arrive on separate trains: Henrietta from England in the process of being shuttled to another relative, and Leopold from his adoptive parents in Italy to await a first acquaintance with his real mother. Leopold and Henrietta, meeting in the house in Paris, become symbolic of the possibility that, with Mme Fisher bedridden for ten years (since the suicide) and now dying, the future will be free of the mistakes of the past. Mme Fisher, in an interview with Leopold, tells him that the possibility of finding himself “like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height,” something Max had failed to do.

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Dark, egotistic, self-centered, and passionate like his father, Leopold constructs imaginatively a role for his unknown mother to play and then breaks into uncontrollable weeping when a telegram arrives canceling her visit. The mature and implacable Henrietta, orphaned like Leopold but accustomed to the vicissitudes of adult life, shows him how to crack out of the tomb of childhood. In part 3, quite unexpectedly, Ray Forrestier, who had given up diplomacy and taken up business to marry Karen in spite of her illegitimate child, urges a reunion with her son Leopold, takes matters into his own hands, and brings Leopold to Karen. The Death of the Heart · The three-part structure of Bowen’s novels is most fully realized in The Death of the Heart; the parts are labeled “The World,” “The Flesh,” and “The Devil,” and follow the seasons of winter, spring, and summer. The world of Windsor Terrace, the Quaynes’ residence in London, is advanced and sterile. Portia enters into this world at age fifteen, an orphan and stepsister to the present Thomas Quayne. Thomas’s wife Anna, who has miscarried twice and is childless, secretly reads Portia’s diary and is indignant at the construction Portia puts on the household events. Portia sees much “dissimulation” at Windsor Terrace, where doing the “right” thing does not mean making a moral choice. As one of Bowen’s radical innocents who has spent her youth in hotels and temporary locations, Portia says no one in this house knows why she was born. She has only one friend in this, her first home: the head-servant Matchett, who gives Portia some religious training. Of the three male friends who wait upon Anna—St. Quentin Martin, Eddie, and Major Brutt—Portia fastens on the affections of Eddie. Spring, in part 2, brings a much-needed vacation for the Quaynes. Thomas and Anna sail for Capri, and Portia goes to stay with Anna’s former governess at Sealeon-Sea. At the governess’s home, dubbed Waikiki, Portia is nearly drowned in sensuality—the sights, smells, sounds, and feelings of a vulgar and mannerless household. Portia invites Eddie to spend a weekend with her at Seale-on-Sea, which further educates her in the ways of the flesh. Portia’s more open nature, on her return to London in part 3, is immediately apparent to Matchett, who says she had been “too quiet.” The Devil’s works are represented both obviously and subtly in this section, and they take many identities. St. Quentin, Anna, Eddie, even the unloving atmosphere of Windsor Terrace make up the Devil’s advocacy. St. Quentin, a novelist, tells Portia that Anna has been reading her diary, a disloyalty and an invasion of privacy with which, after some contemplation, Portia decides she cannot live. Herein lies the death of her teenage heart, what Bowen calls a betrayal of her innocence, or a “mysterious landscape” that has perished. Summer at Windsor Terrace brings maturity to Portia, as well as others: Anna must confront her own culpability, even her jealousy of Portia; St. Quentin, his betrayal of Anna’s reading of the diary; Thomas, his neglect of his father and his father’s memory. Even Matchett takes a terrified ride in the unfamiliar cab, setting out in the night to an unknown location to pick up Portia. They all share in the summer’s maturation that Portia has brought to fruition. William Shakespeare’s Portia preferred mercy to justice, paralleling the Portia in this novel. Bowen’s Portia observes everything with a “political seriousness.” The scaffolding of this novel supports much allusion, metaphor, and drama—all artfully structured. The world, the flesh, and the Devil as medieval threats to saintliness are reinterpreted in this context; they become the locations of the heart that has been

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thrust outside Eden and comprise a necessary trinity, not of holiness but of wholeness. This novel earns critics’ accord as Bowen’s best. The Heat of the Day · In The Death of the Heart, ranked by many critics as a close second to The Heat of the Day, Bowen uses the war to purge the wasteland conditions that existed before and during the years from 1940 through 1945. Middle-class Robert Kelway has returned from Dunkirk (1940) with a limp that comes and goes according to the state of his emotions. At the individual level, it reflects the psychological crippling of his youth; at the national level, it is the culmination of the condition expressed by the person who says “Dunkirk was waiting there in us.” Upper-class Stella Rodney has retreated from the privileges of her past into a rented apartment and a war job. Having grown impassive with the century, divorced with a son (Roderick) in the army, she has taken Robert as her lover. She has become so impassive, in fact, that in 1942, a sinister and mysterious government spy named Harrison tells her that Robert has been passing information to the enemy, and she says and does nothing. Critics have commented frequently on this novel’s analogies to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600-1601), an obvious example being Holme Dene (Dane home), Robert Kelway’s country home. Psychologically weak, Robert is ruled by his destructive mother, who also had stifled his father and planted the seeds of Robert’s defection from English ways. While Stella visits Holme Dene and learns to understand Robert, her son visits a cousin who tells him that Stella did not divorce her husband, as was commonly thought, but rather was divorced by him while he was having an affair, although he died soon after the divorce. Roderick, however, has managed to survive Stella’s homelessness with a positive and manly outlook and, when he inherits an estate in Ireland, finds that it will give him the foundation for a future. Eva Trout · In Eva Trout, the various autobiographical elements of Bowen’s work come to life: Bowen’s stammer in Eva’s reticence, the tragic deaths of both parents, the transience and sporadic education, the delayed adolescence, the settings of hotels and train stations. Eva Trout lives with a former teacher, Iseult Arbles, and her husband Eric while she waits for an inheritance. She turns twenty-four and receives the inheritance, which enables her to leave their home, where the marriage is unstable, to buy a home filled with used furniture. She also escapes the clutches of Constantine, her guardian who had been her father’s male lover. Eva discovers that a woman with money is suddenly pursued by “admirers,” and Eric visits her in her new home. Eva subsequently lets Iseult think that Eric has fathered her child, whom she adopts in America. After eight years in American cities, where Eva seeks help for the deaf-mute child Jeremy, Eva and Jeremy return to England. From England, they flee to Paris, where a doctor and his wife begin successful training of Jeremy. Back in England, Eva attempts the next phase of reaching security and a normal life. She seeks a husband and persuades the son of Iseult’s vicar to stage a wedding departure with her at Victoria Station. All her acquaintances are on hand to see the couple off, but Jeremy—brought from Paris for the occasion—playfully points a gun (he thinks a toy) at Eva and shoots her. In the midst of revelry, on the eve of her happiness, Eva drops dead beside the train. Eva Trout makes a poignant and haunting last heroine for the Bowen sequence and a final bitter statement on the elusiveness of security and happiness. Grace Eckley

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Other major works SHORT FICTION: Encounters, 1923; Ann Lee’s and Other Stories, 1926; Joining Charles, 1929; The Cat Jumps and Other Stories, 1934; Look at All Those Roses, 1941; The Demon Lover, 1945 (pb. in U.S. as Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories, 1946); The Early Stories, 1951; Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, 1959; A Day in the Dark and Other Stories, 1965; Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Stories, 1978; The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, 1980. PLAY: Castle Anna, pr. 1948 (with John Perry). NONFICTION: Bowen’s Court, 1942; Seven Winters, 1942; English Novelists, 1946; Collected Impressions, 1950; The Shelbourne: A Center of Dublin Life for More than a Century, 1951; A Time in Rome, 1960; Afterthought: Pieces About Writing, 1962; Pictures and Conversations, 1975; The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, 1986. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Good Tiger, 1965. Bibliography Austin, Allan. Elizabeth Bowen. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Emphasizes Bowen’s ability to depict locale, as in her account of World War II London in The Heat of the Day. Her characters worry and react to events more with emotion than with reason. Bowen presents these characters in a distinctive and urbane style. After a survey of Bowen’s general traits as an author, Austin follows with a detailed account of the novels and some of the shorter fiction. Craig, Patricia. Elizabeth Bowen. London: Penguin Books, 1986. Most useful for those wishing to read a shorter biography of Bowen than Glendinning’s. Written in a vigorous style and included in the Lives of Modern Women series. Like Glendinning, Craig emphasizes Bowen’s extensive circle of literary friends. The depiction of events in Bowen’s life is good-humored and blunt. Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. The standard biography of Bowen. Portrays Bowen as someone with a dominant personality, charming but at times overwhelming. Gives full coverage to Bowen’s Anglo-Irish background and her wide circle of Oxford friends. Her devotion to her husband, which did not preclude extramarital affairs, emerges as a leitmotif of Bowen’s rather uneventful life. Gives a detailed account of the genesis of each of the major novels. Jordan, Heather Bryant. How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Explores Bowen’s contradictory responses to two world wars, and her view of literary modernism and contemporary events. Treats Bowen as an Anglo-Irish novelist with a strong grounding in history, asserting that she must be read in the context of the events she fictionalized. Includes notes and bibliography. Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991. Section 1 treats Bowen’s comedies of sex, manners, and terror, as well as her studies of the female character. Section 2 contains excerpts from Bowen’s prefaces and essays. Section 3 provides a sampling of Bowen critics. Includes chronology and bibliography. Lee, Hermione. Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981. The most detailed critical study of Bowen. Places her in a tradition of Anglo-Irish writers and ranks The Death of the Heart as worthy of the highest praise. Considers not only Bowen’s novels but her short stories and nonfiction writing as well. Lee ranks a number of the short stories, such as “Summer Night” and “The Cat Jumps,” as outstanding.

Charlotte Brontë Charlotte Brontë

Born: Thornton, Yorkshire, England; April 21, 1816 Died: Haworth, Yorkshire, England; March 31, 1855 Principal long fiction · Jane Eyre, 1847; Shirley, 1849; Villette, 1853; The Professor, 1857. Other literary forms · The nineteen poems which Charlotte Brontë selected to print with her sister Anne’s work in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) were her only other works published during her lifetime. The juvenilia produced by the four Brontë children—Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell, between 1824 and 1839 are scattered in libraries and private collections. Some of Charlotte’s contributions have been published in The Twelve Adventurers and Other Stories (1925), Legends of Angria (1933), The Search After Happiness (1969), Five Novelettes (1971), and The Secret and Lily Hart (1979). A fragment of a novel written during the last year of Brontë’s life was published as Emma in Cornhill Magazine in 1860 and is often reprinted in editions of The Professor. The Complete Poems of Charlotte Brontë appeared in 1923. Other brief selections, fragments, and ephemera have been printed in Transactions and Other Publications of the Brontë Society. The nineteen-volume Shakespeare Head Brontë (1931-1938), edited by T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, contains all of the novels, four volumes of life and letters, two volumes of miscellaneous writings, and two volumes of poems. Achievements · Brontë brought to English fiction an intensely personal voice. Her books show the moral and emotional growth of a protagonist almost entirely by self-revelation. Her novels focus on individual self-fulfillment; they express the subjective interior world not only in thoughts, dreams, visions, and symbols but also by projecting inner states through external objects, secondary characters, places, events, and weather. Brontë’s own experiences and emotions inform the narrative presence. “Perhaps no other writer of her time,” wrote Margaret Oliphant in 1855, “has impressed her mark so clearly on contemporary literature, or drawn so many followers into her own peculiar path.” The personal voice, which blurs the distance between novelist, protagonist, and reader, accounts for much of the critical ambivalence toward Brontë’s work. Generations of unsophisticated readers have identified with Jane Eyre; thousands of romances and modern gothics have used Brontë’s situations and invited readers to step into the fantasy. Brontë’s novels, however, are much more than simply the common reader’s daydreams. They are rich enough to allow a variety of critical approaches. They have been studied in relation to traditions (gothic, provincial, realistic, Romantic); read for psychological, linguistic, Christian, social, economic, and personal interpretations; analyzed in terms of symbolism, imagery, metaphor, viewpoint, narrative distance, and prose style. Because the novels are so clearly wrought from the materials of their author’s life, psychoanalytic and feminist criticism has proved rewarding. In Brontë’s work, a woman author makes significant statements about issues central to women’s lives. Most of her heroines are working women; each feels 83

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the pull of individual self-development against the wish for emotional fulfillment, the tension between sexual energies and social realities, the almost unresolvable conflict between love and independence. Biography · Charlotte Brontë was the third of six children born within seven years to the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria Branwell Brontë. Patrick Brontë was perpetual curate of Haworth, a bleak manufacturing town in Yorkshire. In 1821, when Charlotte Brontë was five years old, her mother died of cancer. Three years later, the four elder girls were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge—the school which appears as Lowood in Jane Eyre. In the summer of 1825, the eldest two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis. Charlotte and Emily were removed from the school and brought home. There were no educated middleclass families in Haworth to supply friends and companions. The Brontë children lived with a noncommunicative aunt, an elderly servant, and a father much preoccupied by his intellectual interests and his own griefs. In their home and with only one another for company, the children had material for both educational and imaginative development. Patrick Brontë expected his children to read and to carry on adult conversations about politics. He subscribed to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, where his children had access to political and economic essays, art criticism, and literary reviews. They had annuals with engravings of fine art; they taught themselves to draw by copying the pictures in minute detail. They were free to do reading that would not have been permitted by any school of the time—by the age of thirteen Charlotte Brontë was fully acquainted not only with John Milton and Sir Walter Scott but also with Robert Southey, William Cowper, and (most important) Lord Byron. In 1826, Branwell was given a set of wooden soldiers which the four children used for characters in creative play. These soldiers gradually took on personal characteristics and acquired countries to rule. The countries needed cities, governments, ruling families, political intrigues, legends, and citizens with private lives, all of which the children happily invented. In 1829, when Charlotte Brontë was thirteen, she and the others began to write down materials from these fantasies, producing a collection of juvenilia that extended ultimately to hundreds of items: magazines, histories, maps, essays, tales, dramas, poems, newspapers, wills, speeches, scrapbooks. This enormous creative production in adolescence gave concrete form to motifs that were later transformed into situations, characters, and concerns of Charlotte Brontë’s mature work. It was also a workshop for literary technique; the young author explored prose style, experimented with viewpoint, and discovered how to control narrative voice. A single event, she learned, could be the basis for both a newspaper story and a romance, and the romance could be told by one of the protagonists or by a detached observer. Because Patrick Brontë had no income beyond his salary, his daughters had to prepare to support themselves. In 1831, when she was almost fifteen, Charlotte Brontë went to Miss Wooler’s School at Roe Head. After returning home for a time to tutor her sisters, she went back to Miss Wooler’s as a teacher. Over the next several years, all three sisters held positions as governesses in private families. None, however, was happy as a governess; aside from the predictable difficulties caused by burdensome work and undisciplined children, they all suffered when separated from their shared emotional and creative life. A possible solution would have been to open their own school, but they needed some special qualification to attract pupils. Charlotte con-

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ceived a plan for going abroad to study languages. In 1842, she and Emily went to Brussels to the Pensionnat Héger. They returned in November because of their aunt’s death, but in the following year Charlotte went back to Brussels alone to work as a pupil-teacher. An additional reason for her return to Brussels was that she desired to be near Professor Constantine Héger, but at the end of the year she left in misery after Héger’s wife had realized (perhaps more clearly than did Charlotte herself) the romantic nature of the attraction. In 1844, at the age of twenty-eight, Charlotte Brontë established herself permanently at Haworth. The prospectus for “The Misses Brontë’s Establishment” was published, but no pupils applied. Branwell, dismissed in disgrace from his post as tutor, came home to drink, take opium, and disinLibrary of Congress tegrate. Charlotte spent nearly two years in deep depression: Her yearning for love was unsatisfied, and she had repressed her creative impulse because she was afraid her fantasies were self-indulgent. Then, with the discovery that all three had written poetry, the sisters found a new aim in life. A joint volume of poems was published in May, 1846, though it sold only two copies. Each wrote a short novel; they offered the three together to publishers. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) were accepted. Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor was refused, but one editor, George Smith, said he would like to see a three-volume novel written by its author. Jane Eyre was by that time almost finished; it was sent to Smith on August 24, 1847, and impressed him so much that he had it in print by the middle of October. Jane Eyre was immediately successful, but there was barely any time for its author to enjoy her fame and accomplishment. Within a single year, her three companions in creation died: Branwell on September 24, 1848; Emily on December 19, 1848; and Anne on May 28, 1849. When Charlotte Brontë began work on Shirley, she met with her sisters in the evenings to exchange ideas, read aloud, and offer criticism. By the time she finished the manuscript, she was alone. Charlotte Brontë’s sense that she was plain, “undeveloped,” and unlikely to be loved seems to have been partly the product of her own psychological condition. She had refused more than one proposal in her early twenties. In 1852 there was another, from Arthur Bell Nicholls, curate at Haworth. Patrick Brontë objected violently and dismissed his curate. Gradually, however, the objections were worn away. On June 29, 1854, Charlotte Brontë and the Reverend Nicholls were married and, after a brief honeymoon tour, took up residence in Haworth parsonage. After a few months of apparent content—which did not prevent her from beginning work on another novel—

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Charlotte Brontë died on March 31, 1855, at the age of thirty-eight; a severe cold made her too weak to survive the complications of early pregnancy. Analysis · The individualism and richness of Charlotte Brontë’s work arise from the multiple ways in which her writing is personal: observation and introspection, rational analysis and spontaneous emotion, accurate mimesis and private symbolism. Tension and ambiguity grow from the intersections and conflicts among these levels of writing and, indeed, among the layers of the self. Few writers of English prose have so successfully communicated the emotional texture of inner life while still constructing fictions with enough verisimilitude to appear realistic. Brontë startled the Victorians because her work was so little influenced by the books of her own era. Its literary forebears were the written corporate daydreams of her childhood and the romantic poets she read during the period when the fantasies took shape. Certain characters and situations which crystallized the emotional conflicts of early adolescence became necessary components of emotional satisfaction. The source of these fantasies was, to a degree, beyond control, occurring in the region the twentieth century has termed “the unconscious”; by writing them down from childhood on, Brontë learned to preserve and draw on relatively undisguised desires and ego conflicts in a way lost to most adults. The power and reality of the inner life disturbed Brontë after she had passed through adolescence; she compared her creative urge to the action of opium and was afraid that she might become lost in her “infernal world.” When she began to think of publication, she deliberately used material from her own experience and reported scenes and characters in verifiable detail. In this way, she hoped to subdue the exaggerated romanticism—and the overwrought writing—of the fantasy-fictions. “Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect,” she wrote to her publisher, “I would not for the world meddle with.” Her drawing from life was so accurate that the curates and the Yorkes in Shirley were recognized at once by people who knew them, and Brontë lost the protection that her pseudonym had provided. The years of practice in writing fiction that satisfied her own emotional needs gave Brontë the means to produce powerful psychological effects. She uses a variety of resources to make readers share the protagonist’s subjective state. The truth of the outside world is only that truth which reflects the narrator’s feelings and perceptions. All characters are aspects of the consciousness which creates them: Brontë uses splitting, doubling, and other fairy-tale devices; she replicates key situations; she carefully controls the narrative distance and the amount of information readers have at their disposal. The unquietness which Brontë’s readers often feel grows from the tension between direct emotional satisfactions (often apparently immature) on one hand and, on the other, mature and realistic conflicts in motive, reason, and sense of self. Read as a sequence, the four completed novels demonstrate both Brontë’s development and the story of a woman’s relationship to the world. Brontë’s heroines find identity outside the enclosed family popularly supposed to circumscribe nineteenth century women. Isolation allows the heroines’ self-development, but it impedes their romantic yearning to be lost in love. The Professor · At the beginning of The Professor, William Crimsworth is working as a clerk in a mill owned by his proud elder brother. He breaks away, goes to Brussels to

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teach English, survives a brief attraction to a seductive older woman, and then comes to love Frances Henri, an orphaned Anglo-Swiss lace-mender who had been his pupil. Brontë’s narrative devices supply shifting masks that both expose and evade the self. The epistolary opening keeps readers from identifying directly with Crimsworth but draws them into the novel as recipients of his revelations. The masculine persona, which Brontë used frequently in the juvenilia, gives her access to the literary mainstream and creates possibilities for action, attitude, and initiative that did not exist in models for female stories. The juvenile fantasies supply the feud between two brothers; the Belgian scenes and characters come from Brontë’s own experiences. Although nominally male, Crimsworth is in an essentially female situation: disinherited, passive, timid. He has, furthermore, an exaggerated awareness and fear of the sexual overtones in human behavior. Biographical details also go into the making of Frances Henri, the friendless older student working to pay for her lessons in the Belgian school. The poem that Frances writes is one Brontë had created out of her own yearning for Professor Héger. In The Professor, the dream can come true; the poem awakens the teacher’s response. Like the central figures in all Brontë novels, both Crimsworth and Frances enact a Cinderella plot. Each begins as an oppressed outcast and ends successful, confident, and satisfactorily placed in society. The details of Crimsworth’s story work both symbolically and functionally. The imprisoning situations in the factory and the school reflect his perception of the world. At the same time, these situations are created by his own inner barriers. His bondage as a despised clerk is self-induced; he is an educated adult male who could move on at any time. In Belgium, he plods a treadmill of guilt because of Zoraïde Reuter’s sexual manipulativeness—for which he is not responsible. His self-suppression is also seen through Yorke Hunsden, who appears whenever Crimsworth must express strong emotion. Hunsden voices anger and rebellion not permitted to the male/female narrator and becomes a voyeuristic alter ego to appreciate Frances and love. The novel is weakest when it fails to integrate the biography, the emotion, and the ideas. True moral dilemmas are not developed. The heroine, seen through sympathetic male eyes, wins love for her writing, her pride, and her self-possession, and she continues to work even after she has a child. Brontë solves her chronic romantic dilemma (how can a strong woman love if woman’s love is defined as willing subordination?) by letting Frances vibrate between two roles: She is the stately directress of the school by day, the little lace-mender by night. Jane Eyre · In Jane Eyre, Brontë created a story that has the authority of myth. Everything which had deeply affected her was present in the book’s emotional content. The traumatic experiences of maternal deprivation, the Clergy Daughters’ School, and Maria’s death create the events of Jane’s early life. The book also taps universal feelings of rejection, victimization, and loneliness, making them permissible by displacement: The hateful children are cousins, not siblings; the bad adult an aunt, not a mother. Rochester’s compelling power as a lover derives from neither literal nor literary sources—Rochester is the man Brontë had loved for twenty years, the duke of Zamorna who dominates the adolescent fantasies, exerting a power on both Jane and the reader that can hardly be explained by reason. Jane defied literary convention because she was poor, plain, and a heroine; she defied social convention by refusing to accept any external authority. Placed repeatedly in situations that exemplify male power, Jane resists and survives. At the end of the narrative, she is transformed from

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Cinderella to Prince Charming, becoming the heroine who cuts through the brambles to rescue the imprisoned sleeper. Identification is so immediate and so close that readers often fail to notice Brontë’s control of distance, in particular the points of detachment when an older Jane comments on her younger self and the direct addresses from Jane to the reader that break the spell when emotions become too strong. Place controls the book’s structure. Events at Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, and Moor House determine Jane’s development; a brief coda at Ferndean provides the resolution. Each of the four major sections contains a figure representing the sources of male power over women: John Reed (physical force and the patriarchal family), Reverend Brocklehurst (the social structures of class, education, and religion), Rochester (sexual attraction), and St. John Rivers (moral and spiritual authority). Jane protects herself at first by devious and indirect means—fainting, illness, flight—and then ultimately, in rejecting St. John Rivers, by direct confrontation. Compelled by circumstances to fend for herself, she comes, at first instinctively, later rationally, to rely on herself. The book’s emotional power grows from its total absorption in Jane’s view of the world and from the images, symbols, and structures that convey multiple interwoven reverberations. The red room—which suggests violence, irrationality, enclosure, rebellion, rebirth, the bloody chamber of emerging womanhood—echoes throughout the book. The Bridewell charade, Jane’s paintings, the buildings and terrain, and a multitude of other details have both meaning and function. Characters double and split: Helen Burns (mind) and Bertha Mason (body) are aspects of Jane as well as actors in the plot. Recurring images of ice and fire suggest fatal coldness without and consuming fire within. Rochester’s sexuality is the most threatening and ambiguous aspect of masculine power because of Jane’s own complicity and her need for love. Her terrors and dreams accumulate as the marriage approaches; there are drowning images, abyss images, loss of consciousness. She refuses to become Rochester’s mistress, finally, not because of the practical and moral dangers (which she does recognize) but because she fears her own willingness to make a god of him. She will not become dependent; she escapes to preserve her self. As Jane takes her life into her own hands, she becomes less needy. After she has achieved independence by discovering a family and inheriting money, she is free to seek out Rochester. At the same time, he has become less omnipotent, perhaps a code for the destruction of patriarchal power. Thus, the marriage not only ends the romance and resolves the moral, emotional, and sexual conflicts but also supplies a satisfactory woman’s fantasy of independence coupled with love. Shirley · For the book that would follow Jane Eyre, Brontë deliberately sought a new style and subject matter. Shirley, set in 1812, concerns two public issues still relevant in 1848—working-class riots and the condition of women. Brontë did historical research in newspaper files. She used a panoramic scene, included a variety of characters observed from life, and added touches of comedy. Shirley is told in the third person; the interest is divided between two heroines, neither of whom is a persona. Nevertheless, Brontë is strongly present in the narrative voice, which remains objective only in scenes of action. The authorial commentary, more strongly even than the events themselves, creates a tone of anger, rebellion, suffering, and doubt. The novel is clearly plotted, although the mechanics are at times apparent. Brontë shifts focus among characters and uses reported conversations to violate the time

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sequence so that she can arrange events in the most effective dramatic order. Robert Moore, owner of a cloth mill, arouses the workers’ wrath by introducing machinery. Caroline Helstone loves Robert but her affection is not reciprocated. Although Caroline has a comfortable home with her uncle the rector, she is almost fatally depressed by lack of love and occupation. Property-owner Shirley Keeldar discovers that having a man’s name, position, and forthrightness gives her some power but fails to make her man’s equal; she is simply more valuable as a matrimonial prize. Louis Moore, Shirley’s former tutor, loves her silently because he lacks wealth and social position. Eventually Robert, humbled by Shirley’s contempt and weakened by a workman’s bullet, declares his love for Caroline, who has in the meantime discovered her mother and grown much stronger. Shirley’s union with Louis is more ambivalent; she loves him because he is a master she can look up to, but she is seen on her wedding day as a pantheress pining for virginal freedom. The primary source of women’s tribulation is dependency. Caroline Helstone craves occupation to fill her time, make her financially independent, and give her life purpose. Women become psychologically dependent on men because they have so little else to think about. Brontë examines the lives of several old maids; they are individuals, not stereotypes, but they are all lonely. Shirley and Caroline dissect John Milton, search for female roots, and talk cozily about men’s inadequacies. They cannot, however, speak honestly to each other about their romantic feelings. Caroline must hold to herself the deep pain of unrequited love. Although Shirley deliberately moves beyond the isolated mythic world of Jane Eyre to put women’s oppression in the context of a society rent by other power struggles (workers against employers, England against France, Church against Nonconformity), the individualistic ending only partially resolves the divisions. Brontë’s narrative tone in the final passage is bleak and bitter. She reminds readers that Shirley’s events are history. Fieldhead Hollow is covered by mills and mill housing; magic is gone from the world. Villette · Villette is Brontë’s most disciplined novel. Because The Professor had not been published, she was able to rework the Brussels experience without masks, as a story of loneliness and female deprivation, deliberately subduing the wish-fulfillment and making her uncompromising self-examination control form as well as feeling. Lucy Snowe is a woman without money, family, friends, or health. She is not, however, a sympathetic, friendly narrator like Jane Eyre. Her personality has the unattractiveness that realistically grows from deprivation; she has no social ease, no warmth, no mental quickness. Furthermore, her personality creates her pain, loneliness, and disengagement. In the book’s early sections, Lucy is not even the center of her narrative. She watches and judges instead of taking part; she tells other people’s stories instead of her own. She is so self-disciplined that she appears to have neither feelings nor imagination, so restrained that she never reveals the facts about her family or the incidents of her youth that might explain to readers how and why she learned to suppress emotion, hope, and the desire for human contact. Despite—or perhaps because of—her anesthetized feeling and desperate shyness, Lucy Snowe drives herself to actions that might have been inconceivable for a woman more thoroughly socialized. Thrust into the world by the death of the elderly woman whose companion she had been, she goes alone to London, takes a ship for the Continent, gets a job as nursemaid, rises through her own efforts to teach in Madame Beck’s school, and begins laying plans to open a school of her own.

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The coincidental and melodramatic elements of the story gain authenticity because they grow from Lucy’s inner life. When she is left alone in the school during vacation, her repressed need to be heard by someone drives her to enter the confessional of a Catholic church. Once the internal barrier is breached, she immediately meets the Bretton family. Realistically, she must have known they were in Villette; she knew that “Dr. John” was Graham Bretton, but she withheld that information from the reader both because of her habitual secretiveness and also because she did not really “know” the Brettons were accessible to her until she was able to admit her need to reach out for human sympathy. The characterization of Paul Emanuel gains richness and detail in such a manner that readers realize—before Lucy herself dares admit it—that she is interested in him. The phantom nun, at first a night terror of pure emotion, is revealed as a prankish disguise when Lucy is free to express feelings directly. The novel’s ending, however, is deliberately ambiguous, though not in event. (Only the most naïve readers dare accept Brontë’s invitation to imagine that Paul Emanuel escapes drowning and to “picture union and a happy succeeding life.”) The ambiguity grows from Lucy’s earlier statement: “M. Emanuel was away for three years. Reader, they were the three happiest years of my life.” In those years, Lucy Snowe prospered, became respected, expanded her school. Her happiness depends not on the presence of her beloved but rather on the knowledge that she is loved. With that knowledge, she becomes whole and independent. No longer telling others’ stories, she speaks directly to the reader about her most private concerns. Only when her lover is absent, perhaps, can a woman treasure love and emotional satisfaction while yet retaining the freedom to be her own person. Sally Mitchell Other major works POETRY: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846 (with Emily and Anne Brontë); The Complete Poems of Charlotte Brontë, 1923. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Twelve Adventurers and Other Stories, 1925 (C. K. Shorter and C. W. Hatfield, editors); Legends of Angria, 1933 (Fannie E. Ratchford, compiler); The Search After Happiness, 1969; Five Novelettes, 1971 (Winifred Gérin, editor); The Secret and Lily Hart, 1979 (William Holtz, editor). MISCELLANEOUS: The Shakespeare Head Brontë, 1931-1938 (19 volumes; T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, editors). Bibliography Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. This massive (more than one-thousand-page) study of the entire Brontë family sometimes overwhelms with detail, but it presents the most complete picture of one of English literature’s most intriguing and productive families. Barker’s analysis of the juvenilia, in particular, constitutes a major contribution to Brontë scholarship. Not surprisingly, she has more to say about Charlotte than about other members of the family, and she is honest in admitting that Emily remains an enigma. Fraser, Rebecca. The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family. New York: Crown, 1988. This thorough and engrossing biography of Charlotte Brontë and the Brontë family is carefully researched and annotated and offers a vividly written portrait of the Brontës and their world. Makes use of letters, published and unpublished manu-

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scripts, and contemporary news sources to examine this complex literary family. Highly recommended. Gaskell, Elizabeth C. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. Reprint. London: Penguin Books, 1975. Still an indispensable source for any student of Charlotte Brontë’s life, Gaskell’s biography offers the insights gained through her long friendship with Brontë. Herself a popular novelist of the time, Gaskell creates a memorable picture of Brontë as both a writer and a woman. Gates, Barbara Timm. Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. The collection reprints some of the more provocative and salient evaluations of Charlotte Brontë’s life and work, such as Adrienne Rich’s “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.” The volume contains a set of five general essays grouped together under the rubric “Critical Perspectives on Brontë’s Dualism,” as well as eighteen devoted to Brontë’s fiction. Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Unlike Barker, Gordon had the blessing of the Brontë Society, which granted access to and permission to reproduce from its copious archives. Gordon makes good use of his materials, producing a readable account of Charlotte Brontë’s life and literary output. Lloyd Evans, Barbara, and Gareth Lloyd Evans. The Scribner Companion to the Brontës. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983. Provides an overview of the Brontë family as a whole. Includes the story of the Brontës’ tragic history, sections on the young Brontës’ juvenilia, discussions of Charlotte, Anne, and Emily’s published works, and excerpts from criticisms written about those works at the time they were first published.

Emily Brontë Emily Brontë

Born: Thornton, Yorkshire, England; July 30, 1818 Died: Haworth, Yorkshire, England; December 19, 1848 Principal long fiction · Wuthering Heights, 1847. Other literary forms · Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) contains poems by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Juvenilia and early prose works on the imaginary world of Gondal have all been lost. Achievements · Emily Brontë occupies a unique place in the annals of literature. Her reputation as a major novelist stands on the merits of one relatively short novel which was misunderstood and intensely disliked upon publication; yet no study of British fiction is complete without a discussion of Wuthering Heights. The names of its settings and characters, particularly Heathcliff, have become part of the heritage of Western culture, familiar even to those who have neither read the novel nor know anything about its author’s life and career. Several film versions, the two most popular in 1939 and 1970, have helped perpetuate this familiarity. The literary achievement of Wuthering Heights lies in its realistic portrayal of a specific place and time and in its examination of universal patterns of human behavior. Set in Yorkshire in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the novel delineates the quality of life in the remote moors of northern England and also reminds the reader of the growing pains of industrialization throughout the nation. In addition, more than any other novel of the period, Wuthering Heights presents in clear dialectic form the conflict between two opposing psychic forces, embodied in the settings of the Grange and the Heights and the people who inhabit them. Although modern readers often apply the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to give names to these forces, Brontë illustrated their conflict long before psychologists pigeonholed them. Wuthering Heights is so true in its portrayal of human nature that it fits easily into many theoretical and critical molds, from the historical to the psychological. The novel may be most fully appreciated, however, as a study of the nature of human perception and its ultimate failure in understanding human behavior. This underlying theme, presented through the dialectic structure of human perception, unites many of the elements that are sometimes singled out or overemphasized in particular critical approaches to the novel. Brontë’s skill is not confined to representing the world and the human forces at work within her characters, great as that skill is. She has also created a complex narrative structure built upon a series of interlocking memories and perceptions, spanning three generations, and moving across several social classes. Told primarily from two often unreliable and sometimes ambiguous first-person points of view, the structure of the novel itself illustrates the limitations of human intelligence and imagination. Faced with choosing between Lockwood or Nelly Dean’s interpretation of Heathcliff’s life, the reader can only ponder that human perception never allows a full understanding of another soul. 92

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Biography · Emily Jane Brontë was born at Thornton, in Bradford Parish, Yorkshire, on July 30, 1818, the fifth child of the Reverend Patrick and Maria Brontë. Patrick Brontë had been born in County Down, Ireland, one of ten children, on March 17, 1777. He was a schoolteacher and tutor before obtaining his B.A. from Cambridge in 1806, from where he was ordained to curacies, first in Essex and then in Hartshead, Yorkshire. He married Maria Branwell, of Penzance, in Hartshead on December 19, 1812, and in 1817, they moved to Thornton. The other children at the time of Emily’s birth were Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Patrick Branwell; another daughter, Anne, was born two years later. Charlotte and Anne also became writers. In early 1820, the family moved to Haworth, four miles from the village of Keighley, where the Reverend Brontë was perpetual curate until his death in 1861. Maria Brontë died on September 15, 1821, and about a year later, an elder sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved in to take care of the children and household. She remained with them until her own death in 1842. Life at Haworth was spartan but not unpleasant. There was a close and devoted relationship among the children, especially between Charlotte and Emily. Reading was a favorite pastime, and a wide range of books, including the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poetry of William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, as well as the more predictable classics, was available to the children. Outdoor activities included many hours of wandering through the moors and woods. Their father wanted the children to be hardy and independent, intellectually and physically, indifferent to the passing fashions of the world. Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte had already been sent away to a school for clergymen’s daughters, at Cowan Bridge, when Emily joined them in November, 1824. Emily was not happy in this confined and rigid environment and longed for home. Two of the sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, became ill and were taken home to die during 1825; in June, Charlotte and Emily returned home as well. From 1825 to 1830, the remaining Brontë children lived at Haworth with their father and Miss Branwell. In June, 1826, their father gave them a set of wooden soldiers, a seemingly insignificant gift that stimulated their imaginative and literary talents. The children devoted endless energy to creating an imaginary world for these soldiers. During these years, Charlotte and her brother Branwell created in their minds and on paper the land of “Angria,” while Emily and Anne were at work on “Gondal.” Although all of these early prose works have been lost, some of Emily’s poetry contains references to aspects of the GondalLibrary of Congress Angria creations.

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In July, 1835, Emily again joined Charlotte, already a teacher, at the Roe Head school. She remained only three months, returning home in October. Three years later, she accepted a position as governess in a school in Halifax for about six months but returned to Haworth in December; Charlotte joined her there early in the following year. During 1839 and 1840, the sisters were planning to establish their own school at Haworth, but the plan was never carried through. Charlotte left home again to serve as a governess in 1841, and in February, 1842, she and Emily went to Mme Héger’s school in Brussels to study languages. They returned to Haworth in November because of Miss Branwell’s death. Charlotte went back to Brussels to teach in 1843, but Emily never left Yorkshire again. From August, 1845, the Brontë children were again united at Haworth. They did not have much contact with neighbors, whose educational level and intellectual interests were much inferior to theirs. They kept busy reading and writing, both fiction and poetry. Wuthering Heights was probably begun in October, 1845, and completed sometime in 1846, although it was not published until December, 1847, after the success of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Meanwhile, the sisters published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in May, 1846. Finding a press was very difficult, and the pseudonyms were chosen to avoid personal publicity and to create the fiction of male authorship, more readily acceptable to the general public. The reaction was predictable, as Charlotte reports: “Neither we nor our poems were at all wanted.” The sisters were not discouraged, however, and they continued to seek publishers for their novels. The first edition of Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 by T. C. Newby, with Anne’s Agnes Grey as the third volume. It was a sloppy edition and contained many errors. The second edition, published in 1850, after the author’s death, was “corrected” by Charlotte. The public reaction to Wuthering Heights was decidedly negative; readers were disturbed by the “wickedness” of the characters and the “implausibility” of the action. Until Charlotte herself corrected the misconception, readers assumed that Wuthering Heights was an inferior production by the author of Jane Eyre. In October, 1848, Emily became seriously ill with a cough and cold. She suffered quietly and patiently, even refusing to see the doctor who had been called. She died of tuberculosis at Haworth on December 19, 1848. She was buried in the church alongside her mother, her sisters Maria and Elizabeth, and her brother Branwell. These facts about Emily Brontë’s life and death are known, but her character will always remain a mystery. Her early prose works have been lost, only three personal letters survive, and her poems give little insight into her own life. Most information about the Brontë family life and background comes from Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte and the autobiographical comments on which she based her work. Charlotte comments that Emily was “not a person of demonstrative character” and that she was “stronger than a man, simpler than a child.” She had a nature that “stood alone.” The person behind this mystery is revealed only in a reading of Wuthering Heights. Analysis · Wuthering Heights is constructed around a series of dialectic motifs which interconnect and unify the elements of setting, character, and plot. An examination of these motifs will give the reader the clearest insight into the central meaning of the novel. Although Wuthering Heights is a “classic,” as Frank Kermode points out in an essay, precisely because it is open to many different critical methods and conducive to many levels of interpretation, the novel grows from a coherent imaginative vision

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that underlies all the motifs. That vision demonstrates that all human perception is limited and failed. The fullest approach to Emily Brontë’s novel is through the basic patterns that support this vision. Wuthering Heights concerns the interactions of two families, the Earnshaws and Lintons, over three generations. The novel is set in the desolate moors of Yorkshire and covers the years from 1771 to 1803. The Earnshaws and Lintons are in harmony with their environment, but their lives are disrupted by an outsider and catalyst of change, the orphan Heathcliff. Heathcliff is, first of all, an emblem of the social problems of a nation entering the age of industrial expansion and urban growth. Although Brontë sets the action of the novel entirely within the locale familiar to her, she reminds the reader continually of the contrast between that world and the larger world outside. Besides Heathcliff’s background as a child of the streets and the description of urban Liverpool from which he is brought, there are other reminders that Yorkshire, long insulated from change and susceptible only to the forces of nature, is no longer as remote as it once was. The servant Joseph’s religious cant, the class distinctions obvious in the treatment of Nelly Dean as well as of Heathcliff, and Lockwood’s pseudosophisticated urban values are all reminders that Wuthering Heights cannot remain as it has been, that religious, social, and economic change is rampant. Brontë clearly signifies in the courtship and marriage of young Cathy and Hareton that progress and enlightenment will come and the wilderness will be tamed. Heathcliff is both an embodiment of the force of this change and its victim. He brings about a change but cannot change himself. What he leaves behind, as Lockwood attests and the relationship of Cathy and Hareton verifies, is a new society, at peace with itself and its environment. It is not necessary, however, to examine in depth the Victorian context of Wuthering Heights to sense the dialectic contrast of environments. Within the limited setting that the novel itself describes, society is divided between two opposing worlds: Wuthering Heights, ancestral home of the Earnshaws, and Thrushcross Grange, the Linton estate. Wuthering Heights is rustic and wild; it is open to the elements of nature and takes its name from “atmospheric tumult.” The house is strong, built with narrow windows and jutting cornerstones, fortified to withstand the battering of external forces. It is identified with the outdoors and nature and with strong, “masculine” values. Its appearance, both inside and out, is wild, untamed, disordered, and hard. The Grange expresses a more civilized, controlled atmosphere. The house is neat and orderly, and there is always an abundance of light—to Brontë’s mind, “feminine” values. It is not surprising that Lockwood is more comfortable at the Grange, since he takes pleasure in “feminine” behavior (gossip, vanity of appearance, adherence to social decorum, romantic self-delusion), while Heathcliff, entirely “masculine,” is always out of place there. Indeed, all of the characters reflect, to greater or lesser degrees, the masculine and feminine values of the places they inhabit. Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw are as wild and uncontrollable as the Heights: Catherine claims even to prefer her home to the pleasures of heaven. Edgar and Isabella Linton are as refined and civilized as the Grange. The marriage of Edgar and Catherine (as well as the marriage of Isabella and Heathcliff) is ill-fated from the start, not only because she does not love him, as her answers to Nelly Dean’s catechism reveal, but also because each is so strongly associated with the values of his or her home that he or she lacks the opposing and necessary personality components. Catherine is too willful, wild, and strong; she

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expresses too much of the “masculine” side of her personality (the animus of Jungian psychology), while Edgar is weak and effeminate (the anima). They are unable to interact fully with each other because they are not complete individuals themselves. This lack leads to their failures to perceive each other’s true needs. Even Cathy’s passionate cry for Heathcliff, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff,” is less love for him as an individual than the deepest form of self-love. Cathy cannot exist without him, but a meaningful relationship is not possible, because Cathy sees Heathcliff only as a reflection of herself. Heathcliff, too, has denied an important aspect of his personality. Archetypally masculine, Heathcliff acts out only the aggressive, violent parts of himself. The settings and the characters are patterned against each other, and explosions are the only possible results. Only Hareton and young Cathy, each of whom embodies the psychological characteristics of both Heights and Grange, can successfully sustain a mutual relationship. This dialectic structure extends into the roles of the narrators as well. The story is reflected through the words of Nelly Dean—an inmate of both houses, a participant in the events of the narrative, and a confidante of the major characters—and Lockwood, an outsider who witnesses only the results of the characters’ interactions. Nelly is a companion and servant in the Earnshaw and Linton households, and she shares many of the values and perceptions of the families. Lockwood, an urban sophisticate on retreat, misunderstands his own character as well as others’. His brief romantic “adventure” in Bath and his awkwardness when he arrives at the Heights (he thinks Cathy will fall in love with him; he mistakes the dead rabbits for puppies) exemplify his obtuseness. His perceptions are always to be questioned. Occasionally, however, even a denizen of the conventional world may gain a glimpse of the forces at work beneath the surface of reality. Lockwood’s dream of the dead Cathy, which sets off his curiosity and Heathcliff’s final plans, is a reminder that even the placid, normal world may be disrupted by the psychic violence of a willful personality. The presentation of two family units and parallel brother-sister, husband-wife relationships in each also emphasizes the dialectic. That two such opposing modes of behavior could arise in the same environment prevents the reader from easy condemnation of either pair. The use of flashback for the major part of the narration—it begins in medias res—reminds the reader that he or she is seeing events out of their natural order, recounted by two individuals whose reliability must be questioned. The working out of the plot over three generations further suggests that no one group, much less one individual, can perceive the complexity of the human personality. Taken together, the setting, plot, characters, and structure combine into a whole when they are seen as parts of the dialectic nature of existence. In a world where opposing forces are continually arrayed against each other in the environment, in society, in families, and in relationships, as well as within the individual, there can be no easy route to perception of another human soul. Wuthering Heights convincingly demonstrates the complexity of this dialectic and portrays the limitations of human perception. Lawrence F. Laban Other major works POETRY: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846 (with Charlotte and Anne Brontë); The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, 1941 (C. W. Hatfield, editor).

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Bibliography Berg, Maggie. “Wuthering Heights”: The Writing in the Margin. New York: Twayne, 1996. Part of the Twayne Masterworks series, this volume provides a good introduction to Emily Brontë’s masterpiece. A chronology of her life and works is followed by a section devoted to the literary and social context of the novel and a reading emphasizing the importance of the novel’s “marginal spaces,” such as the diary that Catherine keeps in the blank spaces of books. Bloom, Harold, ed. Heathcliff. New York: Chelsea House, 1993. Part of the Major Literary Characters series, Heathcliff collects in one volume some of the most salient evaluations of Emily Brontë’s hero. All have appeared previously elsewhere, but such an anthology between two covers is useful. Heathcliff includes both excerpts from longer works—starting with a passage from one of Charlotte Brontë’s letters—and nine full-length essays. Harold Bloom offers an interesting introduction regarding “The Analysis of Character,” which provides a framework for readers attempting to come to terms with Emily Brontë’s most memorable literary creation. Frank, Katherine. A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Frank’s book attempts to strike a balance between the “purple heather school of Brontë biography” and later accounts that present Emily Brontë as a victim. Fraser, Rebecca. The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family. New York: Crown, 1988. Although Fraser’s central focus is Brontë’s sister, Charlotte, her intelligent and exhaustively researched book offers much valuable material on Emily as well. Its portrait of the Brontës as a family evokes a vivid picture of life in the remote Yorkshire parsonage and its effect in shaping Emily’s own work. Gaskell, Elizabeth C. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. Reprint. London: Penguin Books, 1975. Although the central focus is Charlotte Brontë, this invaluable book is a necessary part of any thorough study of Emily. Gaskell’s friendship with Charlotte provides this biography with a unique and informative perspective on the Brontës and their lives. Hewish, John. Emily Brontë: A Critical and Biographical Study. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969. Part biography and part literary analysis, this study of Brontë places her within the context of her time and society, examining her life and the critical and public reception her work received. Contains an extensive and exceptional bibliography of great use to any Brontë scholar. Lloyd Evans, Barbara, and Gareth Lloyd Evans. The Scribner Companion to the Brontës. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983. Provides an overview of the Brontë family as a whole. Includes the story of the Brontës’ tragic history, sections on the young Brontës’ juvenilia, discussions of Charlotte, Anne, and Emily’s published works, and excerpts from criticisms written about those works at the time they were first published. Smith, Anne, ed. The Art of Emily Brontë. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976. A collection of critical essays on Brontë’s work, covering both her poetry and Wuthering Heights. Among the most interesting essays are Keith Sagar’s comparison of Brontë and D. H. Lawrence, and Colin Wilson’s thought-provoking comments on Wuthering Heights, which he views not as a great novel but as a “rough sketch for the masterpiece that should have followed.”

Anita Brookner Anita Brookner

Born: London, England; July 16, 1928 Principal long fiction · A Start in Life, 1981 (pb. in U.S. as The Debut, 1981); Providence, 1982; Look at Me, 1983; Hotel du Lac, 1984; Family and Friends, 1985; The Misalliance, 1986; A Friend from England, 1987; Latecomers, 1988; Lewis Percy, 1989; Brief Lives, 1990; A Closed Eye, 1991; Fraud, 1992; A Family Romance, 1993 (pb. in U.S. as Dolly, 1993); A Private View, 1994; Incidents in the Rue Laugier, 1995; Altered States, 1996; Visitors, 1997; Falling Slowly, 1998; Undue Influence, 1999. Other literary forms · A distinguished historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century French art and culture, Anita Brookner wrote several books of nonfiction before she began to write novels. Watteau (1968) is an assessment of the early eighteenth century French artist Antoine Watteau. The Genius of the Future, Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, the Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans (1971) is a collection of six essays on seven French writers; each writer is considered in the context of his time. The greatest space is given to Charles Baudelaire. Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (1972) is a study of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze in a successful attempt to locate the background of a sentimental genre that is distinct from both rococo and classicism. Jacques-Louis David (1980), a biography of the foremost painter of the French revolutionary period, explores the relationship between David’s life and work, places that work in the context of contemporary French painting, and details a career that spanned some of the most turbulent years in French history. Soundings, a collection of essays, was published in 1997, and Romanticism and Its Discontents was published in 2000. Brookner’s translations include Utrillo (1960) and The Fauves (1962). Achievements · Brookner suddenly began to write fiction during her middle years, while still an active teacher and scholar. Although she continued her academic career, she quickly found equal success as a novelist. With the publication of several novels, she gained an international following and widespread critical acclaim. In 1984, Great Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for fiction was awarded to Hotel du Lac. Brookner was praised for her elegant and precise prose, her acute sense of irony, and her subtle insights into character and social behavior. Her witty explorations of manners and morals suggest to many a literary kinship to Jane Austen and Barbara Pym. While Brookner’s somber, more complex moral vision disallows any sustained comparison to Pym, Austen and Brookner undeniably share a common concern for intelligent, subtle, clever heroines who seek to satisfy both private sensibility and public expectations. To regard Brookner’s novels as simply traditional novels of manners, however, is to misconstrue her art. Brookner’s intentions greatly exceed this conventional genre; her achievements, indeed, take her far beyond it. Perhaps it is more useful to note the singularity of her contribution to British letters. Her highly developed pictorial sense; her baroque diction, with its balance of reason and passion; and her allusive, richly textured narratives, haunting in their resonances, reflect at every turn her extensive 98

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knowledge of the materials and motifs of eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings and literature. Her works have been generously admired, but some dissenting voices have been raised. She is occasionally brought to task for fictive worlds too narrow in scope and claustrophobic in their intensity, for overzealous, self-conscious, schematic fiction, and for excessive sentimentality that unfortunately evokes the pulp romance. Brookner’s worlds, however, are invariably shaped toward significant moral revelations; technique rarely intrudes to the detriment of story; and her ability to maintain an ironic distance from her characters, one that allows her to reveal sentimentality, to make judgments dispassionately, is one of her greatest strengths as a writer. Biography · Anita Brookner was born in London, England, on July 16, 1928, to Newsom and Maude Brookner. She was educated at James Allen’s Girls’ School; King’s College, University of London; and received a Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 1953. From 1959 to 1964, she was visiting lecturer at the University of Reading, Berkshire. In 1967-1968, she was Slade Professor at Cambridge University, the first woman to hold this position. From 1964 to 1988 she taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she lectured on neoclassicism and the Romantic movement. She is a Fellow of New Hall of Cambridge University. In 1983, she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1990 she was made a Commander, Order of the British Empire (CBE). Brookner began her career as a novelist when she was more than fifty years old as an attempt, she hinted, to understand her own powerlessness after a grand passion went wrong. Between 1981 and 1997, she published a novel a year; Hotel du Lac won the prestigious Booker Prize. She has also written many articles, introductions, and reviews on art history and on both French and English literature. They have appeared in such publications as the Burlington Magazine, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. Some of these pieces are collected in Soundings. Analysis · Anita Brookner established her reputation as a novelist with four books published in rapid succession between 1981 and 1984. Written in austerely elegant prose, each of these four novels follows essentially the same course. Each centers on a scholarly, sensitive, morally earnest young woman who leads an attenuated life. None of these heroines has intended a life so circumscribed. As their stories begin, they seek change, liberation from boredom and loneliness. They seek connection to a wider world. While these women are intelligent, endlessly introspective, and possessed of a saving ironic wit, they do not know how to get the things they most desire: the love of, and marriage to, a man of quality. With compassion, rue, and infinite good humor, Brookner makes it abundantly clear that these worthy women, these good daughters, good writers, and good scholars are unknowing adherents to a romantic ideal. Like the shopgirls and “ultrafeminine” women they gaze upon with such wonder and awe, these intellectually and morally superior women accept without question the cultural assumption that marriage is a woman’s greatest good. Consistently undervaluing their own considerable talents and professional achievements, these heroines look to love and marriage as a way of joining the cosmic dance of a rational, well-ordered society. Their intense yearning for a transforming love shapes their individual plots; in each case, the conflict between what the romantic imagination wants and what it indeed does get impels these narratives forward. Brookner’s concern

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is to illuminate the worthiness, the loneliness, the longing of these heroines for love and a more splendid life. Before their stories can end, these women must abandon sentiment and accept their solitary state. Their triumph lies in their ability to confront their fall from romantic innocence and recognize it for what it is. These novels build inexorably toward an ending that is both startling and profoundly moving. While Brookner’s heroines must struggle with sentimentality, Brookner herself does not. Her vision is bleak, unsparing. In telling their stories, she raises several other themes: The most notable of these are filial obligation, the “romantic” versus the “realistic” apprehension of life, truth and its relationship to self-knowledge, the determination of proper behavior in society, and the small pleasures that attend the trivia of daily life. Brookner presents her major and minor themes against the background of fictive worlds so powerfully realized that her novels seem to be absorbed as much as read. These are novels of interior reality. Little that is overt happens; dramatic action rests in the consciousness of the heroine, who is always center stage. The Debut · Brookner’s first novel, The Debut, lacks the richness and gradation of tone that marks her later fiction, but is nevertheless well crafted. Set against Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833), The Debut tells the story of Ruth Weiss, a scrupulous, thoughtful scholar, who finds herself at forty with a life “ruined” by literature. A passionate reader from an early age, now a professor of literature specializing in Balzac, Ruth leads a narrow life alternating between teaching students and caring for an aging father. She blames the tradition of filial duty she found in literature for her mostly cheerless state. Like Frances Hinton of Look at Me and Kitty Maule of Providence, Ruth began with expectations. In her youth, she once cast aside the burden of an oppressive heritage, one best symbolized by the deep silence and heavy, dark furniture in the mausoleum of a house she shared with her parents, and fled England for France. Ostensibly, her goal was to write a dissertation on vice and virtue; in actuality, it was as much to seek air and space and light. Although she at first endured a sense of displacement and exile, a condition that at one time or another afflicts many of Brookner’s heroines, over time Ruth’s transplant into foreign soil proved successful. Away from her charming, eccentric, but infinitely demanding parents, Ruth flourished. She acquired polish, sophistication, lovers. Yet even as she gloried in her new life, Ruth, like many of Brookner’s other heroines, engaged in a constant internal debate over the question of how life is best lived. Does vice or virtue bring victory? She concluded that a life of conventional virtue can spell disaster for one’s hopes; regretfully, Balzacian opportunism cannot be discounted. It is better to be a bad winner than a poor loser. Even though she observed that conventional morality tales were wrong, however, Ruth lamented the triumph of vice. Suddenly called back to England because of what proves to be a final deterioration in her mother’s fragile health, Ruth is forced to leave the comfortable, satisfying life she built for herself. Her spirited adventure over, Ruth is unable to extricate herself once more. At forty, the long and beautiful red hair indicative of her youthful potential for rebellion now compressed into a tight chignon, Dr. Ruth Weiss is a felon recaptured. She is tender with her father, gentle with her students, and expects little more from life. She is the first of Brookner’s heroines who learns to renounce. Ruth’s story is told retrospectively, in a way that recalls the French novel of meditation. The bold configurations of her story suggest the quality of a fable. The narrative also gains

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a necessary solidity and weight by the many allusions to Balzacian characters and texts. These allusions create a substructure of irony that continues to reverberate long after Ruth’s story is complete. Providence · If Ruth is disheartened but finally resigned, Kitty Maule in Providence, Brookner’s second novel, moves toward outright disillusionment. Kitty is also a professor of literature. Her interests lie in the Romantic movement; this novel, then, like the rest of Brookner’s fiction, is filled with ideas, good talk, vigorous intellectual exchanges. Here, both Kitty’s private musings and her running seminar on Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816) provide a context for the exploration of Romantic concerns. Brookner’s use of Kitty as a teacher of the Romantic tradition is ultimately highly ironic, for Kitty cannot discern her own romanticism. Curiously, she has moments when she is almost able to see her romanticism for what it is. Yet in the end, she suppresses the would-be insights and retreats into her dreams and passionate longings. What Kitty longs for is love, marriage, and, perhaps, God. Her longing for God goes largely unrecognized; like her fellow Romantics, she requires a sign. Yet her longing for love, the love of one man in particular, is at the perceived center of her life. The handsome, brilliant, but distant lover of the scholarly, sensitive woman in this novel is Maurice Bishop. Maurice, a professor of medieval history, is noted for his love of cathedrals and God. Well born, rich, confident in the manner of those accustomed to deference, Maurice is everything that Kitty wants in life: He is the very cultural ideal of England itself. To be his wife is Kitty’s hope of heaven; to capture him, she brings to bear all of her weapons at hand: subtle intelligence, grace of manners, enduring patience, and abiding love. That Kitty’s love for Maurice has the fervor of a religious acolyte is suggested by his surname. Maurice may be in love with the idea of a religious absolute, but Kitty’s religion is romantic love. All of her repressed romanticism is focused on this elegant, remote man. Kitty’s extreme dependence upon Maurice as the repository of her hopes and dreams stems in large part from her sense of cultural displacement. The child of a French mother and a British father, both dead in their youth, Kitty was born in England and brought up there by her immigrant French grandparents. Despite her British birth, however, Kitty never feels at home in England. In the face of concerted and varied efforts to “belong,” she retains a sense of exile. Nor is she truly considered English by her colleagues and acquaintances. The product of her doting French grandparents, Kitty is unaware of her true cultural allegiance; ironically, it is the French heritage that dominates in her English setting. Her manners, clothes, and speech belie her English father. In Maurice, Kitty seeks an attachment that anchors, a place to be. Here and elsewhere in Brookner’s fiction, the recurrent theme of the search for a home acquires the force and weight of myth. So powerfully realized is Kitty’s intense desire for love, acceptance, and liberation from loneliness that it comes as a shock when Kitty, who is expecting Maurice’s proposal of marriage, instead learns of his sudden engagement to a woman who shares his aristocratic background. The novel concludes with Kitty’s realization that she had indeed lived in a haze of romantic expectation; the truth is, she has been first, last, and always an outsider. In addition to the major theme of the passive, excellent, but self-deceived young woman in the service of an illusory ideal, Brookner presents in Providence themes which are relevant to all of her works. Maurice’s betrayal of Kitty, for example, establishes a motif that recurs in later novels, while Brookner’s superbly comic

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depiction of bored and boring academics, a staple in her fiction, reaches perhaps its finest statement here. If Balzacian allusions underlie The Debut and give it additional power, allusions to many French writers, but especially to Constant’s Adolphe are used to provide ironic commentary on and foreshadowings of Kitty’s fate. Most important, however, Kitty Maule herself is arguably the quintessential Brooknerian heroine. Like her fictional sisters, Ruth Weiss of The Debut, Frances Hinton of Look at Me, Edith Hope of Hotel du Lac, and Mimi Dorn of Family and Friends, Kitty waits patiently for her life to begin. She is blind to her own worth and discounts her singular achievements; longs for order, a place in a rational world; finds joy in the chores, duties, and routines of everyday life; is sensitive, compassionate, morally deserving. Finally, her final inevitable loss of a man morally her inferior leaves her stripped of all romantic illusions, a convert to reality. Look at Me · By her own admission a relentless observer, Frances Hinton, the heroine of Look at Me, Brookner’s third novel, tells her own compelling story. To be sure, all of Brookner’s heroines are detached observers, though probably none records and stores information so clinically as does Frances. All of Brookner’s heroines suffer, yet perhaps none suffers more intensely than Frances. Like other Brooknerian heroines, Frances is virtuous, sensitive, bright, and in need of a more marvelous life. Like other Brooknerian heroines also, she does not know how to get the things she wants. Frozen into inaction, her intense melancholia is mirrored in the images of death and desolation that surround her. A medical librarian who catalogs prints and engravings of disease through the ages, Frances comments ironically on the scenes of madness, nightmare affliction, and death she must sort and mount. She lives in a tomb of a house where her mother has died; Brookner’s use of Frances’s house recalls her uses of houses elsewhere: They are symbols of oppressive traditions that constrain and weigh heavily upon those who inhabit them. For Frances, the world is somber, dark. The glittering, stylish couple who offer temporary access to a dazzling social world prove cruelly false. In an act of betrayal so profound that Frances cannot but withdraw from the world she has long sought, the beautiful Nick and Alix Fraser hold Frances up to public ridicule. Her brief liberation from solitariness and the eternal prison of self ends abruptly. Always self-analytic, self-deprecatory, Frances sees her failure to find a place in the world as a failure of egotism or will. She observes that others advance through egotism, but she cannot mimic them. She decides to become a writer. Writing will allow her both to comment on life and to retreat from it. As is usual in Brookner’s works, the dramatic action is largely inner. Hers are novels of the interior; the terrain surveyed is that of the soul. Frances presents a commanding narrative voice as she sorts, gathers, and finally reassembles the fragments of her experience into a unified whole. In fullest voice, she provides useful insights into the processes of the creative, transforming imagination. From the detritus of her daily life she, as writer-at-work, will abstract significant form. If Brookner here provides a mirror of herself busy fashioning art from the materials of the ordinary, the details of eating or dressing or chatting that receive so much attention in her novels, she also repeats the characteristic fusion of the comic and the sad that lends such poignancy to her works. Further, the influence of the pictorial is reflected here as well; characters are often framed in an action, presented with a consciousness of scene or setting. Finally, Frances’s long commentary on her experience that is the text of Look at Me again evokes the French novel of meditation, a literary form that subtly influences and pervades Brookner’s fiction. Notably, as Frances begins to write on the

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last page of the novel, she is free of self-pity. Solitude may be her lot, but art will vindicate her. Art will represent the triumph of the unvanquished self. Hotel du Lac · Edith Hope, the heroine of Hotel du Lac, Brookner’s fourth novel and the winner of the 1984 Booker Prize, is also a writer. Edith writes pulp romances for a living. Yet until she learns better, she believes that romance is only her business, not her frame of mind. Brookner’s fiction, however, reveals her tendency sometimes to use names to signal character traits or habits of thought. Such is the case here: Edith is indeed a romantic, although an unknowing one. Edith begins her stay at the Hotel du Lac in ignorance of her true nature; she leaves enlightened as to the deeper, more recessed aspects of her moral being. It was not Edith’s choice to leave England and travel to Switzerland, the setting of Hotel du Lac. Edith was sent away because of her severe breach of social decorum: She chose not to appear at her own wedding, thus profoundly humiliating a good man and eminently suitable husband. Her action was shocking to all, including Edith herself. Modest, unassuming, and usually anxious to please, Edith is in many ways a typical Brooknerian heroine. She, too, spends too much time alone, condemned to her own introspection. Her marriage would have broken that isolation. Edith’s revolt and subsequent removal to Switzerland provide a context for the discussion of numerous moral and psychological questions. While Edith’s story is always foremost, the novel itself alternates between first-and third-person narratives, with philosophical positions being argued, accepted, or dismissed. The central fact that emerges about Edith is her passionate love for a married man whom she only seldom sees. Like his fictional predecessors, Edith’s David is exceedingly handsome, elegant, intelligent, and remote. For love of him, Edith jilted her dull but safe fiancé. At the Hotel du Lac, Edith’s interactions with the other residents move her to a greater understanding of truth, self-knowledge, and the differences between romance and reality. Numerous other themes are present here as well, including that of “ultrafeminine” as opposed to “feminist” women. Edith understands these women as models of feminine response to feminine experience. In relative isolation at this Swiss hotel, she studies these models and rejects both. The will to power, the utility of egotism as a serviceable instrument in the world, a recurrent Brooknerian theme, also receives much discussion here. What Edith eventually learns as she evaluates her exchanges and relationships with her fellow guests is accorded significant status by the mythological underpinnings of this novel. Inside the hotel, characters are both particular and types, acting out self-assigned roles in a grand comedy of manners. All the inhabitants exhibit a theatrical sense of themselves; they “present” themselves to this community consciously, deliberately. Such attention to the pictorial, personal presentation is a constant of Brookner’s fiction. The details of clothes, manners, and mannerisms convey aspects of self and morality in Brookner’s works as they do in the works of Henry James, to whom Brookner alludes in this novel. If inside the hotel the characters are on parade, making their statements with dress, or gesture, once outside the hotel, they are subsumed into the mythicized landscape. Gray mist, conveying a sense of menace and oppression, surrounds everything. Characters make journeys that are important only for their mythic impact. Much movement against this dreary landscape takes place as characters are directed toward crucial, definitive moral choices. The landscape helps Edith to perceive her dilemmas; she is finally able to reject a diabolical figure who offers marriage without love. He forces Edith to

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recognize her romanticism for what it is. At least in the end, however, when she returns to England and her married lover, Edith knows that she has chosen a cold and solitary path. Her self-determination represents a triumph for her and for this book. Edith is finally transformed by her successful journey to knowledge. Having laid claim with her first four novels to a sharply defined fictional territory, Brookner has shown in subsequent books a willingness to extend her range. In Latecomers, for example, she centers her story for the first time on two male figures, close friends, both of whom were refugees brought from Germany to England as children during World War II. Lewis Percy features a single protagonist, again a man, in some ways the counterpart of Brookner’s earlier heroines. Family and Friends · The book with which Brookner departed most radically from the pattern established in her first four novels was Family and Friends; perhaps because it violated readers’ expectations, it was sharply criticized by some reviewers. Written in the historical present with virtually no dialogue, Family and Friends is an extended meditation on the French tradition. It stems from the ruminations of a narrator who quickly disappears, makes only glancing reappearances, and is curiously never identified. Here, Brookner’s concern is not with a particular heroine, but with the Dorn family, rich, most likely German immigrants who fled to England before the start of World War II. The war, when it comes, receives but scant attention; the novel focuses always on the small, interior world of the Dorn family. Little seems to exist outside the family and their immediate interests, sparking again charges of a work too narrow in range. The lives of the Dorn family and their associates are followed over a period of time. Sofka, the gentle but strong matriarch of the family, is the moral center of the work. Widowed early in life, she rejects the idea of remarriage, directing her loving attentions to her family instead. Mimi and Betty are her two daughters. While Betty is selfish, willful, theatrical, tricking her family into giving her an independent life quite early, she is nevertheless the child Sofka secretly loves best. Sofka, beautiful and contained, admires her younger daughter’s spirit. Mimi is virtuous, dreamy, passive, frozen into inertia in young womanhood when an early feeble attempt to reach out for love is unsuccessful. Mimi languishes for years afterward, until her mother urges her into marriage, and thereby respectability, with a gentle, good man who would normally be her social inferior. Also playing a significant part in the novel are Sofka’s two sons: the sensitive, intelligent, responsible Alfred and his handsome, charming brother Frederick. Interestingly, it is Alfred’s plight that mirrors the situation of the usual Brooknerian heroine. It is he who is trapped by filial obligation into a life he had not intended; it is he who suffers forever afterward from an unsatisfying search for love and a desire for a larger, more extended world. It is also he who ultimately becomes inured to long-established habits of insularity. This, then, is the saga of a family whose interior lives and moral relations are acutely realized. Important themes here include familial relations, especially filial obligation; the search for a transcendent love; the need to venture, to dare, if one is to “win” in life. Structured around four wedding pictures, the novel impresses with its unity and intensity of tone; the pervasive, elegant irony; the discerning moral judgments; and the engrossing character portraits. Especially effective also is the novel’s lament for the loss of youthful promise, energy, and innocence. The once-vibrant Betty, trapped in middle-aged stasis, is a case in point. Dominating this entire work is a rich narrative voice, stern, compassionate, and often sad. The Dorn family seems to

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exist in a twilight, dreamlike world outside time. Yet this world, while admittedly narrow, is nevertheless mesmerizing. Altered States · Brookner writes novels in both the first and third person, and most of her novels center on women. Altered States represents a first: a novel told by a man, Alan Sherwood, in the first person. In Hotel du Lac, Brookner divides women into hares (happy winners in life’s game) and tortoises (losers, for whom romance novels are written). In Altered States, Sherwood is a male tortoise; he is obsessed with a hare, the flashy and sexy Sarah Miller. As usual in Brookner, Alan the tortoise figure is a dull person, dutiful and bound to a parent. He is wheedled into marriage by another tortoise, Angela, and he is tortured by guilt after he betrays her and seemingly causes her death. Altered States is different from other Brookner novels in other ways. Sarah is cruder, sexier, more selfish, and more anarchistic than any of Brookner’s other hares; she embodies most of the seven deadly sins. Her lovemaking with Alan is more purely sexual than similar encounters elsewhere in Brookner. Alan, on the other hand, is not simply a tortoise; he knows he is a tortoise. He knows that he is dull and that he represents not just dullness but also civilized order. By the end of the novel, Alan not only learns about himself and the other people in his life, but he also has a small triumph over Sarah. He convinces her to step outside her character and perform a generous act. Visitors · In Visitors, the central character is once more a woman: Thea May, age seventy. She is perhaps Brookner’s most inert and solitary tortoise—until a crisis makes her take a hare into her home. The hare is named Steve Best, a young friend of someone about to marry into Thea’s late husband’s family. The contrast could not be greater. Thea is a lonely, apprehensive, static old woman; Steve is a gregarious, wandering, confident young man. Her reaction to him is complicated. She responds to his presence and even coddles him, but at the same time she feels that her home has been violated, and she wishes he would leave. Visitors is about understanding. Many characters, such as Thea’s husband’s selfcentered family and the rude and charmless young people, understand each other hardly at all. They certainly do not understand Thea. However, as the novel proceeds, Thea displays a talent for understanding all of them and is even able to act on that understanding on a climactic occasion. As she is drawn out of her usual routine, Thea thinks more and more about her past. Since childhood she has harbored a secret fear of intruders—hares such as Steve and even her husband. By the end of the novel, Thea seems to come to terms with her anxieties. She acknowledges her affection for her husband’s family and feels more receptive to daily joys. Betty H. Jones, updated by George Soule Other major works NONFICTION: Watteau, 1968; The Genius of the Future, Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, the Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans, 1971; Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon, 1972; Jacques-Louis David, 1980; Soundings, 1997; Romanticism and Its Discontents, 2000. TRANSLATIONS: Utrillo, 1960 (of Waldemar George’s biography); The Fauves, 1962 (of Jean Paul Crespelle’s book).

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Bibliography Baxter, Gisèle Marieks. “Cultural Experiences and Identity in the Early Novels of Anita Brookner.” English 42 (Summer, 1993): 125-139. Three central characters of early Brookner novels attempt (unsuccessfully) to find the formulas of literary romance in their lives. They aspire, not to the traditional aristocracy or even to the world of the gentry, but to the financially secure ideal of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s era. Fisher-Wirth, Ann. “Hunger Art: The Novels of Anita Brookner.” Twentieth Century Literature 41 (Spring, 1995): 1-15. At first glance, Brookner’s heroines seem to be women trapped in a patriarchal world who accept their humiliation. A closer reading reveals that Brookner treats the universal human situation. Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, 1985. Includes a lively interview with Anita Brookner (pages 57-75) in which she discusses her novels, the ideas behind her writing, and the existential dilemmas of her characters. A substantial interview that provides a useful background to her works. Hosmer, Robert E., Jr. “Paradigm and Passage: The Fiction of Anita Brookner.” In Contemporary British Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Brookner’s central characters, like Brookner herself, are in the tradition of exile figures, from the Bible to contemporary times. Sadler, Lynn Veach. Anita Brookner. Boston: Twayne, 1990. The first full-length study of Brookner’s work, which discusses her first seven novels. Sadler compares Brookner to Barbara Pym and Margaret Drabble but also shows why Brookner has her own voice in feminist fiction. Analyzes Brookner’s heroines and gives insight into the author’s use of irony. Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Skinner speculates on the close relationship of Brookner’s novels to her life. He also discusses the novels in the light of contemporary narrative theory.

John Bunyan John Bunyan

Born: Elstow, England; November, 1628 Died: London, England; August 31, 1688 Principal long fiction · Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 1666; The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, Part I, 1678; The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 1680; The Holy War, 1682; The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, the Second Part, 1684. Other literary forms · Between 1656 and 1688, John Bunyan published forty-four separate works, including prose narratives and tracts, sermons, and verse; ten posthumous publications appeared in a folio edition of 1692, which the author himself had prepared for the press. A nearly complete edition, in two volumes, was printed between 1736 and 1737, another in 1767 by George Whitefield, and a six-volume Edinburgh edition in 1784. The best of Bunyan’s verse can be found in a small collection (c. 1664) containing “The Four Last Things,” “Ebal and Gerizim,” and “Prison Meditations.” In addition, he wrote A Caution to Stir Up to Watch Against Sin (1664), a half-sheet broadside poem in sixteen stanzas; A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhymes for Children (1686); and Discourse of the Building, Nature, Excellency, and Government of the House of God (1688), a poem in twelve parts. Achievements · The spirit of seventeenth century Protestant dissent burst into flame within the heart and mind of Bunyan. He attended only grammar school, served in the parliamentary army at age sixteen, and returned to Bedfordshire to undergo religious crisis and conversion. Imprisoned after the Restoration of Charles II for refusing to obey the laws against religious dissent, he turned to his pen as the only available means of performing his divinely ordained stewardship. He wrote his most significant work, the vision of The Pilgrim’s Progress, while in jail, and the piece became a companion to the Scriptures among lower-class English Dissenters. His limited education came from two sources: the Actes and Monuments (1563) of John Foxe, containing the accounts of the martyrdom of sixteenth century English Protestants; and the Authorized Version of the Bible, the content and style of which he skillfully applied to his own prose. Bunyan’s art grew out of his natural abilities of observation and analysis. He was a Puritan and a product of the Puritan movement, yet, as can be seen clearly from the autobiographical Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, he was chiefly interested in actual human experience, not in religious doctrine for its own sake. His allegorical characters—Mr. Timorous, Mr. Talkative, Mrs. Diffidence, Mr. By-ends, Lord Turnabout, Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-bothways—originated in everyday life. Similarly, the Valley of Humiliation, the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and Fair-speech can be found by all people everywhere, no matter what their culture or religion. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan universalized his Puritanism, depicting every earnest Christian’s search for salvation, every upright person’s attempt to achieve some degree of faith. He wrote to awaken conscience, to strengthen faith, and to win souls—the last being the true object of his evangelical mission. At the same time, he managed to write 107

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tracts and narratives worthy of recognition as literature—even, in certain instances, as masterpieces. Biography · John Bunyan was born in the village of Elstow, in Bedfordshire (one mile south of Bedford) in November, 1628. The parish register of Elstow records his baptism on November 30. His father, Thomas Bunyan, a native of Elstow, married three times between January, 1623, and August, 1644; John Bunyan was the first child of his father’s second marriage, on May 23, 1627, to Margaret Bentley, also of Elstow. The boy’s father was a “whitesmith,” a maker and mender of pots and kettles, although by the time the son adopted the same vocation, the job reference had changed to “tinker.” Young Bunyan attended a nearby grammar school (either the one at Bedford or another at Elstow), where he learned to read and write—but little else. In fact, what he did learn he promptly forgot after his father removed him from school to help in the family forge and workshop. When, in 1644, his mother died and the elder Bunyan promptly remarried, Bunyan lost all interest in his family; he entered the parliamentary army in November, at age sixteen, and remained until the disbanding of that force in 1646. He then returned to Elstow and the family trade. At the end of 1648 or the beginning of 1649, Bunyan married a pious but otherwise unidentified woman who bore him four children, one of whom, Mary, was born blind. He spent some four years wrestling with his finances and his soul, and in 1653 joined a dissenting sect that met at St. John’s Church, Bedford. Shortly after his removal to that city in 1655, his wife died, and two years later he was called upon to preach by the Baptist sect whose church he had joined. In 1659, he married again, to a woman named Elizabeth, who spent considerable time rearing his children, bearing him two more, and trying to secure her husband’s release from a series of prison terms. Bunyan’s career as a writer cannot be separated from his difficulties immediately preceding and during the Restoration of Charles II. The period of Cromwell’s Commonwealth produced a number of dissenting preachers, both male and female, who achieved their offices through inspiration rather than ordination; they professed to be filled with inner light and the gifts of the Holy Spirit rather than with learning. Charles II had promised to tolerate these preachers, but the established Church, in November, 1660, set about to persecute and to silence them. Thus, Bunyan, who chose imprisonment rather than silence, spent all but a few weeks of the next eleven years in jail in Bedford, where he preached to his fellow prisoners, made tagged laces, and wrote religious books—the most noteworthy being his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. He was freed in September, 1672, when Charles II, through his Declaration of Indulgence, suspended all penal statutes against Nonconformists and papists. Upon his release from prison, Bunyan returned to his ministerial duties at St. John’s Church in Bedford, this time with a license (given to him by royal authority) to preach. By 1675, however, he was again imprisoned in Bedford, the result of refusing to declare formal allegiance to Charles II (against whom he had no real objection) and the Church of England. While serving this particular sentence, Bunyan produced his most significant piece of prose, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s major prose works were written within the last ten years of his life, the period during which he both suffered from intolerance and received honors from the intolerant. In the last year of his life, he served as the unofficial chaplain to Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor of London. Indeed, Bunyan endured the entire tide of religious and political trauma of the middle and late seventeenth century: parliamentary acts, ministerial

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changes, popish plots, the rebellious factions. His work bears testimony to that endurance, to the patience of a nonpolitical yet deeply pious man who lost much of his freedom to the impatience of a supposedly pious but terribly political religious establishment. Bunyan died on August 31, 1688, at the London house of his friend, John Strudwick, a grocer and chandler. Supposedly, in order to settle a dispute between a father and his son, he rode through heavy rain and caught a severe cold that led to his death. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, the burial ground of London Dissenters. Analysis · John Bunyan viewed his life as a commitment to Christian stewardship, to be carried on by gospel preaching and instructive writing. Although practically everything that he wrote reflects that commitment, he possessed the ability to create interesting variations on similar themes, keeping in mind the needs of his lower-class

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audience. Thus, The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory of human life and universal religious experience. In The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Bunyan abandoned allegory and developed a dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive through which he publicized the aims and methods of the late seventeenth century bourgeois scoundrel, whose lack of principle and honesty was well known among Bunyan’s readers (the victims of Mr. Badman). Finally, his first major work, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, is a “spiritual autobiography” which presents adventures and experiences not unlike those undergone by any human being at any moment in history who must wrestle with the fundamental questions of life. The function of Bunyan’s prose in every case was to spread the Word of God and to establish a holy community of humankind in which that Word could be practiced. Once the Word took hold, Bunyan believed, the world would become a veritable garden of peace and order. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners · Published in 1666, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners remains one of the most significant spiritual autobiographies by an English writer. Bunyan’s style is perhaps more formal in this piece than in The Pilgrim’s Progress, although he did well to balance the heavy phrasing of Scripture (as it appeared in the Authorized Version) with picturesque, colloquial English. A richly emotional work in which such highly charged experiences as the Last Judgment and the tortures of Hell become as clear as the mundane experiences of daily existence, Bunyan’s autobiography is a narrative of spiritual adventure set against the backdrop of a real village in Britain. Although he omitted specific names and dates, obviously to universalize the piece, he did not forget to describe what he had seen after his return from the army: the popular game of “cat,” with its participants and spectators; the bellringers at the parish church; the poor women sitting, in sunlight, before the door of a village house; the puddles in the road. Woven into this fabric of reality are the experiences of the dreamer; the people of Bedford appear as though in a vision on the sunny side of a high mountain, as the dreamer, shut out by an encompassing wall, shivers in the cold storm. Such interweaving of reality and fantasy was to take place again, with greater force and allegorical complexity, in the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s intention in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners was to point the way by which average Christians, convinced of their own sins, can be led by God’s grace to endure the pain of spiritual crisis. He determined to record how, as an obscure Bedfordshire tinker, he had changed his course from sloth and sin to become an eloquent and fearless man of God. Of course, when he wrote the work, he had been in prison for ten years, and (as stated in the preface) he set about to enlighten and assist those from whom he had, for so long a period, been separated. From the confinement of his prison cell, Bunyan felt the desire to survey his entire life—to grasp his soul in his hands and take account of himself. Thus, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners emerged from the heart and the spirit of a man isolated from humankind to become not merely one more testimonial for the instruction of the faithful, but a serious, psychological self-study—one so truthful and so sincere (and also so spontaneous) that it may be the first work of its kind. Bunyan’s language is simple and direct, and his constant references to Scripture emphasize the typicality of his experiences as a struggling Christian. His fears, doubts, and moments of comfort are filtered through the encounter between David and Goliath and God’s deliverance of the young shepherd, while his lively imagination gathers images from the Psalms and the Proverbs and reshapes them to fit the context of his spiritual experiences.

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The Pilgrim’s Progress · Bunyan’s ability to universalize his experience is supremely evident in The Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps the most successful allegory in British literature. The Pilgrim’s Progress has as its basic metaphor the familiar idea of life as a journey. Bunyan confronts his pilgrim, Christian, with homely and commonplace sights: a quagmire, the bypaths and shortcuts through pleasant country meadows, the inn, the steep hill, the town fair on market day, the river to be forded. Such places belong to the everyday experience of every man, woman, and child; on another level, they recall the holy but homely parables of Christ’s earthly ministry, and thus assume spiritual significance. Those familiar details serve as an effective background for Bunyan’s narrative, a story of adventure intended to hold the reader in suspense. Bunyan grew up among the very people who constituted his audience, and he knew how to balance the romantic and the strange with the familiar. Thus, Christian travels the King’s Highway at the same time that he traverses a perilous path to encounter giants, wild beasts, hobgoblins, and the terrible Apollyon, the angel of the bottomless pit with whom the central character must fight. Other travelers are worthy of humorous characterization, as they represent a variety of intellectual and moral attitudes, while Christian himself runs the gamut of universal experience, from the moment he learns of his sins until the account of his meeting with Hopeful in the river. As always, Bunyan molds his style from the Authorized Version of the Bible. By relying upon concrete, common language, he enables even the simplest of his readers to share experiences with the characters of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Even the conversations relating to complex and tedious theological issues do not detract from the human and dramatic aspects of the allegory: Evangelist pointing the way; Christian running from his home with his fingers stuck in his ears; the starkness of the place of the Cross in contrast to the activity of Vanity Fair; the humorous but terribly circumstantial trial. It is this homely but vivid realism that accounts for the timeless appeal of Bunyan’s allegory. The Pilgrim’s Progress reveals the truth about humankind—its weakness, its imperfection, its baseness—but also its search for goodness and order. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman · The Life and Death of Mr. Badman represents Bunyan’s major attempt at a dialogue, a confrontation between the Christian and the atheist, between the road to Paradise and the route to Hell. Mr. Wiseman, a Christian, tells the story of Mr. Badman to Mr. Attentive, who in turn comments upon it. Badman is an example of the reprobate, one whose sins become evident during childhood. In fact, he is so addicted to lying that his parents cannot distinguish when he is speaking the truth. Bunyan does not place much blame upon the parents, for they indeed bear the burden of their son’s actions; they even attempt to counsel him and to redirect his ways. The situation becomes worse, however, as Badman’s lying turns to pilfering and then to outright stealing. All of this, naturally, leads to a hatred of Sunday, of the Puritan demands of that day: reading Scripture, attending conferences, repeating sermons, praying to God. Wiseman, the defender of the Puritan Sabbath, maintains that little boys, as a matter of course, must learn to appreciate the Sabbath; those who do not are victims of their own wickedness. Hatred of the Sabbath leads to swearing and cursing, which become as natural to young Badman as eating, drinking, and sleeping. Badman’s adult life is painstakingly drawn out through realistic descriptions, anecdotes, and dialogue. He cheats and steals his way through the world of debauchery and commerce and creates misery for his wife and seven children. Growing in importance, he forms a league with the devil and becomes a wealthy man by taking advantage of others’ misfortunes. When the time comes for his end, he cannot be

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saved—nor does Bunyan try to fabricate an excuse for his redemption and salvation. As Mr. Wiseman states, “As his life was full of sin, so his death was without repentance.” Throughout a long sickness, Badman fails to acknowledge his sins, remaining firm in his self-satisfaction. He dies without struggle, “like a chrisom child, quietly and without fear.” The strength of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman derives in large part from Bunyan’s ability to depict common English life of the mid- and late seventeenth century. The details are so accurate, so minute, that the reader can gain as much history from the piece as morality or practical theology. Bunyan places no demands upon the reader’s credulity by providential interpositions, nor does he alter his wicked character’s ways for the sake of a happy ending. In portraying Badman’s ways, Bunyan concedes nothing, nor does he exaggerate. Badman succeeds, gains wealth and power, and dies at peace with himself. Bunyan creates a monstrous product of sin and places him squarely in the center of English provincial life. The one consolation, the principal lesson, is that Badman travels the direct route to everlasting hellfire. On his way, he partakes of life’s pleasures and is gratified by them as only an unrepentant sinner could be. For Bunyan, the harsh specificity of Badman’s life is a sufficient lesson through which to promote his version of positive Christianity. Beneath the veil of seventeenth century British Puritanism, for all its seeming narrowness and sectarian strife, there was something for all persons of all eras—the struggle to know God, to do his will, to find peace. If Bunyan’s first major prose work was a spiritual autobiography, then it is fair to state that the principal efforts that followed—The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman—constituted one of the earliest spiritual histories of all humankind. Samuel J. Rogal Other major works POETRY: A Caution to Stir Up to Watch Against Sin, 1664; A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhymes for Children, 1686; Discourse of the Building, Nature, Excellency, and Government of the House of God, 1688. NONFICTION: Some Gospel Truths Opened, 1656; A Vindication . . . of Some Gospel Truths Opened, 1657; A Few Signs from Hell, 1658; The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded, 1659; Profitable Meditations Fitted to Man’s Different Condition, 1661; I Will Pray with the Spirit, 1663; A Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation, 1664; One Thing Is Needful, 1665; The Holy City: Or, The New Jerusalem, 1665; A Confession of My Faith and a Reason for My Practice, 1671; A New and Useful Concordance to the Holy Bible, 1672; A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith, 1672; The Strait Gate: Or, The Great Difficulty of Going to Heaven, 1676; Saved by Grace, 1676; A Treatise of the Fear of God, 1679; A Holy Life, the Beauty of Christianity, 1684; Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized: Or, Gospel Light Fecht Out of the Temple at Jerusalem, 1688; The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, 1688. Bibliography Collmer, Robert G. Bunyan in Our Time. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989. A collection of distinguished literary criticism and appraisals of Bunyan. Includes essays on his use of language, satire and its biblical sources, and The Pilgrim’s Progress as allegory. Of particular interest are the essays on Marxist perspectives on Bunyan and a comparison between Bunyan’s quest and C. S. Lewis’s quest in The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933).

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Harrison, G. B. John Bunyan: A Study in Personality. New York: Archon Books, 1967. A short study that traces the mind and personality of Bunyan as shown in his writings. Discusses his conversion, his imprisonment, and his roles as pastor and writer. The close analysis of minor works makes this an important critical source. Kelman, John. The Road: A Study of John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” 2 vols. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1912. These volumes are intended as a commentary or textbook, to be read point by point with The Pilgrim’s Progress. An evangelical approach to Bunyan, filled with praise for his work. Gives close analysis of the text from a strongly Christian point of view. Newey, Vincent. “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: Critical and Historical Views. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 1980. Brings together critical essays on The Pilgrim’s Progress to provide fresh, detailed, and varied approaches to this work. Discusses the tension between allegory and naturalism and Bunyan’s handling of the language and values of the people. Indispensable to the serious scholar of this work. Sadler, Lynn Veach. John Bunyan. Boston: Twayne, 1979. A useful introduction to beginning readers of Bunyan. Discusses his life, his religious milieu, and his works. Places Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners in the genre of “spiritual autobiography.” Most of the literary criticism goes to The Pilgrim’s Progress, but there is also discussion of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman and The Holy War. Also includes a selected bibliography. Spargo, Tamsin. The Writing of John Bunyan. Brookfield, Mass.: Ashgate, 1997. A detailed exploration of how Bunyan established his authority as an author. Includes notes and detailed bibliography. Recommended for advanced students and scholars.

Anthony Burgess Anthony Burgess

John Anthony Burgess Wilson Born: Manchester, England; February 25, 1917 Died: London, England; November 25, 1993 Principal long fiction · Time for a Tiger, 1956; The Enemy in the Blanket, 1958; Beds in the East, 1959; The Doctor Is Sick, 1960; The Right to an Answer, 1960; Devil of a State, 1961; One Hand Clapping, 1961 (as Joseph Kell); The Worm and the Ring, 1961; A Clockwork Orange, 1962 (reprinted with final chapter, 1986); The Wanting Seed, 1962; Honey for the Bears, 1963; Inside Mr. Enderby, 1963 (as Joseph Kell); The Eve of Saint Venus, 1964; Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life, 1964; The Long Day Wanes, 1965 (includes Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, and Beds in the East); A Vision of Battlements, 1965; Tremor of Intent, 1966; Enderby, 1968 (includes Mr. Enderby and Enderby Outside); Enderby Outside, 1968; MF, 1971; The Clockwork Testament: Or, Enderby’s End, 1974; Napoleon Symphony, 1974; Beard’s Roman Woman, 1976; Moses: A Narrative, 1976; Abba, Abba, 1977; 1985, 1978; Man of Nazareth, 1979; Earthly Powers, 1980; The End of the World News, 1983; Enderby’s Dark Lady, 1984; The Kingdom of the Wicked, 1985; The Pianoplayers, 1986; Any Old Iron, 1989; A Dead Man in Deptford, 1993; Byrne, 1995. Other literary forms · In addition to his novels, Anthony Burgess published eight works of literary criticism. He paid tribute to his self-confessed literary mentor, James Joyce, in such works as Re Joyce (1965) and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1972). His book reviews and essays were collected in The Novel Now (1967, revised 1971), Urgent Copy (1968), and But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings (1986). His fascination with language and with the lives of writers led to such works as Language Made Plain (1964), Shakespeare (1970), and Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence (1985). An autobiographical work, Little Wilson and Big God, was published in 1987 (part of which was republished in 1996 as Childhood), and a collection of short fiction, The Devil’s Mode, in 1989. A posthumous volume of his uncollected writings, One Man’s Chorus (1998), includes a variety of essays divided into sections on travel, contemporary life, literary criticism, and personality sketches. Achievements · In his novels, Burgess extended the boundaries of English fiction. His inventive use of language, his use of symphonic forms and motifs, his rewriting of myths and legends, his examination of cultural clashes between the Third World and the West, and his pursuit of various ways to tell a story established him as one of the chief exemplars of postmodernism. His novels are studied in contemporary fiction courses, and he also achieved popular success with such works as A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers, for which he received the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1981. Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film A Clockwork Orange (1971) further established Burgess’s popular reputation. 114

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Biography · John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born in Manchester, England, on February 25, 1917. His mother and sister died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Of Irish background, his mother had performed in the music halls of the period and was known as “the Beautiful Belle Burgess.” His father performed as a silent-film pianist and when he remarried, played piano in a pub called “The Golden Eagle,” owned by his new wife; Burgess himself began to compose music when he was fourteen. Burgess graduated from the Bishop Bilsborrow School and planned to study music at Manchester University. When he failed a required physics entrance exam there, he changed his focus to literature and graduated from Xaverian College in Manchester; in 1940, he wrote his senior honors thesis on Christopher Marlowe, while Nazi bombs fell overhead. In October, 1940, Burgess joined the army and was placed in the Army Medical Corps. He was later shifted to the Army Educational Corps—a prophetic move, since he became a teacher for nearly twenty years afterwards. In 1942, Burgess married Llewela Isherwood Jones, a Welsh fellow student. He spent three years, from 1943 to 1946, with the British army on Gibraltar, during which time he wrote his first novel, A Vision of Battlements (which was not published until 1965). Burgess left the army as a sergeant major and as a training college lecturer in speech and drama in 1946 to become a member of the Central Advisory Council for Adult Education in the armed forces. He lectured at Birmingham University until 1948, when he served as a lecturer in phonetics for the Ministry of Education in Preston, Lancashire. From 1950 until 1954, he taught English literature, phonetics, Spanish, and music at the Banbury grammar school in Oxfordshire. Throughout these years, Burgess was painfully aware of his Irish heritage and Catholic religion. Though he had renounced Catholicism early, the Irish-Catholic stigma remained with him in rigorously Protestant England. His decision to apply for the job of education officer for the Colonial Service may have had something to do with his desire to leave England and his need to exile himself physically from a homeland that had already exiled him in spirit. From 1954 to 1957, he was the Senior Lecturer in English at the Malayan Teachers Training College in Kahta Baru, Malaya. There, he had more leisure time to write, and he published his first novel, Time for a Tiger, in 1956 under his middle names, Anthony Burgess. Members of the Colonial Service were not allowed to publish fiction under their own names. Burgess continued working for the Colonial Service as an English-language specialist in Brunei, Borneo, from 1957 to 1959 and published two more novels, which, with his first, eventually constituted his Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes. The clash between the manners and morals of East and West became the major focus of his early novels. Apparent tragedy struck in 1959, when Burgess collapsed in his Borneo classroom. After excruciating medical tests, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He was given a year to live and was returned to England. Unable to teach, virtually penniless, Burgess set himself to writing as much as he could in order to provide for his wife. Not only had she already shown signs of the cirrhosis of the liver that was eventually to kill her, but also she had attempted suicide. In the next three years, Burgess wrote and published nine novels, including A Clockwork Orange and Enderby. On the first day of spring, March 20, 1968, Llewela Burgess finally died. That October, Burgess married Liliana Macellari, a member of the linguistics department at Cambridge, intensifying the scandal that originally developed when their affair produced a son, Andreas, in 1964. The personal guilt involved with his first wife’s

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death always haunted Burgess and provided one of the major underlying themes of his fiction. “Guilt’s a good thing,” Burgess once said, “because the morals are just ticking away very nicely.” In fact, persistent guilt shadows all of his characters and consistently threatens to overwhelm them completely. Burgess, Liliana, and Andrew left England in October, 1968; they moved to Malta, to Bracciano in Italy, and eventually settled in Monaco. Burgess’s life changed dramatically in 1971, when director Stanley Kubrick filmed A Clockwork Orange, making Burgess a celebrity. Regardless of his continuous production of new works in several genres, Burgess lived in the shadow of his 1962 novel. In 1980, he published Earthly Powers, a long and ambitious novel on which he had been working for more than ten years. He continued to compose symphonies and write reviews and articles for major newspapers and periodicals. He also became a skilled dramatic writer, with credits that include a version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), produced on Broadway in 1972, the screenplay for Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 extravaganza Jesus of Nazareth, and A Clockwork Orange 2004, produced at the Barbizon Theater, London, in 1990. Burgess’s production never slackened. In the last decade of his life, he produced six more novels, his last, A Dead Man in Deptford, being published just before his death, due to cancer, in 1993. Analysis · Anthony Burgess shares with many postmodernist writers an almost obsessive awareness of his great modernist predecessors—particularly James Joyce. The vision that Burgess inherited from modernism is informed by the anguish of a sensitive soul lost in a fragmented, shattered world. Each of Burgess’s novels reveals one central character virtually “at sea” in a landscape of battered, broken figures and events. Burgess conveys this fragmented worldview by means of many of the literary devices of his modernist predecessors. Often he employs a stream-of-consciousness narration, in which his main characters tell their own stories; he also has used what T. S. Eliot, reviewing Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), called the “mythic method,” in which contemporary chaos is compared with and contrasted to heroic myths, legends, religious ceremonies, and rituals of the past. As Eliot remarked, the mythic method “is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the intense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Like many postmodernists, convinced that most literary forms are serious games devised to stave off approaching chaos and collapse, Burgess delights in the play of language for its own sake. Here again, Joyce is a prime source of inspiration: surprising images, poetic revelations, linguistic twists and turns, and strange evocative words nearly overwhelm the narrative shape of Ulysses and certainly overwhelm it in Finnegans Wake (1939). Burgess’s best novels are those in which language for its own sake plays an important role, as in Enderby, Nothing Like the Sun, A Clockwork Orange, and Napoleon Symphony. At the heart of his vision of the world lies Burgess’s Manichean sensibility, his belief that there is “a duality that is fixed almost from the beginning of the world and the outcome is in doubt.” God and the Devil reign over a supremely divided universe; they are equal in power, and they will battle to the end of the world. In the Manichean tradition—most notably, that of the Gnostics—Burgess sees the world as a materialistic trap, a prison of the spirit and a place devised by the Devil to incarcerate people until their death. Only art can break through the battlelines; only art can save him. The recasting of a religious commitment in aesthetic terms also belongs to the legacy of modernism. Burgess’s Manichean vision produces such clashes of opposites as that

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between East and West, between the self and the state, and between a single character and an alien social environment. These recurring polarities structure Burgess’s fiction. The Right to an Answer · This principle of polarity or opposition is evident in the early novel The Right to an Answer, in which J. W. Denham, businessman and exile, returns to his father’s house in the suburban British Midlands and finds a provincial, selfsatisfied community engaged in wife-swapping, television-viewing, and pub-crawling. He remains a detached observer, longing for a kind of communion he cannot find, and in his telling his own tale, he reveals himself as friendless, disillusioned, and homeless. The wife-swapping quartet at the Black Swan pub is disturbed by the entrance of Mr. Raj, a Ceylonese gentleman, interested in English sociology and in satisfying his lust for white women. He plays by no rules but his own and espouses a kind of deadly Eastern realism that threatens the suburban sport. Moving in with Denham’s father, he unfortunately kills the old man by “currying” him to death with his hot dishes. The upshot of this clash of cultural and social values is that Raj kills Winterbottom, the most innocent member of the ménage à quatre, and then kills himself. Throughout the novel, Burgess explores both Denham’s point of view and Raj’s within the seedy suburban landscape. Their viewpoints reflect the irreconcilable differences between East and West, between black and white, between sex and love, and between true religion and dead ritual. Denham’s stream-of-consciousness narration eventually reveals his own spirit of exile, which he cannot overcome. He remains disconnected from both worlds, from England and the East, and epitomizes the state of lovelessness and isolation that has permeated modern culture. This early novel clearly explores Burgess’s main themes and narrative forms. Tremor of Intent · In the guise of a thriller à la James Bond, Tremor of Intent explores a world of “God” and “Not-God,” a profoundly Manichaean universe. Soviet spies battle English spies, while the real villains of the novel, the “neutralists,” play one camp off against the other purely for personal gain. Burgess derides the whole notion of the spy’s realm, but he insists that taking sides is essential in such a world, whether ultimate good or evil is ever really confronted. Denis Hillier, aging technician and spy, writes his confessional memoirs in the light of his possible redemption. His Catholic sense of original sin never falters for an instant, and he is constantly in need of some higher truth, some ultimate communion and revelation. In the course of the novel, he fights every Manichaean division, drinks “Old Mortality,” sees himself as a “fallen Adam,” and works his way toward some vision of hope. Finally, he abandons the spy game and becomes a priest, exiling himself to Ireland. From this new perspective, he believes that he can approach the real mysteries of good and evil, of free will and predestination, beyond the limiting and limited categories of the Cold War. Hillier’s opposite in the novel is Edwin Roper, a rationalist who has jettisoned religious belief and who hungers for an ultimately unified universe based on scientific truth and explanation. Such rationalism leads him to the Marxist logic of Soviet ideology, and he defects to the Russian side. Hillier has been sent to rescue him. One section of the novel consists of Roper’s autobiographical explanation of his actions; its flat, logical prose reflects his methodical and disbelieving mind, in contrast to Hillier’s more religious sensibility. Within the complicated plot of the novel, self-serving scoundrels such as Mr.

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Theodorescu and Richard Wriste set out to destroy both Hillier and Roper and gather information to sell to the highest bidder. They fail, owing largely to the actions of Alan and Clara Walters, two children on board the ship that is taking Hillier to meet Roper. The children become initiated into the world of double agents and sexual intrigue, and Theodorescu and Wriste are assassinated. Burgess displays his love of language for its own sake in exotic descriptions of sex, food, and life aboard a cruise ship. Such language intensifies the Manichaean divisions in the book, the constant battle between the things of this world and the imagined horrors of the next. The very language that Hillier and Roper use to tell their own stories reveals their own distinctly different personalities and visions. Tremor of Intent insists on the mystery of human will. To choose is to be human; that is good. Thus, to choose evil is both a good and a bad thing, a Manichaean complication that Burgess leaves with the reader. In allegorical terms the novel presents the problems of free will and its consequences, which underlie all of Burgess’s fiction. Nothing Like the Sun · Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess’s fanciful novel based on the life of Shakespeare, showcases every facet of his vision and technique as a novelist. Shakespeare finds himself caught between his love for a golden man and a black woman. Sex feeds the fires of love and possession, and from these fires grows his art, the passion of language. From these fires also comes syphilis, the dread disease that eventually kills him, the source of the dark vision that surfaces in his apocalyptic tragedies. Shakespeare as a writer and Shakespeare as a man battle it out, and from that dualistic confrontation emerges the perilous equilibrium of his greatest plays. In part, Burgess’s fiction is based on the theories about Shakespeare’s life which Stephen Dedalus expounds in Ulysses. Dedalus suggests that Shakespeare was cuckolded by his brother Richard, that Shakespeare’s vision of a treacherous and tragic world was based on his own intimate experience. To this conjecture, Burgess adds the notion that the Dark Lady of the sonnets was a non-Caucasian and that Shakespeare himself was a victim of syphilis. All of these “myths” concerning Shakespeare serve Burgess’s Manichaean vision: Sex and disease, art and personality are ultimately at war with one another and can only be resolved in the actual plays that Shakespeare wrote. Nothing Like the Sun is written in an exuberant, bawdy, pseudo-Elizabethan style. It is clear that Burgess relished the creation of lists of epithets, curses, and prophecies, filled as they are with puns and his own outrageous coinings. Burgess audaciously attempts to mime the development of Shakespeare’s art as he slowly awakens to the possibilities of poetry, trying different styles, moving from the sweet rhymes of “Venus and Adonis” to the “sharp knives and brutal hammers” of the later tragedies. The book is constructed in the form of a lecture by Burgess himself to his Malayan students. He drinks as he talks and explains his paradoxical theories as he goes along. His passing out from too much drink at the novel’s end parallels Shakespeare’s death. He puns also with his real last name, Wilson, regarding himself as in fact “Will’s son,” a poet and author in his own right. Enderby · Enderby is prototypic of Burgess’s preoccupation with the duality of forces that influence life: the struggle between society’s capacity to do good and the dilemma that human nature inevitably leads to evil. Originally conceived as a whole, Enderby was written as two independent novels, Mr. Enderby and Enderby Outside, for the pragmatic reason that Burgess wanted to tell at least half the tale before he died from

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his supposed brain tumor. One of Burgess’s most popular characters, the flatulent poet F. X. Enderby, was spawned in a men’s room when the author thought he saw a man feverishly writing poetry as he purged his bowels. Enderby is teeming with opposites, juxtaposing the sublime with the ridiculous. Enderby is catapulted into life-transforming situations as the outside world continually plays on and alters the poet’s sensibilities. Burgess, the writer, examines his creation, a writer, whom he happens to admire in spite of his foibles. Mr. Enderby and Enderby Outside depict the difference between transformations that originate within the individual and those that society imposes upon the individual. In the first novel, the very private poet is lured into marriage with Vesta Bainbridge, who leads him into a pop-art world that strips away his integrity and identity. Enderby achieves some success by prostituting his talent, but he is ultimately outraged when a rival poet gains fame and fortune by stealing his ideas, transforming them into a horror film. Enderby escapes from his wife and public life but is despondent and intellectually withered. He is taken to Wapenshaw, a psychologist, who “cures” him by destroying his poetic muse. Enderby is transmuted into Piggy Hogg, a bartender and useful citizen. Enderby Outside is the mirror image of Mr. Enderby, transforming Hogg back into Enderby through a series of parallel experiences. Bainbridge has married a pop singer, Yod Crewsey, whose success is the result of poems stolen from Enderby. When the singer is shot, Enderby is accused of the murder and flees, confronting the chaos and confusion of the modern world and falling prey to another woman, the sensuous Miranda Boland. During sexual intercourse with Boland, inspiration finally strikes Enderby. In the end, he meets a sibylline girl, Muse, who leads him to his art. Enderby is as he began, alone and free, but a poet. The Clockwork Testament and Enderby’s Dark Lady · In Enderby, Burgess shows that the master must come to peace with both his body and society before he can indulge in the intellectual. Shortly after the film version of A Clockwork Orange was released, Enderby returned in The Clockwork Testament: Or, Enderby’s End, which satirized the writer reduced to production assistant by the film industry. Enderby dies of a heart attack when he sees the violent, pornographic film made from his novel. Just as British detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle was forced to return Sherlock Holmes to life, Burgess resurrects his antihero in Enderby’s Dark Lady. Enderby travels to Indiana, where he writes the libretto for a ridiculous musical about Shakespeare. Burgess directs his satire at American culture, but his exploration of the poetic muse is sacrificed for the comic adventure. Earthly Powers · Earthly Powers, Burgess’s longest novel, features perhaps his most arresting first sentence: “It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” Thus begin the memoirs of Kenneth Toomey, cynical agnostic and homosexual writer, a character based loosely on Somerset Maugham. Toomey’s memoirs span the twentieth century—its literary intrigues, cultural fashions, and political horrors. Toomey is seduced on June 16, 1904, that Dublin day immortalized by Joyce in Ulysses, revels in the Paris of the 1920’s, the Hollywood of the 1930’s, and the stylish New York of the 1940’s and 1950’s; his old age is spent in exotic exile in Tangier and Malta in the 1970’s. During his long life he writes plays and film scenarios, carries on with a host of male secretary-lovers, and experiences

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the traumas of Nazism and Communism. He abhors the state-controlled collective soul, which he sees as the ultimate product of the twentieth century. Burgess’s huge, sprawling novel displays a plot crowded with coincidence and bursting with stylistic parodies and re-creations. A priest on his way to becoming pope saves a dying child, only to see him grow up to be the leader of a fanatical religious cult akin to that of Jim Jones in Guyana. An American anthropologist and his wife are butchered during a Catholic mass in Africa: The natives there take the commands of the ceremony all too literally and swallow their visitors. Toomey believes that evil lies firmly within all people and that his experiences of the twentieth century prove that the world is a murderous place. His Manichean opposite in faith is his brother-in-law, Carlo Campanati, the gambler-gourmet priest who becomes Pope Gregory XVII. Evil remains external to humanity, the pope maintains; humankind is essentially good. In Burgess’s jaundiced view of things, such misconceived idealism produces only further evils. Any similarities between Gregory and John XXIII are strictly intentional. The world of Earthly Powers is Toomey’s world, a bright place with clipped, swift glimpses of fads and fashion. Librettos, snippets of plays, even a re-creation of the Garden of Eden story from a homosexual point of view appear in this modernist memoir. The style itself reflects Burgess’s conception of the “brittle yet excruciatingly precise” manner of the homosexual. Earthly Powers wobbles. More than six hundred pages of bright wit can cloy. Verbal surfaces congeal and trail off into trivial documentation. The pope’s spiritual observations impede the novel’s progress, encased as they are in lectures, sermons, and tracts. Indeed, Gregory is as thin a character as Toomey is an interesting one. The book proves that Toomey is right: Things are rotten. No amount of linguistic fun, modernist maneuverings, or Manichaean machinations can change the fact that this is the worst of all possible worlds. Chunks of smart conversation cannot hide that fact; they become stupefying and evasive in the end. The nature of free will, however, and its legacy of unquestionable evil in the twentieth century pervade Burgess’s fat book and linger to undermine any “safe” position the reader may hope to find. A Clockwork Orange · Burgess’s Manichaean nightmare in A Clockwork Orange occupies the center of his most accomplished book. The language of nadsat in its harsh, Russianaccented diction, the ongoing battle between the State and Alex the droog, the vision of an urban landscape wracked with violence and decay, the mysterious interpenetration of Beethoven and lust, and the unresolved issues of good and evil reflect and parallel one another so completely that the novel emerges as Burgess’s masterpiece. The issue raised is an increasingly timely one: Can the state program the individual to be good? Can it eradicate the individual’s right to freedom of choice, especially if in choosing, he or she chooses to commit violent and evil acts? Burgess replies in the negative. No matter how awful Alex’s actions become, he should be allowed to choose them. Since the novel is written from Alex’s point of view, the reader sympathizes with him, despite his acts of rape and mayhem. Alex loves Beethoven; he “shines artistic”; he is brighter than his ghoulish friends; he is rejected by his parents. He is in all ways superior to the foul futuristic landscape that surrounds him. When the state brainwashes him, the reader experiences his pain in a personal, forthright manner. The violence in the rest of the book falls upon outsiders and remains distanced by the very language Alex uses to describe his actions.

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Burgess’s slang creates a strange and distant world. The reader approaches the novel as an outsider to that world and must try diligently to decode it to understand it. Never has Burgess used language so effectively to create the very atmosphere of his fiction. The Russian-influenced slang of the novel is a tour de force of the highest order and yet functions perfectly as a reflection of Alex’s state of mind and of the society of which he is a rebellious member. The world of A Clockwork Orange recognizes only power and political force. All talk of free will dissolves before such a harrowing place of behaviorist psychologists and social controllers. Individual freedom in such a world remains a myth, not a reality, a matter of faith, not an ultimate truth. Everyone is in some sense a clockwork orange, a victim of his or her society, compelled to act in a social order that celebrates only power, manipulation, and control. Even the cyclical form of A Clockwork Orange reveals a world trapped within its own inevitable patterns. At first, Alex victimizes those around him. He in turn is victimized by the state. In the third and final part of the novel, he returns to victimize other people once again: “I was cured all right.” Victimization remains the only reality here. There are no loopholes, no escape hatches from the vicious pattern. The frightening cityscape at night, the harsh language, the paradoxical personality of Alex, the collaborationist or revolutionary tactics of Alex’s “friends,” and the very shape of the novel reinforce this recognition of utter entrapment and human decay. “Oh, my brothers,” Alex addresses his readers, as Eliot in The Waste Land (1922) quoted Charles Baudelaire: “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.” Despite Burgess’s pessimistic vision of contemporary life and the creative soul’s place in it, the best of his novels still reveal a commitment to literature as a serious ceremony, as a game which the reader and the writer must continue to play, if only to transcend momentarily the horrors of Western civilization in the twentieth century. Samuel Coale, updated by Gerald S. Argetsinger Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Devil’s Mode, 1989. SCREENPLAY: Jesus of Nazareth, 1977. TELEPLAY: Moses the Lawgiver, 1976. NONFICTION: English Literature: A Survey for Students, 1958 (as John Burgess Wilson); The Novel Today, 1963; Language Made Plain, 1964; Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader, 1965 (pb. in U.S. as Re Joyce, 1965); The Novel Now, 1967, rev. ed. 1971; Urgent Copy: Literary Studies, 1968; Shakespeare, 1970; Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, 1972; Ernest Hemingway and His World, 1978; On Going to Bed, 1982; This Man and Music, 1983; Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence, 1985; But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings, 1986 (also known as Homage to Qwert Yuiop, 1985); Little Wilson and Big God, 1987 (partly reprinted as Childhood, 1996); You’ve Had Your Time, 1990; A Mouthful of Air: Languages, Languages, Especially English, 1992; One Man’s Chorus: The Uncollected Writings, 1998. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A Long Trip to Teatime, 1976. TRANSLATIONS: The Man Who Robbed Poor-Boxes, 1965 (of Michel Servin’s play); Cyrano de Bergerac, 1971 (of Edmond Rostand’s play); Oedipus the King, 1972 (of Sophocles’ play). MISCELLANEOUS: On Mozart: A Paean for Wolfgang, 1991.

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Bibliography Aggeler, Geoffrey, ed. Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. A collection of well-regarded criticism on Burgess, with particular attention given to his “linguistic pyrotechnics.” Aggeler’s introduction presents an overview of Burgess’s work and discussion of his novels, followed by a Paris Review interview with Burgess. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Anthony Burgess. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. A compilation of fine critical essays, including an essay by the eminent critic of James Joyce, Robert Martin Adams, who considers Joyce’s influence on Burgess. In the introduction, Bloom presents his views on Burgess’s writing, citing Inside Mr. Enderby as one of the most underrated English novels of this era. Boytinck, Paul W. Anthony Burgess: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. New York: Garland, 1985. A checklist of Burgess’s works up to 1984, including bibliographical background on Burgess and extracts from reviews, essays, and articles on his work. An excellent and informative resource for both the beginning reader and scholar of Burgess. Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27 (Fall, 1981). This special issue gathers together seven critical essays on Burgess, some of which are appreciative, “Burgess is clearly in command of his material,” in reference to Earthly Powers, and others which are less favorable—“Burgess’ plots have a tendency to twitch and gyrate.” Keen, Suzanne. “Ironies and Inversions: The Art of Anthony Burgess.” Commonweal 121 (February 11, 1994). This is an examination of the “Catholic quality” in Burgess’s fiction and nonfiction. Focuses primarily upon the autobiographies, the literary criticism of Joyce’s works, and Burgess’s final novel, A Dead Man in Deptford. Mathews, Richard. The Clockwork Orange Universe of Anthony Burgess. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1978. This admiring monograph traces the thematic and temporal concerns that led Burgess to write his futuristic novels, including A Clockwork Orange. Mathews discusses ten novels that fit the metaphor of “clockwork universe.” Stinson, John J. Anthony Burgess Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. This is particularly valuable for biographical information and critical analysis of the later works. Particular attention is given Burgess’s increasing reputation as a public intellectual and the use of language, the importance of moral choice, and the conflict between the Pelagian and Augustinian philosophies in his works.

Fanny Burney Fanny Burney

Born: King’s Lynn, England; June 13, 1752 Died: London, England; January 6, 1840 Principal long fiction · Evelina: Or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, 1778; Cecilia: Or, Memoirs of an Heiress, 1782; Camilla: Or, A Picture of Youth, 1796; The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties, 1814. Other literary forms · In addition to editing the memoirs of her father, the noted organist, composer, and music historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), Fanny Burney wrote an Early Diary, 1768-1778 (1889) and then a later Diary and Letters, 1778-1840 (1842-1846). The first work, not published until 1889, contains pleasant sketches of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, David Garrick, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Notable figures from government and the arts march across the pages of the early diary, which scholars have claimed surpasses her fiction in literary quality. The latter diary and correspondence appeared between 1842 and 1846; the seven volumes are notable for the record of the writer’s meeting in her garden with the insane George III of England, the account of her glimpse of Napoleon I, and the recollections of her chat with the weary Louis XVIII of France. Of her eight dramatic productions, three are worthy of mention: The Witlings (never published); Edwy and Elgiva, written in 1790, performed at Drury Lane on March 21, 1795, and withdrawn after the first night; and Love and Fashion, written in 1800, accepted by the manager at Covent Garden, but never performed. Finally, Burney published, in 1793, a political essay entitled Brief Reflections Relative to the French Emigrant Clergy, an address to the women of Great Britain in behalf of the French emigrant priests. Achievements · Most critics tend to place the reputation of Burney within the shadow of her most immediate successor, Jane Austen. Reasons for this assessment are not immediately clear, especially in the light of responses to the novels from contemporary readers. Burney’s problem during the past two centuries, however, has not concerned popularity, subject matter, or even literary style; rather, certain personal circumstances under which she wrote seriously reduced her artistic effectiveness and considerably dulled her reputation. Essentially, Burney produced fiction at a time in history when a lady of means and social standing could not easily write fiction and still be considered a lady. Adding to that inhibition was the aura of her noted and influential father and his circle of even more influential friends: Samuel Johnson, Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Both her father and his friends held literary standards not always easy for a self-educated young woman to attain. She burned her early manuscript efforts, wrote secretly at night, and published anonymously; she labored under the artistic domination of her father and the advice of his friends; she remained cautious, intimidated by and dependent on elderly people who served as guardians of her intellect. Nevertheless, Burney succeeded as a novelist and achieved significance as a contributor to the history and development of the English novel. She brought to that 123

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genre an ability to observe the natural activities and reactions of those about her and to weave those observations through narrative structures and character delineations similar to those employed by her literary predecessors: Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Aphra Behn, Mary De La Riviere Manley, Eliza Heywood, and Clara Reeve. In her preface to Evelina, she set forth the criteria that, throughout her fiction, she would develop and maintain. For Burney, the novel would be the means by which to portray realistic persons and to represent the times in which they functioned. In her own concept of the form, those characters had to be real but not necessarily true; they had to be drawn “from nature, though not from life.” Further, those same fictional characters had to confront and solve complex human Library of Congress problems—problems that they might avoid for a time but eventually would be forced to encounter. Although Burney’s four novels were published anonymously, the sophisticated readers of the day recognized the woman’s point of view and immediately set the works apart from those of their contemporaries. The female readership, especially, both appreciated and praised the woman’s view of the contemporary world; on the other hand, the young dandies of the late eighteenth century and the pre-Victorian age scoffed at the novels’ heroines as comic sentimentalists, products of blatant amateurism, and characteristic examples of a sex that would continue to be dominated by men. The real basis on which to place Burney’s popularity, however, rests with the ability of the novelist to develop fully the effects of female intelligence upon and within a society dominated by men and to convince her audience that coexistence between the sexes was far more beneficial than the dominance of one over the other. The essential difference between Fanny Burney and her female predecessors (Aphra Behn is the most obvious example) is the extent to which the issue of feminism was developed and then thrust forward as a major consideration. As a woman writing about women, Burney could not cling too long to the models that the past century had provided for her. Despite the mild increase in the numbers of female novelists during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Burney had little guidance in developing the woman’s point of view. She had, essentially, to find her own way within the confines of a limited world and even more limited experience. Thus, she determined early to purge her fictional environment of masculine influence. In its place, she would establish the importance of her titled characters as working parts in the machinery of eighteenth century British society. Burney’s heroines do not convey appearances of being rebels, radicals, or social freaks; rather, their creator has

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drawn each one of them with a fine and firm hand. As a group, they are indeed meant to be carbon copies of one another; individually, each portrays a young lady in pursuit of traditional goals: marriage, money, and the discovery of the self. Biography · Fanny (Frances) Burney, later Madame D’Arblay, the third of six children of Charles Burney and Esther Sleepe Burney, was born on June 13, 1752, at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, where her father served as church organist while recuperating from consumption. In 1760, his health completely restored, Burney moved his family to London, where he resumed his professional involvements in teaching, composition, and music history. Upon the death of Esther Burney on September 28, 1761, two of the children (Esther and Susannah) went to school in Paris, while Frances remained at home. Apparently, Dr. Burney feared that his middle daughter’s devotion to her grandmother (then living in France) would bring about the child’s conversion to Catholicism. He seemed prepared to change that point of view and send Frances to join her sisters, when, in 1766, he married Mrs. Stephen Allen. Thus, the fourteenyear-old girl remained at home in London, left to her own educational aims and directions, since her father had no time to supervise her learning. She had, at about age ten, begun to write drama, poetry, and fiction; on her fifteenth birthday, she supposedly burned her manuscripts because she felt guilty about wasting her time with such trifles. Still, she could not purge her imagination, and the story of Evelina and her adventures did not die in the flames of her fireplace. Her brother, Charles, offered the first two volumes of Evelina to James Dodsley, who declined to consider an anonymous work for publication; Thomas Lowndes, however, asked to see the completed manuscript. After finishing Evelina and then securing her father’s permission, Burney gave the work to the London publisher, who issued it in January, 1778, and paid the writer thirty pounds and ten bound copies. Its success and popularity owed some debt to Dr. Burney, who passed the novel on to Mrs. Thrale, a prominent figure in London’s literary society. From there, it made its way to the select seat of London’s intellectual empire, presided over by Dr. Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke. Shortly afterward, Fanny Burney met Mrs. Thrale, who took the new novelist into her home at Streatham (south of London) and introduced her to Johnson, Reynolds, Sheridan, and Arthur Murphy—all of whom pressed her to write drama. The result took the form of The Whitlings, a dramatic piece that, principally because of her father’s displeasure over the quality of the work, she never published. Returning to the form that produced her initial success, Burney published Cecilia in the summer of 1782, further advancing her literary reputation and social standing. She met Mary Delany, an intimate of the royal family, who helped secure for her an appointment in July, 1786, as second keeper of the Queen’s robes, a position worth two hundred pounds per year. Her tenure at court proved to be more of a confinement than a social or political advantage because of the menial tasks, the rigid schedule, and the stiffness of the Queen and her attendants. The activities and events at court, however, did contribute to the value of Burney’s diaries, though her health suffered from the extreme physical demands of her labors. She continued in service until July, 1791, at which time she sought and gained permission to retire on a pension of one hundred pounds per annum. Then followed a period of domestic travel aimed at improving her health, followed by her marriage, on July 31, 1793, to General Alexandre D’Arblay, a comrade of the Marquis de Lafayette and a member of the small French community living at Juniper Hall, near

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Mickleham (north of Dorking, in Surrey). The couple’s entire income rested with Madame D’Arblay’s pension, and thus she sought to increase the family’s fortunes through her writing. A tragedy, Edwy and Elgiva, lasted but a single night at Drury Lane, but a third novel, Camilla, generated more than three thousand pounds from subscriptions and additional sales, although the piece failed to achieve the literary merit of Evelina or Cecilia. In 1801, General D’Arblay returned to France to seek employment but managed only a pension of fifteen hundred francs. His wife and son, Alexander, joined him the next year, and the family spent the succeeding ten years at Passy, in a state of quasi exile that lasted throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Madame D’Arblay and her son returned to England in 1812, and there, the novelist attended her aged father until his death in April, 1814. Her last novel, begun in France in 1802 and entitled The Wanderer, appeared early in 1814. Again, the financial returns far exceeded the literary quality of the piece; there were considerable buyers and subscribers but extremely few readers. After Napoleon’s exile, the novelist returned to her husband in Paris; she then went to Brussels after the emperor’s return from Elba. General D’Arblay, meanwhile, had been seriously injured by the kick of a horse, which brought about an immediate end to his military career. The family returned to England to spend the remainder of their years: General D’Arblay died on May 3, 1818, and Alexander died on January 19, 1837—less than a year after having been nominated minister of Ely chapel. In November, 1839, Madame D’Arblay suffered a severe illness and died on January 6, 1840, in her eighty-seventh year. Analysis · Despite the relative brevity of her canon, Fanny Burney’s fiction cannot be dismissed with the usual generalizations from literary history: specifically that the author shared the interests of her youthful heroines in good manners. She possessed a quick sense for the comic in character and situation, and those talents distinctly advanced the art of the English novel in the direction of Jane Austen. From one viewpoint, she indeed exists as an important transitional figure between the satiric allegories of the earlier eighteenth century and the instruments that portrayed middle-class manners in full flourish during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Burney’s contemporaries understood both her method and her purpose. Samuel Johnson thought her a “real wonder,” one worth being singled out for her honest sense of modesty and her ability to apply it to fiction, while Edmund Burke seemed amazed by her knowledge of human nature. Three years after her death, Thomas Babington Macaulay proclaimed that the author of Evelina and Cecilia had done for the English novel what Jeremy Collier, at the end of the seventeenth century, did for the drama: maintain rigid morality and virgin delicacy. Macaulay proclaimed that Fanny Burney had indeed vindicated the right of woman “to an equal share in a fair and noble promise of letters” and had accomplished her task in clear, natural, and lively “woman’s English.” Nevertheless, Fanny Burney contributed more to the English novel than simply the advancement of her sex’s cause. Her heroines are mentally tormented and yet emerge as wiser and stronger human beings. The fictional contexts into which she placed her principal characters are those that readers of every time and place could recognize: situations in which the proponents of negative values seem to prosper and the defenders of virtue cling tenaciously to their ground. Burney’s women must learn the ways of a difficult world, a society composed of countless snares and endless rules; they must quickly don the accoutrements for survival: modesty, reserve, submission,

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and (above all else) manners. What makes Burney’s depiction of women in society particularly poignant is the knowledge that the author herself had to endure trials of survival. An awareness of the author’s accounts of actual struggles for social survival, then, becomes a necessity for understanding and appreciating the problems confronted by her fictional characters. Evelina · In Burney’s first novel, Evelina, the title character brings with her to London and Bristol two qualities most difficult for a young provincial girl to defend: her sense of propriety and her pure innocence—the latter quality not to be confused with ignorance. In London, Evelina stumbles into false, insecure situations because she does not comprehend the rules of the social game. During the course of eighty-five epistles, however, she learns. The learning process is of utmost importance to Burney, for it serves as both plot for her fiction and instruction for her largely female readership. Once in London, life unfolds new meanings for Evelina Anville, as she samples the wares of urbanity: assemblies, amusements, parks and gardens, drawing rooms, operas, and theaters. Accompanying the activities is a corps of sophisticates by whose rules Evelina must play: Lord Orville, the well-bred young man and the jealous lover; Sir Clement Willoughby, the obnoxious admirer of Evelina who tries (through forged letters) to breach the relationship between Orville and Evelina; Macartney, the young poet whom Evelina saves from suicide and against whom Orville exercises his jealous streak; Captain Mirvan, the practical joker who smiles only at the expense of others; Mrs. Beaumont, who would have the heroine believe that good qualities originate from pride rather than from principles; Lady Louisa Larpent, the sullen and distraught (but always arrogant) sister of Lord Orville who tries to separate her brother from Evelina; Mr. Lovel, a demeaning fop who constantly refers to Evelina’s simple background; the Watkins sisters, who chide Evelina because they envy her attractiveness to young men. Despite these obstacles of situation and character, however, Evelina does not lack some protection. The Reverend Arthur Villars, her devoted guardian since the death of her mother, guides and counsels the seventeen-year-old girl from his home in Dorsetshire. Villars receives the major portion of Evelina’s letters; in fact, he initally advises her to be wary of Lord Orville but then relents when he learns of his ward’s extreme happiness. Since Evelina cannot count on immediate assistance from Villars, she does rely on several people in London. Mrs. Mirvan, the amiable and well-bred wife of the captain, introduces Evelina to a variety of social affairs, while their daughter, Maria, becomes the heroine’s only real confidante, sharing mutual happiness and disappointment. Finally, there is the Reverend Villars’s neighbor, Mrs. Selwyn, who accompanies Evelina on a visit to Bristol Hot Wells. Unfortunately, the one person closest to Evelina during her London tenure, her maternal grandmother, Madame Duval, proves of little use and even less assistance. A blunt, indelicate, and severe woman, she is bothered by her granddaughter’s display of independence and vows that the young lady will not share in her inheritance. Villars emerges as the supporting character with the most depth, principally because he is ever present in the letters. From the novel’s beginning, the heroine reaches out to him for guidance and support, scarcely prepared “to form a wish that has not [his] sanction.” The local clergyman, Villars serves as parent for a motherless and socially fatherless young lady who, for the first time, is about to see something of the world. Thus, Villars’s caution and anxiety appear natural, for he knows the bitter effects of socially unequal marriages, as in the cases of Evelina’s own parents and

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grandparents. He naturally mistrusts Lord Orville and fears the weakness of the young girl’s imagination. Everyone knows that as long as Evelina remains obedient to Villars’s will, no union between her and Orville can occur. Once the girl’s father, Sir John Belmont, repents for his many years of unkindness to his daughter and then bequeaths her thirty thousand pounds, however, the guardian cleric no longer remains the dominant influence. Lord Orville proceeds to put his own moral house in order and supplants his rivals; the reserve felt by Evelina because of the Reverend Villars’s fears and anxieties gradually disintegrates, and the romance proceeds towards its inevitable conclusion. The process may be inevitable, but it is sufficiently hampered by a series of struggles and conflicts, as is typical of the late eighteenth century novel of manners. Both her grandmother and Mrs. Mirvan provide Evelina with fairly easy access to fashionable society, but the socialites in that society involve the girl in a number of uncomfortable and burdensome situations. For example, Biddy and Polly Branghton and Madam Duval use Evelina’s name in requesting the use of Lord Orville’s coach. Evelina realizes the impropriety of the request and knows that Orville’s benevolence would never permit him to refuse it. Furthermore, Tom Branghton, an admirer of Evelina, solicits business from Orville also by relying on Evelina’s name; he does so after damaging the borrowed vehicle. Evelina’s innocence forces her to bear the responsibility for her relatives’ actions and schemes, although she opposes all that they attempt. Fortunately, the fierce determination with which she advances her innocence and honesty enables her to endure such problems until rescued, in this case, by Lord Orville and Mrs. Selwyn. Vulgarity (Madam Duval), ill breeding (the Branghtons), and impertinence (Sir Clement Willoughby) eventually fall before the steadfastness and the force of Evelina’s emerging wisdom and strength. Burney here demonstrates the specific means by which an eighteenth century woman could surmount the perplexities of that era. Cecilia · If Evelina Anville must defend her innocence and honesty against the social vultures of London and Bristol, Cecilia Beverley, the heroine of Cecilia, carries the added burden of retaining a fortune left to her by an eccentric uncle. She must withstand assaults upon her coffers from a variety of attackers. One of her guardians, Mr. Harrel, draws heavily upon Cecilia’s funds to repay the moneylenders who underwrite his fashionable existence. At the other extreme, Mr. Briggs, the third legally appointed guardian, manages Cecilia’s money during her minority. Although wealthy in his own right, Briggs evidences obvious eccentricity and uncouthness; he is a miser who wants the heroine to live with him to conserve money. In the middle stands another guardian, Compton Delvile, who has priorities other than money; however, he can hardly be recommended as an asset to the development of his ward. Simply, Delvile cares only to preserve the family name, and beneath his pride lie hard layers of meanness. Against such onslaughts upon her morality and her fortune Cecilia must rebel; she is both angry and bewildered at what Burney terms as “acts so detrimental to her own interest.” Unlike Evelina, who has many opportunities to address and receive concerns from a surrogate parent, Cecilia has few people and even less guidance upon which to rely. Cecilia revealed to the world not only a trio of impotent guardians but also a number of irritating male characters who devote considerable time to tormenting her. Obviously bent upon revealing the grotesqueness and instability of London life, Burney created a variety of grotesque and unstable supporting players: Harrel, Dr. Lyster,

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Mrs. Wyers, and Mrs. Hill are some examples. Clearly, Burney’s characters in Cecilia were total strangers to the mainstream of the late eighteenth century fictional world, even though they truly belonged to reality. While at times creating humorous scenes and incidents, these ugly characters nevertheless produced a disturbing effect upon the novelist’s reading audience. Unfortunately, from a social or historical perspective, that audience was not yet ready for significant action to effect social change, which meant that much of the novel’s force was lost amid the apathy of its audience. Camilla · The publication of Camilla, eighteen years after Evelina and fourteen following Cecilia, marked the reappearance of a young lady entering society and enduring shameful experiences. Like her immediate predecessor, Cecilia Beverley, Camilla Tyrold has money problems, only hers involve involuntary indebtedness. Also like Cecilia, the novel contains several grotesque minor characters, whose manners and actions play psychological havoc with Camilla’s attempts to overcome her distress. Particularly vulgar are Mr. Dubster and the mercenary Mrs. Mittin, aided by the overscholarly Dr. Orkborne and the foppish Sir Sedley Clarendel. A major problem, however, is that these characters are pulled from the earlier novels. On the surface, Camilla gives evidence that Burney has matured as a writer and as a commentator on the affairs of women, but that maturity did not broaden her literary experience. If anything, there are signs of regression, for Camilla definitely lacks Evelina’s common sense and her instinct toward feminine resourcefulness. Camilla further suffers from its length; Burney barely holds the plot together through countless episodes, intrigues, misunderstandings, all in front of a backdrop of drollery and absurdity. Stripped of its comic elements, the novel is no more than an overstrained romance. Burney’s motive, however, was to draw the exact conditions that brought about Camilla’s collection of debts and thus contributed to her highly anxious state of mind. Burney rises to her usual level of excellence in detailing the plight of a woman distracted and deprived by misfortune not of her own doing. For late eighteenth century women, especially, such misfortune carried with it an underlying sense of shame. Thus, Burney gave to English prose fiction a sense of psychological depth not always apparent in the works of her female counterparts or in those fictional efforts written by men but concerned with women. The Wanderer · Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer, appeared in 1814 and became lost in the new sensibility of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth. The work, however, reveals Burney’s determination that the nineteenth century should not forget its women. Her heroine—known variously as L. S. (or Ellis), Incognita, Miss Ellis, and Juliet—determines that the cause of her suffering points directly to the fact that she was born a woman, which automatically places her on the lowest rung of the social order. The woman’s lot contains little beyond the usual taboos, disqualifications, discomforts, and inconveniences; the novelist, through the various predicaments of Juliet Granville, rarely allows her readers to forget the degree to which her heroine must suffer because of society’s insensitivity and stupidity. The Wanderer, like Burney’s previous novels, has a number of supporting characters; some of these, while they do not always understand Juliet’s plight, at least try to help her through her difficulties. Others, such as Mrs. Ireton and Miss Arbe, represent the tyranny, frivolity, and insensitivity of the times and thus merely compound Juliet’s problems. The strength of The Wanderer, however, lies in its thematic relationship to the three earlier novels. Although Burney tends to repeat herself, particularly through her

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minor characters—and again the plot hardly deserves the length of the narrative—her ability to depict the misgivings of those who are driven by external circumstances to earn a livelihood through unaccustomed means is powerful. In coming to grips with an obvious and serious problem of her time, she demonstrated how her major fictional characters and she herself, as a character from the real world, could indeed rely successfully upon the resources endowed upon all individuals, female as well as male. If nothing else, the novelist showed her society and the generations that followed not only how well women could function in the real world but also how much they could contribute and take advantage of opportunities offered them. In a sense, Burney’s compositions belong to social history as much as to literature, and they serve as some of the earliest examples of a struggle that has yet to be won. Samuel J. Rogal Other major works PLAYS: Edwy and Elgiva: A Tragedy, pr. 1795; Love and Fashion, pr. 1800; The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, pb. 1995 (2 volumes). NONFICTION: Brief Reflections Relative to the French Emigrant Clergy, 1793; Diary and Letters, 1778-1840, 1842-1846 (7 volumes; Charlotte Frances Barrett, editor); The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778, 1889 (Anne Raine Ellis, editor). EDITED TEXT: Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney, 1832. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Fanny Burney’s “Evelina”: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. This group of essays, written between 1967 and 1988, focuses on Burney’s first novel. Included are essays by Ronald Paulson, Susan Staves, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Judith Lowder Newton, Mary Poovey, Jennifer A. Wagner, and Julia L. Epstein. Bloom’s introduction disparages the feminist tendency of recent Burney criticism, even though this volume includes primarily feminist approaches to Burney’s work. This collection of focused essays provides an illuminating look at current critical opinion of Evelina. Epstein, Julia L. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Takes a feminist approach, focusing primarily on the violence, hostility, and danger in Burney’s work. Finds these parts of her novels to be generally controlled, but occasionally bursting forth into rage. This study meshes moments of physical and emotional danger and pain from Burney’s life with similar images in her novels. Epstein’s interest lies in Burney’s construction of a self-image that plays down danger and violence but that she is frequently unable to control. The bibliography and index are excellent and quite helpful. Simons, Judy. Fanny Burney. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. Contains a condensed look at Burney’s life. The introductory biographical essay places Burney in a tradition of other women writers, such as Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Eliza Haywood, and discusses these women’s views on their roles in society. Includes a chapter on the heroines of Burney’s novels; a chapter on each of her four best-known works, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer; and one on her journals and plays. The bibliography is short but helpful, especially since it includes a section on works about women’s history in the eighteenth century.

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Straub, Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. Examines the “ambiguous social definition of the woman novelist at mid-century,” specifically as it related to Burney. A feminist approach grounded in eighteenth century cultural history. Devotes three chapters to Evelina, one to Cecilia, and one to both Camilla and The Wanderer. Straub’s introductory chapter, “Critical Methods and Historic Contexts,” is excellent and useful, as well as the chapter “The Receptive Reader and Other Necessary Fictions,” which makes intriguing points about Burney’s reaction to the publicity of being a novelist and part of the literary circles of her day. Zonitch, Barbara. Familiar Violence: Gender and Social Upheaval in the Novels of Frances Burney. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Chapters on Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. See especially Zonitch’s introduction, “Social Transformations: The Crisis of the Aristocracy and the Status of Women.” Includes detailed notes and excellent bibliography.

Samuel Butler Samuel Butler

Born: Langar Rectory, England; December 4, 1835 Died: London, England; June 18, 1902 Principal long fiction · Erewhon, 1872; The Fair Haven, 1873; Erewhon Revisited, 1901; The Way of All Flesh, 1903. Other literary forms · The Shrewsbury editions of Samuel Butler’s works, published between 1923 and 1926, reveal the breadth of his interests. Butler’s fiction was perhaps less important to him than his work in other fields, notably his theorizing on religion and evolution. He was also an art critic (Ex Voto, 1888; Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Ticino, 1881); a literary critic (The Authoress of the “Odyssey,” 1897; Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, 1899); the biographer of his famous grandfather, Dr. Samuel Butler; a letter-writer; and a poet. An age which produces “specialists” may find Butler to be a talented dabbler or dilettante, but his unifying philosophy gives a center to all his work. Achievements · Butler was a figure of controversy during his lifetime, and perhaps his greatest achievement resides in his ability to challenge: He contended with Charles Darwin and Darwinism; he took on the established scholars of William Shakespeare, classical literature, and art; and he was part of the nineteenth century revolt against traditional religion. He approached all of these areas in such a way that his opponents could not ignore him; whether he was right or wrong, any subject benefited by his treatment, which opened it up to new and candid thought. Of his four works which may be labeled as fiction, by far the greatest is The Way of All Flesh. Virginia Woolf, in Contemporary Writers (1965), described this novel as a seed from which many others developed—a biological image which would have pleased Butler. In earlier novels, indifferent or cruel families had been portrayed as agents of the hero’s youthful unhappiness—witness Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (18491850)—but only in The Way of All Flesh did the oppressiveness and cruelty of family life become a theme in itself, worthy of generation-by-generation treatment. Biography · Samuel Butler was born in 1835, the son of a clergyman who wished him to go into the Church. After a successful career at Cambridge University, Butler prepared for a career in the Church but found himself unable to face the prospect of that life. Letters between Butler and his father show the young man to be considering a half-dozen plans at once: art, the army, cotton-growing, and bookselling among them. Finally, father and son agreed that the young man should emigrate to New Zealand and try his fortune there, with Butler’s father providing capital. Both father and son hoped that the experience would “settle” Butler and build his character. Butler arrived in New Zealand in January of 1860, remaining there for four years. It was a useful time: He made money, which freed him of his family, at least financially, and he saw an unusual country which gave him a subject and setting for his later writings. New Zealand, however, was too rough a land to be his permanent home. His “hut” there was an island of comfort and civilization, where Butler devoted 132

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himself to music and study. His optimistic letters home became the basis of A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), a book assembled and published by Butler’s father. Returning to England in 1864, Butler settled at Clifford’s Inn in London, which would be his home for the rest of his life. He began to study art; his paintings had some success. He wished to do something greater, however—something which would express his developing ideas. Out of this desire grew Erewhon, a satire which was published anonymously in 1872 at the author’s own expense. By that time, Butler was already at work on The Fair Haven. This book may or may not be considered fiction; it is a dispute over the validity of Christianity, but the dispute is conducted in a fictional frame. The following year, 1873, was an important one for Butler. The Fair Haven was published, his mother died, he made a risky financial investment, and he began The Way of All Flesh. All of these events shaped his later years. The Fair Haven, following on the heels of Erewhon, marked him as a belligerent enemy of traditional religion. His mother’s death caused him some grief, but it spurred him to begin The Way of All Flesh, the work for which he is most remembered. That work was slowed, though, by financial troubles. Butler invested his New Zealand fortune in a Canadian venture which soon failed. He salvaged less than a quarter of his investment and had to seek help from his father. Not until 1886, when his father died, was Butler wholly free of financial pressures. The next several years were occupied by work on evolution and religion. In 1882, Butler returned to The Way of All Flesh, completing it the following year. He felt, however, that the book should not be published while anyone who could be hurt by it was still alive; therefore it did not appear until a year after his own death. In 1883, Butler began to write music. Music and music criticism were to occupy him intermittently for several years, interspersed with art criticism. The last decade of his life was filled with the study of literature, culminating in his publications on Shakespeare’s sonnets and his translations of the Iliad (1898) and the Odyssey (1900). These works were characterized by the combativeness that to some degree sums up Butler’s life. He was always the rebellious, contradictory son. Butler’s life was shaped by a number of intense relationships. His relationship with his family was unresolved; the work (The Way of All Flesh) which might have laid the ghosts to rest was haunted by another ghost, Butler’s lifelong friend Eliza Mary Ann Savage. A fellow art student, she gave the writer friendship, friendly criticism, advice, and approval. Her own understanding of the relationship can never be known, but Butler feared she wished to marry him. His implicit rejection disturbed him deeply after her death. Other friendships were equally ambiguous. Charles Paine Pauli consumed much of Butler’s attentions and resources from their first meeting in New Zealand until Pauli’s death in 1897, when Butler discovered that Pauli had been supported by two other men. The perhaps sexual ambiguities of this relationship were repeated in Butler’s affection for a young Swiss, Hans Faesch, and to a lesser degree in his long-lasting bonds with Henry Festing Jones and Alfred Emery Cathie. Butler’s emotional makeup seems similar to that of Henry James. Both men formed passionate attachments to other men; both appreciated women more as memories than as living beings. Analysis · On his deathbed, Samuel Butler spoke of the “pretty roundness” of his career, beginning with Erewhon and ending, thirty years later, with Erewhon Revisited.

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Erewhon · Erewhon must be understood first of all as a satire rather than as a novel. It is in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), works that sacrifice unity and development to a vision of the writer’s society in the guise of an imaginary foreign land. Like Rasselas and Gulliver, Higgs of Erewhon is a young man, ready for adventure, out to learn about the world. He quickly reveals his image of himself as sharp, cunning, and bold. Before he tells his story, he lets the reader know the things he will hold back so that no reader will be able to find Erewhon and thus profit financially from Higgs’s exploration. His story begins as he is working on a sheep farm in a colony, the name of which he will not reveal. Intending to find precious metals or at least good sheep-grazing land, he journeys alone inland, over a mountain range. On the other side, he finds a kingdom called Erewhon (Nowhere), which looks very much like England. Higgs’s point of reference is England; all aspects of Erewhonian life he measures by that standard. Many such satires work through the narrator’s quick judgment that his new land is either much better or much worse than his native country: The narrator’s rather simple view plays against the author’s more complex perspective. In Erewhon, however, the narrator is not quite so naïve. His own failings, rather than his naïveté, become part of the satire, which thus has a dual focus, much like book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels. Higgs, like many good Victorian heroes, is out to make money. It is this prospect which motivates him most strongly. Coexisting with his desire for fortune is his religiosity. Here, Butler’s satire upon his character is most pronounced and simplistic. Higgs observes the Sabbath, but he seduces Yram (Mary) with no regret. He plans to make his fortune by selling the Erewhonians into slavery, arguing that they would be converted to Christianity in the process; the slaveholders would be lining their pockets and doing good simultaneously. Thus, Butler exposes, to no one’s great surprise, the mingled piety and avarice of British colonialists. Butler satirizes European culture through the Erewhonians more often than through his hero, Higgs, gradually unfolding their lives for the reader to observe. Their lives are, on the surface, peaceful and pleasant; they are a strikingly attractive race. Only through personal experience does Higgs learn the underpinnings of the society: When he is ill, he learns that illness is a crime in Erewhon, while moral lapses are regarded in the same way as illnesses are in England. When his pocket watch is discovered, he learns that all “machines” have been banned from Erewhon. Erewhonian morality is based on reversals: The morally corrupt receive sympathy, while the ill are imprisoned; a child duped by his guardian is punished for having been ignorant, while the guardian is rewarded; children are responsible for their own birth, while their parents are consoled for having been “wronged” by the unborn. This pattern of reversals is of necessity incomplete, a problem noted by reviewers of Erewhon in 1872. “The Book of the Machines” is the section of the satire which has drawn the most attention, because of its relationship to Darwinian thought. It may well be, as it has often been considered, a reductio ad absurdum of Darwinism, but the chapter also takes on reasoning by analogy as a less complex target of satire. “The Book of the Machines” is Higgs’s translation of the Erewhonian book which led to the banning of all mechanical devices. Its author claimed that machines had developed—evolved— more rapidly than humankind and thus would soon dominate, leaving humans mere slaves or parasites. He argued that machines were capable of reproduction, using humans in the process as flowers use bees. The arguments proved so convincing that

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all machines in Erewhon were soon destroyed, leaving the country in the rather primitive state in which Higgs found it. The purpose of “The Book of the Machines” becomes clearer in the following two chapters, which detail Erewhonian debates on the rights of animals and the rights of vegetables. At one point in the past, insistence on the rights of animals had turned Erewhon into a land of vegetarians, but the philosophers went a step further and decreed that vegetables, too, had rights, based upon their evolving consciousness. Again, Butler plays with argument by analogy, as the philosophers compare the vegetables’ intelligence to that of a human embryo. The Erewhonians who believed in the rights of vegetables were led nearly to starvation by their extremism, and it is this same extremism which causes Higgs to leave Erewhon. Fearful that disfavor is growing against his foreign presence, he plans to escape by balloon, taking with him his beloved Arowhena. The perilous escape takes place, and the hero, married to Arowhena and restored to England, becomes a fairly successful hack writer. His account of Erewhon, he says at the end, constitutes an appeal for subscriptions to finance his scheme to return to Erewhon. Erewhon Revisited · The broad, traditional satire of Erewhon is abandoned in its sequel. Written years later, Erewhon Revisited reflects the maturity of its author, then in his sixties. In the later work, Butler treats Erewhon as a habitation of human beings, not satiric simplifications. Erewhon Revisited is thus a novel, not a satire; its focus is on human relationships. Butler had already written (though not published) The Way of All Flesh, and the preoccupations of that work are also evident in Erewhon Revisited. Both works grew out of Butler’s fascination with family relationships, especially those between father and son. The narrator of Erewhon Revisited is John Higgs, the son of George Higgs and Arowhena. He tells of his mother’s early death and of his father’s desire to return to Erewhon. This time, though, Higgs’s desire is sentimental; he has grown past his earlier wish to profit from the Erewhonians. He goes to Erewhon, returns in ill health, tells the story of his adventure to John, and dies. The book in this way becomes John’s tribute to his father. Although Erewhon Revisited may be identified as a novel rather than as a satire, it does have a satiric subject as part of its plot. Upon reentering Erewhon, Higgs discovers that his ascent by balloon has become the source of a new religion. The Erewhonians revere his memory and worship him as the “Sun Child.” Higgs is horrified to find that there are theologians of Sunchildism fighting heretics. Unfortunately, Sunchildism has not made the Erewhonians a better or kinder people. Here is the heart of Butler’s satire: that a religion based upon a supernatural event will divide people, place power in the wrong hands, and humiliate reason. In Erewhon, Higgs was a pious and hypocritical prig, a target of satire himself. In the sequel, he is a genial, loving humanist, appalled by the “evolution” of his frantic escape into the ascent of a god. Much of Erewhon Revisited develops his plans to deflate Sunchildism, to reveal himself as the “Sun Child” and tell the truth about his “ascent.” Higgs has a special motive which transcends his disgust with Sunchildism. Upon arriving in Erewhon, he meets a young man whom he soon recognizes as his own son, a son he did not know he had. The young man is the product of Higgs’s brief romance with Yram, the jailer’s daughter. Higgs keeps his identity from his son (also named George) for a while, but eventually the two are revealed to each other in a touching and intense scene. To earn his newfound son’s respect, Higgs determines to deflate

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Sunchildism. Thus, the process of satire in Erewhon Revisited is rooted in its human relationships. Higgs’s son John, the narrator of the novel, feels no jealousy toward his half brother. Instead, he shares the elder Higgs’s enthusiasm for young George. Following his father’s death, John goes to Erewhon himself to meet George and to deliver a large gift of gold to him. This legacy exemplified one of Butler’s tenets about parent-child relations: that the best parents are kind, mostly absent, and very free with money. This theme is repeated throughout The Way of All Flesh. In Erewhon Revisited, however, it has a simpler expression. The relationship of Higgs and his two sons forms the emotional center of the novel and creates the impetus for some of its plot, but it is distinct from the satire on religion which makes up much of the book. The Fair Haven · It is fitting that Butler’s last work, Erewhon Revisited, should have presented a genial hero determined to strip away what he saw as ridiculous supernatural beliefs. Much of “Sunchildism” is a response to the religious foment of the nineteenth century with which Butler had begun contending early in his career. The Fair Haven was his first satire concerned with Christian belief. This work is “fiction” only in a very limited sense: Butler creates a persona, John Pickard Owen, whose arguments in favor of Christianity are in fact the vehicle for Butler’s satire against it. The Fair Haven begins with a fictional memoir of John Pickard Owen by his brother. The memoir reveals that Owen moved from faith to disbelief to faith, and that his efforts to prove the validity of his religion pushed him to mental exhaustion and, eventually, death. The Way of All Flesh · The characters of The Fair Haven are forerunners of the Pontifex family in The Way of All Flesh, Butler’s fullest and most characteristic work. The Way of All Flesh encompasses all of Butler’s concerns: family life, money, sexual attitudes, class structure, religion, and art. This novel too is a satire, but in it Butler does not portray an Erewhon; much more disturbingly, he keeps the reader at home. The Way of All Flesh is Ernest Pontifex’s story, but it does not begin with Ernest. Butler the evolutionist shows Ernest as the product of several generations of social changes and personal tensions. The genealogical background, as well as the title and biblical epigraph, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God,” helps to create the ironic treatment of religion which will permeate the novel. What is the way of all flesh? The biblical echo suggests sin and decay; Butler’s fiction, however, reminds the reader that the way of all flesh is change, for better or worse. Ernest is the product of three generations of upward mobility. His great-grandfather is a simple, kind craftsman who sends his only son into the city. The son, George Pontifex, becomes successful as a publisher and even more successful as a bully. He chooses the Church as a career for his second son, Theobald, who revolts briefly, then acquiesces and evolves into the image of his father. Butler is careful to show personalities as products of environment. George’s bullying is only that of an egotistical, self-made man; Theobald’s is more harsh, the product of his own fear and suppressed anger. The unfortunate object of this anger is Theobald’s firstborn son, Ernest Pontifex. Ernest’s childhood is dominated by fear of his father. His mother, Christina, is of little help; Butler portrays her as the product of her own family life and the larger social system, both of which make marriage a necessity for her. Like Theobald, Christina becomes a hypocrite pressed into the service of “what is done.” Much later

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in life, Ernest reflects that the family is a painful anachronism, confined in nature to the lower species. His opinion is shared by Overton, the narrator of the novel, an old family friend who takes an interest in young Ernest and becomes his lifelong friend and adviser. The two of them, in fact, eventually come to constitute a kind of family—an evolved, freely chosen family, not one formed by mere biological ties. This outcome occurs only after long agony on Ernest’s part. As a child, he believes all that is told: that he is, for example, a wicked, ungrateful boy who deserves Theobald’s frequent beatings. His young life is lightened, however, by the interest taken in him by his aunt Alethea and by Overton, who has known all of the Pontifexes well and who tells their story with compassion. Ernest is still an innocent and unformed young man when he goes to Cambridge to prepare for a career in the Church. Near the end of his peaceful, happy years there, he comes under the influence of an Evangelical group which alters his perceptions of what his life as a clergyman ought to be. Instead of stepping into a pleasant rural parish, Ernest becomes a missionary in the slums of London. He falls under the spell of the oily clergyman Nicholas Pryor, who “invests” Ernest’s money and eventually absconds with it. Pryor, the Cambridge enthusiasts, and Theobald Pontifex all represent the clerical life; they are radically different kinds of people, and they are all portrayed negatively. Butler took no prisoners in his war on the clergy; his use of the genial Overton as a narrator partially masks this characteristic. Sexual ignorance, imposed (and shared) by Theobald and his kind, provides Butler with his next target for satire. In despair over his religious life, Ernest seeks a prostitute and approaches the wrong woman, the eponymous Miss Snow. Ernest’s ignorance lands him in prison and cuts him off forever from mere gentility. It redeems him, however, from a life circumscribed by his father: Ironically, Theobald’s strict control over Ernest liberates Ernest at last. In prison, stripped of all his former identity, Ernest begins to come to terms with what his life has been and may be. A long illness serves to clarify his mind; he rejects traditional religion, society, and his family’s condescending offers of help. Overton alone stands by Ernest, and it is at this point in Ernest’s development that they become fast friends. Overton takes on the role of the ideal father—fond, genteel, and moneyed. It is in this last area that Overton’s role is most important to the events of the book: He keeps Alethea’s substantial bequest in trust for Ernest, allowing him knowledge of it and access to it, according to Alethea’s wish, only when he judges that Ernest is prepared to use it wisely. Ernest’s ill-advised marriage and his decision to work as a tailor cause Overton to hold the money back. Eventually, Ernest’s maturity evolves to a level acceptable to Overton, and the two of them lead a pleasant life of wealth and, on Ernest’s side at least, accomplishment: He has become a writer who, like Butler, writes thoughtful, theoretical books. In his role as a father, Ernest also has evolved. The children of his marriage to Ellen are reared by simple country people and grow up free of the pressures of Ernest’s childhood. After four generations, the Pontifexes have returned to the peaceful and happy life of Ernest’s great-grandfather. Liberal amounts of money, however, keep Ernest’s son and daughter from any want that ordinary country folk might experience. Ernest’s son wants to be a riverboat captain: Ernest buys him riverboats. This scenario is nearly as idealized a version of country life as was Marie Antoinette’s. What makes this vision disconcerting is that Ernest’s attitudes are clearly shared by Butler. Early in the novel, Ernest the bullied child is the object of the reader’s pity. As a student and young cleric, his life creates a

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sense of pity but also humor. The more fully Ernest evolves, however, the less appealing the reader is likely to find him. The Ernest who finally comes into his aunt’s fortune is a rather dull prig, who, upon learning of his wealth, considers how his emotion might be rendered in music. He tells Overton that he regrets nothing—not his parents’ brutality, not prison—because everything has contributed to his evolution away from the “swindle” of middle-class expectations. Unfortunately, this selfsatisfied view makes his character seem shallow, consisting only of words and affectations. In spite of this problem, Butler’s achievement is considerable. The Way of All Flesh is an immensely ambitious book, and much of it succeeds. Butler articulated fully and convincingly the varied stresses of family life, and that aspect alone would make the novel worthwhile. Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited share some of that evocative power. They also express Butler’s optimism. For all his satirical vision and contentiousness, Butler does offer happy endings: Higgs’s successful escape from Erewhon with his beloved, the reunion of the brothers in Erewhon Revisited, and the pleasant life of Ernest and Overton in The Way of All Flesh. Though societies may often be in the wrong, Butler seems to tell the reader, there is hope in freely chosen human relationships. Deborah Core Other major works NONFICTION: A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, 1863; Life and Habit, 1877; Evolution, Old and New, 1879; God the Known and God the Unknown, 1879; Unconscious Memory, 1880; Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Ticino, 1881; A Psalm of Montreal, 1884; Luck or Cunning, 1887; Ex Voto, 1888; The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler, 1896; The Authoress of the “Odyssey,” 1897; Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, 1899; The Note-books, 1912 (H. Festing Jones, editor). TRANSLATIONS: Iliad, 1898 (Homer); Odyssey, 1900 (Homer). Bibliography Bekker, W. G. An Historical and Critical Review of Samuel Butler’s Literary Works. 1925. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. A full-length study of Butler written by a native of Holland, where Erewhon found popularity and immediate acceptance. Bekker argues for the unity in Butler’s works. Cole, G. D. H. Samuel Butler and “The Way of All Flesh.” London: Home & Van Thal, 1947. An appreciative study of Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh. Contains some discussion of his other works, including Erewhon. Also includes valuable background material on Butler, such as his upbringing and his relationship to Darwinism. Holt, Lee E. Samuel Butler. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Updates this introductory study, first published in 1964. Holt takes into account new scholarships and criticism and new editions of Butler’s work. There are chapters on Butler’s major fiction, a chronology, and an annotated bibliography. Jones, Joseph. The Cradle of “Erewhon”: Samuel Butler in New Zealand. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959. A valuable account of Butler’s five years in New Zealand and the origins of his later Erewhon books. Raby, Peter. Samuel Butler: A Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. A comprehensive scholarly biography, with detailed notes and bibliography.

Lewis Carroll Lew is Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson Born: Daresbury, Cheshire, England; January 27, 1832 Died: Guildford, Surrey, England; January 14, 1898 Principal long fiction · Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865; Through the LookingGlass and What Alice Found There, 1871. Other literary forms · Before and after writing his novels for children, Lewis Carroll published volumes in his primary vocation, mathematics: A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, Systematically Arranged, with Formal Definitions, Postulates, and Axioms (1860), An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Curiosa Mathematica (Part I, 1888; Part II, 1893), and Symbolic Logic, Part I: Elementary (1896). His gift for light verse, demonstrated in his novels, also led to four books of poems, with some duplication of content: Phantasmagoria: And Other Poems (1869), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Rhyme? and Reason? (1883), and the posthumous Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898). His literary and mathematical sides were fused in A Tangled Tale (1885), a series of mathematical word problems in the form of short stories, and Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) a closet drama in which Euclid is defended by various scholars and spirits. Achievements · In 1898, a few months after Carroll’s death, the Pall Mall Gazette published a survey of the popularity of children’s books, and the overwhelming front-runner was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Queen Victoria enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so much that she asked Carroll to dedicate his next book to her (ironically, his next book, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, proved to be nothing like the whimsical adventure the Queen had admired). Carroll encouraged the stage versions of the Alice books that appeared in his lifetime, though he was dismayed at his lack of legal control over adaptations. The Alice books have been translated into dozens of languages and are quoted more often than any English work, after that of William Shakespeare. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is noteworthy for more than its popularity, however; it was the first work of literature for children that did not have an overtly didactic or moralistic nature. In fact, Carroll parodied didactic children’s works in verse, such as “You Are Old, Father William” in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There and characters such as the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Writers as abstruse and complex as British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and Irish novelist James Joyce were drawn to the deeper implications of Carroll’s work, especially the lighthearted sense of play and the role of nonsense in human thought. The absurdist writers of the twentieth century saw Carroll as their prophet, and a few of his nonsense words, such as “Boojum,” “Jabberwocky,” and “chortle,” have become a seemingly permanent part of the English language. His term for a particular method of coining compound words, “portmanteau,” has since become a standard linguistic name for the process. 139

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Library of Congress

Biography · Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the third of eleven children and the eldest son of the Reverend Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge. The younger Charles Dodgson was left-handed and spoke with a stutter, an affliction from which he would suffer his whole life. With eight younger siblings, Dodgson very early developed the knack of amusing children, an ability he would keep as an adult. He wrote and drew little magazines for their amusement, which demonstrated the whimsy of his Alice books. Some of the verses in the Alice books received their first audition in these family magazines. At age twelve, Dodgson attended Richmond Grammar School, and the following year, the famous public school at Rugby. Nearly four years at Rugby, which he later

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recalled with displeasure, prepared him for Oxford University: He entered Christ Church College there on January 24, 1851. He distinguished himself in mathematics and classics, though difficulty with philosophy and history kept him in the lower third of his class. On December 18, 1854, he received his A.B. with first-class honors in mathematics. He stayed on at Christ Church as a tutor and lecturer. At this time his earliest stories and poems appeared in periodicals at Oxford and Whitby. Early in 1856 Dodgson acquired his first camera, then a relatively rare and complicated device restricted to use by specialists. A large number of his photographs, mostly of young girls, survive, and one historian of photography has declared Dodgson the most outstanding child photographer of the nineteenth century. A month after purchasing the camera, one young model, the four-year-old daughter of an Oxford dean, caught Dodgson’s eye. Her name was Alice Liddell. Six years later he would extemporize, on a boating expedition, a story about Alice that was to become the famous Alice stories. However, until then, Dodgson’s energies went into his vocations of mathematics and the Church: He published his first book on mathematics in 1860, and he was ordained a deacon just before Christmas of 1861. By February of 1863, Dodgson had committed to paper the story from the 1862 excursion with the Liddell sisters. He published it in 1865 (though it did not appear until 1866) as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Dodgson used the pseudonym Lewis Carroll for his publications, a name seemingly derived from the names Lutwidge and Charles. In 1867 Dodgson made the only voyage of his lifetime away from England, touring the Continent (mostly Russia). He had already begun his sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which appeared near Christmas, 1871, as Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. When his father died in 1868, Dodgson moved his siblings to Guildford, and he moved into rooms at Tom Quad, Oxford, where he remained the rest of his life. In 1881 his income from writing was sufficient for him to resign his lectureship in mathematics, although he remained at Oxford. The following year he was elected curator of the Senior Common room, a post he held for ten years. He continued writing until his death in 1898, though he never equalled the success of the Alice books. Analysis · Lewis Carroll’s first great contribution to children’s literature is that he freed it from the heavy didacticism of previous children’s books. The second is his legitimizing of nonsense in children’s literature, though in this claim he is preceded by fellow Victorian Edward Lear, whose A Book of Nonsense (1846) preceded the Alice books by two decades. It is perhaps in his nonsense that we can see the connection between Reverend Dodgson, the mathematician, and Lewis Carroll, the writer. Nonsense is self-referential; that is, it lacks “sense,” if sense means a relationship to the world outside of the work of nonsense. Thus, it is like certain mathematical systems or logic games. Carroll’s works are in fact games, which is one of the reasons for their appeal to children. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland · Carroll’s first novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, successfully creates and maintains a dream-consciousness. Its dreamlike quality is revealed not merely in its conventional ending, with Alice waking up to discover her adventures in Wonderland were “all a dream”; its episodic movements are dreamlike in that one episode melts into the other and has no necessary logical connection to the previous. Identities constantly shift: A baby turns into a pig; the Cheshire cat fades away into a grin. Because the logic of dreams, as the logic of

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Wonderland, is closed, internal, and self-referential, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland resists interpretations that attempt to “explain” the novel by connecting its elements to structures outside it, such as biographical, historical, psychoanalytic, or political interpretations. The story begins with Alice drowsing while her sister reads a boring book. Her attention is arrested by a white rabbit, whom she follows, only to fall down a rabbit hole, where she finds a world where nothing is like the world she left. When she eats and drinks the Wonderland foods, she changes drastically in size, becoming small as a mouse, then large as a house. When small, she finds her way into a garden, where she meets a caterpillar, rescues a baby from a mean duchess, attends a mad tea party, plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts, listens to a mock turtle’s life story, and attends the trial of the Knave of Hearts. When the angry subjects of the Queen rush at Alice, she awakens to find them to be only, in the real world, falling leaves. The novel is narrated in the third person, but with limited omniscience, allowing us to view Wonderland from Alice’s perspective. The creation of the Alice character (though it must be remembered that she is modelled after a real girl of the author’s acquaintance) is one of Carroll’s most stunning achievements. It is seen immediately in the opening paragraph, presenting her thoughts as she peers into a book her sister is reading, which bores her because it has no pictures or conversations. This is clearly a child’s perspective. Even Alice’s precipitous changes in size reflect the point of view of children who are given contradictory messages: that they are too big for some things and too little for others. Alice is the most fully realized of the characters in the book, all others being functionally flat. The flatness of the characters is essential to the humor of the book, particularly the slapstick elements, for the whimsy of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare dunking the Dormouse in a teapot is lost if we sympathize with him as a real character with feelings. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There · Carroll’s second novel is a sequel to the first, with the same main character. This time the “wonderland” is the looking-glass world, the world we see when we look in the mirror, a reverse image of our own world. As a photographer, needing to visualize a finished photograph from its negative image, Carroll had an intuitive understanding of the implications of a “reverse” world. The consciousness of his “abnormality” of being a lefthanded boy may also have played into the creation of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. In the opening chapter, Alice enters the looking-glass to find a house precisely the reverse of her own. She goes out into the garden, where she meets the Red Queen, then to the surrounding country where she encounters strange insects, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, Humpty Dumpty, the lion and the unicorn, and the White Knight. In chapter 9, Alice becomes queen, and she upsets the board of chess pieces in a transition from dream to waking precisely like that of the first Alice book. The transition is handled in two truncated chapters, one of fifty-nine words, in which Alice shakes the Red Queen, and one of only six words, in which the Red Queen turns out to be Alice’s kitten, and she is awake. The final chapter is an epilogue, in which Alice poses an unanswered question on the relation of dream to reality. Sylvie and Bruno · Carroll’s last two novels were not as successful commercially as the Alice books, and according to their earliest critics, they were unsuccessful artistically as well. Carroll continues to play with dream-reality in the Sylvie and Bruno

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books, but this time waking and dream realities are interlaced in alternating chapters. In place of Wonderland or the looking-glass world, Sylvie and Bruno puts forth “the eerie state,” in which one becomes aware of fairies. Thus, Sylvie and Bruno has two parallel plots: In the waking world, which Carroll’s introduction calls “the ordinary state,” there is a love triangle. The noble and selfless Dr. Arthur Forester loves Lady Muriel Orme but believes that she loves her cousin, Captain Eric Linden. The cousins, in fact, become engaged, but there is a grave religious impediment: Eric is not a Christian. The novel ends with Arthur accepting a medical post in India so as not to stand in Eric’s way. Simultaneously in the fairy or “eerie” realm parallel to the human one of Arthur, Eric, and Muriel, Sylvie and Bruno are innocent fairy children of the Warden of Outland. This plot is a version of the ancient myth and fairy-tale motif of the disguised god or king. The Warden temporarily abandons his rule in order to travel the kingdom disguised as a beggar. In his absence his wicked brother Sibimet conspires with his wife and selfish son Uggug to take over Outland. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded · In the sequel to Sylvie and Bruno, the interaction between the fairy realm of Outland and the human realm of Arthur and Muriel are more causally connected, as Sylvie and Bruno work “behind the scenes” to bring the true lovers together. Sylvie, in fact, appears to be the fairyland identity of Muriel. Through the invisible ministry of Sylvie and Bruno, Arthur and Muriel are married, but shortly after the wedding Arthur must go off to combat a plague in a nearby town. Muriel reads a false account of the death of Arthur in the plague, who, ironically, is rescued by Eric, who has come to accept the Christian faith and sees his assistance to a would-be rival as divinely directed. Meanwhile, the Warden (Arthur’s counterpart) returns to Outland, thwarts Sibimet (Eric’s counterpart), who repents, and regains his kingdom. Perhaps it is no surprise that the human characters in both Sylvie and Bruno books are the least believable. They are the hackneyed stock characters of sentimental romance, though no worse than others of the same genre. As in the Alice books, the title characters, Sylvie and Bruno, are the more remarkable creations, though readers may have difficulty with the cloying baby talk of the fairies and the effusive affection they lavish on one another. Sylvie and Bruno are emblems of childlike innocence, which Carroll also tried to capture in Alice and in his photography. John R. Holmes Other major works SHORT FICTION: “Bruno’s Revenge,” 1867. POETRY: Phantasmagoria, 1869; The Hunting of the Snark, 1876; Rhyme? and Reason?, 1883; Three Sunsets and Other Poems, 1898. NONFICTION: A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, 1860; An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, 1867; Euclid and His Modern Rivals, 1879; Twelve Months in a Curatorship, 1884; Three Years in a Curatorship, 1886; The Game of Logic, 1887; Curiosa Mathematica, Part I, 1888; Part II, 1893; Symbolic Logic, 1896. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A Tangled Tale, 1885; Sylvie and Bruno, 1889; Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893.

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Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views on Lewis Carroll. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Part of a standard series of literary essays, the selections are good but contain specialized studies that may not help the beginner. Bloom’s brief introduction is a good starting point in critically assessing Carroll. Cohen, Morton Norton. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995. A good, updated biography of Carroll. Fordyce, Rachel, ed. Lewis Carroll: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. An exhaustive annotated bibliography of primary and secondary material on Carroll. Gray, Donald J., ed. Alice in Wonderland. New York: Norton, 1992. This Norton Critical Edition is an ideal starting point for the beginner, not only because of the nearly two hundred pages of background and critical essays, but also because of the helpful annotations on the two Alice novels. Many of the best essays from other collections are reprinted here, making it a reference work of first resort. Guiliano, Edward, ed. Lewis Carroll: A Celebration. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1982. A collection of essays in honor of Carroll’s one hundred fiftieth birthday, this book is notable for two essays that restore the critical reputation of Sylvie and Bruno. Hudson, Derek. Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography. New York: New American Library, 1978. One of the best biographies available, offering a much-needed corrective to the spate of amateur psychological studies of Carroll’s life. Kelly, Richard Michael. Lewis Carroll. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A solid study of Carroll for the beginning student. Includes index and bibliographical references.

Angela Carter Angela Carter

Born: Eastbourne, Sussex, England; May 7, 1940 Died: London, England; February 16, 1992 Principal long fiction · Shadow Dance, 1966 (pb. in U.S. as Honeybuzzard, 1967); The Magic Toyshop, 1967; Several Perceptions, 1968; Heroes and Villains, 1969; Love, 1971, rev. 1987; The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972 (pb. in U.S. as The War of Dreams, 1974); The Passion of New Eve, 1977; Nights at the Circus, 1984; Wise Children, 1991. Other literary forms · Angela Carter is nearly as well known for her short fiction as she is for her novels. Her short-story collections include Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), Black Venus (1985; published in U.S. as Saints and Strangers, 1986), the highly praised The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which contains her transformations of well-known fairy tales into adult tales with erotic overtones, and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). She also wrote a number of fantastic stories for children, including Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (1970), The Donkey Prince (1970), and a translated adaptation of the works of Charles Perrault, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977). In 1978, she published her first book of nonfiction, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography, a feminist study of the Marquis de Sade that remains controversial among both literary and feminist critics. Other nonfiction essays have been published by British journals; Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982) is a collection of her journalistic pieces, and Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (1997) reprints other essays and reviews. She also cowrote, with Neil Jordan, the screenplay for the British film The Company of Wolves (1984), based on her short story of the same title. Achievements · With the publication of her first novels in the late 1960’s, Carter received wide recognition and acclaim in Great Britain for blending gothic and surreal elements with vivid portrayals of urban sufferers and survivors. She was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for The Magic Toyshop and the Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions. Critics have praised her wit, inventiveness, eccentric characters, descriptive wealth, and strongly sustained narrative while sometimes questioning her depth of purpose and suggesting a degree of pretentiousness. Her imaginative transformation of folkloric elements and examination of their mythic impact on sexual relationships began to be fully appreciated on the appearance of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, which received the Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award. Nights at the Circus, recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, helped to establish firmly for Carter a growing transatlantic reputation as an extravagant stylist of the Magical Realist school. Following her untimely death in 1992—which enabled her establishment in the syllabus of British universities traditionally reluctant to venerate living writers—Carter was immediately hailed as the most important English fantasist of her generation. Her critical writings, which add a robust and sometimes scathing rhetoric to the lucid prose of her fiction, also attracted new attention. 145

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Biography · Angela Carter (née Stalker) was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, England, on May 7, 1940. After working as a journalist from 1958 to 1961 in Croyden, Surrey, she attended Bristol University, from which she received a B.A. in English literature in 1965. While married to Paul Carter between 1960 and 1972 she traveled widely and lived for several years in Japan. From 1976 to 1978, she served as Arts Council of Great Britain Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She was a visiting professor at Brown University, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Iowa. She spent the last years of her life in London, living with Mark Pearce, the father of her son Alexander, who was born in 1983. She died of lung cancer in London on February 16, 1992. Analysis · The search for self and for autonomy is the underlying theme of most of Angela Carter’s fiction. Her protagonists, usually described as bored or in some other way detached from their lives, are thrust into an unknown landscape or enter on a picaresque journey in which they encounter representatives of a vast variety of human experience and suffering. These encountered characters are often grotesques or exaggerated parodies reminiscent of those found in the novels of Charles Dickens or such southern gothic writers as Flannery O’Connor. They also sometimes exhibit the animalistic or supernatural qualities of fairy-tale characters. The protagonists undergo a voluntary or, more often, forced submission to their own suppressed desires. By internalizing the insights gained through such submission and vicariously from the experiences of their antagonists and comrades or lovers, the protagonists are then able to garner some control over their own destinies. This narrative structure is borrowed from the classic folk- and fairy tales with which Carter has been closely associated. Carter does not merely retell such tales in modern dress; rather, she probes and twists the ancient stories to illuminate the underlying hierarchical structures of power and dominance, weakness and submission. In addition to the folkloric influence, Carter draws from a variety of other writers, most notably Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, the Marquis de Sade, and William Blake. The rather literal-minded innocent abroad in a nightmarish wonderland recalls both Alice and Gulliver, and Carter acknowledges, both directly and obliquely, her borrowings from Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). She was also influenced by the Swiftian tool of grotesque parody used in the service of satire. It is through Swiftian glasses that she read Sade. While deploring the depradations on the human condition committed by both the victims and victimizers in Sade’s writings, she interprets these as hyperbolic visions of the actual social situation, and she employs in her novels derivatively descriptive situations for their satiric shock value. Finally, the thematic concerns of Blake’s visionary poetry—the tension between the contrarieties of innocence and experience, rationality and desire—are integral to Carter’s outlook. The energy created by such tension creates the plane on which Carter’s protagonists can live most fully. In Blake’s words and in Carter’s novels, “Energy is Eternal Delight.” Although Carter’s landscapes range from London in the 1960’s (The Magic Toyshop, Several Perceptions, Love) to a postapocalyptic rural England (Heroes and Villains) or a sometime-in-the-future South America (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman), a United States whose social fabric is rapidly disintegrating (The Passion of New Eve), or London and Russia at the turn of the century (Nights at the Circus), certain symbolic motifs appear regularly in her novels. Carter is particularly intrigued by the possibilities of roses, wedding dresses, swans, wolves, tigers, bears, vampires, mirrors, tears,

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and vanilla ice cream. Menacing father figures, prostitute mothers, and a kaleidoscope of circus, fair, and Gypsy folk inhabit most of her landscapes. It is unfair, however, to reduce Carter’s novels to a formulaic mode. She juggles traditional and innovative elements with a sometimes dazzling dexterity and is inevitably a strong storyteller. The Magic Toyshop · At the opening of The Magic Toyshop, fifteen-year-old Melanie is entranced with her budding sexuality. She dresses up in her absent mother’s wedding gown to dance on the lawn in the moonlight. Overwhelmed by her awakening knowledge and the immensities of possibilities the night offers, she is terrified and climbs back into her room by the childhood route of the apple tree—shredding her mother’s gown in the process. Her return to childhood becomes catastrophic when a telegram arrives announcing the death of Melanie’s parents in a plane crash. Melanie, with her younger brother and sister, is thrust from a safe and comfortable existence into the constricted and terrifying London household of her Uncle Philip Flower, a toy maker of exquisite skill and sadistically warped sensibility. He is a domestic tyrant whose Irish wife, Margaret, was inexplicably struck dumb on her wedding day. The household is also inhabited by Margaret’s two younger brothers, Finn and Francie Jowle; the three siblings form a magic “circle of red people” which is alternately seductive and repulsive to Melanie. Uncle Philip is a creator of the mechanical. He is obsessed by his private puppet theater, his created world to which he enslaves the entire household. In aligning herself with the Jowle siblings, Melanie asserts her affirmation of life but becomes aware of the thwarted and devious avenues of survival open to the oppressed. The growing, but ambivalent, attraction between her and Finn is premature and manipulated by Uncle Philip. Even the love that holds the siblings together is underlined by a current of incest. Finn is driven to inciting his uncle to murder him in order to effect Philip’s damnation. The crisis arises when Uncle Philip casts Melanie as Leda in a puppet extravaganza. Her symbolic rape by the immense mechanical swan and Finn’s subsequent destruction of the puppet release an orgiastic, yet purifying, energy within the “circle of red people.” The ensuing wrath of Uncle Philip results in the conflagration and destruction of the house. Finn and Melanie are driven out, Adam-and-Eve-like, to face a new world “in a wild surmise.” In fairy-tale fashion, Melanie is threatened by an evil father figure, protected by the good mother, and rescued by the young hero. Even in this early novel, however, Carter skews and claws at the traditional fabric. The Jowle brothers, grimy, embittered, and twisted by their victimization at the hands of Philip Flower, are as dangerous as they are endangered. They are unable to effect their own freedom. Melanie’s submission to Uncle Philip’s swan catalyzes not only her own rescue but also, indeed, the release of the Jowle siblings. Melanie’s sacrifice breaks the magic spell that held the Jowles imprisoned. Several Perceptions · Several Perceptions, Carter’s third novel, depends less on such folkloric structure. In this novel, her evocation of the late 1960’s counterculture is so finely detailed that she manages to illuminate the thin line between the idealism and solipsism of that era, without denigrating the former or disguising the latter. The clarity of observation is achieved by viewing the culture through the eyes of Joseph Harker, a classic dropout. He has failed at the university, been dumped by his Jane Austen-reading lover, is disheartened by his job caring for dying old men, despises the contentment of his hippie peers, and, early in the novel, bungles a suicide attempt. Joseph, like his biblical namesake, is a dreamer of dreams: He dreams in the violent

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images of Vietnam atrocities, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, and assassinations. His schizophrenic perceptions are colored by shattered images from the books in his room, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Anne Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863), by memories of his grandfather, visions of his psychiatrist, the purring of his pregnant cat, Anne Blossom’s custard, and the vanilla ice-cream breasts of Mrs. Boulder. The novel narrates Joseph’s slow crawl back into the world of the living. Despite a tough-minded acknowledgment of the grubby and quite desolate lives of the characters, the novel is written with a gentle touch and ends on an affirmative note. The Christmas party that takes place at the end of the novel, in which Joseph symbolically reenters society, stands as a classic description of a hippie-generation party, just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s party stands as the image for the flapper generation. The connected-disconnected flow, the costumes, the easy sexuality, the simple goodwill, the silliness, and the sometimes inspired personal insights are vividly re-created. Carter wrote the novel as this lifestyle was being played out, and it is much to her credit that she succumbed neither to sentimentality nor to parody. Heroes and Villains, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and The Passion of New Eve · Parody and satire are, however, major elements in Carter’s three novels that are often classified as science fiction or science fantasy. In Heroes and Villains, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and The Passion of New Eve, Carter’s protagonists dwell in societies which are described in metaphysical iconography. Carter seems to be questioning the nature and values of received reality. Marianne’s world in Heroes and Villains is divided into high-technology enclaves containing Professors, the Soldiers who protect them, and the Workers who serve them. Outside the enclaves, in the semijungle/semicesspool wildernesses, dwell the tribes of nomadic Barbarians and the Out-people, freaks created by nature gone awry. Marianne, the daughter of a Professor, motivated mainly by boredom, escapes from her enclave with Jewel, a young Barbarian chieftain, during a raid. In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, the aging Desiderio narrates his heroic exploits as a young man when he saved his City during the Reality War. Doctor Hoffman besieges the City with mirages generated from his Desire Machines. Sent by the Minister of Determination to kill Doctor Hoffman, Desiderio is initiated into the wonders of desires made manifest, Nebulous Time, and the juggled samples of cracked and broken reality. His guide is Hoffman’s daughter, Albertina, who appears to Desiderio as an androgynous ambassador, a black swan, the young valet of a vampiric count, and finally as his one true love, the emanation of his whole desire. The United States in The Passion of New Eve is torn apart by racial, class, and sexual conflicts. Evelyn, a young British teacher, travels through this landscape and is re-created. The unconsciously exploitive and disinterestedly sadistic narrator suffers a wild revenge when captured by an Amazonlike community of women. He is castrated, resexed, raped, forcibly wed and mated, and ultimately torn from his wife’s love by a gang of murderous Puritanical boys. Each of these protagonists experiences love but only seems to be able to achieve wholeness through the destruction of the loved one. Symbolically, the protagonists seem to consume the otherness of the loved ones, reincorporating these manifest desires back into their whole beings. Each, however, is left alone at the end of the novel. Symbolic imagery of a harshly violent though rollicking nature threatens to overwhelm these three novels. The parody is at times wildly exaggerated and at times

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cuts very close to reality (for example, in The Passion of New Eve, the new Eve is incorporated into a polygamous family which closely resembles the Manson cult). Although some critics have decried Carter’s heavy reliance on fantasies, visions, and zany exuberance, it is probably these qualities that have appealed to a widening audience. It must also be given to Carter that, within her magical realms, she continues to probe and mock the repressive nature of institutionalized relationships and sexual politics. Nights at the Circus · With Nights at the Circus, Carter wove the diverse threads of her earlier novels into brilliantly realized tapestry. This novel has two protagonists— Fevvers, the Cockney Venus, a winged, six-foot, peroxide blonde aerialist, who was found “hatched out of a bloody great egg” on the steps of a benevolent whorehouse (her real name is Sophia) and Jack Walser, an American journalist compiling a series of interviews entitled “Great Humbugs of the World,” who joins Colonel Kearney’s circus, the Ludic Game, in order to follow Fevvers, and who is “Not hatched out, yet . . . his own shell don’t break, yet.” It is 1899, and a New World is about to break forth. The ambivalent, tenuous attraction between Fevvers and Walser is reminiscent of that between Melanie and Finn in The Magic Toyshop or Marianne and Jewel in Heroes and Villains, but it is now mature and more subtly complex. The picaresque journeyings from London to St. Petersburg and across the steppes of Russia recall the travels in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve but are more firmly grounded in historical landscapes. The magic in this novel comes in the blurring between fact and fiction, the intense unbelievability of actual reality and the seductive possibilities of imaginative and dreamlike visions. Are Fevvers’s wings real or contrived? Do the clowns hide behind their makeup and wigs or only become actualized when they don their disguises? As in most Magical Realist fiction, Carter is probing the lines between art and artifice, creation and generation, in a raucous and lush style. Here, after a long hiatus from the rather bleak apocalyptic visions of her 1970’s novels, in which autonomous selfhood is only achieved through a kind of self-cannibalization of destroyed love, Angela Carter envisions a route to self-affirmation that allows sexual love to exist. With shifting narrative focuses, Carter unfolds the rebirths of Walser and Fevvers through their own and each other’s eyes. Walser’s shells of consciousness are cracked as he becomes a “first-of-May” clown, the waltzing partner to a tigress, the Human Chicken, and, in losing consciousness, an apprentice shaman to a primitive Finno-Urgic tribe. As star of Kearney’s circus, Fevvers is the toast of European capitals: an impregnable, seductive freak, secure in and exploitive of her own singularity. On the interminable train trek through Siberia, she seems to mislay her magnificence and invulnerability. She becomes less a freak and more a woman, but she remains determined to hatch Walser into her New Man. As he had to forgo his socially conditioned consciousness in order to recognize Sophia, however, so she has to allow him to hatch himself. It is as confident seers that Sophia/Fevvers and Jack Walser love at the close of the novel. Wise Children · The fact that Carter produced only one novel during the last eight years of her life has more to do with the claims made on her time and attention by her son Alexander than the depredations of the cancer that killed her. This was a sore point—her much younger partner, Alexander’s father, did not keep promises he made to take primary responsibility for childcare—and some of that soreness is evident in

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the pages of the satirical comedy Wise Children, in which disowned and abandoned children are extravagantly featured. The story comprises a century-spanning memoir written by Dora Chance, one of the “lucky Chance” twins fathered—but swiftly disowned—by the Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard in advance of the first of his three marriages. Dora recalls that the identical Chance twins are indeed lucky, first by virtue of being informally adopted by Melchior’s more colorful but less successful fraternal twin Peregrine, and second by virtue of developing a career as dancers in music halls. (Music halls were Britain’s primary form of vulgar popular entertainment from the turn of the century to the end of World War II.) It subsequently transpires that Peregrine is the biological father of Melchior’s supposedly legitimate identical twin daughters by his first marriage, Saskia and Imogen. The paternity of the fraternal twins of Melchior’s third marriage, Gareth and Tristan, is never formally disputed, although Dora and her sister Nora cannot help but wonder why it is that one bears a far stronger physical resemblance to Peregrine. The intricate comparisons and contrasts drawn between the fortunes and pretensions of the legitimate Hazards and the illegitimate Chances mirror and embody the fortunes and pretensions of “legitimate” theater and the music-hall tradition, as both are swallowed up by new media—first by Hollywood films (the most hilarious chapter describes the brief reunion of the Chances with their father on the set of a chaotic film version of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and then by television. The contemporary events that surround Dora’s recollections involve the effects of television game-show host Tristan’s simultaneous sexual involvement with his much older half sister Saskia and the Chances’ protégé Tiffany (significantly nicknamed “Our Tiff”). The paradoxes of Melchior’s theatrical career are summed up by the juxtaposition of his eventual knighthood with his attachment to the cardboard crown that was the chief legacy he received from his father, also a redoubtable Shakespearean actor. Although Wise Children is far more sentimental than the bleakly dark fantasies Carter penned while her own marriage was failing in the early 1970’s, it is to some extent a revisitation of their themes. (The revised version of Love, which she prepared while struggling to find the time to write Wise Children, also softens the self-mutilatory aspects of the original, but only slightly.) What Carter’s final novel adds to her jaundiced view of family life, however, is the legacy of her midperiod preoccupation with the processes by which the substance of childhood dreams and unfathomable experiences can be transmuted into high and low art. Beneath the surface of its comic exuberance, Wise Children achieves considerable intensity in its celebration of theatrical magic and its accounts of the redemption of wounded personalities by spirited performances. Jane Anderson Jones, updated by Brian Stableford Other major works SHORT FICTION: Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, 1974; The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 1979; Black Venus, 1985 (pb. in U.S. as Saints and Strangers, 1986); American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, 1993; Burning Your Boats, 1995. SCREENPLAYS: The Company of Wolves, 1985 (with Neil Jordan); The Magic Toyshop, 1987. RADIO PLAYS: Vampirella, 1976; Come unto These Yellow Sands, 1979; The Company of

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Wolves, 1980; Puss in Boots, 1982; Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays, pb. 1985 (includes previous four plays). NONFICTION: The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography, 1978; Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings, 1982; Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, 1992; Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, 1997. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady, 1970; The Donkey Prince, 1970; Moonshadow, 1982. TRANSLATION: The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1977; Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, 1982 (translation and adaptation of Perrault’s tales). EDITED TEXTS: Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, 1986; The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, 1990 (pb. in U.S. as The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book). Bibliography Lee, Alison. Angela Carter. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. A good biographical and critical book-length study of Carter. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Palumbo, Donald, ed. Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic in Literature. London: Greenwood Press, 1986. A compilation of essays on feminist literature. The chapter by Brooks Landon looks at sexuality and the reversal of expectations in Carter’s novels, in particular Heroes and Villains. Discusses the feminist mythology of this novel and Carter’s confrontation of sexual stereotypes. Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Part of the Modern Novelists series, this book offers a good examination of Carter’s life and work. Punter, David. “Angela Carter: Supersessions of the Masculine.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 25 (Summer, 1984): 209-222. Describes Carter as charting the unconscious processes of Western society and addresses the sexual themes in her novels, such as the struggle between Eros and Thanatos in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Also includes some commentary on The Passion of New Eve and The Sadeian Woman. A thoughtful essay on Carter. Sage, Lorna, ed. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. A collection of thirteen essays on various aspects of Carter’s work, which comprise an intelligent and wide-ranging commentary. Smith, Joan. Introduction to Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings by Angela Carter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. A good essay on Carter’s critical work, linking her social commentary to major themes in her long fiction.

Joyce Cary Joyce Cary

Born: Londonderry, Ireland; December 7, 1888 Died: Oxford, England; March 29, 1957 Principal long fiction · Aissa Saved, 1932; An American Visitor, 1933; The African Witch, 1936; Castle Corner, 1938; Mister Johnson, 1939; Charley Is My Darling, 1940; A House of Children, 1941; Herself Surprised, 1941; To Be a Pilgrim, 1942; The Horse’s Mouth, 1944, 1957; The Moonlight, 1946; A Fearful Joy, 1949; Prisoner of Grace, 1952; Except the Lord, 1953; Not Honour More, 1955; The Captive and the Free, 1959 (Winnifred Davin, editor); Cock Jarvis, 1974 (A. G. Bishop, editor). Other literary forms · All of Joyce Cary’s short stories published under his own name are contained in Spring Song and Other Stories (1960, Winnifred Davin, editor). Ten early stories published under the pseudonym Thomas Joyce are not included. More than half a dozen of these stories, which deal with bohemian life in Paris, Cary sold to the Saturday Evening Post (1920) in order to support his serious writing. Cary’s self-admitted formula for these “potboilers” was a little sentiment, a little incident, and surprise. Cary also published three booklets of verse and many essays, the latter appearing in such places as Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and the Sunday Times. The most significant pieces of Cary’s occasional writing have been gathered by A. G. Bishop into a volume of Selected Essays (1976). This volume is of interest to the literary student because it includes some samples of Cary’s practical criticism and of his views on the theory and practice of writing, as well as interesting material about his background and political views. Art and Reality (1958) is a sequence of meditations on aesthetics that Cary composed for the 1956 Clark Lectures at Cambridge University but was too ill to deliver. Cary’s other nonfiction mainly articulates his views on the philosophy and practice of politics, concerning itself with such issues as history, imperialism, and war. These works include Power in Men (1939), The Case for African Freedom (1941; reprinted with other essays about Africa in 1962), Process of Real Freedom (1943), and Memoir of the Bobotes (1960). These works shed light upon Cary’s treatment of ethical and political issues in his fiction. A collection of Cary’s unpublished manuscripts, papers, letters, and diaries is in the possession of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Achievements · Cary’s major artistic achievements—Mister Johnson and the novels Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse’s Mouth composing a trilogy—are realistic books that reflect social, moral, and historical change as well as technical performances that embody the formal and linguistic innovations of literary modernism. This distinctive mixture of traditional realism and modernist style is Cary’s principal legacy as a novelist. Although he experiments with techniques such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, disrupted chronology, shifting point of view, and present-tense narration, he consistently rivets the action—past or present—to a particular historical and social context. The continuity of exterior events never completely disintegrates, though it is sometimes difficult to reconstruct. To be sure, the various novels offer the 152

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reader different perspectives and interpretations of social reality. The intention, however, is not to obscure that reality or to render it relative to the subjectivity of the narrator, but rather to layer it, to augment its texture. Cary’s perspective, therefore, is not nihilistic. His experiments in the trilogy form enhance the reader’s sense of dwelling in a shared or intersubjective reality, even though each novel in the series adroitly captures the idiosyncratic perspective of its first-person narrator. Cary refuses to endorse any sort of feckless relativism (he was repelled by the moral defeatism and philosophical pessimism of such post-World War I writers as Aldous Huxley) and yet manages to inc o r p o r a t e i n t o h i s w r iti n g th e innovations of modernism. His selfLibrary of Congress proclaimed comedy of freedom extends the range of traditional realism and offers new possibilities for the form of fiction. Recognition of Cary’s literary merit came only late in his life. Under the pseudonym Thomas Joyce, he published in the Saturday Evening Post several stories based on his youthful experiences of bohemian life in Paris, but he considered these efforts to be potboilers rather than serious pieces of fiction. The journal, in fact, rejected his subsequent stories for being too “literary.” Not unitl 1932, when Cary was forty-three, was his first novel, Aissa Saved, published. It was not a commercial success. He continued to produce novels, and finally, in 1941, after the publication of A House of Children, his seventh novel, he won his first literary award: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best British novel of the year. After this award, Cary’s reputation increased steadily. In 1950, The Adam International Review devoted a special issue to his work, and in 1953, Walter Allen’s seminal study of his work, Joyce Cary, appeared. Cary enjoyed a successful lecture tour in the United States (1951), and he was asked to deliver the 1956 Clark Lectures at Cambridge University. During his lifetime, he was praised by such prestigious critics as Allen, John Dover Wilson, and Barbara Hardy. Since his death in 1957, Cary scholarship has grown steadily. In 1963, Modern Fiction Studies devoted a special issue to his work, and there are numerous books, articles, and theses dealing with Cary’s achievements. Biography · Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was born in Londonderry, Ireland, on December 7, 1888. His ancestors had been Irish landlords since the early seventeenth century. The Arrears Act of 1882, however, plunged his grandfather into ruinous debt, and his father, Arthur Cary, a prospective civil engineer, moved the family to London shortly after Cary’s birth. There the nexus of traditional family life was Cromwell House, owned by Cary’s Uncle Tristam. Cary never lost contact with his Irish roots and the legacy of his family history, spending childhood vacations at his grandparents’

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cottages in Ireland and gaining familiarity with Devon, England, the point of his family’s origin. These settings, along with the familial stability and continuity they represented, were important to Cary’s fiction. Castle Corner deals with a half century of life in Ireland, England, and Africa, moving from the 1870’s to the brink of World War I; Charley Is My Darling deals with the World War II evacuation of thousands of London children to Devon; A House of Children is a poetical evocation of childhood based on Cary’s recollections of his Irish vacations; and The Moonlight and his two trilogies are set mainly in Devon. A tragic note entered Cary’s life when his mother died in 1898, and his sense of life’s miseries was compounded when his stepmother died five years later. His performance as a student at Hurstleigh and Clifton was average at best, though he did show interest in telling stories and writing poetry. In 1904, at the age of fifteen, he went on a sketching trip with his aunt to France, which was his first exposure to Impressionist painting. Two years later, he went to Paris as an art student and experienced bohemian life. He then went to Edinburgh for formal artistic training; at the age of twenty, he decided that he was not good enough to be a first-rate painter: Writing would be his vocation and painting his hobby. Verses by Arthur Cary, a decidedly mediocre effort, was published in 1908. These early experiences were later exploited in his fiction. The first fictional pieces he published were short stories which dealt with bohemian life in Paris, and The Horse’s Mouth, his portrait of the artist, not only draws some of its material from his life in Paris and Edinburgh but also bases its style on a literary approximation of Impressionism. Cary’s highly developed visual imagination is evident throughout his writings. In accordance with his choice of vocation, Cary went to Oxford University in 1909 to take a degree in law, intending to provide himself with an alternate career should his literary attempts fail. His fourth-class degree, however, the lowest one possible, debarred him from pursuing a gainful career in either the civil service or the field of education. In 1912, the Balkan War erupted, and Cary decided to go to the aid of Montenegro, Yugoslavia, feeling that the firsthand experience of war would offer a writer valuable material. Memoir of the Bobotes is a nonfictional account of his Montenegrin sojourn. He returned to England in 1913, entered the Nigerian service in 1914, and fought against the Germans in West Africa. In 1916, in England on leave from Nigeria, he married Gertrude Ogilvie, whom he had met in Oxford. He returned to Nigeria before the end of the year. Cary’s African years (1914-1919) had a formative influence on the shape of his fiction. Aissa Saved deals with the collision between Western religion and African paganism; An American Visitor explores the difference between the Western idealization of the noble savage and the African reality of tribal life; The African Witch reveals the prejudices of some Britons in Africa; Mister Johnson depicts the vibrantly imaginative existence of a young black clerk with “civilized” aspirations and his tragicomic relationship with District Officer Rudbeck; and Cock Jarvis dramatizes the experience of a “Joseph Conrad character in a Rudyard Kipling role,” a morally sensitive liberal whose paternalistic and imperialistic attitudes do not coincide with the historical situation in twentieth century Africa. Without his experience as an assistant district officer in Nigeria—a position which required him to work as a policeman, tax collector, judge, administrator, census taker, mapmaker, and road builder, not to mention someone capable of dealing tactfully with the mysteries of witchcraft and juju—Cary would not have developed the sympathetic imagination that allowed him to under-

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stand and record the African point of view with sensitivity and knowledge. Not surprisingly, his long residence in Africa put some strain on his marriage; his first two children, born in England during his absence, were virtual strangers to him. Despite occasional outbreaks of tempestuous disagreement, Cary and his wife shared a love that carried them through several adversities and the birth of three more children. Gertrude died in 1949. Cary’s ability to render vividly the perspectives of women is particularly evident in Herself Surprised, The Moonlight, A Fearful Joy, and Prisoner of Grace; in part, this ability derives from the depth and intensity of his relationship with his wife. In 1920, Cary returned to England, and he, his wife, and their two sons moved to a house in Oxford, where Cary lived until his death. After the publication of his first novel, Aissa Saved, in 1932, he produced novels at the impressive rate of almost one a year. His literary reputation increased steadily after he won the James Tait Memorial Prize in 1941. Analysis · The entirety of Joyce Cary’s fiction is, as the author himself suggests, about one world—the world of freedom, “the active creative freedom which maintains the world in being . . . the source of moral responsibility and of good and evil . . . of injustice and love, of a special comedy and a special tragic dilemma which can never be solved.” It is “a world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.” Cary sees human beings as condemned to be free and society as perpetually poised between the extremes of anarchy and totalitarianism. Because creative imagination is of the highest value, the individual must rebel against the forces that threaten to trammel or stultify the free expression of his imagination, whether the forces be those of the established church, the state, tribalism, nationalism, conventional morality, or whatever. Throughout his novels, Cary dramatizes the tension between the intuitive and the analytical, the imaginative and the conceptual, the concrete and the abstract, and the vital and the mechanical. Cary’s romanticism, however, is not naïve. He is acutely aware that the tension between freedom and authority is necessary, that the will to create is continually in conflict with the will to preserve. His first trilogy, for example, sympathetically portrays a survivalist, a conservative, and a rebel. Yet even radically different characters must enact their lives and secure their salvation or damnation in the moral world of freedom, imagination, and love. In Joyce Cary (1973), R. W. Noble conveniently divides Cary’s novels into five categories, according to their subject matter: Africa and empire; youth and childhood; women and social change; the artist and society; and politics and the individual. The novels of Africa and empire are substantial achievements but not major novels of the twentieth century, save for Mister Johnson. Cock Jarvis · Cock Jarvis, Cary’s first effort, was abandoned in 1937; it was published posthumously. The problem with the novel was that Cary could not construct a plot adequate to encompass the character of Cock Jarvis, for at this point Cary had not assimilated the modernist style. Without recourse to first-person narration or stream of consciousness, his eminently interesting character was locked into a melodramatic and conventional plot structure. Whether Jarvis was to murder his wife and her lover, forgive them, or commit suicide, Cary never decided; none of the resolutions would solve the essential problem, which is technical.

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Aissa Saved · Aissa Saved, with its seventy or more characters, has so many cultural conflicts, disconnected episodes, and thematic concerns that the aesthetic experience for the reader is congested and finally diffuse. Its analysis of the transforming powers of religious conversion, however, is penetrating and ironic. The juxtaposition of Aissa, an African convert who understands the sacrifice of Christ in a dangerously literal way and ingests Him as she would a lover, and Hilda, an English convert, is effective. Though the backgrounds of the two converts are divergent, they both end by participating in gruesome blood sacrifices. The novel as a whole, however, suffers from two problems. First, its central action, which revolves around attempts to end a devastating drought, cannot unify the manifold details of the plot: the cultural, religious, and military conflicts between Christians, pagans, and Muslims. Second, its tone is somewhat ambiguous. It is not clear whether the novel is meant to be an outright attack on missionaries and thus an ironic and cynical treatment of Aissa’s so-called salvation or a more moderate assessment of the transforming powers of religious conversion. An American Visitor · An American Visitor has more manageable intentions. The book effectively dramatizes the difference between practical and theoretical knowledge and concrete and abstract knowledge. The preconceptions of the American visitor, Marie Hasluck, are not experientially based and are contrasted with the practices of the local district officer, Monkey Bewsher, who strives to strike a balance between freedom and authority. Even though reality forces Marie to abandon some of her pseudoanthropological beliefs, utopianism is so much a part of her psychological complex that she turns to religious pacifism for compensation, a turning that has tragic consequences for the pragmatic, imaginative, and somewhat self-deluded officer. The African Witch · The African Witch is more panoramic in scope. It deals with the social, political, and religious life of both Europeans and Africans. The plot revolves around the election of a new emir: The Oxford-educated Aladai is pitted against Salé, a Muslim. Aladai’s Western demeanor offends many of the Europeans; they prefer Africans to be noble savages rather than liberal rationalists. In the end, the forces of juju and political corruption prevail. Aladai is rejected and chooses a self-sacrificial death, presumably abandoning his rationalism and lapsing into stereotype. The conclusion of the novel is not convincingly wrought. Castle Corner · Castle Corner is part of a projected trilogy or quartet of novels which Cary decided not to continue. Covering a half century of life in Ireland, England, and Africa, the novel moves from the 1870’s to the brink of World War I. Because of its congeries of characters and variety of themes, the book resists summary. In general, however, it puts the world of individual freedom and responsibility in collision with the world of historical change, but it has too much explicit debate and attitudinizing to be dramatically effective. Generally, Cary’s novels of Africa and empire are competent but not exceptional fiction. More materially than formally satisfying, they suffer finally from a lack of cohesion and unity; the form is not adequate to the content, which is rich and detailed. Nevertheless, these novels well delineate the everlasting conflict between new ideas and the old allegiances, the necessary tension between freedom and authority, reflecting Cary’s characteristic preoccupation with the struggle for imaginative freedom on a personal, moral, social, religious, and political level.

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Mister Johnson · Mister Johnson is an exceptional piece of fiction. The character from whom the novel takes its title, as Cary points out in the preface, is a young clerk who turns his life into a romance, a poet who creates for himself a glorious destiny. Johnson is a supreme embodiment of imaginative vitality and, as such, a prototype for the picaresque heroes in Cary’s later novels. Even though Johnson’s fate is ultimately tragic, his mind is full of active invention until the end. The novel occupies a pivotal moment in the dialectic of Cary’s art, for not only is the content exceptional—Mr. Johnson is an unforgettable character; his adventures indelibly impress themselves upon the reader—but also the innovative form is adequate to that content. In Mister Johnson, Cary deploys third-person, present-tense narration. He notes in the preface that he chose this style because it carries the reader unreflectingly on the stream of events, creating an agitated rather than a contemplative mood. Because Johnson lives in the present and is completely immersed in the vibrant immediacy of his experience, he does not judge. Nor does the reader judge, since the present-tense narration makes him swim gaily with Johnson on the surface of life. Cary’s choice of third-person narration, which he does not discuss in the preface, is equally strategic. The first-person style that he uses so effectively in some of his later novels would have been appropriate. By using the third-person style, he is able not only to give the African scene a solidity of local detail but also to enter into the mind of Rudbeck, so that the reader can empathize with his conscientious decision to shoot Johnson, a personal act, rather than hanging him, an official act. The impact of the tragic outcome is thereby intensified. The novel traces the rise and fall of Mr. Johnson, chief clerk of Fada in Nigeria. A southerner in northern Nigeria and an African in European clothes, he has aspirations to be civilized and claims to be a friend of District Officer Rudbeck, the Wazirin Fada, the King of England, and anyone who vaguely likes him. Johnson’s aspirations, however, are not in consonance with his finances, and his marriage, machinations, schemes, stories, parties, petty thefts, capital crime, and irrepressible good spirits become part of the exuberant but relentless rhythm of events that lead to his death. For Johnson, as Cary suggests, life is simply perpetual experience, which he soaks into himself through all five senses at once and produces again in the form of reflections, comments, songs, and jokes. His vitality is beyond good and evil, equally capable of expressing itself anarchistically or creatively. Rudbeck, too, is a man of imagination, though not as liberated from constraint as Johnson. His passion for road building becomes obsessive once Johnson’s imagination further fuels his own. He goes so far as to misappropriate funds in order to realize his dream. Without the infectious influence of Johnson’s creativity, Rudbeck would never have rebelled against the forces of conservatism. The completed road demonstrates the power of creative imagination. The road, however, brings crime as well as trade, and in his disillusionment, Rudbeck fires Johnson for embezzlement. In the end, Johnson murders a man and is sentenced to death by Rudbeck. Johnson wants his friend Rudbeck to kill him personally, and Rudbeck eventually complies with his clerk’s wish, putting his career as district officer in jeopardy by committing this compassionate but illegal act. Charley Is My Darling · After Mister Johnson, Cary chose domestic settings for his novels. His novels of youth and childhood, Charley Is My Darling and A House of Children, are set in Devon and Ireland. The former deals with the evacuation of

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thousands of London children to Devon during World War II; the latter is a poetical evocation of childhood vacations in Ireland. In Charley Is My Darling, the main character, Charley, like Mr. Johnson, is thrust into an alien world, and the urban values he represents are contrasted with the rural values represented by Lina Allchin, the well-intentioned supervisor of the evacuees. Charley, whose head is shaved as part of a delousing process, is isolated from his peers and consequently channels his imaginative energies into crime and ultimately into anarchistic destruction in order to gain acceptability. Because neither school nor society offers him any outlet for his creative individuality, it expresses itself in violence, an expression which is perhaps a microcosmic commentary on the causes of war. A House of Children · A House of Children is autobiographical. Technically innovative, it has no omniscient point of view and relies instead on one central consciousness, which narrates the story in the first person. This was to become Cary’s characteristic narrative style. The novel has a poetic rather than a linear coherence, depending on a series of revelations or epiphanies rather than on plot. Cary obviously learned a great deal from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which he had read in Africa. The Moonlight and A Fearful Joy · The Moonlight and A Fearful Joy are two novels about women and social change. The former, a response to Leo Tolstoy’s interpretation of women in The Kreutzer Sonata (1890), deals with the familiar theme of law and order versus personal freedom; Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” represents romantic love and womanhood. The latter chronicles Tabitha Baskett’s life from 1890 to 1948 and is set in southeast England and the Midlands. The roguish Bonser, one of her paramours, is a memorable character. These novels were followed by Cary’s masterpiece, a trilogy that focuses on the artist and society. Cary designed the trilogy, he said, to show three characters, not only in themselves but also as seen by one another, the object being to get a three-dimensional depth and force of character. Each novel adapts its style to the perceptual, emotive, and cognitive idiosyncrasies of its first-person narrator. Herself Surprised, the narrative of Sara Monday, is reminiscent of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), and its autobiographical style is ideally suited to dramatize the ironic disparity between Sara’s conventional moral attitudes and her “surprising,” unconventional behavior. To Be a Pilgrim, the narrative of Tom Wilcher, is akin to a Victorian memoir, and the formal politeness of its language reflects the repressed and conservative nature of its narrator. The Horse’s Mouth, the narrative of Gulley Jimson, uses stream of consciousness and verbally imitates the Impressionist style of painting, an imitation which strikingly reveals the dazzling power of Gulley’s visual imagination. The entire trilogy is a virtuoso performance, underscoring Cary’s talent for rendering characters from the inside. Herself Surprised · Sara Monday is the eternal female—wife, mother, homemaker, mistress, and friend. In accordance with her working-class position as a cook, she consistently describes her world in domestic images and metaphors—the sky for her is as warm as new milk and as still as water in a goldfish bowl. Her desire to improve her socioeconomic lot is a major motivating factor in her life, and this desire often encourages her to operate outside the bounds of morality and law. Sara, however, is

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not a moral revolutionary; her values mirror her Victorian education. In her terms, she is constantly “sinning” and constantly “surprised” by sin, but in terms of the reader’s understanding of her, she is a lively and sensuous being with an unconscious genius for survival who succumbs, sometimes profitably, sometimes disastrously, to immediate temptation. Her language of sin, which is vital and concrete, belies her language of repentance, which is mechanical and abstract. Nevertheless, Sara, unlike Moll Flanders, does not seem to be a conscious opportunist and manipulator. Sara betters her socioeconomic status by securing a middle-class marriage to Matthew Monday. The marriage, however, does not prevent her from having affairs with Hickson, a millionaire, and Jimson, an artist. (The narrative description of these “surprises” is exquisitely managed.) Though she sincerely believes in conventional morality, that morality is no match for her joy of life. Cary also shows the negative aspects of Sara’s mode of being. Like other characters in his fiction, she is a creative being whose imaginative vitality borders on the anarchistic and irresponsible. She virtually ruins her first husband and makes little effort to keep contact with her four daughters. After her violent relationship with Gulley Jimson, Sara becomes a cook for the lawyer Wilcher and is about to marry him when his niece has Sara jailed for theft. She had been stealing in order to purchase art supplies for Gulley and to pay for his son’s education. Her will to live is thus an implicit critique of the conventional morality that her conscious mind mechanically endorses. She is a survivalist par excellence. To Be a Pilgrim · Unlike the events in Herself Surprised, those in To Be a Pilgrim are not presented chronologically. The narrative is layered, juxtaposing Wilcher’s present situation of imminent death with the social, political, and religious history of his times. The disrupted chronology poignantly accentuates Wilcher’s realization, which comes too late, that he ought to have been a pilgrim, that possessions have been his curse. Now his repressed energies can only counterproductively express themselves in exhibitionism and arson. Marriage to Sara Monday, which might have been a redemptive force in his life, is now impossible, for she has already been incarcerated for her crimes. In the present time of the novel, Wilcher is a virtual prisoner at Tolbrook Manor, the family home. His niece Ann, a doctor and the daughter of his dead brother Edward, a liberal politician whose life Wilcher tried to manage, is his warden. She marries her cousin Robert, a progressive farmer devoted to the utilitarian goal of making the historic manor a viable commercial enterprise, much to Wilcher’s chagrin. Ultimately, Wilcher is forced to recognize that change is the essence of life and that his conservative fixation with tradition, the family, and moral propriety has sapped him of his existential energy, of his ability to be a pilgrim. The Horse’s Mouth · The Horse’s Mouth, a portrait of the artist as an old man, is justly celebrated as Cary’s most remarkable achievement. (Although the Carfax edition of Cary’s novels is complete and authoritative, the revised Rainbird edition of The Horse’s Mouth, 1957, illustrated by the author, includes a chapter—“The Old Strife at Plant’s”— which Cary had previously deleted.) Its reputation has been enhanced by the excellent film version in which Alec Guiness plays the role of Gulley Jimson. Gulley Jimson is a pilgrim; he accepts the necessity of the fall into freedom with joy and energy, conceiving of it as a challenge to his imagination and thereby seeking to impose aesthetic order on experiential chaos. For Gulley, anything that is part of

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the grimy reality of the contingent world—fried-fish shops, straw, chicken boxes, dirt, oil, mud—can inspire a painting. The Impressionist style of his narrative reflects his vocation, for he mainly construes his world in terms of physical imagery, texture, solidity, perspective, color, shape, and line, merging Blakean vision with Joycean stream of consciousness. Gulley’s sensibility is perpetually open to novelty, and his life affirms the existential value of becoming, for he identifies with the creative process rather than with the finished product. His energies focus on the future, on starting new works, not on dwelling on past accomplishments. Even though he is destitute, he refuses to paint in the lucrative style of his Sara Monday period. Gulley is also a born con artist, a streetwise survivor. He is not adverse to stealing, cheating, swindling, blackmailing, or even murdering if his imaginative self-expression is at stake. He is completely comfortable in a brutal, violent, and unjust world. His vision, therefore, has limitations. His pushing Sara down the stairs to her death shows the anarchistic irresponsibility implicit in regarding life as merely spiritual fodder for the imagination. Moreover, Gulley lacks historical consciousness. Even though the novel chronicles his life before and after the beginning of World War II, Gulley seems to have no conception of who Adolf Hitler is and what he represents. For the most part, this novel clearly champions the creative individual and criticizes the repressive society that inhibits him, although Cary is always fairminded enough to imply the limitations of his characters. Gulley Jimson remains a paradigm of energetic vitality, an imaginative visionary who blasts through generation to regeneration, redeeming the poverty of the contingent world and liberating consciousness from the malady of the quotidian. The entire trilogy is a masterpiece; the created worlds of the three narrators mutually supplement and criticize one another, stressing the difficulty of achieving a workable balance between the will to survive, to preserve, and to create. Prisoner of Grace · Cary’s second trilogy—Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, and Not Honour More—deals with politics and the individual. It is a commentary on radical liberalism, evangelicalism, and crypto-Fascism, moving from the 1860’s to the 1930’s and involving the lives of three characters (Nina Nimmo/Latter, Chester Nimmo, and Jim Latter) whose lives are inextricably enmeshed, unlike those of the characters of the first trilogy. In Prisoner of Grace, Nina Nimmo (Nina Latter by the end of her narrative) tries to protect and defend both her lovers: the radical liberal politician Nimmo, maligned for his alleged opportunism and demagoguery, and the crypto-Fascist Latter, a military man obsessed by a perverted notion of honor. The time span of the novel covers the Boer War, the Edwardian reform government, the World War I victory, the prosperous aftermath, and the 1926 General Strike. The action takes place mainly in Devon, where Chester Nimmo makes his mark as a politician and becomes a member of Parliament, and in London, where Nimmo eventually becomes a cabinet minister. Nina, carrying the child of her cousin Jim Latter, marries the lower-class Chester Nimmo, who is handsomely remunerated for rescuing the fallen woman in order to secure a respectable future for the child. Nina never loves Nimmo but is converted to his cause by his political and religious rhetoric. She writes her account in order to anticipate and rebut criticism of his conduct. Thrust into the duplicitous and morally ambiguous world of politics, she succumbs both to Chester’s ideals, values, morals, and beliefs and to his lusts, lies, schemes, and maneuverings, seemingly incapable of distinguishing the one from the other, as is the

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reader, since he can only rely on Nina’s unreliable account. Unlike the disingenuousness of Sara Monday in Herself Surprised, which the reader can easily disentangle— Sara’s sensuous vitality gives the lie to the maxims of conventional piety she mechanically utters—Nina’s disingenuousness is a fundamental part of her character. Nina, like Chester, is both sincere and hypocritical, genuinely moral and meretriciously rhetorical, an embodiment of the political personality. Even the politics of their marriage parallel in miniature the politics of the outside world. Nina is a prisoner of grace once she has converted to the belief that Chester’s being is infused with grace and that his religious and political beliefs enjoy moral rectitude by definition. Her love for Jim is also a grace that imprisons her and ultimately impels her to divorce Chester and marry Jim. The reader, too, is a prisoner of grace, since he cannot get outside of Nina’s “political” point of view and thus cannot separate truth and falsity, the authorial implication being that the two are necessarily confused and interdependent in the political personality. Like Sara, Nina is a survivalist, and after she becomes adulterously involved with Nimmo, she, like Sara, is murdered by a man whom she had helped. Survivalism has limits. Except the Lord · Except the Lord, the story of Nimmo’s childhood and youth, takes place in the 1860’s and 1870’s. It is the history of a boy’s mind and soul rather than one of political events. Like To Be a Pilgrim, it takes the form of a Victorian memoir in which the mature narrator explores the events and forces that caused him to become what he is. Nurtured in an environment of poverty, fundamentalist faith, and familial love, Nimmo becomes in turn a radical preacher, labor agitator, and liberal politician. According to the first verse of Psalm 127, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that would build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” Since this novel stops before the events of Prisoner of Grace and Not Honour More begin, and since it principally induces a sympathetic response to Nimmo, the reader has a difficult time interpreting the significance of the title. He tends to see Nimmo differently after having read the account of the latter’s youth, but he is still uncertain whether Nimmo is a knight of faith or an opportunistic antinomian. The trilogy as a whole seems to suggest that Chester is both. Not Honour More · Not Honour More is the story of a soldier, Jim Latter, who sees the world in dichotomous terms and cannot accept the necessarily ambiguous transaction between the realms of freedom and authority. The novel is a policewoman’s transcript of Jim’s confession; it is dictated as he awaits execution for the murder of Nina, provoked by his discovery of her adulterous relationship with Nimmo, her exhusband. His language is a combination of clipped military prose, hysterical defensiveness, and invective against both the decadence of British society around the time of the 1926 General Strike and the corruption of politicians such as Nimmo. Latter believes in authority, in imposing law and order on the masses. He has no sense of the moral ambiguity of human behavior, no sense of the complexity of human motivation. A self-proclaimed spiritual descendent of the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace, Jim believes that his murder of Nina proves that he loves honor more. He conceives of the murder as an execution, a moral act, whereas it is in reality a perversion of honor, a parody of the code that Lovelace represents. District Officer Rudbeck, of Mister Johnson, is by comparison a truly honorable man: He personalizes rather than ritualizes Mr. Johnson’s death. Because Jim believes in the rectitude of

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authoritarians with superior gifts, he is a crypto-Fascist. The best that can be said of him is that he has the courage of his misplaced convictions. Throughout his novels, Cary focused his creative energies on human beings who are condemned to be free, to enact their lives somewhere between the extremes of anarchism and conformity. His achievement demonstrates that it is possible for a novelist to be at once stylistically sophisticated, realistically oriented, and ethically involved. Greig E. Henderson Other major works SHORT FICTION: Spring Song and Other Stories, 1960 (Winnifred Davin, editor). POETRY: Verses by Arthur Cary, 1908; Marching Soldier, 1945; The Drunken Sailor, 1947. NONFICTION: Power in Men, 1939; The Case for African Freedom, 1941, 1962; Process of Real Freedom, 1943; Britain and West Africa, 1946; Art and Reality, 1958; Memoir of the Bobotes, 1960; Selected Essays, 1976 (A. G. Bishop, editor). Bibliography Adams, Hazard. Joyce Cary’s Trilogies: Pursuit of the Particular Real. Tallahassee, Fla.: University Presses of Florida, 1983. Adams attempts to rescue Cary from what he views as misplaced critical emphasis by focusing on the particularity of Cary’s two trilogies. Whereas, he says, earlier critics have attempted to interpret Cary’s fiction by using the abstract ideas found in his nonfiction as a guide, Adams saves his theorizing until the last chapter. The book also includes two appendixes devoted to chronologies of the trilogies. Echeruo, Michael J. Joyce Cary and the Novel of Africa. London: Longman, 1973. Echeruo places Cary’s African novels in the tradition of the foreign novel and argues that they have a special place in this genre. Provides new insights into the growth of Cary’s art as well as valuable criticism of Cary’s African novels. Foster, Malcolm. Joyce Cary: A Biography. London: Michael Joseph, 1969. Written in four parts, this is an exhaustive and informative study of Cary; Foster had access to the Cary collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. Critical discussion of each novel is brief and incomplete; however, Foster offers some new insights into Cary’s novels. Hall, Dennis. Joyce Cary: A Reappraisal. London: Macmillan, 1983. Makes the point that there are two Carys: one the thinker and the other the artist. This full-length study discusses all of Cary’s novels with conscientious thoroughness. Hall is sympathetic to Cary, but notes the unevenness of his work and concludes that Cary is “his own worst enemy.” Contains a helpful bibliography for the Cary scholar. Levitt, Annette S. The Intertextuality of Joyce Cary’s “The Horse’s Mouth.” Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1993. A thorough examination of Cary’s novel. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Majumdar, Bimalendu. Joyce Cary: An Existentialist Approach. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982. A scholarly study of Cary devoted to critical appraisal of his work. Majumdar focuses on the central existential theme in Cary’s novels: the uniqueness of the individual who “refuses to fit into some system constructed by rational thought.” O’Brien, Colin Joseph. Art and Reality in the Novels of Joyce Cary. New Delhi: Commonwealth, 1990. An excellent critical study of Cary. Includes bibliographical references.

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Roby, Kinley E. Joyce Cary. Boston: Twayne, 1984. After providing an overview of Cary’s biography, this brief volume surveys Cary’s fiction, all of which, Roby declares, is concerned with the “unchangeable changeableness of life.” Roby also gives glancing attention to Cary’s literary criticism and journalism. The book includes a chronology and a selected bibliography.

G. K. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton

Born: London, England; May 29, 1874 Died: Beaconsfield, England; June 14, 1936 Principal long fiction · The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904; The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, 1908; The Ball and the Cross, 1909; Manalive, 1912; The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914; The Flying Inn, 1914; The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926; The Return of Don Quixote, 1927; The Secret of Father Brown, 1927; The Floating Admiral, 1931 (with others); The Scandal of Father Brown, 1935. Other literary forms · G. K. Chesterton was a prolific writer, and besides novels he produced works in numerous other genres. Throughout his life he wrote poetry; his first two published books were poetical works. He also produced short fiction, especially detective stories. In addition he wrote plays, but he was not always comfortable in this medium since he was at heart an essayist. He published a large number of nonfiction works in such areas as autobiography, biography, essays, history, and literary criticism. Achievements · Among the primary achievements of Chesterton’s long writing career are the wide range of subjects written about, the large number of genres employed, and the sheer volume of publications produced. Chesterton was primarily a journalist and essayist who wrote articles, book reviews, and essays for newspapers and periodicals. Yet he also wrote poetry, biographies, plays, history, and literary criticism as well as novels and short stories. In his approach to fiction Chesterton rejected the “modern realistic short story” and the realistic novel. Instead, in the first instance, he turned to the detective short story and wrote extensively on its legitimacy as a literary art form. Chesterton himself helped to develop the definition of the detective story; he contended that it was the sole popular literary structure expressing “some sense of the poetry of modern life,” and he popularized detective fiction in his fifty-one Father Brown stories and short novels. As a novelist, Chesterton argued that “sensational novels are the most moral part of modern fiction.” He liked tales about death, secret groups, theft, adventure, and fantasy. There was no genre in his day that embraced his ideas and so he crafted his own literary structure, the “fantastic novel.” In his novels Chesterton stressed such themes and issues as family, science versus religion, moral and political integrity, and local patriotism versus empire building. There are also subthemes such as the common man, nature, and womanhood. Above all, Chesterton’s novels illustrate his “love of ideas.” Biography · Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s family was middle class. His father, Edward, was an estate agent who liked literature and art, and his mother, Marie, was the daughter of a Wesleyan lay preacher. Both parents were Unitarians but baptized their son in the Anglican Church. Chesterton attended the Colet Court Preparation school and then in 1887 went to St. Paul’s School. His academic record was not good, but 164

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he finally began to demonstrate literary capability as a member of the Junior Debating Club, which he and some of his fellow students established during the summer of 1890. Two years later he won the Milton Prize for his poem “St. Francis Xavier.” Between 1892 and 1895 he attended the Slade School to study art and took some courses in French, English, and Latin at University College, London. However, except for English, he did not do well, and he left the Slade School in 1895 without taking a degree. For the next six years he worked in publishing houses reading authors’ manuscripts, and at night he did his own writing. In 1900 his first two books appeared, Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen—Rhymes and Sketches and The Wild Knight and Other Poems, both works of poetry. The next year he began to submit articles regularly to the Speaker and the Daily News and thus started a career as a journalist that was to last until his death. He became known for his opposition to the Boer War and his support of small nations. In 1901 Chesterton married Frances Blogg after a courtship of five years. The

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couple lived first in London, and then in 1909 they moved to Beaconsfield, forty miles outside London. They had no offspring, but they enjoyed the company of the children of their friends, relatives, and neighbors. In 1904 Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published, and by 1914 he had written five more novels and numerous other works, including biographies (Robert Browning, 1903, and Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 1906) as well as Heretics (1905), which criticized what he saw as the mistakes of some contemporary writers, Orthodoxy (1908), a defense and support of Christianity, and a study of his friend and disputant, George Bernard Shaw (1909). In 1911 the first of his volumes of detective stories appeared, featuring a Catholic priest, Father Brown, as the sleuth. Chesterton wrote his best work prior to 1914; in November of that year he became gravely ill with a form of dropsy, and it was not until June that he recovered. During the years after World War I, he traveled, visiting Palestine, the United States, Poland, and Italy. In 1922 he became a Roman Catholic, a faith which had attracted him for some time, as is reflected in his writing. The most notable works of his later years are The Everlasting Man (1925) and another biography, St. Thomas Aquinas (1933). Chesterton’s health declined during the first half of 1936, and on June 14 he died in Beaconsfield. Analysis · Between 1904 and 1927 G. K. Chesterton wrote six full-length novels (not including the long Father Brown mysteries). All of them stressed the sensational, and they illustrated life as a fight and a battle. Chesterton thought that literature should portray life as perilous rather than as something listless. Tales of death, robbery, and secret groups interested him, and he did not think that what he called the “tea table twaddle” type of novels approached the status of significant art. The sensational story “was the moral part of fiction.” Fantasy was an important part of Chesterton’s novels, and the methodology used in his long fiction emphasized adventure, suspense, fantasy, characterization, satire, narrative technique, and humor. He needed a medium to employ these techniques, so he produced the “fantastic novel.” Fanstasy also involves ideas, and in all Chesterton’s novels ideas are a central, indispensable feature. Chesterton’s novels served as a vehicle for the dissemination of whatever were his political and social ideas at the time, and to this extent they were propagandistic. His critics have had difficulty in deciding the merits of his various writings in terms of separating propaganda from literary art. Often he used allegory as a device for conveying his controversial ideas. Critic Ian Boyd calls Chesterton’s long fiction “political fables, parables, and allegories or more simply and conveniently . . . novels.” In Chesterton’s novels, the state of bachelorhood predominates; this situation is appropriate, since this status is a fundamental element of adventure. Moreover, women rarely appear in any significant roles in his long fiction. There is no female character in his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, while the woman in The Man Who Was Thursday is a passing character. In The Ball and the Cross and The Flying Inn, women are minor figures, but they do play significant roles in Manalive and The Return of Don Quixote, works that are more involved with the family and society. The weakest of Chesterton’s nondetective novels are perhaps Manalive, published in 1912, and The Return of Don Quixote, which appeared in 1927. In The Return of Don Quixote, Chesterton concludes that the only good future for England involves “a remarriage” of the country with the Catholic Church, as was the case in the Middle

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Ages. The first three of Chesterton’s novels, published between 1904 and 1909, are widely considered his best. The Napoleon of Notting Hill · The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton’s first novel. The first two chapters are distinct from the main plot, the first being an essay on prophecy showing the author working in a genre that was always congenial to him. The next chapter concerns a luncheon discussion between three government clerks and the former president of Nicaragua, Juan del Fuego. The content of their talk brings out one of the main themes of the novel, “the sanctity of small nations,” a concept dear to Chesterton that stemmed from his opposition to the Boer War. The subsequent death of del Fuego eliminates him from the work, but one of the three clerks, Auberon Quin, a zany individual and joker, is subsequently selected king in the futuristic utopian England of 1984, where a mild political despotism exists. The monarch is chosen by lot. Once crowned as king, Quin reorganizes the sections of London into separate municipalities and thus re-creates the smallness of medieval cities, complete with costumes and heraldry. Quin then encounters Adam Wayne, first as a youth and then as the serious-minded provost of Notting Hill, one of the municipalities; Wayne has embraced the king’s “Charter of Cities” wholeheartedly. Wayne, however, much to the dismay of the provosts of other London municipalities, refuses to give up a street in his domain, Pump Street, which contains several shops, so that a thoroughfare connecting three boroughs can be built. The result is a war, which Wayne wins by encouraging the patriotism of Pump Street residents and by following excellent strategy, despite being outnumbered by the opposing forces. Quin with his “Charter of Cities” and Wayne in his defense of Notting Hill both illustrate Chesterton’s small-nation theme. The concluding chapters of the novel concern London twenty years later when the powerful and dominant Notting Hill has become corrupt; the corruption causes a revolt of subject municipalities. Wayne fights in the second war but realizes that there is no longer a noble cause involved. Conflict in the novel lies in the confrontation between Wayne and Quin, the fanatic and the joker. Wayne’s opponents had accused him of being mad, but Quin asserts that the only sane individuals are himself and Wayne. The last chapter is a discussion between the two men, now dead and in the afterlife, in which Wayne argues that in order to be complete both men needed each other since the joker was without seriousness and the fanatic lacked laughter. The Man Who Was Thursday · Chesterton’s second novel, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, has been described by some critics as his best. Ronald Knox called it “an extraordinary book written as if the publisher had commissioned him to write something rather like the Pilgrim’s Progress in the style of the Pickwick Papers.” Chesterton himself called it a protest against the pessimism of the 1880’s, and this protest gives rise to one of two allegories in the novel, a personal one. The other is a public or political allegory concerning an individual’s clash with a world conspiracy that does not really exist. The story concerns a young poet, Gabriel Syme, who, wishing to fight a gigantic conspiracy supposedly being plotted by anarchists, joins the police and becomes a member of an undercover squad of detectives. As a result of a bit of trickery and luck, he becomes a member of the top anarchist council, called the Council of Seven Days because each member has the name of a day of the week. Syme’s name is Thursday. The council’s leader, named Sunday, is an ambiguous figure. While working to stop a bombing planned for Paris, Thursday

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discovers that, except for Sunday, all his fellow council members are undercover police detectives. Each had been interviewed by a figure whom nobody saw in a dark room at Scotland Yard. By the conclusion of the novel, it is revealed that Sunday is both the head of the detectives and the leader of the anarchists. Some critics seem to think that Chesterton is condoning evil in the novel, but as he later asserted, he is attempting to discover if everything is evil and whether one can find good in the pessimism of the age. The Ball and the Cross · A review published a year after the publication of The Ball and the Cross stated that the novel was about two individuals dueling over “the most vital problem in the world, the truth of Christianity.” This work definitely deals with religion and the nature of good and evil, subjects either ignored or ambiguously dealt with in Chesterton’s first two novels. The book opens with Professor Lucifer depositing a captured Bulgarian monk, Michael, from a flying machine atop the cross and ball of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The plot continues with a confrontation between a Catholic highland Scot, Evan McIan, and another Scot, John Turnbull, an atheist and publisher of works on atheism. The two fight a duel over what McIan perceives as an insult to the Virgin Mary. The duelists are constantly interrupted, however; they go through a series of adventures and ultimately become friends. The book ends with the two men in an insane asylum, which is set on fire by a satanic figure. The inmates are led out by the monk, Michael, who had been a prisoner there. Ultimately Turnbull becomes a Christian. The novel contains much symbolism and many allegories. The ball on St. Paul’s dome, for example, is the rational and independent world, while the cross represents religion. Martin Gardner views the work as reflecting the clash between St. Augustine’s City of God, which in Chesterton’s view is the Catholic Church, and the City of Man, which is dominated by Satan. The novel also attacks modern science and accuses modern culture of being “luke warm.” Allan Nelson Other major works NONFICTION: The Defendant, 1901; Twelve Types, 1902 (revised as Varied Types, 1903, and also known as Simplicity and Tolstoy); Thomas Carlyle, 1902; Robert Louis Stevenson, 1902 (with W. Robertson Nicoll); Leo Tolstoy, 1903 (with G. H. Perris and Edward Garnett); Charles Dickens, 1903 (with F. G. Kitton); Robert Browning, 1903; Tennyson, 1903 (with Richard Garnett); Thackeray, 1903 (with Lewis Melville); G. F. Watts, 1904; Heretics, 1905; Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 1906; All Things Considered, 1908; Orthodoxy, 1908; George Bernard Shaw, 1909, rev. ed. 1935; Tremendous Trifles, 1909; What’s Wrong with the World, 1910; Alarms and Discursions, 1910; William Blake, 1910; The Ultimate Lie, 1910; Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, 1911; A Defence of Nonsense and Other Essays, 1911; The Future of Religion: Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s Reply to Mr. Bernard Shaw, 1911; The Conversion of an Anarchist, 1912; A Miscellany of Men, 1912; The Victorian Age in Literature, 1913; Thoughts from Chesterton, 1913; The Barbarism of Berlin, 1914; London, 1914 (with Alvin Langdon Coburn); Prussian Versus Belgian Culture, 1914; The Crimes of England, 1915; Letters to an Old Garibaldian, 1915; The So-Called Belgian Bargain, 1915; Divorce Versus Democracy, 1916; Temperance and the Great Alliance, 1916; A Shilling for My Thoughts, 1916; Lord Kitchener, 1917; A Short History of England, 1917; Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, 1917; How to Help Annexation, 1918;

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Irish Impressions, 1920; The Superstition of Divorce, 1920; Charles Dickens Fifty Years After, 1920; The Uses of Diversity, 1920; The New Jerusalem, 1920; Eugenics and Other Evils, 1922; What I Saw in America, 1922; Fancies Versus Fads, 1923; St. Francis of Assisi, 1923; The End of the Roman Road: A Pageant of Wayfarers, 1924; The Superstitions of the Sceptic, 1924; The Everlasting Man, 1925; William Cobbett, 1925; The Outline of Sanity, 1926; The Catholic Church and Conversion, 1926; A Gleaming Cohort, Being from the Words of G. K. Chesterton, 1926; Social Reform Versus Birth Control, 1927; Culture and the Coming Peril, 1927; Robert Louis Stevenson, 1927; Generally Speaking, 1928 (essays); Do We Agree? A Debate, 1928 (with George Bernard Shaw); The Thing, 1929; G. K. C. as M. C., Being a Collection of Thirty-seven Introductions, 1929; The Resurrection of Rome, 1930; Come to Think of It, 1930; The Turkey and the Turk, 1930; At the Sign of the World’s End, 1930; Is There a Return to Religion?, 1931 (with E. Haldeman-Julius); All Is Grist, 1931; Chaucer, 1932; Sidelights on New London and Newer York and Other Essays, 1932; Christendom in Dublin, 1932; All I Survey, 1933; St. Thomas Aquinas, 1933; G. K. Chesterton, 1933 (also known as Running After One’s Hat and Other Whimsies); Avowals and Denials, 1934; The Well and the Shallows, 1935; Explaining the English, 1935; As I Was Saying, 1936; Autobiography, 1936; The Man Who Was Chesterton, 1937; The End of the Armistice, 1940; The Common Man, 1950; The Glass Walking-Stick and Other Essays from the “Illustrated London News,” 1905-1936, 1955; Lunacy and Letters, 1958; Where All Roads Lead, 1961; The Man Who Was Orthodox: A Selection from the Uncollected Writings of G. K. Chesterton, 1963; The Spice of Life and Other Essays, 1964; Chesterton on Shakespeare, 1971. SHORT FICTION: The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown, 1903; The Club of Queer Trades, 1905; The Perishing of the Pendragons, 1914; The Man Who Knew Too Much and Other Stories, 1922; Tales of the Long Bow, 1925; Stories, 1928; The Sword of Wood, 1928; The Moderate Murder and the Honest Quack, 1929; The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale, 1929; Four Faultless Felons, 1930; The Ecstatic Thief, 1930; The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, 1936. POETRY: Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen—Rhymes and Sketches, 1900; The Wild Knight and Other Poems, 1900, rev. 1914; The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911; A Poem, 1915; Poems, 1915; Wine, Water, and Song, 1915; Old King Cole, 1920; The Ballad of St. Barbara and Other Verses, 1922; Poems, 1925; The Queen of Seven Swords, 1926; Gloria in Profundis, 1927; Ubi Ecclesia, 1929; The Grave of Arthur, 1930. EDITED TEXTS: Thackeray, 1909; Samuel Johnson, 1911 (with Alice Meynell); Essays by Divers Hands, 1926. MISCELLANEOUS: Stories, Essays, and Poems, 1935; The Coloured Lands, 1938. Bibliography Boyd, Ian. The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975. A good study of Chesterton’s six major novels, as well as his collections of short stories. Discusses the novels in four periods: early, the eve of World War I, postwar (Distributist), and late. Carol, Sister M. G. K. Chesterton: The Dynamic Classicist. Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsi Dass, 1971. Contains a chapter on Chesterton as a short-story writer as well as an insightful chapter analyzing his novels. Clipper, Lawrence. G. K. Chesterton. New York: Twayne, 1974. Contains an insightful analysis of Chesterton’s thought and writing in an assortment of areas. Includes a chapter entitled “Detectives and Apocalypses” that discusses his detective short stories and each of his novels. Lauer, Quentin. G. K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio. New York: Fordham

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University Press, 1988. Lauer analyzes the philosophical and theological dimensions of Chesterton’s work. Pearce, Joseph. Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996. A scholarly and well-written biography of Chesterton. Contains many quotes from his works and good analysis of them, as well as useful data on his family and friends. Tadie, Andrew A., and Michael H. Macdonald, eds. Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1995. This volume includes a fairly thorough discussion of Chesterton’s writing, along with works of T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, looking primarily at its ethical and religious components. Ward, Maisie. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943. One of the best biographies of Chesterton. Written by a friend of Gilbert and Frances Chesterton who knew and interviewed individuals in their circle. Published seven years after his death, it contains firsthand accounts and data.

Agatha Christie Agatha Christie

Born: Torquay, England; September 15, 1890 Died: Wallingford, England; January 12, 1976 Principal long fiction · The Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Detective Story, 1920; The Secret Adversary, 1922; The Murder on the Links, 1923; The Man in the Brown Suit, 1924; The Secret of Chimneys, 1925; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926; The Big Four, 1927; The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928; The Seven Dials Mystery, 1929; The Murder at the Vicarage, 1930; Giants’ Bread, 1930 (as Mary Westmacott); The Sittaford Mystery, 1931 (pb. in U.S. as The Murder at Hazelmoor); The Floating Admiral, 1931 (with others); Peril at End House, 1932; Lord Edgware Dies, 1933 (pb. in U.S. as Thirteen at Dinner); Murder on the Orient Express, 1934 (pb. in U.S. as Murder on the Calais Coach); Murder in Three Acts, 1934; Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, 1934 (pb. in U.S. as Boomerang Clue, 1935); Unfinished Portrait, 1934 (as Westmacott); Death in the Clouds, 1935 (pb. in U.S. as Death in the Air); The A. B. C. Murders: A New Poirot Mystery, 1936; Cards on the Table, 1936; Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936; Death on the Nile, 1937; Dumb Witness, 1937 (pb. in U.S. as Poirot Loses a Client); Appointment with Death: A Poirot Mystery, 1938; Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, 1939 (pb. in U.S. as Murder for Christmas: A Poirot Story); Murder Is Easy, 1939 (pb. in U.S. as Easy to Kill); Ten Little Niggers, 1939 (pb. in U.S. as And Then There Were None, 1940); One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, 1940 (pb. in U.S. as The Patriotic Murders, 1941); Sad Cypress, 1940; Evil Under the Sun, 1941; N or M? The New Mystery, 1941; The Body in the Library, 1942; Five Little Pigs, 1942 (pb. in U.S. as Murder in Retrospect); The Moving Finger, 1942; Death Comes in the End, 1944; Towards Zero, 1944; Absent in the Spring, 1944 (as Westmacott); Sparkling Cyanide, 1945 (pb. in U.S. as Remembered Death); The Hollow: A Hercule Poirot Mystery, 1946; Murder Medley, 1948; Taken at the Flood, 1948 (pb. in U.S. as There Is a Tide . . .); The Rose and the Yew Tree, 1948 (as Westmacott); Crooked House, 1949; A Murder Is Announced, 1950; Blood Will Tell, 1951; They Came to Baghdad, 1951; They Do It with Mirrors, 1952 (pb. in U.S. as Murder with Mirrors); Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, 1952; A Daughter’s a Daughter, 1952 (as Westmacott); After the Funeral, 1953 (pb. in U.S. as Funerals Are Fatal); A Pocket Full of Rye, 1953; Destination Unknown, 1954 (pb. in U.S. as So Many Steps to Death, 1955); Hickory, Dickory, Dock, 1955 (pb. in U.S. as Hickory, Dickory, Death); Dead Man’s Folly, 1956; The Burden, 1956 (as Westmacott); 4:50 from Paddington, 1957 (pb. in U.S. as What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!); Ordeal by Innocence, 1958; Cat Among the Pigeons, 1959; The Pale Horse, 1961; The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, 1962 (pb. in U.S. as The Mirror Crack’d, 1963); The Clocks, 1963; A Caribbean Mystery, 1964; At Bertram’s Hotel, 1965; Third Girl, 1966; Endless Night, 1967; By the Pricking of My Thumb, 1968; Hallowe’en Party, 1969; Passenger to Frankfurt, 1970; Nemesis, 1971; Elephants Can Remember, 1972; Postern of Fate, 1973; Curtain: Hercule Poirot’s Last Case, 1975; Sleeping Murder, 1976 (posthumous). Other literary forms · Agatha Christie published approximately thirty collections of short stories, fifteen plays, a nonfiction book (Come Tell Me How You Live, 1946), and many omnibus editions of her novels. Under the pen name Mary Westmacott, Christie published six romantic novels. At least ten of her detective works were made into motion pictures, and An Autobiography (1977) was published because, as Christie 171

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told Publishers Weekly (1966), “If anybody writes about my life in the future, I’d rather they got the facts right.” Sources disagree on the total number of Christie’s publications because of the unusual quantity of titles, the reissue of so many novels under different titles, and especially the tendency to publish the same book in England and America under differing titles. Achievements · Among her many achievements, Christie bears one unusual distinction: She is the only writer whose main character’s death precipitated a front-page obituary in The New York Times. Christie was a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature; received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play of the year in 1955 (Witness for the Prosecution); was knighted Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1971; received the Film Daily Poll Ten Best Pictures Award, 1958 (Witness for the Prosecution); and was made a doctor of literature at the University of Exeter. Biography · Mary Clarissa Agatha Miller was born at Torquay, England, on September 15, 1890; the impact of this location on her was enormous. Near the end of An Autobiography, Christie indicates that all other memories and homes pale beside Ashfield, her parents’ home in Torquay. “And there you are again—remembering. ‘I remember, I remember, the house where I was born. . . .’ I go back to that always in my mind. Ashfield.” The roots of Christie’s self-contained, quiet sense of place are found in her accounts of life at Ashfield. The love of peace, routine, and order was born in her mother’s well-ordered household, a household cared for by servants whose nature seemed never to change, and sparked by the sudden whims of an energetic and dramatic mother. Christie’s father was Fred Miller, an American, many years older than her English mother, Clara. They were distant cousins and had an exceptionally harmonious marriage because, Christie says, her father was an exceptionally agreeable man. Nigel Dennis, writing for Life (May, 1956), says that Christie is at her best in “orderly, settled surroundings” in which she can suddenly introduce disruption and ultimately violence. Her autobiographical accounts of days upon days of peace and routine followed by sudden impulsive adventures initiated by her mother support the idea that, as she says, all comes back to Ashfield, including her mystery stories at their best. In writing her autobiography, Christie left a detailed and insightful commentary on her works. To one familiar with her autobiography, the details of her life can be found in the incidents and plots of her novels. Frequently, she barely disguises them. She writes, for example, of a recurring childhood dream about “the Gunman,” whose outstanding characteristics were his frightening eyes appearing suddenly and staring at her from absolutely any person around her, including her beloved mother. This dream forms almost the entire basis for the plot of Unfinished Portrait, a romantic novel written under the pen name “Mary Westmacott.” That dream may have been the source of her willingness to allow absolutely any character the role of murderer. No one, including her great Hercule Poirot, is exempt from suddenly becoming the Gunman. Christie was educated at home chiefly by her parents and her nurse. She taught herself to read before she was five and from then on was allowed to read any available book at Ashfield. Her father taught her arithmetic, for which she had a propensity and which she enjoyed. She hated spelling, on the other hand, because she read by word sight and not by the sound of letters. She learned history from historical novels and

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a book of history that her mother expected her to study in preparation for a weekly quiz. A stay in France at about age seven and an ensuing return with a French woman as her companion resulted in her speaking and reading French easily. She also had piano and voice tutors and a weekly dancing class. As she grew older, she attended the theater weekly, and, in her teens, she was sent to a boarding school in France. She was always allowed to use her imagination freely. Her sensible and beloved nurse went along with her early construction of plots and tales enlisting the nurse as well as dolls and animals to be the characters. She carried on a constant dialogue with these characters as she went through her days. The absence of playmates and the storytelling done within the family also contributed to the development Library of Congress of her imagination. Her mother invented ongoing bedtime tales of a dramatic and mysterious nature. Her elder sister, Madge, liked to write, and she repeatedly told Agatha one particular story: It was the “Elder Sister” tale. Like the Gunman, the Elder Sister became a frequent personage in her later novels. As a child, Agatha would ask her sister, feeling a mixture of terror and delight, when the elder sister was coming; Madge would indicate that it would be soon. Then a few days later, there would be a knock on Agatha’s door and her sister would enter and begin talking in an eerie voice as if she were an elder, disturbed sister who was normally locked up somewhere but at large for the day. The pattern seems similar to that of the Gunman: the familiar figure who is suddenly dangerous. One book in particular, Elephants Can Remember, concerns a crazy identical twin sister who escapes from a mental institution, kills her twin, and takes her place in marriage to a man they had both known and loved as young girls. Besides her sister, Madge, Agatha had an elder brother, Monty, whom she adored. He allowed her to join him frequently in his escapades and was generally agreeable, but, like her father, did not amount to much otherwise and was managed and even supported by his sisters later in his life. “Auntie Grannie” was another strong figure in Agatha’s early life. She was the aunt who had reared Clara Miller and was also Fred’s stepmother. Many critics see in her the basis for the character of Miss Marple. The picture emerging of Christie is of a woman coming from an intensely femaledominated household where men were agreeable and delightful but not very effective. Female servants and family members provided Agatha with her rigorous, stable values and independent behavior. She grew up expecting little of men except affection and loyalty; in return, she expected to be sensible and self-supporting when possible. Another possible explanation for Christie’s self-sufficiency is the emotional support

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that these surrounding females provided for her. Even after her mother’s death in the late 1920’s, Christie always sought the companionship of loyal female servants and secretaries who, in the British Victorian fashion, then became invaluable to her in her work and personal life. Especially in her marriage to Archibald Christie, she relied on her female relatives and servants to encourage, assist, and even love her. The Miss Marples of her world, the Constance Sheppards (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), and the servants were her life’s bedrock. In 1914, Agatha Miller married Colonel Archibald Christie in a hasty wartime ceremony. They had one daughter, Rosamund, whom Agatha adored but considered an “efficient” child. She characterized Rosamund in “Mary Westmacott’s” novel A Daughter’s a Daughter. Agatha started writing on a dare from her sister but only began writing novels seriously when her husband was away in World War I and she was employed as a chemist’s (pharmacist’s) assistant in a dispensary. Finding herself with extra time, she wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Since she was familiar with both poisons and death because of her hospital and dispensary work, she was able to distinguish herself by the accuracy of her descriptions. Several other books followed, which were increasingly successful, until The Murder of Roger Ackroyd became a best-seller in 1926. The death of her mother and a divorce from Archie Christie took place about the same time as her success. These sent her into a tailspin which ended in her famous eleven-day disappearance. She reappeared at a health spa unharmed but, to her embarrassment, the object of a great deal of attention; the public was outraged at the large expense of the search. In 1930, she married Sir Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, perhaps a more “agreeable” man. Certainly her domestic life after the marriage was peaceful; in addition, she was able to travel with Mallowan to his archaeological dig sites in the Middle East. This gave her new settings and material for her books and enabled her to indulge in one of her greatest pleasures: travel. In 1930, The Murder at the Vicarage was published; it introduced her own favorite sleuth, Miss Jane Marple, who was village spinster and observer of the village scene. By this time, Christie was an established author, and in the 1940’s, her books began to be made into plays and motion pictures. In 1952, The Mousetrap was launched in London theater and eventually became one of the longest-running plays in that city’s history. The film version of Witness for the Prosecution received awards and acclaim in the early 1950’s. Murder on the Calais Coach became Murder on the Orient Express, a popular American film. Producing approximately one book per year, Christie has been likened to an assembly line, but, as her autobiography indicates, each book was a little puzzle for her own “grey cells,” the conceiving of which gave her great enjoyment and the writing of which took about six to twelve weeks and was often tedious. In 1971, she was knighted Dame Agatha Christie by Queen Elizabeth II and had what she considered one of her most thrilling experiences, tea with the Queen. In 1975, she allowed the book Curtain: Hercule Poirot’s Last Case to be published and the death of her chief sleuth, Hercule Poirot, to occur. This was of sufficient interest to warrant a front-page obituary in The New York Times. By the time of her own death in 1976, Ellsworth Grant in Horizon (1976) claimed that Christie’s writings had “reached a wider audience than those of any author who ever lived.” More than 400 million copies of her novels and short stories had been sold, and her works had been translated into 103 languages.

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Analysis · Agatha Christie’s trademarks in detective fiction brought to maturity the classical tradition of the genre, which was in its adolescence when she began to write. The tradition had some stable characteristics, but she added many more and perfected existing ones. The classical detective hero, for example, from Edgar Allan Poe on, according to Ellsworth Grant, is of “superior intellect,” is “fiercely independent,” and has “amusing idiosyncrasies.” Christie’s Hercule Poirot was crafted by these ground rules and reflects them in The Mysterious Affair at Styles but quickly begins to deplore this Sherlock Holmes type of detecting. Poirot would rather think from his armchair than rush about, magnifying glass in hand, searching for clues. He may, by his words, satirize classical detection, but he is also satirizing himself, as Christie well knew. Christie’s own contributions to the genre can be classified mainly as the following: a peaceful, usually upper-class setting into which violence intrudes; satire of her own heroes, craft, and genre; a grand finale in which all characters involved gather for the dramatic revelation of truth; the careful access to all clues; increased emphasis on the “who” and the “why” with less interest in the “how”; heavy use of dialogue and lightning-quick description, which create a fast-paced, easy read; a consistent moral framework for the action; and the willingness to allow absolutely any character to be guilty, a precedent-setting break with the tradition. Her weakness, critics claim, is in her barely two-dimensional characters and in their lack of psychological depth. Christie created, as Grant puts it, a great many interesting “caricatures of people we have met.” Grant excuses her on the grounds that allowing every character to be a possible suspect limits the degree to which they can be psychologically explored. One might also attribute her caricatures to her great admiration for Charles Dickens, who also indulged in caricatures, especially with his minor characters. Christie herself gives a simple explanation. She judged it best not to write about people she actually knew, preferring to observe strangers in railroad stations and restaurants, perhaps catching a fragment of their conversation. From this glimpse, she would make up a character and a plot. Character fascinated her endlessly, but, like Miss Marple, she believed the depths of human iniquity were in everyone, and it was only in the outward manifestation that people became evil or good. “I could’ve done it,” a juvenile character cries in Evil Under the Sun. “Ah, but you didn’t and between those two things there is a world of difference,” Poirot replies. Death Comes in the End · In spite of Christie’s simplistic judgment of human character, she manages, on occasion (especially in her novels of the 1940’s and later), to make accurate and discerning forays into the thought processes of some characters. In Death Comes in the End, considerable time is spent on Renisenb’s internal musings. Caught in the illiterate role which her time (Egypt, 2000 b.c.e.) and sex status decree for her, Renisenb struggles to achieve language so she can articulate her anxieties about evil and good. Her male friend, Hori, speaks at great length of the way that evil affects people. “People create a false door, to deceive,” he says, but “when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth—their truth self reasserts itself.” When Norfret, a beautiful concubine, enters a closed, self-contained household and threatens its stability, all the characters begin to behave differently. The murderer is discovered precisely because he is the only person who does not behave differently on the outside. Any innocent person would act guilty because the presence of evil touches self-doubts and faults; therefore, the one who acts against this Christie truth and remains normal in the face of murder must, in fact, be guilty.

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The Mysterious Affair at Styles · Although The Mysterious Affair at Styles is marred by overwriting and explanations that Christie sheds in later books, it shows signs of those qualities that will make her great. The village of Styles St. Mary is quiet, and Styles House is a typical country manor. The book is written in the first person by Hastings, who comes to visit his old friend John Cavendish and finds him dealing with a difficult family situation. His mother married a man who everyone agrees is a fortune hunter. Shortly afterward, she dies of poison in full view of several family members, calling her husband’s name. Hastings runs into Hercule Poirot at the post office; an old acquaintance temporarily residing at Styles, he is a former police inspector from Belgium. Christie’s idea in this first novel seems to be that Hastings will play Watson to Poirot’s Holmes, although she quickly tires of this arrangement and in a later book ships Hastings off to Argentina. Every obvious clue points to the husband as the murderer. Indeed, he is the murderer and has made arrangements with an accomplice so that he will be brought to a speedy trial. At the trial, it would then be revealed that the husband had an absolute alibi for the time when the poison must have been administered; hence, he and his accomplice try to encourage everyone to think him guilty. Poirot delays the trial and figures out that the real poison was in the woman’s own medicine, which contained a substance that would only become fatal if released from other elements. It then would settle to the bottom of the bottle and the last dose would be lethal. Bromide is an ingredient that separates the elements. Bromide was added at the murderer’s leisure, and he had only to wait until the day when she would take the last dose, making sure that both he and his accomplice are seen by many people far distant from the household at the time she is declared to have been poisoned. The plot is brilliant, and Christie received congratulations from a chemists’ association for her correct use of the poisons in the book. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd · By the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her sixth book, Christie had hit her stride. Although Poirot’s explanations are still somewhat lengthy, the book is considered one of her best. It is chiefly noted for the precedent it set in detective fiction. The first-person narrator, Dr. Sheppard, turns out to be the murderer. The skill with which this is revealed and concealed is perhaps Christie at her most subtle. The reader is made to like Dr. Sheppard, to feel he or she is being taken into his confidence as he attempts to write the history of Roger Ackroyd’s murder as it unwinds. Poirot cultivates Dr. Sheppard’s acquaintanceship, and the reader believes, because he hears it from Dr. Sheppard, that Poirot trusts him. In the end, Dr. Sheppard is guilty. Christie allows herself to gloat at her own fiendish cleverness through the very words that Sheppard uses to gloat over his crime when he refers back to a part of his narrative (the story itself is supposedly being written to help Poirot solve the crime) where a discerning reader or sleuth ought to have found him out. The Body in the Library · The Body in the Library, executed with Christie’s usual skill, is distinctive for two elements: the extended discussions of Miss Marple’s sleuthing style and the humorous dialogue surrounding the discovery of the body of an unknown young woman in the library of a good family. Grant says of Jane Marple that she insists, as she knits, that human nature never changes. O. L. Bailey expands upon this in Saturday Review (1973): “Victorian to the core,” he writes, “she loves to gossip, and her piercing blue eyes twinkle as she solves the most heinous crimes by

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analogy to life in her archetypal English village of St. Mary Mead.” Marple, as well as the other characters, comments on her methods. Marple feels her success is in her skeptical nature, calling her mind “a sink.” She goes on to explain that “the truth is . . . that most people . . . are far too trusting for this wicked world.” Another character, Sir Henry, describes her as “an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day’s work.” Through a delightfully comic conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Bantry, the possibility of a dead body in the library is introduced, and, once it is discovered, the story continues in standard sleuth style; the opening dialogue, however, is almost too funny for the subject matter. Ralph Tyler in Saturday Review (1975) calls this mixture of evil and the ordinary a distancing of death “by bringing it about in an upper-middle-class milieu of consummate orderliness.” In that milieu, the Bantrys’ dialogue is not too funny; it is quite believable, especially since they do not yet know the body is downstairs. The Secret Adversary · Perhaps a real Christie aficionado can be identified by his reaction to Tommy and Tuppence Beresford of The Secret Adversary, an engaging pair of sleuths who take up adventuring because they cannot find work in postwar England. Critics dismiss or ignore the pair, but Christie fans often express a secret fondness for the two. In Tommy and Tuppence, readers find heroes close to home. The two blunder about and solve mysteries by luck as much as by anything else. Readers can easily identify with these two and even feel a bit protective of them. Tommy and Tuppence develop a romance as they establish an “adventurers for hire” agency and wait for clients. Adventure begins innocently when Tommy tells Tuppence he has overheard someone talking about a woman named Jane Finn and comments disgustedly, “Did you ever hear such a name?” Later they discover that the name is a password into an international spy ring. The use of luck and coincidence in the story is made much of by Christie herself. Christie seems to tire of the frequent convenient circumstances and lets Tommy and Tuppence’s romance and “high adventure” lead the novel’s progress. When Tommy asks Mr. Carter, the British spy expert, for some tips, Carter replies, “I think not. My experts, working in stereotyped ways, have failed. You will bring imagination and an open mind to the task.” Mr. Carter also admits that he is superstitious and that he believes in luck “and all that sort of thing.” In this novel, readers are presented with a clever story, the resolution of which relies on elements quite different from deductive reasoning or intuition. It relies on those qualities which the young seem to exude and attract: audacity and luck. N or M? The New Mystery · In N or M? The New Mystery, Tommy and Tuppence (now married and some twenty years older) are again unemployed. Their two children are both serving their country in World War II. The parents are bemoaning their fate when a messenger from their old friend Mr. Carter starts them on a spy adventure at the seacoast hotel of Sans Souci. They arrive with the assumed names Mr. Meadowes and Mrs. Blenkensop. Mrs. Blenkensop, they agree, will pursue Mr. Meadowes and every now and then corner him so they can exchange information. The dialogue is amusing and there is a good deal of suspense, but too many characters and a thin plot keep this from being one of Christie’s best. At times, it seems that Christie withholds clues; the fact that all evidence is

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presented to the reader is the supreme test of good detective fiction. Mrs. Sprot, adopted mother of Betty, coolly shoots Betty’s real mother in the head while the woman is holding Betty over the edge of a cliff. The reader cannot be expected to know that the woman on the cliff is Betty’s real mother. Nor can the reader be expected to decipher Tuppence’s mutterings about the story of Solomon. In the story of Solomon, two women claim the same baby, and Solomon decrees that the woman who is willing to give up her child rather than have it killed is the real mother. Since both women in this scene appear willing to jeopardize the baby’s life, the reader is likely, justifiably, to form some wrong conclusions. This seems less fair than Christie usually is in delivering her clues. Sleeping Murder · In Sleeping Murder, written several years before its 1976 publication date, Christie achieves more depth in her portrayal of characters than before: Gwenda, her dead stepmother, Dr. Kennedy, and some of the minor characters such as Mr. Erskine are excellent examples. The motivation in the book is, at least, psychological, as opposed to murder for money or personal gain, which are the usual motives in Christie’s novels. There seems, in short, to be much more probing into the origin and motivation of her characters’ actions. Her last novel, Sleeping Murder ends with the romantic young couple and the wise old Miss Marple conversing on the front porch of a hotel in, of all places, Torquay, Christie’s beloved birthplace. Christie came full circle, celebrating her romantic and impulsive youth and her pleasant old age in one final reunion at home in Torquay, England. Anne Kelsch Breznau Other major works SHORT FICTION: Poirot Investigates, 1924; Partners in Crime, 1929; The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 1930; The Thirteen Problems, 1932 (pb. in U.S. as The Tuesday Club Murders, 1933); The Hound of Death and Other Stories, 1933; The Listerdale Mystery and Other Stories, 1934; Parker Pyne Investigates, 1934 (pb. in U.S. as Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective); Murder in the Mews and Other Stories, 1937 (pb. in U.S. as Dead Man’s Mirror and Other Stories); The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories, 1939; The Labours of Hercules: Short Stories, 1947 (pb. in U.S. as Labors of Hercules: New Adventures in Crime by Hercule Poirot); The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories, 1948; Three Blind Mice and Other Stories, 1950; Under Dog and Other Stories, 1951; The Adventures of the Christmas Pudding, and Selection of Entrées, 1960; Double Sin and Other Stories, 1961; Thirteen for Luck: A Selection of Mystery Stories for Young Readers, 1961; Star over Bethlehem and Other Stories, 1965 (as A. C. Mallowan); Surprize! Surprize! A Collection of Mystery Stories with Unexpected Endings, 1965; Thirteen Clues for Miss Marple: A Collection of Mystery Stories, 1965; The Golden Ball and Other Stories, 1971; Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases, 1974. PLAYS: Black Coffee, pr. 1930; Ten Little Niggers, pr. 1943 (pb. in U.S. as Ten Little Indians, pr. 1944); Appointment with Death, pr., pb. 1945; Murder on the Nile, pr., pb. 1946; The Hollow, pr. 1951; The Mousetrap, pr. 1952; Witness for the Prosecution, pr. 1953; The Spider’s Web, pr. 1954; Towards Zero, pr. 1956 (with Gerald Verner); The Unexpected Guest, pr., pb. 1958; Verdict, pr., pb. 1958; Go Back for Murder, pr., pb. 1960; Afternoon at the Seaside, pr. 1962; The Patient, pr. 1962; The Rats, pr. 1962; Akhnaton, pb. 1973 (also known as Akhnaton and Nefertiti). POETRY: The Road of Dreams, 1925; Poems, 1973. NONFICTION: Come Tell Me How You Live, 1946; An Autobiography, 1977.

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Bibliography Bargainnier, Earl F. The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980. A scholarly study which provides a literary analysis of Christie’s writings. Individual chapters focus on settings, characters, plots, and so on. Contains a very useful bibliography. Cade, Jared. Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days. London: Peter Owen, 1998. Questions Christie’s disappearance. Includes bibliographical references, a list of works, and an index. Gill, Gillian. Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries. New York: The Free Press, 1990. This short and highly readable biography is definitely of the popular, rather than critical, variety, employing as chapter titles seven different names used at one time or another by the mystery writer (including the assumed name Christie used during her infamous disappearance in 1926). Still, Gill goes out of her way to emphasize Christie’s dedication to her art and the discipline of her life. Riley, Dick, and Pam McAllister, eds. The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Containing more than two hundred illustrations, this handbook also provides plot summaries of all Christie’s novels, plays, and many of her short stories arranged chronologically by first date of publication. Robyns, Gwen. The Mystery of Agatha Christie. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Provides a well-written and well-rounded popular biography of Christie. Richly illustrated and contains an appendix with a chronological listing of all Christie’s writings. Perhaps the best place to begin a further study of Christie. Shaw, Marion, and Sabine Vanacker. Reflecting on Miss Marple. London: Routledge, 1991. After a brief chronology of Christie’s life, Shaw and Vanacker devote four chapters to one of her most memorable detectives, in the course of which they make a case for viewing Miss Marple as a feminist heroine. They do so by reviewing the history of women writers and the golden age of detective fiction, as well as the social context of Christie’s Miss Marple books. The spinster Miss Marple, they conclude, is able to solve her cases by exploiting prejudice against unmarried older women. Sova, Dawn B. Agatha Christie A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Writings. New York: Facts on File, 1996. Provides information on all aspects of Christie’s life and career. Toye, Randall. The Agatha Christie’s Who’s Who. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. Toye has compiled a dictionary of more than two thousand, out of a total of more than seven thousand, important characters appearing in Christie’s 66 mystery novels and 147 short stories. For each entry, he attempts to give the character’s importance to the story, as well as some memorable characteristics. Wagoner, Mary S. Agatha Christie. Boston: Twayne, 1986. A scholarly but readable study of Christie and her writings. A brief biography of Christie in the first chapter is followed by analytical chapters focusing on the different genres of her works, such as short stories. Also contains a good bibliography, an index, and a chronological table of Christie’s life.

Arthur C. Clarke Arthur C. Clarke

Born: Minehead, Somerset, England; December 16, 1917 Principal long fiction · Prelude to Space, 1951; The Sands of Mars, 1951; Against the Fall of Night, 1953, 1956 (revised as The City and the Stars); Childhood’s End, 1953; Earthlight, 1955; The Deep Range, 1957; Across the Sea of Stars, 1959; A Fall of Moondust, 1961; From the Ocean, from the Stars, 1962; Glide Path, 1963; Prelude to Mars, 1965; “The Lion of Comarre” and “Against the Fall of Night,” 1968; 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968; Rendezvous with Rama, 1973; Imperial Earth, 1975; The Fountains of Paradise, 1979; 2010: Odyssey Two, 1982; The Songs of Distant Earth, 1986; 2061: Odyssey Three, 1987; Cradle, 1988 (with Gentry Lee); Rama II, 1989 (with Lee); The Ghost from the Grand Banks, 1990; Beyond the Fall of Night, 1990 (with Gregory Benford); The Garden of Rama, 1991 (with Lee); The Hammer of God, 1993; Rama Revealed, 1993 (with Lee); Richter 10, 1996 (with Mike McQuay); 3001: The Final Odyssey, 1997; The Light and Other Days, 2000 (with Stephen Baxter). Other literary forms · Best known for his novels, Arthur C. Clarke has also written numerous science-fiction stories, which are available in several collections; two of them, “The Star” and “A Meeting with Medusa,” won major awards. Clarke is noted for scientific essays and books for general readers, usually about outer space or the ocean, and he published a few loosely structured autobiographies. Achievements · Beginning in the 1950’s, Arthur C. Clarke became acknowledged as a major science-fiction author, winning several Hugo and Nebula Awards for his works, and he earned the Kalinga Prize in 1961 for science writing. He garnered greater renown in 1968 as author of the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and as a screenwriter of the Stanley Kubrick film of the same name, which led to an Academy Award nomination; a year later, he joined newscaster Walter Cronkite as a television commentator on the Apollo 11 space mission to the Moon. From the 1970’s on, his novels were best-sellers, the most successful being his sequels to 2001. In the 1980’s, he hosted two documentary series about strange phenomena, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (1981) and Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1984), and in 1998, he was knighted by the British government for his contributions to literature. Biography · Clarke first displayed his interests in science fiction and science as a child, reading pulp magazines and conducting his own experiments. By the late 1930’s, he was living in London, working for the British Interplanetary Society and publishing scientific articles. During World War II, he helped develop a system for radar-assisted airplane landings, an experience fictionally recounted in Glide Path. In 1945, he published a now-famous article that first proposed communications satellites. After the war, he graduated from college and worked as assistant editor of Physics Abstracts before quitting to pursue a writing career. In the 1950’s, Clarke grew fascinated with the sea and, in 1956, moved to the island of Sri Lanka, which became his permanent residence. His 1953 marriage to Marilyn Mayfield ended with divorce in 1964. After the success of 2001, Clarke signed a 180

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million-dollar contract to write Rendezvous with Rama, Imperial Earth, and The Fountains of Paradise, once announced as his final work. Clarke continued writing novels, though many were disappointed by a flurry of collaborations: Cradle, Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed, all cowritten with Gentry Lee; Beyond the Fall of Night, cowritten with Gregory Benford; and Richter 10, cowritten with Mike McQuay. In these works, Clarke’s participation was presumed to be minimal. Analysis · Clarke’s fiction consistently displays tremendous scientific knowledge combined with a boundless imagination, often touching upon the mystical, and flashes of ironic humor. One specialty of Clarke is the novel that, with meticulous realism, describes near-future events, such as the first space flight (Prelude to Space), humans living under the sea (The Deep Range), lunar settlements (Earthlight, A Fall of Moondust), colonies on Mars (The Sands of Mars), and efforts to raise the Titanic (The Ghost from the Grand Banks). While these novels are involving, Clarke’s determination to be plausible can make them less than dramatic, and they are rarely celebrated. More noteworthy to most readers are the novels that envision incredible engineering accomplishments (Rendezvous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise), venture far into the future (Against the Fall of Night, The Songs of Distant Earth), or depict encounters with enigmatic aliens (Childhood’s End, 2001 and its sequels). Few writers can match Clarke’s ability to take a broad perspective and regard vast expanses of space and time as mere episodes in a vast cosmic drama inaccessible to human understanding. Critics frequently complained about Clarke’s undistinguished prose style and wooden characters, but he steadily improved in these areas, and if his fiction of the 1980’s and 1990’s brought no spectacular new visions, the writing is generally more impressive than that of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Ghost from the Grand Banks, for example, effectively employs short chapters that jump forward and backward in time and reveal Clarke’s skill in crafting superb opening and closing lines. Many observed the previously underdeveloped Heywood Floyd and Frank Poole evolve into realistic characters in the sequels to 2001. While commentaries often focus more on the earlier works, Clarke’s later novels also merit attention. Against the Fall of Night · Clarke’s first major novel features Alvin, a restless young man, in Diaspar, a city in Earth’s distant future where machines provide for all needs. Alvin quickly disrupts the placid, unchanging lives of Diaspar’s nearly immortal residents with his remarkable discoveries. An underground vehicle transports him

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to Lys, a previously unknown civilization where people choose agrarian lifestyles aided by telepathic powers rather than machines. There, an old man’s strange robot reveals the location of a spaceship, in which Alvin journeys to a faraway planet, where he encounters a disembodied intelligence named Vanamonde. Back on Earth, Alvin and the elders of Lys deduce humanity’s history: After humans worked with aliens to create pure intelligences, their first product, the Mad Mind, went insane and unleashed its destructive energies throughout the galaxy. After creating other, sane intelligences like Vanamonde, humans left the universe entirely, leaving behind a few who preferred to remain on Earth. Dispatching a robot to search for the departed humans, Alvin stays behind to solve other mysteries of human history. Overflowing with ideas, presented with breathless haste, Against the Fall of Night commands attention for its evocative and imaginative portrayal of decadent future humans haunted by a misunderstood heritage, and the arrogance with which Alvin dominates and upsets their sterile existence may reflect the self-confidence of a young author who felt destined to accomplish great things. However, a dissatisfied Clarke soon took the unusual step of writing an extensive revision, published as The City and the Stars. While this new version offered fascinating new details about life in Diaspar, many preferred the youthful exuberance of the original story, and a consensus developed that the first version was superior. Thus, in continuing Alvin’s story, writer Gregory Benford chose to follow the original version, republished together with Benford’s sequel as Beyond the Fall of Night in 1989. Childhood’s End · Sometimes considered Clarke’s masterpiece, Childhood’s End begins when Earth is peacefully taken over by the benevolent alien Overlords. Concealing themselves because they resemble devils, the Overlords govern through human intermediaries such as the Secretary General of the United Nations, whom they effortlessly rescue when he is kidnapped by rebels who oppose the Overlords. When they finally reveal their appearance fifty years later, humanity is enjoying a golden age of peace and prosperity thanks to the Overlords’ wise rule and advanced technology. However, streaks of rebelliousness persist, and a man named Jan Rodricks stows away on a starship to visit the Overlords’ homeworld. Later, on Earth, George and Jean Greggson are upset when their son begins dreaming about other worlds and their daughter manifests telekinetic powers. An Overlord now explains the true motives behind their takeover. Certain races, such as humans, have the capacity to achieve a higher level of evolution by merging into a group mind and joining the mysterious Overmind that controls the universe; the Overmind assigns the Overlords, who paradoxically lack this potential, to supervise these races during the transitional stage. Soon, all human children have mentally united and seem like aliens to their distraught parents. While the adults, their dreams shattered, commit suicide in various ways, Rodricks returns to Earth to observe its final moments, as the children employ psychic powers to disintegrate their world and merge with the Overmind. Perhaps perturbed by his own prophecy, Clarke adds this introductory comment: “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.” Certainly, Childhood’s End stirs strong and conflicting emotions in its final portrait of Earth’s children seemingly reduced to naked savages engaged in senseless activities, even while the reader is assured that they represent a glorious new stage in human evolution. If not wholly satisfactory in style and character development, the novel persuasively presents its unsettling developments and, decades after publication, inspires heated discussion.

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2001 · Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey differs from the film based on it both in major details and in its overall tone, which is clear and explanatory in contrast to Kubrick’s directorial mystification. Clarke develops the character of Moon-Watcher, the ape-man of the distant past who first notices the alien monolith that teaches Moon-Watcher and his companions to use tools. Next, in the near future, Heywood Floyd visits the Moon to examine another monolith, which suddenly emits a powerful radio signal toward Saturn (not Jupiter, as in the film). The spaceship Discovery is sent to investigate, though the crewmen who are not placed in hibernation, David Bowman and Frank Poole, know nothing about the monolith. Driven insane by contradictory commands to cooperate with Bowman and Poole while concealing their real mission, the onboard computer HAL kills Poole in space and attempts to kill Bowman by opening the ship’s airlocks, exposing him to the vacuum of space. Finding an emergency shelter with a spacesuit, Bowman disables HAL and proceeds to Saturn, where another monolith waits on the surface of Saturn’s moon Japetus. An alien transportation system then takes Bowman to a distant planet and a crude replica of an Earth hotel, where he is transformed into a baby with immense powers who returns to Earth and destroys its nuclear weapons. 2010, 2061, and 3001 · 2001 stands on its own as a masterful saga of human evolution and exploration. The later sequels do not enhance its impact, however. In 2010: Odyssey Two, Floyd returns to Jupiter (following the film version) to discover Bowman’s fate, meets a ghostly Bowman (now cast more as a messenger for the aliens than as the harbinger of a new human race), and flees when Jupiter becomes a star, with its moons offered to humanity as new homes (except Europa, declared off-limits by the aliens). In 2061: Odyssey Three, Floyd journeys to Halley’s Comet but accidentally lands on Europa, while in 3001: The Final Odyssey, a revived Poole helps to disable the monoliths, now likened to out-of-control computers. Though readers may enjoy meeting old friends, the sequels never reveal the unseen aliens or their final plans for humanity, which is perhaps as it should be. Rendezvous with Rama · Clarke’s first novel after 2001 begins with the discovery of a gigantic cylindrical object, clearly artificial in origin, approaching the Sun. William Norton, commanding the spaceship Endeavour, leads an investigation of the object, named Rama. Entering through an airlock, Norton and his crew observe a huge interior landscape divided by a Cylindrical Sea, with clusters of buildings dubbed “cities” and other inexplicable objects. As they descend to the surface, massive lights suddenly illuminate Rama, as if it were coming to life. When a crewman crosses the Cylindrical Sea in a glider and investigates strange formations, he notices the first of many “biots”—biological robots manufactured to perform functions such as observation and removal of debris. The people of Mercury, fearing Rama is hostile, launch a nuclear missile to destroy it, but another crewman disables the bomb. As the humans depart, the biots destroy themselves and the lights go out, signaling that Rama has finished its work. Rama then absorbs energy and matter from the Sun before leaving the solar system—though a scientist notes, “The Ramans do everything in threes,” suggesting other alien vehicles may arrive soon. Despite weak characterization, Clarke’s unique ability to evoke the bizarre with straightforward exposition is well displayed in this story, which intrigues readers with its narrative unpredictability and unanswered questions. Rendezvous with Rama earned the Hugo and Nebula Awards as the best science-fiction novel of 1973. Clarke later

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continued the story in three sequels cowritten with Gentry Lee—Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed—describing the coming of another Raman spaceship and the astronauts who stay on board for a cosmic journey. Despite revealing new data about the Ramans and their goals, the sequels leave many mysteries unresolved, ultimately adding little to the original novel. The Fountains of Paradise · Projected as the capstone of Clarke’s career, The Fountains of Paradise describes a future engineer, Vannevar Morgan, planning to construct an enormous “space elevator” to connect the surface of Earth to a geosynchronous satellite, providing cheap and safe transportation into space. His story is interwoven with that of another great builder, Kalidasa, the ancient king of Taprobane (an island analogous to Sri Lanka) who built the magnificent Fountains of Paradise at the mountain where Morgan wishes to build his space elevator. When the monks inhabiting the mountain abandon their home after an old prophecy is fulfilled, Morgan begins work, and soon the tower is slowly being constructed from a point between Earth and space. When scientists are stranded on the incomplete tower, Morgan pilots a transport vehicle to bring supplies, though the effort strains his weak heart and causes his death. In an epilogue set further in the future, an alien visiting Earth marvels at its “Ring City,” with Morgan’s tower as only one spoke in an immense wheel of satellites circling the globe, all linked to each other and to the ground. Inspired by the history and traditions of Sri Lanka, Clarke’s adopted homeland, The Fountains of Paradise seems one of his most personal works, blending reverence for ancient accomplishments with dreams of futuristic space exploration. Like Rendezvous with Rama, it earned both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The concluding chapters describing Morgan’s rescue may be the most gripping sequence Clarke has ever written, but its awe-inspiring vision of a world transformed by cosmic engineering makes the novel memorable. Gary Westfahl Other major works SHORT FICTION: Expedition to Earth, 1953; Reach for Tomorrow, 1956; Tales from the White Hart, 1957; The Other Side of the Sky, 1958; Tales of Ten Worlds, 1962; The Nine Billion Names of God, 1967; Of Time and Stars: The Worlds of Arthur C. Clarke, 1972; The Wind from the Sun, 1972; The Best of Arthur C. Clarke, 1937-1971, 1973; The Sentinel: Masterworks of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1983; Dilemmas: The Secret, 1989; Tales from Planet Earth, 1989; More than One Universe: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, 1991. NONFICTION: Interplanetary Flight, 1950; The Exploration of Space, 1951 (revised 1959); The Exploration of the Moon, 1954; Going into Space, 1954; The Coast of Coral, 1956; The Making of a Moon, 1957; The Reefs of Taprobane, 1957; Voice Across the Sea, 1958; The Challenge of the Spaceship, 1959; The Challenge of the Sea, 1960; The First Five Fathoms, 1960; Indian Ocean Adventure, 1961 (with Mike Wilson); Profiles of the Future, 1962; Man and Space, 1964 (with others); Indian Ocean Treasure, 1964 (with Wilson); The Treasure of the Great Reef, 1964; Voices from the Sky, 1965; The Promise of Space, 1968; First on the Moon, 1970 (with others); Into Space, 1971 (with Robert Silverberg); Report on Planet Three, 1972; Beyond Jupiter, 1972 (with Chesley Bonestall); The Lost Worlds of 2001, 1972; The View from Serendip, 1977; 1984: Spring, a Choice of Futures, 1984; Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography, 1984; Arthur C. Clarke’s July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century, 1986; The Odyssey File, 1985 (with Peter Hyams); Astounding Days: A Science

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Fictional Autobiography, 1989; How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, 1992; By Space Possessed, 1993; The Snows of Olympus: A Garden of Mars, 1994; Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998, 1999. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Islands in the Sky, 1952; Dolphin Island, 1963. Bibliography Hollow, John. Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. An analysis of major themes in Clarke’s fiction. McAleer, Neil. Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1992. A definitive account of Clarke’s career, written with Clarke’s cooperation. Reid, Robin Anne. Arthur C. Clarke: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. An accessible study of Clarke focusing on major novels after 1970. Samuelson, David N. Arthur C. Clarke: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. A complete bibliography of Clarke’s works from the 1930’s to early 1980’s. Slusser, George Edgar. The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1978. A brief but provocative commentary on Clarke’s fiction.

Wilkie Collins Wilkie Collins

Born: London, England; January 8, 1824 Died: London, England; September 23, 1889 Principal long fiction · Antonina: Or, The Fall of Rome, 1850; Basil: A Story of Modern Life, 1852; Hide and Seek, 1854; The Dead Secret, 1857; The Woman in White, 1860; No Name, 1862; Armadale, 1866; The Moonstone, 1868; Man and Wife, 1870; Poor Miss Finch: A Novel, 1872; The New Magdalen, 1873; The Law and the Lady, 1875; The Two Destinies: A Romance, 1876; A Rogue’s Life, 1879; The Fallen Leaves, 1879; Jezebel’s Daughter, 1880; The Black Robe, 1881; Heart and Science, 1883; I Say No, 1884; The Evil Genius: A Dramatic Story, 1886; The Legacy of Cain, 1889; Blind Love, 1890 (completed by Walter Besant). Other literary forms · Wilkie Collins produced a biography of his father in 1848 as well as travel books, essays and reviews, and a number of short stories. He also wrote and adapted plays, often in collaboration with Charles Dickens. Achievements · Collins’s reputation nearly a century after his death rests almost entirely on two works—The Woman in White, published serially in All the Year Round between November 26, 1859, and August 25, 1860; and The Moonstone, published in 1868. About this latter work, Dorothy Sayers said it is “probably the finest detective story ever written.” No chronicler of crime and detective fiction can fail to include Collins’s important contributions to the genre; simply for the ingenuity of his plots, Collins earned the admiration of T. S. Eliot. The Woman in White and The Moonstone have also been made into numerous adaptations for stage, film, radio, and television. Yet, for an author so conscientious and industrious—averaging one “big” novel every two years in his maturity—to be known as the author of two books would hardly be satisfactory. The relative obscurity into which most of Collins’s work has fallen cannot be completely attributed to the shadow cast by his friend and sometime collaborator, Charles Dickens, nor to his physical infirmities and his addiction to laudanum, nor to the social vision which led him to write a succession of thesis novels. Indeed, the greatest mystery Collins left behind concerns the course of his literary career and subsequent reputation. Biography · A pencil drawing survives, entitled “Wilkie Collins by his father William Collins, R. A.” It shows a pretty, if serious, round face. The features beneath the end of the boy’s nose are shaded, giving especial prominence to the upper face and forehead. The viewer at once is drawn to the boy’s eyes. They are large, probing, mysterious, hardly the eyes of a child. Perhaps the artist-father sought to impart to his elder son some of his own austere, pious nature. William Collins (1788-1847), whose life began on the verge of one great European revolution and ended on the verge of another, was no revolutionary himself, nor the bohemian others of his calling imagined themselves. Instead, William Collins was a strict Sabbatarian, an individual who overcame by talent and perseverance the disadvantages of poverty. The novelist’s paternal grandfather was an art dealer, a restorer, a storyteller who lovingly trained and cajoled his son in painting and drawing. William Collins did not begin to taste 186

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success until several years after the death of his father in 1812, but gradually commissions and patrons did come, including Sir Robert Peel. Befriended by noted artists such as Sir David Wilkie and Washington Allston, William Collins was at last elected to the Royal Academy in 1820. Two years later, he married Harriet Geddes. The names of both of their sons, born in 1824 and 1828, respectively, honored fellow artists: William Wilkie Collins and Charles Allston Collins. Little is known of Wilkie Collins’s early years, save that they appear to have been relatively tranquil. By 1833, Collins was already enrolled at Maida Hill Academy. In 1836, William Collins elected to take his family to Italy, where they remained until the late summer of 1838. The return to London required taking new lodgings at Regent’s Park, and the fourteen-year-old Wilkie Collins was sent to boarding school at Highbury. By the close of 1840, he was presumably finished with school. His father’s health began to fail, and the senior Collins made known his wish that Wilkie take holy orders, though the son apparently had no such inclinations. The choice became university or commerce. Wilkie Collins chose business, and he became an apprentice to the tea merchants Antrobus and Company in 1841. Collins performed well and was able to take a leave in order to accompany his father to Scotland the following summer. While still an apprentice, Collins began to write occasional pieces, and in August, 1843, The Illuminated Magazine published his first signed story, “The Last Stage Coachman.” A novel about Polynesia was also written but discarded. In 1844, Collins traveled to Paris with his friend Charles Ward, and he made a second visit in 1845. While William Collins’s health began to deteriorate more rapidly, his son was released from his apprenticeship and decided upon the study of law. In February, 1847, William Collins died. Wilkie Collins emulated his father’s self-discipline, industry, and especially his love of art and beauty, yet if one judges by the series of self-serving religious zealots who populate Collins’s fiction, one must assume that, while he respected his father’s artistic sensibilities, he did not admire his pious ardor. Instead, Wilkie Collins seems in most things to have taken the example of his mother, a woman of loving good nature and humor with whom both he and his brother Charles remained close until her death. Nevertheless, William Collins near the end of life had asked Wilkie to write his biography, providing the opportunity for the young man’s first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, R. A., published in 1848 in two volumes. While the narrator tends toward self-effacement and burdens his readers with minute detail, the work is nevertheless a formidable accomplishment. Researches on the book led Collins into correspondence with the American writer Richard Henry Dana and with a circle of established and rising artists, including E. M. Ward (brother of his friend Charles), Augustus Egg, John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, and the Rossettis. At this time, Collins completed his historical novel Antonina, filled with gothic violence and adventure, a work that attracted the serious attention of John Ruskin. It was published in 1850, the same year in which Collins made his first public stage appearance in A Court Duel, which he had adapted from the French. With the success of his first dramatic work and the surprisingly positive reception of Antonina, Collins began to enjoy a rising reputation. Richard Bentley published Collins’s account of a Cornwall hiking trip taken during the summer of 1850 in January, 1851, as Rambles Beyond Railways. Two months later, Egg introduced the twenty-seven-year-old Collins to Dickens, and the initial contact resulted in Collins taking part in Dickens’s theatrical, Not So Bad as We Seem, written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. (Until Dickens’s death in 1870, he and Collins remained

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staunch friends, though there remains some indication of friction following Collins’s success with The Moonstone and Dickens’s supposed attempt to outdo his junior in his incomplete novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870.) In 1852, after having tried to sell the version of a story that would become “Mad Monkton” to Dickens, Collins published “A Terribly Strange Bed,” anthologized often since, in Household Words (1850-1859). The following years saw considerable collaboration between the two authors, not the least of which were Collins’s stories for the Christmas annuals such as Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box: Or, The Mask and the Mystery (1852); the collaboration The Seven Poor Travellers (1854); The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), a work often attributed to Dickens until the late twentieth century; the novel The Dead Secret (1857); and numerous other stories and articles. In 1853, Collins, Dickens, and Egg traveled together in Italy and Switzerland. Four years later, Dickens produced Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, later noting that the self-sacrifice of the central character, Richard Wardour (played by Dickens), provided the germ for A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Although never published as a play, The Frozen Deep was published in 1874 as a collection of short stories. The impact each had on the writing of the other has long been a topic of controversy and speculation for critics and biographers; generally unchallenged is the influence of Collins’s meticulous plotting on his senior. In turn, Dickens often corrected and refined by suggestion Collins’s fiction, although he never agreed with Collins’s practice of including prefaces which upbraided critics and the public alike. When Collins published Basil (having included for Bentley’s publication in book form the first of those vexing prefaces), he forwarded the volumes to Dickens. After a two-week silence, there came a thoughtful, admiring reply: “I have made Basil’s acquaintance,” wrote Dickens at the end of 1852, “with great gratification, and entertain high respect for him. I hope that I shall become intimate with many worthy descendants of his, who are yet in the limbo of creatures waiting to be born.” Collins did not disappoint Dickens on that count over their years of friendship and collaboration; indeed, they became “family” when Charles Allston Collins married Dickens’s daughter Kate. Household Words faded in 1859 along with Dickens’s association with the publishers Bradbury and Evans. Dickens’s new periodical, All the Year Round (1859-1870), began auspiciously with the publication of A Tale of Two Cities. After its run, he needed something to keep public interest in the new magazine from abating, and Collins provided it with The Woman in White. Its monumental success put Collins into that rarest literary circle: that of well-to-do authors. Its success also coincided with other important events—personal ones—in Collins’s life. Collins had lived the life of a bachelor, residing with his brother and mother at least into his early thirties. Their house was often open to guests. On one such evening, the author and his brother escorted home the artist Millais through then rural North London. Suddenly, a woman appeared to them in the moonlight, attired in flowing robes, all in white. Though distraught, she gained her composure and vanished as quickly as she had appeared. The author was most astounded, and insisted he would discover the identity of the lovely creature. J. G. Millais, the painter’s son, who narrates this anecdote in a life of his father, does not reveal the lady’s ultimate identity: “Her subsequent history, interesting as it is, is not for these pages.” The woman was Caroline Elizabeth Graves, born 1834, mother of a little girl, Harriet. Her husband, G. R. Graves, may or may not have been dead. Of him, only his name is known.

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Clearly, however, the liaison between Caroline Graves and Wilkie Collins was fully under way when he began to write The Woman in White. From at least 1859, the couple lived together in a secret relationship known only to their closest friends, until the autumn of 1868, when for obscure reasons Caroline married the son of a distiller, John C. Clow. Collins, not one to waste time, started a new liaison with Martha Rudd. This union produced three children: Marian (1869), Harriet Constance (1871), and William Charles (1874). The children took the surname Dawson, but Collins freely admitted his paternity. By this time, too, Caroline and her daughter returned, and Harriet Graves for a time served as her mother’s lover’s amanuensis; Collins adopted her as his daughter. A lover of hearty food, fine champagne, and good cigars, Collins appears to have lived in private a life that would have shocked many of his readers. Still, Collins treated his “morganatic family” quite well: He provided handsomely for his natural and adopted children and for their mothers. When she died in 1895 at sixty-one, Caroline Elizabeth Graves was interred beside the author of The Woman in White. As Collins’s private life began taking on its unconventional proportions in the 1860’s, his public career grew more distinguished. His output for All the Year Round in shorter forms declined; he simply did not need the money. In March, 1861, a didactic novel about inheritance, No Name, began its run; it was published in volume form in December, 1862. A year later, Collins resigned his editorial assignment for Dickens’s periodical and also published, with Sampson Low, Son, and Company, My Miscellanies, bringing together, in two volumes, work that had first appeared in the two Dickens periodicals. After about seven years of almost obsessive productivity, Collins relented, but only for a time; he began Armadale in the spring of 1864, for serial publication in The Cornhill Magazine in Britain and Harper’s Monthly in the United States. This exploration of inherited and personal guilt remains one of Collins’s most adept and popular novels; it is also his longest. He wrote a dramatic version of the novel in 1866, but not until it appeared as Miss Gwilt (1876) was it produced. In 1867, Collins and Dickens began their last collaboration, No Thoroughfare, an adventure set in the Alps and perhaps not unaffected by their shared Swiss journey many years before. By this time, too, Collins began to suffer tremendously from the good living he had long enjoyed—gout of the areas around the eyes drove him into excruciating pain, requiring the application of bandages for weeks at a time. To allay the ache, Collins developed a habit for laudanum, that tincture of opium that fills the darker recesses of middle Victorian culture. It was in this period of alternating pain and bliss that Collins penned The Moonstone, for All the Year Round, beginning in January, 1868. It was an uncontestable triumph; Collins himself thought it wonderfully wrought. Yet The Moonstone had hardly begun its run when Collins’s mother died, and later that same year, Caroline married Clow. When the novel was finished, Collins again turned to the stage, writing Black and White with his actor-friend Charles Fechter, which successfully opened in March, 1869. At the end of the year, the serialization of Man and Wife began in Harper’s Weekly and in January, 1870, in Cassell’s Magazine. Posterity has judged Man and Wife more harshly than did its first readers. It was a different kind of novel from The Moonstone: It attacked society’s growing obsession with athleticism and castigated marital laws which Collins believed to be cruel, unfair, and unrealistic. Collins’s “standard” modern biographer, Kenneth Robinson, sees Man and Wife as the turning point in Collins’s career, the start of the “Downhill” (his chapter title) phase of the writer’s life. It sold well after its serialization; Collins also

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wrote a four-act dramatic version, although it did not appear onstage until 1873. At the same time, Collins adapted No Name for the theater, and in 1871, The Woman in White. This play opened at the Olympic Theatre in October and ran for five months before going on tour. The same year saw the beginning of a new novel in serial, Poor Miss Finch, about a blind woman who falls in love with an epileptic whose cure turns him blue. When she is temporarily cured of her affliction, she finds herself in a dilemma about her blue lover, whose healthy twin also desires her love. A year later the indefatigible Collins published The New Magdalen in a magazine called Temple Bar, whose heroine, a virtuous prostitute, outraged contemporary critics. Its dramatization (1873) was greeted with enthusiasm. As his work increasingly turned to exposing social hypocrisies, Collins sought to regulate as a writer of established repute the body of his published work. Since Basil, wholesale piracy had angered him and hurt his finances. By the early 1870’s, he had reached agreement with the German publisher Tauchnitz, with Harper and Brothers in America, and, by 1875, with Chatto & Windus in Britain. Chatto & Windus not only bought all extant copyrights to Collins’s work but also became his publisher for the rest of his life. This arrangement was finalized in the year after Collins, like his friend Dickens before him, had undertaken a reading tour of the United States and Canada. Apparently, while in New York, his gout had relented sufficiently for him to demand only brut champagne. The years 1875 and 1876 saw the publication of two popular but lesser novels, The Law and the Lady and The Two Destinies. The next year was marked, however, by the successful dramatization of The Moonstone and the beginning of Collins’s friendship with Charles Reade. In 1879, Collins wrote The Haunted Hotel for The Belgravia Magazine, a ghost story fresh in invention that extends one’s notions about the genre. Meanwhile, however, Collins’s health became less certain and his laudanum draughts became more frequent and potent. The decade took away many close friends, beginning with Dickens, and later, his brother Charles, then Augustus Egg. In the last decade of his life, Collins became more reclusive, though not much less productive. He adapted his 1858 play, The Red Vial, into a novel Jezebel’s Daughter. He also began, for serialization in The Canadian Monthly, the novel The Black Robe, whose central figure is a priest plotting to encumber the wealth of a large estate. The work has been regarded as the most successful of his longer, late novels. It was followed by a more controversial novel, Heart and Science, a polemic against vivisection that appeared in 1883. The same year saw Collins’s last theatrical, Rank and Riches, an unqualified disaster that brought the leading lady to tears before the first-act curtain and which led her leading man, G. W. Anson, to berate the audience. Collins thereafter gave up writing for the stage, save a one-performance version of The Evil Genius (1885), quickly recast as a novel that proved his single most lucrative publication. Although 1884 saw the passing of Reade, Collins’s closest friend of the time, he continued to write steadily. The Guilty River made its appearance in the Arrowsmith Christmas Annual for 1886; in 1887, Chatto & Windus published Little Novels, collecting earlier stories. Two works also appeared that ended the battle Collins had long waged with critics. A young man, Harry Quilter, published an encomiastic article for The Contemporary Review, “A Living Story-Teller.” Collins himself wrote “How I Write My Books” for The Globe, an account of composing The Woman in White. As his health at last began to fail precipitously in 1888, Collins completed his final serial novel, The Legacy of Cain. It appeared in three volumes the following year, at a time when he was

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finished writing Blind Love for The Illustrated London News. On the evening of June 30, 1889, Collins suffered a stroke. He requested Walter Besant, then traveling in the north, to return and complete the tale. Collins had long ago befriended Dickens’s physician and neighbor, Frank Beard. Beard did what little could be done to comfort Collins in his final days. Just past mid-morning, on September 23, 1889, Wilkie Collins died, Beard at his bedside. Four days following his death, Collins was buried at Kensal Green; his procession was headed by Caroline Graves, Harriet Graves, and his surviving literary, theatrical, and household friends. Despite infirmities, Collins had lived a life long and full, remaining productive, industrious, and successful throughout his career. Analysis · At its best, Wilkie Collins’s fiction is characterized by a transparent style that occasionally pleases and surprises the reader with an apt turn of word or phrase; by a genius for intricate plots; by a talent for characterization that in at least one instance must earn the epithet “Miltonic”; and by an eye for detail that seems to make the story worth telling. These are the talents of an individual who learned early to look at things like a painter, to see the meaning, the emotion behind the gesture or pose—a habit of observation which constituted William Collins’s finest bequest to his elder son. Little Novels · The transparency of Collins’s style rests on his adherence to the conventions of the popular fiction of his day. More so than contemporaries, he talks to readers, cajoles them, often protesting that the author will recede into the shadows in order that the reader may judge the action for himself. The “games”—as one current critic observes—that Collins plays with readers revolve about his mazelike plots, his “ingenuous” interruptions of the narrative, and his iterative language, symbolic names, and metaphors. Thus, at the beginning of “Mrs. Zant and the Ghost,” published in Little Novels, the narrator begins by insisting that this tale of “supernatural influence” occurs in the daylight hours, adding “the writer declines to follow modern examples by thrusting himself and his opinions on the public view. He returns to the shadow from which he has emerged, and leaves the opposing forces of incredulity and belief to fight the old battle over again, on the old ground.” The apt word is “shadow,” for certainly, this story depicts a shadow world. At its close, when the preternatural events have occurred, the reader is left to assume a happy resolution between the near victim Mrs. Zant and her earthly rescuer, Mr. Rayburn, through the mood of the man’s daughter: Arrived at the end of the journey, Lucy held fast by Mrs. Zant’s hand. Tears were rising in the child’s eyes. “Are we to bid her good-bye?” she said sadly to her father. He seemed to be unwilling to trust himself to speak; he only said, “My dear, ask her yourself.” But the result justified him. Lucy was happy again. Here, Collins’s narrator has receded like Mrs. Zant’s supernatural protector, leaving the reader to hope and to expect that Mrs. Zant can again find love in this world. This kind of exchange—direct and inferred—between author and reader can go in other directions. Surely, when near the middle of The Woman in White, one realizes that Count Fosco has read—as it were—over one’s shoulder the diary of Miss Halcolmbe, the author intends that one should feel violated, while at the same time forced into collusion with the already attractive, formidable villain.

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The Woman in White and The Moonstone · Because Collins’s style as narrator is so frequently self-effacing, it sustains the ingenuity of his plots. These are surely most elaborate in The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In both cases, Collins elects to have one figure, party to the main actions, assemble the materials of different narratives into cohesive form. It is a method far less tedious than that of epistolary novels, and provides for both mystery and suspense. Although not the ostensible theme in either work, matters of self-identity and control over one’s behavior operate in the contest between virtue and vice, good and evil. Thus, Laura Fairlie’s identity is obliterated in an attempt to wrest from her her large fortune; thus, Franklin Blake, heavily drugged, unconsciously removes a gem that makes him the center of elaborate investigation. In each novel, the discovery of the actual circumstances restores identity to these characters. The capacity to plot allows Collins to surprise his readers profoundly: In The Woman in White, one is astounded to be confronted by Laura Fairlie standing in the churchyard, above her own grave. In The Moonstone, one is baffled when the detective, Sergeant Cuff, provides a plausible solution to the theft of the diamond which turns out to be completely incorrect. The novels of the 1860’s find Collins having firmly established his transparent detachment from the subjects at hand, in turn giving full scope to his meticulous sense of plot. No Name and Armadale are no less complex in their respective actions than their more widely read counterparts. Interestingly, though, all of these novels explore matters of identity and motive for action; they attest Collins’s ability to relate popular tales that encompass more serious issues. Because he had a painter’s eye for detail, Collins was a master of characterization, even when it appears that a character is flat. Consider, for example, this passage from “Miss Dulane and My Lord” published in Little Novels: Mrs. Newsham, tall and elegant, painted and dyed, acted on the opposite principle in dressing, which confesses nothing. On exhibition before the world, this lady’s disguise asserted she had reached her thirtieth year on her last birthday. Her husband was discreetly silent, and Father Time was discreetly silent; they both knew that her last birthday had happened thirty years since. Here an incidental figure in a minor tale remains fixed, the picture of one comically out of synchronization with her own manner; before she has uttered a syllable, one dislikes her. Consider, on the other hand, the initial appearance of a woman one will grow to like and admire, Marian Halcolmbe, as she makes her way to meet Walter Hartright in The Woman in White: She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Not only does this passage reveal Collins’s superb sense of pace, his ability to set a trap of astonished laughter, but also it reveals some of Hartright’s incorrect assumptions about the position he has taken at Limmeridge House; for example, that the two young women he will instruct are pampered, spoiled, and not worth his serious consideration. Preeminently, it shows the grace of Marian Halcombe, a grace that overcomes her lack of physical beauty in conventional senses and points to her

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indefatigable intelligence and loyalty so crucial to future events in the novel. Marian is, too, a foil for her half sister, Laura Fairlie, the victim of the main crimes in the book. While one might easily dismiss Laura Fairlie with her name—she is fair and petite and very vulnerable—she also displays a quiet resilience and determination in the face of overwhelming adversaries. The most memorable of Collins’s characters is Count Fosco in the same novel, whose name immediately suggests a bludgeon. To Marian Halcombe, Collins gives the job of describing the Count: “He looks like a man who could tame anything.” In his characterization of Fosco, Collins spawned an entire race of fat villains and, occasionally, fat detectives, such as Nero Wolfe and Gideon Fell. One is not surprised that Sydney Greenstreet played both Fosco and his descendant, Caspar Gutman, in film versions of The Woman in White and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930). In one of his best speeches, Fosco reveals the nature of his hubris, his evil genius: Crimes cause their own detection, do they? . . . there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill between the police on one side, and the individual on the other. When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. In pitting decent people against others who manipulate the law and social conventions to impose their wills, Collins frequently creates characters more interesting for their deficiencies than for their virtues. His novels pit, sensationally at times, the unsuspecting, the infirm, or the unprepossessing, against darker figures, usually operating under the scope of social acceptance. Beneath the veneer of his fiction, one finds in Collins a continuing struggle to legitimize the illegitimate, to neutralize hypocrisy, and to subvert the public certainties of his era. Kenneth Friedenreich Other major works SHORT FICTION: Rambles Beyond Railways, 1851; Mr. Wray’s Cash-Box: Or, The Mask and the Mystery, 1852; The Seven Poor Travellers, 1854; After Dark, 1856; The Wreck of the Golden Mary, 1856; The Queen of Hearts, 1859; Miss or Mrs.? and Other Stories, 1873; The Frozen Deep, 1874; The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice, 1879; The Guilty River, 1886; Little Novels, 1887; The Lazy Tour of Two Apprentices, 1890 (with Charles Dickens). PLAYS: No Thoroughfare, pr., pb. 1867 (with Charles Dickens); The New Magdalen, pr., pb. 1873; Man and Wife, pr. 1873; The Moonstone, pr., pb. 1877. NONFICTION: Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, R. A., 1848 (2 volumes); The Letters of Wilkie Collins, 1999 (edited by William Baker and William M. Clarke). MISCELLANEOUS: My Miscellanies, 1863; The Works of Wilkie Collins, 1900, 1970 (30 volumes). Bibliography Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A well-illustrated, alphabetical guide to characters, titles, and terms in Collins. Includes a chronology, the Collins family tree, maps, and a bibliography. Nayder, Lillian. Wilkie Collins. New York: Twayne, 1997. A good introductory study of the author. Includes biographical information and literary criticism.

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O’Neill, Philip. Wilkie Collins: Women, Property, and Propriety. New York: Macmillan, 1988. Seeks to move the discussion of Collins away from popularist categories by using modern feminist criticism deconstructively to open up a more considered version of his thematic material. Contains a full bibliography. Page, Norman. Wilkie Collins. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. One of the Critical Heritage series, this is a full anthology of Collins’s critical reception from 1850 through 1891. Contains a short bibliography. Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. A comprehensive biography, with detailed notes and bibliography. Pykett, Lyn, ed. Wilkie Collins. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. An excellent place for the beginning student to begin. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Taylor, Jenny. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth Century Psychology. New York: Routledge, 1988. The subtitle of this study suggests its perspective. However, it deals as fully with social structures and how these shape the structures of Collins’s major fiction. Contains full notes and an excellent select bibliography of both primary and secondary material.

Ivy Compton-Burnett Ivy Compton-Burnett

Born: Pinner, England; June 5, 1884 Died: London, England; August 27, 1969 Principal long fiction · Dolores, 1911; Pastors and Masters, 1925; Brothers and Sisters, 1929; Men and Wives, 1931; More Women than Men, 1933; A House and Its Head, 1935; Daughters and Sons, 1937; A Family and a Fortune, 1939; Parents and Children, 1941; Elders and Betters, 1944; Manservant and Maidservant, 1947 (pb. in U.S. as Bullivant and the Lambs, 1948); Two Worlds and Their Ways, 1949; Darkness and Day, 1951; The Present and the Past, 1953; Mother and Son, 1955; A Father and His Fate, 1957; A Heritage and Its History, 1959; The Mighty and Their Fall, 1961; A God and His Gifts, 1963; The Last and the First, 1971. Other literary forms · Ivy Compton-Burnett is known only for her novels. Achievements · Compton-Burnett is a novelist’s novelist, much appreciated by her peers. She has been compared by her partisans to figures as various as Jane Austen, Jean Racine, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, Anton Chekhov, the Elizabethan tragedians, William Congreve, Oscar Wilde, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harold Pinter, and the cubists. Her appeal is to a growing circle of admirers, although her work has enjoyed neither popular adulation nor widespread critical attention. Her novels require slow and attentive reading and make heavy demands upon the reader, yet they do not offer the inviting depths of works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Compton-Burnett’s modernism is of a different kind: Her works present hard and brittle surfaces, and her style reaches its purest expression in pages of unbroken dialogue, highly stylized and crackling with suppressed emotion. Her uncompromising artistry won for her a small but permanent place in twentieth century world literature. Biography · Ivy Compton-Burnett always thought she would write, even when she was quite young. She came from a well-to-do family: Her father, James Compton Burnett (no hyphen), was a doctor and direct descendant of the ecclesiastical writer Bishop Gilbert Burnett. Ivy adored her father and from him inherited a love of words and of nature. Her mother, Katharine Rees Compton-Burnett, was the second wife of her father: Katharine became stepmother to five children at marriage and mother of seven more, of whom Ivy was the oldest. Katharine seems to have been the prototype for several of the tyrants in Compton-Burnett’s works: She was beautiful, autocratic, indifferent to her stepchildren and distant to her own. The real mother to the children was their nurse Minnie. Olive, the eldest of all the children, was bitterly jealous of her stepmother and of Ivy for her close relationship with their father. Compton-Burnett’s closest companions were her two younger brothers, Guy and Noel ( Jim). The three were educated together, first by a governess, then by a tutor, and Compton-Burnett always remained proud that she had had a boy’s education. She loved Latin and Greek. In 1902, she entered Royal Holloway College, London 195

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University; in 1904, she was awarded the Founder’s Scholarship; in 1906, she passed the bachelor of arts honors examination in the classics. Her love of the classics appears clearly in her works: Her plots, with their recurring motifs of incest and family murder, seem straight from Greek tragedy; her characters often allude to Greek tragedy; her view of life as cruel and ironic is the tragic view of the Greek dramatists, skewed by modern experience and by her own temperament. Compton-Burnett claimed to have written very little before her first novel, Dolores, was published. She discounted Dolores entirely in later life, uncertain which parts were hers and which were the work of her overly enthusiastic brother Noel. Between the publication of Dolores and Pastors and Masters, her second novel, is a gap of fourteen years which was filled with family turbulence. After the death of both her parents, Ivy became head of the household and a bit of a tyrant herself. Her four younger sisters and Minnie moved out and set up their own household which they refused to let Ivy visit. Compton-Burnett’s only remaining brother, Noel (Guy had died earlier), was killed in World War I, and the author cared for his widow after she took an overdose of sleeping pills. Around the same time, Ivy’s two youngest sisters committed suicide. She herself had a bout with Spanish influenza which drained her energy for some years. In the early 1920’s, Compton-Burnett settled in a flat in London with her friend, Margaret Jourdain, an authority on Regency furniture, with whom she lived for thirty years. Jourdain was the more famous and remained the dominant of the pair. The two women traveled abroad together every year, where Compton-Burnett pursued her passion of collecting wildflowers. Every odd-numbered year, with only a few exceptions, she produced a novel. World War II disturbed her greatly: She and Jourdain fled to the country to escape the bombing. When Jourdain died in 1951, ComptonBurnett felt betrayed by her “desertion.” In her later years, many honors were bestowed upon Compton-Burnett. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1951; she was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956; in 1960, she received an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Leeds; in 1967, she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Compton-Burnett dedicated her life to her art, reading and working continually. She had little wish to reveal the details of her private life, “I haven’t been at all deedy”—and believed that all she had to offer the world could be found in her books. Analysis · Ivy Compton-Burnett has no wide range of style or subject in her twenty novels. Like Jane Austen, she limits her characters to a few well-to-do families in the country. The action takes place in the late Victorian era, though there are few indications of any time period. Scenery is almost nonexistent, and no heavy Victorian furnishings clutter the scene. Compton-Burnett concentrates entirely on her characters, not in describing them but in having them reveal (and sometimes betray) themselves in what they do and do not say. Her novels demand more of the ear than of the eye. They have been likened to plays in their spareness of description, narration, exposition, and their concentration on talk. Dialogue indeed is the reason why her novels draw readers and is her chief contribution to the art of the novel. Each chapter contains one event, which is discussed in detail by one family, and then perhaps another, or by the masters in the house and then the servants. Although Compton-Burnett as an omniscient author does not comment on or analyze her characters or their motives, her chorus of

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servants, children, neighbors, and schoolmistresses do so incessantly. In this way, she achieves many points of view instead of only one. Compton-Burnett’s novels do have plots—melodramatic and sometimes implausible ones with murders, incest, infidelity, and perversions of justice. At times, she drops enough clues for the reader to know what will happen; at other times, events occur arbitrarily. Shipwrecked characters often reappear; documents are stolen or concealed only to turn up later. Eavesdroppers populate her novels. Several people, for example, coincidentally walk into a room when they are being slandered. Although the events themselves are often too coincidental, the highly crafted conversations about them prove Compton-Burnett’s talent as a writer. These witty and ironic conversations insist on the revelation of truth, on the precise use of language, making Compton-Burnett’s novels memorable. Language insulates people against the primitive forces, the unmentionable deeds of which they are capable. Her witty dialogue tends to anesthetize the reader’s response (and the characters’ as well) to horrendous crimes of passion. Compton-Burnett’s novels explore all the tensions of family life—between strong and weak, between generations, between classes. Power is her chief subject, with love, money, and death as constant attendants. Her main foes are complacency, tyranny, and hypocrisy. Compton-Burnett deplores sloppy thinking and dishonesty, whether with oneself or with others. Her novels clearly indicate her view of human nature. She believes that wickedness is often not punished and that is why it is prevalent. When wickedness is likely to be punished, most people, she thinks, are intelligent enough to avoid it. She also sees very few people as darkly evil; many people, when subjected to strong and sudden temptation without the risk of being found out, yield to such an urge. Even her bad characters have some good in them. Although the good points of the tyrants can be recognized, their cruelty can never be forgiven. Yet, ironically, their cruelty often produces good results. The victims build up bravery, loyalty, and affection as defenses against the wicked and cruel. Compton-Burnett’s novels, above all, elicit concern for human suffering. Though she does believe in economic and hereditary forces, Compton-Burnett also believes in free will. She is one of the rare novelists whose good-hearted characters are credible as well as likable. The good and innocent characters in her novels, particularly the children, are not corrupted and usually remain unharmed. They conquer by truth, affection, and, most important, by intelligence. ComptonBurnett shows the great resilience of the human spirit; her characters survive atrocities and then settle down to resume their everyday lives. In her novels, the greatest crimes are not crimes of violence, but crimes against the human spirit: one person beating down, wounding, or enslaving another’s spirit. Yet her novels do not end with a feeling of despair. They end, rather, with a feeling of understanding. The good characters see the faults of the tyrants yet continue to love them and gallantly pick them up when they have fallen. The good characters realize that evil and good are inextricable. Compton-Burnett’s strengths and weaknesses as a novelist are both suggested by the fact that she has no masterpiece, no best or greatest novel. Her oeuvre has a remarkable consistency, the product of an unswerving artistic intelligence yet also evidence of a certain narrowness and rigidity. By general consensus, her strongest works are those of her middle period, including Brothers and Sisters, More Women than Men, A Family and a Fortune, and Manservant and Maidservant.

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Brothers and Sisters · Brothers and Sisters, Compton-Burnett’s third novel, is distinguished by the appearance of the first of many tyrannical women in her oeuvre. Sophia Stace (who, like the later tyrants, is a tragic figure as well) wants attention and affection, but she is never willing to give in return. She never sees beyond herself or acts for anyone but herself. Her daughter Dinah succinctly comments: “Power has never been any advantage to Sophia. . . . It has her worn out, and everyone who would have served her.” Sophia’s self-absorption leads to disaster. Thinking her father’s instructions, which are locked in a desk, will cut her and her adopted brother out of his will, Sophia leaves them there unread, marries her adopted brother (who is really her half brother), and bears three children. Her husband dies of a heart attack after finding out the truth about his and Sophia’s parentage, and Sophia reacts to his death by imprisoning herself in her home. Intending to draw attention to herself, Sophia dramatizes her grief. When her children attempt to resume life as usual, she moans that they feel no affection for her: “I don’t know whether you like sitting there, having your dinner, with your mother eating nothing?” Like other Compton-Burnett tyrants, she turns mealtime into domestic inquisition. The only one who can control Sophia, modeled on Compton-Burnett’s mother Katharine, is Miss Patmore, modeled on Compton-Burnett’s own nurse Minnie. The children love and respect “Patty” as a mother since their own is incapable of giving love. When Sophia herself finds out the truth, she has no feeling for what the revelation will do to her children. They meet the tragedy with characteristic wittiness to cover the pain: “Well if we are equal to this occasion, no other in our lives can find us at a loss. We may look forward to all emergencies without misgiving.” The children, though they have been Sophia’s victims, are able to realize after her death that she, more than anyone else, has been her own victim: “The survey of Sophia’s life flashed on them, the years of ruthlessness and tragedy, power and grief. Happiness, of which she held to have had so much, had never been real to Sophia. They saw it now.” Power thus eats away at the powerful while their victims rise to a higher moral plane of understanding. Brothers and Sisters has many of the standard Compton-Burnett plot ingredients: incest, illegitimacy, domestic torture, and the family secret that becomes public knowledge. What gives the novel added strength is the subplot of Peter Bateman and his children, another example of a parent who blithely torments his children. Socially gauche, Peter’s vicious stupidity inflicts painful embarrassment on his skulking son Latimer and his self-effacing daughter Tilly. He determinedly pigeonholes his children into demeaning positions. While the bond between parents and children in the novel is a brutal one, the bond between brothers and sisters becomes a saving one. Sophia’s children, Andrew, Robin, and Dinah, support one another, and they are not the only brothers and sisters in the novel to do so. There are three other sets of brothers and sisters: Edward and Judith, Julian and Sarah, and Gilbert and Caroline, all friends of the Stace children. At various points in the novel, Andrew and Dinah are engaged to Caroline and Gilbert, then to Judith and Edward, and finally Julian proposes to Dinah but is rejected. The Stace children and their friends change romantic partners as if they were merely changing partners at a dance, partly in reaction to the tragic secrets that are revealed, and partly because Compton-Burnett has little faith in marriage or in romantic love. Her marriages are matters of convenience, timing, and location; none of her husbands and wives grow together in a fulfilling relationship. The strongest love bond is always the fraternal bond.

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More Women than Men · Like Compton-Burnett’s first two novels, More Women than Men is a school novel. The schoolmistresses of Josephine Napier’s girls’ school function as the villagers do in Compton-Burnett’s manor novels: They serve as a chorus for the main action and provide comic relief from the main tragic action (Miss Munday, the senior teacher, is particularly good at this). The schoolmistresses, however, have less freedom than the villagers: In a society where unmarried or widowed women have few options in supporting themselves, they are bound to the tyrant Josephine. More Women than Men, like Men and Wives and A House and Its Head, the novels that immediately preceded and followed it, is a very somber work. Josephine is morally, though not legally, guilty of murder; she exposes her nephew Gabriel’s wife, who is deathly ill with pneumonia, to cold blasts of air. She is also a hypocrite par excellence. When her husband Simon dies, she affects ostentatious mourning and claims, “I am not a person to take a pride in not being able to eat and sleep,” yet she does exactly that. In reality, she feels little at his death. Gabriel, her morose victim, is also one of the few people who stands up to her. When she makes such claims as “I am not an ogress,” Gabriel flatly replies, “Well, you are rather.” His standing up to her, though, cannot prevent his wife’s murder. There are two other important elements in Josephine’s complex personality: sexual repression and dominance. Indeed, More Women than Men is preoccupied with the psychology of sex and with gender differences. Men and women are attracted both to women and to men. Josephine, for example, many years before the book begins, has stolen Simon from Elizabeth Giffard; she disposes of Ruth Giffard so she can reclaim her nephew Gabriel’s affections; she thrusts herself on Felix Bacon and, when rejected, accepts the love of Miss Rossetti, Gabriel’s natural mother. For Josephine, sex is purely an expression of power. Josephine’s cruel oppression is counterbalanced by another sexually amorphous character, the comic Felix Bacon. Felix begins the novel as the homosexual companion of Josephine’s brother, inherits a manor and a fortune in the course of the novel, and marries the intelligent young heroine Helen Keats at the end. He triumphs in that he escapes Josephine’s smothering affection and is able to be master of his own world, yet he still feels a longing for the old situation. One can never break completely free from the stranglehold of the tyrant. Gender differences are explored in many of Compton-Burnett’s novels. In Pastors and Masters, she had already dealt with the relative merits of men and women. Emily Herrick, the novel’s main character, had maintained that men are egotistical and “devious.” In More Women than Men, Compton-Burnett raises the problem of the shoddy attention women receive. Felix, for example, wryly remarks that parents express surprise that their daughters’ education should be taken seriously. “It is a good thing that they entrust it to other people . . . they don’t seem to give any real thought to their being the mothers of the race.” Although never an ardent supporter of feminist causes, Compton-Burnett did object to the unequal treatment women received, especially in terms of education. A Family and a Fortune · A Family and a Fortune is one of Compton-Burnett’s kindliest novels. Matty Seaton, the tyrant, is not like the tyrants of earlier novels: She has neither the highly dramatic and tragic sense of Sophia Stace nor the magnetizing and suffocating attraction of Josephine Napier. She wants to be needed by others and craves power, but her tyranny is limited because she is a maiden aunt (not a mother),

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because she is financially dependent on her sister’s family, because she cannot actively move about (she was crippled in a riding accident), and because she lives in a lodge separated from the main family in the manor. With these limitations, she becomes a study of frustrated tyranny. Compton-Burnett introduces her thus: “Her energy seemed to accumulate and to work itself out at the cost of some havoc within her.” All that is left of her youthful attractiveness is her overpowering self-regard. She tries to make herself needed by cutting down others with recrimination and guilt, but all her maneuvers are transparent. She releases her frustration by browbeating her paid companion Miss Griffin, whom she even drives out into the cold one night. While Matty’s energies are loosed into negative and destructive channels, her niece Justine releases her own similar energies in positive and constructive routes. Justine is one of the best of the strong-minded, clear-seeing, female characters whom Compton-Burnett uses to balance her tyrants (Patty in Brothers and Sisters and Rachel in Men and Wives are other examples). Justine is the one who patches the leaky boat of family life with her optimistic matter-of-factness. Self-effacing and comic, she is “utterly honest” with herself, particularly about her own potential weaknesses. She busies herself about everyone’s business but never lapses into tyranny and willingly yields her power when her father remarries. Though a bit officious, she brings a positive force to the family and the novel, insisting that life has meaning: “All human effort must achieve something essential, if not apparent,” she explains. She is one of the few Compton-Burnett characters who is morally good and truthful, but not cynical (nor very witty). It is she who makes the ending of the novel happy—with the two brothers Edgar and Dudley once again arm in arm—happy because she insists it is. Another remarkable character in the novel is Aubrey, Justine’s fifteen-year-old retarded brother. Compton-Burnett first introduced children into her novels in Daughters and Sons, and they never left her novels thereafter. Children prove useful to Compton-Burnett in the contrast they make with their parents; in the choric comments they can make on the action; in the helpless victims they provide for the tyrants; and in themselves, because Compton-Burnett knows the difficult and sometimes fearful world of children. Aubrey senses his inadequacies and is always trying to reassure himself by saying how much he is like someone else in the family. His dialogue brings out real family resemblances: At times he is peevish like his grandfather, at other times he consciously (and sometimes unconsciously) imitates his uncle Dudley’s clearheaded, mannered speech. Aubrey’s attempts to be normal constitute some of the most moving scenes in Compton-Burnett’s fiction. One important theme of A Family and a Fortune is that to be “normal” is to be flawed. Matty Seaton treats her devoted companion brutally; her nephew Clement Gaveston hoards gold coins in his bedroom; and Dudley Gaveston, the generous bachelor uncle who inherits the fortune, leaves the manor in a jealous rage when his brother Edgar steals his fiancé. Dudley sums up their behavior by saying that all have their ridiculous moments. Dudley and Edgar have the very close fraternal relationship so common in Compton-Burnett novels. They almost exclude Blanche, Edgar’s first wife, from close communion, and the greatest threat in the novel is not murder or incest as in the early novels, but that the brotherly bond will be broken. At the end of the novel, though, it is clear that Edgar will return to Dudley. Manservant and Maidservant · Manservant and Maidservant has been the most popular of all Compton-Burnett’s novels; some critics have named it as their favorite, and

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Compton-Burnett even said it was one that she particularly liked. It is less spare than the other novels, with more exposition, more sense of place (a smoking fireplace begins and ends the novel, for example), and fully drawn characters. A story of reformation, it shows strong bonds of affection among Horace Lamb, his cousin Mortimer, and his counterpart in the servants’ world, Bullivant, the butler. Horace, a penny-pincher who makes his children do calisthenics to keep warm in winter, is one of Compton-Burnett’s crotchety male tyrants. He often looks aside in apparent abstraction as “punishment to people for the nervous exasperation that they produced in him, and must expiate.” His wife Charlotte and his cousin Mortimer plan to run away and take the children with them to save them from suffering. Horace finds a letter detailing their plans and becomes Compton-Burnett’s first and only tyrant who attempts to reform. His reformation does not erase the past (his children, in particular, point this out); in fact, it makes the children suffer more because he inevitably has lapses. The ups and downs of being nourished, then starved, torture the children far more excruciatingly than would consistent oppression. Yet Horace draws forth deep love from Mortimer and devoted service from Bullivant. Mortimer explains the tyrant’s appeal: “Is there something in Horace that twines itself about the heart? Perhaps it is being his own worst enemy.” The wise characters may be victims of the tyrants, but they also understand and pity them. Mortimer, like Dudley Gaveston, is an example of Compton-Burnett’s unmarried, rather impotent characters who attach themselves to their richer relatives in the manor. Like Dudley, Mortimer cares more about the children than their own father does. It is these dependent characters who have the strength to challenge the tyrant’s ruthlessness, who speak with caustic honesty to expose the tyrant’s pretentiousness. They act courageously, even though they must mortify themselves (thus Mortimer’s name) and expose their own weakness in the cause of truth. The exploiter needs the exploited, and vice versa. Manservant and Maidservant introduces an important new element in ComptonBurnett’s novels: the servants. Like the children, they can mirror their masters or can serve as a chorus discussing the action. The characters of Compton-Burnett’s servants are never better than in this novel: the timid maid; the motherly, nonconformist cook; George, the workhouse boy with grandiose pretensions; and Bullivant, the wonderfully comic butler. Bullivant holds both upstairs and downstairs together with his wry wit and firm hand. He knows everything that has transpired and anticipates what will come. He is also a character of great tenderness and protectiveness, though he hides it under a mask of strict propriety. His devotion to Horace is almost that of an elder brother, though he is always careful to keep his place. Two important themes of Manservant and Maidservant are the conflict between instinct and social conventions and the pernicious effects of do-gooders’ meddling. Compton-Burnett had no belief in God, but she was a great supporter of social conventions as necessary restraints on man’s primitive instincts. The decent majority of men create social and moral rules; the unscrupulous minority violate them. Horace claims that civilized life consists in suppressing one’s instincts, but his wife Charlotte corrects him by saying that all life consists in fulfilling them. Charlotte expresses the complexity of Compton-Burnett’s vision: “There is so much truth on all the different sides of things.” Compton-Burnett first sounded the theme of meddling do-gooders in Pastors and Masters, in which one character remarks, “I think it’s rather terrible to see it [good] being done.” In Manservant and Maidservant, Mortimer breaks his engagement to

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Magdalen because of her interference: “At any time you might act for my good. When people do that, it kills something precious between them.” Like Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1852-1853), Compton-Burnett believes that do-gooders are usually thinly veiled tyrants. Yet the novel ends happily with an act of goodness: The maid will teach Miss Buchanan, the illiterate shopkeeper, to read. A God and His Gifts · After Manservant and Maidservant, Compton-Burnett’s novels weaken, showing signs of strain, repetition, melodrama, and lack of inventiveness. One exception to this is A God and His Gifts, in which the tyrant Hereward Egerton overflows with sexual and artistic energy. Through his character, Compton-Burnett reflects on the nature of the artist: his essential and consuming egoism and his godlike creativity. The most telling criticism leveled against the novels of Compton-Burnett is their sameness. The plots of her novels tend to become indistinguishable after many are read; the speech of all her characters, no matter what their social class or background, is witty and stylized, and her characters themselves become habitual types. Such charges have a degree of validity, yet Compton-Burnett’s novels must be accepted on their own terms. She was not interested in realistic dialogue; she was concerned with speech as a means of revealing human character. Her tyrants tend to be careless in their discourse, relying on clichés or using words inexactly, just as they are careless in the way they trample moral laws and people. They pretend to be open, but their speech incriminates them for lack of self-knowledge and candor. Their victims, who seek truth, always correct the tyrants’ misuse of language by questioning the real meaning of the words they use. Whatever her flaws as a novelist, Compton-Burnett was an artist of uncommon intelligence, originality, and control. Her work might best be described in a phrase from one of her own novels, More Women than Men: “Like agate, beautiful and bright and hard.” Ann Willardson Engar Bibliography Baldana, Frank. Ivy Compton-Burnett. New York: Twayne, 1964. Packs much information into a short space. Offers brief characterizations of all the novels, organized around common themes such as home and family. Also “criticizes the critics,” giving an analysis of the major evaluations of Compton-Burnett available at that time. Baldana regards Compton-Burnett as the foremost contemporary novelist. Burkhart, Charles. I. Compton-Burnett. London: Victor Gollancz, 1965. Classes Compton-Burnett as an eccentric novelist and offers a psychological account of this type of writer. Presents themes found in Compton-Burnett’s works, such as conventions, secrets, people and power, and ethos, devoting a chapter to each. Concludes with a summary of each of the novels, ranking Manservant and Maidservant as the most brilliant. Gentile, Kathy Justice. Ivy Compton-Burnett. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. A shrewd feminist rereading with chapters on Compton-Burnett’s “ethic of tolerance,” her early novels, her treatment of mothers and martyrs, her view of civilization, her later novels, her reading of human character, and the responses of her critics. A very thorough study, with notes and bibliography. Nevius, Blake. Ivy Compton-Burnett. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. This

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short study presents a general account of the novelist. Her works stress the conflict of passion and duty and are situated in an enclosed space. Their peculiar form, consisting almost entirely of dialogue, has led many to dismiss Compton-Burnett as an eccentric. Although her characters are static, her theme of the abuse of power has contemporary relevance. Sprigge, Elizabeth. The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett. New York: George Braziller, 1973. Devoted to Compton-Burnett’s life much more than her works, but includes some literary analysis. Sprigge denies that the novels are all alike: Each one is a separate creation. The main theme of Compton-Burnett’s work is that the truth behind a family’s relationships will eventually come to light. Sprigge is extremely favorable to her subject and accepts what Compton-Burnett claims at face value. Spurling, Hilary. Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. The most comprehensive account of Compton-Burnett’s life, based on exhaustive research and conversations with Compton-Burnett’s friends. The novelist’s severely repressed life as a child in the late Victorian era dominates the first half of the book. After the death of her two sisters by suicide in 1917, her life was outwardly uneventful. Her childhood experiences influenced her stories and novels, all of which are discussed at length.

Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad

Jósef Teodor Konrad Nalfcz Korzeniowski Born: Near Berdyczów, Poland; December 3, 1857 Died: Oswalds, Bishopsbourne, England; August 3, 1924 Principal long fiction · Almayer’s Folly, 1895; An Outcast of the Islands, 1896; The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 1897; Heart of Darkness, 1899 (serial), 1902 (book); Lord Jim, 1900; The Inheritors, 1901 (with Ford Madox Ford); Romance, 1903 (with Ford); Nostromo, 1904; The Secret Agent, 1907; Under Western Eyes, 1911; Chance, 1913; Victory, 1915; The Shadow-Line, 1917; The Arrow of Gold, 1919; The Rescue, 1920; The Rover, 1923; The Nature of a Crime, 1909 (serial), 1924 (book; with Ford); Suspense, 1925 (incomplete). Other literary forms · Joseph Conrad’s many short stories were published in seven collected editions. The majority of the stories appeared earlier in magazine form, especially in Blackwood’s Magazine, a magazine that Conrad referred to as “Maga.” Of the short stories, three—“Youth,” “The Secret Sharer,” and “An Outpost of Progress”—have been widely anthologized and are generally recognized as classics of the genre. Two memoirs of Conrad’s years at sea, The Mirror of the Sea (1906) and A Personal Record (1912) are prime sources of background information on Conrad’s sea tales. Conrad wrote three plays: The Secret Agent (1921), a four-act adaptation of the novel which enjoyed a brief success on the London stage; and two short plays, Laughing Anne (1923) and One Day More (1905), which had no success. His oeuvre is rounded out by two books of essays on widely ranging topics, Notes on Life and Letters (1921) and Last Essays (1926); a travel book, Joseph Conrad’s Diary of His Journey Up the Valley of the Congo in 1890 (1926); and the aborted novel The Sisters, left incomplete at his death in 1924, but published in fragment form in 1928. Achievements · In the late twentieth century, Conrad enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in readership and in critical attention. Readers and critics alike have come to recognize that although one of Conrad’s last novels, The Rover, was published in the early 1920’s, he is the most modern of writers in both theme and technique. Conrad is, in fact, the architect of the modern psychological novel with its emphasis on character and character analysis. For Conrad, people in plot situations, rather than plot situations themselves, are the primary concern. Indeed, Conrad once professed that he was incapable of creating “an effective lie,” meaning a plot “that would sell and be admirable.” This is something of an exaggeration, but the fact remains that Conrad’s novels center around the solitary hero who, either by chance or by choice, is somehow alienated and set apart from his fellow people. This theme of isolation and alienation dominates Conrad’s novels and spans his work from the early sea tales to the political novels to what Conrad called his “romances.” Conrad’s “loners” are manifest everywhere in his work—Jim in Lord Jim, Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Razumov in Under Western Eyes. This emphasis on the alienated and isolated figure has had a considerable impact on the direction of the twentieth century 204

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novel, and Conrad’s influence may be discerned in such disparate writers as Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot. Conrad made another contribution in shaping the modern novel: He was the forerunner (although hardly the originator) of two techniques which have found much favor and wide employment in the twentieth century novel. Conrad was among the first of the modern novelists to employ multiple narrators, or shifting points of view, as he does in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. This technique enabled Conrad to make the probing analyses of characters and their motivations which are the hallmarks both of his work and of the work of so many others to follow. The reader sees both Kurtz and Jim, for example, through several pairs of eyes, some sympathetic, some not, before both tales are turned over to Charlie Marlow, who Library of Congress does his best to sort out the conflicting testimonies and to give the reader an objective and a rounded view of both men. The extensive use of the flashback in the contemporary novel and, indeed, the contemporary film, is another technique which Conrad pioneered. In Conrad’s case, as is the case with all writers who employ the technique, the flashback creates suspense; but it also serves another and more important function in his work, enabling him to examine more thoroughly the minds and the motivations of his characters. Having presented the crisis or the moment of action or the point of decision, Conrad then goes back in time, in an almost leisurely fashion, and retraces step by step the psychological pattern which led to the crisis, to the action, or to the decision. Finally, Conrad finds a place and a role among the moderns in still another way. He is one of the great Symbolists in English literature. Conrad’s use of thoroughly unconventional symbols, related in some way to the metaphysical metaphors to be found in much modern poetry, has had an inestimable influence on the modern novel. Biography · Joseph Conrad was born Jósef Teodor Konrad Nalfcz Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, near the rural village of Berdyczów in Poland, under Russian domination. Conrad’s mother, Ewa Bobrowski, came from an affluent and influential family of landowners who had made their peace, as best they could, with their Russian overlords. Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a would-be poet, a dedicated patriot, and a translator of William Shakespeare into Polish who found no peace in Russian Poland. The marriage of Apollo and Ewa was frowned upon by the Bobrowskis, who felt that Ewa had married beneath herself, and Ewa’s brother, Tadeusz, a prominent lawyer and member of the landed gentry, seldom missed an opportunity

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to remind his nephew, Jósef, that he bore the tainted Nalfcz blood. Apollo Korzeniowski devoted all his energies and, ultimately, his life to the Polish freedom movement. As a result of his political activities, he was labeled an enemy of the state and exiled to Vologda in northern Russia. The five-year-old Jósef and his mother followed Apollo into exile. Three years later, her health ruined by the fierce Russian winters, Ewa Korzeniowski died, and Apollo, equally weakened by the ordeal, succumbed four years after his wife. There is little doubt that Conrad’s own lifelong precarious physical state had its genesis in these years in exile. From these blighted early years, two convictions were impressed in Conrad’s consciousness which surfaced in his work: a continuing hatred for all things Russian and for autocratic regimes; and a strong sense of man as victim, instilled by his father’s fate, and of man’s essential loneliness and isolation, instilled by his own orphanage at the age of twelve. The victimization of the innocent lies at the heart of Conrad’s political novels, especially Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, and is a major theme in Heart of Darkness. The alienated figure, forced to cope as best he can alone, is the essential Conrad. With the deaths of Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, Conrad came under the tutelage of his concerned but somewhat demanding maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Bobrowski, a man of many affairs and very positive ideas and ideals, sent his young ward to St. Anne’s School in Kraków for a brief term and later provided Conrad with a tutor and companion in the hope of creating a proper Polish gentleman. These few years constituted the extent of Conrad’s formal education. An avid reader from his early childhood, Conrad was largely self-educated, and the wide knowledge of English, French, and Russian literature apparent in his works (especially in his critical essays) was acquired through his own efforts. Bobrowski’s hopes and plans for Conrad’s becoming an accepted member of the right circles in Polish society were not to be realized. Chafing under the regimen of his oversolicitous uncle and, perhaps, convinced that there was no place for Apollo Korzienowski’s son in Russian Poland, Conrad finally persuaded his reluctant uncle that his future lay elsewhere: at sea, a dream with which Conrad had been obsessed since seeing the Adriatic during a walking tour of northern Italy in 1873. In 1874 Conrad left Poland for the port city of Marseilles, France, and the seaman’s life to which he would devote the next twenty years. He carried with him his uncle’s begrudging blessing and, more important, considerable financial support. The break with his native land was to be more complete than Conrad may have realized at the time, since he returned to Poland on only three occasions during the remainder of his life. Conrad’s adventures and misadventures during his four years in and about Marseilles provided the material, many years later, for the almost lyrical memoir The Mirror of the Sea and the novel The Arrow of Gold, the latter of which has been the subject of much critical dispute. With his uncle’s backing, Conrad acquired, during that time, part ownership of the bark Tremolino, which was then employed in smuggling arms for the Spanish Pretender, Don Carlos. It was a period of much intrigue, and Conrad appears to have been at the center, enjoying it hugely. What is not clear about the Marseilles years, unless one accepts Conrad’s highly fictionalized version of the events in The Arrow of Gold, is how his ventures at that time all came to a disastrous end. Conrad apparently invested a considerable sum of money in a quixotic mining venture. Moreover, if the Doña Rita of The Arrow of Gold did, in fact, exist as Conrad describes her in the novel, then a particularly painful and

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hopeless love affair complicated Conrad’s desperate financial straits. In any event, in February, 1878, Conrad attempted suicide and almost succeeded by placing a bullet in his chest, very near the heart. Uncle Tadeusz made a hasty trip to Marseilles and restored some kind of order to Conrad’s tangled affairs, and, on April 24, 1878, Conrad signed on the British ship Mavis, bound from Marseilles to England. Conrad’s career as a seaman and, more particularly as a British seaman, had begun. In the next twenty years, sailing on a variety of ships on passages which encompassed half the globe, Conrad accomplished an incredible feat. An alien from a landlocked country, bearing an unpronounceable foreign name and speaking English with a pronounced Slavic-French accent, Conrad rose from able seaman to master mariner in the British Merchant Service. Conrad took great pride in being addressed as Captain Korzeniowski, just as he took great pride in his British citizenship, acquired in 1885. Many of the ships on which Conrad sailed make an appearance in his works. For example, there actually was a Narcissus on which Conrad sailed from Bombay to Dunkirk and a Palestine which became the Judea of “Youth” and the SS Roi des Belges, the counterpart of Marlow’s “tinpot” steamboat in Heart of Darkness. In similar fashion, many of Conrad’s characters are based on real-life prototypes, men whom Conrad had encountered or of whom he had heard while at sea. There was a “Jim”; there was a “MacWhirr”; there was an “Almayer”; there was an “Axel Heyst”; there was a “Tom Lingard”; and there was a “Charlie Marlow,” born Jósef Korzeniowski. In 1889, while between ships in London, Conrad began work on the strange tale of Kaspar Almayer. The work continued sporadically during Conrad’s six-month tour in the Belgian Congo in 1890, a sojourn which later provided the material for his first major work, Heart of Darkness, and also succeeded in further undermining his already unstable health. In 1893, Conrad, then first mate of the ship Torrens, showed the nine completed chapters of Almayer’s Folly to an English passenger and was encouraged to finish the book. Almayer’s Folly was published in 1895, to be followed by An Outcast of the Islands in 1896, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” in 1897, Heart of Darkness in 1899, and Lord Jim in 1900. Conrad enjoyed almost immediate critical acclaim, but despite the string of critical successes, he had only a modest public following. In fact, Conrad did not have a best-seller until 1913, with Chance. Ironically, the reading public did not find Conrad until after he had written his best work. Given this limited popular success, Conrad did not feel secure enough to devote himself entirely to a writing career, and, for a six-year period, 1889 to 1895, he vacillated between the safety of a master’s berth aboard ship and the uncertainty of his writing table. Even as late as 1898, when he was well established with a publisher and several reputable magazines were eager for his work, Conrad seriously considered returning to the sea. With his marriage to Jessie George in 1894, Conrad had, in effect, returned from the sea and settled down to a life of hectic domesticity and long, agonizing hours of writing. Jessie, an unassuming, maternal woman, was the perfect mate for the often unpredictable, volatile, and ailing Conrad, and she cheerfully nursed him through his frequent attacks of malaria, gout, and deep depression. The marriage produced two sons, Borys and John, and lasted until Conrad’s death. Except for a brief trip to his native Poland in 1914, a few holidays on the Continent, and an even briefer trip to the United States in 1923, Conrad was resigned to the endless hours at his desk and content to live the life of an English gentleman in his

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adopted land. The Conrads were something of a nomadic family, however, moving frequently whenever Conrad tired of one of their rented dwellings. His last five years were spent at Oswalds, Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury. After World War I, the acclaim and the recognition which he had so richly earned finally came to Conrad—an offer of knighthood (which he declined) and the friendship and the respect of many of the literary greats of the time. Essentially a very private man, Conrad, while never denying his Polish origins or renouncing his Roman Catholic faith, tried to live the quiet life of the quintessential English country squire. There was always, however, something of the foreigner about him—the monocle, the Continental-style greatcoat, the slightly Asian eyes, the click of the heels and the formal bow from the waist—which did not go unnoticed among his English friends and neighbors. Like so many of the characters in his novels, Conrad remained somehow apart and alienated from the mainstream of the life about him. On August 3, 1924, Conrad succumbed to a massive heart attack at his home near Bishopsbourne. He is buried in the cemetery at Canterbury, in—according to the parish register of St. Thomas’s Church—“that part reserved for Catholics.” Even in death, Conrad, like so many of his fictional creations, found himself alone and apart. Analysis · Three themes are dominant among Joseph Conrad’s sea tales, considered by most critics as his best work. The first of these themes is an unremitting sense of loyalty and duty to the ship, and this quality is exemplified by Conrad’s seamen who are successful in practicing their craft. In The Mirror of the Sea, Conrad, in propria persona, and through Singleton, the exemplar of the faithful seaman in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” summarized this necessity for keeping faith in observing, “Ships are all right. It’s the men in them.” The note of fidelity is struck again in A Personal Record, when Conrad says of his years at sea: “I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.” Conversely, it is the men who break faith—Jim is the prime example—who fail and who are doomed to be set apart. A second major theme in Conrad’s sea tales, noted by virtually all of his critics, is the therapeutic value of work. To Conrad, the ancient adage “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” was not a cliché but a valid principle. The two most damning words in Conrad’s lexicon are “undisciplined” and “lazy,” and, again, it is the men whose hands and minds are without meaningful employment who get into difficulties, who fail, and who suffer the Conradian penalty for failure, alienation and isolation. Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, is Conrad’s chief exemplar here, but Jim’s failure, too, partially results from the fact that he has very little to do in the way of work during the crucial passage aboard the Patna. Finally, a sense of tradition, of one’s place in the long continuum of men who have gone to sea, is a recurring theme in Conrad’s sea tales. Marlow expresses this sense of tradition best when he speaks of the faithful seamen who band together and are bonded together in what he calls “the fellowship of the craft.” The Jims, on the other hand, the captains who display cowardice, the seamen who panic under stress, all those who bring disgrace on the men who have kept faith and do keep faith, are dismissed from the fellowship and are set apart, isolated and alienated. Conrad, then, played a central role in setting the stage for the alienated, solitary figures and, ultimately, the rebels-at-arms who people the pages of the modern novel. Heart of Darkness · In Heart of Darkness, the first of Conrad’s recognized masterpieces and one of the greatest novellas in the language, a number of familiar Conradian

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themes and techniques coalesce: his detestation of autocratic regimes and their special manifestation, colonialism; the characteristic Conradian alien figure, isolated and apart; the therapeutic value of work; and the use of multiple points of view and of strikingly unconventional symbols. Charlie Marlow, the ostensible narrator of the story, finds himself (as Conrad did on occasion during his sea career) without a ship and with few prospects. As a last resort, he signs on to command a river steamboat for a Belgian trading company, then seeking ivory in the Congo. In a curious way, Marlow’s venture into the Congo represents a wish fulfillment, since, Marlow recalls, as a child he had placed his finger on a map of Africa and said, “Someday, I will go there,” “there” being the Congo. (This is “autobiography as fiction” again in that Conrad himself had once expressed such a desire and in exactly the terms Marlow employs.) The mature Marlow, however, has few illusions about what he is undertaking. He characterizes his “command” as “a two-penny-half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached,” and he is quite aware that he will be working for a company whose chief concern is turning a profit, and a large one at that. Moreover, the Company’s success will come only at the expense of the innocent and helpless natives who have the misfortune of living in an area that has immense possibilities as a colony. Marlow, like Conrad, abhors the concept of one people dominating another unless, as he says, the colonizing power is faithful to the “idea” which provides the sole rationale for colonialism, that is, the “idea” of actually bringing the benefits of civilization to the colonized. He believes that only in the British Crown Colonies is the “idea” being adhered to, and he has grave reservations about what he will find in the Congo. Despite these reservations, Marlow is hardly prepared for what awaits him. Marlow finds in the Congo disorder bordering on lunacy, waste, intrigue, inefficiency, and the cruelest kind of exploitation. The “pilgrims of progress,” as Marlow calls them, go about their aimless and pointless tasks while the steamboat he is to command sits idle in the river with a hole in her bottom. Mountains are leveled to no purpose, while equipment and supplies rust or rot in the African sun or never reach their destination. As long as the ivory flows from the heart of darkness, however, no one is overly concerned. Marlow is appalled by the hypocrisy of the situation. An entire continent is being ruthlessly ravaged and pillaged in the name of progress, when, in fact, the real motivation is sheer greed. Nor is there the slightest concern for the plight of the natives in the Company’s employ. Marlow sees once proud and strong tribesmen, divorced from their natural surroundings and from all that is familiar to them, sickened and weakened, sitting passively in the shade waiting to die. Herein is Marlow/Conrad’s chief objection to colonialism. By taking people from their normal mode of life and thrusting upon them a culture which they neither want nor understand, colonialism places people in isolation and makes them aliens in their own land. The cannibals who serve as woodcutters for Marlow’s steamboat have lost their muscle tone and belong back in the jungle practicing the peculiar rites that, however revolting by other standards, are natural for them. The native fireman on the steamboat, “an improved specimen,” Marlow calls him, watches the water gauge on the boiler, lest the god inside become angry. He sits, his teeth filed, his head shaved in strange patterns, a voodoo charm tied to his arm, a piece of polished bone inserted through his lower lip. He represents the perfect victim of the white man’s progress, and “he ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank.” The evil that colonialism has wrought is not, however, confined to the natives. The

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whites who seek adventure or fortune in the Congo are equally uprooted from all that is natural for them, equally isolated and alienated. The doctor who gives Marlow a perfunctory examination in the Company’s headquarters in Brussels asks apologetically for permission to measure Marlow’s head while, at the same time, noting that the significant changes will occur “inside.” To some degree or other, such changes have come to the whites whom Marlow encounters in Africa. The ship on which Marlow sails to the Congo passes a French gunboat firing aimlessly into the jungle as an object lesson to the natives. The accountant at the Central Station makes perfectly correct entries in his impeccable ledgers while just outside his window, in the grove of death, the mass of displaced natives is dying of fever and malnutrition. The Company’s brickmaker makes no bricks because there has been no straw for more than a year, but he remains placid and unconcerned. Marlow’s summation of what he has seen in the Congo is acerbic, withering in its emotional intensity, but it is also an accurate statement of Conrad’s feelings toward this, the cruelest exercise of autocratic power. Marlow says, “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale . . . and with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” The voice is Charlie Marlow’s, but the sentiments are Joseph Conrad’s. One man alone among the Company’s disreputable, if not depraved, white traders appears to be an exception, a man who is faithful to the “idea” and is bringing progress and betterment to the natives in exchange for the ivory he gathers. Kurtz is by far the Company’s most productive trader, and his future in Brussels seems assured. At the same time, Kurtz is both hated and feared by all the Europeans in the Company’s employ. He is hated because of the unconventional (an ironic adjective) methods he has adopted, and he is feared because these methods are apparently working. With the introduction of Kurtz into the tale, Conrad works by indirection. Neither Marlow nor the reader is allowed to see Kurtz immediately. Rather, one is exposed to Kurtz through many different viewpoints, and, in an effort to allow the reader to see Kurtz from all perspectives, other narrators are brought forth to take over the story briefly: the accountant; the brickmaker; the manager of the Central Station; the Russian; penultimately, Marlow himself; and ultimately, Kurtz’s fiancé, the Intended. In addition to these many shifting points of view which Conrad employs, it should be noted that the story, from beginning to end, is told by a dual narrator. Charlie Marlow speaks, but Marlow’s unnamed crony, the fifth member of the group gathered on the fantail of the Nellie, is the actual narrator of the story, retelling the tale as he has heard it from Marlow. In some sense, then, it is difficult to say whether Heart of Darkness is Kurtz’s story or Marlow’s story or the anonymous narrator’s story, since Marlow’s tale has obviously had a significant impact on the silent listener. Marlow is fascinated by Kurtz and what his informants tell him of Kurtz, and throughout the long journey upriver to the Inner Station, he is obsessed with meeting this remarkable man, but he is destined for a shocking disappointment. Kurtz is perhaps the extreme example among all the isolated and alienated figures to be found in Conrad’s works. Philosophically and spiritually alienated from the “pilgrims of progress,” he is also physically isolated. He is the only white man at the Inner Station, and, given the steamboat debacle, nothing has been heard from or of him for months. He has been alone too long, and the jungle has found him out. He is, in Marlow’s words, “a hollow man” with great plans and hopes but totally lacking in the inner resources vital for survival in an alien environment. As a result, he has regressed completely to the primitive state; he has become a god to the natives, who worship

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him in the course of “unspeakable rites.” He has taken a native woman as a consort, and the Russian trader who tried to befriend him has been relegated to fool and jester in Kurtz’s jungle court. Kurtz exercises absolute power of life and death over the natives, and he punishes his enemies by placing their severed heads on poles about his hut as ornaments. The doctor in Brussels, Marlow recalls, was fearful of what physical and spiritual isolation might do to people’s minds, and on Kurtz, the effect has been devastating. Kurtz is mentally unbalanced, but even worse, as Marlow says, “His soul was mad.” Marlow has confessed that he, too, has heard the appeal of “the fascination of the abomination,” the strange sounds and voices emanating from the banks of the river as the steamboat makes its way to Kurtz. Meaningless and unintelligible as the sounds and voices are, they are also somehow familiar to Marlow and strike deep at some primordial instinct within him. Yet, while Kurtz is destroyed, Marlow survives, “luckily, luckily,” as he observes. The difference between the two men is restraint, a recurrent term in the novel: With restraint, a man can survive in isolation. The cannibals on the steamboat have it, and Marlow is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. The manager at the Central Station also has it, largely the result of his unfailing good health which permits him to serve, virtually unscathed, term after term in the darkness. The accountant has restraint by virtue of concentrating on his correct entries in his meticulous ledgers and, at the same time, by forfeiting his humanity and closing his mind to the chaos around him. Chiefly, however, restraint (in Conrad’s Weltanschauung) is a function of work, and Conrad’s major statement of the redeeming nature of work comes in Heart of Darkness. Marlow confesses that, like most human beings, he does not like work per se. He does, however, respond to “what is in the work,” and he recognizes its salutary effect, “the chance to find yourself.” Indeed, the fact that Marlow has work to do in the Congo is his salvation. The steamboat must be salvaged; it must be raised from the bottom of the river. No supplies are available, and the boiler is in disrepair. Marlow needs rivets and sheeting to patch the gaping hole in the boat. The task seems hopeless, but Marlow attacks it enthusiastically, almost joyously, because his preoccupation with rescuing his “two-penny, half-penny” command effectively shields him from “the fascination of the abomination.” Later, during the trip upriver to the Inner Station, it is again the work of piloting the vulnerable steamboat around and through the myriad rocks and snags of the convoluted river and the intense concentration required for the work that shut Marlow’s eyes and, more important, his mind to the dangers to psyche and spirit surrounding him. Marlow does not leave the Congo completely untouched; he has paid a price, both physically and mentally, for venturing into the darkness, but he does escape with his life and his sanity. As he later recognizes, he owes his escape to the steamboat, his “influential friend,” as he calls it, and to the work it provided. Symbols abound in Heart of Darkness, many of them conventional: the interplay of light and darkness throughout the novel, for example, carrying essentially the traditional symbolic meanings of the two terms, or the rusting and decaying equipment Marlow comes across at the Central Station, symbolizing the callous inefficiency of the Company’s management. More striking, however, is Conrad’s use of thoroughly unconventional symbols; dissimilar images are yoked together in a startling fashion, unique in Conrad’s time. Kurtz’s totally bald head, for example, is compared to a ball of ivory, and the comparison moves beyond metaphor to the realm of symbol, adumbrating the manner in which the lust for and preoccupation with ivory have turned flesh-and-blood human beings into cold, lifeless ivory figures. There are also

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the shrunken heads fixed as ornaments on the fence posts surrounding Kurtz’s hut. These are Kurtz’s “rebels” and, notably, all but one are facing inward, so that, even in death, they are compelled to worship their god. The one facing outward, however, is irretrievably damned and without hope of salvation. Lord Jim · Similar in many ways to Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim is considered by many critics to be not only Conrad’s greatest sea tale but also his greatest novel. Lord Jim is not a sea tale, however, in the purest sense, since most of the action of the novel takes place on land. Lord Jim is one of Conrad’s psychological studies; Jim’s mind and his motivations are searched and probed in meticulous detail in an effort to “see Jim clearly.” In making this effort, Conrad employs two characteristic techniques: shifting, multiple points of view and the extensive use of flashbacks. The narrative begins conventionally with an unnamed third-person narrator who brings the reader to the point of Marlow’s first encounter with Jim at the Board of Inquiry investigating the strange case of the pilgrim ship Patna. At this point, Marlow takes over the tale, recounting his meeting with Jim. Marlow’s account, however, is filtered through the consciousness of the anonymous narrator, much as is the case in Heart of Darkness. The manipulation of the narrative voices in Lord Jim is much more complex, however, since Jim speaks through Marlow and Marlow through the ultimate narrator. Again, as in Heart of Darkness, other narrators enter the scene briefly, and Marlow gives way to a series of speakers, each of whom is qualified to tell the reader something more about Jim. Montague Brierly, captain of the crack ship Ossa, is troubled by Jim’s failure to meet the demands of “the fellowship of the craft” and is also troubled by his doubts about his own ability to meet those demands. The French Lieutenant who boarded the abandoned Patna and brought it safely to port is a bit more sympathetic toward Jim’s moment of cowardice, but is also more rigid in his condemnation of Jim’s loss of honor. At the opposite end of the scale, Chester, the preposterous seaman-atlarge, dismisses Jim’s canceled mate’s certificate as nothing more than “a bit of ass’s skin” and solicits Marlow’s aid in involving Jim in Chester’s lunatic scheme of extracting guano from an island that is totally inaccessible. In Chester’s view, Jim is the right man for the job, since he is now good for nothing else. Through Chester as interim narrator, Marlow recognizes how desperate Jim’s plight is and how equally desperate Jim is for his help. Marlow does help by putting Jim in touch with Mr. Denver, the owner of a rice mill, and Jim thrives for a time, becoming, in essence, a surrogate son to his employer. The specter of the Patna affair overtakes Jim, however, in the form of the fated ship’s second engineer, who comes to work at the rice mill. Through Denver; through Egström, who employs Jim briefly as a water clerk; and finally, through the seedy Schomberg, proprietor of an equally seedy hotel in Bangkok, Marlow learns of Jim’s gradual decline and his erratic flight from the Patna or, as Marlow puts it, his flight “from himself.” In an attempt to help Jim, Marlow turns to Stein, an extraordinary trader and shrewd judge of both butterflies and people. Stein’s eminently “practical” solution is to send Jim to Patusan, virtually the end of the earth, where the Patna has never been heard of and from where Jim need run no more. Marlow’s visit to Patusan and to Jim is relayed, as is the bulk of the novel, through the unnamed listener among Marlow’s small circle of friends gathered over their evening cigars, to whom Marlow has been addressing his tale. In the final chapters,

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Conrad’s tour de force of narrative technique takes yet another twist. The disaster in Patusan is recounted through the medium of a lengthy letter which Marlow writes to the ultimate narrator, the narration thus coming full circle from third-person narrator, to Marlow, to a series of intermediate narrators, and finally returning to the speaking voice which began the tale. Adding to the difficulties which Conrad’s dizzying shift of narrators presents for the reader is his frequent use of time shifts in the narrative. Jim’s long colloquy with Marlow in Marlow’s room at the Malabar House, for example, takes the reader back in time to the events aboard the Patna, which occurred several months earlier. While observing the seemingly bored Brierly in the courtroom at the Board of Inquiry, Marlow abruptly moves ahead in time to Brierly’s suicide, which follows a week after the end of the trial, and then ahead again some two years for the mate’s detailed account of Brierly’s methodical leap over the side of the Ossa. Marlow’s letter, which Conrad employs to bring the novel to its close, represents yet another flashback. Examples of this movement back and forth in time in the novel could be multiplied. Conrad’s complex manipulation of his narrators and of the disjointed time sequence of the events of the novel have a single purpose: to give the reader a complete view of a psychologically complex figure. It is an effort, as Marlow insists several times, to “see Jim clearly.” Yet, for all Conrad’s (and Marlow’s) efforts, Jim remains an enigma. Marlow, in fact, confesses at the end of his letter that Jim continues to be “inscrutable.” Chiefly, there are two problems which have plagued critics in coming to grips with Jim. Stein, on whom Marlow relies for enlightenment, pronounces Jim “a romantic,” which Stein says is “very bad . . . and very good too.” In attempting to resolve the problem of how a romantic may cope with reality, Stein uses the metaphor of a man falling into the sea (the overtones of Jim’s leap from the Patna are obvious here). Stein continues, “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” The trouble here is that Stein does not make clear whether it is Jim’s dream of heroes and heroics which is the “destructive element” or whether it is the practical and mundane world in which he must endeavor to carry out this dream which is destructive. Does Jim immerse himself in the dream yet keep his head above “water” in the world of reality, or immerse himself in the world of reality and yet keep the dream alive directly above the surface? The critical controversy which Stein’s cryptic advice has provoked continues. Critics are also divided on the meaning of the end of the novel. When Jim presents himself to the old nakhoda, Doramin, and suffers the pistol shot which ends his life, is this the act of a man who has finally accepted that he is capable of failure and who “has mastered his destiny,” or is it merely the desperate act of a man who has simply run out of options? The distinction may seem fine, since in any case, Jim’s gesture is a positive act, but it governs the reader’s final judgment on whether Marlow is correct in accepting Jim as “one of us.” If Jim is not “one of us,” he is clearly one of “them,” them being the familiar Conradian figures, the isolated and alienated solitaries, and he is so both spiritually and physically. In abandoning the Patna, Jim has violated a cardinal principle of the seaman’s code, placing his own safety above that of the pilgrims who have entrusted themselves to him. As Brierly puts it, “we are trusted,” and he is unforgiving of Jim’s dereliction, as is Marlow, although Marlow is willing to admit mitigating circumstances. To the seamen whom Jim encounters, who raise the specter of the Patna, Jim

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is a pariah who has broken the bond of “the fellowship of the craft.” Jim himself is quite conscious of his alienation. When he sails aboard Marlow’s ship from Bangkok, he takes no interest in the passage as a seaman would, but instead, in Marlow’s words, skulks below deck, “as though he had become a stowaway.” Jim is also isolated physically. In a moving passage, Marlow speaks with great feeling of the seaman’s ties with and affection for his native land, for home. Jim, however, can never go home; he has, in effect, no home, and his destiny lies everywhere and anywhere but in the village in Essex where he came into being. On Patusan, Jim’s physical isolation is complete. Except for the unspeakable Cornelius, he is the only white man for hundreds of miles. With the Patna safely behind him, as he supposes, Jim thrives in isolation, bringing order and security to the troubled land, and is called by the natives “Tuan Jim,” “which is to say, Lord Jim.” The years of unparalleled success take their toll. Jim is convinced that “nothing can touch me,” and his egotism proves fatal when Gentleman Brown finds him out. Jim’s last hours are spent isolated and alone, and he dies alone. In addition to the alienated hero, another familiar Conradian motif may be observed in Lord Jim: Conrad’s continuing insistence on the redeeming nature of work. Earlier in the novel, the unnamed narrator makes an attempt to sum up Jim, and it comes in the form of Jim’s failure to accept or to appreciate the nature of the demands of life at sea. The narrator says that “the only reward [one may expect in the seafaring life] is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him.” Notably, throughout the novel, Jim is most vulnerable when he is without work. During his long stay in the hospital at Singapore, he is infected by the malaise of the seamen ashore who have been in the East too long and who have given up all thought of returning to the more demanding Home Service. Under this debilitating influence, Jim takes the fateful step of signing aboard the Patna. The ship’s passage is deceptively uneventful and undemanding, and Jim has so little to do as mate that his “faculty of swift and forestalling vision,” as Marlow calls it, is given free reign. Thus, in the emergency, Jim sees with his imagination rather than with his eyes. In like fashion, after the initial heroics on Patusan, the demands on Jim are minimal. In the absence of anything practical for Jim to do, except carry out his role as “Tuan Jim,” he is again vulnerable. Gentleman Brown is enabled, as a result, to catch Jim off guard, to find the “weak spot,” “the place of decay,” and Jim’s idyllic but precarious world comes crashing down. Conrad the Symbolist may also be observed in Lord Jim. Again, as in Heart of Darkness, some of the symbols are conventional. Jim’s retreat from the Patna, for example, is always eastward toward the rising sun, and Jim has bright blue eyes—the eyes, one assumes, of the romantic which darken in moments of stress—and Jim wears immaculate white attire during his climactic confrontation with Gentleman Brown across the creek in Patusan. As in Heart of Darkness, however, some of the symbols in Lord Jim are thoroughly original. In pronouncing Jim a “romantic,” Stein is, in part, also pronouncing judgment on himself. Stein’s romanticism, though, is mixed with a strong alloy of the practical, and he is prepared, as Jim is not, to act or to react immediately when action is called for, as is evident when he is ambushed and defends himself with skill and daring. Thus, Stein the romantic collects butterflies, while Stein the practical man collects beetles. The ring which Doramin gives his old “war-comrade” Stein as a talisman of the bond between white and native ultimately assumes symbolic import. Stein, in turn, gives the ring to Jim as his entrée to Patusan, and Jim wears it proudly

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during his brief days of glory. In the midst of the Gentleman Brown affair, Jim sends the ring to Doramin’s son, Dain Waris, as a token of the white man’s faith. In the closing scene of the novel, the ring, taken from the finger of the dead Dain Waris and placed in Doramin’s lap, falls to the ground at Jim’s feet. Jim glances down at it, and, as he raises his head, Doramin shoots Jim. The ring, then, paradoxically, is both a symbol of faith and of a breach of faith. Victory · Victory, one of Conrad’s later novels, was published in 1915. As such, it represents in one sense a Conrad who had mastered the techniques of the genre he had made his own, the novel, and in another sense a Conrad in decline as a creative artist. The early experimentation in narrative technique—the multiplicity of narrators and the complex, and sometimes confusing, manipulation of chronology—is behind Conrad. Victory is a linear narrative, told by a single, first-person speaking voice without interruption of the forward chronological thrust of the tale. For the noncritical reader, this straightforward handling of his material on Conrad’s part was a boon and may very well account for the fact that not until Chance, in 1913, and Victory, two years later, did Conrad enjoy a genuine popular success. At the same time, Conrad made a stride forward in narrative technique and in command of the language in the fifteen years between Lord Jim and Victory. This step took him past clarity to simplicity. Victory is, perhaps, too straightforward a tale, freed of occasional confusion and of the varied and variable speaking voices, but also lacking the richness and the range contributed by those same voices. Confined as Conrad is to one point of view, the extensive searching and probing of his characters, seen in Kurtz and Jim, are denied him. Axel Heyst is an interesting character, but he is only that. He is not, like Kurtz and Jim, a provocative, puzzling, and ultimately enigmatic figure. The other characters in the novel are similarly unimpressive. Heyst finds the heroine, Alma, or Lena, a thoroughly intriguing young woman, but the reader is at a loss to understand the fascination, even the appeal, she seems to have for Heyst. Other than the commitment Heyst has made to Lena in rescuing her from the odious Schomberg, the tie between the two is tenuous. Many critics have noted that Conrad’s women are generally lifeless, and it is true that, with the possible exception of Doña Rita in The Arrow of Gold (and here Conrad may have been writing from direct emotional involvement), women generally remained mysteries to him. As his greatest work attests, he was essentially a man’s writer. The three other principal characters in Victory, however, are male; yet they, too, are wooden and artificial. Much has been made of “plain Mr. Jones,” Ricardo, and Pedro’s representing Conrad’s most searching study of evil. In this construct, Jones stands for intellectual evil, Ricardo for moral (or amoral) evil, and Pedro for the evil of force. On the whole, however, they emerge as a singularly unimpressive trio of thugs. The lanky, emaciated Jones, called the “spectre,” is indeed a ghostlike figure whose presence is observed but scarcely felt. Ricardo, with his bluster and swagger, is almost a comic character, and some of his lines are worthy of a nineteenth century melodrama. Pedro’s chief function in the novel appears to be his availability to be bashed on the head and suffer multiple contusions. Compared to Gentleman Brown, “the show ruffian of the Australian coast” in Lord Jim, they are theatrical, and while they may do harm, the evil they represent pales beside that ascribed by Conrad to Brown, “akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces and giving factitious vigor to the body.”

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Victory is a talky novel with long passages devoted to inconclusive conversations between Heyst and Lena. It is relevant here to contrast the lengthy exchange between Jim and Marlow in the Malabar House and the “getting to know one another” colloquies in which Heyst and Lena engage. In the former, every line is relevant and every word tells; in the latter, the emotional fencing between the two ultimately becomes tedious. Gone, indeed, in Victory are the overblown passages of the earlier works, which can make even the most devout Conradian wince. Gone too, however, are the great passages, the moments of magic in which by the sheer power of words, Conrad moves, stirs, and thrills the reader. On the whole, the style in Victory, like the format of the novel itself, is straightforward; the prose is clear, but the interludes of splendor are sadly missing, and missed. Whatever differences are to be found in the later works in Conrad’s technical handling of the narrative and in his style, one constant remains. Heyst, like Kurtz, Jim, and so many of the figures who fill Conrad’s pages—is an alien, isolated and apart, both spiritually and physically. He does differ somewhat from his counterparts, however, in that he stands alone by choice. Heyst, following the dying precept of his gifted but idealistic father—“Look-on—make no sound”—proposes to spend his life aloof and divorced from humankind; in this way, he believes, nothing can ever touch him. In general, except for his brief involvement with the unfortunate Morrison, Heyst manages to maintain his role of the amused and detached skeptic, living, as Conrad puts it, an “unattached, floating existence.” He accommodates himself to all people but makes no commitments to anyone. Thus, chameleon-like, he is known under many guises; he is called, for example, “Enchanted Heyst” because of his expressed enchantment with the East and, on other occasions by would-be interpreters, “Hard Facts Heyst,” “the Utopist,” “the Baron,” “the Spider,” and “the Enemy.” A final sobriquet, “the Hermit,” is attached to Heyst when, with the collapse of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, he chooses to remain alone on the deserted island of Samburan. Heyst’s physical isolation is now of a piece with his spiritual isolation. The encounter with Lena changes this attitude. With his commitment to Lena, Heyst is no longer the detached observer of the world, and with the flight to Samburan, his wanderings come to an end. Paradoxically, this commitment brings about both his spiritual salvation and his physical destruction. It is a redeemed Heyst, freed at last from the other enchantment of his life (the living presence of his dead father), who, at Lena’s death, is able to assert, “Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!” Thus, Heyst differs from Conrad’s other alien spirits in that he “masters his destiny,” as Jim could not and Kurtz, perhaps, would not. In still another way, Heyst “masters his destiny” as Jim and Kurtz do not. Kurtz dies the victim of his own excesses and of the debilitating effect of the jungle; Jim places his life in the hands of Doramin. Heyst, however, governs his own fate and chooses to die with Lena, immolating himself in the purgative fire which he sets to destroy all traces of their brief idyll on Samburan, a fire that, ironically, blazes over the ruins of a defunct coal company. Other echoes of the earlier Conrad may be seen in Victory. For example, albeit to a lesser degree than in Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The Arrow of Gold, and Almayer’s Folly, Victory is another instance of Conrad’s writing “autobiography as fiction.” In the Author’s Note to the novel, Conrad speaks of a real-life Heyst whom he remembers with affection, but also with a sense of mystery. So too, Mr. Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro

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come from Conrad’s store of memories, although he encountered each individually and not as the trio they compose in the book. The character of Lena is drawn from a brief encounter in a café in the south of France with a group of entertainers and with one girl in the company who particularly caught Conrad’s eye. The settings of Victory, exotic names such as Malacca, Timor, and Sourabaya, were, of course, as familiar to the seagoing Conrad as the streets of London, and there is no reason to doubt that somewhere in the tropics, the fictional Samburan has its counterpart. Finally, in Victory, Conrad the Symbolist may again be seen. Noticeably, however, in this later novel, just as Conrad’s narrative technique and his style have become simplified and his ability to create vivid characters has declined, the symbols he employs lack the freshness and the depth of those of the earlier novels. Conrad makes much of the portrait of the elder Heyst which dominates the sparse living room on Samburan, just as the subject of the portrait has dominated Heyst’s existence. In fact, Conrad makes too much of the portrait as a symbol, calling attention to it again and again until the reader can virtually predict that each time Heyst enters the room, the portrait will be brought to his and to the reader’s attention. As a symbol, then, the portrait is overdone, overt, and obvious. Similarly, the darkening storm which threatens Samburan as the events of the novel reach their climax is a bit heavy-handed and hardly worthy of Conrad at his best. Even so, there is a brief moment of the genuine Conrad shortly before the climactic violence that brings about both Heyst’s redemption and destruction. Conrad writes: “The thunder growled distantly with angry modulations of its tremendous voice, while the world outside shuddered incessantly around the dead stillness of the room where the framed profile of Heyst’s father looked severely into space.” Here, the two symbols coalesce in a telling and effective manner. Regrettably, telling and effective instances such as this are rare in Victory. Conrad’s work as a whole, however, with its stylistic and narrative innovations, testifies to the quality of his contribution to twentieth century literature. C. F. Burgess Other major works SHORT FICTION: Tales of Unrest, 1898; Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, 1902; Typhoon, and Other Stories, 1903; A Set of Six, 1908; ’Twixt Land and Sea, Tales, 1912; Within the Tides, 1915; Tales of Hearsay, 1925; The Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad, 1933. PLAYS: One Day More: A Play in One Act, pr. 1905; The Secret Agent: A Drama in Four Acts, pb. 1921; Laughing Anne: A Play, pb. 1923. NONFICTION: The Mirror of the Sea, 1906; Some Reminiscences, 1912 (pb. in U.S. as A Personal Record); Notes on Life and Letters, 1921; Joseph Conrad’s Diary of His Journey Up the Valley of the Congo in 1890, 1926; Last Essays, 1926; Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, 1927 (Gérard Jean-Aubry, editor); Joseph Conrad’s Letters to His Wife, 1927; Conrad to a Friend, 1928 (Richard Curle, editor); Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924, 1928 (Edward Garnett, editor); Lettres françaises de Joseph Conrad, 1929 (Gérard Jean-Aubry, editor); Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Doradowska, 1940 ( John A. Gee and Paul J. Sturm, editors); The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume I, 1861-1897, 1983; The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume II, 1898-1902, 1986; The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume III, 1903-1907, 1988.

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Bibliography Bohlmann, Otto. Conrad’s Existentialism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Bohlmann interprets six of Conrad’s major works in the light of the philosophical musings of theoreticians such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and practitioners such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Davis, Laura L., ed. Conrad’s Century: The Past and Future Splendour. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Examines Conrad and his times. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Gekoski, R. A. Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1978. Explores the novels in terms of the apparent contradiction between personal autonomy, with its attendant alienation, and social responsibility. Devotes separate chapters to Conrad’s major fiction. Gekoski’s analyses are studded with quotations from the works and with plot summaries. Contains a selected bibliography and an index. Gibson, Andrew, and Robert Hampson, eds. Conrad and Theory. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. Essays include “Conrad and the Politics of the Sublime, “The Dialogue of Lord Jim,” and “Conrad, Theory and Value.” Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. A pioneering critical study of Conrad’s major fiction. Jordan, Elaine, ed. Joseph Conrad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. An excellent introductory study of Conrad and his works. Karl, Frederick Robert. A Reader’s Guide to Joseph Conrad. Rev. ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997. A good handbook for students. Provides bibliographical references and an index. Orr, Leonard, and Ted Billy, eds. A Joseph Conrad Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. A good manual, complete with bibliographical references and an index. Ressler, Steve. Joseph Conrad: Consciousness and Integrity. New York: New York University Press, 1988. Devotes separate chapters to Conrad’s major fiction: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, “The Secret Sharer,” and Under Western Eyes. Ressler’s focus is the conflict between the characters’ self-affirming possibilities of action and the necessary test of moral substance. Claims that Under Western Eyes is Conrad’s greatest artistic and moral success; the later Victory is dismissed, along with Conrad’s other late fiction. Stape, J. H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. This companion to Conrad’s life and works is intended primarily for the layperson, rather than the specialist. A three-and-a-halfpage chronology is followed by twelve essays—each written by a different author and each devoted to a different work or set of works, and to analyses of Conrad’s narrative technique, his attitude toward British imperialism, his literary modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay includes a bibliography, and the volume concludes with suggestions for further reading. Swisher, Clarice, ed. Readings on Joseph Conrad. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998. Contains essays by J. B. Priestley, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Adams about many of Conrad’s works.

A. J. Cronin A. J. Cronin

Born: Cardross, Scotland; July 19, 1896 Died: Gilon, near Montreux, Switzerland; January 6, 1981 Principal long fiction · Hatter’s Castle, 1931; Three Loves, 1932; The Grand Canary, 1933; The Stars Look Down, 1935; The Citadel, 1937; The Keys of the Kingdom, 1941; The Green Years, 1944; Shannon’s Way, 1948; The Spanish Gardener, 1950; Beyond This Place, 1953; A Thing of Beauty, 1956 (also known as Crusader’s Tomb); The Northern Light, 1958; The Judas Tree, 1961; A Song of Sixpence, 1964; A Pocketful of Rye, 1969; Desmonde, 1975 (also known as The Mistral Boy); Lady with Carnations, 1976; Gracie Lindsay, 1978; Doctor Finlay of Tannochbrae, 1978. Other literary forms · In addition to the many novels he has published, A. J. Cronin has also written one play, Jupiter Laughs, which was produced in Glasgow and New York in 1940. His autobiography, Adventures in Two Worlds (1952), remains the best account of his formative years as well as an engaging vehicle for many of his opinions. In 1926, he also wrote two studies entitled Report on First-Aid Conditions in British Coal Mines and Report on Dust Inhalation in Haematite Mines. The outcome of his journeys to investigate the conditions said to prevail there became the fictional account of the mining communities found in The Stars Look Down and The Citadel. Achievements · In the spring of 1930, a tall, sandy-haired, genial physician sold his London practice and home, moved with his family to an isolated farmhouse near Inverary, Scotland, and at the age of thirty-four wrote a novel for the first time in his life. Hatter’s Castle, published the following year by Victor Gollancz, became an immediate success. It was the first novel to be chosen by the English Book Society for the Book-of-the-Month Club. It was later translated into many languages, dramatized, and made into a Paramount motion picture starring James Mason and Deborah Kerr. Before long, critics hailed Cronin as a new and important author, whose writing was comparable in content and style to that of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Honoré de Balzac. Cronin and his wife moved to a small apartment in London and then on to a modest cottage in Sussex, where he went to work on another novel, Three Loves. His popularity continued to increase following The Grand Canary and The Stars Look Down; the ex-physician became something of a literary lion, in demand at dinners, bazaars, and book fairs. His writing launched him upon a literary career with such impetus that, once and for all, he “hung up [his] stethoscope and put away that little black bag—[his] medical days were over.” The physician-novelist is of course by no means an unfamiliar literary figure. Arthur Conan Doyle, W. Somerset Maugham, C. S. Forester, Oliver Goldsmith, and the poet laureate of England, Robert Bridges, among others, had rich medical backgrounds into which they reached for ideas for their books. None of these examples, however, can quite parallel the dual career of Cronin. Medicine with him was not a stopgap or a stepping-stone. He was an outstanding professional and financial success; moreover, he was ambitious, desperately tenacious, and single219

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minded in his pursuit of that success. It was hard won and well deserved. His second success, in an entirely different field, was equally substantial. Twenty novels (several of which were adapted to the cinema), a play, an autobiography, and one of the longest-running British television series represent a career that spans one-half of the twentieth century—1930 to 1978—and a life that was itself as engrossing and multifaceted as Cronin’s fiction. Perhaps just as remarkable as the extraordinary commercial success of the novels is the fact that most of them are much more than highly readable potboilers. Like Emily Brontë, Dickens, and Hardy, three writers with whom he is often compared, Cronin was a natural-born storyteller who transcended the category of “academic” fiction writer. His novels are realistic, purporting to present the actual experiences of actual people. They present life not in the vacuum of timelessness, but in the timely flux of ordinary experience. They rely on a specific sense of place—interiors and exteriors—and reflect a rapid mastery of the different settings and environments to which Cronin’s travels had taken him. Even in his most extreme formal experimentation—as in The Stars Look Down—Cronin’s fiction retains accessibility and readability. Although Cronin’s popularity has somewhat waned, he was for many years one of the best-known and most controversial of British writers; through a number of books remarkable for their honesty and realism, he helped entertain and educate a generation of readers. As a writer, he was always promoting tolerance, integrity, and social justice. His favorite theme was that people should learn to be creative rather than acquisitive, altruistic rather than selfish. Biography · Before Archibald Joseph Cronin’s books can be appreciatively read, the reader must have a reasonable acquaintance with his life. This is not necessarily true in the case of many writers, whose private lives are less clearly reflected in their work than are those of writers such as Dickens and Maugham, to whom Cronin bears a resemblance in this matter. Throughout his career as a novelist, Cronin drew heavily on his memories of what he had actually observed. Henry James’s argument that the writer of fiction should be “one upon whom nothing is lost” received an emphatic embodiment in the life of Cronin, whose experiences as a child, a medical student, and a physician are woven inextricably into the fabric of his novel. As is the case with so many of his fictional characters, life for young Cronin was by no means idyllic. He was born in Cardross (Dumbartonshire), Scotland, on July 19, 1896, the only child of a middle-class family whose fortunes were soon to decline rapidly. His mother, Jessie Montgomerie, was a Scottish Protestant woman who had defied her family—and a host of ancestors—by marrying an Irishman and turning Catholic. His father, Patrick Cronin, was a mercantile agent who until his death was able to offer his family a fairly comfortable existence. After the death of his father, however, Cronin was forced to retreat with his penniless mother to the bitter and poverty-stricken home of her parents. To most neighbors and relatives in the small, strictly moral, and sternly Protestant town of Cardross, Jessie Montgomerie’s marriage and conversion were considered a disgrace, and upon young Cronin they inflicted the inevitable ridicule and persecution. On one hand, there was sectarian antagonism, not far short of that which has erupted in the late twentieth century in Northern Ireland as violence. On the other hand, there was the stern Protestant morality. Cronin was permanently marked by an environment that was noisy, quarrelsome, profoundly unhappy, and emotionally

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dramatic—a source of endless tension and grief for the growing boy and of endless material for the future novelist. Cronin’s delight in reading and learning perhaps compensated for his frustrations. Among the authors he read were Robert Louis Stevenson (an only child like himself and a firm favorite right to the end of his life), Sir Walter Scott, Guy de Maupassant, Dickens, Maugham, and Samuel Butler—whose The Way of All Flesh (1903) Cronin cited as his favorite book. At Cardross Village School and later at the Dumbarton Academy, where literature was his best subject, the boy became something of a prodigy, repeatedly winning prizes and discovering in himself that love for learning which would be a source of stability all his life. Both as a student and, later in life, as a physician-writer, he spent enormous stretches of time at his desk, wrestling with his work. This compulsiveness, combined with his intelligence and his eagerness, won Cronin the approbation of his uncle—a poor, kindly Catholic priest who helped secure for him his education and who later became the model for Father Chisholm in The Keys of the Kingdom—and of his great-grandfather, who later became the model for Alexander Gow in The Green Years. Yet Cronin’s talent also meant he would suffer the emotions of premature loneliness that so often afflict an unusually bright boy. He was highly regarded by his teachers; however, other students—and their parents—sometimes resented his abilities. One father, whose young hopeful was beaten by Cronin in an important examination, became so enraged that years later Hatter’s Castle took shape around his domineering personality. The theme, “the tragic record of a man’s egotism and bitter pride,” suggests the dark and often melodramatic atmosphere of Cronin’s early novels. In them, some characters are drawn with humorous realism, but for the most part humor is dimmed by gloomy memories of his own neglected childhood, and sensational scenes are shrouded in an atmosphere genuinely eerie and sinister. Inevitably, Cronin clung to the notion that between the life of the mind and the life of the senses, between a disciplined commitment to scholarship and a need to share in the common pleasures of humankind, there is an irremediable conflict. The religious bigotry, the family’s unceasing poverty, the interest in learning—this trio of forces worked at shaping the young Cronin. A shy, sensitive, lonely boy, aware of his peculiarities yet hungry for the town’s acceptance, he developed, like Robert Shannon of The Green Years, an overt mistrust of organized religion. Until his father’s death, Cronin had been devout, and the question of his becoming a clergyman may have been considered, but if Cronin had entertained any such ambitions, his increasing indifference, which emerges very clearly in his novels, must have caused him to abandon such plans. Instead, he decided he would become a doctor—the only other thing for an ambitious poor boy living in Scotland to do—and in 1914 he entered Glasgow University Medical School. Cronin had begun his medical studies when World War I took him into the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a surgeon sublieutenant. Back at the university, he was struck forcefully by the contrast between his sincere idealism and the cynicism, selfishness, and muddled incompetency of many of the students and doctors he met. This conflict later found expression in his fiction, in which his idealized heroes’ enthusiasm is contrasted sharply with the satirical descriptions of other doctors, civic officials, and small-town bigots. In The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, The Green Years, and Shannon’s Way, for example, every aspect of the medical profession is criticized: medical schools, small-town practice, public health, fashionable clinics, and even research centers.

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Having been graduated M.B., Ch.B. with honors in 1919, Cronin was appointed physician to the outpatients in Bellahouston war pensions hospital, and later medical superintendent at Lightburn Hospital, Glasgow. Two years later, he married Agnes Mary Gibson, also a medical school graduate, and entered into general practice in a mining area of South Wales from 1921 until 1924. In the latter year, he became a medical inspector of mines for Great Britain. In 1925, he took his M.D. degree with honors; a year later he prepared a report on first-aid conditions in British coal mines and another report on dust inhalation in haematite mines. After his service with the ministry of mines was completed, Cronin moved to London and built a practice in London’s West End. Throughout these experiences and contacts with people of every kind, he continually thought of stories he could create. His patients and colleagues provided him with a dramatic cast of characters, a ready-made network of complex relationships, and a complete set of thunderous emotions. In all of this, he was not only an active participant but also, as the trusted doctor, an advantaged spectator. “It has been said that the medical profession proves the best training ground for a novelist,” Cronin wrote, “since there it is possible to see people with their masks off.” Certainly, in his own writings, Cronin drew heavily upon his experiences as a doctor. The Glasgow medical school environment; the touch-and-go associations with mental patients at a suburban asylum; the medical practice in a Welsh mining village with its calls in the night and impromptu surgery on the kitchen tables and in mine shafts; the drama, pathos, and cynical worldliness that passed under his eyes as a medical practitioner in London—all these episodes were used as material for his novels. The richest source of material for his novels, however—especially the later ones, beginning with The Keys of the Kingdom—was his newfound faith. At the height of financial prosperity and great reputation, in good health and with his work flowing smoothly and abundantly, Cronin felt a deep malaise, a feeling of emptiness and “interior desolation.” For years he had ignored matters of the spirit; then, almost coinciding with the end of one career and the start of a new, even more successful one, he found himself confronted with a fundamental fact of existence. He had been born a Catholic, observing the outward practice of his faith, but had gradually drifted into a position where religion was something entirely outside his inner experience. In the years after World War II, he took his wife on pilgrimages to Vienna, Italy, and France, in particular Normandy. Each trip to war-battered Europe provided experiences which further crystallized Cronin’s maturing faith. The source of his renewed strength can be summed up in a few words: “No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves from our divine source, there is no substitute for God.” This is a simple statement of sincere faith by a man whose adventures in various environments were marked by a steady development in spirit and in art. Analysis · Everything that A. J. Cronin wrote was stamped by his personality, his sincerity, his direct concern with ethical issues, his seemingly instinctive knowledge of ordinary people, and his tremendous gift for storytelling. An examination of five of his most popular novels, Hatter’s Castle, The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom, and The Green Years, reveals a consistent commitment to the value of the individual—the personal—and a remarkable development in narrative technique. Hatter’s Castle · Hatter’s Castle was in many ways a happy accident, securing for its author laudatory reviews and substantial earnings and establishing him as a writer of great promise. In its hero, readers found an outstanding personality: a hatter in

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Levenford, in strongly characterized surroundings, who lived through a destiny of suffering and tragedy. Readers were also treated to a return to the English novel in the grand tradition. Its themes of the rejected family, the struggle against poverty, the desire for wealth, the illusion of limitless opportunity, and the conflict between personal desire and conventional restraint were recurring ones throughout Cronin’s fiction. To develop the plot of Hatter’s Castle, Cronin used the familiar Victorian conventions available to all aspiring writers of the time: a straightforward linear chronology unfolded through the agency of the omniscient third-person narrator, with an emphasis on melodrama and horror. Added to these conventions is one of the most familiar themes of Greek tragedy, the retribution that attends overweening pride. James Brodie is a man whose inordinate self-love and unusually strong physique have made him the most feared person in town as well as the tyrant of a trembling household. He has deluded himself into believing that his hat shop is a thriving business, that his house is a romantic castle, and that he himself is related to the aristocracy. The novel proceeds almost consecutively from its beginning, with the hero at the “peak” of his power, to his decline into futility, frustration, and finally, alienation. Woven through the book are patterns of developing images and symbols which serve important structural functions: They relate and unify the individual lives presented in the book; they support and embody its themes; and they are the means by which the texture of an event or feeling is conveyed. One cluster of these images grows out of the title, which refers, of course, literally to the house, and also to James Brodie himself and his career. The “castle,” at once a physical structure and symbol of the Brodie family, is pictured early in the novel in terms that both symbolize the owner’s pride and prophesy the dreadful environment and outcome of the story. It is a place of gloom and solitude, “more fitted for a prison than a home,” “veiled, forbidding, sinister; its purpose likewise ‘hidden and obscure.’” The pompous dignity of the gables greets the visitor with “cold severity.” The parapet embraces the body of the house like a “manacle.” Its windows are “secret, close-set eyes [which] grudgingly admitted light.” Its doorway is “a thin repellent mouth.” This description not only provides a haunting counterpoint to the action of Hatter’s Castle but also establishes the essential character of Brodie well before he appears, before he is even named. The members of the Brodie family share with the house a condition of imminent collapse. Typical of so many novelists, Cronin’s device, here and elsewhere, is to put his minor characters in dire straits at the outset of the action so that they can be tested against the hardships life has to offer. This strategy he accomplishes by introducing the family members as they wait for Brodie, moving from grandmother to elder daughter, from younger daughter to mother, and each picture is presented as a miniature scene in a continuous drama of frustration. All along, the reader notes a strange absence of the usual signs of domesticity in a large country household. The driving force of the book, however, is the portrayal of the successive disasters that Brodie brings upon himself and his family. Margaret, his feeble, downtrodden wife, is reduced to abjection and dies horribly of cancer. Mary, his elder daughter, is a lovely, gentle girl not quite able to cope with her father. She becomes pregnant, is thrown out of the house into a raging storm, and eventually marries the young doctor whom Brodie hates. Nessie, the younger daughter, is driven to insanity and suicide by Brodie’s morbid determination that she shall win a scholarship and go to college. Matthew, Brodie’s weakling son, robs his mother, lies to both of his parents, and runs off with his father’s mistress. By the end of the novel, therefore, any manifestations of

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Brodie’s supposed supremacy have vanished. Not only has he lost his family, but he has lost his business and has become a drunkard. He is left shattered, with no companion but his tragic, greedy old mother, and with no hope but death. Although Hatter’s Castle is in many ways a conventional novel, there are ideas, themes, and techniques in it which reappear in Cronin’s later, more mature work. The characters are typical of Cronin: paradoxical mixtures of good and bad, weak and strong. Possessiveness, to the point of the pathological, is used as a catalyst to introduce a conflict and action, and, as in his later novels, it is always expressly condemned. The unrequited love theme which appears so often in Cronin’s writing is present in the form of Mary’s plight. Also, the central idea of rebellion against social pressures anticipates the kinds of revolt that motivate so many Cronin characters, including artists, seekers, and criminals. Perhaps a legitimate criticism of the plot is that the sheer number of misfortunes suffered by Brodie and his family seems excessive and implausible. Possibly, but it seems to be a part of Cronin’s philosophy that troubles never come singly, and, certainly, all of Brodie’s misfortunes can be convincingly traced to his character and actions. “Character is Fate,” quotes Thomas Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and his nemesis works unerringly through Brodie’s own glaring defects. Imaginative belief in Brodie compels belief in what happens to him. As one critic observed, “The plot may creak, but Brodie lives.” The Stars Look Down · Cronin’s fourth novel, The Stars Look Down, surpasses its predecessors by many standards. It develops in greater depth his major preoccupations—a concern with the chaos of life, its bitterness and desolation—but keeps under restraint the tendency toward melodrama without weakening the force of his instinct for drama. Characters reflect the special types to which Cronin is attracted, but the theme of the futility of the British working class against the greed and selfishness of the moneyed overlords receives fuller treatment here. With action ranging over much of England, the novel takes place in the period from 1903 to 1933. The story’s center is the Neptune coal mine in Ryneside County. The plot moves back and forth between two families, the Fenwicks and Barrases, adding constantly to their widening circle of acquaintances. Working primarily (although not exclusively) within the minds of his characters, Cronin maintains a tightly unified texture as he changes focus from one character to another. The six main characters are rather schematically drawn: One character is paired off with another, usually to show contrasting versions of a general type. The six major characters fall into three pairs: David Fenwick and Joe Gowlan; Laura Millington and Jenny Sunley; and Arthur Barras and his father, Richard. David, Laura, and Arthur are the generally praiseworthy characters in the novel, the ones who gain the greatest share of the reader’s sympathy. The “evil” ones, or those who obstruct the good characters, are Joe, Jenny, and Richard. The good are characterized by genuineness, sincerity, and a general lack of pretense; the bad, on the other hand, continually disguise their motives and present a false appearance. If the six main characters have obvious symbolic import, so has the title of the novel. Subject to their own laws and compulsions, heeding little outside them, the stars look down upon a scene of chaos and social revolution and go on looking, unperturbed. “Did you ever look at the stars?” asks the fat man in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Merry Men (1887). “‘When a great battle has been lost or a dear friend is dead, when we are hipped or in high spirits, there they are, unweariedly shining

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overhead.’ ‘I see,’ answered Will. ‘We are in a mousetrap.’” This is the idea Cronin suggests in the title and acts out through his characters, intending to convey something of the aloofness of eternity compared to the chaos of the earth below. Cronin conveys the atmosphere of a typical mining community by piling up factual detail upon factual detail in an attempt to re-create the very look, texture, and smell of the life of the miner. Frequently, he uses the slangy, ungrammatical language of these people even in descriptive or explanatory passages when the omniscient narrator is speaking. A work on a subject as technical as coal mining is bound to have a somewhat specialized vocabulary, and a reader without firsthand knowledge of life in the pits must search for the meanings of such words as “collier,” “hewer,” “getter,” “breaker,” “pickman,” and “pikeman.” To come to grips with the actualities of life in the mine, Cronin describes scenes such as the gaunt, unfriendly landscape, perpetually shrouded in grit; the silent and laconic manner of the miners; and the pervasive atmosphere of grim suffering and endurance. The town’s very name—“Sleesdale,” suggesting “sleazy”—is emblematic. This, then, is the backdrop to the human drama Cronin reconstructs, a drama about defeat and disappointment, about how people are victims of the greed and selfishness of others in power. The Citadel · Set partly in the same atmosphere as The Stars Look Down—the dusky, dirty towns of the English coal-mining region—Cronin’s fifth novel, The Citadel, is the savage and fiercely idealistic story of a young physician’s struggle to achieve success in life. To many readers, doctors particularly, the novel’s main interest lay in Cronin’s indictment of both the unethical practices of the medical profession and the system under which the miners lived and worked. To other readers, the interest lay in the unmistakable similarity between the hero’s personal philosophy and Cronin’s own opinions. There is the same integrity of character, the same effort to focus public attention on social forces which are responsible for many of the ills of his patients, and the same deep concern as an individual for lessening human disaster. In the hero, these readers welcomed the titillating sense of being “inside” the medical profession. Reading Cronin, they enjoyed the especially comforting thought that they were being educated as well as entertained. If there is any single clue as to Cronin’s intention in The Citadel, it is in the title. This simultaneously tragic and romantic novel was first called Manson, M.D., after its hero, but it was felt that the title finally chosen was a better expression of the underlying meaning of the novel. Andrew Manson is a man who in spite of great odds tries and ultimately succeeds in freeing himself from materialistic influences. The word “citadel” stands for medical competency and medical integrity, the ideals to which Manson aspires. That this symbol is central to the plot of the novel is made clear when Chris Manson tells her husband: “Don’t you remember how you used to speak of life, that it was an attack on the unknown, an assault uphill . . . as though you had to take some castle that you knew was there, but could not see, on the top?” At the end of the story, as Manson leaves Chris’s grave, he sees in the sky before him a bank of clouds “bearing the shape of battlements.” The reader is left to assume that Manson will once more assault the battlements, and that the conquest of them will be the greatest of all his achievements. A large part of the novel’s impressiveness stems from the way it functions throughout on a realistic level. Having grown out of Cronin’s years as a physician and his experiences in Wales and London from 1921 to 1930, The Citadel may be read autobiographically, but with great caution. The reader may be sure that the greedy

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Mrs. Edward Page, the bitter Philip Denny, the incompetent but fashionable Doctors Ivory, Freedman, and Hampton, and a score of others had their living counterparts in Cronin’s own experience. From a full spectrum of professional men and women, Cronin tells of the jealousies of the assistants and the scheming rivalries of their supervisors, of questionable medical practices, unsanitary conditions, hostile patients, rejected treatments, ephemeral successes and horrifying failures, and always the drudgery of endless plodding hackwork. Significantly, these supporting characters remain stereotypes, since Cronin’s main point is that, except for Denny, they ease through life, think and talk mostly of fees, and scheme to get ahead. The lazy among them learn little and continue to prescribe routine drugs and treatments. The ambitious think up tricks to entice rich patients, prompting them to believe they are sick whether or not they are. These antagonists—the nonprogressive, materialistic doctors—are mostly figures of straw, their outlines only vaguely discernible through the young doctor’s self-concern. Relative to Manson’s vigor and vitality, these characters appear flat and insipid. Another striking achievement of the book is the solid underlayer of fact. Almost all of Cronin’s books, including the poor ones, have this foundation, giving them a satisfying density and bulk. In The Citadel, the details of Manson’s experiences— without the use of abstruse technical terms and too many scientific explanations—are tremendously appealing to the reader. His restoration to life of Joe Morgan’s stillborn baby, his coal-pit amputation of a miner’s arm in the perilous tunnel, his restoration to consciousness of hysterical Toppy Le Roy, and the shocking butchery of the operation by Dr. Ivory, all of these scenes rouse the emotions as a means of persuading the mind. With its sober factuality, it is not difficult to understand why this novel has been enormously popular in both the United States and Great Britain. While The Citadel has much to say about a society which seems unwilling to allow Manson to do his best work, while it dilates upon the evil practices of other physicians, it is also an unusual love story, with Andrew and Chris Manson at the center. Chris is effectively presented as a frank, well-educated, levelheaded young woman whose instinctive enjoyment of life is the counterpart of Andrew’s integrity and determination. She knows the secret of turning hardships into fun, of forgetting irritation in laughter. Hard work and poverty do not scare her. The passionate integrity her husband brings to his science she brings to human relations—above all to her husband. From him, she refuses to accept any compromise of principle, even though this course leads them for a time to obscurity and poverty. She is strongly opposed to materialism and its shabby, cheapening results. She fights as best she can against every influence which she thinks will hurt her husband either as a scientist or as a man. If one demands purity of conception and unflagging precision of execution in a novel, then The Citadel is clearly disappointing. Cronin, however, surmounts these flaws as an artist to represent seriously, and at times movingly, some of the significant problems of his day. To one concerned with literary movements, part of the interest of the book lies in its representation of the many facets of its cultural and social milieu. It contains elements of Romantic optimism, of realistic appraisal, and of naturalistic pessimism. In attempting to trace in The Citadel the progression of his own attitudes toward life, Cronin makes a comment about human experience that frequently strikes home with compelling force. The Keys of the Kingdom · Perhaps his most popular novel, The Keys of the Kingdom emphasizes with incisiveness the problems encountered when a religious man rebels

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against the human-made rules, limitations, and barriers that are continually thrust between human beings and their God. Its merit lies precisely in its analysis of the conflicts between kindliness, sincere faith, and human understanding on one side, and smugness, intolerance, bigotry, and assumed piety on the other side. Francis Chisholm is the medium through which Cronin presents his conception of what has been called the most difficult subject in the world: religion. In The Keys of the Kingdom, it is not the profession of medicine but that of the priesthood which is held up to examination. The verdict, however, is much the same as that found in The Citadel. The priest who serves God according to the teachings of Christ, viewing himself as the selfless shepherd and servant of man, accepting poverty, humility, and perhaps even martyrdom, is likely to be misunderstood, undervalued, and cruelly censored by his brethren. The more worldly priest, on the other hand, will win the power and the glory that the Church has to bestow. Cronin’s priest, like Cronin’s doctor, is an individualist with the courage to accept the guidance of his conscience rather than his self-interest. In the Church, as in the medical profession, such courage may put one at a disadvantage, often bringing disappointment and disillusionment. The Keys of the Kingdom, therefore, is an entrancing story, but also an expression of personal faith. The title for this novel comes from the words of Christ to Peter—“And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven”—and the central theme comes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous description of the poor parson of the town, which ends, “But Christes’ lore and his apostles twelve/ He taught, but first he followed it himselve.” Thus, the keys, according to Cronin and his mouthpiece, Francis Chisholm, are one’s knowledge and use of the fundamentals of tolerance, humility, charity, and kindness. Where creeds divide, deeds of love and sympathy unite. Like the great Victorians from whose rich tradition they spring, Cronin’s characters, according to his modest moral aims, are unmistakably “good” or “bad.” The reader knows as soon as he meets them that Aunt Polly, Nora Bannon, Mr. Chia, Dr. Willie Tullock, and Bishop McNabb are “good.” One also can be reasonably sure that these people will endure their share of misfortune. The reader can find in these characters a schooling in generous humanity. Also easily recognizable are the unsympathetic characters: Bishop Mealey, Father Kezer, Mrs. Glennie, and Monsignor Sleeth. The reader always knows where he stands with Cronin. This contrast between the “good” and the “bad” is apparent especially through the comparison of Francis Chisholm and his lifelong associate, Anselm Mealey, who lacks the feeling and innate spirituality of his friend, but who uses a certain veneer and his commanding appearance to get himself elevated to the bishopric. As a picture of the worldly priest, Mealey is eloquent in his sermons, popular with the women of the parish, and especially assiduous in those good works which gain him the approbation of his superiors. He attracts large donations, makes many converts, and fights the outward battles of the Church. He is even willing to capitalize on a “miracle” that proves to be no miracle at all. Francis Chisholm, on the other hand, is the dissenter, the man who is different and therefore doomed to disappointment and failure in the eyes of the world. Through him, however, Cronin celebrates a central conviction: the significance—in possibility and promise, in striving if not in attainment—of tolerance and compassion and of encouragement for those striving to be true to their aspirations. Francis wins the priesthood the hard way: Being plain, outspoken, and unprepossessing in appearance, he never gets far in the Church. While Mealey attends to the social affairs of the

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Church, Francis works with the poor and lonely. While Mealey complies with all of the Church’s teachings, Francis speaks his mind. Christlike yet human, Francis believes in tolerance rather than dogma, and he holds humility above pride and ambition. It is doubtful that a book has ever been more timely. Appearing as it did when most of the world was at war, and with most writers preoccupied with that topic, a book with religion as its background was most refreshing. When religion is presented logically and unpretentiously, as in The Keys of the Kingdom, without mawkishness or condescension, it is sufficiently novel to make the reading public take notice. In this atmosphere and with these attributes, Cronin’s most popular novel achieved its immense success. The Green Years · Until The Green Years, most of Cronin’s attention had been focused on the absurdities and complications of the adult world. In The Green Years, however, Cronin set himself the added difficulty of working within the limited consciousness of a small child while at the same time avoiding the sentimentalities of so many books about childhood written for adults. To accomplish all of this Cronin takes his hero quite seriously, and he often describes his experiences with the same gravity as Robert, the protagonist, would view them. What is more, the novel consists of a grown man’s remembered experience, for the story is told in retrospect of a man who looks back to a particular period of intense meaning and insight. “Our purpose,” the author says, “is to reveal [the young Robert] truthfully, to expose him in all his dreams, strivings and follies.” This double focus—the boy who first experiences, and the man who has not forgotten—provides for the dramatic rendering of a story told by a narrator who, with his wider, adult vision, can employ the sophisticated use of irony and symbolic imagery necessary to reveal the story’s meaning. The Green Years is a story of initiation, of a boy’s quest for knowledge. The plot covers a period of ten years (1902-1912) and falls into three sections of nearly equal length as the hero progresses from innocence to perception to purpose. In the early chapters, Robert’s innocence is expressed as a mixture of bewilderment and ignorance. The opening establishes with Proustian overtures the desolation which haunts him upon his arrival at his new home, Levenford, with his new “mama,” Grandma Leckie: “I was inclined to trust Mama, who, until today, I had never seen before and whose worn, troubled face with faded blue eyes bore no resemblance to my mother’s face.” Robert’s sensitivity to his new surroundings is apparent in his acute perception of details. At the dinner table, Papa says “a long, strange grace which I had never heard before.” Robert has difficulty managing “the strange bare-handled knife and fork,” does not like the cabbage, and finds the beef “terribly salty and stringy.” He wonders why he is “such a curiosity” to all these people. The feeling of “being watched” is an experience that is repeated and a notion that reverberates throughout the novel. Suggested here is his continual need to perform for others and to be evaluated by others. Robert is the typical uncomprehending child caught in an uncomfortable situation. Lonely, imaginative, and isolated, he lacks the understanding necessary for evaluation and perspective. Robert’s gradual development into a perceptive young man functions, in large part, as a kind of organizing principle in the novel, uniting the common interest of a variety of disparate characters. These figures include Papa and Mama Leckie, Uncle Murdock, and Adam Leckie—all of whom are caught by marked shifts in their lives: illness, the death of those close to them, the breakup of careers, and the discovery of

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new opportunities. To compensate for this unhappy environment, Robert turns in part to nature and literature. His appreciation of nature, for example, may be attributed to his friend, Gavin Blair, in whom he discovers the companionship he craves. Like the companions of so many of Cronin’s protagonists, Gavin is intelligent, gifted, and handsome. Particularly appealing to Robert is Gavin’s “inner fibre, that spiritual substance for which no words suitable can be found.” While Cronin makes it clear that there is great comfort in all this, he also shows that this friendship initiates a problem that haunts Robert for much of the novel: a weakness for idealism. For Cronin, the great struggle of youth coming to maturity is the search for reality. This process involves disillusionment and pain. Robert endures a great deal of anguish each time one of his illusions is destroyed, but these disillusionments are necessary if he is to achieve intellectual and emotional independence. Once he must fight with his best friend, Gavin, to stop the taunts of his fellow classmates. At night, he is terrified by his grandmother’s tales of Satan. He witnesses Gavin’s death and on the same day fails the important Marshall examinations. All of this contributes to his temporary loss of faith in himself and his God. Helping to shape Robert’s purpose and philosophy is Alexander Gow, the one character with whom Robert feels secure. Robert quite naturally takes to Gow, with his apocryphal tales of the Zulu War, his eye for the ladies, his orotund views of human frailty, and his love for drink. Gow possesses “those faint ennobling virtues—never to be mean, always kind and inspiring affection.” He defends Robert’s right to Catholicism and to an education. Robert sees him as the reader sees him: erratic, not always dependable, yet, as one reviewer wrote, “still with an unquenchable zest for experience, an insatiable hunger for vital and beautiful things, an instinctive understanding of the human heart, especially a heart in trouble or in extreme youth.” In retrospect, Hatter’s Castle, The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom, and The Green Years fall into a pattern, illustrating Cronin’s recurring themes. Each of the five novels features a protagonist who has glimpses of values beyond the reach of his environment and who must struggle to achieve them. All five novels focus with dramatic force on the essential evil of injustice: the personal suffering that is the real reason for hating such injustice. Cronin’s humanitarian sympathies, his reaction against political, social, and religious injustice in his time, led him to a philosophical position somewhat akin to Thomas Carlyle’s. He believed that it is man’s responsibility to work, to prove his worth in whatever social stratum he happens to find himself. Dale Salwak Other major works PLAY: Jupiter Laughs, pr., pb. 1940. NONFICTION: Report on First-Aid Conditions in British Coal Mines, 1926; Report on Dust Inhalation in Haematite Mines, 1926; Adventures in Two Worlds, 1952 (autobiography). Bibliography Bartlett, Arthur. “A. J. Cronin: The Writing Doctor.” Coronet 35 (March, 1954): 165-169. This readable, entertaining piece provides biographical details concerning Cronin’s transition from life as a doctor to life as a writer. Cronin, Vincent. “Recollection of a Writer.” Tablet 235 (February 21, 1981): 175-176. One of Cronin’s surviving sons writes a moving appreciation of his father with

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biographical details and a discussion of Hatter’s Castle through The Spanish Gardener. His novels were both “indictments of social injustice” and expressions of “a deep religious faith.” From the latter stemmed “the warm humanity which gave his novels a worldwide appeal.” Quotes from two messages of sympathy sent to the family. Davies, Daniel Horton. A Mirror of the Ministry in Modern Novels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. This perceptive piece compares and contrasts the portrayal of a Protestant missionary in W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain” and Cronin’s The Grand Canary and The Keys of the Kingdom. Frederick, John T. “A. J. Cronin.” College English 3 (November, 1941): 121-129. One of the earliest important considerations of Cronin’s reputation in the light of his flaws as a writer. Discusses Hatter’s Castle, The Grand Canary, The Citadel, The Stars Look Down, and The Keys of the Kingdom. Judges Cronin’s novels to suffer from a lack of humor, an absence of stylistic grace, an obvious construction, and some feeble characters. On the positive side, finds a “deliberate choice of fictional material of the highest value and importance, unquestionable earnestness of purpose and— most important of all—positive evidence of capacity for self-criticism and for growth.” Fytton, Francis. “Dr. Cronin: An Essay in Victoriana.” Catholic World 183 (August, 1956): 356-362. This important discussion covers the man behind the novels and his religious thinking since his return to the faith. Divides the works into two groups: those before The Keys of the Kingdom (which grow in quality) and those after (which descend in quality). Salwak, Dale. A. J. Cronin. Boston: Twayne, 1985. The only published book-length study of Cronin, offering a full introduction to his life and works. After a discussion of his life as a doctor and his transition to that of a writer, examines each of Cronin’s novels and concludes with an assessment of his career. Supplemented by a chronology, notes, a comprehensive bibliography (listing primary as well as secondary sources with brief annotations), and an index. ____________. A. J. Cronin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. This annotated bibliography is an indispensable research tool for those interested in tracing the judgments passed on Cronin, the writer and the man, by his English and American readers from 1931 until his death in 1981. The annotations are descriptive, not evaluative, and are fully indexed, and the introduction traces the development of Cronin’s literary reputation.

Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe

Born: London, England; 1660 Died: London, England; April 26, 1731 Principal long fiction · The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, Written by Himself, 1719; The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, 1719; The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell, a Gentleman Who, Tho’ Deaf and Dumb, Writes Down Any Stranger’s Name at First Sight, with Their Future Contingencies of Fortune, 1720; The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, 1720; Memoirs of a Cavalier: Or, A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England, from the Year 1632 to the Year 1648, 1720; The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Written from Her Own Memorandums, 1722; The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col Jack, 1722; A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Publick as Private, Which Happened in London, During the Last Great Visitation in 1665, 1722 (also known as The History of the Great Plague in London); The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Call’d the Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany, Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II, 1724 (also known as Roxana); The Memoirs of an English Officer Who Serv’d in the Dutch War in 1672, to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, by Capt George Carleton, 1728 (also known as A True and Genuine History of the Last Two Wars and The Memoirs of Cap George Carleton). Other literary forms · Although Daniel Defoe is mainly remembered as the author of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, Written by Himself, more commonly known as Robinson Crusoe, he did not begin to write fiction until he was fifty-nine. The earlier part of his writing career was spent primarily in producing essays and political pamphlets and working for strongly partisan newspapers. He also wrote travel books, poetry (usually on political or topical issues), and biographies of rogues and criminals. Achievements · Defoe’s principal contribution to English literature is in the novel, and he has been called the first English novelist. The extent of his contribution, however, has been debated. A contemporary of Defoe, Charles Gildon, wrote an attack on Robinson Crusoe, criticizing, in part, inconsistencies in the narrative. Such problems are not infrequent in Defoe’s long and episodic plots. Nevertheless, the reader of almost any of Defoe’s works finds himself in a real and solid world, and Defoe’s constant enumeration of things—the layettes for Moll’s illegitimate children, the objects she steals, even her escape routes through London—has earned for Defoe a reputation as a realist and for his style the label “circumstantial realism.” To see Defoe as a photographic realist, however, is also to see his limitations, and some of his critics argue that the formlessness of his novels shows his lack of the very shaping power that belongs to great art. Further, even his circumstantial realism is not of the visual sort: Once Moll has named an object, for example, she rarely goes on to describe 231

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it in such detail that the reader may visualize it. In the late twentieth century, Defoe’s novels underwent a reassessment, and critics started to see him as more than a mere assembler of objects. Although these critics diverge widely in their interpretation of his techniques, they do agree that Defoe consciously developed the themes and used his narratives to shape these themes, all of which center around the conflict between spiritual and earthly values. Instead of viewing Defoe as a plodding literalist, some critics see a keen irony in his work: Moll’s actions and her commentary on those actions, they argue, do not always agree. Thus, the reader is allowed to cultivate a certain ironic detachment about Moll. While few readers would judge Defoe Library of Congress to be a deeply psychological novelist, this double perspective does contribute to a rudimentary analysis of character. Others see a religious vision in his works, one that underwrites an almost allegorical interpretation of his novels: The ending of Robinson Crusoe, the killing of the wolves, is seen as Crusoe slaying his earthly passions. While such a reading may seem forced, one should perhaps remember that John Bunyan was a near contemporary of Defoe—he even preached at Morton’s Academy at Stoke Newington while Defoe was a student there—and that readers in his time were accustomed to reading allegorically. Part of the fascination—and achievement—of Defoe may well lie in the tension between realism and allegory that informs his work. Using natural dialogue and a kind of realistic detail, he can yet go beyond these to create events and characters which are, finally, mythic. Biography · Daniel Defoe was born in the parish of St. Giles, London, the son of James Foe, a Dissenter and a tallow-chandler. (Only after the age of forty did Defoe change his last name, perhaps to seem more aristocratic.) The date of his birth is conjectural: In 1683, he listed his age on his marriage license as twenty-four, but since his sister, Elizabeth, was born in 1659, it is probable that Defoe was born the next year. Not much is known of his early childhood, but his education was certainly important in molding his interests. Being a Dissenter, Defoe was not allowed to attend Oxford or Cambridge; instead, he went to a dissenting academy presided over by the Reverend Charles Morton. While offering a study of the classics, the academy also stressed modern languages, geography, and mathematics, practical subjects neglected at the universities. This interest in the practical seems to have stayed with Defoe all his life: When his library was sold after his death, the advertisements listed “several hundred Curious, Scarce Tracts on . . . Husbandry, Trade, Voyages, Natural History, Mines, Minerals, etc.” Defoe’s appreciation of the objects and processes by which one

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is enabled to live in the world is obvious: After making a table and chair, Crusoe reflects that “by stating and squaring everything by reason and by making the most rational judgment of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanic art.” Although his father intended him for the ministry, Defoe became a merchant after leaving school and probably traveled on the Continent as part of his business. In 1684, he married the daughter of another dissenting merchant, and she brought him a considerable dowry. Defoe’s fortunes seemed to be rising, but in 1685, he was briefly involved in the duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, a Protestant uprising. Although he escaped the king’s soldiers, this event illustrates his willingness to espouse dangerous political causes: Three former schoolmates who joined the rebellion were caught and hanged. While his affairs seemed to prosper during this time, there were disquieting lawsuits—eight between 1688 and 1694, one by his mother-in-law, whom he seems to have swindled—that cast doubt on both his economic stability and his moral character. In fact, by 1692 he was bankrupt, a victim of losses at sea and his own speculations. Defoe’s character is always difficult to label; while the lawsuits show his unsavory side, he did make arrangements after his ruin to repay his creditors, which he seems to have done with surprising thoroughness. Defoe then began building a brick factory on some land that he owned in Tilbury. This enterprise went well and, with William and Mary on the throne, Defoe could praise the government with a clear conscience. He admired William’s religious toleration, foreign policy, and encouragement of English trade. He wrote several pamphlets supporting William’s policy of containing Louis XIV’s political aspirations, a policy not always popular in England. When William’s followers from Holland were harassed by the English, Defoe wrote The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (1701), a long poem arguing that the English are themselves a mixed race who cannot afford to deride other nationalities. With the accession of Queen Anne of England in 1702, the Dissenters—and Defoe—suffered serious political grievances. Fiercely loyal to the Church of England, Anne looked with disfavor on other religious groups, and bills were introduced to limit the freedom of Dissenters. While both houses of Parliament debated the Occasional Conformity Bill in 1702, a bill that would have effectually prevented Dissenters from holding political office, Defoe published “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” an ironic pamphlet urging the government to annihilate this group entirely. At first it was taken at face value and applauded by the High Church party but, when its irony was perceived, a warrant was issued for Defoe’s arrest, and he went into hiding. Fearful of imprisonment and the pillory, Defoe sent letters to Daniel Finch, second earl of Nottingham, the secretary of state, trying to negotiate a pardon: He would raise a troop of horses for the government at his own expense; he would volunteer to fight—and possibly die—in the Netherlands. Nottingham was inflexible, however, and when Defoe was found, he was imprisoned in Newgate, the scene of Moll’s incarceration. Two months later, he was fined two hundred marks, forced to stand in the pillory three times, imprisoned at the queen’s discretion, and forced to provide sureties for his good behavior for the next seven years. This experience helps, perhaps, to explain Defoe’s later political views, which seemed to his contemporaries based on expediency rather than conviction: In a letter to a friend, he said that, after Newgate, he would never feel himself maligned if called a coward. When Defoe describes Moll’s stay in prison, he knows whereof he speaks. How long Defoe might have remained in Newgate at the queen’s discretion cannot, of course, be known; certainly the government showed no sign of releasing him

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during the summer nor in the fall. He appealed to Robert Harley, a man destined to take Nottingham’s place when the latter had been dismissed by the queen. After leisurely negotiations—perhaps to render Defoe more grateful when his pardon finally did come—Harley obtained Defoe’s release in November, 1703, the queen even going so far as to send money to Mrs. Defoe and another sum to Defoe to settle his debt. Harley continued to be influential in Defoe’s life; indeed, popular opinion seems to have been that Defoe prostituted himself, abandoning all political ideals for Harley. Still, it is hard to imagine how a forty-three-year-old ruined businessman, with a wife and seven children to support, could begin life over if not with the help of a powerful ally. Defoe’s letters to Harley also suggest that Harley sometimes kept him short of funds on purpose, perhaps to make him more compliant. In any case, Defoe’s career was definitely the writing of political pamphlets—usually in favor of Harley’s policies—and he also edited and wrote most of A Weekly Review, which ran from 1704 to 1713. Perhaps Defoe’s most significant work for Harley was the establishment of a spy system in England to determine what the national sentiment was for the government. This project, which was Defoe’s own idea, began in 1704 when Harley sent him on a preliminary reconnaissance trip through the country. This was the first of several such trips, including one to Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1706, to determine local opinion about the proposed union of the English and Scottish parliaments. On all these trips, Defoe had to assume fictitious identities, and he seems to have relished this subterfuge; it is perhaps significant that Defoe’s characters usually are forced to assume many varied disguises in the course of their eventual lives. Even Defoe’s tracts and pamphlets bear witness to his fascination with assuming various roles: One critic has estimated that Defoe created eighty-seven personae in these works. After Harley’s political decline and Queen Anne’s death, Defoe continued to work for the government, characteristically, in a role requiring deception. Pretending to be a Tory out of favor with the government, he obtained a job on Mist’s Weekly Journal, one of the most influential Tory papers. In this way, he was able to temper the writing so that its attacks on the government became less virulent. Defoe’s shadowy activities are difficult to follow, but it seems that he was also performing the same service to the government on other papers: Dyer’s News-Letter, Dormer’s News-Letter, and Mercurius Politicus. Defoe’s easy transition from Harley’s Tory government to the succeeding Whig regime angered many people, who claimed that he had no principles. Defoe’s reply, difficult to counter, was always that he was working for moderation, no matter on which side. Only toward the end of his life did Defoe begin to write prose fiction: Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its sequels: The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720), The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Written from Her Own Memorandums (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col Jack (1722), and The Fortunate Mistress or Roxana (1724). Even after completing this enormous output, he continued to produce biographies of criminals and imaginary biographies of soldiers and sailors. To all appearances, Defoe seemed to embark on a comfortable old age; Henry Baker, his son-in-law, reported that he had retired from London to a handsome house in Stoke Newington, where he lived a leisurely life, growing a garden, pursuing his studies, and writing. In 1730, however, Defoe vanished from his home and, in a rather cryptic letter to Baker, wrote about his “Load of insupportable Sorrows,” a “wicked, perjur’d, and contemptible Enemy,” and the “inhuman dealing of my own son” who

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reduced his “dying Mother to beg . . . Bread at his Door.” The enemy seems to have been Mary Brooke, the wife of one of Defoe’s former creditors. Although Defoe appears to have paid Brooke—at least Brooke’s executor accepted Defoe’s story— Brooke died before destroying his record of the debt and his wife was determined to collect it. Once again, Defoe was being hounded by a creditor. His reference to his unnatural son is a bit more puzzling but may show that he had transferred most of his money and property to his son to keep it out of Mary Brooke’s hands; if so, his son seems to have abused the trust placed in him. Defoe died in April, 1731, while hiding in a lodging house in Ropemaker’s Alley. Although Defoe’s colorful life almost calls too much attention to itself—some critics have tried to deduce his exact birthdate by events in his characters’ lives—it is hard not to see a link between the elements of disguise and trickery in so many of his novels and his own eventful life, spent, in large part, in fabricating identities for himself in his government work. Like his character Moll Flanders, Defoe had personal experience with Newgate, and his biographies of criminals and rogues show a fascination with the inventive powers that allow one to thrive in a treacherous world. In this respect, Defoe and his characters seem to have a great deal in common: They are all survivors in an often hostile environment. This sense of alienation may also have a link with Defoe’s religion, a creed that was sometimes tolerated but rarely encouraged by the Crown. Analysis · Although A Journal of the Plague Year is not Daniel Defoe’s first work of fiction, it does offer an interesting perspective from which to examine the novels. Purporting to be a journal, one man’s view of a period in a city’s history, it shows especially well the nexus between realistic reporting and imaginative invention that is the hallmark of Defoe’s novels. A Journal of the Plague Year · Defoe himself lived through one seige of the plague, and although he was only five years old when the disease swept through London, he presumably would have retained some recollections of this catastrophic event, even if only through conversations he would have heard in his family. He also refers frequently to the mortality list, drawing on actual documents of the time to give his narrative a sense of reality. In spite of the realistic foundations of the work, however, its imaginative—not to say fantastic—elements outweigh its realism. Defoe, in fact, often shows a surprising interest in the occult or grotesque for one who is supposedly forging the realistic novels in English. Dreams and premonitions often assail his characters: Crusoe’s dream of the angel, Moll’s telepathic contact with her Lancashire husband, Roxana’s precognitive vision of the dead jeweler. The utter incomprehensibility of the plague takes this work far beyond cause-and-effect realism. Perhaps the main thing to consider in A Journal of the Plague Year is the narrator, who, like many of Defoe’s characters, is divided spiritually: He must decide whether to flee London or stay and trust God’s divine providence. Like Crusoe, H. L. in times of stress opens the Bible randomly and applies its words to his immediate situation. A problem with theme—often Defoe’s weakness—immediately arises, for while the passage that he finds in the Bible convinces him to stay, by the end of the novel he has decided that flight is the only sensible option. His stay in the city is not developed as a moral flaw, however, although given the religious concerns of the novel it seems as though it should be: Some critics even see him guilty of overstraining God’s providence. This view seems inconsistent with the overall sympathetic character of H. L., and one feels that Defoe is not, perhaps, completely in control of his theme.

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Even more significant for theme is the origin of the plague. H. L., a sensible, levelheaded man, insists that the plague’s cause is natural; he is just as insistent, however, that God has used natural means to bring about the plague. In fact, he makes frequent biblical references which, if not providing specific emblematic types for the plague, do give it a resonance beyond that of a mere disease. Thus, the narrator’s insistence on seeing all the horrors of the plague for himself, even though he admits he would be safer at home, has led some critics to see his curiosity as a desire to understand God’s workings directly. Again, one encounters an awkward thematic problem. Is H. L. really curious about God’s wisdom, or is his seeming inability to stay home simply a narrative necessity? There would, after all, be no journal without an eyewitness. Like many thematic problems in Defoe’s works, this only becomes one in retrospect; H. L.’s emphasis on the particulars he describes can be so interesting—even if gruesome—that it is not until the reader has finished the book that these problems surface. Two episodes from this work show how effective Defoe can be with detail. The first involves H. L.’s journey to the post office. Walking through silent and deserted streets, he arrives at his destination, where he sees “In the middle of the yard . . . a small leather purse with two keys hanging at it, with money in it, but nobody would meddle with it.” There are three men around the courtyard who tell H. L. that they are leaving it there in case the owner returns. As H. L. is about to leave, one of the men finally offers to take it “so that if the right owner came for it he should be sure to have it,” and he proceeds to an elaborate process of disinfection. This episode, on the surface merely straightforward description, is fraught with drama and ambiguity. While it is realistic that the streets be deserted as people take to the safety of their houses, the silence lends an eerie backdrop to this scene. Furthermore, the men’s motivations are hardly straightforward. Are they leaving the purse there out of honesty or are they fearful of contamination? Are they simply playing a waiting game with one another to see who leaves first? Does one man finally take the purse to keep it for the owner or for himself? Finally, why does he have all the disinfecting materials, including red-hot tongs, immediately available? Was he about to take the purse before H. L. arrived? H. L.’s remarks about the money found in the purse—“as I remember . . . about thirteen shillings and some smooth groats and brass farthings”—complete this episode: The particularity of the amount is typical of Defoe’s realism, and H. L.’s hesitant “as I remember” also persuades the reader that he is witnessing the mental processes of a scrupulously honest narrator. In fact, this whole passage is so effective that one tends to overlook an internal inconsistency: Early in the paragraph H. L. says that the sum of money was not so large “that I had any inclination to meddle with it,” yet he only discovers the sum at the end of this episode. Defoe is prone to narrative slips of this kind but, like this one, they are usually unimportant and inconspicuous. Another vivid episode concerns H. L. going to check on his brother’s house while he is away. Next to the house is a warehouse, and as H. L. approaches it, he finds that it has been broken into and is full of women trying on hats. Thievery is by no means uncommon during the plague, although the women’s interest in fashion does seem bizarre. What is remarkable about this description, however, is its ambience: Instead of grabbing the hats and fleeing, the women are behaving as if they are at a milliner’s, trying on hats until they find those that are most becoming. This scene shows Defoe ostensibly writing realistically, but in fact, he is creating a picture that borders on the surreal.

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A Journal of the Plague Year does not always achieve the degree of success that these two episodes display; much of the book is filled with descriptions of the cries and lamentation the narrator hears as he walks the streets. Even horror, if undifferentiated, can become monotonous, and Defoe does not always know how to be selective about details. One device that he employs to better effect here than in his other works is the keeping of lists. Defoe’s characters often keep balance sheets of their profits and expenditures, and while this may indicate, as Ian Watt contends, Defoe’s essentially materialistic bias, these lists often seem examples of the crudest form of realism. In A Journal of the Plague Year, however, the mortality lists scattered throughout are rather more successful and provide almost a thudding rhythm to what is being described: God’s terrible visitation. Robinson Crusoe · Robinson Crusoe, like A Journal of the Plague Year and much of Defoe’s fiction, is based on a factual event: Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor, lived for four years on the island of Juan Fernandez until he was rescued in 1709. Defoe supplemented accounts of Selkirk’s adventures with travel books: Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages (1589), William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World (1697), and Robert Knox’s An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681). Nevertheless, it is as fiction—not a pastiche of other people’s books—that Robinson Crusoe engrosses the reader. Since the story centers around one character, it depends on that character for much of its success, and critics have tended to divide into two groups: those who see Crusoe as the new middle-class economic man with only perfunctory religious feelings, and those who see him as a deeply spiritual person whose narrative is essentially that of a conversion experience. The answer, perhaps, is that both views of Crusoe coexist in this novel, that Defoe was not sure in this early work exactly where his story was taking him. This ambiguity is not surprising since the same problem surfaces in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (more popularly known as Moll Flanders); it was not until Roxana that Defoe seems to have worked out his themes fully. The opening frame to Crusoe’s island adventure provides a logical starting point for examining his character. Writing in retrospect, Crusoe blames his shipwreck and subsequent sufferings on his “propension of nature” which made him reject his father’s counsel of moderation and prompted him to go to sea. His father’s speech seems to echo the idea of a great chain of being: Crusoe’s life belongs to the “middle state,” and he should not endanger himself by reckless acts. If Crusoe’s filial disobedience seems trivial to modern readers, it was not to Defoe: His The Family Instructor, in Three Parts (1715) and A New Family Instructor (1727) make clear how important the mutual obligations of parents and children are. Crusoe himself, recounting his exile from the perspective of old age, talks about his father in biblical terms: After Crusoe’s first shipwreck he is “an emblem of our blessed Saviour’s parable, [and] had even killed the fatted calf for me.” When Crusoe reflects, then, on his sinful and vicious life, the reader has to accept Defoe’s given: that Defoe’s early giddy nature is a serious moral flaw. Even with this assumption, however, the reader may have problems understanding Crusoe’s character. Throughout the novel, for example, there are images of prison and capture. This makes sense, for the island is both a prison and, if the reader believes in Crusoe’s conversion, a means of attaining spiritual freedom. Crusoe himself is imprisoned early in the novel by some Moors and escapes only after two years (which, like many long stretches of time in Defoe’s novels, are only briefly summarized) with a boy named Xury, a captive who soon becomes Crusoe’s helpmate

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and friend. Once Crusoe is free, however, he sells Xury willingly and misses him only when his plantation grows so large that he needs extra labor. Indeed, it is indicative of his relations with other people that, when Crusoe meets Friday, Friday abases himself to Crusoe, and Crusoe gives his own name as “Master.” Perhaps one should not expect enlightened social attitudes about slavery or race in an eighteenth century author. Even so, there seems pointed irony—presumably unintended by Defoe—in Crusoe gaining his freedom only to imprison others; Crusoe’s attitude does not seem sufficient for the themes and imagery that Defoe himself has woven into this work. Crusoe does not behave appreciably better with Europeans. When he rescues Friday and his father, he also rescues a Spaniard who, with a group of Spaniards and Portuguese, has been living peaceably with Friday’s tribe. Crusoe begins to think about trying to return to civilization with the Europeans and sends the Spaniard back to Friday’s tribe to consult with the others. Before he returns, however, a ship with a mutinous crew arrives on the island: Crusoe rescues the captain and regains control of most of the mutineers. They leave the worst mutineers on the island and sail off for civilization; Crusoe apparently gives no thought to the Spaniard, who will return to the island only to find a motley collection of renegades. Defoe may, of course, simply have forgotten momentarily about the Spaniard as his narrative progressed to new adventures, but if so, this is an unfortunate lapse because it confuses the reader about character and, therefore, about Crusoe’s humanity. Another problem, this time having to do with theme, occurs at the end of the novel. After being delivered to Spain, Crusoe and another group of travelers set out to cross the Pyrenees, where they are beset by fierce wolves. They manage to escape, and Crusoe returns to England, marries, has three children, travels back to his island, and continues having adventures, which, he says, “I may perhaps give a farther account of hereafter.” One might argue that the adventures after he leaves the island are anticlimactic, although some critics try to justify them on thematic grounds, the killing of the wolves thus being the extermination of Crusoe’s earthly passions. The question remains whether the narrative can bear the weight of such a symbolic—indeed, allegorical—reading. The fact that the sequels to Robinson Crusoe are merely about external journeys—not internal spiritual states—shows, perhaps, that Defoe was not as conscious an allegorist as some critics imagine. Given these thematic problems, it may seem odd that the novel has enjoyed the popularity it has over the centuries. In part, this may simply be due to the element of suspense involved in Crusoe’s plight. On one level, the reader wonders how Crusoe is going to survive, although the minute rendering of the day-to-day activities involved in survival can become tedious. Of more interest are Crusoe’s mental states: His fluctuating moods after he finds the footprint, for example, have a psychological reality about them. Further, the very traits that make Crusoe unappealing in certain situations lend the novel interest; Crusoe is a survivor, and, while one sometimes wishes he were more compassionate or humane, his will to endure is a universal one with which the reader can empathize. Aside from the basic appeal of allowing the reader to experience vicariously Crusoe’s struggles to survive, the novel also offers the reader a glimpse of Crusoe’s soul; while some of Crusoe’s pieties seem perfunctory, Defoe is capable of portraying his internal states in sophisticated ways. For example, early in his stay he discovers twelve ears of barley growing, which convinces him “that God had miraculously caused this grain to grow without any help of seed sown and that it was so directed purely for my sustenance on that wild miserable place.” Two paragraphs later,

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however, “it occurred to my thoughts that I had shook a bag of chicken’s meal out in that place, and then the wonder began to cease; and I must confess, my religious thankfulness to God’s Providence began to abate too. . . .” The mature Crusoe who is narrating this story can see in retrospect that “I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen Providence as if it had been miraculous; for it was really the work of Providence as to me” that God allowed the seed to take hold and grow. Here the reader finds Defoe using a sophisticated narrative situation as the older Crusoe recounts—and comments upon—the spiritual states of the young Crusoe. Indeed, one problem in the novel is determining when Crusoe’s egocentric outlook simply reflects this early unregenerate state of which his mature self would presumably disapprove, and when it reflects a healthy individualism in which Defoe acquiesces. Perhaps Crusoe is most appealing when he is aware of his foibles—for example, when he prides himself on building a gigantic canoe, only to find that he cannot possibly transport it to water. Colonel Jack · If Robinson Crusoe shows an uneasy balance between egocentricity and spiritual humility, materialism and religion, Defoe’s novel The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, more commonly known as Captain Singleton, displays what Everett Zimmerman calls a “soggy amalgam of the picaresque and Puritan.” This problem reappears in The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col Jack, known to readers simply as Colonel Jack. Jack’s motives are often suspect. When he becomes an overseer in Virginia, for example, he finds that he cannot whip his slaves because the action hurts his arms. Instead, he tells the slaves they will be severely punished by an absentee master and then pretends to have solicited their pardon. Grateful for this mercy, the slaves then work for Jack willingly and cheerfully. While Jack describes this whole episode in words denoting charity and mercy, the reader is uneasily aware that Jack is simply playing on the slaves’ ignorance. It is method rather than mercy that triumphs here. Moll Flanders and Roxana · The confusion in Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack between expediency and morality can also be found in Moll Flanders and, to a lesser extent, in Roxana. What makes these latter novels enduring is the power of their central characters. Both Moll and Roxana bear many children, and although they manage to dispose of their offspring conveniently so that they are not hampered in any way, their physical fertility sets them apart from Defoe’s more sterile male heroes. This fertility may, of course, be ironic—Dorothy Van Ghent calls Moll an Earth Mother but only insofar as she is a “progenitrix of the wasteland”—but it adds a dimension to the characters that both Jack and Singleton lack. One also feels that Defoe allows his female characters greater depth of feeling: Each one takes husbands and lovers for whom they have no regard, but Moll’s telepathic communication with her Lancashire husband and Roxana’s precognitive vision of the jeweler’s death imply that both of these women are involved deeply in these relationships, even though Roxana manages to use the jeweler’s death as a way of rising in the world by becoming the Prince’s mistress. Defoe’s heroines may mourn their losses yet also use them to their advantage. Another difference between the female and male protagonists is that neither Moll nor Roxana descends to murder, whereas Defoe’s male picaros often do. Although Moll can occasionally rejoice when a criminal cohort capable of exposing her is hanged, she feels only horror when she contemplates murdering a child from whom

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she steals a necklace. Similarly, while Roxana may share an emotional complicity in Amy’s murder of her importunate daughter, she explicitly tells Amy that she will tolerate no such crime. Roxana also seems to have more thematic unity than Defoe’s other novels: Instead of advocating an uneasy balance between spiritual and material values, Roxana shows a tragic awareness that these are finally irreconcilable opposites. Roxana, although recognizing her weaknesses, cannot stop herself from indulging in them, and her keen awareness of what she calls her “secret Hell within” aligns her more with John Milton’s Satan than with Defoe’s earlier protagonists. If Defoe begins to solve the thematic problems of his earlier novels in Moll Flanders and Roxana, he does so through fairly dissimilar characters. Moll equivocates and justifies her actions much more than does Roxana; when she steals the child’s necklace, she reflects that “as I did the poor child no harm, I only thought I had given the parents a just reproof for their negligence in leaving the poor lamb to come home by itself, and it would teach them to take more care another time.” She also shows a tendency to solve moral dilemmas by the simple expedient of maintaining two opposing moral stances simultaneously. When she meets a man at Bartholomew Fair who is intoxicated, she sleeps with him and then robs him. She later reflects on his “honest, virtuous wife and innocent children” who are probably worrying about him, and she and the woman who disposes of her stolen goods both cry at the pitiable domestic scene Moll has painted. Within a few pages, however, she has found the man again and taken him as her lover, a relationship that lasts for several years. Moll seems to see no conflicts in her attitudes. Her speech also shows her ability to rationalize moral problems, and she often uses a type of equivocation that allows her to justify her own actions. When a thief is pursued through a crowd of people, he throws his bundle of stolen goods to Moll. She feels herself free to keep them “for these things I did not steal, but they were stolen to my hand.” Contrary to the character of Moll, Roxana recognizes her failings. After her first husband leaves her in poverty, her landlord offers to become her lover. Although he has a wife from whom he is separated, he argues that he will treat Roxana in every way as his legal wife. Throughout their life together, Roxana distinguishes between their guilt: The landlord, she says, has convinced himself that their relationship is moral; she, however, knows that it is not and is thus the greater sinner. Indeed, Roxana is portrayed in much greater psychological depth than is Moll; one measure of this is the relationship between Roxana and her maid, Amy. While Defoe’s characters often have close friends or confidants—Friday in Robinson Crusoe, the midwife in Moll Flanders, Dr. Heath in A Journal of the Plague Year—it is only in Roxana that the friend appears in the novel from the beginning to the end and provides an alter ego for the main character. When Roxana is deciding whether to take the landlord as her lover, for example, Amy volunteers several times to sleep with him if Roxana refuses. Once the landlord and Roxana are living together, Roxana decides to put Amy into bed with the landlord, which she does—literally tearing off Amy’s clothes and watching their sexual performance. By the next day, the landlord’s lust for Amy has turned to hatred and Amy is suitably penitent. The logical question is why Roxana does this destructive deed, and the answer seems to be that, since she herself feels intense guilt at sleeping with the landlord, she wants to degrade Amy and the landlord as well. Amy, similarly manipulative, is less passive than Roxana. At the end of the novel, Susan, one of Roxana’s daughters, appears, guesses her mother’s identity, and begs Roxana to acknowledge her. Amy’s suggestion is that she kill Susan, who alone can

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reveal Roxana’s past, having been, unknowingly, a maid in her mother’s household when Roxana had many lovers. Roxana recoils from this idea although she admits that Amy “effected all afterwards, without my knowledge, for which I gave her my hearty Curse, tho’ I could do little more; for to have fall’n upon Amy, had been to have murther’d myself. . . .” Some critics argue that Roxana actually acquiesces in Susan’s murder, even though she forbids Amy to do it; her statement that to fall upon Amy would be to destroy herself does lend credence to this view. Amy, perhaps, acts out the desires that Roxana will not admit, even to herself. In fact, both Moll Flanders and Roxana seem to hint at an irrational perverseness in their characters that explains, in part, their crimes. At one point after beginning her life as a thief, Moll actually tries to earn her living with her needle and admits that she can do so, but temptation makes her return to crime. She appears to enjoy living outside the law, no matter how much she may talk of her fears of Newgate. Similarly, she once steals a horse simply because it is there; she has no way to dispose of it, but the irrational impulse in her that leads her to crime causes her to commit this theft anyway. Defoe is not given to high comedy, but the picture of Moll leading the horse through the streets, wondering how she is ever going to rid herself of it, is a memorably comic scene. The frequent irrationality of Moll’s behavior seems reiterated in the actions of Roxana; without Moll’s self-justifying rationalizations, however, Roxana becomes a tragic figure who knows that her behavior is wrong but cannot stop it. About halfway through the novel, for example, she meets a Dutch merchant, who helps her out of some difficulties; she sleeps with him, but, when he proposes marriage, she refuses him on the grounds that marriage is a kind of slavery for women. Actually, she fears that he is trying to take over her fortune. When he answers this unspoken objection, promising not to touch her wealth, she is left in the uncomfortable position of having to admit that her initial reluctance was based solely on financial considerations, or else continuing her spirited defense of female freedom. Moll chooses the latter option, arguing until the merchant admits defeat. After she is left alone, Roxana regrets her decision and wishes the merchant back, arguing that no “Woman in her Senses” would ever behave as she did. In these two novels, Defoe seems to be exploring the nature of evil, and it is seen repeatedly as an irrational drive that can deprive its victims of free choice. In fact, Roxana is noteworthy for the ambiguously dark atmosphere that pervades the novel, even apart from Roxana’s actions. Although Moll Flanders touches on incest, madness, and murder, these seem to be the understandable results of understandable causes: If you do not know your mother, you may marry your brother; if your brother-husband discovers your identity, he may go mad with grief; if you steal from a child, you may contemplate murder to cover up your crime. In Roxana, however, many of the characters seem motivelessly malignant, obscurely evil. The midwife whom the Prince hires for Roxana seems so murderous that Roxana has him dismiss her, yet there has been no suggestion in the novel that the Prince intends Roxana harm. On the contrary, he seems delighted with her pregnancy and even spends some time with her during labor. The sexual promiscuity found in Moll Flanders turns to sexual perversion in Roxana: Roxana’s final lover before she goes to live with the Quaker disgusts her “on some Accounts, which, if I cou’d suffer myself to publish them, wou’d fully justifie my Conduct; but that Part of the Story will not bear telling. . . .” Even the Quaker is an ambiguous figure. Although strictly truthful—Roxana states several times that the woman will not tell a lie—she hardly seems above reproach: She

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shows a surprising adeptness at bringing together Roxana and her former lover; she knows how to disguise the smell of alcohol on one’s breath; she says at one point that she is almost tempted to abandon her sober Quaker attire and wear Roxana’s Turkish costume, although the costume by this time has come to be an emblem of Roxana’s sinful life. Perhaps Defoe’s darkening vision can best be seen by comparing the conclusions of Moll Flanders and Roxana. After a life of crime—by which she becomes quite wealthy—Moll is finally caught and sent to Newgate. Sentenced to die, she is instead transported, but not before meeting Jemmy, her Lancashire husband, who has been a highwayman and who also ends up in Newgate. They leave for America together, and since they have enough money to pay the captain of the ship handsomely, they are treated like gentry on their voyage. Once in America, they prosper, only returning to England at the end of the novel, presumably repentant but certainly wealthy from their life of crime. The uneasy balance of religion and roguery in Moll Flanders—Moll’s pieties interspersed throughout the work sometimes sound as perfunctory as Crusoe’s—shifts in Roxana, where Defoe’s character finally realizes that one cannot reconcile sin and prosperity in the easygoing synthesis that Moll seems to achieve. The novel ends with Susan’s death and Amy’s desertion; the final paragraph tells the reader that Roxana and her husband prospered for a while but that a “Blast from Heaven” finally destroyed her tranquility and she ended her days miserably. The abruptness of this conclusion makes for an unsatisfactory ending, but at least it does show Defoe solving the thematic problems inherent in all his earlier novels: Roxana recognizes a higher power but is unable to obey it. Instead of having the best of two worlds—prosperity and religion—she is doomed by a just providence which punishes her unrepentance. If, like Defoe’s heroes and heroines, the reader is given to keeping balance sheets, he could summarize easily Defoe’s weaknesses and strengths. On a basic level, Defoe is often slipshod in his handling of narrative: At one point Moll tells the reader how many lovers she has had in her life, but Moll’s list of lovers falls far short of the number she mentions in her own narrative. More serious are the thematic problems that Defoe seems to solve only in his final novel. Finally, his realism is quite crude in some places; descriptions of objects assail the reader without having any sensuous reality to them. To Defoe’s credit, he is able to establish a convincing conversational tone for most of his characters, and they often have an energy which far exceeds their function as counters through whom Defoe can manipulate his episodic plots. When reading Defoe, however, one does not tend to think in terms of balance sheets. In his best works, the problems in Defoe’s writings are so far masked by the vitality of his fiction as to be unnoticeable. Like all artists, Defoe has the ability to make his readers suspend disbelief. Carole Moses Other major works SHORT FICTION: A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, 1706. POETRY: The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, 1701. NONFICTION: An Essay upon Projects, 1697; The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 1702; The History of the Union of Great Britain, 1709; An Appeal to Honour and Justice, 1715; The Family Instructor, in Three Parts, 1715; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, 1724-1728 (2 volumes); A New Voyage Round the World by a Course

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Never Sailed, 1724; A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724-1727 (3 volumes); The Complete English Tradesman, 1725-1727 (2 volumes); The Four Years Voyages of Capt George Roberts, 1726; A New Family Instructor, 1727; Augusta Triumphans: Or, The Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe, 1728; A Plan of the English Commerce, 1728. MISCELLANEOUS: The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel Defoe, 1840-1841 (20 volumes; Walter Scott, editor); Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, 1895 (16 volumes; George Aitken, editor); The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, 1927-1928 (14 volumes). Bibliography Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Argues for Defoe’s conscious artistry, seeing a consistency of outlook throughout his writing. Places him at the beginning of the English novelistic tradition and maintains that the historical novel is among his inventions. A fine survey of Defoe’s entire oeuvre, including many pieces generally ignored. ____________. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Excellent, detailed biography of Defoe. Sets the man and his writings in his political, social, and economic milieu. Includes a full bibliography of Defoe’s writing and an extensive bibliography (thirty pages) of works about him from the eighteenth century through the 1980’s. Blewett, David. Defoe’s Art of Fiction: “Robinson Crusoe,” “Moll Flanders,” “Colonel Jack,” and “Roxana.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. In Defoe’s letters and nonfiction, Blewett finds a worldview that sees the individual as isolated in an indifferent or hostile universe. Shows how four of Defoe’s novels artfully voice this outlook. An epilogue considers Defoe’s contribution to the development of prose fiction. Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in “Robinson Crusoe.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Examines Robinson Crusoe to understand not only that work but also the nature of the early English novel. Looks at the way Defoe used Puritan ideas, especially as they were expressed in seventeenth and early eighteenth century tracts. Lund, Roger D., ed. Critical Essays on Daniel Defoe. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Essays on Defoe’s domestic conduct manuals, his travel books, his treatment of slavery, his novels, and his treatment of the city. Includes an introduction and index, but no bibliography. Novak, Maximillian E. Defoe and the Nature of Man. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Traces the sources of Defoe’s ideas about natural law and then discusses how Defoe demonstrates those views in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana. ____________. Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. A collection of previously published essays by a leading Defoe scholar. Treats various aspects of Defoe’s artistry: the psychological realism of Roxana, the use of history in A Journal of the Plague Year and Memoirs of a Cavalier, and myth-making in Robinson Crusoe. Richetti, John J. Daniel Defoe. Boston: Twayne, 1987. A good general introduction to Defoe, with three of the seven chapters devoted to the novels. Includes a useful selective, annotated bibliography. Spaas, Lieve, and Brian Stimpson, eds. “Robinson Crusoe”: Myths and Metamorphoses.

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New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Explores many aspects of the seminal novel. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Sutherland, James. Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. An excellent overview of all of Defoe’s work. Offers commonsensical readings of the works and provides helpful historical and biographical background as well as a useful bibliography for further study. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Discusses Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Defoe’s contribution to the realistic novel. Relates Defoe’s fiction to the social and economic conditions of the age. West, Richard. Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998. West covers all aspects of Defoe: not only the journalist, novelist, satirist, newsman, and pamphleteer, but also the tradesman, soldier, and spy. Written with considerable flair by a journalist and historian of wide-ranging experience.

Walter de la Mare Walter de la Mare

Born: Charlton, Kent, England: April 25, 1873 Died: Twickenham, Middlesex, England; June 22, 1956 Principal long fiction · Henry Brocken, 1904; The Return, 1910; The Three MullaMulgars, 1910 (reprinted as The Three Royal Monkeys: Or, The Three Mulla-Mulgars, 1935); Memoirs of a Midget, 1921; At First Sight: A Novel, 1928. Other literary forms · Walter de la Mare was a prolific author of poetry, short stories, and nonfiction. Like his novels, de la Mare’s poetry and short fiction range from works written explicitly for children (for which he is best remembered) to works intended for adults. Poetry collections such as Songs of Childhood (1902) and A Child’s Day: A Book of Rhymes (1912) reveal his understanding of the pleasures and frustrations of childhood, an understanding that made The Three Mulla-Mulgars a favorite with children. De la Mare’s poetry for adults embodies his belief that human beings live in two coexistent worlds: the world of everyday experience and the world of the spirit, which is akin to dreaming. Dreams and the nature of the imagination are frequent themes in both his fiction and his poetry. These and other interests are more explicitly revealed in his essays and in his work as an editor. Not much given to analysis, de la Mare was primarily an appreciative critic. Of the anthologies he edited, Behold, This Dreamer! (1939) is perhaps the most revealing of the influences that shaped his work. Achievements · De la Mare published only five novels, one of which, At First Sight, is more a long short story than a true novel. His fiction is metaphorical and resembles his poetry in its concerns. Much of what he wanted to communicate in his writing is best suited to short works, and therefore his novels are haphazardly successful. In spite of the difficulties of the novels of de la Mare, his contemporary critics in general had a high regard for him as a novelist. Edward Wagenknecht, an important historian of the novel, ranked Memoirs of a Midget as one of the best twentieth century English novels. Indeed, in his essay on de la Mare in Cyclopedia of World Authors (1958), Wagenknecht emphasizes Memoirs of a Midget at the expense of de la Mare’s other writings. De la Mare’s novels, however, were not as widely read in their time as his poetry and short fiction, and today they are seldom read at all. The lack of modern attention to de la Mare’s novels is caused less by any absence of merit than by the predictable drop in reputation which many authors undergo in the literary generation after their deaths. Although his novels are unlikely to regain their popularity with a general readership, serious students of twentieth century English literature will almost certainly return to de la Mare’s novels as his generation’s writings are rehabilitated among scholars. Biography · No full-length biography of Walter de la Mare has as yet been published. He was, by the few published accounts of those who knew him, a quiet and unpretentious man. One can reasonably infer from the absence of autobiographical material 245

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from an otherwise prolific writer that he was a private man. He seems to have lived his adventures through his writing, and his primary interests seem to have been of the intellect and spirit. He was born in 1873 to James Edward de la Mare and Lucy Sophia Browning de la Mare, a Scot. While attending St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, Walter de la Mare founded and edited The Choristers’ Journal, a school magazine. In 1890, he entered the employ of the Anglo-American Oil Company, for which he served as a bookkeeper until 1908. During these years, he wrote essays, stories, and poetry, which appeared in various magazines, including Black and White and The Sketch. In 1902, his first book—and one of his most lastingly popular—was published, Songs of Childhood, a collection of poetry. He used the pseudonym “Walter Ramal,” which he also used for the publication of the novel Henry Brocken in 1904, then dropped. He married Constance Elfrida Igpen in 1899, with whom he had two sons and two daughters. His wife died in 1943. De la Mare’s employment at the Anglo-American Oil Company ended in 1908, when he was granted a Civil List pension of a yearly one hundred pounds by the British government. Thus encouraged, he embarked on a life of letters during which he produced novels, poetry, short stories, essays, one play, and edited volumes of poetry and essays. These many works display something of de la Mare’s intellect, if not of his character. They reveal a preoccupation with inspiration and dreams, an irritation with Freudians and psychologists in general (too simplistic in their analyses, he believed), a love of romance, and a love for the child in people. The works indicate a complex mind that preferred appreciation to analysis and observation to explanation. Analysis · Walter de la Mare’s novels are diverse in structure, although unified by his recurring themes. Henry Brocken is episodic, with its protagonist moving from one encounter to another. The Return has all the trappings of the gothic, with mysterious strangers, supernatural events, and unexplained happenings. The Three Mulla-Mulgars is a children’s story, with a direct narrative and a clear objective toward which the novel’s actions are directed. Memoirs of a Midget is Victorian in structure and is filled with incidents and coincidences; it emphasizes character over the other aspects of novel-writing. At First Sight: A Novel is really a long short story, what some might call a novella; its plot is simple, the problem its protagonist faces is straightforward, and it has only the barest attempt at a subplot. Henry Brocken · Early in his literary career, de la Mare concluded that there were two ways of observing the world: inductive and deductive. Induction was a child’s way of understanding his environment, through direct experience, whereas deduction was associated with adolescents and adults—the environment was kept at an emotional and intellectual distance. De la Mare believed that reality is best understood in relation to the self and best interpreted through imagination; childlike—as opposed to childish—observation is subjective, and childlike imagination can make and remake reality according to the imaginer’s desires. Henry Brocken, the eponymous protagonist of de la Mare’s first novel, is such a childlike observer. Critics are often confused by his adult behavior; they fail to understand that Brocken is intended to be childlike rather than childish. Dreams are a part of the human experience that can be made and remade according to the subjective dictates of the self; de la Mare believed that dreams

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revealed a truer reality than that which is found in the waking experience. Given de la Mare’s beliefs, Brocken’s use of dreams to meet with famous literary characters seems almost natural. Brocken is able to converse with characters from the works of such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, and Charlotte Brontë. The characters are often living lives that were barely implied in their original author’s works. Jane Eyre, for instance, is with Rochester long after the conclusion of Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Henry Brocken is about imagination and what it can do to reality. Great literary characters can seem more real than many living people. De la Mare represents this aspect of the imaginaLibrary of Congress tive response to literature by showing characters maturing and changing in ways not necessarily envisioned by their creators. Chaucer’s Criseyde, for example, is not only older but also wiser than in Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). What is imagined can have a life of its own, just as dreams can be more alive than waking experience. The Three Mulla-Mulgars · The Three Mulla-Mulgars seems to be an interruption in the development of de la Mare’s themes of imagination, dreams, and reality. In it, three monkeys—called “Mulgars”—search for the Valley of Tishnar and the kingdom of their uncle Assasimmon. During their travels, the three—Nod, Thimble, and Thumb—have adventures among the various monkey species of the world and encounter danger in the form of Immanala, the source of darkness and cruelty. Although a children’s story, and although humorous and generally lighthearted, The Three Mulla-Mulgars contains the spiritual themes typical of de la Mare’s best work. Nod, although physically the weakest of the three monkeys, is spiritually gifted; he can contact the supernatural world in his dreams and is able to use the Moonstone, a talisman; Immanala is essentially a spiritual force; it can strike anywhere and can take any form; it can make dreams—which in the ethos of de la Mare are always akin to death—into the “Third Sleep,” death. The quest for the Valley of Tishnar is a search for meaning in the Mulla-Mulgars’ lives; their use of dreams, a talisman, and their conflict with Immanala make the quest spiritual as well as adventurous. The Return · The Return represents a major shift in de la Mare’s approach to fiction, both long and short. Before The Return, he presented his iconoclastic views in the guise of children’s stories and allegories—as if his ideas would be more palatable in inoffensive fantasies than in the form of the adult novel. In The Return, de la Mare took an important step toward his masterpiece, Memoirs of a Midget, by creating a novel featuring adult characters with adult problems. The Return seems gothic on its surface. Arthur Lawford, weak from a previous illness, tires while walking in a graveyard. He naps beside the grave of Nicholas

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Sabathier, a man who committed suicide in 1739. Lawford awakens refreshed and vigorous, but to his dismay he discovers that his face and physique have changed. Later, a mysterious stranger, Herbert Herbert, reveals that Lawford resembles a portrait of Sabathier, and Herbert’s sister Grisel becomes a powerful attraction for Lawford—she seems to be an incarnation of the lover who may have driven Sabathier to kill himself. The plot, when examined by itself, seems trite and melodramatic, yet de la Mare makes the events frightening, in part because he imbues the novel with genuine metaphysical questions and in part because he believes in his story. Belief is always a problem in fiction, particularly fantastic fiction. Part of what makes hackwork poor literature is insincerity in the author; the author does not believe that his work is valid, important, or worthy of belief. De la Mare clearly believes that the love story in The Return is important, that the novel’s themes are valid, and that its events can be believed. His sincerity endows the novel’s events with poetic power. Thus, the question of Lawford’s identity becomes disturbing for the reader: De la Mare is saying that no one’s identity is certain. Soon after Lawford’s physical metamorphosis, his speech takes on a dual sound, as if he and Sabathier were speaking simultaneously. His conversations with Grisel are discussions between the corporeal Lawford and Grisel and between Sabathier and his past love. In The Return, de la Mare’s notions about the human spirit being part of two coexistent worlds are made graphic. Lawford becomes a citizen of everyday reality and of the greater reality of the spirit. He can see the world out of time, past and present; he battles both corporeal and supernatural foes; he is at once Sabathier and an ordinary, middle-aged Englishman. Although a part of two realities, he is accepted by neither. His friends and neighbors want him jailed or locked up in a madhouse; Grisel tells him that he cannot have her, although she shares his love, because he is not free of the burdens of his old world. The dilemma of Lawford, trapped as he is between the two worlds, is representative of the human condition: Everyone is trapped between two realities because everyone, whether he chooses to recognize it or not, is spiritual as well as physical. So thick with double meanings and disturbing confusions is The Return that its almost too convenient resolution—on All Angels Eve, the night on which Sabathier had committed suicide, Lawford is freed of Sabathier’s spiritual tug—is a relief. Lawford is free to pretend that what he sees is all that exists, and so is the novel’s reader. Memoirs of a Midget · Greeted from its publication with praise for its characterization and graceful prose, Memoirs of a Midget is generally regarded by critics as de la Mare’s masterpiece. The novel allows multiple readings; most critics readily recognize de la Mare’s unusually successful development of a character’s point of view, and they note the subtlety of his social commentary, but they often fail to recognize the novel’s informing purpose. The story is simple on its surface. Miss M., also known as Midgetina, is a perfectly formed midget. The novel describes her childhood and emergence as an adult. Her point of view as a small adult is carefully created. The bulk of the novel is devoted to her twentieth year, during which she confronts her selfhood and comes to understand that there is a world of the spirit that is greater than the physical one in which she is a social amusement. The novel has a Victorian flavor, and many of the characters have a Dickensian vitality. One of the most memorable characters is Mr. Anon, a misshapen hunchback who is only a little taller than Miss M. Mr. Anon transforms Miss M. from a social manipulator into a thoughtful person. He loves her—probably, he says, because she is

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one of the few people close to his size. His ugliness is repulsive, and Miss M. wants to keep him as a friend, but not as a lover. She joins a circus in order to become independent and quickly becomes a main attraction. In order to save Miss M. from possible recognition when Mrs. Monnerie, Miss M.’s former patroness, attends the circus, Mr. Anon takes her place in a pony-riding act. He is thrown from the pony and later dies in Miss M.’s arms. Some critics contend that at Mr. Anon’s death Miss M. finally loves him. What is probable is that she believes that his inner self—his spirit—is beautiful and more real than his ugly physical form. Later, Miss M. disappears from a locked room. Her housekeeper, Mrs. Bowater, who commands the only entrance and exit to the room, hears a male voice from within, even though no one had entered through the door. Upon investigation, Mrs. Bowater finds a note which reads “I have been called away.” The character of Miss M. is well suited to de la Mare’s purposes. She is small and treated like a child by other characters, and thus her perspective is like that of a child. Reared in seclusion by indulgent parents, she emerges into society with much of her childlike ability to experience the world inductively still intact. She is an adult with an adult’s thinking capacity, enabling her to understand as well as know the world. She is an excellent vehicle for de la Mare’s ideas about the nature of the human spirit. She observes the best and worst in people, and she sees that the unhappiest people are those who see the world as something to be manipulated, who take without giving. Mr. Anon gives all he has without expectation of receiving what he wants, Miss M.’s love. Memoirs of a Midget is more than a story of a social outcast’s view of society; it is a depiction of spiritual conflict and revelation. De la Mare was a seeker, a questioner, and an observer; the endings of his novels are suggestive but provide few answers. A skilled and demanding craftsman, he never failed to entertain his readers, but he employed his storyteller’s gift in the service of the lifelong spiritual quest which animated all of his works. Kirk H. Beetz Other major works SHORT FICTION: Story and Rhyme: A Selection, 1921; The Riddle and Other Stories, 1923; Ding Dong Bell, 1924; Broomsticks and Other Tales, 1925; Miss Jemima, 1925; Readings, 1925-1926 (2 volumes); The Connoisseur and Other Tales, 1926; Told Again: Traditional Tales, 1927; Old Joe, 1927; On the Edge, 1930; Seven Short Stories, 1931; The Lord Fish, 1933; The Nap and Other Stories, 1936; The Wind Blows Over, 1936; Animal Stories, 1939; The Picnic, 1941; The Best Stories of Walter de la Mare, 1942; The Old Lion and Other Stories, 1942; The Magic Jacket and Other Stories, 1943; The Scarecrow and Other Stories, 1945; The Dutch Cheese and Other Stories, 1946; Collected Stories for Children, 1947; A Beginning and Other Stories, 1955; Ghost Stories, 1956. PLAY: Crossings: A Fairy Play, pr. 1919. POETRY: Songs of Childhood, 1902; Poems, 1906; The Listeners and Other Poems, 1912; A Child’s Day: A Book of Rhymes, 1912; Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes, 1913; The Sunken Garden and Other Poems, 1917; Motley and Other Poems, 1918; Flora: A Book of Drawings, 1919; Poems 1901 to 1918, 1920; Story and Rhyme, 1921; The Veil and Other Poems, 1921; Down-Adown-Derry: A Book of Fairy Poems, 1922; Thus Her Tale, 1923; A Ballad of Christmas, 1924; Stuff and Nonsense and So On, 1927; Self to Self, 1928; The Snowdrop, 1929; News, 1930; Poems for Children, 1930; Lucy, 1931; Old Rhymes and New, 1932; The Fleeting and Other Poems, 1933; Poems 1919 to 1934, 1935; This Year, Next Year, 1937;

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Memory and Other Poems, 1938; Haunted, 1939; Bells and Grass, 1941; Collected Poems, 1941; Collected Rhymes and Verses, 1944; The Burning-Glass and Other Poems, 1945; The Traveller, 1946; Rhymes and Verses: Collected Poems for Young People, 1947; Inward Companion, 1950; Winged Chariot, 1951; O Lovely England and Other Poems, 1953; The Complete Poems, 1969. NONFICTION: Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, 1919; The Printing of Poetry, 1931; Lewis Carroll, 1932; Poetry in Prose, 1936; Pleasures and Speculations, 1940; Chardin, J.B.S. 1699-1779, 1948; Private View, 1953. EDITED TEXTS: Come Hither, 1923; The Shakespeare Songs, 1929; Christina Rossetti’s Poems, 1930; Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe, 1930; Stories from the Bible, 1930; Early One Morning in the Spring, 1935; Animal Stories, 1939; Behold, This Dreamer!, 1939; Love, 1943. Bibliography Atkins, John. Walter de la Mare: An Exploration. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1973. A brief but useful analysis of de la Mare’s works. Duffin, Henry Charles. Walter de la Mare: A Study of His Poetry. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. The first full-length critical study of de la Mare’s poetry. Unfortunately the repetition and effusive style detract from the main points of criticism. Hopkins, Kenneth. Walter de la Mare. London: Longman, 1954. A brief but excellent overview of de la Mare. Includes a bibliography. McCrosson, Doris Ross. Walter de la Mare. New York: Twayne, 1966. Focuses on his novels as being the clearest statement of de la Mare’s vision, giving particular emphasis to his imagination and dreams. McCrosson hopes to correct the popular notion that de la Mare is primarily a children’s author. A helpful study, in part because there is so little modern criticism on de la Mare. Reid, Forrest. Walter de la Mare: A Critical Study. St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970. An important study of de la Mare that discusses both his prose and his poetry. Also focuses on the later tales, which Reid divides into various groups according to themes, including six tales of the supernatural. Wagenknecht, Edward. Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. See the chapter on Walter de la Mare, which includes a brief biographical sketch and discusses his fiction in the context of the English literary tradition. Wagenknecht deals with both the short and the long fiction, providing a succinct overview of de la Mare’s body of work in prose. Whistler, Theresa. Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare. London: Duckworth, 1993. A good biography of de la Mare. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Charles Dickens Charles Dickens

Born: Portsmouth, England; February 7, 1812 Died: Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, England; June 9, 1870 Principal long fiction · Pickwick Papers, 1836-1837 (originally pb. as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club); Oliver Twist, 1837-1839; Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-1839 (originally pb. as The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby); The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840-1841; Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ’80, 1841; Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843-1844 (originally pb. as The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit); Dombey and Son, 1846-1848 (originally pb. as Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation); David Copperfield, 1849-1850 (originally pb. as The Personal History of David Copperfield); Bleak House, 1852-1853; Hard Times, 1854 (originally pb. as Hard Times for These Times); Little Dorrit, 1855-1857; A Tale of Two Cities, 1859; Great Expectations, 1860-1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1864-1865; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870 (unfinished). Other literary forms · All of Charles Dickens’s novels were published in bound form after serialization, the Oxford edition being the most complete modern collection. A prolific writer, Dickens also published a number of other works. He founded and edited the periodicals Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840-1841), Household Words (18501859), and All the Year Round (1859-1870), in which many of his essays, collaborative works, and Christmas stories were originally published. Some of the essays have been collected: Sketches by Boz (1836), for example, comprises Dickens’s periodical contributions from 1833 to 1836, and The Uncommercial Traveller (1860) reprints essays from All the Year Round. In addition to the Christmas stories, Dickens published five Christmas books, all collected in 1852. He recorded his travel experiences as well: American Notes (1842) depicts his first American tour, and Pictures from Italy (1846) is a collection of essays first printed in the Daily News. Finally, the texts of his public readings have appeared, along with reprints of his dramatic productions. Many of Dickens’s works have been anthologized and adapted for stage and screen, and the definitive Pilgrim Edition of his letters, The Letters of Charles Dickens, was completed in 1995. Achievements · Known for his biting satire of social conditions as well as for his comic worldview, Dickens began, with Pickwick Papers, to establish an enduring novelistic reputation. In fourteen completed novels and countless essays, sketches, and stories, he emerged as a champion of generosity and warmth of spirit, those human traits most likely to atrophy in an industrialized society. In his own day, he appealed to all levels of society but especially to the growing middle class, whose newfound literacy made them educable to eradicate the social evils they themselves had fostered. Dickens was extremely popular in the United States, despite his ongoing attack on the lack of an international copyright agreement, an attack directed in part against the Americans who had a financial stake in pirated editions of his works. Above all, Dickens appealed to his readers’ emotions, and through them, to an awakened social sense. To be sure, Dickens’s sentimentality offends as many modern 251

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readers as it pleased Victorian ones. Indeed, the twentieth century reader may study his novels primarily for the enjoyment of his craft, but to do so is to ignore Dickens’s purpose: to argue on the side of intuition against materialism, as Angus Wilson puts it, or on the side of the individual against the system, as Philip Hosbaum has commented. In his facility for comic language, for example, Dickens created the unforgettable Sairey Gamp, Flora Finching, and Alfred Jingle, whose manic lingo creates worlds with a preposterous logic of their own, but such lingo is sometimes a shield for a warm heart and sometimes an indicator of fragmentation and despair. The reader also finds that Dickens’s attacks on certain social institutions, such as the Poor Law in Oliver Twist or the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, are actually attacks on universal human evils—the greed, hypocrisy, and lust for power that lead to dehumanization and make, for example, a “species of frozen gentleman” out of Mr. Dombey instead of a warm, affectionate human being. Biography · Born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, on Portsea Island, England, Charles Dickens was the son of John Dickens, a Naval Pay Office employee, and Elizabeth Barrow, the daughter of the Naval Conductor of Moneys. John Dickens’s largely unsuccessful struggle to gain middle-class respectability was hampered not only by his parents’ career in domestic service, but also by the disgrace of his father-in-law, who left the country to avoid the consequences of a petty embezzlement. John Dickens’s seaport life left a lasting impression on his son to be recorded partly in Rogue Riderhood’s river activities in Our Mutual Friend, and partly in metaphor, as in Dombey and Son, where the running of the river into the ocean represents the passage of life into immortality. John Dickens’s improvidence and inevitable bankruptcy is reflected in the impecunious but absurdly hopeful Mr. Micawber and, more abstractly, in Dickens’s ambiguous attitude toward wealth, which he viewed as a highly desirable tool but worthless as a gauge of human value, as in Our Mutual Friend, in which money is equated with an excremental dust heap. An inordinate number of his deserving characters acquire wealth fortuitously: Oliver Twist, the parish boy, finds his near relatives; Nicholas Nickleby becomes clerk to the generous Cheerybles; and Esther Summerson comes under the protection of the well-to-do Jarndyce. Childhood associations were incorporated into his stories as well. His nurse, Mary Weller, by her own dogmatic adherence, inculcated in him a distaste for Chapel Christianity; his childhood taste for theatricals blossomed into a lifelong fascination. (In fact, in 1832, only illness prevented him from auditioning at Covent Garden.) Perhaps no other circumstance, however, had so profound an effect on Dickens as his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea for bankruptcy, well chronicled in David Copperfield. John Forster, Dickens’s friend and biographer, records the author’s bitterness at being put to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory. Even worse than the degradation of the job for the young Dickens was the feeling that he had been abandoned. While his period of employment in the factory could be measured in months, the psychological scars lasted for the rest of Dickens’s life, as witnessed by his novelistic preoccupation with orphans and adopted families: Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit, Pip, Little Nell—all abandoned in some sense and forced into precocity, some, in effect, reversing roles with their parents or guardians to become their protectors. At the age of fifteen, Dickens was apprenticed as a law clerk in Doctor’s Commons, certainly the source of his profound dislike for the pettifoggery exhibited in the Jarndyce case in Bleak House. He then became a reporter in Parliament, and, at the age of seventeen, fell in love with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banking family

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who discouraged the attentions of the impoverished young man. This experience, as well as his unsuccessful marriage to Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the editor of the Morning Chronicle, contributed much to his alternate idealization of women (such as Dora in David Copperfield) and mockery of their foibles. At the time of his marriage, Dickens had been writing a serial for Robert Seymour’s sporting drawings—a work that became Pickwick Papers upon Seymour’s suicide. Dickens’s success came quickly: He became editor of Bentley’s Miscellany (1836), and in February, 1837, Oliver Twist began to appear, one month after the birth of the first of his ten children. Before Oliver Twist had finished its serial run, Dickens had begun

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Nicholas Nickleby, in which he drew on his dramatic interests to create the Crummles provincial acting company. Then, in 1840, Dickens arranged to edit Master Humphrey’s Clock, which became a vehicle for both The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge (the story of the 1780 Gordon riots). Some of his immense creative energy came from the early happiness of his marriage, but some also came from an effort to forget the death of his beloved sister-in-law Mary, who died in his arms when she was seventeen. This period of activity ended in 1842 with a six-month visit to the United States. In letters, in American Notes, and in Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens reveals his double vision of America. Welcomed in Boston by such literati as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dickens moved from the cultivated bluestocking milieu into a furious newspaper war that was battling over the lack of an international copyright agreement. Dickens came to believe that while democracy did exist in such model factory towns as Lowell, Massachusetts, America’s much-vaunted freedom was an excuse for vulgarity on one hand and hypocrisy on the other. He was appalled at the conditions of slavery in St. Louis and dismayed by the flat stretches of the Great Plains and by the ever-present concern for partisan politics, money, and power. All of these he satirized bitterly in the American section of Martin Chuzzlewit. At home again, he installed his sister-in-law Georgina in her lifelong role of housekeeper to counter what he judged to be Catherine’s growing indolence, surely symptomatic of their growing disillusionment with each other. Two years later, he began publication of Dombey and Son, his first planned novel. His next, the autobiographical David Copperfield, contains advice by the novel’s heroine, Agnes, that he applied to his own life: “Your growing power and success enlarge your power of doing good.” In March, 1850, Dickens founded Household Words, a periodical that featured short stories, serialized novels, poetry, and essays. Dickens and his writers published exposés of hospitals, sanitary conditions, political affairs, education, law, and religion, all expressed in a characteristically fanciful style. In these years, Dickens was engaged in amateur theatricals, partly to raise money to endow an impoverished actors’ home. Between 1852 and 1857, he wrote three novels: Bleak House, his experiment in first-person narration; Hard Times, an attack on utilitarianism; and Little Dorrit, a semiautobiographical work. Becoming more and more estranged from his wife, he engaged in a strenuous and highly popular series of readings from his works, again bringing his dramatic talent into play. In June, 1858, he published a much-criticized apologia for his marital separation; then, chafing at the restrictions imposed on Household Words by the publishers, Edward Chapman and William Hall, Dickens severed the connection and began All the Year Round, a new periodical of the same type. His liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan continued in this period, during which he wrote A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel. He undertook another exhausting series of public readings, his reenactment of Nancy’s murder in Oliver Twist proving the most demanding. In 1867, he left for a successful tour of the United States. He continued public readings until the end of his life. Dickens died at Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, on June 9, 1870, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His last unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, appeared posthumously. Analysis · The “Dickens World,” as Humphrey House calls it, is one of sharp moral contrast, a world in which the self-seeking—imprisoned in their egotism—rub shoulders

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with the altruistic, freed from the demands of self by concern for others; a world in which the individual achieves selfhood by creating a “home” whose virtues of honesty and compassion are proof against the dehumanizing “System”: a world in which all things are animate and where, indeed, metaphors for moral perversity take lives of their own, like the miasma of evil that hangs above the houses in Dombey and Son. Many of Charles Dickens’s most memorable characters are those whose language or personality traits are superbly comic: Sairey Gamp, the bibulous nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, with her constant reference to the fictitious Mrs. ’Arris; Flora Finching, the parodic reincarnation of a stout, garrulous Maria Beadnell in Little Dorrit; and Turveydrop, the antediluvian dandy Beau Brummel in Bleak House. To provide characters with distinguishing traits is, of course, a dramatic device (to see red hair and a handkerchief is to be reminded of Fagin, and knitting, of Mme DeFarge); more important, however, such traits carry a moral resonance. While Dickens’s villains grow more complex as his writing matures, most share an overriding egotism that causes them to treat people as things. Perhaps that is why things become animate; in a world in which human traits are undervalued, objects achieve a life and controlling power of their own. The miser Harmon disposes of Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend as if she were a property to be willed away; the convict Jaggers creates a “gentleman” out of Pip in Great Expectations; both Carker and Dombey see Edith as a valuable objet d’art in Dombey and Son. Dickens’s later heroes and heroines are characterized by their movement toward self-actualization. In the early novels, Rose Maylie, Mr. Brownlow, Tom Pinch, Nicholas Nickleby, and even Pickwick represent compassionate but stereotyped models. Later, however, Dombey is thawed by his daughter Florence’s love; Eugene Wrayburn, the blasé lawyer, is humanized by Lizzie Hexam; and Bella Wilfer gives up self-seeking for John Rokesmith. Some, however, must go through the reverse process of acquiring self-assertiveness. Florence Dombey is such a one; only by fleeing her father’s household and establishing a family of her own can she achieve perspective. Amy Dorrit is another; she must grow up and then willfully become as a child again for the benefit of Arthur Clennam, who needs to be convinced of his worth. Esther Summerson is yet a third; persuaded of her worthlessness because of her illegitimacy, she must learn a sense of self-worth before she can marry Allan Woodstone. Many of the heroes and heroines are tested by touchstone figures, such as Smike, Jo, Mr. Toots, Maggie, and Sloppy—unfortunates whose lack of mental capability or personal disfavor provide a test for altruism. Many of Dickens’s child characters serve a similar purpose, from Oliver Twist and his famous request for more gruel to the itinerant Little Nell. All of the characters are subject to the effects of the “System,” in whatever shape it takes: Dotheboys Hall and the Gradgrind’s school, the Circumlocution Office, the middle-class complacency of Podsnappery, the unsanitary conditions of Tom All Alone’s, or the financial shenanigans of Montague Tigg’s Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance Company. Far worse are the hypocrisy of Pecksniff, the concupiscence of Gride, the utilitarianism of Gradgrind, and the lovelessness of Estella, but all are personal evocations of the evils of the “System.” Even as early as Oliver Twist, Dickens seemed to recognize that no one individual could rectify evil; as Stephen Marcus comments, “Pickwick Papers is Dickens’s one novel in which wickedness, though it exists, is not a threat. The unfortunate and the deprived . . . have only to catch a glimpse of Pickwick in order to be renewed, for this is the world of the ‘good

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heart,’ that thaumaturgic resource of spirit.” When Nicholas breaks up Dotheboys Hall by whipping Squeers, all that one can do is succor the runaways; when the law is befogged by obscurities as in the Jarndyce case, all one can do is provide a warm, loving household. This, in fact, seems to be Dickens’s solution, for despite his call for reforms, he was, at heart, a conservative, more likely to help Angela Burdett-Coutts set up a home for “fallen women” and to campaign against public executions than to lead riots in the streets. Dickens, then, might say with Voltaire’s Candide, “Let us cultivate our garden.” Nicholas Nickleby · Nicholas Nickleby, an ebullient novel loosely patterned after such picaresque models as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), is ostensibly an attack on the abusive Yorkshire schools that served as repositories for unwanted children. It is, as well, a depiction of Dickens’s theatrical concerns, a condemnation of greed, a mystery story, and a conventional romance. To be sure, as Bernard Bergonzi points out, it has been criticized for its lack of a tightly woven plot as well as for its lack of a “significant moral pattern”; nevertheless it stands as the first of Dickens’s full-scale, complex novels. Dickens went to some trouble to establish the realistic fabric of the novel. Dotheboys Hall is modeled on William Shaw’s notorious Bowes Academy, and the generous Cheeryble brothers, who give employment to the titular hero, mirror the merchants William and Daniel Grant. More important than the realistic antecedents, however, is what they represent: The schoolmaster Squeers and the Cheerybles are at opposite moral poles. Indeed, Nicholas’s encounter with Dotheboys, his self-defense against Squeers, and his decision to “adopt” the enfeebled and mistreated Smike are preparation to confront his uncle Ralph, whose ungenerous nature is paradigmatic of moral usury. Even Nicholas’s accidental joining with the Crummleses and their Infant Phenomenon is a way for him to act out his confrontation with pasteboard sword, for certainly, despite Crummles’ benevolence, the closed world of the theater betrays as much selfishness as the world Nicholas eventually joins. As Angus Wilson suggests, the foe that Nicholas confronts is more complex than generally recognized. Ralph, driven by the desire for money, is also driven by a desire for power. His belittlement of his clerk, Newman Noggs, is comically reflected in Miss Knag’s spitefulness and in Mr. Lillyvick’s patronizing attitude toward his relatives, and more seriously in Arthur Gride, the miser who charily serves an old wine—“liquid gold”—on his wedding day, and in Walter Bray, who affiances his daughter Madeline to Gride for a retirement stipend. Ralph is powerless, however, against generosity. Cast off by his uncle, Nicholas, like a hero in a French comedy of manners, rescues his sister Kate from the unwelcome advances of Sir Mulberry Hawk, one of Ralph’s procurers; he is befriended by Noggs, with whose help he eventually rescues Madeline; and he is given a livelihood by the Cheerybles. In setting up a home for his mother, sister, and Smike, Nicholas establishes a center of domestic harmony independent of his uncle’s world yet connected to that of the Cheerybles, who inculcate similar homely virtues in their business. Indeed, as Nicholas gathers friends around him, Ralph is slowly denuded of his power. Both plot strands meet in the Gride/Bray association, where Ralph faces a double loss, material and psychological: Not only does Gride’s loss of valuable deeds spell the beginning of Ralph’s financial downfall, but Ralph’s scheme to marry Madeline to Bray is also foiled by his nephew, against whom he feels growing resentment. Nicholas’s circle of friends thus comes to dominate Ralph’s circle of power. Ralph’s

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bankruptcy is, moreover, symbolic of spiritual bankruptcy, for his ultimate ignominy is discovering that Smike, whom he had persecuted in an attempt to wound Nicholas, is his own son. That the enfeebled boy turned to Nicholas for help is, for Ralph, a final, inescapable bitterness. As Ralph’s wheel of fortune reaches its nadir, he hangs himself, cursing the hope of the New Year which brings to Nicholas a marriage and a new family. Martin Chuzzlewit · Partly the product of Dickens’s 1842 trip to America, Martin Chuzzlewit takes as its theme the effects of selfishness. Some critics, such as Barbara Hardy, find this theme to be fragmented, insofar as the characters are so isolated that their moral conversions produce no resonance. Critic John Lucas locates the flaws not only in narrative sprawl and faulty timing but also in Dickens’s indecision as to “whether he is writing a realistic study or a moral and prescriptive fable.” The fabular element is indeed strong. Young Martin is a developing hero whose American experiences and the selflessness of his companion Mark Tapley bring him to recognize his flaws, while his father, Old Martin, serves in his wealth and eccentricity as a touchstone for cupidity. In studying the cumulative effects of selfishness, Dickens portrays a number of family groups and also presents an effective psychological study of a murderer. Pecksniff, ostensibly an architect and Young Martin’s teacher, is the root of hypocrisy in the novel. He imposes on the gullible Tom Pinch; he raises his daughters, Charity and Mercy, to be spiteful and thoughtless; he tries to seduce Martin’s fiancé, then accuses Tom of the action; and he attempts to influence Old Martin to disinherit his grandson. Like Molière’s Tartuffe, Pecksniff only appears to be virtuous. His assistant, Tom Pinch, is the reader’s surrogate; honest, consistent, and generous, Pinch is exiled from Pecksniff’s house and goes to London, where he is aided by John Westlock, a former pupil who has come into his inheritance. Tom’s household, where he installs his sister Ruth (rescued from being a governess to a highly inconsiderate family), is in direct contrast to Pecksniff’s in its innocent, loving companionship. Other family groups appear as contrasts as well, not the least being that of Anthony Chuzzlewit, brother to Old Martin. Anthony’s miserly ways have inculcated in his son Jonas so grasping a nature that Jonas attempts to poison his father. Another kind of family group may be seen at Todgers’ Commercial Boarding House, where the Pecksniffs stay and where Mercy, eventually married to the brutal Jonas, finds understanding from Mrs. Todgers. The association between young Martin and Mark Tapley may be contrasted with that between Pecksniff and Pinch, for Mark moves from the character of servant to that of friend. While Mark’s Pollyannaish attitude—that one must be “jolly” under all circumstances—has annoyed many critics, he is a descendant of the comedy of humors and serves as an important antidote to Martin’s selfishness. In setting Martin’s conversion (a purgative illness) in the swamps of America, Dickens suggests that hypocrisy, greed, and false pride are not simply manifestations of the British social milieu but flourish even in the “City of Eden,” which that worshiper of freedom, Major Hannibal Chollop, praises so highly. Jonas, on the other hand, undergoes no such conversion, although Mercy fills a role similar to that of Mark. As an investor in a pyramid scheme, the Anglo-Bengalee Company, he is blackmailed into procuring Pecksniff as an investor by Montague Tigg, who is privy to Jonas’s poisoning scheme. Fearing exposure, Jonas murders Tigg. Dickens’s portrayal of the murderer’s frame of mind is exceptional, accompanied as it is by a study of Nadgett, the self-effacing paid informer who shadows Jonas

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like conscience itself. Even more telling is the disclosure that the deed was unnecessary, for Anthony, who had discovered his son’s scheme and foiled it, is said to have died of a broken heart. The regrouping that occurs at the end when Old Martin confesses his own kind of selfishness, that of suspicion of others, is a reestablishment of an extended family and a casting out of Pecksniff as a kind of scapegoat. Martin and Mary, Ruth Pinch and John Westlock are affianced; only Tom Pinch, hopelessly in love with Mary, remains unwed, to be a source of financial support for Pecksniff and Charity, who cadge small amounts from him. In the final analysis, Dickens has performed an “anatomy of selfishness” that is especially powerful because some of his characters have exhibited moral development. To be sure, Old Martin’s pretended subservience to Pecksniff and final revelations may be seen as contrivances making possible a deus ex machina ending; yet, for all their artificiality, the conversions seem as true in spirit as do Jonas’s terrified and cowardly maunderings. Dombey and Son · Dombey and Son is considered to be the first novel of Dickens’s maturity. Indeed, as John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson point out, it is the first for which he worked out a complete plot outline; therefore, the subplots are controlled, and a fully orchestrated set of symbols emerges. Importantly, John Lucas notes that Dombey and Son presents the social panorama of the new, industrialized England, allowing “patterns of behavior and language to suggest connections more deeply insistent than blood-ties.” In this story of a middle-class merchant prince who must learn to place heart above head, Dickens produces one of his most moving and powerful studies of childhood, not only in Florence, the neglected daughter, but also in Paul, whom Dombey regards as a small version of himself. Paul is portrayed as an “old fashioned” boy, one who astonishes his father by asking what money is. Unlike Oliver Twist, who seeks to find a way into society, Paul runs counter to its expectations, resisting his father’s attempt to make him into a grown-up before he has been a child. Alive to the world of the imagination, Paul is left untouched by Blimber’s educational establishment, described as a hothouse where young minds are forced to produce before their time. Mr. Toots, one of Dickens’s divine fools, is intellectually blasted by the process but retains a sweetness of soul that adds poignancy to his comic diction. When Paul dies in Florence’s arms, Dickens illustrates his pervasive water imagery in a masterly way. Paul, rocked gently out to sea in a flood of divine love, has come “to terms with the watery element,” as noted by Julian Moynihan; only by close association with the sea is anyone in Dombey and Son saved from an atrophying of the affections. Paul’s death is but one step in the education of Dombey, whom it initially hardens rather than softens: Dombey blames all of those Paul loved—Polly Toodle, his wet nurse; Walter Gay, one of Dombey’s clerks in love with Florence; and Florence herself—for alienating Paul’s affections. Another important step comes from Dombey’s second marriage, which is to Edith Granger, a young widow put on the marriage market by her Regency mother, the artificial Mrs. Skewton. Bought for her accomplishments and ability to bear sons, Edith sets her will against Dombey’s, determined to scorn his material success. She elopes with John Carker, the manager to whom Dombey had entrusted not only his domestic troubles but also his business affairs. Outraged, Dombey strikes Florence when she tries to comfort him. Florence runs away, taking refuge with a friend of Walter’s uncle. Edith eventually runs away from Carker, for her motive was not adultery but vengeance. Carker, while trying to escape

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from the pursuing Dombey, is hit by a train. As Marcus notes, the railroad is Dickens’s “great symbol of social transformation” as well as Carker’s nemesis. That Florence takes refuge with Captain Cuttle, a friend of Walter’s uncle, shows the way in which the ocean theme is invoked even in a comic way, for Captain Cuttle is a peg-legged, Bible-quoting sea dog, yet he proves to be a tenderhearted surrogate father to Florence. Her affiancement to Walter, who, at Dombey’s instigation, has been sent to the West Indies and shipwrecked, is another blow to Dombey, for it allies him not only with a class he shuns but also with an individual he believes had stolen his son’s affections. The last step in the education of Dombey is the failure of his business, largely through Carker’s machinations. Left alone in his empty mansion to be pitied by Miss Tox, an old-maid figure whose ridiculousness, like Captain Cuttle’s, is belied by her warmth of heart, Dombey meditates on the remembered figure of his daughter. His contemplation of suicide is interrupted, however, when Florence unexpectedly returns. For Dickens, Florence serves as the model of Christian, womanly behavior, of unselfish self-abnegation that, founded upon love, redeems her father. She returns because, as a mother, she can imagine what desertion by a child would be like. The story of Dombey was a powerful parable for the middle classes, for whom, Dickens believed, overconcentration on such firms as Dombey and Son led to dehumanization, to a buying and selling not of goods but of people. That Paul’s old-fashioned, loving nature could evoke responses in such unlikely quarters as in the pinched and spare Miss Tox or in the schoolmarmish Cornelia Blimber, or that Florence could melt both the disdainful Edith and her hardhearted father, is testimony to Dickens’s optimism. In keeping with the theme, all of the characters, no matter how comic, are invariably treated as more than comic elements. Mr. Toots and his fascination with the boxer, the Game Chicken; Miss Tox’s futile hope to become Mrs. Dombey; the straitlaced Mrs. Pipchin; and the seaman’s caricature, Captain Cuttle himself, are integrated with the plot and ranged on the side of heart. Little Dorrit · While David Copperfield is considered to be Dickens’s autobiographical novel par excellence, Little Dorrit explores some of the same themes through the metaphor of the imprisonment that had so deep an effect on the Dickenses’ family fortunes. Critical opinion ranges from Angus Wilson’s comment that the “overcomplicated plot” weakens the imprisonment/release theme, to Lionel Trilling’s assessment that the novel is “one of the most profound . . . and most significant works of the nineteenth century.” In Little Dorrit, imprisonment has many facets. The initial and end scenes are set in the Marshalsea, where William Dorrit, imprisoned like Dickens’s father for debt, has set up a social circle whose obsequiousness and class consciousness is simply a reflection of the society outside the prison. The resemblance suggests, in fact, that the large, self-seeking society without is itself a prison, for even when William Dorrit is freed by a legacy (as was John Dickens), he carries the taint of the Marshalsea with him, attempting to conform to social conventions so rigid that they dehumanize him, and hiring the “prunes and prisms” Mrs. General to tutor his daughters. That Dorrit, in ill health, should break down at Mrs. Merdle’s state dinner to babble about the prison, is indicative that he has never, indeed, left it but has merely called it by different names. Some prisons are built to contain those like Blandois, an evocation of the evil principle; others are less obvious, like the workhouse, for example, where old Nandy lives, or Bleeding Heart Yard, whose tenants are imposed upon by the patriarchal

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landlord Casby, or the Circumlocution Office—an accurate representation of the futile motions of a government bound by red tape. People, as well, create their own prisons: Miss Wade, for example, writes “The History of a Self-Tormentor”; Flora Finching is an “embodiment of romantic love that persists against all reason and propriety,” as Wilson calls her; even Cavalletto is sequestered by his inability to speak English fluently. Amy, or Little Dorrit, is held in bondage not only by her selfless love for her father but also by her neurotic refusal to be anything but a child. Her sister Fanny willfully contracts a marriage with the dandified Edmund Sparkler, a marriage that guarantees her social respectability at the price of a fool for a husband. Fanny’s prison becomes even smaller when her father-in-law, Mr. Merdle, commits suicide before his financial chicanery is discovered; without the emollient of money, Fanny spends her days in social battle with her mother-in-law, leaving her children in Little Dorrit’s care. For Arthur Clennam, to return home to his mother’s house is to return to imprisonment, where the walls are walls of the spirit, built of her unforgiving nature and her Calvinism that judges by the letter, not by the spirit of the ethical law. Clennam, however, carries his prison with him in the form of diffidence, for it is a lack of self-confidence that prevents him from proposing to Pet Meagles and almost prevents him from believing in the redeeming love of Little Dorrit herself (whom Lionel Trilling sees finally as “the Paraclete in female form”). In the end, he deliberately takes responsibility for his friend Doyce’s financial trouble and is imprisoned in William Dorrit’s old room. It is fitting that Amy should tend him there, for just as she held the key of affection to lead her father from the prison of self, so she holds the key of love that frees Clennam. In this respect, she radically differs from Clennam’s mother, who, knowing that Arthur Clennam is her husband’s illegitimate child, takes her vengeance accordingly. Clearly, in Little Dorrit, the individual is both the jailer and the jailed, the cause of suffering and the sufferer; perhaps nowhere else does Dickens so emphasize the intertwined fates of all humans. At this stage in his life, when he was actively involving himself in a number of projects and coming to understand that his marriage was failing, Dickens’s view of the human condition had little of the sunny hope exhibited, for example, in Pickwick Papers, or little of the simplistic interpretation of motivation found in Nicholas Nickleby. Indeed, the last lines of the novel sound a quiet note; Little Dorrit and Clennam go down into the midst of those who fret and chafe as if entering a prison; their only hope is “a modest life of usefulness and happiness.” Their ability to quell the “usual uproar” seems severely limited. Our Mutual Friend · For J. Hillis Miller, “Our Mutual Friend presents a fully elaborated definition of what it means to be interlaced with the world.” In this last completed novel, Dickens has indeed relinquished the idea that evil or, in fact, the redemption of society resides in any one individual or institution. The Poor Law in Oliver Twist, the effects of education in Nicholas Nickleby, and the law itself in Bleak House represent abuses that are manifestations of a larger illness permeating society. This view, which Dickens begins to develop in Little Dorrit, is clear in Our Mutual Friend. From the violent, repressed sexuality of the schoolmaster Bradley Headstone to the cool indifference of Eugene Wrayburn, who would despoil Lizzie Hexam to satisfy a whim, all society is affected with a kind of moral (and financial) selfishness that was a matter of parody in Martin Chuzzlewit. Even the heroine, Bella Wilfer, becomes, as she calls herself, a “mercenary little wretch,” consciously weighing her desire for a wealthy

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marriage against love for John Rokesmith. The exuberance of subplotting evident in Dickens’s early novels is again evident here, although in this case he provides a more disciplined framework, giving the reader not only a central symbol—money (represented as an excremental dust heap) inherited by the Boffins from the miser John Harmon—but also a central character, the enigmatic John Rokesmith, Harmon’s son and therefore rightful heir to the fortune. The central plot that devolves from a single generous act—the Boffins returning to Rokesmith his inheritance—is illustrative of the title, whose significance Arnold Kettle explores in terms of the mutuality of relationships, insofar as the activities of Rokesmith/Harmon interweave all social levels, from Wegg and Venus to the Podsnaps. The novel, moreover, contains elements of the masquerade in Martin Chuzzlewit as well as the motif of educating the affections in Dombey and Son. Boffin pretends to be a miser and Rokesmith an impoverished clerk to convince Bella that grasping for wealth deadens the heart. Her happy marriage is contrasted with that of her mother, whose perpetual toothache, tender temperament, and mortuary-like deportment minister to her pride but not to the comfort of her family. Indeed, other marriages in the book are hardly preferable: The nouveau-riche Veneerings, who make good friends of strangers in order to entertain them at a sumptuous board, are one example; another is the Lammles, who, sadly deceived in their original estimate of each other’s wealth, set out to defraud the world. Likewise, the Podsnaps, an embodiment of the solid, tasteless, and pretentious middle class, are concerned not, for example, with the emotional state of the much-repressed Georgiana but rather with their place on the social scale, and they are therefore willing to entrust her to the Lammles, whose intention it is to procure her in marriage for the moneylender “Fascination Fledgeby.” The novel is about the use and misuse of childhood as well. It offers a panoply of unnatural parents, among them Jesse Hexam, who forces Lizzie to dredge corpses from the Thames, and the bibulous “Mr. Dolls,” whose crippled daughter Fanny (“Jenny Wren”) is a dolls’ dressmaker. There are adoptive parents as well—some, like the Lammles, shamming affection to benefit themselves; others, like Lizzie, mothering her selfish brother Charley; or Riah, giving Lizzie fatherly protection; or Betty Higden, showing kindness to her diminutive boarders. The prime example is, of course, the Boffins, who nurture a series of children, young and old, beginning with John Harmon, for whom their kindness created a home in his father’s cold house; then Bella, who they felt had been harmed by the dictates of Harmon’s will, being, as she was, ceded in marriage to a stranger; then Johnny, the orphan who dies; and finally, Sloppy, an idiot foundling. Their adoption of Sloppy, an unprepossessing individual, is the key to the series, for Sloppy is another of Dickens’s touchstone figures. The subplot which runs parallel to the education of Bella is that of Lizzie Hexam’s wooing by Eugene Wrayburn. While Bella originally refuses Rokesmith because of his supposed poverty, Lizzie evades Wrayburn because of his wealth, fearing that she will become his mistress rather than his wife. Again, while Bella can accept Rokesmith’s proposal without knowing his true identity, Lizzie flees Wrayburn to a factory town (perhaps an evocation of Lowell, Massachusetts, where Dickens visited on his American tour). Even Bella’s moment of bravery, in which she relinquishes all hope of inheriting the Boffins’ money in favor of defending Rokesmith, whose dignity she thinks Boffin is maligning, has a parallel, albeit on a more earthy level; Lizzie rescues Wrayburn from the murderous attack of Headstone, thereby putting to use the skills she had learned when working with her father. Wrayburn’s proposal of marriage to

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her is his recognition that financial and class standing are irrelevant in matters of the heart. It is, in fact, their marriage that is central to the “trial” scene at the end of the novel, in which the Veneerings convene their friends to pass judgment on Wrayburn’s action. Mr. Twemlow, a minor character with romantic notions and little apparent strength of character, nevertheless rises to the occasion, as he had in agreeing to help warn the Podsnaps that their daughter was in danger of a mercenary scheme. He asserts, with finality and against the general disparagement, that if Wrayburn followed his “feeling of gratitude, of respect, of admiration and affection,” then he is “the greater gentleman for the action.” Twemlow’s voice is clearly not the voice of society; rather, it is the voice of the heart, and it is to him that Dickens gives the closing word. Patricia Marks Other major works SHORT FICTION: Sketches by Boz, 1836; A Christmas Carol, 1843; The Chimes, 1844; The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845; The Battle of Life, 1846; The Haunted Man, 1848; Reprinted Pieces, 1858; The Uncommercial Traveller, 1860; George Silverman’s Explanation, 1868; Christmas Stories, 1871. PLAYS: The Strange Gentleman, pr. 1836; The Village Coquettes, pr., pb. 1836; Mr. Nightingale’s Diary, pr., pb. 1851 (with Mark Lemon); No Thoroughfare, pr., pb. 1867 (with Wilkie Collins). NONFICTION: American Notes, 1842; Pictures from Italy, 1846. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A Child’s History of England, 1852-1854; The Life of Our Lord, 1934. EDITED PERIODICALS: Master Humphrey’s Clock, 1840-1841; Household Words, 18501859; All the Year Round, 1859-1870. Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. British novelist and biographer Ackroyd is famous for immersing himself in the milieu of his subjects. He tried to incorporate all extant material on Dickens’s life. The biography is written with a novelist’s flair, opening with a set piece that places the reader squarely at the scene of the great Victorian’s deathbed. Connor, Steven, ed. Charles Dickens. London: Longman, 1996. Part of the Longman Critical Readers series, this is a good reference for interpretation and criticism of Dickens. Davis, Paul B. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 1998. An excellent handbook for the student of Dickens. Epstein, Norrie. The Friendly Dickens: Being a Good-natured Guide to the Art and Adventures of the Man Who Invented Scrooge. New York: Viking, 1998. An interesting study of Dickens. Includes bibliographical references, an index, and a filmography. Flint, Kate. Dickens. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1986. Looks at paradoxes within his novels and between his novels and his culture. Includes a select bibliography and an index. Hawes, Donald. Who’s Who in Dickens. New York: Routledge, 1998. The Who’s Who series provides another excellent guide to the characters that populate Dickens’s fiction. Hobsbaum, Philip. A Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse

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University Press, 1998. Part of the Reader’s Guide series, this is a good manual for beginning students. Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography. New York: William Morrow, 1988. Kaplan’s biography is nearly as detailed and lengthy as one of Dickens’s own novels. Dickens is a fairly straightforward account of the novelist’s life. With the exception of an opening scene detailing Dickens’s attempt in 1860 to thwart future biographers by making a bonfire of his correspondence, the biography proceeds more or less directly from Dickens’s birth to his death with few diversions—and no introductory matter whatsoever. Newlin, George, ed. and comp. Every Thing in Dickens: Ideas and Subjects Discussed by Charles Dickens in His Complete Works, A Topicon. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. A thorough guide to Dickens’s oeuvre. Includes bibliographical references, an index, and quotations. Smith, Grahame. Charles Dickens: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. A strong biography of Dickens.38S Charles

Arthur Conan Doyle Arthur Conan Doyle

Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; May 22, 1859 Died: Crowborough, England; July 7, 1930 Principal long fiction · A Study in Scarlet, 1887; The Mystery of Cloomber, 1888; The Firm of Girdlestone, 1889; Micah Clarke, 1889; The Sign of Four, 1890; Beyond the City, 1891; The Doings of Raffles Haw, 1891; The White Company, 1891; The Great Shadow, 1892; The Refugees, 1893; The Parasite, 1894; The Stark Munro Letters, 1895; The Surgeon of Gaster Fell, 1895; Rodney Stone, 1896; The Tragedy of the Koroska, 1897 (also as A Desert Drama); Uncle Bernac, 1897; A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, 1899, revised 1910; The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901-1902; Sir Nigel, 1906; The Lost World, 1912; The Poison Belt, 1913; The Valley of Fear, 1915; The Land of Mist, 1926. Other literary forms · In his lifetime, Arthur Conan Doyle was far better known for his short stories than for his novels. Until he became interested in science fiction (a medium he found better suited to shorter fiction) after 1900, Doyle concentrated his creative energies on his novels, those works he felt posterity would judge him by, and took a purely monetary interest in the short-story format. Ironically, contemporary readers and critics continue to value the Sherlock Holmes short stories and largely ignore Doyle’s historical novels. One of the most prolific in an era of prolific authors, Doyle also dabbled in the theater. The most commercially successful of his dramas was the stage version of Sherlock Holmes (pr. 1899), starring William Gillette. Doyle frequently financed his own plays, such as the violent and realistic The Fires of Fate (pr. 1909, from his novel The Tragedy of the Koroska), a dramatization of a river-pirate raid on a party of English tourists in Egypt, an adventure based—like so many of Doyle’s works—on his own experiences. Doyle’s nonfiction was largely polemic. The course of the British involvement in the Boer War was chronicled and defended in his The Great Boer War, written in 1900, and The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct (1902). His efforts at defending government policy, as well as his own medical service during the war, were largely responsible for his knighthood. He also wrote extensively about other causes: the reform of the divorce laws, the denial of the vote for women, the abolition of ostrich-feather hats. He reserved his greatest energy, however, for his popularizing and propagandizing of spiritualism, a doctrine with which he had toyed from his youth and to which he became devoted after the death of his oldest son in World War I. Indeed, the last fifteen years of his life were spent in furthering the spiritualist cause through writings and lectures. Achievements · “Come, Watson. The game’s afoot.” Few words by any author evoke a clearer picture in the public’s mind. Individuals who have never read a Sherlock Holmes story can immediately conjure up a vision of two distinctive figures leaving the fog-shrouded entrance to 221-B Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes, tall and skeletal, pale from his sedentary existence and haggard from his addiction to cocaine, wearing his famous deerstalker cap; Dr. Watson, short and stolid, though limping from an old 264

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bullet wound, one hand nervously hovering over the pocket that holds his trusted revolver. Indeed, few, if any, imaginary addresses have received the bulk of mail which continues to be sent to Holmes’s Baker Street apartment; few fictional characters have been the subject of even a single “biography,” let alone the great number of books which purport to document the life of Sherlock Holmes; and certainly few authors have cursed the success of one of their creations as much as Doyle did that of Sherlock Holmes. When the young Portsmouth physician first wrote down the name of “Sherringford Hope,” soon changed to “Sherlock Holmes” in honor of the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, he did not dream of fame or literary immortality but merely of some means of augmentLibrary of Congress ing his income, for he had a wife as well as a younger brother and an impoverished mother to support. In fact, as soon as A Study in Scarlet had been sent off to a prospective publisher in early 1887, Doyle was hard at work on Micah Clarke, the novel he felt would represent “a door . . . opened for me into the Temple of the Muses.” Two years later, Doyle wrote the second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four, as a jeu d’esprit after a convivial dinner with Oscar Wilde, an unlikely admirer of Micah Clarke, and James Stoddart, the editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, who challenged both Doyle and Wilde to supply him with suitable mystery manuscripts. Doyle’s real interest at this time was in the completion of his “masterpiece,” the historical novel The White Company, and its acceptance for serialization in the Cornhill Magazine, beginning in January, 1891, seemed to him a far better harbinger of literary fame. The unexpected success of Sherlock Holmes stories as they appeared in Strand Magazine in the early 1890’s quickly established Doyle’s reputation, in the opinion of Greenough Smith, the literary editor of that magazine, as the greatest short-story writer since Edgar Allan Poe, but he continued to churn out a seemingly endless series of historical and semi-autobiographical novels, most of which are read today only by scholars. The commercial success of these novels (The Firm of Girdlestone, Beyond the City, The Great Shadow, The Refugees, The Parasite, The Stark Munro Letters, Rodney Stone, Uncle Bernac, and Sir Nigel, among others), of his numerous collections of short stories, of his occasional ventures into drama, and of his essays and pamphlets on social and political issues (such as reform of the divorce laws and the conduct of the Boer War), all depended in large part on Doyle’s popularity as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Yet throughout his life, he never saw the stories and novels featuring Holmes and Watson as much more than potboilers. Even the famous “resurrection” of Holmes in 1903 was an attempt to capitalize financially on the success of the London opening of

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the play Sherlock Holmes, starring William Gillette. Doyle saw his real life’s work, up until he became a propagandist for spiritualism at the end of his life, as writing fiction which would amuse and distract “the sick and the dull and the weary” through the evocation of the heroic past. Biography · The idealization of the past served other purposes for Arthur Conan Doyle, who had been born into genteel poverty in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, and named for King Arthur: It gave him a model to live by and to instill in his sons, and it diverted him from the disappointments of life which frequently threatened to overwhelm him. From his earliest childhood, his mother, Mary Doyle, the daughter of a lodging-house keeper who believed herself a descendant of the Plantagenets, indoctrinated her oldest son in tales of his aristocratic ancestry and the virtues of medieval chivalry. Doyle’s father Charles, although employed throughout his son’s childhood as a municipal architect in Edinburgh, was the youngest son of a highly gifted and artistic family. Charles Doyle’s father John Doyle was the talented caricaturist “H. B.”; his maternal uncle Michael Edward Conan was an artist as well as the art and drama critic and Paris correspondent for Art Journal; his brother Richard was a graphic artist for Punch and later an illustrator for John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray; another brother Henry was a painter before becoming director of the National Gallery of Ireland; a third brother James was a famous mid-Victorian portrait painter. Charles Doyle himself, who had suffered since early childhood from epilepsy and emotional disturbances, supplemented his salary with sketches of famous criminal trials and illustrations of fairy tales and historical romances. By the time his older son reached adulthood, Charles Doyle had descended through alcoholism into incurable insanity, retreating from a world he found uncongenial to his artistic temperament. Mary Doyle necessarily became the central figure in her children’s lives and continued to be so after they grew up. When Doyle first considered killing off Sherlock Holmes in November, 1891, his mother convinced him not to do so, thus reprieving the famous detective for a year. She also supplied her son with ideas for the Holmes stories. Throughout his childhood, Doyle’s mother managed the practical necessities of life for an improvident husband and eight children on £180 per year and also instilled a vision of the ideal gentleman into her oldest son. In contrast to his father’s instability and impracticality, Doyle grew into the epitome of the Victorian male: respectable, decent, cautious, thrifty, stolid. Only his writing—with its predilection for the codes of chivalry and honor and its preoccupation with a romantic past and his later obsession with spiritualism—betrayed the influences of Doyle’s belief in his descent from kings and his father’s retreat into a world of fantasy. Doyle’s family was Catholic, and he was educated first at a Catholic preparatory school and then at Stonyhurst, the foremost Jesuit educational institution in England. He hated both, finding Stonyhurst rigid, backward, superstitious, narrow, and, above all, dull. Unpopular with the masters because of his frequent protests against physical punishment, Doyle survived his school days because of his ability at games, his preeminence among his schoolmates, and his aptitude at diverting himself through reading and writing about a more glorious and exciting past. In his five years at Stonyhurst, he had no formal holidays but managed one visit to his uncle Richard Doyle in London, where the highlight of his stay was a visit to the Chamber of Horrors at Mme Tussaud’s on Baker Street. During this period, he began to read the short stories of Poe, which later influenced him through their fascination with the macabre

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as well as through the characterization of Poe’s intellectual detective, M. Auguste Dupin, who was one of the models for Sherlock Holmes. When Doyle entered Stonyhurst, the Jesuits had offered free tuition if he would train for the priesthood; fortunately, his mother refused the offer for him in spite of the advantages such an arrangement would have held. Ironically, the reactionary atmosphere at Stonyhurst contributed to his loss of faith, a faith he would not regain until his adoption of spiritualism forty years later. Leaving school, Doyle found himself with three choices: the priesthood, law, or medicine. His loss of faith ruled out the first alternative, his lack of influential connections the second, so he entered Edinburgh University to study medicine in 1877. Although he was once again not a particularly brilliant student, he was deeply influenced by two of his professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, who became a prototype for Sherlock Holmes, and Dr. Andrew Maclagan, an instructor of forensic medicine, who served as a model for Professor Challenger in Doyle’s later science-fiction novels. The School of Medicine at Edinburgh formed both the setting and the subject of his early and happily forgotten novel The Firm of Girdlestone. His university days were punctuated with two spells as a ship’s surgeon. The first voyage was aboard the Hope, an Arctic fishing boat. The seven-month-long trip was one of the highlights of Doyle’s life. Seemingly indifferent to the bloody spectacle of the slaughter of whales and seals, he remembered only the sense of adventure and camaraderie among the crew. After graduation, he took a similar job aboard the passenger ship Mayumba on a voyage to the Gold Coast. This trip was in stark contrast to the first. Passengers and crew were struck down with tropical fevers that the young doctor was unable to treat. This experience so depressed Doyle that he gave up his plans for a career as a ship’s surgeon and took up a position as an assistant to a doctor who turned out to be incompetent. When Mary Doyle objected to this association, her son left his employer and went to Portsmouth, where he opened his first practice. Since the first years of his practice were not prosperous, Doyle returned to writing to occupy his time and to supplement his earnings. He also began to toy with an interest in the supernatural that is reflected in his later fiction and in his obsession with spiritualism. He attended his first séance in 1879 and worked on a number of bizarre stories. His poverty was such (he earned only about fifty pounds a year from his writing, and not much more from his practice) that his nine-year-old brother Innes, who was living with him at the time, had to usher patients into his surgery. His mother sent sheets and other household necessities from Edinburgh. One of Doyle’s greatest strokes of good fortune was the death of a patient. When a young boy collapsed of meningitis, then an incurable illness, outside his office, Doyle took the patient in and nursed him until his death. The boy’s mother was so grateful for the doctor’s solicitude, if not his medical skill, that she introduced Doyle to her daughter Louise (Touie) Hawkins. The young couple was married on August 6, 1885, and Touie Doyle became the perfect Victorian wife. Not only was she gentle, undemanding, and industrious, but also she possessed a small yearly income which nicely supplemented her husband’s earnings. The Doyles eventually had two children, Mary Louise and Alleyne Kingsley, before Touie developed consumption, the disease which doomed her to an early death and Doyle to years of celibacy. Doyle’s Beyond the City and A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus chronicle their married life. Beyond the City is set in Upper Norwood, the London suburb to which they moved in 1891, and details the days of their early married life: quiet afternoons spent bicycling together, equally quiet evenings with Touie sewing and her husband reading

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or writing. A Duet, written after Touie’s fatal illness had been diagnosed, is silly and sentimental but ends with the deaths of the main characters in a train crash. Although Doyle remained devoted to assuring his wife’s happiness until her death in 1906, he had fallen in love again in the mid-1890’s. How much the fictionalized death of Touie in A Duet may have represented wish fulfillment remains conjecture. The 1890’s were years of contradiction for Doyle. His rise to literary prominence was paralleled by great personal distress. Although he had enjoyed moderate success as an author beginning with the publication of A Study in Scarlet in 1887, he still doubted that he could support his family by his pen. Early in 1891, he and Touie went to Austria, where he attempted to study ophthalmology; unsuccessful in this, he returned to England and moved his wife and daughter to London, where he set up a practice that drew even fewer patients than the one in Portsmouth. He had arrived back in England at a fortuitous moment for his career as a writer, however, as Strand Magazine had decided to bolster its circulation by abandoning the traditional serial novel for a series of short stories featuring a continuing character. Hearing of this, Doyle decided to revive his Sherlock Holmes character. In less than two weeks, he wrote two more Holmes stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Red-Headed League,” which were immediately accepted by Greenough Smith, the literary editor of Strand Magazine. With Sidney Paget as illustrator, the two stories were instant and enormous successes. Doyle found himself an overnight celebrity. This, however, was not the type of literary fame for which Doyle had hoped. Although he continued to turn out Holmes stories for Strand Magazine, he worked more diligently on two new novels, The Refugees, another historical tale, and Beyond the City. By November, 1891, just five months after Holmes first appeared in Strand Magazine, his creator had decided to end the detective’s life. Only the influence of Mary Doyle and the temptation of the one thousand pounds Strand Magazine was offering for a new series to run throughout 1892 made Doyle reconsider. The second Holmes series confirmed Greenough Smith’s opinion that Doyle was among the masters of the short-story form. Doyle himself found the format tedious; he always thought up the solution to the mystery first and then concocted the story in such a fashion as to obscure the true outcome from the reader as long as possible. His real affinity was for the historical novel, which he felt comfortable in writing and which he felt represented the true and highest purposes of art. In 1892, The Great Shadow, another example of his fondness for this genre, was published. It was extremely popular only because its author was the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The continued ill health of Doyle’s wife (her tuberculosis was finally diagnosed in 1893) required frequent journeys to the Continent. Churning out a story a month to meet his commitment to Strand Magazine, concerned about Touie’s health, constantly on the move, unhappy with the format in which he was forced to write, Doyle became more and more dissatisfied with his literary detective. If he did not exactly grow to hate Sherlock Holmes, he found the process of inventing new adventures for him more and more distasteful. He informed Strand Magazine that Holmes’s final case, recorded in “The Final Problem,” would appear in their December, 1893, issue. No entreaties or offers of higher payments would change his mind. After the account of Holmes’s death was published, more than twenty thousand Strand Magazine readers canceled their subscriptions. With Sherlock Holmes seemingly permanently out of his life, Doyle devoted himself to a renewed interest in the psychical research of his youth and to public affairs. Since his wife’s illness precluded sexual intercourse, Doyle’s writings of this

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period reverted to his earlier preoccupation with a connection between sex and death. The 1894 novel, The Parasite, deals with the relationship between Professor Gilroy, a Holmesian figure who has retreated to the world of the intellect, and Helen Penclosa, a beautiful clairvoyant. At first a skeptic, Gilroy becomes increasingly obsessed with the beautiful young woman until, unable to withstand the passion that has made him lock himself in his own room, he rushes to her flat and makes love to her. Overcome immediately by guilt, he flees from her room, only to discover later that she has mesmerized him and forced him to rob a bank. As his obsession grows, Gilroy is dismissed from his post at the university and becomes increasingly erratic in his behavior. The more unstable Gilroy becomes, the weaker Penclosa grows, her power obviously transferring itself into his mind. In a moment of madness, Gilroy attempts to murder his fiancé, then decides to free himself by killing Penclosa. When he arrives at her flat, he finds her already dead and himself returned to sanity. The public Doyle, however, continued to be the respectable man of affairs. Another historical novel, Rodney Stone, the story of a Regency dandy who becomes a “man” in the end, appeared in 1896. Round the Red Lamp, a collection of ghost stories Doyle wrote for his children, was published in 1894. He continued his travels in search of renewed health for Touie, journeying back and forth to Switzerland and spending the winter of 1896-1897 in Egypt. In private, Doyle was increasingly troubled by the complications of his love for Jean Leckie, to whom he was originally attracted because of her descent from the Scottish hero Rob Roy. Although he confessed his love for Jean to his mother and other family members, he resisted all their advice that he divorce Touie. Vowing never to consummate his relationship with Jean until Touie’s death, he instructed his family never even to hint of the affair to his wife. His “code of honor” as a gentleman mandated that he cherish and protect Touie at the cost of his own happiness. Jean, with whom he had never and would never quarrel, agreed. They continued to see each other, but Touie was kept ignorant of her husband’s love for another woman. Doyle and Jean even waited the requisite year of mourning after Touie’s death before they were finally married in 1907. Although he had returned to an English setting for Rodney Stone, Doyle was fascinated by the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. In 1896 and 1897, after a spell in Egypt as a war correspondent during the Sudanese War, he published The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, the first of a series of stories about the picaresque hero to appear in novel form. He also wrote Uncle Bernac, another Napoleonic novel, and The Tragedy of the Koroska, a melodrama about his adventures with paddleboat bandits in Egypt. In the late 1890’s and the first years of the new century, Doyle increasingly turned to the horror story. One particular story, “Playing with Fire,” published in 1900, combined his interest in psychic phenomena with his love for animals and suggested that animals, too, survive the grave. “The King of Foxes” (1903) dealt with Jean Leckie’s favorite sport, foxhunting, in a bizarre and macabre form. To make money and to forestall another dramatist from seizing on the idea, he adapted the character of Sherlock Holmes for the American stage, emphasizing that the play which would make William Gillette famous was not a new adventure but related events that had occurred before Holmes’s “death.” The outbreak of the Boer War in October, 1899, gave Doyle the outlet he needed for his interest in public affairs. He first attempted to enlist and then accepted the position of senior surgeon with John Longman’s private field hospital. He saw his

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service at Bloemfontein in 1900 as that of a medieval knight seeking to help those less fortunate than he. His heroic efforts with inadequate equipment, his propaganda pamphlet The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, and later his history of the war, The Great Boer War, combined to win him his knighthood in 1902. While in South Africa, Doyle had read of the story of the Cabell family, which was haunted by a ghostly hound. He saw in this the germ of a new Holmes novel, and The Hound of the Baskervilles was duly published in 1901-1902. He was still not committed to reviving Holmes from beneath the Reidenbach Falls and insisted once again that The Hound of the Baskervilles was an earlier adventure only now coming to light. Although he continued to write horror stories, he was unable to resist the financial lure of more Holmes tales, and, consequently, in October, 1903, the first adventure of the “resurrected” Sherlock Holmes appeared. During the last two decades of Doyle’s life, his fame and finances were assured by the popularity of Sherlock Holmes. His private life, after his marriage to Jean Leckie and the birth of their three children, was that of an Edwardian paterfamilias. With the exception of Sir Nigel, he finally abandoned the historical novel in favor of science fiction. Politically reactionary, Doyle nevertheless was respected for his warnings about the outbreak of World War I. His greatest preoccupation, however, was with the cause of spiritualism; his final “conversion” to absolute belief in the phenomenon which had fascinated him for years resulted from the deaths of his brother Innes and oldest son Kingsley during World War I. To the end of his life, he was convinced that he was in frequent touch with the spirits of his loved ones and thus devoted all the proceeds from his novels and lectures to the “cause.” In the early 1920’s, he once again announced Holmes’s departure, this time to honorable retirement as a beekeeper on the Sussex Downs. Doyle brought him back only once, in a 1924 story written expressly for Queen Mary’s Dollhouse. His literary reputation suffered because of his involvement in spiritualism, and his excellent science-fiction novels, many of which rival those of Jules Verne, were ridiculed by the critics more for their author’s peculiarities than for their own lack of merit. Doyle died on July 7, 1930; his wife Jean claimed to receive a spirit message from him less than twenty-four hours later. His epitaph, however, looked back to earlier decades, to the little boy named after King Arthur who had resolved to live his life according to knightly ideals: “STEEL TRUE/BLADE STRAIGHT.” Analysis · Arthur Conan Doyle’s epitaph can also serve as an introduction to the themes of his novels, both those that feature actual medieval settings and those that center on Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s central character is always the knight on a quest, living and battling according to chivalric ideals. Micah Clarke, Alleyne Edricson, and Sir Nigel Loring all engage in real battles; Sherlock Holmes combats villains on behalf of distressed young women and naïve and frightened young men; Professor Challenger takes on the unknown: a prehistoric world, the realm of the spirit, the threatened extinction of life on Earth. Micah Clarke · Doyle’s first historical novel, Micah Clarke, is set in seventeenth century England against the background of Monmouth’s Rebellion. As he always did in his historical fiction, in which he intended to portray the actual conditions of life at the time the novels were set, he paid meticulous attention to actual detail. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle seems not to have cared whether Dr. Watson’s old war wound was in his shoulder or his knee, whether the good doctor’s Christian name was John

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or James, whether there were one or two Mrs. Watsons, but his period novels show none of this casualness. For Micah Clarke, the author had carefully explored the area around Portsmouth, where most of the action takes place. He also did careful research into the dress, customs, and speech of the era. Indeed, it was its “mode of speech” that caused both Blackwoods and Bentley, Ltd. to reject the novel; this same period diction makes the novel extremely slow going for the modern reader. Like most of Doyle’s characters, those in Micah Clarke are modeled on real individuals. Micah Clarke, the gallant young man fighting zealously for a lost cause, is largely based on young Doyle himself, protesting hopelessly at Stonyhurst against outmoded courses of study, unfair punishments, and censorship of his letters home. Ruth Timewell, the cloyingly sweet young heroine, depicts the quiet, meek Touie Doyle, who at the time the novel was written represented her husband’s ideal of womanhood. In spite of the critical acclaim Micah Clarke received when it was originally published, few people would consider it the stirring tale of adventure that its author did, although parts of it, especially the description of the climactic Battle of Sedgmoor and the portrait of the evil Judge Jeffreys, retain some interest for the modern reader. The White Company · The White Company, Doyle’s second venture into the historical genre, and its companion piece, Sir Nigel, have worn slightly better. Like its predecessor, The White Company is distinguished by its scrupulous re-creation of the entire spectrum of life in fourteenth century England. Once again, Doyle’s preoccupation with noble causes is reflected in the interests of his characters, members of a small but dedicated mercenary company who set off for the Continent to fight for England during the Hundred Years War. The hero of The White Company, after whom Doyle later named his eldest son, is Alleyne Edricson, a landless young squire who leaves the monastery where he has been reared with his two companions, the lapsed monk Hortle John and the former serf Samkin Aylward, to join the White Company under the command of Sir Nigel Loring. Alleyne, his friends, his leader, and later his prince represent a microcosm of English society in the Middle Ages, depicting an idealized vision of the English character and contrasting with that of the country’s main enemies: the French, the Spanish, and the Germans. Departing from his usual historical accuracy, Doyle presents the Germans as the worst foes of the English, reflecting his own late-Victorian perspective. Alleyne and his friend are mercenaries who live by their wits, but their fighting, looting, and pillaging are always conducted according to the rules of the chivalric game. At the end of the novel, Alleyne wins his knighthood, his inheritance, and his lady fair in the person of Sir Nigel’s daughter Maude. The virtues Sir Nigel embodies and Alleyne learns are those that Doyle taught his own sons: sympathetic treatment of social inferiors, courtesy and respect for women, and honesty in financial dealings. The novel is particularly interesting for its two main themes: the rise of the English middle class and of English patriotism. The White Company depicts a world where individuals are judged not by their birth but by their accomplishments, in much the same manner as Doyle rose from poverty to affluence through his own efforts. The book, however, also reflects its author’s belief that the English character was the best in the world; Doyle clearly insists that the language, history, customs, and beliefs of England are far superior to those of any other nation.

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The Sherlock Holmes novels · At first glance, the four Sherlock Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear) might seem to have little in common with Doyle’s historical fiction. A closer look, however, shows that whatever the surface differences, the author’s underlying concerns and prejudices are the same. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes can be seen as a knight-errant who ventures forth from Baker Street on a series of quests. In the earlier novels and stories, he battles dragons of crime on behalf of individuals. Mary Morstan in The Sign of the Four is the epitome of a damsel in distress. In Holmes’s later adventures, both the suppliants and the dragons are different. There is an increasing tendency for those seeking Holmes’s assistance to be representatives of the government itself or, as in “The Illustrious Client,” a person no less exalted than King Edward VII himself, and for the villains to be international criminals or even foreign governments. Holmes’s relationship with Dr. Watson reflects that of a knight and his squire. The detective and his intellect operate according to the rules of detection which Holmes has himself established at the beginning of The Sign of the Four, rules analogous to the chivalric code, and squire Watson accompanies Holmes as much to learn how to conduct himself according to these rules as to assist in the solution of the crime. Dull, plodding, faithful Watson may never win his spurs, but at least he wins the hand of Mary Morstan. The Holmes novels also exhibit Doyle’s characteristic xenophobia. With the possible exception of Moriarty, who, after all, is an international rather than an English criminal, the villains Holmes contends with frequently are foreigners or else the crimes he deals with have their origins in foreign or distant events. A Study in Scarlet is a story of the revenge exacted for a crime committed in the mountains of Utah twenty years earlier. The novel’s “victims” are in fact villains who have mistreated an old man and a young girl, those most deserving of protection, and so deserve their own deaths, while its “villain” is a just avenger who is saved from the gallows by a “higher judge” and dies with a smile upon his face as if looking back on a deed well done. The crime in The Sign of the Four similarly has its origins years before in India, and its victims also turn out to have brought their doom upon themselves. Rodger Baskerville, the father of Stapleton the naturalist, who perpetrated the hoax in The Hound of the Baskervilles, had fled to South America before his son was born. As in the fictional press report at the end of A Study in Scarlet, Doyle appears eager to distance the true Englishman from responsibility for crime. Although Doyle himself favored his historical fiction while the public preferred the Sherlock Holmes adventures, the author’s finest works have largely been ignored. The Lost World, The Poison Belt, and The Land of Mist are novels which belong to a series of science-fiction works featuring the eccentric Professor George Edward Challenger. By the time The Lost World was published in 1912, Doyle was already becoming a figure of fun among the intelligentsia because of his ardent defense of psychic phenomena and his reactionary political views. The critics’ disdain for this series unfortunately affected its popularity, and there has been a consequent tendency to overlook them as examples of Doyle’s literary skill at its finest. The Lost World · The Lost World resulted from Doyle’s interest in prehistoric footprints near his home in the New Forest. After he made casts of the prints, he consulted with zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester and came away with the idea for the novel. The Lost World is narrated by Edward Dunn Malone, a journalist who comes to act as a Watson-like chronicler of the exploits of Professor Challenger, an eccentric scientist

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with a great physical resemblance to Arthur Conan Doyle. After knocking Malone down the stairs at their first meeting, Challenger recruits him for a proposed expedition to South America in search of a prehistoric monster believed to exist on a plateau in the Amazon River basin. Doyle’s penchant for realistic description deserts him in The Lost World. His details are fifty years out of date; he instead presents a fantastically imaginative vision of the unexplored jungle wilderness. The beauty of the jungle vanishes as the explorers reach the historic plateau. With almost surrealistic horror, Doyle depicts the filthy, fetid nesting ground of the pterodactyls and the dank and dirty caves of the ape-men who inhabit the plateau. A marvelous comic ending has Challenger revealing the results of the expedition to a skeptical London audience of pedants by releasing a captured pterodactyl over their heads. The characterization in The Lost World is among Doyle’s finest achievements. The members of the expedition are well balanced: the eccentric and pugnacious Challenger, the naïve and incredulous Malone, the cynical and touchy Summerlee, and the great white hunter Lord John Roxton. The one woman in the novel, Malone’s fiancé Gladys, bears no resemblance to the Ruth Timewells and Lady Maudes of Doyle’s earlier work. She is spunky and independent, refusing to marry Malone until he has done something worth admiring, and in his absence marrying someone else because she decides money is a more practical basis for marriage than fame. The series retains its high quality in The Poison Belt, but the subsequent related works are less consequential. In The Land of Mist, Challenger becomes a spiritualist convert when the spirits of two men whom he believes he has killed return to tell him of his innocence. “When the World Screamed,” one of the stories in The Maracot Deep and Other Stories (1929), reverts to the morbid sexuality of The Parasite. When Challenger attempts to drill a hole to the center of the earth, the world turns out to be a living female organism. When Challenger’s shaft penetrates the cortex of her brain, she screams, setting off earthquakes and tidal waves. Few of Doyle’s writings from the last decade of his life are read by other than specialists, dealing as they do with the propagation of spiritualism. The canon of his fiction can thus be said to have ended with science-fiction novels. These novels too all deal with Doyle’s characteristic themes and concerns. Challenger and Maracot uncover hidden truths about the nature of the past, the present, the future, and life after death much in the same way as Sherlock Holmes discovered the truth about human nature in the course of his investigation of crime. The historical fiction had sought to explore the truth about a specialized human nature, that of the archetypal Englishman, in the same manner. Even the obsession with spiritualism that cost him his credibility among intellectual circles was but another example of Doyle’s lifelong search for the truth about human existence. In whatever guise he portrayed that search, Doyle never deviated from the devotion to the ideals that had been instilled in him in childhood and which were recorded on his gravestone: “STEEL TRUE/BLADE STRAIGHT.” Similarly, all his literary protagonists embodied these same ideals: a devotion to truth and a belief in the rightness of their cause. Few other authors have managed to create such a coherent body of work as did Arthur Conan Doyle, and fewer have matched the content of their work so closely to the conduct of their lives. Mary Anne Hutchinson

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Other major works SHORT FICTION: Mysteries and Adventures, 1889 (also as The Gully of Bluemansdyke and Other Stories); The Captain of Polestar and Other Tales, 1890; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892; My Friend the Murderer and Other Mysteries and Adventures, 1893; The Great Keinplatz Experiment and Other Stories, 1894; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894; Round the Red Lamp: Being Fact and Fancies of Medical Life, 1894; The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, 1896; The Man from Archangel and Other Stories, 1898; The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport, 1900; The Adventures of Gerard, 1903; The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905; Round the Fire Stories, 1908; The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales, 1911; One Crowded Hour, 1911; His Last Bow, 1917; Danger! and Other Stories, 1918; Tales of the Ring and Camp, 1922 (also as The Croxley Master and Other Tales of the Ring and Camp); Tales of Terror and Mystery, 1922 (also as The Black Doctor and Other Tales of Terror and Mystery); Tales of Twilight and the Unseen, 1922 (also as The Great Keinplatz Experiment and Other Tales of Twilight and the Unseen); Three of Them, 1923; The Dealings of Captain Sharkey and Other Tales of Pirates, 1925; Last of the Legions and Other Tales of Long Ago, 1925; The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927; The Maracot Deep and Other Stories, 1929; The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1981; Uncollected Stories: The Unknown Conan Doyle, 1982. PLAYS: Foreign Policy, pr. 1893; Jane Annie: Or, The Good Conduct Prize, pr., pb. 1893 (with J. M. Barrie); Waterloo, pr. 1894 (also as A Story of Waterloo); Halves, pr. 1899; Sherlock Holmes, pr. 1899 (with William Gillette); A Duet, pb. 1903; Brigadier Gerard, pr. 1906; The Fires of Fate, pr. 1909; The House of Temperley, pr. 1909; The Pot of Caviare, pr. 1910; The Speckled Band, pr. 1910; The Crown Diamond, pr. 1921. POETRY: Songs of Action, 1898; Songs of the Road, 1911; The Guards Came Through and Other Poems, 1919; The Poems: Collected Edition, 1922. NONFICTION: The Great Boer War, 1900; The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, 1902; The Case of Mr. George Edalji, 1907; Through the Magic Door, 1907; The Crime of the Congo, 1909; The Case of Oscar Slater, 1912; Great Britain and the Next War, 1914; In Quest of Truth, Being a Correspondence Between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Captain H. Stansbury, 1914; To Arms!, 1914; The German War: Some Sidelights and Reflections, 1915; Western Wanderings, 1915; The Origin and Outbreak of the War, 1916; A Petition to the Prime Minister on Behalf of Roger Casement, 1916(?); A Visit to Three Fronts, 1916; The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 1916-1919 (6 volumes); The New Revelation, 1918; The Vital Message, 1919; Our Reply to the Cleric, 1920; Spiritualism and Rationalism, 1920; A Debate on Spiritualism, 1920 (with Joseph McCabe); The Evidence for Fairies, 1921; Fairies Photographed, 1921; The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, 1921; The Coming of the Fairies, 1922; The Case for Spirit Photography, 1922 (with others); Our American Adventure, 1923; My Memories and Adventures, 1924; Our Second American Adventure, 1924; The Early Christian Church and Modern Spiritualism, 1925; Psychic Experiences, 1925; The History of Spiritualism, 1926 (2 volumes); Pheneas Speaks: Direct Spirit Communications, 1927; What Does Spiritualism Actually Teach and Stand For?, 1928; A Word of Warning, 1928; An Open Letter to Those of My Generation, 1929; Our African Winter, 1929; The Roman Catholic Church: A Rejoinder, 1929; The Edge of the Unknown, 1930; Arthur Conan Doyle on Sherlock Holmes, 1981; Essays on Photography, 1982; Letters to the Press, 1984. TRANSLATION: The Mystery of Joan of Arc, 1924 (Léon Denis). EDITED TEXTS: D. D. Home: His Life and Mission, 1921 (by Mrs. Douglas Home); The Spiritualist’s Reader, 1924.

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Bibliography Baring-Gould, W. S. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective. New York: Bramhall House, 1962. A “biography” of Doyle’s most popular creation, Sherlock Holmes. Based upon the Sherlock Holmes stories and numerous secondary sources. A chronological outline of Holmes’s life as created by Baring-Gould is also included. Booth, Martin. The Doctor, the Detective, and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997. A good survey of the life of Doyle. Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949. Well researched and written by a distinguished mystery writer, this is a highly readable biography. Carr had access to Doyle’s personal papers and enjoyed the cooperation of Doyle’s children. A good place to begin further study. Edwards, Owen Dudley. The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. Concentrates on the first twenty-three years of Doyle’s life in an attempt to unravel the influence of various forces in his early life on his writing, such as his early love of history and Celtic lore, the impoverished and Catholic Edinburgh of his youth, and his alcoholic father. Green, Richard Lancelyn. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Provides a massive (712-page) bibliography of all that Doyle wrote, including obscure short pieces. Illustrated and containing a seventy-fivepage index, this book includes a list of more than one hundred books of biographical, bibliographical, and critical interest for the study of Doyle. Higham, Sir Charles. The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator of Sherlock Holmes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. A popular biography which attempts to establish a link between Doyle’s detective fiction and events in his own life, such as his use of actual criminal cases, the mental collapse of his father, and his interest in spiritualism. Indexed and illustrated. Includes a bibliography. Jann, Rosemary. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order. New York: Twayne, 1995. Part of Twayne’s Masterwork Series, this slim volume is divided into two parts, the first of which places the great detective in a literary and historical context, followed by Jann’s own reading of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlockian approach to detective fiction. In addition to a selected bibliography, Jann’s book includes a brief chronology of Doyle’s life and work. Kestner, Joseph A. Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997. Discusses the theme of masculinity in Doyle’s fiction. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Including both evaluations by Doyle’s contemporaries and later scholarship—some of it commissioned specifically for inclusion in this collection—Critical Essays is divided into three sections: “Sherlock Holmes,” “Other Writings,” and “Spiritualism.” Harold Orel opens the collections with a lengthy and comprehensive essay, which is followed by a clever and classic meditation by Dorothy L. Sayers on “Dr. Watson’s Christian Name.” Also included are pieces by such literary lights as George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, and Heywood Broun. Ross, Thomas Wynne. Good Old Index: The Sherlock Holmes Handbook, a Guide to the Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Persons, Places, Themes, Summaries of all the Tales, with Commentary on the Style of the Author. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997. An excellent manual for followers of Doyle’s Holmes stories.

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Symons, Julian. Conan Doyle: Portrait of an Artist. New York: Mysterious Press, 1979. This biography is particularly useful, as it tries to present Doyle as much more than the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Only 135 pages, it contains 122 illustrations, a chronology of Doyle’s life, and a bibliography of his writings.

Margaret Drabble Margaret Drabble

Born: Sheffield, England; June 5, 1939 Principal long fiction · A Summer Bird-Cage, 1963; The Garrick Year, 1964; The Millstone, 1965 (pb. in U.S. as Thank You All Very Much); Jerusalem the Golden, 1967; The Waterfall, 1969; The Needle’s Eye, 1972; The Realms of Gold, 1975; The Ice Age, 1977; The Middle Ground, 1980; The Radiant Way, 1987; A Natural Curiosity, 1989; The Gates of Ivory, 1991; The Witch of Exmoor, 1997. Other literary forms · Margaret Drabble has combined literary scholarship with her career as a novelist. She wrote a short critical study of Willliam Wordsworth, Wordsworth (1966), and edited a collection of critical essays about Thomas Hardy, The Genius of Thomas Hardy (1975). Over the years, she has edited or written introductions for most of Jane Austen’s works for various publishers, including Lady Susan (1974), The Watsons (1974), and Sanditon (1974). She also edited Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Poems. In 1989, she published her Gareth Lloyd Evans Shakespeare Lecture at Stratford-Upon-Avon as Stratford Revisited: A Legacy of the Sixties. She has written two major biographies: Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995). Her literary travelogue A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature was published in 1979. Drabble has had a long-standing connection with drama. Her works include Bird of Paradise (1969), a stage play; A Touch of Love (1969), a screenplay based on her novel The Millstone; and Laura (1964), a play for television. She has written political essays, including Case of Equality (1988). She is well known for editing the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985, revised 1995). Drabble has written a fair number of short stories, as yet uncollected and only partially available to American audiences. Finally, Drabble has also written a book for children, For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age (1978). Achievements · Drabble’s novels charm and delight, but perhaps more significantly, they reward their readers with a distinctively modern woman’s narrative voice and their unusual blend of Victorian and modern structures and concerns. Although there seems to be critical consensus that Drabble has, as Bernard Bergonzi has said, “devised a genuinely new character and predicaments,” the exact nature of this new voice and situation has not been precisely defined. Bergonzi sees the new character as an original blend of career woman and mother, yet Drabble’s career woman begins to appear only in her seventh novel, The Realms of Gold. Her earlier, yet equally freshly portrayed heroines are often not mothers, as, for example, Sarah in A Summer Bird-Cage, or Clara in Jerusalem the Golden. Most of the mothers who precede Frances Wingate in The Realms of Gold can in no way be considered career women. Rose Vassiliou in The Needle’s Eye does not work; Rosamund Stacey in Thank You All Very Much works only sporadically to support her baby, and her job can hardly be considered a career. Other critics have claimed that the new voice involves an unprecedented acquaintance with the maternal attitude toward children. This is the voice Erica Jong pre277

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dicted would emerge once motherhood was no longer thought to be incompatible with literary artistry. In fact, only three Drabble novels can be said to contain this voice: Thank You All Very Much, The Ice Age, and The Middle Ground; yet all the novels seem to present something original in their female point of view. Female characters have illuminated literature for more than a thousand years, but until recently they have appeared as secondary figures. The female has been present, but her point of view and voice have been lacking. Drabble seems to be able to evoke not only the female point of view but also the cadence of the female voice. Her ear for speech rhythms is exceptional, and each central female Jerry Bauer character has a distinct speech pattern and cadence. This is, of course, more intensely true in the first-person narratives of Drabble’s earlier novels, but it is also true of her later novels in which the heroine’s interior life is rendered by an omniscient narrator who mimes her speech in order to discuss her feelings and thoughts. Perhaps Drabble’s artistry in portraying the sound of the female voice is among her most significant accomplishments, more simple and more complex than the evocation of a maternal career woman or of the mother-child bond. Drabble has also begun to experiment with the return of the outspoken omniscient narrator. Drabble’s rediscovery of an old literary technique seems timely rather than regressive. She does not embed the characters in the amber of the narrator’s point of view, preventing them from dramatizing themselves. Drabble’s omniscient narrator gives the reader a sense of place, a sense of location and history, without forcing the characters to bear the burden of carrying all that perception in their minds. It frees the characters to notice only what they perceive within the confines of their personalities, for there is a narrative voice to create the density of the social and physical scene. The narrator’s involvement in place and history has important thematic implications for Drabble’s fiction. She departs from the prevalent modern emphasis on the centrality of the individual sensibility, reaching back instead to the tradition of two authors she admires, Arnold Bennett and George Eliot. She explores modern fragmentation as a function, to some extent, of human choice. She explores the consequences of choosing to submit to centrifugal forces as opposed to struggling against them in an effort to be true to one’s roots. This original blend of a deep concern for society’s conventions and origins and an unusually sensitive evocation of the individual female sensibility gives Drabble’s works their particular flavor.

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Biography · Margaret Drabble was born into a family that at once reflects the breakup of old patterns and the power of conventions, which may account for her receptiveness to both aspects of modern England. Her parents, John Frederick Drabble and Kathleen Marie (Bloor) Drabble, were the first of their families to attend a university. The results of her parents’ upward mobility were both creative and destructive. Her father became a barrister and then a judge; her mother suffered the dislocations which attend such rapid social changes. She became an atheist and thus estranged herself from her fundamentalist parents. Drabble says that her mother was released from the harshness of her religious training when, as a young woman, she read George Bernard Shaw. As she turned the pages she had a revelation that there was no God. “One could say,” says Drabble, “that that was a revelation from God not to worry about him because it was going to drive her mad if she did.” Drabble’s mother struggled against clinical depression until her death. Drabble herself is the second of three daughters. Her sisters are Dr. Helen Langdon, a scholar, and Susan Duffy, a novelist, whose pen name is A. S. Byatt. She also has a brother, Richard J. B. Drabble. She attended a Quaker boarding school in York, The Mount School, and then read English at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she finished among the top of her class. In 1960, in the week that she finished at Cambridge, she married Clive Swift. Swift was an aspiring actor who worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the early years of their marriage, Drabble spent much of her time having three children, writing novels, and acting bit parts and understudying for the Royal Shakespeare Company. While she was writing The Garrick Year, she understudied Imogen in Cymbeline, played a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and had a bit part in The Taming of the Shrew. Drabble separated from her husband in 1972; their divorce became final in 1975. For many years, Drabble lived in the North London village of Hampstead. Her novels have won many prizes: the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Award (1966), the James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize (1968), the Book of the Year Award from the Yorkshire Post (1972), and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1973). She is a member of the National Book League and served as its chair from 1980 to 1982. During the 1980’s she devoted much of her efforts to revising the Oxford Companion to English Literature for its fifth edition. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1980. Drabble has received honorary D.Litt. degrees from many universities: Sheffield, Manchester, Keele, Bradford, Hull, East Anglia, and York. She has lectured in the United States at such educational institutions as Purdue University and Carleton College. She was made an Honorary Fellow of the Sheffield City Polytechnic in 1989. In 1982, Drabble married the biographer Michael Holroyd. They settled in the Notting Hill district of London and at Porlock Weir, Somerset. Analysis · Margaret Drabble’s novels begin as female arias in the bel canto style, predominantly elaborate embellishments on a simple series of events relative only to the first-person narrator, events that reflect a brief but formative time in the narrator’s life. The early novels deal with the lives of rather ordinary middle-class girls and, but for their sensitivity and subtlety of insight, come dangerously close to being considered women’s magazine fiction. The later novels are more complex, exploring the delicate webs of social interconnections and covering longer periods of time in which the convergences of many lives upon one another effect subtle and not so subtle changes.

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Both the early and later novels express concern with finding the legitimate sources of growth and development. A Summer Bird-Cage · Drabble’s distinctive narrative voice is clear in her first novel. Sarah Bennett, a recent college graduate, is the protagonist of A Summer Bird-Cage, but figures mainly as a witness to her sister Louise’s marriage. From her older sister’s mistakes, Sarah learns about her own attitude toward the future. The novel begins as Sarah returns from Paris to attend Louise’s marriage to Stephen Halifax, a boring, trendy, wealthy, satirical novelist. Louise is a stunning and exciting raven-haired beauty, yet Sarah cannot understand why she is marrying the bloodless Stephen Halifax. Sarah and her friends attempt to puzzle this out through the progress of the novel, especially as it becomes increasingly obvious that Louise has been having an affair with a very attractive actor, John Connell. In the end, Sarah learns directly from Louise what was obvious all the while: Louise married Stephen for his money. Rather than seeming anticlimactic, this knowledge solidifies Sarah’s growing understanding of what fidelity and betrayal are about. Despite its socially sanctioned position, the marriage Louise has contracted is in fact adulterous because it is a betrayal of her heart and affections. The technical adultery is an act of faith. Louise divorces Stephen to take her chances with John, and Sarah ends the novel with a forged bond of affection with Louise. Sarah is thus prepared for the return of her boyfriend, Francis, from America. Having observed Louise, Sarah realizes that fidelity to her vow to marry Francis is not as important as waiting to see if in fact their relationship has its roots in truth. Sarah will only marry if the action follows from an authentic feeling. Jerusalem the Golden · In her fourth novel, Jerusalem the Golden, Drabble experimented for the first time with omniscient narration, maintaining an ironic distance from her protagonist. Clara Maugham, a provincial girl from Northam, a small town in the north of England, is that young woman all too familiar in fiction, the woman whose capacities for development are greater than the opportunities presented by her narrow circumstances. In general, such a character is often created by writers who have escaped the clutches of small minds and tight social structures; an identity of author and character is usually suspected. The character becomes a vehicle through which the author gets back at the tormentors of his or her youth; the character finds dazzling fulfillment in the city. Clara Maugham, then, comes out of this tradition, but does not lead the reader into the usual pitfalls. Drabble considers the problems of leaving one’s roots for fuller possibilities. As impoverished as it may be, one’s heritage provides the individual with a foothold in reality. Hence, the title of the novel is a mocking one. It alludes to the utopian dream that emerges from a hymn to which Clara is attracted as a school girl: Jerusalem the Golden With Milk and Honey blest Beneath thy contemplation Sink heart and voice oppressed. I know not, oh, I know not What social joys are there What radiance of glory What light beyond compare.

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For Clara, the mysteries of ecstasy counterpoint the threadbare, wretched, familiar world. For her there is nothing in between, and she leaves Northam only to find a sham Jerusalem in London. Clara begins life believing that she is doomed to be as her mother is, a woman without hope who remarks that when she is dead the garbage collector can cart her off. Mrs. Maugham is a jealous, inconsistent woman who verbally snipes at her neighbors behind her lace curtains because of their concern for their proprieties, and then she outdoes them in cheap ostentation. Rejecting such a life, Clara finds hope in literary images. Metaphors provide avenues of escape, as in the hymn. So too does a children’s story that makes a deep impression on her, The Two Weeds. The story presents the choices of two weeds. One decides on longevity at the cost of a miserly conservation of its resources, growing “low and small and brown”; the other longs for intensity, the spectacular but short life, and puts its efforts into fabulous display. Each weed achieves its goal. The small, plain one survives, as it had hoped. The magnificent, attractive weed is plucked and dies happily at the bosom of a lovely girl. What impresses Clara about this story is the offer of any possibility other than the low road of mere survival. Little by little, Clara chooses the mysteries of ecstasy. Clara has to make her way to these mysteries by rejecting a more moderate course, thus losing real opportunities to grow and succeed. Her intellect is widely despised by the good people of Northam, although it is valued by some of her teachers, who fight to attach her to their subjects. She is also revered by a boy named Walter Ash, who values culture and comes from a family tradition which stresses intellectual stimulation. Clara is cynical about her teachers’ admiration; she does not value their esteem. She allows Walter to go out with her, but has little regard for him. She ultimately rejects him, thinking, “I shall get further if I’m pulled, I can’t waste time going first.” This cryptic remark makes sense only in the light of her choices in London, to which she goes on scholarship to attend Queens College. By chance, she meets Clelia Denham at a poetry reading. This meeting drives her to an instinctual attachment to the girl and subsequently to her family, especially Clelia’s brother Gabriel, with whom she has an affair. Although her attachments to the Denhams “pull her,” and she does not need to “go first,” it is questionable whether they take her anywhere. Indeed, the Denhams provide her the accoutrements of ecstasy. The life she leads with them, however, having torn herself away from her unsatisfactory family, is not one that she builds herself. It is one that envelops her in a “radiance of glory.” The Denhams are rich, and their money is old. Their family house is exquisitely done in tile, fireplaces, pictures, and mirrors, old, good things. Outside the house is a terraced garden that to Clara is the original Eden. The Denhams themselves are good-looking people who dress well and speak cleverly. Mrs. Denham is a writer known professionally as Candida Grey. Mr. Denham is a lawyer. Magnus, the oldest boy, is a rich capitalist. Gabriel is in television, and Clelia works in a chic art gallery. To the detached eye, the Denham children seem smothered by this “good life.” The oldest child, no longer living in the Denham house, has gone crazy. Clelia is startlingly infantile. She speaks in all situations as if to a close relative, never using tact or discretion. Although twenty-seven years old, she lives at home, seemingly unable to establish herself on her own as wife, mother, or career woman. The job she holds in the gallery is purely decorative, one she obtained through family connections, and on which she could never support herself. Her extremely chic room contains her childhood toys as part of the decor. Clara interprets their presence as

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part of Clelia’s enviable sense of continuity with a happy childhood. Unfortunately for both Clelia and Clara, they are the sign of a childhood that has never ended. Gabriel is married and lives with his wife and children in one of those fashionable sections of London that are emerging from slum conditions. He has a good job with Independent Television and makes a good salary. He and his wife, Phillipa, make stunning personal impressions. When Clara visits the couple, however, she is appalled to find that their home is in a state of chaos. The house is potentially as beautiful as others in the neighborhood which have been renovated, but nothing has been done to it. The floors are pitted and worn, the walls are badly in need of paint, the ancient wallpaper hangs in tatters, and the rooms are poorly lit. The kitchen is a war zone in which the litter of cracking plaster vies with expensive cooking equipment. Phillipa is unable to provide food for her family or any kind of supportive attention to the children. Gabriel is unable to organize a life of his own, so dependent is he on the glorious life of his mother and father’s house. Gabriel becomes obsessively attracted to Clara and dreams of a ménage à trois between them and Clelia. Magnus is an industrial mogul, a bachelor who becomes parasitically and emotionally attached to Gabriel’s women. At first in love with Phillipa, when he senses the affair between Gabriel and Clara he begins an erotic flirtation with Clara. Clara gives herself over emotionally to all the Denhams, and sexually to the brothers Magnus and Gabriel. She feels little for them, or anyone, but the lust for inclusion in a beautiful life. She acts out increasingly more elaborate scenes with them, climaxed by a visit to Paris with Gabriel. During this journey, a flirtation between Clara and Magnus sends Gabriel back to the hotel where he and Clara are staying. Clara outdoes him by leaving him sleeping to miss his plane while she returns to London alone. Once there, she discovers that her mother is dying of cancer. Clara visits her mother but there is no feeling between them. Returning to London, her connections to her childhood severed, she finds that the affair with the Denhams is just beginning. Despite the seemingly decisive break in Paris, Clara is now well into Denham games. Her future is to be composed of “Clelia, and Gabriel and she herself in shifting and ideal conjunctions.” There is no mention of the development of her intellect or talents. Clara, at last, contemplates her victory: her triumph over her mother’s death, her triumph over her early life, her survival of all of it. “Even the mercy and kindness of destiny she would survive; they would not get her that way, they would not get her at all.” These final words are fully ironic: Clara has not triumphed over anything. She is a victim of her own fear of life. Her evasion of a nebulous “them” is a type of paranoid delusion which amounts to a horror of life. Clara has been true to her need to expand, but false to what she is. The outcome is not a joyous one. She has achieved a perverse isolation in a bogus, sterile Jerusalem. The Waterfall · The same themes are explored in Drabble’s next novel, The Waterfall. Though rendered in the first person by the central character, Jane Grey, The Waterfall is a highly ironic, fearfully complex exploration of the question which informs A Summer Bird-Cage and Jerusalem the Golden: To what must one be true? There is a vast variety of claims on one’s fidelity, and these claims frequently pull in different directions. Shall one be true to one’s family? One’s religion? One’s friends? One’s heart? One’s sexuality? One’s intellect? Even from the simple personal perspective, Drabble arrives at an impasse from which the protagonist herself cannot reckon her obligations or even the main issue deserving of her attention.

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Jane Grey begins her story giving birth, overwhelmed, that is, by her biology, shaped and determined by her gender, her flesh, her sexuality. This is confirmed by her statement to her husband, Malcolm, who has left her before the birth of their second child, “If I were drowning, I couldn’t reach out a hand to save myself, so unwilling am I to set myself up against my fate.” Jane Grey is a woman who does not give allegiance to anything that requires conscious choice. She cannot sustain a marriage, a career, or any affiliation that calls for directed will. She is faithful only to what takes her, overwhelms her, leaving her no choice—her sexuality. Thus, she can be a mother, but not a wife. She can be a lover, but not a companion. The result is that she becomes the adulterous, almost incestuous lover of James, her cousin Lucy’s husband. This comes about in a way that can be seen as nothing less than a betrayal of a number of social norms. Because Jane has been deserted by Malcolm, Lucy and James alternate visits to assist her. Lucy, who has been like a sister to Jane, initiates these visits without Jane’s request. Jane’s breaking of her marriage vows and her betrayal of Lucy is not as uncomplicated as Louise’s affair with John in A Summer Bird-Cage. Louise has violated nothing more than the law; Jane has violated the bonds of her heart, since Lucy has been so close to her, and the bonds of family and morality, as well as the bonds of law and ethics. Nevertheless, there is a fidelity in Jane’s choice. She and James, whose name is deliberately the male reflection of hers, are, in being overwhelmed by each other, satisfying the deepest narcissistic sexuality in each other. It is, of course, true that in so doing they create social limbo for their mates and children, and for themselves. Their adultery is discovered when they are in an automobile accident. James’s car hits a brick, although he is driving carefully, as they begin a weekend outing together with Jane’s children. The car turns over; only James is hurt, but he recovers almost fully. Jane and James continue with their ordinary life. Neither Malcolm nor Lucy exacts any payment from them. The lovers meet when they can. The novel ends with their only full weekend together after the accident. Jane and James climb the Goredale Scar, one of England’s scenic wonders. They are there because someone described it so enthusiastically to Jane that it became her goal to see it herself. The Scar is the quintessential female sexual symbol, a cavernous cleft in the mountains, flushed by a waterfall and covered by a pubic growth of foliage. Drabble then sends the lovers back to their hotel room to drink Scotch inadvertently dusted by talcum powder, which leaves a bad taste in their mouths. They have been faithful in their own minds to a force validated by nature. The Needle’s Eye · The Needle’s Eye, regarded by many readers as Drabble’s finest novel, takes its title from Jesus’ proverbial words to a rich young man: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). At the center of the novel are Simon Camish, a barrister from a poor background who would seem to have regretfully gained the world at the expense of his soul, and Rose Bryanston Vassiliou, a rich young woman who compulsively divests herself of the benefits of her inheritance but is not fully enjoying her flight into the lower classes. Rose, a pale, timid girl, had created a tabloid sensation by marrying out of her class. Her choice was the disreputable, seedy, sexy Christopher Vassiliou, son of Greek immigrants whose pragmatic financial dealings are not solidly within the boundaries of the law. Rose sought to escape from the evils of wealth through

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Christopher, one of the downtrodden. Much to her consternation, however, Christopher is not a “happy peasant.” He detests poverty, legitimately, and associates it not with virtue but with humiliation and deprivation, both of which he has endured. Christopher’s dream is to make something of himself. This dream is only strengthened by the birth of their three children, for whom Christopher wants “only the best.” He sees in Rose’s war on wealth nothing but perverse self-destructiveness. His fury vents itself in physical abuse. Frail, pale Rose is equally adamant in the protection of her children’s future. To her mind, “the best” means freedom from possessions. Again Rose and Christopher become figures of tabloid fantasy, this time in a dramatic divorce case. Rose is working out her divorce settlement when she meets Simon. Simon is introduced to the reader on the same night that he is introduced to Rose; the reader first sees him in a store, buying liquor. Simon feels estranged from the lower-class types who frequent and staff the store. Soon thereafter, this isolation is established as a sharp discontinuity in Simon’s life, for he has risen from these ranks. He has been pushed upward by a mother embarrassed by the meanness of her lower-class life and determined that her son will have what she never had. Ironically, the essential gap in his mother’s life is also left unfilled in Simon’s; that is, the need for warmth and affection. Simon tried to marry into an inheritance of warmth and wealth by his alliance with what he thought was a good-natured girl of the comfortable upper-middle class, Julie Phillips. Their marriage, however, only revealed her fear and insecurity, her essential coldness. What Simon had mistaken for warmth was merely superficial brightness, a by-product of the Phillipses’ affluence. Rose and Simon have attempted to gain what each personally lacked through marriage, as if one could graft onto oneself a human capacity with a wedding ring. Such marriages are doomed to failure. Also doomed has been Rose’s attempt to meet human needs with “filthy lucre.” She has given a huge portion of her inheritance to a schoolhouse in a lonely, little-known part of Africa. Within months, the school was demolished in the chaos of a civil war, along with approximately one hundred children. Rose does not attempt to deny the futility of what she has done. Simon and Rose strike up a professional acquaintance, casually, it seems, because Christopher has begun some devious maneuvers to get his children away from Rose. As he becomes increasingly involved in helping Rose, Simon realizes that he is in love with her. Rose reveals but a few of her feelings on this issue, but does indicate the joy she takes in his company. While Rose and Simon are chasing around after Christopher, who appears to be in the process of abducting the children and taking them out of England, Simon finally tells Rose that, were they at liberty, he would marry her. He blurts out this sentiment as they are walking in a woodland setting. The moment of his revelation finds them in sudden confrontation with a dead stoat, hanging grotesquely in front of them, a dried-up little corpse. According to the narrator, this is “a warning” to Simon and Rose. The satisfaction that Rose and Simon might find together is based on their shared concern for their obligations and duties. To turn to each other, a temptation for both of them, would be a betrayal of the very basis of their attraction to each other, as it would necessitate shirking their responsibilities. It is the grace in them that understands commitments beyond the self. Understanding this, Simon and Rose remain friends; Christopher and Rose are reunited. Rose has achieved a modus vivendi with Christopher, who goes to work for her father. There is no fully articulated happiness, but a kind of integrity exists at the heart of Rose’s and Simon’s arrangement.

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In the novel’s final tableau, Rose is looking at a vandalized lion outside a secondrate British edifice called the Alexandra Palace. The lion’s plaster head is broken, revealing a hollow inside. It has been spray-painted red with the name of a local gang, but Rose decides that she likes it. Although beginning life as an anonymous, massproduced piece of kitsch, the lion has been worn into something unique: “it had weathered into identity. And this she hoped for every human soul.” Rose’s final wish accepts the uniqueness of life, the beauty of its mere being. She rejects the vision of a life that is continually being held up to an intellectual ideal, by which standards the lion, like her life, is an awful mess. Drabble has said in an interview that, had she written The Needle’s Eye after her husband left her, she might have altered Rose’s destiny; perhaps she meant that Rose might have been sent off with Simon, after all. Perhaps these words reveal something of the personal Drabble, but they are a betrayal of the novel. The delicacy of Simon and Rose’s poise in front of the dead stoat and the final image of the lion resist second thoughts. The Realms of Gold · Drabble has called The Realms of Gold her only comedy. It is the most elaborately plotted of her novels, and Drabble has observed that comedies are permitted such carefully structured plots. Perhaps Drabble defends her plot to excuse herself for pivoting the outcome of her story on the delay in the mail of a postcard, consciously parodying the tragic turn of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595-1596), when Romeo’s letter from Friar Laurence is delayed. Unlike the passion of Romeo and Juliet, however, the passion of the lovers in The Realms of Gold, Frances Wingate and Karel Schmidt, is not “too swift, too unadvised.” Frances and Karel are survivors, and it is for this reason that true love is possible. The novel begins in a hotel room. Frances is on tour, lecturing about her discovery of an ancient city, Tizouk. One evening, in a fit of loneliness, she writes a postcard to Karel, whom she capriciously rejected six months previously. She now regrets her gesture. Impulsively, she writes on the card, “I miss you. I love you.” Bothered when she receives no response to her card, she is ignorant of the fact that her card has not been delivered, having been mislaid by the European mail system. Frances is distraught, but carries on as mother to her four children, as a professional, and as a member of her family. Karel, too, carries on, thinking hopelessly about Frances, his lost love, puzzled by her rejection of him, suffering at the hands of his deranged wife and his students at the polytechnic, where he is a lecturer in history. Both wife and students continually take advantage of Karel’s patience and good nature, and he, not quite understanding why, allows them to victimize him. Karel and Frances’s professional interests, history and archaeology, bring to the novel the long view of continuity. This view is partially what sustains Karel and Frances, whose families cannot or will not support them. Karel has been cut off from his family by the horrors of history. He is Jewish, the only member of his immediate family to survive World War II. Frances, on the other hand, has a large family, but it is wracked with odd and self-destructive behavior: alcoholism, suicide, depression. Frances’s family is composed of two estranged branches, isolated from each other by an ancient quarrel—that no one can remember—between two brothers. During the course of the novel, the branches are reconciled. The healing begins when Frances discovers her cousin David, of whom she has never before heard. She meets him professionally at a UNESCO conference in Adra.

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The conference has taken Frances away from England at a particularly crucial time in the life of her family. In Tockley, in the English midlands, an old lady discovered dead of starvation turns out to be Frances’s estranged great-aunt. As Frances’s family is a prominent one, there is a scandal about this shocking neglect of a family member. Frances is called home from the conference and discovers another lost cousin, Janet Bird, the last person to see their great-aunt alive. Meanwhile, Frances’s cousin David is surprised at the conference by the arrival of Karel, who, finally receiving the delayed postcard, flies heedlessly to join Frances at the conference and must be escorted by David back to Tockley. The upshot of these and more complications is the marriage of Karel and Frances and the reunification of Frances’s family. Frances and Karel synthesize stability and freedom; their marriage triumphantly asserts the victory of human freedom through history, continuity, and culture. The horrors of history present in both the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Frances’s blighted family history, and the evidence of child sacrifice which Frances has found in her ancient city Tizouk, do not lead to a rejection of continuity but to the passion to grow through it and outlive the evil it contains. The major image of the novel incarnates the comic attitude necessary if one is to lay hands on that hard-won treasure known as life. Shortly before Frances had rejected Karel, causing the long separation that was to end in Tockley, Frances and Karel were enjoying a holiday together. Endeavoring to spend a pleasant day in the country, they had driven their car into the mud, resulting in the bespattering of their persons in a most unromantic way. In the midst of their predicament, they heard a strange, almost ominous sound. An investigation turned up hundreds of frogs simply honking away in a drainage pipe in a ditch. Frances and Karel were flooded with affection and amusement at this gratuitously joyous spectacle. The image of it never leaves them and becomes a sustaining force during their ordeal of separation. Perhaps this is Drabble’s best image of a realistic optimism in a very flawed world, joy spontaneously uttered from a muddy ditch. The Ice Age · In The Ice Age, Drabble considers the problem of survival within a dying tradition. England is enduring an ice age: Its social structure is collapsing. In a brilliantly dark vision, Drabble surveys the challenge this poses to personal resources. As the novel begins, a reckless real estate speculator, Len Wincobank, is serving time in Scratby Open Prison for fraud. Len’s technically innocent accomplice, Maureen Kirby, is wondering how to fit the pieces of her life back together again. A teenage girl, Jane Murray, daughter of an extremely beautiful former actress, Alison Murray, is on trial in the remote Communist country of Wallachia. Anthony Keating, a charming author of musical comedies turned real estate speculator, is recovering from a heart attack and the collapse of his financial empire. All the characters are suffering through imprisonment in England. It is a time in which Max and Kitty Friedman are the victims of an IRA terrorist attack as they are having an anniversary dinner. England is plagued with degenerate youth, frightening in what it portends for the future. Jane Murray is an angry, shallow child, seemingly incapable of love or of true civility. Anthony Keating finds two young squatters on the empty floor of his former home. The girl is a heroin addict, pregnant and in labor. The boy is drunk and stoned, unable to summon assistance for the girl. Anthony’s chance visit to his old house means that the girl will get to the hospital, but she will die and her baby will be born suffering from prenatal heroin addiction.

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Through the gloom of England’s dark night, Drabble feels her way toward dawn, steadfastly refusing to deny the value of principle because history is suffering temporarily from chaos. She paints a damning picture of a contemporary of Anthony, Mike Morgan, a comedian who pointlessly and viciously ridicules his audience because he mistakes a bad patch for the end of coherence. She also, however, defends the human being as a flexible, creative source of energy not be be trapped within rigidities of principle. Alison Murray emerges as the polar opposite to Mike Morgan. She too is a doomed soul, because as England flails about, she has chosen the sterility of a noble perfection over the struggles of possibility. Alison’s choice has been to devote herself to her brain-damaged daughter Molly rather than to her normal daughter, Jane. Molly can never develop and grow, despite Alison’s martyrdom, and Jane is wild and sullen as a result of her displacement. Drabble shows that Alison’s choice is at least as bad as Mike’s, leading directly to her own misery and indirectly to Jane’s self-imposed troubles in Wallachia. Alison’s choice also leads indirectly to Anthony Keating’s downfall. Anthony, Alison’s lover, goes to Wallachia to escort Jane home when the authorities suddenly decide to return her to England. A civil war erupts, randomly freeing Jane and trapping Anthony. He is mistaken for a British spy and remanded to a Siberian-style forced labor camp. Between the extremes of Mike Morgan and Alison Murray lies the possibility of working one’s way back to continuity by keeping the spirit free. The major examples of such survival in the novel are Maureen Kirby and Anthony Keating. Maureen is a lower-class girl, sexy rather than beautiful, who falls somewhat short of conventional morality. Hardly a person who eschews extremes, Maureen has been the partner of Len Wincobank in his whirlwind financial spree. She has also temporarily retreated into her own selfish, protected world when Len is imprisoned, but she is resilient. In a striking narrative device, Drabble looks into the future at the end of the novel, coolly summarizing the fates of her characters. Maureen is projected as a woman of the 1980’s who ultimately marries well and becomes a model to young women. Her coarse-grained vitality and common sense lack the charm of Alison’s elegant self-immolation, but it radiates the warmth of survival. Anthony Keating, in his frozen Wallachian prison, the ice age of England made palpable, turns also toward life in the only way that is available to him. He becomes enthralled with watching birds, symbols of his spirit which, despite everything, remains untrammeled. At the close of the novel, the state of the nation is given a good prognosis. It will recover, asserts the narrator. Anthony has come to terms. Len will surely go on to further development and a financial comeback. Maureen’s trajectory is in ascent, but, asserts the narrator, Alison Murray will never recover. The doom of Alison Murray strongly suggests that her kind of retreat from possibility is the worst prison of all, subject to no reprieve or amelioration. Here Drabble seems to have found the limits of what critics have called her conservatism. Cutting off from one’s roots to rise in the world brings peril, denying one’s context in order to acquire more brings suffering; these may reveal the flaws in the liberal dream. The ultimate horror, however, would seem to be turning away from growth, regardless of the reason. The Radiant Way · In her novels of the 1980’s—The Middle Ground, The Radiant Way, and A Natural Curiosity—Drabble continued to work in the manner of The Realms of

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Gold and The Ice Age. Her intrusive narrators continued to reflect on the nature of fiction and to make arch asides to the reader. All three of these novels center on well-educated characters of the upper middle class whose domestic concerns are intertwined with larger social issues. The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and a long novel published in 1991, The Gates of Ivory, form a trilogy that follows a number of characters through the 1980’s and beyond. Not only is The Gates of Ivory a long book, it is also a demanding one. It moves from England to Thailand and back and seems to take as its subject not only the state of England but also the state of the world. In the book’s opening sentence, Drabble understandably wonders whether it is a novel at all. There is no doubt that the first two books in the trilogy are novels. As The Ice Age had shown Britain’s suffering during a Labour government, so these novels show national life under Margaret Thatcher. At the center of the novels are three women friends: Liz Headleand, a psychotherapist; Alix Bowen, an idealistic social worker; and Esther Breuer, a mysterious art historian who focuses on minor figures of the Italian Renaissance. The title The Radiant Way refers both to a book that Liz’s husband, Charles, read as a boy and to a television documentary he made in the 1960’s. It also provides the novel’s double-edged central symbol: the radiant personal sun of achievement that many of its youthful characters once envisioned and a radiant national future of justice and harmony. The novel’s other pervasive symbol is a web—a vast and complicated web of interconnections in which the characters live. The novel begins at Liz’s New Year’s Eve party in the last minutes of 1979. The 1980’s get off to a bad start when Charles announces that he is leaving her. Things get worse nationally as relations between social classes deteriorate and as the gap between the North and South of England widens. Alix, the most political of the three friends, finds that her efforts to help the underprivileged not only bear no fruit but also lead to horrible violence. She loses faith in her husband’s old-fashioned lower-class values and is content to sift through the papers of an old poet. Liz finds herself enmeshed in a personal web with her sister, Shirley Harper, unhappily married back in their home in the North of England, and with their mother, Rita. The Dickensian secret that Rita Ablewhite keeps is one of even more interrelationships. A Natural Curiosity · By means of a loosely constructed narrative that shifts from plot thread to plot thread, A Natural Curiosity enables readers to follow the stories of the three women up to the point where The Gates of Ivory begins. In A Natural Curiosity, Liz and her former husband try to discover what has happened to a friend of theirs who is being held hostage. Liz also worries about the fate of another friend, a novelist named Stephen Cox. (The story of Stephen Cox will form the backbone of the plot of The Gates of Ivory.) Alix, now living in the North, visits the murderer who was introduced in the previous novel and brings him books. In order to try and understand him, she tracks down and confronts his unpleasant father and even more unpleasant mother. Shirley Harper is more prominent in this book; she finds herself free for the first time in her adult life and flees to Paris and a wild affair. Liz and Shirley find that the Ablewhite family mysteries deepen and go in new directions; these lead in turn to new revelations and new energy. Drabble’s narrative voice is more intrusive than ever. Martha Nochimson, updated by George Soule

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Other major works PLAY: Bird of Paradise, pr. 1969. SCREENPLAYS: Isadora, 1969 (with Melvyn Bragg and Clive Exton); A Touch of Love, 1969. TELEPLAY: Laura, 1964. NONFICTION: Wordsworth: Literature in Perspective, 1966; Arnold Bennett: A Biography, 1974; A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature, 1979; The Tradition of Women’s Fiction: Lectures in Japan, 1982; Case of Equality, 1988; Stratford Revisited: A Legacy of the Sixties, 1989; Angus Wilson: A Biography, 1995. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age, 1978. EDITED TEXTS: Lady Susan; The Watsons; Sanditon, all 1974 (by Jane Austen); The Genius of Thomas Hardy, 1975; The Oxford Companion to English Literature: New Edition, 1985, rev. ed. 1995; 6th ed. 2000. Bibliography Bokat, Nicole Suzanne. The Novels of Margaret Drabble: This Freudian Family Nexus. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Part of the Sexuality and Literature series, this volume examines the sexual and psychological backgrounds of Drabble’s characters. Creighton, Joanne V. Margaret Drabble. New York: Methuen, 1985. This slim volume begins with an introductory overview, followed by a chronological survey of Drabble’s novels through The Middle Ground. Creighton argues that Drabble, with such contemporaries as John Fowles and Muriel Spark, has gradually changed her approach to fiction, “challenging the conventions and epistemological assumptions of traditional realistic fiction, perhaps in spite of herself.” Includes notes and a bibliography. Hannay, John. The Intertextuality of Fate: A Study of Margaret Drabble. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Drabble’s characters sometimes think they are fated when their lives seem to imitate the patterns (or intertexts) of stories they have read. As a result, Drabble’s references to other stories are not decorations but serious allusions to the myths that shape the novels. Accidents and coincidences often signal that an intertext is in operation. Myer, Valerie Grosvenor. Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Myer usefully identifies allusions, sets historical and literary contexts, and summarizes critical opinions. Rose, Ellen Cronan, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Drabble. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. An important collection of essays and a useful introduction to Drabble’s career. ____________. The Novels of Margaret Drabble: Equivocal Figures. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980. Rose’s study seeks to “acknowledge and applaud [Drabble’s] feminist vision and encourage her to give it freer rein in the future.” Drabble’s first three novels are discussed together in the opening chapter, while each of her next five novels (through The Ice Age) is given a separate chapter. Includes a list of works cited and endnotes for each chapter. Rubenstein, Roberta. “Fragmented Bodies/Selves/Narratives: Margaret Drabble’s Postmodern Turn.” Contemporary Literature 35 (Spring, 1994): 136-155. Rubenstein treats Drabble’s novels of the 1980’s and 1990’s and shows how they are fragmented in postmodern ways. Sadler, Lynn Veach. Margaret Drabble. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Acknowledging that Drabble both “exasperates and delights” her, Sadler offers a balanced and readable appraisal. A very brief biographical sketch is followed by a chronological survey

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of Drabble’s novels through The Middle Ground, with a coda on “Drabble’s Reputation.” Includes notes and an extensive bibliography, both primary and secondary; entries for secondary sources are annotated. Soule, George. Four British Women Novelists: Anita Brookner, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym—An Annotated and Critical Secondary Bibliography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1998. An analysis and evaluation of most of the critical books and articles on Drabble through 1996. Talwar, Sree Rashmi. Woman’s Space: The Mosaic World of Margaret Drabble and Nayantara Sahgal. New Delhi: Creative Books, 1997. A comparative study of Indian writer Sahgal and Drabble, exploring the effects of feminism on the writers.

Daphne Du Maurier Daphne Du Maurier

Born: London, England; May 13, 1907 Died: Par, Cornwall, England; April 19, 1989 Principal long fiction · The Loving Spirit, 1931; I’ll Never Be Young Again, 1932; The Progress of Julius, 1933; Jamaica Inn, 1936; Rebecca, 1938; Frenchman’s Creek, 1941; Hungry Hill, 1943; The King’s General, 1946; The Parasites, 1949; My Cousin Rachel, 1951; Mary Anne, 1954; The Scapegoat, 1957; Castle Dor, 1962 (with Arthur Quiller-Couch); The Glass-Blowers, 1963; The Flight of the Falcon, 1965; The House on the Strand, 1969; Rule Britannia, 1972. Other literary forms · In addition to her many novels, Daphne du Maurier wrote and edited biographies, collections of letters, travel books, plays, and short stories. Her biographical works include Gerald: A Portrait (1934), the life story of her actor father; The du Mauriers (1937), the inside story of her famous family of actors, dramatists, and novelists; and Young George du Maurier: A Selection of His Letters, 1860-67 (1951), a selection of her caricaturist-novelist grandfather’s letters. She earned a place among playwrights with The Years Between (1945) and September Tide (1949). Her travel book Vanishing Cornwall (1967) described the rugged coastal area of southwestern England, where she set so many of her novels and stories. Often weaving elements of the supernatural into her tales of mystery and romance, du Maurier produced several notable volumes of short stories, including Echoes from the Macabre in 1976 and Classics from the Macabre in 1987. Achievements · The theatrical quality of du Maurier’s novels is evidenced by the frequency and reported ease with which her works were adapted for the big screen. Alfred Hitchcock directed film versions of Jamaica Inn, in 1939, and her best-selling gothic novel Rebecca, in 1940. The latter won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Paramount filmed Frenchman’s Creek in 1944. Universal Pictures released a film adaptation of Hungry Hill in 1947, for which du Maurier herself wrote the first draft of the screenplay. My Cousin Rachel became a Twentieth Century Fox production in 1952, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released The Scapegoat in 1959. Hitchcock turned her story “The Birds” into a highly successful motion picture in 1963. Her story “Don’t Look Now” became a hit film in 1973. Rebecca won an award from the American Booksellers’ Association in 1939. In 1969, du Maurier was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Biography · Daphne du Maurier was born to a theatrical family. Her father, Gerald, was an actor and manager; her mother, Muriel Beaumont, was an actress. Du Maurier was educated in both England and France. Plagued from childhood by feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, she turned to writing to achieve the solitude she desperately craved. She preferred fantasy to reality and shunned social engagements. She began writing stories and poems in her teens. By the time she was in her twenties, she was selling regularly to magazines such as The Bystander and the Sunday Review. She wrote her first novel, The Loving Spirit, when she was only twenty-two years 291

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old. This romantic family saga earned both critical acclaim and best-seller status. It so impressed a major in the Grenadier Guards that he arranged a meeting with its author. The two soon developed an attachment, and in 1932 du Maurier married the Major Frederick Arthur Montague Browning, whom she called Tommy. He later earned the rank of lieutenant general, became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the household of Princess Elizabeth, and became treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh. The couple had three children: daughters Flavia and Tessa and son Christian. Browning died in 1965. In 1943, du Maurier fulfilled a childhood dream and moved into Menabilly, a seventy-room manor house in Cornwall that inspired Manderley, the eerie setting for Rebecca. She adored the reputedly haunted house, asserting that it whispered its secrets to her in the solitude of midnight. Never one for social life, she preferred solitary walks in the woods to bustling cities and glittering social gatherings. Family life was seldom serene, with du Maurier’s troubled and erratic spirit manifesting itself in frequently problematic ways, while Browning was plagued with psychological problems and poor physical health, both associated with his chronic abuse of alcohol. A rocky marriage was only one of this writer’s torments. Her biographer, Margaret Forster, asserts that du Maurier’s stories and novels reflected severe emotional turbulence. Du Maurier had, Forster said, a stifling relationship with her father, a complicated extramarital affair, and a lesbian relationship with actress Gertrude Lawrence. The details of daily life troubled her, and she frequently retreated from family and friends to find solace in make-believe. Twice she faced plagiarism charges and endured the agonies of court hearings as a result of claims that she had stolen the second-wife theme used in Rebecca. Although she was acquitted in both instances, the publicity wearied and shamed her, and she grew increasingly reclusive in later life. Analysis · Du Maurier came naturally by her dramatic bent. Having eschewed a career in acting, she turned instead to writing, creating the settings of her novels as a vivid stage upon which her melodramas could unfold. Most often, she wrote about what she knew: the craggy, tempestuous coasts and climate of Cornwall. With the playwright’s flare, she elicited as much suspense from her setting as from her characters and plots. Du Maurier yearned to write light romance, but it was not in her nature. “I may determine to write a gay, light romance. But I go for a walk on a moor and see a twisted tree and a pile of granite stones beside a deep, dark pool, and Jamaica Inn is born,” she told Current Biography in 1940. Du Maurier’s readers can only be glad for the writer’s solitary walks, for Jamaica Inn and the writer’s many other haunting novels and stories rank among the finest spine-tingling page-turners ever written. Her books contain passion, jealousy, evil, and murder, with surprise heaped upon surprise. While du Maurier’s works may not probe the depths of human experience, they create worlds and peoples which haunt long after the book is finished. Du Maurier believed in her own brand of predestination, a reincarnation of the human spirit. Evil is inevitable in her view, but not insurmountable. Yet people are, by their very nature, condemned to a vision that exceeds their grasp. Her interest in character took a backseat to her fascination with personality types symbolic of abstract qualities of good and evil. She told Barbara Nichols in an interview for Ladies Home Journal: “I am not so much interested in people as in types—types who represent great forces of good or evil. I don’t care very much whether John Smith likes Mary Robinson, goes to bed with Jane Brown and then refuses to pay the hotel bill. But I am [emphasis in original] passionately interested in human cruelty, human lust, and human avarice—and, of course, their counterparts in the scale of virtue.”

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Although critics have complained about her melodrama, plot contrivances, shallow characterization, romanticism, sentimentality, vague motivations, and moralizing, such commentary probably misses the point. Du Maurier’s unfailing appeal to her readers is fundamental: She tells a good story, and she tells it well. Unsurpassed as a teller of gothic tales tinged with horror or the supernatural, she is worth studying if only for her pacing, which moves from plot twist to plot twist with consummate ease. A romance writer in the best sense of the label, she creates engaging heroines blessed with immense inner strength. Her heroes establish the model for modern romances: dark of complexion, dark of spirit, silent, enigmatic, harboring some unspeakable secret. Her settings evoke the foreboding ambience of Cornwall’s precipitous cliffs and misty moors, the perfect backdrop for the dramatic events that so astonish and delight her readers. Rebecca · Among the most memorable opening lines in English literature is the first sentence of du Maurier’s best-known work, Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” In a landscape of words, du Maurier takes her readers to Manderley to hear the rustle of leaves, smell the flowers in the garden, luxuriate in the opulence of the estate’s drawing room. As ominous waves pound the Cornish coast, the dark tale unfolds. Maxim de Winter, the brooding, detached master of Manderley, marries in haste while abroad and brings his new bride home to Cornwall. The new Mrs. de Winter (whose given name is never revealed) recounts her tale entirely in flashback, compelling the reader to stay with her as the reason for her departure from Manderley is slowly brought to light. What begins as a Cinderella story—this young girl of modest means swept off her feet by a wealthy, powerful gentleman—soon turns sinister. The narrator is haunted by the lingering influence of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, who died in a sailing accident. Yet Rebecca’s presence is perpetually felt; even the name of Rebecca’s boat, Je reviens (French for “I return”), suggests its owner will not depart, either in body or in spirit. Manderley itself seems keeper of Rebecca’s mystique, with its forbidden halls, haunted rooms, and secret passages accidentally discovered. Beautiful, witty, flirtatious, and strong, Rebecca looms large—her power all the greater, even as a memory, for its contrast to the reticent nature of de Winter’s diffident, second bride. The narrator imagines she can hear Rebecca calling to the dogs and Rebecca’s evening dress rustling on the stairs. The housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, exhibits fierce loyalty to the first Mrs. de Winter and sullen contempt for the second. Cruelly, she plots to displace the narrator from Manderley and drive a wedge between its master and mistress. The ensuing labyrinth of deceptions, betrayals, and revelations spellbinds readers and proves that the new Mrs. de Winter is not without resources. Determined to uncover the truth and break free of Rebecca’s legacy, she counters the housekeeper’s wicked lies and her husband’s silent brooding with a resolute search for the truth. In a surprise ending, she rises whole and victorious, her nightmare ended and justice served. Manderley was great and corrupt, just as was Max’s dead wife. Readers find it satisfying to learn that love can be deep and enduring enough to overcome an adversary as powerful as Rebecca. Jamaica Inn · Critics praised Jamaica Inn as a tale nineteenth century adventure writer Robert Louis Stevenson would have been proud to write, and du Maurier admitted it was similar to—and inspired by—Treasure Island. The rain-swept Cornish coast in raw

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November portends danger, but orphan Mary Yellan is determined to keep the promise she made to her dying mother, to make her home with her victimized Aunt Patience and brutish Uncle Joss. Working at the dilapidated Jamaica Inn, where thieves and smugglers come to divide their spoils and pirates plot their next raids, Mary discovers a secret about her father’s death. Alone and afraid, Mary feels a sexual (although not romantic) attraction to Jem Merlyn, Joss’s younger brother and a domineering ruffian not above violence. In the background lurks the mysterious vicar of Altarnum, who hides a few secrets of his own. With its twisted motives, midnight crimes, smugglers, and secrets, this is du Maurier at her best. Although depicting a rather pessimistic view of the plight of women as helpless and subservient, the fast-paced adventure gains fresh popularity with each new generation of readers who discover it. The House on the Strand · In du Maurier’s penultimate novel, The House on the Strand, the narrator Dick (the last among five du Maurier books featuring a male protagonist) travels back to fourteenth century England, his journeys made possible by an experimental drug concocted by his scientist friend and mentor, Magnus. A stereotypic “nice guy,” Dick marries an American who is already mother to two sons. Dick is no fan of women (including his wife), judging the feminine point of view trivial and restrictive, but he changes his mind when he becomes entranced with Isolda, a woman of the fourteenth century saddled with a faithless husband. Dick develops as a pathetic character who longs for perceived glories of the past but can find no fulfillment in any epoch, past or present. Combining historical fact with psychological analysis, the book paints the same haunting atmosphere so apparent in du Maurier’s earlier works, this time using the Kilmarth house in Cornwall and its rich history as both setting and theme. Dick’s unwillingness to be pulled away from his time travels reflects du Maurier’s own total immersion in her fantasy worlds. When writing, she lost herself in the lives of her characters, finding real life little more than a distraction and an annoyance. Faith Hickman Brynie Other major works SHORT FICTION: Come Wind, Come Weather, 1940; Happy Christmas, 1940; The Apple Tree, 1952; Kiss Me Again, Stranger, 1952; Early Stories, 1955; The Breaking Point, 1959; The Treasury of du Maurier Short Stories, 1959; Not After Midnight, 1971; Echoes from the Macabre, 1976; The Rendezvous and Other Stories, 1980; Classics from the Macabre, 1987. PLAYS: The Years Between, pb. 1945; September Tide, pb. 1949. NONFICTION: Gerald: A Portrait, 1934; The du Mauriers, 1937; Young George du Maurier: A Selection of His Letters, 1860-67, 1951; The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, 1960; Vanishing Cornwall, 1967; Golden Lads: Anthony Bacon, Francis and their Friends, 1975; The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall, 1976; Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer, 1977 (pb. in U.S. as Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer, 1977); The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories, 1980; Letters from Menabilly: Portrait of a Friendship, 1994 (Oriel Mallet, editor). Bibliography Block, Maxine, ed. Current Biography: Who’s News and Why: 1940. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940: 262-264. Up close and personal with the novelist at the beginning of her career, including insights into her involvement with the war effort.

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Breit, H. “Talk with Lady Browning.” New York Times Book Review, March 16, 1952, p. 25. A glimpse into the character of du Maurier in her maturity. Cook, Judith. Daphne: A Portrait of Daphne du Maurier. London: Bantam Books, 1991. Good insights into the woman and the author. Du Maurier, Daphne. Letters from Menabilly: Portrait of a Friendship. Edited by Oriel Malet. New York: M. Evans, 1994. A selection of Du Maurier’s correspondence during the middle part of her life. Forster, Margaret. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York: Doubleday, 1993. A candid, meticulous, and riveting biography, prepared with cooperation of the du Maurier family after du Maurier’s death. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. An evaluation of du Maurier’s fiction from historical, cultural, geographic, and female gothic literary perspectives. Kelly, Richard Michael. Daphne du Maurier. Boston: Twayne, 1987. A solid introduction to the author’s works. Includes index and bibliography. Leng, Flavia. Daphne du Maurier: A Daughter’s Memoir. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1994. A good biography of du Maurier written by her daughter.

Lawrence Durrell Lawrence Durrell

Born: Julundur, India; February 27, 1912 Died: Sommières, France; November 7, 1990 Principal long fiction · Pied Piper of Lovers, 1935; Panic Spring, 1937 (as Charles Norden); The Black Book, 1938; Cefalû, 1947 (republished as The Dark Labyrinth, 1958); Justine, 1957; Balthazar, 1958; Mountolive, 1958; Clea, 1960; The Alexandria Quartet, 1962 (includes previous 4 novels); Tunc, 1968; Nunquam, 1970; Monsieur: Or, The Prince of Darkness, 1974; Livia: Or, Buried Alive, 1978; Constance: Or, Solitary Practices, 1981; Sebastian: Or, Ruling Passions, 1983; Quinx: Or, The Ripper’s Tale, 1985; The Avignon Quintet, 1992 (includes previous 5 novels). Other literary forms · Lawrence Durrell was a prolific writer in many genres. As a successful poet, he published many books, including Ten Poems (1932); Bromo Bombastes (1933); Transition: Poems (1934); A Private Country (1943); Cities, Plains, and People (1946); On Seeming to Presume (1948); Deus Loci (1950); The Tree of Idleness and Other Poems (1955); Private Drafts (1955); Selected Poems (1956); The Ikons and Other Poems (1966); The Red Limbo Lingo (1971); Vega and Other Poems (1973); and Collected Poems 1931-1974 (1980). He wrote three plays in verse, Sappho (pr. 1950), An Irish Faustus (pb. 1963), and Acte (pr. 1964). He also published travel books such as Prospero’s Cell (1945), Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), Bitter Lemons (1957), Sicilian Carousel (1977), and The Greek Islands (1978). His essays and letters were published in A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952), Art and Outrage (1959), Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence (1963, George Wickes, editor), and Spirit of Place (1969, Alan G. Thomas, editor). His publisher apparently persuaded him to identify one of his books, White Eagles over Serbia (1957), as being “for juveniles.” He translated Greek poetry by C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, and others, as well as The Curious History of Pope Joan (1954; revised as Pope Joan: A Romantic Biography, 1960) by Emmanuel Royidis. He published widely in periodicals as various as Mademoiselle, Quarterly Review of Literature, New Statesman, T’ien Hsia Monthly of Shanghai and Réalités, and he edited anthologies of poetry and collections of letters. He also spent some time working on the screenplay for the 1963 film Cleopatra. His last book, a nonfiction work entitled Caesar’s Vast Ghost: A Portrait of Provence, appeared in 1990. Achievements · Although Durrell was highly respected as a poet and travel writer, it is generally agreed that his greatest accomplishments were his The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet. There is little doubt that Durrell’s place in twentieth century literature rests on these extraordinary works. Throughout his career, Durrell had a sensuous, ornate, and lyrical style that sometimes degenerated into overwriting—a tendency to which he freely admitted. In his best books, however, the style reflected his Mediterranean surroundings of Greece, Egypt, or Provence, France. Influenced by Henry Miller but by no means an imitator of him, Durrell appealed to so-called literary tastes beginning with The Black Book. Yet the popularity of The Alexandria Quartet seems to be the result of the blend of an exceptional style with an exotic setting and characters, wit, and exciting plot elements such as murder, conspiracy, and 296

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unrequited love. The Avignon Quintet has these same elements and is no less a literary triumph for its lack of public acclaim. Biography · Lawrence George Durrell was born in Julundur, India, on February 27, 1912, to Lawrence Samuel Durrell, an English engineer who built the Tata Iron and Steel Works, and Louise Florence “Dixie” Durrell, of Irish heritage. Both his parents’ families had been in India for some time. When the boy was very young, the Durrells moved to Kurseong, near the Himalayas, so that the elder Durrell could accept a three-year contract on a mountain railway to Darjeeling. The sight of the mountains made a strong impression on the boy, so much so that he once described his childhood in a letter to Henry Miller as “a brief dream of Tibet.” While in Darjeeling, he began his education at the College of St. Joseph and received the first encouragement for his writing from a Belgian priest, Father Joseph De Guylder. At twelve, Durrell was sent to England with his brother Leslie “to get the hallmark,” as his father said, of a public school education. He attended St. Olave’s and St. Saviour’s Grammar School, where he developed his lifelong interest in Elizabethan writers, and later entered St. Edmund’s School in Canterbury. Despite several attempts, he was never admitted to Cambridge University and would later write of his life in England, “That mean shabby little island . . . wrung my guts out of me and tried to destroy anything singular and unique in me.” The death of his father left Durrell with a small income, which he used to move to Bloomsbury in order to become a writer. During his Bloomsbury years, Durrell held a number of odd jobs, including jazz pianist and composer, race-car driver, and real-estate agent. During this period, he also met his first wife, Nancy Myers, a student at the Slade School, with whom he ran a photo studio for a time. At nineteen, he met John Gawsworth in a café after fleeing from an upstairs window during a police raid on the Blue Peter Night Club, where Durrell was playing piano. Awed by Gawsworth’s personal knowledge of many famous authors, he became his friend, and though they often disagreed on literary matters—Gawsworth was a very conservative poet who admired the literature of the 1890’s and had little respect for W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender—Gawsworth helped him to get his first poems published. Ten Poems was published in 1932 under the pseudonym “Gaffer Peeslake” by Caduceus Press, founded by Durrell, his wife, and George Wilkinson. Durrell began his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, while he and Nancy lived for a year in a Sussex cottage with George and Pam Wilkinson. After the Wilkinsons immigrated to Corfu, Greece, Durrell lived with his mother, sister, and two brothers in Bournemouth, where they received glowing letters from the Wilkinsons. Excited by the idea of the warm climate, Durrell left his novel under consideration at Cassell’s and departed for Corfu. When the rest of his family followed a few weeks later, they bore the news that the book had been accepted, confirming Durrell in his notion to take up writing as a profession, though very few copies of the book would sell. The residence in Corfu had two important results for him. First, it began his long association with Greece, its poetry, and language; and second, he discovered Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller. The latter was probably the most significant development in the young Durrell’s career. He wrote a letter of praise to Miller, who responded warmly, saying that the letter was the most intelligent he had yet received from a Briton about his book. By 1936, Durrell was clearly under the influence of Miller, apologizing for his second novel and engrossed in writing The Black Book. The next year, Durrell announced that

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he was the “first writer to be fertilized by H. M.” and sent The Black Book to Miller, who paused in the writing of Tropic of Capricorn (1939) to type out (with Anaïs Nin) three copies to be sent to Herbert Read, T. S. Eliot, and Jack Kahane. Kahane published it in Paris, and Eliot endorsed it as “the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction.” Durrell visited Paris, and Miller later visited Corfu, solidifying a friendship which would last until the latter’s death, despite Durrell’s forthright, often scathing, reviews of Miller’s later works. The war interrupted Durrell’s idyllic life in Corfu. He moved to Athens in 1940, where he worked for the British Embassy, and then was posted to the Institute of English Studies in Kalamata. While in Athens he met George Katsimbalis and George Seferiades (“Seferis”), both of whose works he would later translate. In 1941, he was forced to escape the Nazi invasion with Nancy and their daughter Penelope Berengaria in an old caïque bound for Crete. From Crete, they went on to Egypt, where Durrell served as a foreign press service officer for the British Information Service. Nancy and Penelope spent the war in Palestine, and the marriage deteriorated, resulting in a divorce in 1947, when Durrell married Eve Cohen, a dark-eyed Alexandrian woman who may have partly inspired the character of Justine. Happy to escape from Egypt, Durrell lived for a time on Rhodes, then in Argentina and Yugoslavia, disliking both places. In the early 1950’s, he left Yugoslavia for Cyprus, where he bought a home, taught school, and, during the developing civil war, became Public Relations Officer for the British government. His second marriage deteriorated early in his stay on Cyprus, but by 1956, he had completed Justine, the first novel of The Alexandria Quartet. Late that year, he moved on to Dorset with Claude-Marie Vincenden, later to become his third wife, where he worked on Bitter Lemons, a book drawing on his experiences in Cyprus. Financially exhausted, but unable to live away from the Mediterranean area for very long, Durrell and Claude began to look for a home in the Midi. Virtually overnight, he became a world-renowned author when Justine, Bitter Lemons, White Eagles over Serbia, and Esprit de Corps were published in 1957. He was translated into numerous foreign languages and could devote his entire time to writing. With his favored mode of work being intense days of some fourteen hours of writing, he allegedly produced Justine in four months, Balthazar in six weeks, Mountolive in twelve weeks, and Clea in eight. For thirty years or so, Durrell lived a settled life in Provence, with occasional travel. On March 27, 1961, he and Claude were married, and in 1966, they moved into a larger house in Sommieres to accommodate their guests, Claude’s children by a previous marriage, Penelope, and their daughter Sappho-Jane. After a period of declining health, Claude died on New Year’s Day, 1967. In 1973, Durrell married Ghislaine de Boysson, but by 1986 his fourth marriage was finished. The five novels of The Avignon Quintet appeared between 1974 and 1985 to mixed reviews, but there is no question that this thirteen-hundred-page sequence is a tour de force of the first order. Lawrence Durrell died on November 7, 1990, at the age of seventy-eight in his home in Provence. His literary reputation, which rests chiefly on The Alexandria Quartet, is higher on the Continent and in the United States than in Great Britain. Analysis · Lawrence Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, is a story of life among the bohemians at Bloomsbury. It was sufficiently dismal to provoke a publisher to advise him to offer Panic Spring under the pseudonym of Charles Norden, so that the

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latter, a slightly better book, would not be associated with its predecessor. Panic Spring has been described as being influenced by, even imitative of, the works of Aldous Huxley; even as it was published, Durrell was writing an apology to Henry Miller for his “new and facile novel.” In essence, Durrell’s early career was characterized by a search for a paradigm or form for his talent, a search that ended with his discovery of Tropic of Cancer. The Black Book · The impact of Miller’s novel on the young Durrell was enormous. A comparison of his earlier works with his third novel, The Black Book, reveals a dramatic transformation. His creative impulses have been freed. As he described it in 1959, The Black Book is “a two-fisted attack on literature by a young man in the thirties,” taking its aggressive intent from Miller’s all-out assault on the literary establishment. The narrator, Lawrence Lucifer, recounts his experiences in a seedy London hotel from the perspective of his life on Corfu. In the hotel, he finds the diary of Herbert Gregory, which overlaps with his own experiences. There are numerous other characters and much obscurity as to the details of time and event. There is a great deal of erotic content, both homosexual and heterosexual, as the characters betray and cuckold one another. The novel’s themes are revealed not through a carefully constructed plot but through a series of scenes, reminiscences, and vignettes. Durrell later wrote in the 1959 introduction to the second edition of The Black Book: With all its imperfections lying heavy on my head, I can’t help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting, perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. In it, the reader finds the first cry of Durrell’s literary voice, his exotic characters, his sensual and sensuous prose, and his experiments with narrative time. When it was published, T. S. Eliot (among others) was perspicacious enough to recognize the voice of a major new talent. Had Durrell ended his career with The Black Book, it would most likely be forgotten. Burdened with an excessively baroque style, it is of interest chiefly because of its place in his career. The Dark Labyrinth · Cefalû, Durrell’s next novel (reissued as The Dark Labyrinth after Justine had assured Durrell a place in twentieth century literature), can be viewed in much the same way as The Black Book. In it, he seems to be discovering himself, experimenting, finding the form and style which would achieve maturity in The Alexandria Quartet. One also sees a tugging away from Miller’s influence—only a few years later, Durrell would write a scathing indictment of Miller’s Sexus (1949)—and a reversion to the influence of Aldous Huxley that had been so apparent in Panic Spring. The Dark Labyrinth has extensive allegorical elements, reminiscent of Huxley: The characters are trapped in a labyrinth in Crete, and each finds in the maze that for which he or she has been looking. The book was written quickly—which is not unusual for Durrell—and seems rather derivative in structure, though the writing itself often attains his characteristic brilliance. The Alexandria Quartet · The four novels which compose The Alexandria Quartet are collectively one of the greatest achievements in the modern novel. Like many modern works, The Alexandria Quartet often seems to be about the creation of fiction. Darley, the narrator of Justine and Balthazar, is a novelist, as are two other characters. Diversity

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in point of view is regularly exploited through the use of diaries, letters, and recounted experiences. Truth becomes subjective and layered. The characters’ knowledge is limited to what they perceive, and numerous questions are left unanswered. The Alexandria Quartet is also an examination of love in the modern world as the characters pass through convoluted interrelationships. Sex and love, like art, become ways of glimpsing underlying truths, of developing one’s knowledge of reality. Durrell has also stated that The Alexandria Quartet consists of four parts because he was attempting to produce a novelistic version of Albert Einstein’s universe. Relativity (or subjectivity) thus appears as a justification for the exploitation of point of view, for the questionable reliability of narrators, and for an exploration of time and memory. Durrell, however, is careful, despite the modern and postmodern objectives of The Alexandria Quartet, to hang all the theory on a generous structure of narrative. There are a number of stories of betrayal, murder, love, devotion, and tragedy intertwined, and although they are elusive, they make the tetralogy accessible in a way that many “experimental” works are not, without compromising the artistic integrity of the work. Finally, Durrell’s extraordinary prose, his poetic, lyrical, and erotic use of language, elevates The Alexandria Quartet above most modern fiction, although this talent was manifest as early as The Black Book, provoking Miller to write “You are the master of the English language.” Some critics have regarded Durrell’s prose as excessive, overdone, a flamboyant collection of purple clichés and Victorian decadence. Yet, in each of his major works, and especially in The Alexandria Quartet, it is difficult to imagine a prose style without his deliberate rhythms and cadences that would be suitable to his themes and extraordinary settings. The chief characters of The Alexandria Quartet may be loosely based upon people Durrell had known. Darley has a number of characteristics in common with the author: They are both novelists; three women (up to the writing of the novel) have played a major part in both their lives; and they have held similar jobs. Other resemblances between other characters and certain “real people” might be noted, but these would only contribute to the thematic question of how reality is transformed by experience, recollection, and novelization. The whole question adds another layer to the multiple levels among which the tetralogy moves. Justine is one of the most haunting characters in the tetralogy. Born in Alexandria, she is a dark, beautiful Jewess with an intense sexuality and an obscure background. She runs the gamut of sexual pleasure and is seen from a variety of viewpoints, including the romanticized memories of Darley’s love, the cynical stance of the novelist Pursewarden, and the roman à clef of her first husband, Arnauti. Though not really in love with Nessim Hosnani, a Copt, she marries the devoted Egyptian on the condition that he help her find her kidnapped child. Nessim becomes involved in gunrunning into Palestine because of his hatred of the English. Narouz—Nessim’s harelipped, violent, and earthy brother—becomes a force in the second and third volumes of the tetralogy. Balthazar, a physician, gives his name to the second volume, which he also partly narrates, though he is present throughout the books. A mystic homosexual, he seems to know most of the other characters’ secrets, and his illuminations of Darley’s perceptions provide new insights into the situations. Mountolive is a diplomat who has an affair with Leila Hosnani, Nessim’s mother, who later contracts smallpox, loses her beauty, and engages in a lengthy correspondence with Mountolive, who falls in love with Pursewarden’s blind sister, Liza. Alexandria, with its convoluted intrigues, gradually wears away the English confidence of the diplomat as Nessim and others betray him as he investigates the

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circumstances of Pursewarden’s suicide. Clea is a superstitious artist, beloved of Narouz, lover of Justine, Dr. Amaril, and eventually, Darley. With blonde hair and blue eyes, Clea’s northern European beauty contrasts with Justine’s Mediterranean beauty. Even this short summary of the characters reveals the complexity of the story line of The Alexandria Quartet, and there are even more characters who play important roles: Scobie, the transvestite who becomes a saint; Cohen, who plots to liberate Palestine; Dr. Amaril, who loves the noseless Semira; Mnemjian, the dwarf barber; Pombal, involved in espionage; Capodistria of the great sexual prowess; and Toto de Brunel, who is murdered with a hatpin, probably by mistake. A complete list of characters would number more than one hundred. Alexandria itself has often been discussed as playing a characterlike role in the tetralogy. Like James Joyce’s Dublin, Marcel Proust’s Paris, and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the landscape exhibits a crucial influence upon the characters, determining their behavior. Sometimes characters seem to be mere expressions of some element of the landscape, appearing and disappearing into the textures of Alexandrian life, just as the “reality” of Scobie is absorbed into the legend of “El Scob.” Alexandria is mysterious, full of deception and treachery. There are always murderous undercurrents, such as when Justine suspects Nessim’s plans to kill Darley at the duck shoot and when Toto is murdered at the masked ball, probably in Justine’s place. Even Narouz’s frustration at being unable to satisfy his love for Clea seems to explode out of his harpoon gun after his death, the accident nearly causing her to drown when her hand is staked to a sunken ship. A brief discussion of The Alexandria Quartet can hardly do justice to the complexity of the work. With no ostensible intention of making a moral statement, Durrell’s foremost intention was the creation of a work of art which reflected the relativistic sensibility of the modern world, yet he carefully maintained an absorbing plot to serve as a skeleton on which to flesh out his musings on love, sex, art, writing, memory, and time. Although Durrell celebrates life in a way many contemporary artists do not, The Alexandria Quartet also reveals ambiguities and darknesses. The tetralogy cannot be reduced to story, theme, or message. Its lush writing becomes a sensory experience of a world with overlapping, often conflicting layers of reality. Tunc and Nunquam · Tunc and Nunquam, the pair of novels which followed The Alexandria Quartet, have much in common with the tetralogy, despite the great difference in subject matter. Felix Charlock invents a computer, named Abel, which can recall or predict virtually anything. Charlock soon finds himself under contract to a huge conglomerate headed by Julian Merlin, a mysterious character who seems to control, through business connections, most of the people in the world. To join Merlin is to be assured of comfort but also to give up individual freedom. Tunc and Nunquam contain Durrell’s usually rich selection of characters, including the neurotic Benedicta, Julian’s sister; Iolanthe, a prostitute-become-film-star; and Caradoc, a wordplaying architect. In style, Tunc and Nunquam are similar to The Alexandria Quartet, despite the science-fiction mise-en-scène. When Merlin creates a robotic duplicate of Iolanthe, which can hallucinate eating and other bodily functions even though it does not do these things, Charlock comes to identify with the robot’s quest for freedom, seeing in it his own struggle to remain an individual despite his absorption into Merlin’s world. This thematic concern with individual freedom in the contemporary world does not

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play a large part in The Alexandria Quartet, but Tunc and Nunquam exhibit the tetralogy’s themes of time, space, art, love, and sex, as well as a masterful use of language. The Avignon Quintet · With the five novels that constitute The Avignon Quintet (Monsieur: Or, The Prince of Darkness; Livia: Or, Buried Alive; Constance: Or, Solitary Practices; Sebastian: Or, Ruling Passions; and Quinx: Or, The Ripper’s Tale), Durrell recapitulates the themes of a lifetime with self-conscious exuberance, like a magician putting on his show for the last time. Shifts of viewpoint are kaleidoscopic in effect: bright, dazzling, patterned, but ambiguous as to meaning. He presents two novelists, Aubrey Blanford and Robin Sutcliffe, who explore the theme of novel writing to a fare-thee-well. Durrell creates two different fates for each of these characters, as if his world suddenly split in two and his personae lived out opposing potentialities. Duality is rife in The Avignon Quintet, as one can see from the double titles of each novel. There is one underlying idea, however, that permeates everything: entropy, the tendency for orderly systems to dissolve in anarchy and death. Taking the period from 1938 to 1945, with the whole of World War II occurring in Constance, Durrell shows entropy at work in Europe under the impact of Nazism, entropy in the failure of Western rationalism to stem the “deathdrift” of society or individuals, and entropy in the breakdown of personality in the forms of insanity and suicide. Against entropy, Durrell poses the forces of love and art. Yet even these succumb to chaos and death. As an author, Durrell is like the “Lord of Misrule,” the comic king of festival, in The Avignon Quintet. His world is one in which social disorder reigns amid drinking and feasting. In fact, The Avignon Quintet describes celebrations and banquets frequently, often at the end of a novel, and often with something sinister at their cores. Durrell’s comic tone and exuberance just barely conceal a deeply pessimistic outlook, like gallows humor. The Provence town of Avignon is the geographical and spiritual center of the quintet. With its dual legacy, very much present in these novels, of having been the center of Catholicism and of the heretical Knights Templar in the Middle Ages, Avignon represents the opposing pulls of reason and mysticism, West and East, and life and death on the characters. Egypt stands for the East, for Gnostic mysticism (linked with the Templar heresy), and for death throughout The Avignon Quintet. Geneva is the site of safety and reason during World War II, an outpost of civilized Western values in an era turned savage and suicidal. Each locale—Avignon, Egypt, and Geneva—has its own distinct flavor and ambiguity, and each is fully realized artistically. Durrell’s unique descriptive prose and his use of vignette and narrative event are matchless in creating the feel of place. Most of the main characters are on a quest of sorts: some for love (Blanford, a novelist; Constance, a psychoanalyst; Chatto, a consul), some for sexual adventure (Livia, Prince Hassad), some for wealth (Lord Galen, Smirgel), some for revenge (Quatrefages, Mnemidis), and some for a sacrificial death at the hands of a Gnostic cult (Piers de Nogaret, Sebastian Affad). Several of these private quests are subsumed under one last, collective quest: the search for the lost Templar treasure, hidden centuries ago in a labyrinth of caves near the Roman aqueduct at Avignon, caves mined with explosives by Austrian sappers in the closing days of World War II. On a Friday the 13th, Blanford and Constance enter the caves, following a group of intoxicated revelers from a banquet at which Death has just appeared. The inconclusive end of this quest for treasure hints strongly that some poor fool set off the dynamite, sending The Avignon Quintet into the silence of extinction.

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In the end, three aspects of life matter to Durrell: love as the means to truth, art as the mirror of truth, and a joyful acceptance of both life and art as the final consummation of truth. By facing down entropy, his own and his world’s, Durrell achieved a rare and disturbing kind of wisdom. J. Madison Davis Other major works SHORT FICTION: Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life, 1957; Stiff Upper Lip: Life Among the Diplomats, 1958; Sauve qui peut, 1966; The Best of Antrobus, 1974; Antrobus Complete, 1985. PLAYS: Sappho, pr. 1950; An Irish Faustus, pb. 1963; Acte, pr. 1964. POETRY: Quaint Fragment: Poems Written Between the Ages of Sixteen and Nineteen, 1931; Ten Poems, 1932; Bromo Bombastes, 1933; Transition: Poems, 1934; Proems: An Anthology of Poems, 1938 (with others); A Private Country, 1943; Cities, Plains, and People, 1946; Six Poems from the Greek of Sekilianos and Seferis, 1946 (translation); The King of Asine and Other Poems, 1948 (translation of George Seferis); On Seeming to Presume, 1948; Deus Loci, 1950; Private Drafts, 1955; The Tree of Idleness and Other Poems, 1955; Selected Poems, 1956; Collected Poems, 1960; Penguin Modern Poets 1, 1962 (with Elizabeth Jennings and R. S. Thomas); Beccaficio Le Becfigue, 1963 (English; includes French translation by F. J. Temple); Selected Poems 1935-63, 1964; The Ikons and Other Poems, 1966; The Red Limbo Lingo: A Poetry Notebook for 1968-70, 1971; On the Suchness of the Old Boy, 1972; Vega and Other Poems, 1973; Collected Poems 1931-1974, 1980. NONFICTION: Prospero’s Cell, 1945; A Landmark Gone, 1949; A Key to Modern British Poetry, 1952; Reflections on a Marine Venus, 1953; The Curious History of Pope Joan, 1954 (translation, revised as Pope Joan: A Personal Biography, 1960); Bitter Lemons, 1957; Art and Outrage, 1959; Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence, 1963 (George Wickes, editor); Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel, 1969 (Alan G. Thomas, editor); The Big Supposer: Dialogues with Marc Alyn/Lawrence Durrell, 1973; Sicilian Carousel, 1977; The Greek Islands, 1978; Literary Lifelines: The Richard AldingtonLawrence Durrell Correspondence, 1981; The Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935-1980, 1988; Caesar’s Vast Ghost: A Portrait of Provence, 1990; Lawrence Durrell: Conversations, 1998 (Earl G. Ingersoll, editor). CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: White Eagles over Serbia, 1957. Bibliography Adams, Robert M. After Joyce: Studies in Fiction After “Ulysses.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. A look at modern and postmodern fiction, tracing James Joyce’s influence from the 1920’s through the mid-1970’s. A bit sketchy and patronizing on Durrell. Bowker, Gordon. Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996. A good biography of Durrell. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Fraser, George S. Lawrence Durrell. London: Longman, 1970. A perceptive pamphletlength study of Durrell’s major literary output up to 1970, tracing the themes and plot of The Alexandria Quartet with admirable clarity. Contains a select bibliography. Friedman, Alan W., ed. Critical Essays on Lawrence Durrell. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. A stimulating collection covering many aspects of Durrell’s work. Concentrates on his important fiction, including The Avignon Quintet.

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Kaczvinsky, Donald P. Lawrence Durrell’s Major Novels: Or, The Kingdom of the Imagination. London: Associated University Presses, 1997. An excellent discussion of Durrell’s seminal works. MacNiven, Ian. Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Written with Durrell’s cooperation, MacNiven has extraordinary access to both his subject and his papers (including notebooks and letters). MacNiven’s interviews with Durrell’s friends and lovers are integrated into a probing look at the sources of his writing. Includes illustrations, chronology, family tree, and notes. Moore, Harry T., ed. The World of Lawrence Durrell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. A landmark collection of early critical essays on Durrell by eminent scholars and writers, a reminiscence by Henry Miller, and letters to and from Durrell. Pinchin, Jane LaGoudis. Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. A study of how a seedy Egyptian port was transformed by three writers of genius, and by Durrell in particular, into a place of imagination, mystery, and romance. Includes a fine bibliography. Weigel, John A. Lawrence Durrell: Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Weigel updates his 1965 edition to cover both the work Durrell produced after 1965 and the criticism of his work after that date. Includes chronology, notes, and annotated bibliography.

Maria Edgeworth Maria Edgeworth

Born: Black Bourton, England; January 1, 1767 Died: Edgeworthstown, Ireland; May 22, 1849 Principal long fiction · Castle Rackrent, 1800; Belinda, 1801; Leonora, 1806; Ennui, 1809; The Absentee, 1812; Vivian, 1812; Patronage, 1814; Harrington, 1817; Ormond, 1817; Helen, 1834. Other literary forms · Like a number of late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century authors, Maria Edgeworth did not intend to become a novelist but began writing extended prose fiction as an outgrowth of other kinds of literary production. Her first works were children’s tales, usually short and always with a clear and forcefully advanced didactic thesis—a few titles suggest the nature of the themes: “Lazy Laurence,” “Waste Not, Want Not,” “Forgive and Forget.” Many of these stories were assembled under the titles The Parent’s Assistant: Or, Stories for Children (1796, 1800) and Moral Tales for Young People (1801), the first of which encompassed six volumes, while the second filled five volumes. These tales were written largely at the behest of Edgeworth’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who was a deeply committed moralist and is still considered a notable figure in the history of education in England and Ireland. Both father and daughter collaborated on many of the stories, as they did on most of what Maria Edgeworth wrote. As a sort of commentary on the short fictions and certainly as an adjunct to them, the essays on education collected in Essays on Practical Education (1798) were designed to advance the liberal but moralistic theories on child rearing that the elder Edgeworth had imbibed in part from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and had transmitted to his daughter. Richard Edgeworth’s credentials for such a piece of writing were perhaps enhanced by the fact that he fathered no fewer than twenty-two children with four wives. Apart from further essays (again, chiefly written either in collaboration with her father or under his watchful eye) on education, morals, Ireland, and culture, Edgeworth’s primary emphasis was on fiction, usually of novel length (her “novels” range in length from the quite short Castle Rackrent, merely one hundred pages, to Belinda, which extends to almost five hundred pages). The only other form she attempted—one in which, like many nineteenth century authors, she had no publishing success—was the drama. The plays were composed essentially for the pleasure of the family, as were the first drafts of the majority of the fictions; the volume containing the best of them, Comic Dramas in Three Acts (1817), is now almost universally unread. Achievements · During her long lifetime, Edgeworth helped to make possible the Victorian novel. Reared with a rich background in the high achievements of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett, she began to write at a time when female novelists were just beginning to be accepted; a few of them, such as Fanny Burney and Elizabeth Inchbald, managed to attain some popularity. The novel of manners was the prevailing genre produced by these “lady writers.” It had affinities with the lachrymose novel of sensibility (the classic example of which, The Man of 305

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Feeling, was penned in 1771 by a man, Henry Mackenzie), and the tight focus and excessively delicate feelings exhibited in this form limited its appeal and artistic possibilities. It fell to Jane Austen to instill clever and penetrating satire, along with a much greater sense of realism in regard to human behavior, and to Maria Edgeworth to extend its bounds of character depiction, to include persons of the lower classes, and to broaden its range: Men are seen at the hunt, in private conference, and in all manner of vigorous activity unknown in Austen’s fiction. Edgeworth is, of course, bound to be compared with Austen, to the former’s derogation; there can be no doubt that the latter is the greater novelist, from an artistic standpoint. This judgment should not blind the reader to Edgeworth’s accomplishment. As P. N. Newby observes in Maria Edgeworth (1950), though “Jane Austen was so much the better novelist,” yet “Maria Edgeworth may be the more important.” Her significance rests chiefly on two achievements: She widened the scope of the “female” novel (the emphasis on female sensibility in her work is considerably less than in Austen’s novels, though it can be detected); and, as Newby remarks, in her careful and detailed treatment of Ireland and its people, she “gave dignity to the regional subject and made the regional novel possible.” Today, readers tend to take for granted the insightful historical works of, for example, Sir Walter Scott; they often do not realize that, had it not been for Edgeworth, Scott might not have attempted the monumental effort that he began in Waverly (1814), in whose preface he gives Edgeworth full credit for inspiring him to essay the regional fiction in which his work became a landmark. It has also been claimed that such disparate figures as Stendhal and Ivan Turgenev were influenced by Edgeworth’s sympathetic treatment of peasants. Some critics and literary historians have gone so far as to claim for her the title of the first intelligent sociological novelist in English literature. More than any author up to her time, Edgeworth revealed human beings as related to, and partially formed by, their environment. Biography · January 1, 1767, is usually accepted as the birth date of Maria Edgeworth; but, in Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972), Marilyn Butler asserts that Maria herself “seems to have considered 1768 correct, and the Black Bourton records on the whole support her.” This is one of the few uncertainties in a life dedicated to family, friends, and literature. Edgeworth was born in England, the child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (an Anglo-Irish gentleman with extensive estates in County Longford, about sixty miles from Dublin) and his first wife, Anna Maria Elers Edgeworth, who died when Maria was five years old. By all accounts, Maria got along well with her three siblings, two sisters and a brother (another child died before she was born), and with her father’s next three wives and her seventeen half brothers and half sisters, most of whom she helped to rear. The general harmony in the Edgeworth household may be seen as all the more remarkable when one considers that Richard Edgeworth’s last wife, Frances Anne Beaufort Edgeworth (with whose family Maria became quite friendly), was a year or two younger than Maria. Much of this impressive concord can be credited to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a man of enormous confidence and personal force. He took the not untypical eighteenth century view that, as the father in the household, he was the lord and master in a literal sense. Fortunately, he was a benevolent master. Although he believed firmly that he knew what was best for all his wives and children, what he believed to be best was their relatively free development, confined only by his sense of what was morally right and socially proper. Maria evidently accepted her father’s guidance to the point of

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seeking and welcoming his advice. Richard Edgeworth had such confidence both in the good sense of his children and in his own principles of education, which were patterned after those of his eccentric friend, Thomas Day (author of the once-famous novel of education, Sandford and Merton, 1783-1789), that he informed his family of the reasons for nearly all of his decisions, and certainly for the important ones. The most important of these was his resolve to settle on his family estate in Ireland (he had been living in England for a number of years, having left Ireland about 1765; and Maria had visited Ireland only briefly, in 1773). One reason for the election to live in Ireland—Edgeworth could have afforded to stay in England, since he received rents from his Irish Library of Congress property—was that Richard Edgeworth was convinced by his reading and by the course of national affairs (one feature of which was the harsh economic treatment of Ireland because of the great expense incurred by England in its war with the American colonies) that Ireland could be one of the best and most productive areas in the British Empire. To achieve the goal of proper estate management, a subject that was to engage the interest of Maria Edgeworth for the rest of her life, her father had to revolutionize the way in which his lands and tenants were cared for. The salient aspect of the change was a greater concern for genuine productivity and less for high rents. He was quite successful, partly because of the help of his adoring and sensible daughter. The estate and the family survived riots, famines, and the very real threat of a French invasion of Ireland during the Napoleonic campaigns. From the time the Edgeworth family relocated to Edgeworthstown, in 1782, until her death, Maria Edgeworth lived in the family homestead—the constancy of her residence there being broken by only a few trips to England, France, and Scotland, and brief visits to other countries on the Continent. During these sojourns, she managed to become acquainted, largely through her father’s influence, with some of the leading thinkers and artists of the day, notably Sir Walter Scott, with whom she formed a warm personal friendship and for whom she had a great admiration, which was reciprocated. Edgeworth was one of the first readers to recognize that the anonymously published Waverly was the work of “the Wizard of the North.” While visiting France in 1802, Edgeworth met the Chevalier Abraham Nicolas Clewberg-Edelcrantz, a Swedish diplomat to whom she was introduced in Paris. For this somewhat shy, very small, not particularly attractive woman, the encounter was extraordinary. Edelcrantz was not handsome, and he was forty-six years old. On the positive side, he was very intelligent and quite well educated, a fact that appealed to Edgeworth. Although evidently astounded and pleased by Edelcrantz’s proposal of

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marriage, she was wise enough to realize that his devotion to Sweden, which he could not think of leaving as his home, and hers to Ireland posed an absolute barrier to any happiness in such a union. Richard Edgeworth was apparently in favor of the marriage, but he did nothing to persuade Maria to accept the Swede, and he received her decision with equanimity. Apart from helping her father to manage the estate—managing it herself almost single-handedly after his death in 1817—and looking after the family, Edgeworth devoted herself almost exclusively to writing. Some of her novels began as very short tales written (usually on a slate, so that erasures and improvements could be made readily) for the entertainment of the younger members of the family circle. Richard Edgeworth, though, persuaded her to take her writing seriously. This she did for some fifty years, until shortly before her death in 1849, by which time she had become respected and, to a degree seldom achieved by a female author, famous. Analysis · The novels of Maria Edgeworth are, to the modern reader, an odd combination of strengths and weaknesses. This phenomenon is not really very strange, given the times in which she lived and the progress of fiction writing in the early nineteenth century. The work of all the novelists of that period may be considered strongly flawed and yet often unexpectedly effective (Sir Walter Scott is the obvious example, but the same might even be said of much of the work of Charles Dickens). What is perhaps more surprising is that Edgeworth herself was aware of the defects of her work. She knew, for example, that her writings were didactic to an often annoying degree. Her father, who had a great deal to do with her conviction that fiction should aim to elevate the morals of its readers, even comments on the fact in one of his prefaces to her novels and claims that a severe attempt had been made to subdue the moralistic features. By modern standards, the attempts never fully succeeded in any of Edgeworth’s novels. One reason for the “failure” is simply the prevalence of the late eighteenth century belief that behavior can be modified by edifying reading and that character can be formed and, possibly more important, reformed by acts of the will. Those of Edgeworth’s tales titled with the name of the central character, such as Ormond, Belinda, and Vivian, are thus the stories of how these young people come to terms with society and their responsibilities: in short, how they grow up to be worthy citizens. The concept itself is not ludicrous; literature is replete with studies of the ways in which young people come of age successfully. What is distressing in Edgeworth’s “moral tales” (and those of many other writers of the era) are the improbable turns of plot such as those by which poor but honest people are suddenly discovered to be heirs to great properties, those believed to be orphans are revealed as the offspring of noble houses, and so forth. This sort of device has a long history in both fiction and drama, but it is especially dismaying in a work that is otherwise, and by clear intention, realistic. The distracting and hardly credible process by which Grace Nugent, in The Absentee, is proved legitimate so that Lord Colambre can in good conscience marry her (the moral logic behind his reluctance to wed her, blameless as she is for the situation of her birth, may repel modern readers who are not familiar with the depth of the eighteenth century conviction concerning the influence of a flawed family background), is needlessly detailed. Such a device also intrudes on a story that is otherwise filled with convincing details about estate management (and mismanagement) in Ireland and fairly realistic studies of the lives of the common people. Richard Edgeworth was blamed, perhaps unjustly, for the excess of didacticism in

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his daughter’s novels (it is surely no accident that the only work lacking such material, Castle Rackrent, was her most popular title and is today her only novel still read); some of the tiresome passages of “uplifting” commentary do sound as if they came from his eloquent but ponderous pen, as in Belinda’s comment in a letter, “Female wit sometimes depends on the beauty of its possessor for its reputation; and the reign of beauty is proverbially short, and fashion often capriciously deserts her favourites, even before nature withers their charms.” To his credit, however, Richard Edgeworth is now known to have done a great deal to provide his daughter with ideas for stories and plot sequences. Perhaps the most important artistic flaw to which the younger Edgeworth pleaded guilty was a lack of invention, and critics over the decades have noticed that she depends to excess on details and facts, many of which she collected from her own family’s records and memoirs. The rest she gathered by direct (and penetrating) observation, as in the realistic farm scenes in the Irish tales and the believable pictures of society gatherings in London and Paris. One of the most obvious indications of Edgeworth’s failure to devise plots artfully is her reliance on the retrospective strategy of having a character reveal his or her background by telling it to another. Certainly, the review of her own life that Lady Delacour provides for Belinda is not without interest and is necessary to the story; yet it seems cumbersome, appearing as it does in two chapters that occupy more than thirty pages near the opening of the novel. The two types of novels that Edgeworth wrote—the Irish tales and, as the title of one collection indicates, the Tales of Fashionable Life (1809-1812)—manifest the poles of her thematic interest. She believed, as did her father, that Ireland could benefit and even prosper from a more responsible aristocracy, landowners who lived on their property and saw that it was fairly and efficiently managed. In her three best Irish tales, Castle Rackrent, The Absentee, and Ormond, Edgeworth underlines the virtues of fair play with tenants, caution in dealing with hired estate managers (the wicked Nicholas Garraghty, in The Absentee, should be warning enough for any proprietor), and close attention to details of land and equipment. The years that Edgeworth spent aiding her father at Edgeworthstown bore impressive fruit in her grasp of the problems and difficulties faced by owners of large estates. Because the sectarian, political, and economic problems that faced Ireland have tended to persist into the present, while the aspects of fashionable life have not, the “society” novels in Irish literature are almost unknown by the reading public today. In any case, Edgeworth was much more intellectually involved in the politics and social problems of her homeland than she was in the vagaries and evils of society life in big cities. Much as she believed that a great deal can be learned about the proper way to live one’s life by observing society closely, she was personally never so involved in that topic as she was in such concerns as the injustices created by absentee landlords and the abuse of tenants by land agents hired by the absentees and given enormous power. Thus, while Belinda, Vivian, and Helen do hold some interest for the reader, their problems and challenges are dated. The modern reader has difficulty taking seriously the follies of Vivian, who manages to misjudge nearly everybody in the novel, leading to his not unexpected demise, which is sad but far from tragic. The peculiarities of King Corny in Ormond, however, as when it is revealed that he is elevating the roof of his large house so that he can construct attics under it, help to provide the reader with a more substantial grasp of the great power, the tendency toward eccentricity, and the frequent good-heartedness of Irish estate owners. Edgeworth usually dealt with events and conditions in the fairly recent past; as such, she

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can be considered a historical novelist. Her emphasis on what can be viewed as an international theme, however (the relationship between English, as well as Irish, characters and attitudes), is thought by many to be the most significant aspect of her novels. Critics have even suggested that her treatment of the topic prefigures the more detailed analyses by Henry James. Edgeworth appeared on the literary scene at the best possible moment for her career and the future of the English novel. Her own records designate the amounts that she was paid by her publishers for each major work, and the list of payments is, by the standards of the time, impressive. For example, the minor novel Patronage earned Edgeworth £2,100, at that time an enormous sum. The influence that she had on the course of the historical and regional novel is proof of her little-known but vital contribution toward the development of the English novel. Castle Rackrent · In his introduction to the Oxford English Novels edition of Castle Rackrent (1964), George Watson claims for this unusual book the distinction of being “the first regional novel in English, and perhaps in all Europe.” Certainly, the work is a tour de force, all the more impressive because it was, by most accounts, achieved virtually by accident. Richard Edgeworth had on the estate a steward named John Langan. His opinions and mode of expression so struck Maria Edgeworth that she began to record his comments and became an able mimic of his dialect and turns of speech. Her letters to her father’s sister, Mrs. Margaret Edgeworth Ruxton, one of her favorite correspondents, inspired this sympathetic lady to encourage her niece to develop the material into a story. Thus was born Maria Edgeworth’s only substantial piece of fiction written during Richard Edgeworth’s lifetime in whose composition he evidently did not play a part. Edgeworth claimed that only the narrator was based on a real-life person, Langan; some scholars have suggested that one or two other characters might have been fashioned after people known to her. An example is the entertaining character Sir Condy Rackrent, who may have been broadly patterned on Edgeworth’s maternal grandfather. However great or small its basis in real life, the novel has the air of reality about it. The actions and the motivations ring true to life. Castle Rackrent is often praised for its lack of an obtrusive moral emphasis, but it would be a mistake to read the novel as having no message. The decline and fall of the Rackrent family is the story of irresponsibility and extravagance, an unfortunately common phenomenon in the history of Irish landowners. The narrator, Thady Quirk, commonly called “honest Thady,” tells the dismal but occasionally humorous tale of the several masters under whom he has served: Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who drinks himself to death early in the story; Sir Murtaugh Rackrent, who dies in a paroxysm of anger over a legalistic contretemps; Sir Kit Rackrent, who dies in a duel over the controversy stemming from his indecision regarding the choice of a new wife, when his first spouse seems on the point of death; and Sir Conolly Rackrent, whose narrative is longer than the tale of the first three owners of Castle Rackrent. Another innovative aspect of the novel, besides the use of such an authentic narrator, is the consistent employment of dialect. The text is not difficult to read, but many of the expressions are not easily comprehensible to a reader unfamiliar with the Irish speech and mores of that era. Wisely, Edgeworth—with her father’s help—appended a glossary which explains, occasionally in needless detail, many of Thady’s locutions and references. That Thady opens his memoir on a Monday morning might have little special significance unless the reader is informed

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by the glossary that “no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but Monday morning.” Perhaps the chief appeal of the work to the modern reader lies in the personality of Thady and in the folkways he embodies. On the first page, he tells of his “great coat,” which poverty compels him to wear winter and summer but which is “very handy, as I never put my arms into the sleeves, (they are as good as new,) though come Holantide next, I’ve had it these seven years.” The extraordinary loyalty of Thady to a family that seems not to deserve such fidelity is both exasperating and admirable. Thady is not, however, overcome with emotion when unfortunate circumstances arise. Though he cannot recall the drinking habits of Sir Patrick without the brief aside, “God bless him!,” he speaks of a shocking event at the funeral with relative calm: “Happy the man who could get but a sight of the hearse!—But who’d have thought it? Just as all was going on right, through his own town they were passing, when the body was seized for debt. . . .” Thady is moved enough to call the creditors “villains,” but he swiftly moves on with his tale: “So, to be sure, the law must take its course—and little gain had the creditors for their pains.” The old man spends more time on the legal implications of the seizure than on the event itself. This passage displays Edgeworth’s understanding of the contentious element in the Irish personality and the formidable grasp of the law that even poorly educated people often had. Indeed, lawsuits and legal technicalities abound in Edgeworth’s fiction. Thady’s almost eccentric equanimity and generous nature are further revealed when, after Sir Kit has gambled away virtually all the assets of the Rackrent estate, including the good will of his wealthy wife, the old retainer remarks, “the Castle Rackrent estate was all mortgaged, and bonds out against him, for he was never cured of his gaming tricks—but that was the only fault he had, God bless him!” Further, Thady seems untroubled by the confinement of Sir Kit’s wife for seven years in her apartments (an incident based on the actual imprisonment of a Lady Cathcart, in 1745, who was kept locked up by her husband for a much longer period), apparently lost in admiration of the fierce temper of his master, which not only caused the drastic action but also discouraged anyone from asking him about it. The first part of Castle Rackrent is entitled “An Hibernian Tale.” It is indeed very “Hibernian,” but no more so than the story of Sir Conolly Rackrent, whom Thady refers to as “ever my great favorite, and indeed the most universally beloved man I had ever seen or heard of.” Condy’s chief attractions are a good nature and a propensity to spend excessively. Both of these qualities contribute to the further impoverishment of the estate, a condition that he does little to alleviate. Even his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy landowner on a nearby estate (who promptly disinherits his offspring as soon as he learns of the wedding, thus frustrating even this halfhearted attempt to repair the Rackrent fortunes) is a matter of chance: Condy, who actually loves Thady’s pretty but fortuneless grandniece, Judy M’Quirk, flips a coin to determine whether he will propose to Judy or the moneyed Isabella. Despite the disinheritance, Sir Condy is fond of Isabella; when financial disaster looms, he attempts to provide her with a generous allotment in his will. The closing of the novel exposes another theme that may be derived from the plot. The villain who buys up Sir Condy’s debts and brings on his personal ruin is Thady’s own son, the self-serving Jason. Edgeworth possibly had in mind to make some point about the difference between the single-minded loyalty and honesty of the older generation and the selfish heartlessness of the younger. Even the attractive Judy, when Thady suggests that she might become the next mistress of Castle Rackrent (Isabella has had an

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accident from which Thady believes she will die), tells him there is no point in marrying a poor man; she has evidently set her sights on Jason, much to Thady’s dismay. Typically, the novel ends with a lawsuit. Lady Condy, after her husband’s death from drinking, sues for the title to the estate. Thady does not know how the suit will end, and he seems not to care: “For my part, I’m tired wishing for any thing in this world, after all I’ve seen in it.” With this touching close to what is considered Edgeworth’s best novel, the reader may well believe that the author has provided the opportunity for a greater understanding of those elements of Irish culture and history that impelled her to devote a lifetime of study to them. The Absentee · During Edgeworth’s lifetime, The Absentee was probably her most influential work. The central problem addressed in the novel is that of the absentee landlords, who left the management of their often vast Irish estates in the hands of inept and frequently unscrupulous agents. These agents robbed the landlords as well as the tenants, but the indifferent landowners took little interest in the lands so long as the rents were paid on time. As Edgeworth makes eminently clear by the contrast between the sensible and benevolent Mr. Burke, one of Lord Clonbrony’s agents, and the other, Nicholas Garraghty, who is scheming and dishonest, not all agents were bad; the trouble was that the owners had no accurate way of knowing, since they were almost never on the scene. The hero of this novel, Lord Colambre, is the son of Lord and Lady Clonbrony; it is around this unbelievably virtuous and somewhat stuffy young man that the several subplots and themes are centered. Each subplot is designed to underline an obvious theme, and Colambre is a vital, if artificial, unifying element in a novel whose general absence of unity is disquieting. The main plot line has to do with the Clonbronys, who live in London because Lady Clonbrony believes that high society is indispensable to her happiness (typically, the other members of the “smart set” find her pretensions ridiculous; Edgeworth explores a number of opportunities to satirize the false values of such people). Lord Clonbrony would not mind returning to the family estate, and he realizes that remaining away may be ruinous, since he is already in considerable debt. Lord Colambre visits his father’s lands in disguise, where he identifies the problem and recognizes the virtues and evils of the two agents. After vigorous efforts to repay his father’s debts, he saves the situation and persuades his mother to return to Ireland. A related theme concerns the actions that Colambre will not take in order to pay the debts—chiefly, he will not marry for money, a time-honored method of acquiring funds in a short time. Edgeworth offers several illustrations of the folly of such a practice, though perhaps to the modern reader her emphasis on the legitimacy of the birth of Grace Nugent, Colambre’s cousin, as a criterion for his proposing to her may seem artificial and even essentially immoral. Interestingly, when Miss Nugent (who has been unaware of the “disgrace”) learns of the reason for Colambre’s erstwhile restraint, she fully agrees that it would have been improper for him to offer marriage when her birth seemed under a cloud. Through an unlikely and tiresome concatenation of circumstances and accidents, the problem is solved: It is proved that Grace’s birth was legitimate, and the marriage is approved, even by Lady Clonbrony, who for most of the story has been trying to persuade her son to wed the wealthy Miss Broadhurst. The Absentee is filled with flat characters created in the heroic mold, most of whom befriend Colambre and impress him with a variety of sensible insights: the positive

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aspects of life in Ireland; the joys and satisfactions of the quiet country life (the O’Neill family, tenants on the Clonbrony estate, underline this point; they, too, are so honest and good-hearted as to be difficult to accept); the emptiness and falseness of “society”; and the great importance of taking responsibility and performing one’s duty well. The Absentee emphasizes two aspects of Edgeworth’s philosophy of life. She fully accepted the eighteenth century conviction that the class structure of society was inevitable and proper, and she wholeheartedly believed in the primacy of duty (a word iterated by her father as the chief element of a worthy life) as everyone’s first responsibility. Thus, in The Absentee there is an interesting mingling of liberal attitudes toward the rights of the peasants and conservative views regarding the propriety of aristocratic privilege. At the close of a long and complicated reticulation of plot lines, Edgeworth had the clever notion of ending the story simply and even humorously (there is an unfortunate paucity of humor in this novel) by completing the tale through the device of a letter written by an Irish coach-driver to his brother, who currently lives in England, telling him of the happy return of the Clonbronys to the estate and the upcoming marriage of Colambre and Grace, and urging him to come back to Ireland, since “it’s growing the fashion not to be an Absentee.” The Absentee lacks the humor and directness of Castle Rackrent, but it makes its thematic points forcefully, and in Sir Terence O’Fay, Edgeworth has created a revealing, rounded portrait of an interesting Irish type: a good-natured wastrel who is no one’s enemy but his own. His function in the plot is minimal, but he displays some of the most engaging features of the Irish personality. Ormond · Unlike The Absentee, whose title indicates that the subject is a general phenomenon, Ormond, as its title suggests, is about the development of a single individual. The novel is based on the view that young people can change their character by learning from their experiences and exerting their will. Although Harry Ormond is not exactly Rousseau’s “noble savage,” he is clearly intended to be the image of an untutored, raw personality, full of fine possibilities that must be cultivated to be realized. During the long, complex advance of the story, this is just what happens. The lad has been reared by an old friend of his father, who died in India, a minor aristocrat named Sir Ulick O’Shane, who believes that educating the boy would be a waste of time, since he is destined to be a poor dependent for life. The contrast between Harry Ormond and Ulick’s own son, Marcus, a formally educated but weak and ineffective youth, is one of several that give the novel a sense of polarity. Ulick is contrasted with his cousin, Cornelius O’Shane, the King Corny who takes over the care of Harry when he is forced to leave Ulick’s estate after a shooting incident; Dora O’Shane, the daughter of Corny, with whom for a while Harry believes himself to be in love, is seen as quite different from the modest and highly moral Florence Annaly, whom he does love and finally marries; White Connal, Dora’s first suitor, is, even by his name, contrasted with his brother, Black Connal, who ultimately is the man who marries Dora. Harry Ormond is placed in the care of a succession of older men, and from each he learns things that help him grow into a responsible and sensitive man. Ulick teaches him some of the complexities of business and helps him to understand the difficulty of judging character in another; King Corny instructs him in the need for bold action and in the excellences to be found in the primitive personality; Dr. Cambray, a clergyman, starts Harry on his formal education; and, while staying with

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the Annaly family, Harry perceives the delights of a well-ordered life in a wellregulated family, something he has never before experienced. The essence of the book, apart from Ormond’s development into a mature person, is his ultimate winning of the girl he truly loves. His material dependence is easily (and, again, incredibly) solved by the discovery that his father has left him a fortune. His only real problem, then, is to pass a series of moral tests created by Edgeworth to prove that he is a worthy, responsible man. The novel is marked by a number of traditional devices, such as the timeworn “While Sir Ulick is drinking his cup of cold coffee, we may look back a little into his family history,” which is done for some six and a half pages. Frequent references to Ormond as “our hero” remind the reader that this is his story and that Harry is to be thought of as heroic, no matter what mistakes he makes (and he does blunder now and then, usually on the side of excessive credulity). The author does not hesitate to intrude into the story, to proclaim ignorance (“What he said, or what Florence answered, we do not know”), or to move the plot along with phrases such as “We now go on to,” or “We now proceed to.” Ormond is thus in many ways a traditional novel of the period, but it achieves a level of social criticism—of French society (a number of scenes are set in Paris) as well as of English and Irish ways—seldom found before William Makepeace Thackeray in the history of the English novel. This tale, unlike The Absentee, is also enlivened by humor. Edgeworth’s novels are unfortunately little read today, except by students of the English novel. Aside from plainly revealing the significant lines of tradition and transition from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century novel, her work is enjoyable in itself. Nowhere else can one find such a lively and fairly balanced picture of the life and values found in the Ireland and England of the late Georgian period. Fred B. McEwen Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Modern Griselda, 1805; Tales of Fashionable Life, 1809-1812; Tales and Miscellaneous Pieces, 1825; Garry Owen: Or, The Snow-Woman, and Poor Bob, the Chimney-Sweeper, 1832; Tales and Novels, 1832-1833, 1848, 1857 (18 volumes), 1893 (10 volumes), 1893 (12 volumes); Orlandino, 1848; Classic Tales, 1883. PLAY: Comic Dramas in Three Acts, pb. 1817. NONFICTION: Letters for Literary Ladies, 1795; An Essay on the Noble Science of SelfJustification, 1795; Practical Education, 1798 (also known as Essays on Practical Education; with Richard Lovell Edgeworth); A Rational Primer, 1799 (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth); Essay on Irish Bulls, 1802 (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth); Essays on Professional Education, 1809 (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth); Readings on Poetry, 1816 (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth); Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth Esq., 1820 (vol. 2); Thoughts on Bores, 1826; A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth, 1867 (Francis Edgeworth, editor); Archibald Constable and His Literary Correspondents, 1873; The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 1894 (Augustus J. Hare, editor); Chosen Letters, 1931 (F. V. Barry, editor); Romilly-Edgeworth Letters, 1813-1818, 1936 (Samuel H. Romilly, editor); Letters from England, 1813-1844, 1971 (Christina Colvin, editor). CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Parent’s Assistant: Or, Stories for Children, 1796 (3 volumes), 1800 (6 volumes); Early Lessons: Harry and Lucy, I and II; Rosamond, I-III; Frank, I-IV and Other Stories, 1801 (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth); Moral Tales for Young People, 1801; The Mental Thermometer, 1801; Popular Tales, 1804; Continuation of Early Lessons, 1814; Rosamond: A Sequel to Early Lessons, 1821; Frank: A Sequel to Frank

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in Early Lessons, 1822; Harry and Lucy Concluded, 1825; Little Plays for Children, pb. 1827; The Purple Jar and Other Stories, 1931. Bibliography Bilger, Audrey. Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Part of the Humor in Life and Letters series, this volume reveals feminist traits of these eighteenth century writers. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1972. Does a good job of balancing Edgeworth’s personal and working life. Her large family was very important to her and seems to have provided sources for her novels. Devotes much space to establishing how her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was a major influence in her life. Also focuses on Edgeworth’s contemporary reputation, placing her as an important member of the literary milieu of her day. The bibliography and index are extensive. Includes three interesting appendices on her siblings and publication information regarding her novels. Gilmartin, Sophie. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Examines familial relationships in Edgeworth’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Harden, O. Elizabeth McWhorter. Maria Edgeworth. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Attempts to dispel critical myths about Edgeworth, such as her father’s negative influence over her, but does not always succeed. While trying to take an open-minded approach, Harden often treats Edgeworth and her contemporaries, such as Jane Austen, in highly conventional ways; for example, Harden’s distinctions between Austen and Edgeworth in the last chapter are too simplistically polar. Provides a short biography and is divided into chapters based on Edgeworth’s intended audiences, starting with children, moving to adolescents, and ending with adults, which is more useful than a purely chronological treatment. The bibliography is helpful given the limited number of works dealing with Edgeworth, even including chapters in books not specifically about her. ____________. Maria Edgeworth’s Art of Prose Fiction. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. While this book treats Edgeworth’s works simply, giving little more than plot summary and some approving comments for each novel, it is useful because it runs through her canon of fiction work by work, discussing them chronologically. The bibliography is good, including biographies, works containing important contemporary comments, mentions of Edgeworth in general works, contemporary reviews and notices, fiction technique studies, and general criticism and background. A good starting place for a study of Edgeworth. Hollingworth, Brian. Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. See especially the chapters on Castle Rackrent and Ormond. Includes detailed notes and bibliography. Hurst, Michael. Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene: Intellect, Fine Feeling, and Landlordism in the Age of Reform. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969. Takes an interesting and fresh approach to Edgeworth, looking at her attitudes toward Irish reform in the early nineteenth century. Sees her as a moderate who wanted improvement for the lower classes of society but no fundamental change in the upper classes. Historically based and not especially literary, focusing on political events and Edgeworth’s opinion of them. Since these events took place

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fairly late in her life, Edgeworth is seen as an older, possibly more political woman, and Hurst argues that since her father was dead, her opinions at this time were probably more fully her own than those she voiced during his life. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. New York: Oxford, 1991. What does it mean for a female writer to identify with her father? This is the question Kowaleski-Wallace explores, devoting several chapters to Edgeworth’s life and work. Includes detailed notes but no bibliography. McCann, Andrew. Cultural Politics in the 1790’s: Literature, Radicalism, and the Public Sphere. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Discusses the political and social views of Edgeworth and such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Godwin.

George Eliot George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans Born: Chilvers Coton, England; November 22, 1819 Died: London, England; December 22, 1880 Principal long fiction · Adam Bede, 1859; The Mill on the Floss, 1860; Silas Marner, 1861; Romola, 1862-1863; Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866; Middlemarch, 1871-1872; Daniel Deronda, 1876. Other literary forms · George Eliot’s three early stories, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” and “Janet’s Repentance,” originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, were collected as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. She wrote two other stories, “The Lifted Veil,” also published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, and “Brother Jacob,” published in Cornhill in 1864. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a miscellany of sketches and essays, was published in 1879. Eliot’s poetry does not achieve the high quality of her prose. Most notable examples are The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a verse drama, and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). Eliot wrote more than seventy periodical essays and reviews; the most comprehensive collection is Thomas Pinney’s Essays of George Eliot (1963). Eliot translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums as The Essence of Christianity (1854). Her translation of Benedictus de Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) has never been published. Achievements · Eliot’s pivotal position in the history of the novel is attested by some of the most distinguished novelists. Reviewing Middlemarch in 1873, Henry James concluded, “It sets a limit, we think, to the development of the old-fashioned English novel”; Middlemarch does, indeed, take what James calls the panoramic novel—“vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression,” seeking to “reproduce the total sum of life in an English village”—to an unsurpassed level of achievement. Eliot was also an innovator. In the words of D. H. Lawrence, “It all started with George Eliot; it was she who put the action on the inside,” thus giving impetus to the rise of the psychological novel, where the most significant actions derive from the motives of the characters rather than from external events. Eliot’s work is, then, both the culmination of the panoramic Victorian novel as practiced by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and the beginning of the modern psychological novel as practiced by James, Lawrence, and many others. More than anyone else, Eliot was responsible for making the novel, a genre which had traditionally been read primarily for entertainment, into a vehicle for the serious expression of ideas. Few novelists can equal Eliot’s depth of intellect or breadth of learning. Deeply involved in the religious and philosophical ferment of her time, Eliot was probably the first major English novelist who did not subscribe, at least nominally, to the tenets of Christian theology. Nevertheless, her strong moral commitment, derived from her Evangelical Christian heritage, led her to conceive of the novel as 317

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an instrument for preaching a gospel of duty and self-renunciation. Moral commitment alone, however, does not make a great novelist. In addition, Eliot’s extraordinary psychological insight enabled her to create characters who rival in depth and complexity any in English or American fiction. Few novelists can equal her talents for chronicling tangled motives, intricate self-deceptions, or an anguished struggle toward a noble act. She creates a fictional world that combines, in a way unsurpassed in English fiction, a broad panorama of society and psychological insight into each character. Biography · The woman known to countless readers as George Eliot—a name she did not use until she was nearly forty—was born on November 22, 1819, and christened Mary Ann Evans, the third child of Robert Evans and his second wife Christina Pearson. Evans, a man of extraordinary competence and unimpeachable integrity, worked as a general overseer of Arbury Hall, the seven-thousand-acre estate of the Newdigate family in Warwickshire. A shy and homely girl, Eliot excelled as a student in nearby boarding schools. Under the influence of a favorite teacher, Maria Lewis, the strict and conventional adherence to the Church of England which she learned from her parents acquired an overlay of pious Evangelicalism. After her mother’s death and her father’s retirement, Eliot and her father moved to a new home outside Coventry. She soon established a close and lasting friendship with Charles and Cara Bray and Cara’s sister Sara Hennell. Her conversations with the Brays, who were Unitarians and whose views of religion were more intellectual than those with which Eliot had been acquainted, accelerated the process of religious questioning that she had already experienced. At Bray’s suggestion, she began to translate Das Leben Jesu, a key work of the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss. Strauss, by applying the methods of scientific research and criticism to the Bible, questioned the divinity of Christ. Eliot’s work on this translation, published anonymously in 1846, completed the destruction of her religious orthodoxy. Following the death of her father in 1849 and a brief stay in Switzerland, Eliot moved to London, where she began to write for the Westminster Review. The fact that, while in Switzerland, she began to spell her name Marian suggests her awareness of a new and different life ahead of her. Although the Westminster Review was nominally edited by John Chapman—a man with whom Eliot may have been romantically involved—Eliot assumed most of the responsibilities of editorship and was, especially after Chapman bought the periodical in January, 1852, virtual editor. Her work with the Westminster Review placed her near the center of the intellectual life of Victorian England and brought her into contact with many of the prominent thinkers of the time. One of the persons whom Eliot met at this time was George Henry Lewes, who later became her common-law husband. A man of unusual versatility, Lewes had written novels, a blank-verse tragedy, a history of philosophy, and many periodical articles on a variety of subjects. He was, with Thornton Leigh Hunt, coeditor of a weekly newspaper called The Leader. Lewes, Hunt, and Lewes’s wife Agnes subscribed to the notion that passions could not be restricted by social conventions; thus, when Agnes, after bearing Lewes four sons, delivered a fifth son who had been fathered by Hunt, Lewes quietly registered the child as his own. By the time Agnes bore a second child fathered by Hunt, however, Lewes no longer considered her his wife, although he continued to support her and to be on friendly terms with her and Hunt, with whom he continued to work

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on The Leader. Victorian laws made divorce virtually impossible and prohibitively expensive; the fact that Lewes had accepted Hunt’s child as his own precluded his citing adultery as possible grounds. Under the circumstances, Eliot and Lewes had the choice of living together in a common-law marriage or not living together at all. They chose the former, and on July 20, 1854, traveled to Germany as husband and wife. Eliot wrote to her friends to explain her new status and to ask that from henceforth they address her as Marian Lewes. Although the couple had no children, their relationship was in many respects a model Victorian marriage. They lived happily together until Lewes’s death in 1878; with their writing, they supported not only themselves but also Lewes’s four sons and Agnes and her children by Hunt. Lewes’s sons appeared to regard Eliot with great affection. In other respects, however, the irregularity of their relationship cut Eliot off from much of the social life of the time, since only the most courageous Victorian women dared risk their own respectability by calling on her. Eliot’s family, especially

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her brother Isaac, also cut her off, condemning her relationship with Lewes as adulterous. Encouraged by Lewes, Eliot published her first work of fiction, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” in Blackwood’s Magazine in January, 1857. Because Eliot wished to protect her standing as an editor and reviewer and because she feared that her unconventional marriage to Lewes would prejudice the reception of her fiction, she published under the pseudonym George Eliot. Encouraged by the favorable reception of these stories and protected by Lewes from adverse criticism, Eliot published her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859. For the next two decades the chief events in Eliot’s life were the publications of her novels—The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Of these novels, only Romola, a meticulously researched historical novel set in fifteenth century Florence, was less than successful; the others won Eliot both an enthusiastic popular audience and critical recognition as the major English novelist of her time. As the success of Eliot’s novels and the continuing acceptance of Lewes’s articles and books also brought considerable prosperity, the Leweses’ life together was punctuated by trips to various parts of England and the Continent and by a series of moves to houses in more attractive parts of London. In November, 1878, only a few months after they moved to a long-sought-for house in the country, Lewes died. Devastated by the loss of the emotional support that Lewes provided, on May 6, 1880, Eliot married John Cross, who, although twenty years younger than she, had long been a close friend and frequent visitor to the Lewes household. In the eyes of her sternly conventional brother Isaac, this marriage conferred respectability; he wrote to his sister for the first time since 1854 to offer his “sincere congratulations.” Their marriage, though happy, was brief: Eliot died in December, 1880. Analysis · Discussions of George Eliot’s fiction are likely to begin by quoting chapter 17 of Adam Bede, in which she makes one of the most persuasive statements of the creed of the realistic novelist to be found in nineteenth century literature. Indicating that she is seeking that “rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in [in] many Dutch paintings,” she goes on to state the need for “men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things—men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them.” Through the truthful and sympathetic rendering of a fictional world no better than the actual one “in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work,” novelists should win the reader’s sympathy for “the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice, who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.” These statements suggest that Eliot conceived of fiction as a moral force, not because it is didactic in any narrow sense, but because it inculcates in the reader an attitude of sympathy for his or her fellow people, which in turn leads to everyday acts of justice and compassion that lighten the burden of the human lot. Fiction, then, performs one of the functions that is commonly associated with the church as a Christian community by reminding readers of Christ’s second commandment, that they love their neighbors as themselves. Indeed, although Eliot’s belief in Christian theology waned when she was in her twenties, her devotion to the major elements of Christian morality as she understood them remained steadfast throughout her life and provided the moral framework for

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her fiction. Her practice as a novelist eventually goes beyond her statement in Adam Bede in both complexity and subtlety, but this statement remains as the foundation of her creed as a novelist. As her career developed, Eliot’s characters became complex moral paradigms that could serve her readers as both examples and warnings. The highest moral achievement of her characters is renunciation of their own claims to happiness in order to minister to the needs of others, sometimes less deserving, whose lives impinge on theirs. The act of renunciation involves acknowledgement of the claims of community and often provides a sense of continuity with the character’s past or traditions. Conversely, the characters whom Eliot condemns most severely are those who evade their responsibilities by a process of self-delusion or self-indulgence, avoiding hard choices and hoping that chance will deliver them from the consequences of selfish actions. Characters are often moved toward renunciation by others who act as “messengers”—almost secularized angels—to guide them; their acts of renunciation and sense of community are often associated with the sacraments of baptism or communion. The process of egotistical self-indulgence, on the other hand, is often associated with a sexual relationship that is clearly inappropriate, although not necessarily illicit. Later in her career, Eliot treated the difficulty of finding an arena for purposeful life in the England of her time, but she never abandoned her intense commitment to individual moral responsibility. Adam Bede · Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, is built on two pairs of contrasting characters, one male and one female. Adam, a carpenter of consummate skill, is a model of rectitude and self-discipline whose only flaw is his intolerance of any weakness in others. Contrasting with Adam is Arthur Donnithorne, a well-intentioned young landowner whose moral weakness causes the principal catastrophe of the novel. There is a similar contrast between the two major female characters: Dinah Morris, a self-effacing Methodist preacher whose primary concern is doing what she can for others, and Hetty Sorrel, a young farm girl whose kittenish appeal conceals a hard core of egotism. The fact that both Adam and Arthur love Hetty intensifies the contrast between them. Adam, captivated by her charms, admires her as a paragon of femininity without ever perceiving her indifference to him. Arthur, without really intending to, takes advantage of Hetty’s self-deluding dreams of being a wealthy landowner’s wife to indulge in an affair with her. Frightened when she discovers that she is pregnant, Hetty runs away from home in a vain attempt to find Arthur, who has gone to rejoin his regiment. After her baby is born, she abandons it in a forest, where it dies of exposure. When she is arraigned for child murder, she appears hard and indifferent until Dinah moves her to repentance. Although Arthur succeeds in obtaining a pardon that saves Hetty from hanging, the young woman disappears from the story and, like the overwhelming majority of fallen women in Victorian fiction, dies. The somewhat improbable marriage of Adam and Dinah provides the happy ending that the contemporary audience expected. The melodramatic aspects of Adam Bede tend to obscure, especially in summary, Eliot’s primary concerns in the novel. Most conspicuously, the relationship between Arthur and Hetty is not simply a trite story of a sexual encounter between a wealthy young man and a simple farm girl; the sexual aspect of their relationship is less important than their self-delusion, self-indulgence, and egotism. Both characters embody moral issues that Eliot returned to again and again in her career: Arthur is attractive, likable, and well-intentioned, but he lacks both strength of purpose and

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self-knowledge. Intending to break off his relationship with Hetty, he finds himself contriving meetings with her; dreaming of being a model landowner, he comes near to destroying the happiness of his best tenants. Hetty’s flaw is even more damaging: Although she appears to be a creature of simple charm with the “beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence,” her egotism makes her indifferent to almost everything except her own beauty and her self-deluding dreams. Similarly, Dinah’s success in leading Hetty to repentance is a prototype of much more complex processes that occur in later novels, when characters who have greater potential for moral growth than Hetty are enabled to develop that potential. Dinah’s willingness to take on responsibility for sympathetically ministering to the needs of people around her—a moral virtue Eliot lauds above all others—has to be learned by Adam, whose own stalwart rectitude causes him to scorn weakness in others. His success in learning sympathy is symbolized by his acceptance of a meal of bread and wine in an “upper room” the morning of Hetty’s trial—one of several instances in Eliot’s fiction where objects associated with a Christian sacrament are used to suggest the establishment of a sense of community. Although it is a major achievement for a first novel, Adam Bede pales in comparison to Eliot’s later fiction. Eliot’s depiction of the self-deception and egotism of Arthur and Hetty looks ahead to the fuller development of this theme in later novels, but neither the characters nor their situation provides the opportunity for the depth of psychological insight Eliot shows later. Similarly, Arthur’s last-minute rescue of Hetty from the very foot of the gallows is reminiscent of the clichés of nineteenth century melodrama and seems almost pointless in the light of Hetty’s immediate disappearance from the story and her early death. The marriage of Adam and Dinah caters too obviously to the Victorian taste for this kind of conventional “happy ending” and seems inconsistent with the earlier description of Dinah. Adam himself is too idealized a character to be convincing. Many minor characters, however, demonstrate Eliot’s impressive gift for characterization. Mr. Irwine is the first of several Eliot clergymen who are virtuous but hardly spiritual; Mrs. Poyser’s pungent sayings indicate Eliot’s humor; and Adam’s mother Lisbeth combines maternal love with grating querulousness and self-pity. The Mill on the Floss · More than any of Eliot’s other novels, The Mill on the Floss, her second novel, focuses on a single character: Maggie Tulliver. Considered one of Eliot’s most complex creations, Maggie embodies both the tendency toward self-indulgence that Eliot condemns elsewhere and the earnest desire for moral achievement by renunciation of one’s own happiness that is the hallmark of the characters of whom Eliot appears to approve most highly. These conflicting tendencies in Maggie, although evident in the long childhood section of the novel, assume their full significance when Maggie begins a series of secret meetings with Philip Wakem, the crippled son of a lawyer whom Maggie’s father regards as a mortal enemy. In some respects, these meetings are innocent enough: Philip and Maggie are both lonely, as Philip is set apart by his physical handicap and Maggie is isolated by her family’s financial distresses, and their conversations provide them with companionship they find nowhere else. More significantly, however, Maggie’s meetings with Philip are wrong in that they require her to deceive her family and because they would, if discovered, add to her father’s already overflowing cup of grief and bitterness. Although the standard of conduct that Maggie is

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being asked to meet seems almost pointlessly rigid, Eliot makes it clear that Maggie errs by not meeting it. When Maggie’s narrowly righteous brother Tom discovers the meetings and harshly puts a stop to them, even Maggie feels that the “sense of a deliverance from concealment was welcome at any cost.” Maggie’s failure to meet the standards of conduct required of her has much more serious consequences when she allows herself to go away with Stephen Guest, a young man who is virtually engaged to her cousin Lucy. Although Maggie rejects Stephen’s offer of marriage, their apparent elopement causes a scandal that prostrates Lucy and bitterly divides Maggie’s family. Tom is especially adamant in condemning her. Maggie is a character who is sometimes almost painful to read about, for she has too little self-discipline to avoid slipping into actions that she knows to be wrong and too sensitive a conscience not to feel acutely the consequences of her errors. The ideal of conduct that she longs for and ultimately achieves when she decides to reject Stephen’s second proposal of marriage is expressed by passages marked in an old volume of St. Thomas à Kempis that is in a package of books given to Maggie in the depths of the Tullivers’ poverty. Reading the words “Forsake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shall enjoy much inward peace,” Maggie seems to see “a sudden vision” and feels this “direct communication of the human soul’s belief and experience . . . as an unquestioned message.” Maggie is spared further conflict by the melodramatic conclusion of the novel. A flood gives her the opportunity to demonstrate her love for Tom by rescuing him from the mill. Maggie and Tom are briefly reconciled; then a floating mass of machinery bears down on their boat, drowning them both. Their epitaph—“In death they were not divided”—suggests a harmony that Maggie hungered for but seldom achieved in life. The collision that results in the drowning of Maggie and Tom is, in fact, a kind of deus ex machina employed to achieve a resolution for Maggie that would be hard to envision otherwise. More intelligent and gifted than any of the other women in the novel, Maggie would hardly have found the fulfillment in marriage that appears to be the only resource for the women of the village, especially since marriage to Philip would have brought her into irreconcilable conflict with Tom and marriage to Stephen could only have been achieved at the cost of Lucy’s happiness. Finally, since Maggie’s sensitive compassion has conflicted with Tom’s narrow dogmatism throughout the novel, it seems unlikely that their reconciliation could have been permanent. Even the renunciation she learns about in Thomas à Kempis seems to offer more a model of resignation than a pattern for a fruitful and fulfilling life. In the melodramatic ending, therefore, the issues raised by the novel finally remain unresolved. As in Adam Bede, Eliot’s brilliant creation of minor characters is one of the finest achievements of the novel. Especially noteworthy are the Dodson sisters, Maggie’s aunts, who embody the common qualities of a proud and clannish family, and yet have traits which clearly distinguish them according to their age, degree of prosperity, and individual temperament. Silas Marner · Eliot’s third and most perfectly constructed novel, Silas Marner, embodies her complex moral vision with the precision of a diagram. Like Adam Bede, the novel is built on morally contrasting characters, but Silas Marner and Godfrey Cass reveal with much greater clarity than any of the characters in the earlier novel Eliot’s concern with the moral patterns of renunciation and self-indulgence. In a sort of prologue to the main action of the novel, Silas, a linen weaver who is

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a member of a pious religious sect in a large industrial city, is accused of stealing church funds by a close friend who actually stole the money. When a trial by lots sponsored by the sect declares Silas guilty, he loses faith in God and humanity and flees to a distant country village, where he isolates himself from the community and finds solace in constant weaving, like a “spinning insect.” Through years of weaving, Silas accumulates a hoard of gold coins which become the only object of his affections. When his gold is stolen by Godfrey Cass’s irresponsible brother Dunstan, Silas is utterly devastated, until Godfrey’s daughter by a secret marriage toddles into his house after her mother dies of exposure and an overdose of laudanum. The presence of this child, whom Silas rears as his own, restores the contact with his fellow men and women that Silas had lost; Eliot compares the girl to the “white-winged angels” that “in old days . . . took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction.” Almost every act that Silas performs in relation to the loss of his gold and the rearing of the child takes on near-symbolic significance. His spontaneous turning to the men assembled at the village tavern when his gold is stolen and to the New Year’s assemblage at the Cass house when he finds the child suggest an instinctive searching for community. His heeding the parish clerk’s admonition not to accuse the innocent after his gold is stolen and his choice of his younger sister’s “Bible name” of Hepzibah (shortened to Eppie) for the child suggest the reestablishment of ties to his past. Most particularly, his acceptance of lard cakes with I. H. S. pricked on them from his kindly neighbor Dolly Winthrop provides a secularized communion that suggests that ties between human beings and God may be replaced in importance by ties between individuals, as Eppie has replaced the white-winged angels of older days. It may also be significant that Silas spends Christmas in lonely isolation, while Eppie comes to his house on New Year’s Eve. Similarly, Godfrey embodies the consequences of a self-indulgent avoidance of one’s responsibilities. Prevented by his secret marriage to the dissolute mother of Eppie from marrying Nancy Lammeter, he weakly trusts to chance, “the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in,” to somehow relieve him of the consequences of his actions. Godfrey has none of the malice of his younger brother Dunstan; nevertheless, his anxiety is so great that his “one terror” when Silas comes to his house with Eppie is that his wife might not be dead. He sees that the child is his, but fails to acknowledge her, salving his conscience by giving Silas a half-guinea when he finds that Silas has determined to keep her. The chance that has relieved Godfrey of the consequences of his secret marriage eventually brings retribution. His marriage to Nancy is childless, and when Dunstan’s body is discovered with Silas’s long-lost gold, Godfrey finally tells Nancy that Eppie is his child. Their plan of relieving their childlessness by adopting Eppie comes to nothing when Eppie tells them that she can only think of Silas as her father. With poetic justice that even Godfrey recognizes, the man who admits that he “wanted to pass for childless once” will now “pass for childless against my wish.” Middlemarch · Middlemarch is unquestionably Eliot’s finest achievement as a novelist. Whereas Silas Marner presented the moral patterns of renunciation and self-indulgence with unparalleled clarity, Middlemarch explores them with profound subtlety and psychological insight. The vast scope of Middlemarch—it is more than twice the length of Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss—gives Eliot room for a panoramic view of provincial life, and her focus on the upper middle class and gentry gives her an

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opportunity to deal with characters whose experience is wider and whose motives are more sophisticated and complex than those of many of the characters in the early novels. In this “Study of Provincial Life,” as the novel is subtitled, Eliot explores the familiar moral territory of renunciation and self-indulgence by developing four moreor-less-distinct plot lines: The most important of these concern Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, but Fred Vincy and Nicholas Bulstrode also claim a substantial amount of Eliot’s attention. This vast novel is unified not only by Eliot’s moral concerns and by various cross-connections among the plot lines, but also by a pervasive theme of reform. The implied contrast between the climate for “far-resonant” action that existed when a “coherent social faith” allowed St. Theresa to find “her epos in the reform of a religious order” and the time of the novel, which ends “just after the Lords had thrown out the Reform Bill [of 1832],” suggests the difficulty of achieving meaningful action in the fragmented world of contemporary England. More than any previous novel, Middlemarch explores the moral achievements and failures of individuals against the background of an entire society, a society which does not provide many opportunities for people to put their best talents to use. These issues are perhaps most fully embodied in Dorothea Brooke, a young heiress with “a nature altogether ardent, theoretic and intellectually consequent” who is “struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither.” Seeking a way to give her life consequence and purpose, she marries Edward Casaubon, a desiccated pseudoscholar, whom she naïvely thinks of as a John Locke or a John Milton, a “winged messenger” who can guide her along the “grandest path.” She soon discovers that Casaubon is not a great man, but a rather pathetic egotist, who is morbidly sensitive to real or imagined criticism of his work, pettishly jealous of Dorothea’s friendship with his nephew Will Ladislaw, and incapable of offering her any real affection. She also learns that his projected work, grandly entitled a “Key to All Mythologies,” is nothing but a monumental collection of trivia, already rendered obsolete by superior German scholarship. Nevertheless, Dorothea prepares to promise her husband, who is suffering from a “fatty degeneration of the heart,” that she will continue his work after his death, a sacrifice from which she is saved by his timely demise. Like Dorothea, Tertius Lydgate finds his ambitions for significant achievement frustrated by social pressures, but unlike Dorothea he adds to his difficulties by a tendency toward heedless self-indulgence. His well-intentioned plans for medical reform are jeopardized by his lack of sensitivity to the feelings of both patients and other practitioners and by his regrettable involvement with Nicholas Bulstrode, an unpopular but powerful leader in community affairs. More important, he shackles himself by marriage to Rosamond Vincy, the beautiful and self-centered daughter of the mayor of Middlemarch. This marriage, which Lydgate slips into more or less intentionally, blights his hopes of success. He gets heavily into debt as both he and Rosamond carelessly incur expenses on the unconsidered assumption that they ought to live well. Rosamond, utterly unwilling to make any sacrifices, simply blames him for their problems. These two plot lines come together when Dorothea, deeply moved by Lydgate’s marital and financial problems and eager to clear him from blame in a scandal involving Bulstrode, offers to call on Rosamond. She finds Rosamond in what appears to be a compromising tête-à-tête with Will, whom she had come to love since

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Casaubon’s death. Deeply distressed by what she assumes about Will’s conduct, she nevertheless forces herself to “clutch [her] own pain” and think only of the “three lives whose contact with hers laid an obligation on her.” Feeling “the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance,” she compels herself to make a second visit. She has some success in reconciling Rosamond to Lydgate and finds that Will’s conduct was indeed blameless. Although Dorothea’s renunciation of herself has the unexpected result of opening the way for her marriage to Will, she never achieves her potential as a latter-day St. Theresa, “for the medium in which [her] ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.” Her “full nature” spends itself “in channels which had no great name on earth” but which nonetheless bring benefits to her fellow men and women. Lydgate, who allowed himself to slip into marriage with the paralyzingly egotistical Rosamond, achieves financial success as a society doctor but “always regarded himself as a failure; he had not done what he once meant to do.” The other two plot lines, although less important than those centering on Dorothea and Lydgate, afford Eliot opportunity to round out her study of provincial life. Fred Vincy, who is Rosamond’s brother, overcomes his tendency to fritter away his money in casual pleasures when he realizes the distresses that his failure to pay a debt will cause the Garth family, who represented security for him, and recognizes that Mary Garth will not marry him unless he undertakes a worthwhile career. The plot line centering on Nicholas Bulstrode, although the least extensive of the four, contains some of Eliot’s most perceptive explorations of self-delusion. Bulstrode, who had gathered a fortune dealing in stolen goods before coming to Middlemarch, aspires to leadership in the community as a banker and as an Evangelical Christian. Although he assiduously conceals his former life, he is no simple hypocrite, but an ambitious man who aims at “being an eminent Christian,” capable of deluding himself even in his prayers. His lifetime habit of confusing his own desires with God’s will comes to a climax when he allows his housekeeper to administer brandy to an alcoholic former associate who has been blackmailing him—a treatment which, although common at the time, has been forbidden by Lydgate. Only after the man dies does Bulstrode discover that the former associate has already revealed Bulstrode’s long-guarded secrets in his drunken ramblings. Although the principal themes of Middlemarch are developed primarily in the four major plot lines, the novel’s extraordinary richness of minor characters is surely one of its outstanding features. Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s uncle, is one of Eliot’s supreme comic creations, a man “of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote.” Caleb Garth, “one of those rare men who are rigid with themselves and indulgent to others,” is a model of sturdy rectitude. Mrs. Bulstrode’s loyal support of her guilty husband and her acceptance of “a new life in which she embraced humiliation” is one of Eliot’s finest passages. The list could be continued almost at will, amply justifying the claim of the novel’s subtitle to be a “study of provincial life.” The subtitle is also appropriate in that it calls attention to Eliot’s recognition, more fully expressed in this novel than in any of the earlier ones, of the ways in which the circumstances of society limit her characters’ options. Dorothea achieves the ideal of self-renunciation that earlier characters have striven for, but the conditions of her life prevent her from achieving her potential; Lydgate fails not only because of his ill-advised marriage, but also because the community views his eagerness to advance his medical practice with suspicion and prejudice. Conditions of society, as well as moral flaws, frustrate the ambitions of even the worthiest characters.

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Daniel Deronda · Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s final novel, emphasizes the search for purpose more than the ideal of renunciation. Eliot continues her examination of egotism and self-indulgence, but these themes are muted with pathos in the portrayal of Gwendolen Harleth. In subject matter, Eliot also takes another step or two up the social ladder, dealing in this novel with the wealthy upper middle class and aristocracy. The protagonist, Daniel Deronda, is such a paragon at the beginning of the novel that he has little need of the lessons in renunciation that Eliot’s other protagonists must learn. Handsome, well-educated, and generously supported by Sir Hugo Mallinger, Deronda is only concerned with finding something purposeful to do with his life. His only burden is the assumption that he is Sir Hugo’s illegitimate son. His discovery of a cause to which he can dedicate himself proceeds by easy stages. His rescue of Mirah, a Jewish singer who is preparing to drown herself, prompts his interest in Judaism. He succeeds in reuniting Mirah with her terminally ill brother Mordecai, a visionary Jewish mystic. When Mordecai sees Deronda from a bridge, which he describes as “a meeting place for spiritual messengers,” he assumes that Deronda has been sent to bring him “my new life—my new self—who will live when this breath is all breathed out.” Finally, Deronda discovers that he is actually the son of a distinguished Jewish singer who had asked Sir Hugo to bring him up as an Englishman. The discovery that he is Jewish enables him to marry Mirah, take up the torch from the dying Mordecai, and dedicate himself to the “restoration of a political existence to my people, giving them a national center, such as the English have.” (In assigning this cause to Deronda, Eliot anticipated the Zionist movement by some twenty years and, indeed, gave powerful stimulus to the movement for the development of a Jewish national state.) In Gwendolen Harleth, Eliot examines again the anatomy of egotism. Concerned only with her own comforts, Gwendolen rules imperiously over the household of her twice-widowed mother, Mrs. Davilow. Gwendolen’s manifest dislike of men and her habit of sleeping in her mother’s bedroom suggest sexual frigidity. Nevertheless, she is on the verge of marrying Henleigh Grandcourt, Sir Hugo’s nephew and heir, when she discovers that Grandcourt has had four children by a mistress who deserted her own husband and whom Grandcourt still supports. An invitation to visit Germany with some family friends allows Gwendolen to evade a decision, but when her family loses its fortune, she decides on marriage rather than having her mother live in painfully reduced circumstances while she is forced to take the ignominious position of governess. Gwendolen’s motives in marriage are intriguingly mixed. To be sure, she is essentially egotistical and assumes that she will be able to control her husband. The family’s dismal prospects after their catastrophic financial losses inevitably influence her. She is especially concerned for her mother, the one person for whom she feels genuine affection. Nevertheless, she also suffers an agony of guilt in her sense that her marriage has deprived Grandcourt’s illegitimate children of any claim to his wealth. Once they are married, the ruling hand is entirely Grandcourt’s. Gwendolen bears his elegantly polite sadism with proud reserve, but is inwardly tormented by dread that her fear and hatred of her husband may drive her to some desperate act. When he drowns, perhaps because she fails to throw him a rope, she is overwhelmed with guilt. Desolated by the marriage of Deronda, whom she has turned to as a moral guide and mentor, she takes solace in Deronda’s admonition that she “may live to be one of the best of women,” although, as she adds in a final letter to Deronda, “I do not yet see how that can be.”

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Although Gwendolen’s willingness to accept suffering scourges her egotism and brings her to a prospect of redemption that Rosamond Vincy glimpses only briefly, Daniel Deronda is in most ways Eliot’s bleakest novel. An air of futility hangs like a pall over most of the characters; without a tradition of commitment to some place or purpose, they lack a future also. Mrs. Davilow moves from one rented house to another, and the estates passed down to Sir Hugo from the time of William the Conqueror will finally be inherited by Grandcourt’s illegitimate son. Jewish characters such as Mirah’s father and Deronda’s mother wander over Europe, rejecting even an obligation to their own children. Only the dedication to art of Herr Kelsmer, a German musician, and the acceptance of Mordecai’s dream of a national Jewish homeland by Deronda provide a sense of purpose or direction, and these vocations are ones from which most of the characters are inevitably excluded. Except in unusual cases, it appears that even the desire to renounce oneself may not be efficacious. The very circumstances of modern life work against moral achievement. Erwin Hester Other major works SHORT FICTION: Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858. POETRY: The Spanish Gypsy, 1868; The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, 1874. NONFICTION: The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879; Essays of George Eliot, 1963 (Thomas Pinney, editor); The Journals of George Eliot, 1998 (Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, editors). TRANSLATIONS: The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 1846 (with Mrs. Charles Hennell; of D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu); The Essence of Christianity, 1854 (of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums). Bibliography Beer, Gillian. George Eliot. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1986. One of a number of feminist readings of Eliot. Concentrates on her engagement with contemporary feminist issues in her fiction and the tensions between her life and her art set up by gender. Contains a full bibliography and an index. Brady, Kristin. George Eliot. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Includes chapters on Eliot as icon, on her life as a woman writer, and on her major novels and poetry. Argues that in spite of Eliot’s major status, obviating the customary feminist call for a reevaluation, her work is still susceptible to a feminist rereading. Includes bibliography and index. Haight, Gordon. George Eliot: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Still the basic biography of Mary Ann Evans, making full use of her letters. A very large index is provided. Hardy, Barbara. The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form. London: Athone Press, 1959. This study has retained its relevance in the continuing discussion of Eliot’s fiction, dealing particularly with attempts to shape tragedy out of fiction. Plot, characterization, setting, imagery, and voice are dealt with separately but then focused into a discussion of Eliot’s construction of the moral individual. Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. London: Fourth Estate, 1998. A standard biography of Eliot, good for the general reader. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Hutchinson, Stuart, ed. George Eliot: Critical Assessments. East Sussex, England: Helm

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Information, 1996. Volume 1 consists of biography, nineteenth century reviews, and responses; volume 2 contains perspectives from 1900-1970 on Eliot’s work; volume 3 provides critical essays on individual works; volume 4 includes perspectives from the 1970’s on. Karl, Fred. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. While Karl’s biography does not supersede Haight’s, it does draw on valuable new archival material and on feminist criticism. Pangallo, Karen L., ed. The Critical Response to George Eliot. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Provides sections divided into articles on individual novels as well as a separate section on general responses to Eliot’s novels. The selection encompasses both the responses of Eliot’s contemporaries and later generations of critics. Includes a bibliography and index. Pinion, F. B. A George Eliot Companion. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1981. Not only is this volume a mine of information on Eliot’s life and work, but it also seeks to rehabilitate some of her neglected later fiction. Includes appendices and an index. Shaw, Harry E. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Explores the technique of the three authors. Provides bibliographical references and an index.

Henry Fielding Henry Fielding

Born: Sharpham Park, Somersetshire, England; April 22, 1707 Died: Lisbon, Portugal; October 8, 1754 Principal long fiction · An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, 1741; The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, 1742; The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, 1743, 1754; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 1749; Amelia, 1751. Other literary forms · Henry Fielding’s literary output, besides his novels, can be categorized in three groups: plays, pamphlets and miscellaneous items, and journals. In addition, the publication of his three-volume Miscellanies (1743) by subscription brought together a number of previously published items, as well as new works, including the first version of The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great, commonly known as Jonathan Wild, and an unfinished prose work, “A Journey from This World to the Next.” Fielding’s dramatic works, many presented with great success at either of London’s Little Theatre in the Haymarket or the Drury Lane Theatre, include ballad opera, farce, full-length comedy, and adaptations of classical and French drama. Most are overtly political in theme. Because of their contemporary subject matter, few have survived as viable stage presentations, although The Covent Garden Tragedy (1732) was presented by The Old Vic in London in 1968. Fielding also wrote a number of prologues, epilogues, and monologues performed in conjunction with other dramatic pieces. The pamphlets and miscellaneous items which are currently attributed to Fielding, excluding those for which he merely wrote introductions or epilogues, are “The Masquerade” (1728), a poem; The Military History of Charles XII King of Sweden (1740), a translation; “Of True Greatness” (1741), a poem; “The Opposition: A Vision” (1741), a poem; “The Vernoniad” (1741), a poem; “The Female Husband” (1746); “Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased” (1747); “A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez” (1749); “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers” (1751); “Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder” (1752); “A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor” (1753); “A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning” (1753); and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, published posthumously (1755). Fielding edited and made major contributions to four journals: The Champion (November 15, 1739-June 1741; the journal continued publication without Fielding until 1742); The True Patriot (November 5, 1745-June 17, 1746); Jacobite’s Journal (December 5, 1747-November 5, 1748); and The Covent-Garden Journal ( January 4-November 25, 1752). Achievements · Fielding’s lasting achievements in prose fiction—in contrast to his passing fame as an essayist, dramatist, and judge—result from his development of critical theory and from his aesthetic success in the novels themselves. In the preface 330

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to The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, more commonly known as Joseph Andrews, Fielding establishes a serious critical basis for the novel as a genre and describes in detail the elements of comic realism; in Joseph Andrews and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, popularly known as Tom Jones, he provides full realizations of this theory. These novels define the ground rules of form that would be followed, to varying degrees, by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, and they also speak to countless readers across many generations. Both, in fact, were transLibrary of Congress lated into successful films (Tom Jones, 1963; Joseph Andrews, 1978). The historical importance of the preface results from both the seriousness with which it treats the formal qualities of the novel (at the time a fledgling and barely respectable genre) and the precision with which it defines the characteristics of the genre, the “comic epic-poem in prose.” Fielding places Joseph Andrews in particular and the comic novel in general squarely in the tradition of classical literature and coherently argues its differences from the romance and the burlesque. He also provides analogies between the comic novel and the visual arts. Thus Fielding leads the reader to share his conception that the comic novel is an aesthetically valid form with its roots in classical tradition, and a form peculiarly suited to the attitudes and values of its own age. With his background in theater and journalism, Fielding could move easily through a wide range of forms and rhetorical techniques in his fiction, from direct parody of Samuel Richardson in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, to ironic inversion of the great man’s biography in Jonathan Wild, to adaptation of classical structure (Vergil’s Aeneid, c. 29-19 b.c.) in Amelia. The two major constants in these works are the attempt to define a good, moral life, built on benevolence and honor, and a concern for finding the best way to present that definition to the reader. Thus the moral and the technique can never be separated in Fielding’s works. Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones bring together these two impulses in Fielding’s most organically structured, brilliantly characterized, and masterfully narrated works. These novels vividly capture the diversity of experience in the physical world and the underlying benevolence of natural order, embodying them in a rich array of the ridiculous in human behavior. Fielding combines a positive assertion of the strength of goodness and benevolence (demonstrated by the structure and plot of the novels) with the sharp thrusts of the satirist’s attack upon the hypocrisy and vanity of individual characters. These elements are held together by the voice of the narrator—witty, urbane, charming—who serves as moral guide through the novels and the

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world. Thus, beyond the comic merits of each of the individual novels lies a collective sense of universal moral good. The voice of the narrator conveys to the reader the truth of that goodness. Although the novels were popular in his own day, Fielding’s contemporaries thought of him more as playwright-turned-judge than as novelist. This may have been the result of the low esteem in which the novel as a form was held, as well as of Fielding’s brilliant successes in these other fields. These varied successes have in common a zest for the exploration of the breadth and variety of life—a joy in living—that finds its most articulate and permanent expression in the major novels. Today Fielding is universally acknowledged as a major figure in the development of the novel, although there is still niggling about whether he or Richardson is the “father” of the British novel. Ian Watt, for example, claims that Richardson’s development of “formal realism” is more significant than Fielding’s comic realism. Other critics, notably Martin Battestin, have demonstrated that Fielding’s broader, more humane moral vision, embodied in classical structure and expressed through a self-conscious narrator, is the germ from which the richness and variety of the British novel grows. This disagreement ultimately comes down to personal taste, and there will always be Richardson and Fielding partisans to keep the controversy alive. There is no argument, however, that of their type—the novel of comic realism—no fiction has yet surpassed Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones. Biography · Henry Fielding was born April 22, 1707, in Sharpham Park, Somersetshire, to Edmund and Sarah Fielding. His father, an adventurer, gambler, and swaggerer, was a sharp contrast to the quiet, conservative, traditional gentry of his mother’s family, the Goulds. In 1710, the family moved to Dorset, where Fielding and his younger brother and three sisters (including the future novelist Sarah Fielding) would spend most of their childhood on a small estate and farm given to Mrs. Fielding by her father, Sir Henry Gould. The death of Fielding’s mother in April, 1718, ended this idyllic life. Litigation over the estate created a series of family battles that raged for several decades. In 1719, Fielding was sent to Eton College, partly because the Goulds wanted him influenced as little as possible by his father, who had resumed his “wild” life in London, and partly because he disliked his father’s new, Catholic wife. Remaining at Eton until 1724 or 1725, Fielding made many friends, including George Lyttleton and William Pitt. At Eton he began his study of classical literature, a profound influence on his literary career. Few details are known of Fielding’s life during the several years after Eton. He spent a good deal of time with the Goulds in Salisbury, but he also led a hectic, boisterous life in London, spending much time at the theater, where the popular masquerades and burlesques influenced him greatly. His visits to the theater stimulated him to try his own hand at comedy, and in February, 1728, Love in Several Masques, based on his own romantic adventures of the previous year, was performed at Drury Lane. In March, 1728, Fielding enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Leyden (Netherlands), where he pursued his interest in the classics. In August, 1729, at the age of twenty-two, he returned to London without completing his degree. It is clear from his literary output in the 1730’s that Fielding was intensely involved in theatrical life. From 1730 through 1737 he authored at least nineteen different dramatic works (as well as presenting revivals and new productions of revised works),

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most with political themes, at both the Little Theatre in the Haymarket and the Drury Lane. In addition to writing ballad opera, full-length comedies, translations, and parodies, Fielding was also producing, revising the plays of other writers, and managing theater business. He also formed a new, important friendship with the artist William Hogarth. His theatrical career came to an abrupt halt (although a few more plays appeared in the 1740’s) with the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737, which resulted in the closing of many theaters. Fielding’s political satire offended Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and had been part of the motivation for the government’s desire to control and censor the theaters. In addition to this theatrical activity with its political commentary, Fielding found time from 1733 to 1734 to court and marry Charlotte Cradock of Salisbury. Charlotte’s mother died in 1735, leaving the entire estate to the Fieldings and alleviating many of the financial problems caused by the legal disputes over the estate in Dorset. The couple moved from London to East Stour the same year, although Fielding regularly visited London, because he was manager, artistic director, and controller-in-chief of the Little Theatre. The first of their three children, Charlotte, was born April 17, 1736. Fielding’s relentless energy (and desire to add to his income) compelled him to begin a new career in late 1737, whereupon he began to study law at the Middle Temple. He became a barrister on June 20, 1740, and spent the next several years in the Western Circuit. During this service he became friends with Ralph Allen of Bath. He remained active in the practice of justice, as attorney and magistrate, until he left England in 1754. Fielding continued to involve himself in political controversy, even while studying law. He edited, under pseudonyms, The Champion, an opposition newspaper issued three times a week, directed against Prime Minister Walpole (a favorite subject of Fielding’s satire). Later he would edit The True Patriot in support of the government during the threat of the Jacobite Rising, Jacobite’s Journal, and The Covent-Garden Journal. From theater to law to journalism, Fielding had already charged through three careers when the first installment of Richardson’s Pamela appeared on November 6, 1740. Deeply disturbed by the artificiality of the novel’s epistolary technique, and appalled by its perversion of moral values, Fielding quickly responded with An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, often referred to as Shamela, an “antidote” to Pamela. Although published anonymously, Fielding’s authorship was apparent and created ill feelings between the two authors that would last most of their lives. The success of Shamela encouraged Fielding to try his hand at a more sustained satire, which eventually grew into Joseph Andrews. In 1743 he published, by subscription, the Miscellanies, a collection of previously published works, and two new ones: an unfinished story, “A Journey from This World to the Next,” and the first version of Jonathan Wild. Although the mid-1740’s brought Fielding fame, success, and money, his personal life was beset with pain. He suffered continually from gout, and Charlotte died in November, 1744. In the following year he became involved in the propaganda battles over the Jacobite Rising. On November 27, 1747, he married his wife’s former maid, Mary Daniel, and some sense of peace and order was restored to his private life. They would have five children. While forming new personal ties and continuing strong involvement in political issues, Fielding was preparing his masterwork, Tom Jones. He also took oath as Justice

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of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex, London, in 1748, and opened an employment agency and estate brokerage with his brother in 1749. His last novel, Amelia, was not well received, disappointing those readers who were expecting another Tom Jones. The early 1750’s saw Fielding’s health continue to decline, although he remained active in his judgeship, producing a number of pamphlets on various legal questions. In June of 1754, his friends convinced him to sail to Lisbon, Portugal, where the climate might improve his health. He died there on October 8, 1754, and is buried in the British Cemetery outside of Lisbon. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, his last work, was published one year after his death. Analysis · Analysis and criticism of Henry Fielding’s fiction have traditionally centered on the moral values in the novels, the aesthetic structure in which they are placed, and the relationship between the two. In this view, Fielding as moralist takes precedence over Fielding as artist, since the aesthetic structure is determined by the moral. Each of the novels is judged by the extent to which it finds the appropriate form for its moral vision. The relative failure of Amelia, for example, may be Fielding’s lack of faith in his own moral vision. The happy ending, promulgated by the deus ex machina of the good magistrate, is hardly consistent with the dire effects of urban moral decay that have been at work upon the Booths throughout the novel. Fielding’s own moral development and changes in outlook also need to be considered in this view. The reader must examine the sources of Fielding’s moral vision in the latitudinarian sermons of the day, as well as the changes in his attitudes as he examined eighteenth century urban life in greater detail, and as he moved in literature from Joseph Andrews to Amelia, and in life from the theater to the bench of justice. As is clear from the preface to Joseph Andrews, however, Fielding was equally interested in the aesthetics of his fiction. Indeed, each of the novels, even from the first parody, Shamela, conveys not only a moral message but a literary experiment to find the strongest method for expressing that message to the largest reading public. This concern is evident in the basic plot structure, characterization, language, and role of the narrator. Each novel attempts to reach the widest audience possible with its moral thesis. Although each differs in the way in which Fielding attempts this, they all have in common the sense that the how of the story is as important as the what. The novels are experiments in the methods of moral education—for the reader as well as for the characters. This concern for the best artistic way to teach a moral lesson was hardly new with Fielding. His classical education and interests, as well as the immediate human response gained from theater audiences during his playwriting days, surely led him to see that fiction must delight as well as instruct. Fielding’s novels are both exemplars of this goal (in their emphasis on incidents of plot and broad range of characterization) and serious discussions of the method by which to achieve it (primarily through structure and through narrative commentary). The direct stimulation for Fielding’s career as novelist was the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a novel that disturbed Fielding both by its artistic ineptitude and by its moral vacuousness. Fielding was as concerned with the public reaction to Pamela as he was with its author’s methods. That the reading public could be so easily misled by Pamela’s morals disturbed Fielding deeply, and the success of that novel led him to ponder what better ways were available for reaching the public with his own moral thesis. His response to Pamela was both moral (he revealed the

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true state of Pamela/Shamela’s values) and aesthetic (he exposed the artificiality of “writing to the moment”). Sermons and homilies, while effective in church (and certainly sources of Fielding’s moral philosophy), were not the stuff of prose fiction; neither was the epistolary presentation of “virtue rewarded” of Pamela (nor the “objectively” amoral tone of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, 1722). Fielding sought a literary method for combining moral vision and literary pleasure that would be appropriate to the rapidly urbanizing and secular society of the mid-eighteenth century. To find that method he ranged through direct parody, irony, satire, author-narrator intrusion, and moral exemplum. Even those works, such as Jonathan Wild and Amelia, which are not entirely successful, live because of the vitality of Fielding’s experimental methods. In Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, he found the way to reach his audience most effectively. Fielding’s informing moral values, embodied in the central characters of the novels ( Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, Tom Jones, Squire Allworthy, Mr. Harrison) can be summarized, as Martin Battestin has ably done, as Charity, Prudence, and Providence. Fielding held an optimistic faith in the perfectibility of humanity and the potential for the betterment of society, based on the essential goodness of human nature. These three values must work together. In the novels, the hero’s worth is determined by the way in which he interacts with other people (charity), within the limits of social institutions designed to provide order (prudence). His reward is a life full of God’s provision (providence). God’s providence has created a world of abundance and plenitude; man’s prudence and charity can guarantee its survival and growth. Both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones learn the proper combination of prudence and charity. They learn to use their innate inclination toward goodness within a social system that ensures order. To succeed, however, they must overcome obstacles provided by the characters who, through vanity and hypocrisy, distort God’s providence. Thus, Fielding’s moral vision, while optimistic, is hardly blind to the realities of the world. Jonathan Wild, with its basic rhetorical distinction between “good” and “great,” and Amelia, with its narrative structured around the ill effects of doing good, most strongly reflect Fielding’s doubts about the practicality of his beliefs. These ideas can be easily schematized, but the scheme belies the human complexity through which they are expressed in the novels. Tom Jones is no paragon of virtue, but he must learn, at great physical pain and spiritual risk, how to combine charity and prudence. Even Squire Allworthy, as Sheldon Sacks emphasized in Fiction and the Shape of Belief (1964), is a “fallible” paragon. These ideas do not come from a single source, but are derived from a combination of sources, rooted in Fielding’s classical education; the political, religious, and literary movements of his own time; and his own experience as dramatist, journalist, and magistrate. Fielding’s familiarity with the classics, begun at Eton and continued at the University of Leyden, is revealed in many ways: through language (the use of epic simile and epic conventions in Joseph Andrews), through plot (the symmetry of design in Tom Jones), through theme (the importance of moderation in all the novels), and through structure (the relationship of Amelia to Vergil’s Aeneid). The preface to Joseph Andrews makes explicit how much Fielding saw in common between his own work and classical literature. His belief in the benevolent order of the world, especially illustrated by country living, such as at Squire Allworthy’s estate (Paradise Hall), is deeply rooted in the pastoral tradition of classical literature. These classical elements are combined with the beliefs of the latitudinarian homilists of the seventeenth and

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eighteenth centuries, who stressed the perfectibility of humankind in the world through good deeds (charity) and good heart (benevolence). While Fielding’s thematic concerns may be rooted in classical and Christian thought, his literary technique has sources that are more complex, deriving from his education, his own experience in the theater, and the influence of Richardson’s Pamela. It is difficult to separate each of these sources, for the novels work them into unified and original statements. Indeed, Joseph Andrews, the novel most closely related to classical sources, is also deeply imbued with the sense of latitudinarian thought in its criticism of the clergy, and satire of Richardson in its plot and moral vision. The London in which Fielding spent most of his life was a world of literary and political ferment, an age of factionalism in the arts, with the Tory wits ( Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot) allied against Colley Cibber, the poet laureate and self-proclaimed literary spokesman for the British Isles. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) had recently appeared; both were influential in forming Fielding’s literary methods—the first with its emphasis on sharp political satire, the second with the creation of a new literary form, the ballad opera. The ballad opera set new lyrics, expressing contemporary political and social satire, to well-known music. Fielding was to find his greatest theatrical success in this genre and was to carry it over to his fiction, especially Jonathan Wild, with its emphasis on London low life and its excesses of language. It was a time, also, of great political controversy, with the ongoing conflicts between the Tories and Jacobites about the questions of religion and succession. Prime Minister Walpole’s politics of expediency were a ripe subject for satire. Fielding’s career as journalist began as a direct response to political issues, and significant portions of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, as well as Jonathan Wild, deal with political issues. These various sources, influences, and beliefs are molded into coherent works of art through Fielding’s narrative technique. It is through the role of the narrator that he most clearly and successfully experiments in the methods of teaching a moral lesson. Starting with the voice of direct literary parody in Shamela and moving through the varied structures and voices of the other novels, Fielding’s art leads in many directions, but it always leads to his ultimate concern for finding the best way to teach the clearest moral lesson. In Tom Jones he finds the most appropriate method to demonstrate that the world is a beautiful place if man will live by charity and prudence. Shamela · The key to understanding how Shamela expresses Fielding’s concern with both the moral thesis and the aesthetic form of fiction is contained in the introductory letters between Parsons Tickletext and Oliver. Oliver is dismayed at Tickletext’s exuberant praise of Pamela and at the novel’s public reception and popularity. The clergy, in particular, have been citing it as a work worthy to be read with the Scriptures. He contends that the text of Shamela, which he encloses, reveals the “true” story of Pamela’s adventures and puts them in their proper moral perspective. By reading Oliver’s version, Tickletext will correct his own misconceptions; by reading Shamela (under the guidance of the prefatory letters), the public will laugh at Pamela and perceive the perversity of its moral thesis. Shamela began, of course, simply as a parody of Richardson’s novel, and, in abbreviated form, carries through the narrative of the attempted seduction of the young serving girl by the squire, and her attempts to assert her virtue through chastity

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or marriage. Fielding makes direct hits at Richardson’s weakest points: His two main targets are the epistolary technique of “writing to the moment” and the moral thesis of “virtue rewarded” by pounds and pence (and marriage). Fielding parodies the epistolary technique by carrying it to its most illogical extreme: Richardson’s technical failure is not the choice of epistolary form, but his insistence on its adherence to external reality. Shamela writes her letters at the very same moment she is being attacked in bed by Squire Booby. While feigning sleep she writes: “You see I write in the present tense.” The inconsistency of Pamela’s shift from letters to journal form when she is abducted is shown through Fielding’s retention of the letter form throughout the story, no matter what the obstacles for sending and receiving them. He also compounds the criticism of Richardson by including a number of correspondents besides Shamela (her mother, Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews, Mrs. Jewkes, Parson Williams) and including various complications, such as letters within letters within letters. Fielding retains the essential characters and key scenes from Pamela, such as Mr. B’s hiding in the closet before the attempted seduction, Pamela’s attempted suicide at the pond, and Parson Williams’s interference. For each character and scene Fielding adopts Richardson’s penchant for minute descriptive detail and intense character response to the event; he also parodies the method and seriousness of the original by revealing the motives of the characters. The revealing of motives is also Fielding’s primary way of attacking the prurience of Richardson’s presentation, as well as the moral thesis behind it. He debunks the punctilio (decorum) of the central character. Shamela’s false modesty (“I thought once of making a little fortune by my person. I now intend to make a great one by my virtue”) mocks Pamela’s pride in her chastity; the main difference between them is Shamela’s recognition and acceptance of the mercenary motives behind her behavior and Pamela’s blindness to her own motivation. Richardson never examines the reliability of Pamela’s motivations, although he describes her thoughts in detail. Fielding allows Shamela to glory in both her ability to dupe the eager Squire Booby and her mercenary motives for doing so. The reader may, as Parson Oliver wants Tickletext to do, easily condemn Shamela for a villain but never for a hypocrite. Fielding also attacks Richardson’s refusal to describe the sexual attributes of his characters or to admit the intensity of their sexual desires, particularly in the case of Pamela herself. Pamela always hints and suggests—and, Fielding claims, wallows in her suggestiveness. Fielding not only describes the sexual aspects directly, but exaggerates and reduces them to a comic level, hardly to be taken sensually or seriously. Shamela quickly, fully, and ruthlessly annihilates the moral thesis of “virtue rewarded” through this direct exaggeration. Fielding does not, however, in his role as parodist, suggest an alternative to Pamela’s moral thesis; he is content, for the time, with exposing its flaws. This first foray into fiction served for Fielding as a testing ground for some of the rhetorical techniques he used in later works, especially the emphasis on satiric inversion. These inversions appear in his reversal of sexual roles in Joseph Andrews, the reversal of rhetoric in the “good” and “great” in Jonathan Wild, and the reversal of goodness of motive and evil of effect in Amelia. Fielding’s concern to find a rhetorical method for presenting a moral thesis was confined in Shamela to the limited aims and goals of parody. He had such success with the method (after all, he had his apprenticeship in the satiric comedy of the theater), that he began his next novel on the same model.

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Joseph Andrews · Like Shamela, Joseph Andrews began as a parody of Pamela. In his second novel, Fielding reverses the gender of the central character and traces Joseph’s attempts to retain his chastity and virtue while being pursued by Lady Booby. This method of inversion creates new possibilities, not only for satirizing Richardson’s work, but for commenting on the sexual morality of the time in a more positive way than in Shamela. The most cursory reading reveals how quickly Fielding grew tired of parody and how Joseph Andrews moved beyond its inspiration and its forerunner. Even the choice of direct narration rather than epistolary form indicates Fielding’s unwillingness to tie himself to his model. Most readers agree that the entrance of Parson Adams, Joseph’s guide, companion, and partner in misery, turns the novel from simple parody into complex fiction. Adams takes center stage as both comic butt, preserving Joseph’s role as hero, and moral guide, preserving Joseph’s role as innocent. Adams’s contribution is also part of Fielding’s conscious search for the best way to convey his moral thesis. The narrative refers continually to sermons, given in the pulpit or being carried by Adams to be published in London. These sermons are generally ineffectual or contradicted by the behavior of the clergy who pronounce them. Just as experience and the moral example of Adams’s life are better teachers for Joseph than sermons—what could be a more effective lesson than the way he is treated by the coach passengers after he is robbed, beaten, and stripped?—so literary example has more power for Fielding and the reader. Adams’s constant companion, his copy of Aeschylus, is further testament to Fielding’s growing faith in his exemplary power of literature as moral guide. In Joseph Andrews, narrative art takes precedence over both parody and sermon. Fielding’s concern for method as well as meaning is given its most formal discussion in the preface. The historical importance of this document results from both the seriousness with which it treats the formal qualities of the novel and the precision with which it defines the characteristics of the genre, the “comic epic-poem in prose.” The seriousness is established through the careful logic and organization of the argument and through the parallels drawn between the new genre and classical literature (the lost comic epic supposedly written by Homer) and modern painting (Michelangelo da Caravaggio and William Hogarth). Fielding differentiates the comic epic-poem in prose from contemporary romances such as Pamela. The new form is more extended and comprehensive in action, contains a much larger variety of incidents, and treats a greater variety of characters. Unlike the serious romance, the new form is less solemn in subject matter, treats characters of lower rank, and presents the ludicrous rather than the sublime. The comic, opposed to the burlesque, arises solely from the observation of nature, and has its source in the discovery of the “ridiculous” in human nature. The ridiculous always springs from the affectations of vanity and hypocrisy. Within the novel itself, the narrator will continue the discussion of literary issues in the introductory chapters to each of the first three of four books: “of writing lives in general,” “of divisions in authors,” and “in praise of biography.” These discussions, although sometimes more facetious than serious, do carry through the direction of the opening sentence of the novel: “Examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.” Additionally, this narrative commentary allows Fielding to assume the role of reader’s companion and guide that he develops more fully in Tom Jones. While the preface takes its cue from classical tradition, it is misleading to assume that Joseph Andrews is merely an updating of classical technique and ideas. Even more

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than Shamela, this novel brings together Fielding’s dissatisfaction with Richardson’s moral thesis and his support of latitudinarian attitudes toward benevolence and charity. Here, too, Fielding begins his definition of the “good” man in modern Christian terms. Joseph redefines the place of chastity and honor in male sexuality; Parson Adams exemplifies the benevolence all people should display; Mrs. Towwowse, Trulliber, and Peter Pounce, among others, illustrate the vanity and hypocrisy of the world. The structure of the novel is episodic, combining the earthly journey and escapades of the hero with suggestions of the Christian pilgrimage in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-1684). Fielding was still experimenting with form and felt at liberty to digress from his structure with interpolated tales or to depend on coincidence to bring the novel to its conclusion. The immediate moral effect sometimes seems more important than the consistency of rhetorical structure. These are, however, minor lapses in Fielding’s progression toward unifying moral thesis and aesthetic structure. Jonathan Wild · In Jonathan Wild, Fielding seems to have abandoned temporarily the progression from the moral statement of parody and sermon to the aesthetic statement of literary example. Jonathan Wild was first published in the year immediately following Joseph Andrews (revised in 1754), and there is evidence to indicate that the work was actually written before Joseph Andrews. This is a reasonable assumption, since Jonathan Wild is more didactic in its method and more negative in its moral vision. It looks back toward Shamela rather than ahead to Tom Jones. Jonathan Wild is less a novel, even as Fielding discusses the form in the preface to Joseph Andrews, than a polemic. Critic Northrop Frye’s term, “anatomy,” may be the most appropriate label for the work. Like other anatomies—Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759)—it emphasizes ideas over narrative. It is more moral fable than novel, and more fiction than historical biography, altering history to fit the moral vision. More important, it was Fielding’s experiment in moving the moral lesson of the tale away from the narrative (with its emphasis on incident and character) and into the rhetoric of the narrator (with its emphasis on language). Fielding attempted to use language as the primary carrier of his moral thesis. Although this experiment failed— manipulation of language, alone, would not do—it gave him the confidence to develop the role of the narrative voice in its proper perspective in Tom Jones. Fielding freely adapted the facts of Wild’s life, which were well known to the general public. He chose those incidents from Wild’s criminal career and punishment that would serve his moral purpose, and he added his own fictional characters, the victims of Wild’s “greatness,” expecially the Heartfrees. Within the structure of the inverted biography of the “great” man, Fielding satirizes the basic concepts of middleclass society. He differentiates between “greatness” and “goodness,” terms often used synonymously in the eighteenth century. The success of the novel depends on the reader’s acceptance and understanding of this rhetorical inversion. “Goodness,” characterized by the Heartfrees, reiterates the ideals of behavior emphasized in Joseph Andrews: benevolence, honor, honesty, and charity, felt through the heart. “Greatness,” personified in Wild, results in cunning and courage, characteristics of the will. The action of the novel revolves around the ironic reversal of these terms. Although Wild’s actions speak for themselves, the ironic voice of the narrator constantly directs the reader’s response.

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Parts of Jonathan Wild are brilliantly satiric, but the work as a whole does not speak to modern readers. Fielding abandoned the anatomy form after this experiment, recognizing that the voice of the narrator alone cannot carry the moral thesis of a novel in a convincing way. In Jonathan Wild, he carried to an extreme the role of the narrator as moral guide that he experimented with in Joseph Andrews. In Tom Jones, he found the precise balance: the moral voice of the narrator controlling the reader’s reaction through language and the literary examples of plot and character. Tom Jones · In Tom Jones, Fielding moved beyond the limited aims of each of his previous works into a more comprehensive moral and aesthetic vision. No longer bound by the need to attack Richardson nor the attempt to define a specific fictional form, such as the moral fable or the comic epic-poem in prose, Fielding dramatized the positive values of the good man in a carefully structured narrative held together by the guiding voice of the narrator. This narrator unifies, in a consistent pattern, Fielding’s concern for both the truthfulness of his moral vision and the best way to reach the widest audience. The structure of Tom Jones, like that of Joseph Andrews, is based on the secularization of the spiritual pilgrimage. Tom must journey from his equivocal position as foundling on the country estate of Squire Allworthy (Paradise Hall) to moral independence in the hellish city of London. He must learn to understand and control his life. When he learns this lesson, he will return to the country to enjoy the plenitude of paradise regained that providence allows him. He must temper his natural, impetuous charity with the prudence that comes from recognition of his own role in the larger social structure. In precise terms, he must learn to control his animal appetites in order to win the love of Sophia Western and the approval of Allworthy. This lesson is rewarded not only by his gaining these two goals, but by his gaining the knowledge of his parentage and his rightful place in society. He is no longer a “foundling.” Unlike the episodic journey of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones adapts the classical symmetry of the epic in a more conscious and precise way. The novel is divided into eighteen books. Some of the books, such as 1 and 4, cover long periods of time and are presented in summary form, with the narrator clearly present; others cover only a few days or hours, with the narrator conspicuously absent and the presentation primarily scenic. The length of each book is determined by the importance of the subject, not the length of time covered. The books are arranged in a symmetrical pattern. The first half of the novel takes Tom from his mysterious birth to his adventures in the Inn at Upton; the second half takes him from Upton to London and the discovery of his parentage. Books 1 through 6 are set in Somerset at Squire Allworthy’s estate and culminate with Tom’s affair with Molly. Books 7 through 12 are set on the road to Upton, at the Inn, and on the road from Upton to London; the two central books detail the adventures at the Inn and Tom’s affair with Mrs. Waters. Books 13 through 18 take Tom to London and begin with his affair with Lady Bellaston. Within this pattern, Fielding demonstrates his moral thesis, the education of a “good man,” in a number of ways: through the narrative (Tom’s behavior continually lowers his moral worth in society); through characters (the contrasting pairs of Tom and Blifil, Allworthy and Western, Square and Thwackum, Molly and Lady Bellaston); and through the voice of the narrator. Fielding extends the role of the narrator in Tom Jones, as teller of the tale, as moral guide, and as literary commentator and critic. Each of these voices was heard in Joseph

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Andrews, but here they come together in a unique narrative persona. Adopting the role of the stagecoach traveler, the narrator speaks directly to his fellow passengers, the readers. He is free to digress and comment whenever he feels appropriate, and there is, therefore, no need for the long interpolated tales such as appeared in Joseph Andrews. To remind his readers that the purpose of fiction is aesthetic as well as moral, the narrator often comments on literary topics: “Of the Serious in Writing, and for What Purpose it is introduced”; “A wonderful long chapter concerning the Marvelous”; “Containing Instructions very necessary to be perused by modern Critics.” Taken together, these passages provide a guide to Fielding’s literary theory as complete as the preface to Joseph Andrews. Although in Tom Jones Fielding still schematically associates characters with particular moral values, the range of characters is wider than in his previous novels. Even a minor character, such as Black George, has a life beyond his moral purpose as representative of hypocrisy and self-serving. Most important, Tom Jones demonstrates Fielding’s skill in combining his moral vision with aesthetic form in a way that is most pleasurable to the reader. The reader learns how to live the good Christian life because Tom learns that lesson. Far more effective than parody, sermon, or moral exemplum, the combination of narrative voice and literary example of plot and character is Fielding’s greatest legacy to the novel. Lawrence F. Laban Other major works PLAYS: Love in Several Masques, pr., pb. 1728; The Temple Beau, pr., pb. 1730; The Author’s Farce, and The Pleasures of the Town, pr., pb. 1730; Tom Thumb: A Tragedy, pr., pb. 1730 (revised as The Tragedy of Tragedies, pr., pb. 1731); Rape upon Rape: Or, Justice Caught in His Own Trap, pr., pb. 1730 (also known as The Coffee-House Politician); The Letter-Writers: Or, A New Way to Keep a Wife at Home, pr., pb. 1731; The Welsh Opera: Or, The Grey Mare the Better Horse, pr., pb. 1731 (revised as The Grub-Street Opera, pb. 1731); The Lottery, pr., pb. 1732; The Modern Husband, pr., pb. 1732 (five acts); The Old Debauchees, pr., pb. 1732; The Covent Garden Tragedy, pr., pb. 1732; The Mock Doctor: Or, The Dumb Lady Cur’d, pr., pb. 1732 (adaptation of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui); The Miser, pr., pb. 1733 (adaptation of Molière’s L’Avare ); Don Quixote in England, pr., pb. 1734; The Intriguing Chambermaid, pr., pb. 1734 (adaptation of Jean-François Regnard’s Le Retour imprévu); An Old Man Taught Wisdom: Or, The Virgin Unmask’d, pr., pb. 1735; The Universal Gallant: Or, The Different Husbands, pr., pb. 1735 (five acts); Pasquin: Or, A Dramatic Satire on the Times, pr., pb. 1736; Tumble-Down Dick: Or, Phaeton in the Suds, pr., pb. 1736; Eurydice: Or, The Devil’s Henpeck’d, pr. 1737 (one act); Eurydice Hiss’d: Or, A Word to the Wise, pr., pb. 1737; The Historical Register for the Year 1736, pr., pb. 1737 (three acts); Miss Lucy in Town, pr., pb. 1742 (one act); The Wedding-Day, pr., pb. 1743 (five acts; also known as The Virgin Unmask’d); The Fathers: Or, The Good-Natured Man, pr., pb. 1778 (revised for posthumous production by David Garrick). NONFICTION: The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 1755. TRANSLATION: The Military History of Charles XII King of Sweden, 1740. MISCELLANEOUS: Miscellanies, 1743 (3 volumes). Bibliography Battestin, Martin C. The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. An important study arguing

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that in Joseph Andrews Fielding presents an allegory of the conflict between vanity and true Christian morality. Like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the novel traces the movement from the sinful city to the redemptive countryside. Sees the story of Mr. Wilson not as a digression but as a central expression of the novel’s theme. Battestin, Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge, 1989. The Sunday Times voted this work one of the four best biographies of the year. Based on fourteen years’ research, this detailed biography replaces Wilbur L. Cross’s The History of Henry Fielding (1918, New York: Russell & Russell, 1945) as the definitive story of Fielding. Includes a useful bibliography of Fielding’s writings. Bloom, Harold, ed. Henry Fielding. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Essays on Field ing’s major novels, his anti-Romanticism, and his uses of style, history, and comedy. Includes chronology and bibliography. ____________, ed. Henry’s Fielding’s “Tom Jones.” New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Essays on the style and structure of the novel, with an introduction by Bloom succinctly detailing the history of criticism of the novel and Fielding’s handling of Squire Western. Includes a chronology and bibliography. Johnson, Maurice. Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on “Shamela,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tom Jones,” and “Amelia.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961. Johnson writes in his introduction, “I want to suggest how, in his fiction, Fielding attempted vigorously and cheerfully to define the good life, within the severe limitations set by Fortune, society, and man’s own errant nature” (pages 16-17). These eleven pieces provide a good critical survey of Fielding’s fiction. Mace, Nancy A. Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. Examines the classical influence on Fielding. Pagliaro, Harold E. Henry Fielding: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Part of the Literary Lives series, this is an excellent, updated biography of Fielding. Provides bibliographical references and an index. Rivero, Albert J., ed. Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. A good collection of essays about Fielding’s major novels. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Sacks, Sheldon. Fiction and the Shape of Belief. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Posits three categories of fiction: satire, apologue, and novel. Argues that, because Fielding uses characters to demonstrate his moral stance, his works are novels, but that his various digressions, providing more overt moral lessons, are apologues. Stoler, John A., and Richard D. Fulton. Henry Fielding: An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Criticism, 1900-1977. New York: Garland, 1980. After listing a number of major Fielding bibliographies and various editions of his works, this bibliography provides a comprehensive, annotated list of secondary works. Arrangement is by title, so students seeking material on a specific work, such as Tom Jones, can quickly find what they need. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. While praising Fielding’s “wise assessment of life,” Watt believes that Fielding’s novelistic techniques reject verisimilitude for the sake of the moral. Hence, Watt sees Fielding’s approach as a fictional dead end. Contains some useful observations about Fielding’s plots and language.

Ford Madox Ford Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Hueffer Born: Merton, England; December 17, 1873 Died: Deauville, France; June 26, 1939 Principal long fiction · The Shifting of the Fire, 1892; The Inheritors, 1901 (with Joseph Conrad); Romance, 1903 (with Conrad); The Benefactor, 1905; The Fifth Queen, 1906; Privy Seal, 1907; An English Girl, 1907; The Fifth Queen Crowned, 1908; Mr. Apollo, 1908; The “Half Moon,” 1909; The Nature of a Crime, 1909 (serial), 1924 (book; with Conrad); A Call, 1910; The Portrait, 1910; The Simple Life Limited, 1911; Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, 1911; The Panel, 1912; The New Humpty-Dumpty, 1912; Mr. Fleight, 1913; The Young Lovell, 1913 (also known as Ring for Nancy); The Good Soldier, 1915; The Marsden Case, 1923; Some Do Not . . . , 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man Could Stand Up, 1926; The Last Post, 1928; A Little Less Than Gods, 1928; When the Wicked Man, 1931; The Rash Act, 1933; Henry for Hugh, 1934; Vive le Roy, 1936; Parade’s End, 1950 (includes Some Do Not . . . , No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post). Other literary forms · Ford Madox Ford was an extremely prolific author, working in virtually every literary form. His children’s stories and fairy tales include The Brown Owl (1891); The Feather (1892); The Queen Who Flew (1894); Christina’s Fairy Book (1906); and the pantomime Mister Bosphorus and the Muses (1923). His volumes of poetry include The Questions at the Well (1893, as Fenil Haig); Poems for Pictures (1900); The Face of the Night (1904); From Inland and Other Poems (1907); High Germany (1911); Collected Poems (1913); On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service (1918); A House (1921); New Poems (1927); and Collected Poems (1936). Ford, who is acknowledged with Joseph Conrad as coauthor of the novels The Inheritors and Romance, may have had some hand in the composition of a number of Conrad’s other works during the decade from 1898 to 1908. Ford’s biographical, autobiographical, and critical works include Ford Madox Brown (1896); Rossetti (1902); Hans Holbein, the Younger (1905); The PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (1907); Ancient Lights (1911); The Critical Attitude (1911); Henry James (1913); Thus to Revisit (1921); Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924); The English Novel (1929); Return to Yesterday (1931); It Was the Nightingale (1933); and Mightier Than the Sword (1938). During the last years of his life, Ford served as professor of comparative literature at Olivet College in Michigan and prepared his final book, a massive critical history of world literature, The March of Literature (1938). His history and travel books include The Cinque Ports (1900); Zeppelin Nights (1916); Provence (1935); and Great Trade Route (1937). Collections of essays include The Soul of London (1905); The Heart of the Country (1906); The Spirit of the People (1907); Women and Men (1923); A Mirror to France (1926); New York Is Not America (1927); and New York Essays (1927). Several volumes Ford classified simply as propaganda, including When Blood Is Their Argument (1915) and Between St. Dennis and St. George (1915). Ford also edited The English Review and later The Transatlantic Review and wrote much ephemeral journalism. 343

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Achievements · It is generally agreed that Ford’s The Good Soldier is one of the masterpieces of modernism, a major experimental novel of enormous historical and artistic interest. His tetralogy Parade’s End, composed of Some Do Not . . . , No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post, is also a key work in the modernist revolution, more massive than The Good Soldier, more sweeping in its treatment of historical change, but less daring in its formal innovations. After these five novels, there is a considerable drop in the quality of Ford’s remaining fiction. The historical trilogy concerning Henry VIII (The Fifth Queen, Privy Seal, and The Fifth Queen Crowned) is cited by some critics as meriting serious reading. Scattered among his many volumes, works such as A Call reward the reader with surprisingly high quality, but most of the lesser books are all too obviously potboilers. Ford was equally at home in the English, French, and German languages, and he contributed to the cosmopolitan and polyglot texture of European modernism. As an editor of influential literary magazines, he recognized and encouraged many writers who have since become famous. His collaboration with Joseph Conrad in the 1890’s corresponded with Conrad’s most productive artistic period, but whether Conrad’s achievements were stimulated by Ford’s collaboration or accomplished in spite of Ford’s intrusion is still under debate. Ford also exercised a considerable influence on Ezra Pound during Pound’s early London years. Later, after World War I, Ford was associated with all the prominent writers of the Parisian Left Bank: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys, and others. Ford’s achievement, then, was as a man of letters whose diverse contributions to modern literature—particularly as an editor and as a champion of modernist writers— far transcended his not inconsiderable legacy as a novelist. Biography · Ford Madox Hermann Hueffer was born in what is now London on December 17, 1873; he was named for his maternal grandfather, the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893). Brown had two daughters: The elder married William Michael Rossetti (brother to the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti); the younger daughter, Catherine, married the German journalist Francis Hueffer, music critic for the London Times, who wrote many books and had a serious scholarly interest in Richard Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Provençal poetry. Ford was born to this couple and grew up in an intellectual hothouse of painters, musicians, artists, and writers with advanced ideas. His family expected him to be a genius, which led him to acquire, early in his life, a sense of inadequacy and failure. Ford tended later to falsify information in his biography and to have difficulty separating reality from fantasy in his recollections. He attended the coeducational Praetorius School in Folkestone, apparently an institution with very modern ideas of education. One of his schoolmates there was Elsie Martindale, a young woman whom he married against her parents’ wishes in 1894. Perhaps this elopement by the impetuous young lovers shows Ford’s tendency to play out in reality the conventions of courtly love, a subject of intense study by Ford’s father and a preoccupation of the author himself in all his fiction, evident even in his final book, the critical survey The March of Literature. Ford and Elsie did not, however, find passionate love a practical way to attain long-term happiness or stability. In September, 1898, Edward Garnett introduced Ford to Joseph Conrad, now recognized as one of the greatest English-language novelists, even though his native tongue was Polish. Ford, like Conrad, was multilingual, and, at least to some degree, he helped Conrad with the niceties of the English idiom. The two would often write

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in French, then translate the work into English. By the spring of 1909, however, Ford and Conrad had quarreled and were never again closely associated. They acknowledged that they collaborated on The Inheritors and Romance, although Ford must have had at least some slight hand in many of Conrad’s fictions written between 1898 and 1909. In fairness, the reader should note that Ford, too, must have had his ideas and his style permanently shaped to some degree by his collaboration with the older, more worldly master, Conrad. Conrad had married an Englishwoman, Jessie George, in 1896, and he lived in a settled and respectable way with her until his death in 1924. At least in part, Conrad’s breach with Ford stemmed from Jessie’s dislike for what she regarded as Ford’s ever more outrageous sexual behavior. In 1903, Ford had an affair with his wife’s sister, Mary Martindale. Throughout his fiction, Ford replays similar real-life issues of passion, adultery, and their tawdry consequences. Thomas C. Moser in The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (1980) maintains that Ford’s writing follows a cyclical pattern, with each outburst of creativity triggered by the introduction of a new love into his life: Elsie Martindale, Mary Martindale, Arthur Marwood, Violet Hunt, Brigit Patmore, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala. Moser’s thesis is a bit too neat to be completely convincing, but its outline suggests the generally messy personal life that Ford must have been living while writing his voluminous works. Analysis · From his association with Conrad, his study of Henry James and of the rise of the English novel, and his knowledge of French literature, Ford Madox Ford developed his notion of literary impressionism, which is central to an understanding of his masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Ford’s clearest statement of his theory of literary impressionism is found in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. Literary impressionism, Ford says, is a revolt against the commonplace nineteenth century novel, or “nuvvle,” as he calls it. The impressionist novel should not be a narration or report, but a rendering of impressions. Rather than following a linear plot, giving one event after another as they occur, the impressionist novel enters the mind of a storyteller and follows his associated ideas in a tangled stream of consciousness, so that vivid image becomes juxtaposed to vivid image, skipping across space and time in a collage of memory and imagination. The impressionist novel takes as its subject an affair, some shocking event which has already happened, and proceeds in concentric rings of growing complication as the storyteller cogitates. The focus of the novel is internal rather than external. The reader must focus on the storyteller’s mental processes rather than on the events themselves. The impressionist novel is limited to the mind of the storyteller, and so is finally solipsistic. The novel refers to itself, so that the reader can never “get out of” the storyteller’s limited mentality and judge whether he is reliable or unreliable, perhaps merely a madman telling a tale which has no connection whatever to reality. Limited and unreliable narration, time-shifts, fragmentation of details torn from the context in which they occur, verbal collages of such fragments in configurations produced by the narrator’s association of ideas, defamiliarization of the commonplace—all these are characteristics of Ford’s best work. The traditional nineteenth century English novel depended on the convention of the linear plot. The process of reading from page one to the end of the text was generally assumed to correspond to the passage of time as one event followed another in the story, so that the hero might be born on page one, go to school on page fifty, commit adultery or consider committing adultery on page one hundred, and meet his just reward in the concluding pages of the book. In The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

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rejected this linear structure and substituted for it the “affair”: A shocking set of events has already occurred before the book begins, and the narrator weaves back and forth in his memories related to the affair. Gradually, in concentric circles of understanding, the reader learns the complicated situation underlying the superficial first impressions he or she may have formed. The drama of the story shifts from the events of the tale to the process of the telling; such stories necessarily contrast first appearances with deeper “realities” revealed in the narration. The Good Soldier · The Good Soldier concerns two married couples: Arthur Dowell (the narrator) and his wife Florence (Hurlbird) Dowell and Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora (Powys) Ashburnham. The events of the story take place between August, 1904, and August, 1913, a nine-year period throughout most of which the two couples are the best of friends, living the life of the leisured rich at European spas, in elegant, cultivated idleness. There is an elegiac tone to this work, reflecting the autumn sunshine of the Edwardian era and a way of life which would be brutally wiped out with the outbreak of World War I. The texture of the novel invites the reader to consider the conflict between appearance and reality. For most of the nine-year period of the action, Arthur Dowell believes that his wife is suffering from a heart ailment which confines her travels and requires her to be shut in her room under peculiar circumstances from time to time. He subsequently learns, however, that her heart is sound and that these arrangements are necessary to allow her to commit adultery, first with a young man named Jimmy and later with Edward Ashburnham himself. Dowell imagines Ashburnham to be a model husband, only gradually learning that he has engaged in a series of affairs and that his wife does not speak to him except when required to do so in public. This novel is like a hall of mirrors, and any statement by the narrator must be doubted. Because readers are accustomed to novels with linear plots, the novel is more easily understood if the plot is rearranged into the customary linear sequence of events. Edward Ashburnham is from an ancient Anglican landholding family who owns the estate Branshaw Teleragh. As the novel opens, he has recently returned from serving as a military officer in India and arrives at the health spa, Bad Nauheim, in Germany, where he meets the Dowells for the first time. Although he appears to be brave, sentimental, and heroic, like the knights in ancient romances, the reader learns that he has been involved in a series of unfortunate affairs with women. His parents arranged his marriage to Leonora Powys, a convent-educated Catholic girl, whose impoverished family had an estate in Ireland. Religious and temperamental differences soon cause their marriage to cool. While riding in a third-class carriage, Edward tries in a blundering way to comfort a servant girl and is arrested for sexual misbehavior in what is called the Kilsyte case. This misadventure leads him for the first time in his life to consider himself capable of bad conduct. His next affair involves a short-lived passion for a Spanish dancer, La Dolciquita, who demands cash for spending a week with him at Antibes. Reckless gambling at the casino, combined with the direct expenses of La Dolciquita’s passion, substantially deplete Edward’s inherited fortune. His wife, Leonora, makes herself the guardian of his estate and sets out to recover their financial losses. She demands that he take a military post in India for eight years and doles out his spending money carefully while squeezing his tenants and lands back in England for as much profit as possible. In India, Edward finds his next woman, Mrs. Basil, whose husband, a brotherofficer, allows the affair to continue in order to blackmail Edward. Eventually, Mrs.

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Basil’s husband is transferred to Africa so that she can no longer stay with Edward. Edward then makes an alliance with Mrs. Maidan, also the wife of a junior officer. Mrs. Maidan has a heart condition and accompanies the Ashburnhams to Bad Nauheim for treatment. On the day that the Dowells and the Ashburnhams first meet, Leonora Ashburnham has found Mrs. Maidan coming out of Edward’s bedroom in the hotel. Enraged, Leonora has slapped her and, in doing so, entangled her bracelet in Mrs. Maidan’s hair. Florence Dowell, in the hall, sees them struggling there and comes to help. Leonora lamely explains that she has accidentally caught her bracelet in Mrs. Maidan’s hair, and Florence helps them get untangled, as the sobbing Mrs. Maidan runs to her room. That evening, Leonora Ashburnham insists on sitting at the Dowells’ dinner table in the hotel so as to prevent any gossip about that day’s events in the hallway. Mrs. Maidan soon commits suicide, leaving Edward free to form a liaison with Florence Dowell herself. Edward’s ward, Nancy Rufford, is being educated in the same convent where Leonora went to school. As Nancy grows to a mature woman, Edward becomes attracted to her, but he is caught in the conflict between love and honor. He desires Nancy, but he is honor-bound not to violate his sacred trust to protect her. After Florence Dowell learns of Edward’s affection for Nancy (along with some other distressing developments), she too commits suicide. Edward remains firm, however, and refuses to take advantage of his ward or corrupt her, even when she openly offers herself to him. He arranges for her to be sent to her father in Ceylon. On her voyage there, she cables from Brindisi a cheerful note implying that she feels no sorrow about leaving him. Edward then commits suicide with a penknife, and Nancy goes insane when she hears of his death. His widow, Leonora, marries a rabbitlike neighbor, Rodney Bayham, while Arthur Dowell is left as the proprietor of the Branshaw Teleragh estate, where he nurses the insane Nancy Rufford. From the exterior, to those who know him only slightly, Edward Ashburnham appears almost superhumanly noble, the ideal of the British country gentleman and good soldier. If the reader believes all that is alleged about him, he is quite the contrary, a raging stallion, recklessly ruining every female he meets. The superficial goodness is merely a veneer masking his corruption. All the other characters, as well, have two sides. Florence Dowell, the respectable wife, has had an affair before her marriage to Arthur with the despicable Jimmy and may have married simply to get back to her lover in Europe. She certainly does not hesitate to become Edward Ashburnham’s mistress and commits suicide when she learns in a double-barreled blow that Edward is attracted to Nancy Rufford and that the man in whose house she committed adultery with Jimmy is now talking with her husband in Bad Nauheim. Leonora is purposeful in trying to manage her husband’s estate economically, but she is cruel and unloving. The reader can easily imagine that her husband would be driven to seek other company. Arthur Dowell, the narrator himself, is stupid, lazy, and piggish. Since the story is told entirely from the point of view of Arthur Dowell, and since his is a limited intelligence, the reader can never entirely trust his narration as reliable. Dowell may assert on one page that a character is noble, yet show the reader in a hundred ways that the character is despicable. The reader is caught in the web of Dowell’s mind. Clearly, Dowell sometimes does not tell the “truth”; but since the total work is fiction, the reader is not simply confronted with a conflict between appearance and reality but with the status of competing fictions. Is Edward a noble knight or a despicable roué? The story evaporates into the impressions in Dowell’s mind. What

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Dowell thinks or believes is the truth at that moment in the fiction. It could be seriously argued that Edward, Leonora, and Florence have no external “reality” at all, that they are simply the imaginings of the sickly Dowell as he tells or dreams his story. This approach may shock readers of conventional fiction, who are accustomed to reading a novel as if the characters were real people, yet all characters in every fiction are simply projections of the author’s creative imagination. Parade’s End · Ford’s massive tetralogy, Parade’s End, consists of four separate novels: Some Do Not . . . ; No More Parades; A Man Could Stand Up; and The Last Post. The main theme of these works repeats a major concern of The Good Soldier, the destruction of the Tory gentleman. Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier belongs to the same class as Christopher Tietjens, the protagonist of Parade’s End. Both are said to have been modeled on Ford’s friend Arthur Marwood, who collaborated with Ford in publishing The English Review. Ashburnham is the landowner of Branshaw Teleragh, whereas Tietjens’s family owns the Groby estate. Both feel an obligation to their dependents and take seriously their stewardship over the land. Both are highly altruistic in certain areas but are tormented by the conflict between their sexual impulses and what is considered proper or honorable behavior. They are Tory gentlemen, landowning, relaxed in manner, Anglican in religion, physically vigorous, classically educated, generous, virile, and possessed of a worldview in which man’s place in the universe is clearly defined. Such men are assailed on all sides by women, by modern commercial industry, by Catholics and Jews, by fascists and communists, and finally by the internal contradictions of their own characters. World War I smashed that class of Tory landholding gentlefolk once and for all, in an externalization of that internal battle. Because the books are a kind of verbal collage, creating a palimpsest of memory and imagination, weaving backward and forward through the minds of characters who are frequently under stress and incapable of reporting events without distorting them, the linear plot of the tetralogy is difficult to summarize. The first novel, Some Do Not . . . , opens with Christopher Tietjens traveling in a railway carriage. His destination, unknown to him at the time, is the future world, the wasteland created by World War I and the destruction of the comfortable Tory universe into which he was born. His wife, Sylvia, has a child of whom he is perhaps not the true father, and she has run away with another man to Europe. Christopher meets an attractive young woman named Valentine Wannop. In the course of the tetralogy, Valentine replaces Sylvia as Tietjens’s mate. The war, when it breaks out, is a terrifying expression of the conflict already implied in the mind of Christopher. In No More Parades, Christopher sees the men on the battlefield harassed by infidelity at home. The combat scenes in the next volume, A Man Could Stand Up, include ones in which Christopher is buried in a collapsed trench under fire, fights desperately to free his companions, and then is demoted for having a dirty uniform. At the end of this book, Valentine and Christopher come together in a nightmare party celebrating the end of the war. The final volume in the tetralogy, The Last Post, is composed of a series of dramatic monologues in which the reader learns that the estate has passed to other hands and that the Groby elm, signifying the Tietjenses’ ownership of the land, has been cut down. Ezra Pound suggested that Ford’s contribution to modern literature could be measured less by reference to any given works than by “the tradition of his intelligence.” While most of Ford’s many novels have been consigned to oblivion, The Good

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Soldier and Parade’s End testify to his manifold gifts as a man of letters and as a godfather to the modernists. Todd K. Bender Other major works POETRY: The Questions at the Well, 1893 (as Fenil Haig); Poems for Pictures, 1900; The Face of the Night, 1904; From Inland and Other Poems, 1907; Songs from London, 1910; High Germany, 1911; Collected Poems, 1913; Antwerp, 1915; On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service, 1918; A House, 1921; New Poems, 1927; Collected Poems, 1936. NONFICTION: Ford Madox Brown, 1896; The Cinque Ports, 1900; Rossetti, 1902; The Soul of London, 1905; Hans Holbein, the Younger, 1905; The Heart of the Country, 1906; The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1907; The Spirit of the People, 1907; Ancient Lights, 1911 (published in the United States as Memories and Impressions, 1911); The Critical Attitude, 1911; Henry James, 1913; When Blood Is Their Argument, 1915; Between St. Dennis and St. George, 1915; Zeppelin Nights, 1916; Thus to Revisit, 1921; Women and Men, 1923; Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 1924; A Mirror to France, 1926; New York Is Not America, 1927; New York Essays, 1927; No Enemy, 1929; The English Novel, 1929; Return to Yesterday, 1931 (autobiography); It Was the Nightingale, 1933 (autobiography); Provence, 1935; Great Trade Route, 1937; Mightier Than the Sword, 1938; The March of Literature, 1938. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Brown Owl, 1891; The Feather, 1892; The Queen Who Flew, 1894; Christina’s Fairy Book, 1906; Mister Bosphorus and the Muses, 1923. Bibliography Bender, Todd K. Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë. New York: Garland, 1997. Examines style and technique in the four authors. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Cassell, Richard A., ed. Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. In his introduction, Cassell reviews Ford criticism, which he believes becomes more laudatory and perceptive after 1939. Though there are essays dealing with Ford’s romances, poetry, and social criticism, the bulk of the book focuses on The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. Also valuable are contributions by literary figures such as Graham Greene, Ezra Pound, and Conrad Aiken. Well indexed. ____________. Ford Madox Ford: A Study of His Novels. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961. The first three chapters (biography, aesthetics, literary theory) are followed by close readings not only of the major works (The Good Soldier, Parade’s End) but also of neglected minor fictional works, particularly Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, The Rash Act, and Henry for Hugh. Also includes helpful discussions of Joseph Conrad’s and Henry James’s influence on Ford. Green, Robert. Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Unlike earlier studies which applied New Criticism to Ford’s work, Green’s analysis places Ford within his historical context and identifies his political beliefs. Asserts that Ford drew no firm line between fiction and nonfiction, treating such works as Ancient Lights and Henry James as important in themselves and glossing over Ford’s major fiction, The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. Also contains a chronological bibliography of his work as well as an extensive yet selected bibliography of Ford criticism. Huntley, H. Robert. The Alien Protagonist of Ford Madox Ford. Chapel Hill: University

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of North Carolina Press, 1970. Focuses on the Ford protagonist, typically a man whose alien temperament and ethics produce a conflict with his society. After extensive treatments of neglected novels (An English Girl, A Call, The Fifth Queen), concludes with an entire chapter devoted to The Good Soldier, which is discussed in terms of Ford’s historical theories. Judd, Alan. Ford Madox Ford. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. A very readable, shrewd biography. However, this major university press includes no source notes and only a brief bibliographical note. Leer, Norman. The Limited Hero in the Novels of Ford Madox Ford. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966. After defining “heroism” in Ford’s thought, Leer discusses the early novels and the ineffectual hero before an extended analysis of The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. Leer sees a decline in Ford’s post-1929 fiction, but praises Ford’s travel books of the same period. A first-rate bibliography of secondary sources is also included. MacShane, Frank, ed. Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. An invaluable collection of reviews and responses, gleaned from literary journals, to Ford’s fiction and poetry. Includes an 1892 unsigned review of The Shifting of the Fire, as well as essays by such literary greats as Theodore Dreiser, Arnold Bennett, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Christina Rossetti, H. L. Mencken, Graham Greene, and Robert Lowell. There are reviews of individual novels, essays on controversies in which Ford was embroiled, and general studies of Ford’s art.

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MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Notable British Novelists

Volume 2 E. M. Forster — Walter Pater 351 – 706

edited by

Carl Rollyson

SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

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Copyright © 2001, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Essays originally appeared in Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Second Revised Edition, 2000; new material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Notable British novelists / editor, Carl Rollyson p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89356-204-1 (set : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-208-4 (v. 1 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-209-2 (v. 2 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-237-8 (v. 3 : alk. paper) 1. English fiction-—Bio-bibliography-—Dictionaries. 2. Novelists, English—Biography—Dictionaries. 3. English fiction— Dictionaries I. Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund) II. Series. PR821.N57 2001 820.9′0003—dc21 [B] 00-046380

First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents — Volume 2 Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii E. M. Forster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 John Fowles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 John Galsworthy Elizabeth Gaskell George Gissing . William Golding Oliver Goldsmith Robert Graves . . Graham Greene .

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Thomas Hardy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445 L. P. Hartley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 Aldous Huxley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468 P. D. James . . . . . Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Samuel Johnson . . . Elizabeth Jolley . . .

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Rudyard Kipling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516 Arthur Koestler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 D. H. Lawrence . . . . . John le Carré . . . . . . Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Doris Lessing . . . . . . C. S. Lewis . . . . . . . . Matthew Gregory Lewis Penelope Lively . . . . . Malcolm Lowry . . . . .

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George Meredith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 658 Iris Murdoch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 George Orwell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 687 Walter Pater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696

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Complete List of Contents Contents—Volume 1 G. K. Chesterton, 164 Agatha Christie, 171 Arthur C. Clarke, 180 Wilkie Collins, 186 Ivy Compton-Burnett, 195 Joseph Conrad, 204 A. J. Cronin, 219 Daniel Defoe, 231 Walter de la Mare, 245 Charles Dickens, 251 Arthur Conan Doyle, 264 Margaret Drabble, 277 Daphne Du Maurier, 291 Lawrence Durrell, 296 Maria Edgeworth, 305 George Eliot, 317 Henry Fielding, 330 Ford Madox Ford, 343

Richard Adams, 1 Kingsley Amis, 6 Martin Amis, 21 Jane Austen, 29 J. G. Ballard, 41 Julian Barnes, 51 Aphra Behn, 58 Arnold Bennett, 65 Elizabeth Bowen, 76 Charlotte Brontë, 83 Emily Brontë, 92 Anita Brookner, 98 John Bunyan, 107 Anthony Burgess, 114 Fanny Burney, 123 Samuel Butler, 132 Lewis Carroll, 139 Angela Carter, 145 Joyce Cary, 152

Contents—Volume 2 Arthur Koestler, 525 D. H. Lawrence, 534 John le Carré, 559 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 572 Doris Lessing, 580 C. S. Lewis, 591 Matthew Gregory Lewis, 601 Penelope Lively, 609 Malcolm Lowry, 614 Rose Macaulay, 626 Sir Thomas Malory, 632 Charles Robert Maturin, 641 W. Somerset Maugham, 649 George Meredith, 658 Iris Murdoch, 667 George Orwell, 687 Walter Pater, 696

E. M. Forster, 351 John Fowles, 366 John Galsworthy, 380 Elizabeth Gaskell, 389 George Gissing, 399 William Golding, 407 Oliver Goldsmith, 418 Robert Graves, 423 Graham Greene, 435 Thomas Hardy, 445 L. P. Hartley, 461 Aldous Huxley, 468 P. D. James, 481 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 490 Samuel Johnson, 499 Elizabeth Jolley, 509 Rudyard Kipling, 516 xxiii

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Contents—Volume 3 Robert Louis Stevenson, 883 Jonathan Swift, 891 William Makepeace Thackeray, 899 J. R. R. Tolkien, 912 Anthony Trollope, 925 John Wain, 936 Evelyn Waugh, 948 Fay Weldon, 959 H. G. Wells, 966 Paul West, 973 T. H. White, 983 Oscar Wilde, 988 A. N. Wilson, 994 Angus Wilson, 1001 P. G. Wodehouse, 1010 Virginia Woolf, 1019

Thomas Love Peacock, 707 Anthony Powell, 716 J. B. Priestley, 729 Barbara Pym, 737 Ann Radcliffe, 745 Mary Renault, 754 Jean Rhys, 762 Dorothy Richardson, 769 Samuel Richardson, 777 Susanna Rowson, 787 Dorothy L. Sayers, 796 Sir Walter Scott, 807 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 824 Tobias Smollett, 835 C. P. Snow, 843 Muriel Spark, 855 Laurence Sterne, 870

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E. M. Forster E. M. Forster

Born: London, England; January 1, 1879 Died: Coventry, England; June 7, 1970 Principal long fiction · Where Angels Fear to Tread, 1905; The Longest Journey, 1907; A Room with a View, 1908; Howards End, 1910; A Passage to India, 1924; Maurice, 1971 (wr. 1913). Other literary forms · In addition to his novels, E. M. Forster wrote short stories, travel books, biographies, essays, and criticism. A number of these works, as well as his novels, have already appeared in the standard Abinger Edition, in progress. The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911) includes his frequently anthologized story “The Road from Colonus” and five other stories written in a fantastic vein that is found much less frequently in his novels. Aspects of the Novel (1927) remains one of the most widely read discussions of that genre, while the essays of Abinger Harvest—A Miscellany (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) have also found many receptive readers. In Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, 1797-1887 (1956) Forster recalls his great-aunt, a woman whose long life plunged him into the social history of a milieu going back to the closing years of the eighteenth century. A useful description of Forster’s uncollected writings by George H. Thomson may be found in Aspects of E. M. Forster (1969), a Festschrift honoring the author on his ninetieth birthday. In the same volume, Benjamin Britten recounts one more Forster achievement: the libretto he coauthored with Eric Crozier for Britten’s opera Billy Budd (1951). Achievements · Forster will continue to stand a little apart from other major novelists of the twentieth century. Because he made it difficult to decide by which standards his work should be judged, assessing it fairly presents problems. Unlike many of his Bloomsbury friends, he did not rebel against the Victorians or their literary habits; neither did he embrace the literary trends of his own time with any great enthusiasm. He lamented the encroachment of a commercial culture, but he did not war on the modern world. Although he composed a set of lectures on the novel, its plural title, Aspects of the Novel, anticipates his refusal to develop therein any single theory of the form in which he distinguished himself. On the one hand, his work is impossible to pigeonhole; on the other hand, his six novels do not entitle him to a lonely eminence overshadowing his most able contemporaries. Readers of the novel will not lose sight of Forster, however, because the very ambiguities and inconsistencies which frustrate efforts to find a niche for him continue to intrigue critics. Forster lived long enough to see his reputation fade and then rebound strongly. He had gained critical acclaim while still in his twenties, written a masterpiece in midlife, and published no fiction for nearly two decades before Lionel Trilling’s E. M. Forster (1943) swung critical attention back to him. Since that time, a formidable body of books and articles dealing with Forster has formed, and many aspects of his work have been studied in great detail. While incapable of putting Forster in a specific place, his critics agree overwhelmingly that he deserves a place of honor among English novelists. 351

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Forster’s critics, fortunately, do not hold his unusually protracted silence against him. The author’s failure to write a novel in the final forty-six years of his life has been explained in various ways—for example by noting that instead of exercising his talents in succession, husbanding his resources, exhausting one mode before moving to another, Forster put all of himself into the first six novels and then (Photo not available) ceased at an age when many novelists are just reaching their prime. Whatever the reason for his early retirement from a literary form successfully practiced by so many older writers, he furnished his critics no occasion to regret the decline of his powers. Those powers yielded fiction marked by a blend of qualities— intelligence, wit, sensitivity, compassion, and alert moral imagination—that few other writers can match. No doubt, many readers begin A Passage to India in the line of duty, for it has attained the rank of “classic,” but they are likely to complete it, and then begin the earlier ones, out of a desire to know better a man who could write so movingly and yet so tough-mindedly about the climate created by racial and religious prejudice. Few such readers are disappointed, for while the earlier novels are less fine, the distance between Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Passage to India is not nearly so great as that between the apprentice and masterworks of most writers. Even if his final novel is, as one critic puts it, “Forster’s sole claim upon posterity,” those who delve into his other works will continue to reap rewards in proportion to the attention they bestow on them, for neither wit nor wisdom is ever far away. The critical consensus is that Forster’s most successful mode is comic irony, and his name is often coupled with those of Jane Austen and George Meredith, whose test for comedy—“that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter”—Forster passes with flying colors. Critics invariably hasten to point out that Forster refused to confine himself to this mode; in the midst of deploring these deviations from high comedy, they find in Forster’s odd blends of comedy, melodrama, fantasy, lyricism, and tragedy a distinctiveness they would not willingly relinquish. Biography · Edward Morgan Forster lived a long but rather uneventful life. Born on New Year’s Day, 1879, he was reared by his possessive mother and worshipful great-aunt (whose biography he later wrote) after the death of his father from tuberculosis before Forster turned two. Happy, protected, and dominated by women in his early years, he suffered painfully the transition to the masculine, athletically oriented

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Tonbridge School—later the model for Sawston School in The Longest Journey. After a more congenial four years, 1897 to 1901, at King’s College, Cambridge, he took a second-class degree. In the next few years, he wrote seriously, traveled in Italy and Greece, tutored the children of a German countess, and also indulged in walking tours of his native land. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, much of which is set in Italy, received favorable reviews in 1905, and Forster produced three more novels in the next five years, of which A Room with a View drew also on his Italian experience, while The Longest Journey and Howards End both reflect his keen delight in the English countryside. Thereafter, having attained a considerable reputation as a novelist, he slowed his pace. He began, but could not finish, a novel called Arctic Summer; completed a novel about homosexuality, his own orientation, which he knew to be unpublishable; and brought out a volume of short stories. Among his many friends he numbered Virginia Woolf, as well as others of the Bloomsbury group, of which, however, he was never more than a fringe member. World War I found him in Egypt as a Red Cross worker. Although he disliked Egypt, his life there led to the writing of two nonfiction books. Forster had first visited India in 1912, but his second sojourn there as personal secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas gave him the opportunity to observe the political and social life closely enough to inspire him to write another novel. A Passage to India, which appeared in 1924, increased his fame and led to an invitation to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927, published later that year as Aspects of the Novel. Although he continued to write for several more decades, he published no more novels. Forster received a number of honors, culminating in the Order of Merit, presented to him on his ninetieth birthday. He died in June of 1970. Analysis · E. M. Forster’s most systematic exposition of the novelist’s art, Aspects of the Novel, is no key to his own practice. Written three years after the publication of A Passage to India, the work surveys neither his achievement nor intentions. While full of the insights, charm, and homely but colorful metaphors which also distinguish Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader volumes (1925, 1932), the book is an enthusiast’s, rather than a working writer’s, view of the novel, as if Forster were already distancing himself from the form which earned him his fame as a writer. A lecture given twenty years later by Lionel Trilling, who had already published his book on Forster, gives a better sense of Forster’s achievement. In “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” later published in The Liberal Imagination (1950), Trilling explains the novel as the writer’s response to the modern world’s besetting sin of snobbery, which he defines as “pride in status without pride in function.” Europeans, and perhaps especially the English, familiar with snobbery as a manifestation of class structure, require less explanation than do Americans of the novel’s relation to snobbery. The central tradition of the English novel from Henry Fielding through Jane Austen, Charles Dickens William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Meredith— and indeed English comedy as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400)—stands as evidence. In Forster’s time, however, that tradition was being modified. For one thing, the greatest English novelists at work during Forster’s formative years were a wealthy American expatriate and a retired Polish mariner. No one as sensitive as Forster could escape the influence of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, but these men made curious heirs to Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot. James, while intensely interested

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in the textures of society, focused his attention on the relations between the English (and Continental) leisure class and those American travelers that Mark Twain had christened “innocents abroad,” thus limiting his social scrutiny, in Forster’s opinion, to the narrow perceptions of a few wealthy idlers. Conrad diverged even more sharply from the path of previous English novelists, for he neither understood nor cared to understand any level of English society. A man of his temperament and interest might be imagined as a literary force in the midcentury United States of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), but not in the England of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-1848) and Dickens’s Bleak House (18521853). Nevertheless, Conrad was more in tune with his own literary milieu than Meredith, who at the end of the century reigned as the grand old man of English letters, and Conrad’s work, like that of James, diverted the creative energy of many of the new century’s novelists into new channels. Of native English novelists still regarded as substantial, the most active at the time of Forster’s entry into the field were Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy—all men born in the 1860’s and all inheritors of the native tradition of the novel, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale. The next generation of novelists, born slightly after Forster in the 1880’s, included Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, all of whom published their initial works after Forster had already written five of his six novels. This latter group obviously belongs to a new literary dispensation. Society and its network of snobbery, though still significant, have receded into the background, and the conflicts of the protagonists are waged at a more personal, intimate, sometimes semiconscious level. Clearly the work of psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Henry James’s brother William influenced these later writers and drove them to develop literary techniques adequate to the task of a more truly psychological novel. Forster, as has been suggested, stands in the middle. A friend of Virginia Woolf and in her mind, certainly, no part of the decaying tradition she trounced so severely in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Forster nevertheless anticipated few of the technical innovations of the novelists who reached their maturity after World War I. His last novel stands with the post-Freudian achievements. Howards End, his most ambitious novel, is in most respects a novel of the old school. It is denser, symbolically richer, than the characteristic work of Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy, but the same might be said of Bleak House, written more than half a century earlier. Only around the time of Forster’s birth did novelists begin to insist on the novel as an art form and write theoretical defenses of it. Meredith delivered a lecture on “The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” (1877), which, though mentioning Miguel de Cervantes and Fielding, has more to say of Artistophanes and Molière; Henry James’s essay “The Art of Fiction” appeared in 1884. By the century’s end, novelists had achieved respectability, and Conrad could soberly echo Longinus: “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.” Such new expressions of the novelist’s kinship with poet and playwright did not end the nineteenth century habit of producing loose, baggy narratives in a diversity of modes, punctuated by their author’s abrupt changes of direction, interpolated moral essays, and episodes introduced for no better reason than a hunch that readers, who cared nothing for artistic integrity, would enjoy them. Stock literary devices that storytellers had accumulated over the centuries—bizarre coincidences, thoroughly improbable recognition scenes thrust into “realistic” contexts, the bundling forth of long-lost (often supposedly deceased) personages in the interests of a happy or

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surprising denouement, all devices that twentieth century novels would shun—still flourished in Forster’s youth, and he used many of them unashamedly. If Forster’s moment in literary history partly explains his wavering between Victorian and modern canons, his skeptical, eclectic temperament must also be cited. His astute analyses of the morals and manners of society involved him in comedy, tragedy, romance, and fantasy—the sort of “God’s plenty” that the supposedly neoclassical John Dryden admired in Chaucer and Ben Jonson in William Shakespeare. Such men would write any sort of work and take up with any sort of character. Forster was similarly indiscriminate. His veneration for Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865-1869), though “such an untidy book,” betrays his Englishman’s weakness in believing that God’s plenty would overcome the artist’s scruples. Of course Forster’s novels are not as long as War and Peace or the Victorian ones that readers worked their way through in installments spread over many months. Compared with the seamless garments of Woolf or even the longer works of Joyce and William Faulkner (both of whom exhibit an un-English type of variety but also an astonishing coherence), Forster’s juxtapositions of sharply contrasting modes invite criticism by readers who take in his works in two or three successive evenings. Thus, while Forster does not belong with Wells and Galsworthy, neither does he quite keep company with the greatest of his slightly younger contemporaries, for he loved too much the variety and freedom that most earlier English novelists permitted themselves. Nevertheless, his motto for Howards End—“Only connect”—applies to his work generally. If he does not always make the artistic connections, his consistent theme is the necessity of making moral connections with fellow humans, of struggling against the class divisions which so many Englishmen, including a number of his fellow novelists, took for granted. In his novels, prudence is invariably on the side of those who, like Henry Wilcox in Howards End and Ronnie Heaslop in A Passage to India, resist the breakdown of social barriers; but courage, generosity, friendship, and sympathy are found among Forster’s liberal opponents of snobbery. In the world of Forster’s novels, the closed class is always sterile and corrupt. Forster’s eclecticism, his versatility, his refusal to ignore the claims either of heart or head make the reading of his novels an ambiguous but rich experience. Never, though, does he seem like a mere exhibitionist. Rather, his openness to life’s variety amounts to a perpetual invitation to the participation of alert and open-minded readers. He is far less afraid of a gaucherie than of a missed opportunity to “connect.” Where Angels Fear to Tread · Forster’s shortest and most tightly focused novel is Where Angels Fear to Tread. A young man named Philip Herriton is commissioned by his mother and sister Harriet to bring back from Italy the infant son of Lilia Carella, the widow of another of Mrs. Herriton’s sons. Within a year after marrying Gino Carella, the aimless son of a small-town dentist, Lilia died giving birth to a son. Aided by Harriet and by Caroline Abbott, who as Lilia’s traveling companion had been able to do nothing to ward off the offensive marriage, Philip finds Gino resistant to Mrs. Herriton’s pocketbook and ultimately becomes involved in a shabby kidnapping venture engineered by Harriet—a venture that ends with the accidental death of the child. On the way home, Philip finds himself drawn emotionally to Caroline, who reveals that she too has fallen in love with Gino. In the common effort to minister to the pitifully unregenerate Harriet, however, Philip and Caroline become friends. Thus summarized, the novel bears some resemblance to one by Henry James.

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Forster enjoys contrasting Anglo-Saxon and Italian mores, and he shares James’s fascinated horror over the machinations and intrigues of sophisticated schemers. He may have owed the idea of centering the story on a somewhat detached emissary to James, whose novel The Ambassadors (1903) appeared shortly before Forster began work on his own book. Forster’s handling of his material, however, differs substantially from James’s. He cannot resist scathing treatment of the characters whose company he expects his readers to keep and with whom they are to sympathize. Harriet, appalled by Italy’s uncleanliness, carries a bottle of ammonia in her trunk, but Forster has it “burst over her prayer-book, so that purple patches appeared on all her clothes.” Prayer brings out the worst in many of Forster’s characters, an exception being Caroline, who is able to pray in the church in Gino’s hometown, “where a prayer to God is thought none the worse of because it comes next to a pleasant word to a neighbor.” For Philip to develop neighborliness is a struggle. Not only is he much less experienced and resourceful than Strether or any other Jamesian ambassador, he is also decidedly unattractive: callow, priggish, and cowardly. Caroline’s assessment of him in the final chapter, though tardily arrived at, is accurate enough: “You’re without passion; you look on life as a spectacle, you don’t enter it; you only find it funny or beautiful.” By the time he hears this, however, Philip has learned what neither his mother nor his sister ever suspects: that the son of an Italian dentist can love his child more than wealth, that he is capable of trust and friendship, that he can be not merely angered but also hurt by a betrayal. Philip has also felt enough by this time to be hurt by Caroline’s words. Though selfish and short-sighted, Gino is without the treachery of a Jamesian Italian such as Giovanelli in Daisy Miller (1878). Indeed, Forster makes him morally superior to the Herriton women. Fixing on a domestic vignette of a sort impossible in any well-appointed English household (or in a James novel, for that matter)—Gino bathing his infant son—Forster draws Caroline into helping him and lets Philip come upon them so engaged, “to all intents and purposes, the Virgin and Child, with Donor.” Forster’s heroes tend to idealize people who are only behaving a little better than expected, but the capacity to idealize is a symptom of their regeneration. Harriet tricks Philip into the kidnapping; he discovers the ruse only after the baby has died and his own arm has been broken in a carriage accident. He returns to confess the transgression, only to have the grief-stricken Gino cruelly twist his broken arm and then nearly choke him to death before Caroline appears to stop him. In a typically Forsterian piece of symbolism, she persuades Gino and Philip together to drink the milk that had been poured for the child. In a pattern that Forster repeats in later novels, Philip, though excessive in his estimate of Caroline’s goodness, is nevertheless “saved” by it. Salvation is at least partly illusion, but such an illusion serves him better than the cynicism that Philip has spent his youth imbibing. The Longest Journey · Like Philip, Rickie Elliot of The Longest Journey is frail and aesthetic. In addition, a deformed foot which he has inherited from his father marks him as different from his Cambridge classmates. At the beginning of the novel, both his father, whom he despised, and his beloved mother are dead; his father’s sister, Mrs. Failing, is his closest relative. On her Wiltshire estate lives a young man, Stephen Wonham, an illegitimate half-brother to Rickie. Rude, truculent, undiscriminating in his choice of companions, and more or less a habitual drunkard, Stephen also proves loyal and almost pathetically trusting. The relationship between the two brothers forms the core of the novel.

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The title of the book, from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Epipsychidion (1821), alludes to the folly of denying the rest of the world for the sake of “a mistress or a friend,” with whom, in consequence, one must “the dreariest and longest journey go.” In the midst of mulling over the poem, Rickie ironically decides to take his journey with Agnes Pembroke, a girl whose first lover, a strapping athlete, has died suddenly of a football injury. Death, it may be noted, always strikes with unexpected suddenness in Forster’s novels. The marriage disgusts Rickie’s closest friend, Stewart Ansell, and Rickie himself comes soon enough to regret it. Discouraged by Agnes and her elder brother Herbert from pursuing a career as a writer, Rickie takes a teaching post at Sawston School, where Herbert is a master. By a strange coincidence, a maladjusted boy at the school writes a letter to Stephen Wonham, among other total strangers, asking Stephen to “pray for him.” Agnes’s practical mind senses trouble if Stephen appears at the school, but mercifully the boy withdraws before Stephen can carry out an offer to come visit him. Rickie, while not fond of Stephen, is willing for him to receive his aunt’s property when she dies; not so Agnes. When Mrs. Failing sends the troublesome Stephen packing, he decides to visit Sawston and inform Rickie of their relationship—about which Rickie already knows. Outside the school, Stephen meets Stewart Ansell, on hand to verify for himself the death of his friend’s spirit in his loveless union with the Pembrokes, and, after receiving an insult, knocks him down. Before Stephen can see Rickie, Agnes intercepts him and offers him the money she is sure he wants in return for leaving Sawston and sparing Rickie the embarrassment of acknowledging him. Stunned and stung, the utterly unmercenary Stephen leaves, but Ansell, won over not only by Stephen’s fist but also by his principles, breaks into the Sawston dining hall during Sunday dinner and, in front of masters, students, and all, rebukes Rickie for turning away his own brother in the latter’s deepest distress. As the assemblage gapes, Ansell reveals what he has correctly intuited: that Stephen is not the son of Rickie’s father, as Rickie had supposed, but of his beloved mother. At this news Rickie faints. Although wildly improbable, the scene has an electric intensity about it. Ansell, with all the clumsy insistence of a true egalitarian and all the insight of a true friend, has, while mistakenly charging Rickie with complicity in Agnes’s treachery, stripped away the hypocrisy behind which the couple has hidden. There is about this revelation something of the quality of the recognition scene of a tragedy such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429), with Rickie the lame protagonist faced with the consequences of his disastrous marriage and of his unjust assumption about his father, as well as of his denial of his brother. From the time Rickie listened mutely to his classmates’ discussion of whether the cow in the field was “there” if no one was present to perceive her, he has searched unavailingly for reality. He has misinterpreted his love for Agnes as real, watched his son—inevitably deformed like his father and himself—die in infancy, and seen his attempt at a schoolmaster’s life tumble. Now he tries, none too successfully, to effect a reconciliation with his brother. He leaves Agnes and the school and tries to rekindle the flame of his short-story writing. When Stephen disappoints him on a visit to Mrs. Failing by breaking a promise not to drink, Rickie concludes that people are not “real.” Finding Stephen sprawled drunkenly across the tracks at a railroad crossing, Rickie finds the strength to move him from the path of an oncoming train—but not the strength to save himself. Rickie’s aunt and brother-in-law, incapable of seeing his rescue of Stephen as worthwhile, see him as a failure whose life is mercifully over. Stephen, who is no

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thinker, is not so sure. In the final chapter, he feels himself to be in some sense the future of England, for he is now the father of a girl who bears the name of his and Rickie’s mother. Dimly, he acknowledges that his salvation is from Rickie. Not only does The Longest Journey run to melodrama, but it also incorporates some rather tedious moralizing, both on the part of Mrs. Failing and in an interpolated essay by Forster which forms the whole twenty-eighth chapter (although the chapter is a short one). Probably the greatest burden, however, is the one Stephen Wonham is forced to carry. First of all, he is the disreputable relative who knocks people down and falls down drunk himself. He serves a contrasting and complementary purpose as a kind of spiritual extension of Rickie, particularly after Rickie, recognizing him as his mother’s son, begins to invest him with her excellencies, as recollected. In the final chapter, Stephen becomes the consciousness of the novel itself. Without Stephen, however, Forster’s brilliant portrait of Rickie is not only incomplete but also depressing, for Rickie dies, sad to say, murmuring agreement with Mrs. Failing’s antihumanist convictions that “we do not live for anything great” and that “people are not important at all.” Stephen exists and procreates and retains the idea of greatness to prove Rickie wrong. A Room with a View · Forster sends his principals off to Italy again in A Room with a View. The room in question is one which Lucy Honeychurch and her elder cousin Charlotte Bartlett do not enjoy at the beginning of their stay in a Florentine hotel but which two other travelers, the elderly Mr. Emerson and his son George, are more than willing to exchange for the one that furnishes the ladies with only a disappointing view of the courtyard. Characteristic of Forster’s well-bred characters, they lose sight of Emerson’s generosity in their horror at the directness and bluntness of his offer, for he has interrupted their conversation at dinner before other guests: “I have a view, I have a view.” Having defied the convention that forbids hasty and undue familiarity with a stranger, Mr. Emerson must be certified by an English clergyman, after which the ladies somewhat stiffly accept the view. Mr. Emerson, of course, has throughout the novel a “view” which the cousins, who hate the darkness but blanch at openness, achieve only with difficulty. Soon an unexpected adventure literally throws Lucy and George Emerson more closely together. While enthusiastically and uncritically buying photographs of Italian masterpieces, Lucy witnesses a stabbing in a public square. She faints; George catches her and, after throwing her blood-spattered photographs into the River Arno, conducts her away gently. Later, Lucy puzzles over the affair and comes to the conclusion that, despite his kind intentions, George Emerson is devoid of “chivalry.” When circumstances throw them together again, George impulsively kisses Lucy. Such behavior drives Lucy and Charlotte to Rome, where they meet Cecil Vyse. He is propriety itself, never once offering to kiss Lucy, and back in England Lucy and Vyse become engaged. By coincidence, Vyse has met the Emersons and introduces them to the neighborhood where Lucy and her mother live. Though well-intentioned, Vyse is one of Forster’s snobs. He is also a drab lover, and when Lucy finally tastes one of his unsatisfactory kisses, she is thrown into a panic by the prospect of another meeting with George. They meet again, and George kisses her again, with the result that Lucy deems George impossible and Vyse intolerable and breaks her engagement to the latter with the resolve never to marry anyone. Clearly Forster is on a different, more wholeheartedly comic, course in this novel, and the denouement fulfills the tradition of romantic comedy, the inevitable marriage

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of Lucy and George being brought about through the ministrations of a lady who casts off her role as an apparently irredeemable snob—cousin Charlotte. What Forster says of the Honeychurch house, Windy Corner, might almost be said of the novel: “One might laugh at the house, but one never shuddered.” Despite the play of Forster’s wit throughout the novel and the sympathy he extends to a girl as silly as Lucy, the reader does shudder occasionally. Two murders, the real one Lucy sees and a supposed one, interrupt the proceedings. The latter is a rumor, bruited about by a clergyman named Eager, that Mr. Emerson has murdered his wife. The charge is baseless and seems to have been injected to deepen Emerson’s character as a man of sorrows. The real death is even more gratuitous—unless it is meant to validate George Emerson’s seriousness and dependability. Events lead Lucy into a series of lies which she supposes to be little white ones but which threaten general unhappiness, until Mr. Emerson, whom she has led to believe that she still intends to marry Vyse, induces heart’s truth and persuades her to marry George. The novel ends with the honeymooners back in Florence speculating on Charlotte’s motive in bringing about Lucy’s climactic meeting with Mr. Emerson. They conclude that “she fought us on the surface, and yet she hoped.” Mr. Emerson, in two respects at least, echoes the writer of the same name. He is convinced of the importance of discovering Nature, and he is an apostle of self-trust. A good man, he grows tedious after the initial chapter, functioning finally as his son’s advocate. George himself never quite comes into focus, and the reader is forced to accept on faith Charlotte’s change of heart. The lightest of Forster’s novels, A Room with a View—had it been lighter yet and avoided the rather heavy-handed symbolism of the “view” and the dark—might not have turned out to be the weakest of the five novels Forster published in his lifetime. Howards End · Howards End, Forster’s most ambitious novel, recounts the adventures of two sisters, Margaret and Helen Schlegel, after two encounters with people not of their quiet, cultivated London set. At the beginning, while a guest at the country home of the Wilcoxes (a family the Schlegels had met while traveling abroad), Helen has become engaged—at least in her own mind—to one of the Wilcox sons, Paul. Her visit and engagement end awkwardly when her aunt whisks her back to London. The second incident grows out of Helen’s inadvertently taking home from the theater the umbrella of a bank clerk named Leonard Bast. Standing “at the extreme verge of gentility,” Leonard wishes to approach closer. The idealistic Schlegels appreciate the impulse and strike up an acquaintance. Meanwhile, the Wilcox connection is reestablished when the Wilcoxes rent a flat across from the house where the Schlegels, including younger brother Tibby, live, and Margaret, the oldest Schlegel, comes to know Mrs. Wilcox. A quiet, even dull woman, Ruth Wilcox is an utterly charitable person who conveys to Margaret “the idea of greatness.” Her husband Henry, a prosperous businessman, and the three Wilcox children—young adults like Helen and Tibby— radiate energy, good humor, and physical health but lack wit, grace, and any sense of beauty. Suddenly, a quarter of the way through the novel, Ruth Wilcox dies. In marrying Henry Wilcox, Margaret proves very nearly as improvident as Lilia Herriton or Rickie Elliot. The two have little in common, and before long a series of fortuitous events shakes their precarious union. As a result of offhand bad advice from Henry, duly passed on by the Schlegel sisters, Leonard Bast loses his job. Leonard makes a pilgrimage to Oniton, one of several Wilcox estates on which Henry and

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Margaret are living. Unfortunately, Leonard chooses to bring along his unbecoming common-law wife, who turns out to be a former mistress of Henry Wilcox. When Henry angrily turns the Basts away, the conscience-stricken Helen insists on trying to compensate Bast. Like Stephen Wonham, he indignantly refuses her money. The impulsive and emotionally overwrought Helen refuses to abandon him. Later Helen disappears into Germany for a time; on her return Margaret discovers that she has conceived a son by Leonard. When Margaret relays to her husband Helen’s request that she be permitted to stay at the unused Howards End for one night, he indignantly refuses, and Margaret realizes that Henry, the betrayer of his own first wife, is unrepentant in his maintenance of a moral double standard. One tragic scene remains. Leonard appears at Howards End to beg forgiveness for sinning with Helen, Charles Wilcox (Henry’s other son) totally misunderstands the intruder’s motive and strikes him down with the flat of a sword, and Leonard’s weak heart gives way. Charles is convicted of manslaughter, and at the end, Margaret, Helen and her child, and the broken-spirited Henry are living together at Howards End. The reader will have noted similarities to Forster’s first two published novels—the melodrama, the improbable coincidences, the often awkward modulations between comic and tragic tone, and so on. The pattern of events in Howards End, on the other hand, is both more richly and less intrusively symbolic. As many critics have observed, this is a novel about England, written in the uneasy pre-World War I years of growing antagonism between Germany and England. Forster permits himself a series of meditations on, paeans of praise to, his native isle in the manner of John of Gaunt’s “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England” speech in William Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595-1596). At the same time, Forster clearly intimates that England is also the Wilcoxes—insular in their outlook, stolid in their prejudices, merciless in their advocacy of the class structure. The Schlegel sisters spring from a German father and revere German Romantic culture. Chapter 5 of the novel celebrates their (and Forster’s) extraordinary sensitivity to Ludwig van Beethoven; it is after a performance of the Fifth Symphony that Helen takes Leonard’s umbrella. Margaret also loves England, typified by Howards End, which is no ancient seat of the Wilcoxes but a property which had belonged to Mrs. Wilcox herself, even though she sometimes seems to be amid alien corn there. England, Forster seems to say, needs to unite the best in its Wilcoxes, its providers and healthy consumers of material goods, with the Schlegel principle, expressed in the love of art and civilized discussion. By themselves the Schlegels are ineffectual. They can only watch helplessly as commercial development dooms their London house. After Helen has been carried away by her feeling for Leonard’s plight, she flees to her father’s ancestral home but cannot live there. Only at Howards End can she live securely and watch her child grow up. As a symbol for England and for the possibilities of a balanced life, Howards End might seem to have some deficiencies. It is lacking in beauty and tradition. It has become the seat of a philistine family, for even the saintly Ruth demonstrates no artistic interest more highly developed than a fondness for flowers and for a certain adjacent meadow in the early morning. On her first visit to Howards End, Helen Schlegel sees more of nature’s beauties than any of the Wilcoxes, who are preoccupied with croquet, tennis, and “calisthenic exercises on a machine that is tacked on to a greengage-tree,” ever perceive. The agent who renders Howards End truly habitable is an uneducated farm

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woman who refuses to accept her “place.” When Margaret first visits Howards End, where, it is thought, they will not make their home, she finds Miss Avery there. The old woman, who for a second mistakes Margaret for the first Mrs. Wilcox, has taken it upon herself to guard the empty house. Her presumptuousness, which in the past has taken the form of wedding gifts to both Henry’s daughter and daughter-inlaw—gaucheries the Wilcoxes are quick to condemn—extends shortly thereafter to unpacking the Schlegel books and other personal belongings, which have been stored there following the expiration of the lease on the London house. After ranging the Schlegel library in bookcases and arranging the Schlegel furniture to suit herself, the woman declines to accept even polite criticism: “You think that you won’t come back to live here, Mrs. Wilcox, but you will.” Thus it is an intuitive country person who joins the half-foreign Schlegel culture to the native Wilcox stock. Miss Avery also sends over a country boy, Tom, after Helen and Margaret, in defiance of Henry, spend a night together at Howards End. “Please, I am the milk,” says Tom, speaking more truth than he knows. As in Where Angels Fear to Tread, the milk is spiritual as well as physical nourishment. Peopled with such life-affirming folk, Howards End becomes a sustaining place, an embodiment of what English life might yet be if the deepening disorder of 1910 is somehow averted. Finally won over to permitting Helen to reside there—and thus at least tacitly acknowledging his own fornication—Henry decrees that at his death the property will pass to Margaret; Ruth Wilcox herself had wanted to give it to her. The motto of Howards End is “Only connect.” In the house, “the prose and passion” of life, the Wilcox and Schlegel principles, are joined through the ministrations of another of Forster’s characters willing to defy the class system in the interests of a nobler order. The central symbol of Howards End is hay. Ruth Wilcox is first observed “smelling hay,” a product that the naturally fertile estate produces in abundance. The rest of the Wilcoxes, Miss Avery at one point observes maliciously, all suffer from hay fever. Forster uses the hay very much as Walt Whitman, whom he occasionally quotes and from whom he appropriated the title of his final novel, uses the grass: to suggest life, sustenance, hope, democracy. At the end of the novel, the chastened Henry’s case of hay fever seems to have subsided when Helen, her baby, and Tom burst in from the meadow, with Helen exclaiming, “It’ll be such a crop of hay as never!” Maurice · Written a few years after Howards End, Maurice did not see print until the year following Forster’s death. In a later “terminal note” to this novel of a homosexual, Forster observed a change in the public’s reaction to this subject from one of “ignorance and terror” at the time he wrote it to “familiarity and contempt” in his old age, so he continued to withhold the work. Maurice Hall also defies the class system, for his sexual partner is a gamekeeper on a college classmate’s estate. Given the rigid penal code of the time, the novel is also about criminality. Aside from his sexual orientation, Maurice resembles his creator very little, being rather ordinary in intellect, little drawn to the arts, and rather robust physically. Whereas Rickie Elliot had been effeminate, his deformed foot a symbolic impediment to satisfactory heterosexuality, Maurice seems quite “normal” to his friends. His college friend Clive Durham, leaning somewhat to homosexuality in college, ironically changes after an illness and a trip to Greece, and marries. The Durhams are gentlefolk, though somewhat reduced, and Maurice has gotten on well with them, but Clive’s marriage drives a wedge between them. After indulging in, and apparently

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escaping from, a furtive but passionate affair with Alec Scudder, their gamekeeper, Maurice suffers a blackmail threat from his former lover, but in the end Alec proves true, and instead of emigrating with whatever conscience money he might have extracted, Alec returns to the Durham estate, where, in the boathouse, the two come together again. At the end, Maurice’s revelation to the conventionally horrified Clive leaves the latter trying “to devise some method of concealing the truth from Anne”— his wife. Maurice demonstrates Forster’s conviction that the desire for loving human relations is proof against the snobbery of all social classes. Although it could not be printed when it was written, the novel now seems more dated than Forster’s other works, perhaps because its style is plain and drab. It obviously suffers from its lack of a contemporary audience, although Forster showed it to Lytton Strachey and received some constructive advice. Significantly, when Oliver Stallybrass, the editor of the Abinger Edition of Forster’s works, assembled his favorite quotations from Forster, he could find nothing in Maurice worth including. A Passage to India · Although Forster committed himself wholeheartedly to friendship, it cannot be called the central theme of any of his novels until A Passage to India. The friendship of Rickie Elliot and Stewart Ansell, while vital to the former’s development and self-discovery, is subordinated to the theme of brotherhood, in its familial sense, and Rickie can find no basis for friendship with Stephen. The incipient friendship of Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox is aborted by the latter’s death. A Passage to India, while treating of brotherhood in its largest sense, is at heart a novel of friendship and its possibilities in the context of a racially and religiously fragmented society. Beginning with the visit to India of the mother and fiancé of Ronnie Heaslop, the young colonial magistrate, and the complications of their encounters with a few educated natives, the narrative comes to focus on the friendship that, as a consequence, waxes and wanes between the English schoolmaster Cyril Fielding and the young Muslim Dr. Aziz. Forster dedicated the book to another Anglo-Indian friendship: his own with Syed Ross Masood, who first knew Forster as his tutor in Latin prior to Masood’s entrance to Oxford in 1906, and who provided the impetus for Forster’s own initial passage to India a few years later. Since Anglo-Indian prejudice was one of the loquacious Masood’s favorite subjects, Forster understood it well by the time he came to write the novel. Indeed, his friendship with Masood demonstrated the possibility of such a relationship surviving the strains imposed on it by one partner’s determination to pull no punches in discussing it. Aziz, accused by Ronnie’s fiancé Adela Quested of assaulting, or at least offending her (for she remains vague about the matter throughout), in a cave they are exploring, is a less masterful and self-confident figure than Masood, and the reader knows all along that there must be some mistake. Adela has seen how Ronnie’s Indian service has exacerbated the weaker aspects of his character, and she has broken off their engagement, but she is not, as Aziz affects to believe, a love-starved female—at least not in the crude sense Aziz intends. Forster draws an unforgettable picture of the tensions between the colonial rulers and the Indian professional class. The most idealistic Englishmen, it seems, succumb to the prevailing intolerance. It is an effort to consider the natives as human, as when Ronnie, told by his mother, Mrs. Moore, of her meeting with a young doctor, replies: “I know of no young doctor in Chandrapore,” though once he learns that his mother

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has actually been consorting with a Muslim, he identifies him readily enough. An exception to the rule is Fielding, already over forty when he came to India and a continuing believer in “a globe of men who are trying to reach one another.” When Aziz’ trial divides the community more openly and dangerously than usual, Fielding supports the young doctor—a move that assures the enmity of the English without guaranteeing the affection of the skeptical Indians. After Adela withdraws her charges against Aziz, the intimacy between the two men reaches its height; almost immediately, however, they quarrel over Aziz’ determination to make his tormentor pay damages. Fielding cannot persuade Aziz to show mercy, but Mrs. Moore can, even though she has left the country before the trial and in fact has died on her return passage. For the sake of the mother of the detested man whom Aziz still believes Adela will marry, he spares the young woman, knowing that the English will interpret this decision as an indication of guilt. With Adela finally gone, Aziz mistakenly assumes that Fielding, now contemplating a visit to England, intends to marry her himself. When the friends meet again two years later, the old frankness and intimacy has been shattered. Although Fielding has married, his bride is the daughter of Mrs. Moore. The final chapter is a particularly excellent one. As Aziz and Fielding ride horses together, the former vowing that they can be friends but only after the Indians “drive every blasted Englishman into the sea,” the horses swerve apart, as if to counter Fielding’s objection. Not religion, land, people, even animals want the friendship now. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that under imperial conditions no rapprochement is possible. Much of the interest in this novel has centered on Mrs. Moore, a rather querulous old woman with a role not much larger than Mrs. Wilcox’s in Howards End. Although she joins the roster of Forster’s admirable characters who defy the taboos that divide people, she refuses to involve herself in the Aziz trial. Nevertheless, the Indians make a legend out of her and invest her with numinous powers. Critics have tended to regard her as a more successful character than Mrs. Wilcox. Part of the explanation may lie in Forster’s decision to allow the reader to see her not only at first hand but also through the eyes of the Indians. If their view of Mrs. Moore is partly illusion, the illusion itself—like the more familiar illusions of the English—becomes itself a part of the truth of the situation. It is one of Forster’s virtues that he knows and communicates the often conflicting values and attitudes of native Indians. Nor is the Indian version of Mrs. Moore completely illusory, for in addition to her openness and candor, Mrs. Moore in one respect surpasses all the Europeans, even the gentle Fielding. She loves and respects life, especially unfamiliar life. It is illuminating to contrast her attitude with that of two incidental characters—missionaries who live among the people and never come to the whites’ club. They measure up to their calling very well for Forster clergymen, allowing that God has room in his mansions for all people. On the subject of animals they are not so sure; Mr. Sorley, the more liberal of the two, opts for monkeys but stumbles over wasps. Mrs. Moore, more alert to the native birds and animals than she is to many people, is even sympathetic to a wasp (“Pretty dear”) that has flown into the house. It is doubtless significant that the wasp is very different from the European type. Long after she is gone, Professor Godbole, Aziz’ Hindu friend, remembers her in connection with the wasp. Love of humble forms of life, which the other Westerners in the novel notice only as irritations if at all, is for the Indians of Forster’s A Passage to India a reliable indication of spirituality. The sensitivity of Mrs. Moore and the good will of Fielding seem like frail

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counterweights to the prevailing cynicism and prejudice which stifle the necessarily furtive social initiatives of well-intentioned victims such as Aziz. If these flawed but genuine human beings have little impact on the morally bankrupt society in which they move, they have for more than half a century heartened readers of like aspirations. Robert P. Ellis Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories, 1911; The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, 1928; The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster, 1947; The Life to Come and Other Stories, 1972; Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, 1980. PLAY: Billy Budd, pb. 1951 (libretto; with Eric Crozier). NONFICTION: Alexandria: A History and a Guide, 1922; Pharos and Pharillon, 1923; Aspects of the Novel, 1927; Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 1934; Abinger Harvest—A Miscellany, 1936; Virginia Woolf, 1942; Development of English Prose Between 1918 and 1939, 1945; Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951; The Hill of Devi, 1953; Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, 1797-1887, 1956; Commonplace Book, 1978. Bibliography Beauman, Nicola. E. M. Forster: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1994. A well-informed biography drawing on new archival material. Includes a family tree. Crews, Frederick J. E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962. This comprehensive, readable introduction to Forster’s novels and short stories argues that, although Forster’s mind is anchored in liberalism, he is always aware of the liberal tradition’s weaknesses. Claims that “his artistic growth runs parallel to his disappointments with humanism.” Although he is agnostic and anti-Christian, Forster’s “books are religious in their concern with the meaning of life” and the virtues of private freedom, diversity, personal relationships, sincerity, art, and sensitivity to the natural world and its traditions. Indexed. Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. London: Secker & Warburg, 1978. This major biographical study written by another famous novelist is readable and perceptive in its analyses of the novels, short stories, and criticism. Finds pertinent influences on Forster’s writing in his childhood, adolescent, and early adult years. An index is included. Gransden, K. W. E. M. Forster. 1962. 2d ed. New York: Grove Press, 1970. This insightful study summarizes Forster’s career, the influences of Samuel Butler, George Meredith, and Jane Austen, and his novels and short fiction. Included is a postscript to the 1970 revised edition which celebrates Forster’s tenacious hold on his readers as well as selective primary/secondary bibliographies and an index. Iago, Mary. E. M. Forster: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. A succinct study of Forster’s novels and work for the BBC. Helpful notes. McConkey, James. The Novels of E. M. Forster. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1957. This historically important study looks forward to the 1960’s emphasis on textual and philosophical criticism of Forster’s writings. Analyzes the author’s use of point of view, fantasy, images, symbols, and rhythms and demonstrates that both the transcendent and the physical worlds are always present in Forster. Selective primary and secondary bibliographies and an index conclude the book. Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1943. This is one of

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the most important, most influential assessments of Forster ever written. Trilling’s discussion of Forster and the liberal imagination went far to influence a revival of interest in the work. Considers Forster’s novels, short fiction, and criticism to show that his work is to be explained in terms of his emphasis upon the disastrous effects of “the undeveloped heart.” An index is included.

John Fowles John Fowles

Born: Leigh-on-Sea, England; March 31, 1926 Principal long fiction · The Collector, 1963; The Magus, 1965, 1977; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969; Daniel Martin, 1977; Mantissa, 1982; A Maggot, 1985. Other literary forms · In addition to his novels, John Fowles has written philosophy, essays for scholarly and popular audiences, criticism, poetry, and short fiction. He has also translated several other writers into English. The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas, published in 1964, is his philosophical “self-portrait in ideas.” Patterned after writings of Heraclitus, the fifth century b.c.e. Greek philosopher, it reflects Fowles’s philosophical stance, outlining many of the views which Fowles expresses more fully and artistical1ly in his fiction. His collected poetry is published in Poems (1973); much of it reflects his period of residence in Greece, the major setting for The Magus. His longer nonfiction pieces reflect his love for and interest in nature: Shipwreck (1974), a text to accompany the photographs of shipwrecks along the English coast near Fowles’s home, and Lyme Regis Camera (1990), a text to accompany photographs of the town, its inhabitants, and its immediate environs; Islands (1978), about the Scilly Islands off the English coast, but more about the nature of islands as a metaphor for literature and the writer; The Tree (1980), an extension of the same theme with emphasis on the tree as representative of all nature; and The Enigma of Stonehenge (1980), a further extension of nature to encompass the mystery of a sacred place. All these themes are touched on in the varied pieces collected in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings (1998). These themes find definition and elaboration in his fiction. Fowles’s only collection of short fiction, The Ebony Tower, includes a novella from which the title is taken, three short stories, and a translation of a medieval romance with a “Personal Note” that comments on its relation to his fiction. The collection, entitled Variations in manuscript, also reflects Fowles’s central themes in the longer fiction. Achievements · Fowles’s place in literary history is difficult to assess. He has established an excellent reputation as a writer of serious fiction, one who will continue to be read. He continues to receive the notice of numerous critics; more than a dozen books have been published about him. Fowles, however, is no “ivory tower” author; he enjoys a wide readership, and several of his novels have been made into motion pictures, including The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Readers can expect to find in Fowles’s works a good story with a passionate love interest, complex characters, a healthy smattering of philosophy, all presented within the context of the plot. Critics can slice away multiple layers to get at the wheels-withinwheels of meaning on existential, historical, philosophical, psychological, and myriad other levels. Because Fowles rarely tells the same story in the same way, genre is a topic of much discussion among his critics. His fiction reflects not only his experimentation with genre, but also his questioning of authorial voice, the continuum of time, moments out of time, split viewpoint, a story without an ending, a story with a choice of endings, and still another with a revised ending. Despite such experimentation, most of the 366

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novels are in many ways quite old-fashioned, reflecting the ancient boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-seeks-to-find-girl-again-and-in-so-doing-finds-himself quest motif that characterizes so much fiction. They are fairly straightforward “good reads” without the dizzying experimentation of a James Joyce to make them virtually inaccessible to all but the most diligent reader. On any level, Fowles is enjoyable, and what reserves him a place among memorable writers is that he is discoverable, again and again. Biography · John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England, on March 31, 1926, to Robert and Gladys Richards Fowles. During World War II, his family was evacuated to the more remote village of Ippeplen, South Devon, and it was there that Fowles discovered the beauty of the country of Devonshire, his “English Garden of Eden” that figures so prominently in other guises in his fiction. During that same period, he was a student at the exclusive Bedford School, where he studied German and French literature, eventually rising to the stature of head boy, a position of great power over the other boys in the school. It was there that he got his first taste of literature, which he loved, and power, which he despised. The knowledge of both was influential in his own writing. From Bedford, he went into military service, spending six months at the University of Edinburgh and completing training as a lieutenant in the merchant marine just as the war was ending. Following the war, he continued his education in German and more particularly French literature at New College, Oxford University; he graduated in 1950 with a B.A. with honors. His fiction owes many debts to his study of French literature, particularly his interest in existentialism as espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and his knowledge of the Celtic romance, from which stems his expressed belief that all literature has its roots in the theme of the quest. Upon graduation, Fowles taught English at the University of Poitiers. After a year at Poitiers, he took a job teaching English to Greek boys on the island of Spetsai in the Aegean Sea. The school, the island, the aura of Greece, and the thoughts of the young teacher became the material for The Magus, his first novel (although not published first). It was also on Spetsai that he met Elizabeth Whitton, whom he married three years later. For Fowles, Greece was the land of myth, the other world, the place of the quest. Leaving Greece, Fowles suffered the loss of another Eden, but that loss inspired him to write. While writing, he continued to teach in and around London until the publication of The Collector in 1963, the success of which enabled him to leave teaching and devote himself full time to writing. The following year he published The Aristos, and in 1965 he finally published The Magus, twelve years after its conception. A year later, he and Elizabeth moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset, a small seaside town away from London where they have continued to live. First living on a rundown farm, the Fowleses later moved to an eighteenth century house overlooking Lyme Bay. The dairy, the house, and the town of Lyme figure prominently in his third novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a work that established his international reputation. Following its success were his Poems, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, the revised version of The Magus, Mantissa, and A Maggot. Fowles’s love of nature is evident in his writing as well as his life, especially in such nonfiction works as Islands and The Tree. At his home in Lyme Regis, he oversees a large, wild garden overlooking Lyme Bay and fosters the natural development of the flora, passions that have not died since boyhood. One that has died, however, is the

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collection of living things. Once a collector of butterflies, like his character Frederick Clegg in The Collector, Fowles now abhors such activities. Rather, he collects Victorian postcards and antique china, reads voluminously, goes to London infrequently, and shares a very private life with his wife, who is his best critic. It was a life he very much enjoyed until he suffered a mild stroke in early 1988. Although the stroke caused no permanent damage, it left him depressed by the sudden specter of death and by a resulting loss of creative energies. By the mid-1990’s most readers who had followed Fowles’s career did not expect him to add to his body of work, but he said at the Fowles seminar in Lyme Regis in 1996 that he was again at work. Analysis · John Fowles’s fiction has one theme: the quest of his protagonists for self-knowledge. Such a quest is not easy in the modern world because, as many other modern authors have shown, the contemporary quester is cut off from the traditions and rituals of the past that gave people a purpose and sense of direction. Still, desiring the freedom of individual choice which requires an understanding of self, the Fowlesian protagonist moves through the pattern of the quest as best he can. Following the tradition of the quest theme found in the medieval romance, which Fowles sees as central to his and all of Western fiction, the quester embarks on the journey in response to a call to adventure. Because the quester is in a state of longing for the adventure, oftentimes not recognized as such by him, he readily responds to the call. The call takes him across a threshold into another world, the land of myth. For Fowles’s questers, this other world is always described as a remote, out-of-the-way place, often lush and primeval. In this place the quester meets the usual dragons, which, in modern terms, are presented as a series of challenges that he must overcome if he is to proceed. Guided by the figure of the wise old man who has gone before him and can show the way, the quester gradually acquires self-knowledge, which brings freedom of choice. For Fowles’s heroes, this choice always centers around the acceptance of a woman. If the quester has attained self-knowledge, he is able to choose the woman— that is, to know and experience love, signifying wholeness. Then, he must make the crossing back into the real world and continue to live and choose freely, given the understanding the quest has provided. What separates the journey of the Fowlesian hero from the journey of the medieval hero is that much of it has become internalized. Where the quester of old did actual battle with dragons, monsters, and mysterious knights, the modern quester is far removed from such obvious obstacles. He cannot see the enemy in front of him, since it is often within him, keeping him frozen in a state of inertia that prevents him from questing. The modern journey, then, can be seen in psychological terms; while the events are externalized, the results are measured by the growth of the protagonist toward wholeness or self-knowledge. Thus, as Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), “The problem is . . . nothing if not that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life.” Each of Fowles’s protagonist/heroes follows the pattern of the mythic quest. Each journeys to a strange land (the unconscious): the Greek island of Phraxos and Conchis’s more secret domain for Nicholas Urfe, the isolated countryside house for Frederick Clegg, the primitive Undercliff of Lyme Regis for Charles Smithson, the hidden manor in the forests of Brittany for David Williams, the lost landscape of his youth and the journey up the Nile for Daniel Martin, the interior space of the mind

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of Miles Green, and the ancient landscape of Stonehenge plus the mystery of the cave for Bartholomew and Rebecca. Each undergoes a series of trials (the warring aspects of his personality) intended to bring him to a state of self-consciousness. With the exception of Clegg, whose story represents the antiquest, each has the aid of a guide (the mythical wise old man): Conchis for Nicholas, Dr. Grogan for Charles, Breasley for David Williams; Professor Kirnberger, Georg Lukács, a Rembrandt self-portrait, and others for Daniel Martin; the various manifestations of the muse for Miles Green; and Holy Mother Wisdom for Bartholomew and Rebecca. Each has an encounter with a woman (representative of “the other half” needed for wholeness): Alison for Nicholas, Miranda for Frederick, Sarah for Charles, the “Mouse” for David, Jane for Daniel, Erato for Miles, Holy Mother Wisdom for Bartholomew, and Bartholomew for Rebecca. The ability of the quester to calm or assimilate the warring aspects within him, to come to an understanding of himself, and as a result reach out to the experience of love with the woman, represents the degree of growth of each. Feeling strongly that his fiction must be used as “a method of propagating [his] views of life” to bring a vision of cosmic order out of modern chaos, Fowles sees himself on a journey to accomplish this task. An examination of his fiction reveals the way in which he tackles the task, providing his readers with a description of the journey that they, too, can take. The Magus · The Magus was Fowles’s first novel (although it was published after The Collector), and it remains his most popular. Fowles himself was so intrigued by the novel that he spent twelve years writing it, and even after publication, produced a revised version in 1977 because he was dissatisfied with parts of it. While some critics see changes between the original and the revision, there is little substantive difference between the two books beyond the addition of more explicit sexual scenes and the elaboration of several sections; thus the discussion of one suffices for the other. The story derives from Fowles’s period of teaching in Greece, and its protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, is much like Fowles in temperament and situation. As is often the case with Fowles, his fiction describes protagonists of the same age and temperament as himself at the time of his writing; thus an examination of the corpus reveals a maturing hero as well as a maturing author. In this first novel, Nicholas is twenty-five, Oxfordeducated, attracted to existentialism, and bored with life. He is the typical Fowlesian protagonist, wellborn and bred, aimless, and ripe for the quest. Discontented with his teaching job in England, he, like Fowles, jumps at the opportunity to teach in Greece. His subconscious desire is for a “new land, a new race, a new language,” which the quest will provide. Just before going, he meets Alison, who is to become the important woman in his life, although it takes many pages and much questing through the labyrinth of self-knowledge on Phraxos for Nicholas to realize this. Alison, as the intuitive female, the feeling side Nicholas needs for wholeness, recognizes the importance of their relationship from the beginning, while Nicholas, representing reason, does not. In discussing the elements of the quest that bring Nicholas to an understanding and acceptance of the feeling side of himself which allows him to experience love, one can chart the pattern of the quest which Fowles presents in variations in all his fiction. On Phraxos, Nicholas responds to the call to adventure embodied in the voice of a girl, the song of a bird, and some passages of poetry, especially four lines from T. S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” These lines state

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the mystery of the journey that awaits him: to quest outside so as to come back to himself with understanding. Put another way, it is the yearning in humankind for the return to the harmony of the Garden of Eden. It is, as well, the thesis of Four Quartets (1943), which solves for Eliot the problem of the wasteland. Finally, it is the concept that motivates almost all of Fowles’s questers, beginning with Nicholas. Crossing the threshold beyond the Salle d’Attente, or Waiting Room, to the domain of myth at Bournai, Nicholas meets Conchis, his guide through the quest. Under Conchis’s tutelage, Nicholas’s “discoveries” begin. Nicholas understands that something significant is about to happen, that it is somehow linked to Alison, and that it restores his desire to live. Conchis exposes Nicholas to a series of experiences to teach and test him. Some he describes for Nicholas; others make Nicholas an observer; and still others give him an active, sometimes frightening role. In all, whether he is repulsed, fascinated, or puzzled, Nicholas wants more, allowing himself to be led deeper and deeper into the mysteries. These culminate in the trial scene, during which Nicholas is examined, his personality dissected, his person humiliated. Finally, he is put to the test of his ability to choose. Longing to punish Lily/Julie, the personification of woman Nicholas romantically and unrealistically longs for, he is given the opportunity at the end of the trial to flog her. His understanding that his freedom of choice gives him the power to resist the predictable, to go against the dictates of reason alone and follow the voice of the unconscious, signifies that he has become one of the “elect.” Nicholas emerges from the underground chamber reborn into a higher state of consciousness. He must then make the return crossing into the real world. To begin the return journey, he is given a glimpse of Alison, although he has been led to believe that she has committed suicide. Realizing that she is alive and that she offers him “a mirror that did not lie” in her “constant reality,” he understands that the remainder of the quest must be toward a reunion with Alison. Apparently, however, he is not yet worthy of her, being dominated still by the ratiocinative side of himself, that part that seeks to unravel logically the mystery that Conchis presents. Thus, on his return to London he is put through additional tests until one day, completely unsuspecting of her arrival, he sees Alison again and follows her to Regents Park for their reunion. Signifying the experience of the Garden of Eden when man and woman existed in wholeness, the park provides an appropriate setting for their reunion. Echoing lines from Eliot, Nicholas has arrived where he started. Now he must prove that he is worthy of Alison, that he can accept the love she once offered freely, but that he must win her just as Orpheus attempted to win Eurydice from the dead. Becoming his own magus, he acts out a drama of his own making, challenging Alison to meet him at Paddington Station, where their journey together will begin. Unlike Orpheus, who was unsuccessful in bringing Eurydice from the dead, Nicholas has the confidence gained in his quest to leave Alison and not look back, knowing that she will be at the train station to meet him. While there is some question among critics as to whether Nicholas and Alison do meet and continue their journey together, Fowles has indicated that “Alison is the woman he will first try to love.” Certainly, in either case it is the element of mystery that is important, not whether Nicholas wins this particular woman. The significance is in his yearning for her, demonstrating that he has learned to accept and give love, that he has journeyed toward wholeness. What makes such a journey significant for the reader is that he or she can partake of the experience as an insider, not as an outsider. This results from the narrative technique Fowles employs. In Fowles’s first-person narrative, Nicholas reveals only

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what he knows at any particular point on his journey; thus the reader sees only what Nicholas sees. Not able to see with any more sophistication than Nicholas the twistings and turnings of Conchis’s “godgame,” the reader must do exactly what Nicholas does: try to unravel the mystery in its literal sense rather than understand the “mystery” in its sacred sense. Believing every rational explanation Nicholas posits, one learns as he learns. As his own magus, Nicholas leads the reader into the mystery he was led into, not spoiling one’s sense of discovery as his was not spoiled, and providing one with the experience of the journey as he experienced it. Of course, behind Nicholas is the master magus Fowles, whose design is to lead each reader to his own essential mysteries. The technique provides an immediacy that allows each reader to take the journey toward self-discovery; the novel provides a paradigm by which the mystery of Fowles’s other novels can be deciphered. The Collector · The Collector, in sharp contrast to The Magus, presents the other side of the coin, sounding a warning. Here the protagonist is the antihero, his captured lady, the heroine. She goes on the journey he is incapable of taking, which, in his incapacity to understand her or himself, he aborts. Frederick Clegg, the protagonist, shares many similarities with Nicholas of The Magus. Each is orphaned, in his twenties, and aimless. Each forms an attachment to a blond, gray-eyed woman, and each goes to a remote land in which the relationship with this woman is explored. Each is given the opportunity to become a quester in that land, and each tells a first-person narrative of the experience. In each, the narrative structure is circular, such that the novel arrives where it started. The major difference, of course, is that Nicholas journeys toward wholeness; Clegg, while given the same opportunities, does not. The reason for Clegg’s failure lies in the fact that he cannot understand the mythic signals; thus, he cannot move beyond his present confused state. The novel begins and ends in psychic darkness; the hero does not grow or develop. Yet, while Clegg remains unchanged, the captive Miranda, trapped as Clegg’s prisoner, undergoes a transforming experience that puts her on the path of the quest Clegg is unable to take. The tragedy is not so much Clegg’s lack of growth as it is the futility of Miranda’s growth in view of the fact that she cannot apply in the real world the lessons learned in her quest. She is incapable even of having any beneficial effect on her captor. Part of the problem between Miranda and Clegg lies in the differences in their cultural backgrounds. Miranda has the background of a typical Fowlesian quester in terms of education and social standing; Clegg’s, however, is atypical in his lower-class roots and lack of education. Part of the thesis of this novel is the clash between these two as representative of the clash between the “Many” and the “Few,” which Fowles describes in detail in The Aristos. The novel, presented as a divided narrative told first by Clegg and then by Miranda, depicts in its very structure the division between Miranda and Clegg that cannot be bridged. The first problem for Clegg as a quester is that he captures the object of his quest, keeping her prisoner in a hidden cellar. In psychological terms, Miranda, the feeling side of Clegg, is kept in the cellar “down there,” which disallows the possibility of union. Clegg remains a divided man, living above in the house, with Miranda imprisoned below. Miranda, however, discovers that her “tomb” becomes a “womb” in which she grows in self-consciousness and understanding. Thus, the quest centers on her and the antiquest centers on Clegg. As a butterfly collector, Clegg sees Miranda as his prize acquisition. He hopes that

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she will come to love him as he thinks he loves her, but what he really prizes is her beauty, which he has hoped to capture and keep as he would a butterfly’s. When she begins to turn ugly in her vitality and lack of conformity to his preconceived notions of her, she falls off the pedestal on which he has placed her, and he then feels no compunction about forcing her to pose for nude photographs. Clegg’s problems are many. On a social level, he identifies too closely with what he sees as the judgment of the middle class against his lower-class background. On a psychological level, he is possessed by images from his past, the negative influences of his aunt, and his upbringing. His sexual fears and feelings of personal inadequacy combine to lock him into his own psychological prison in the same way that he locks Miranda in hers. Trapped in his internal prison, the outward presence of Miranda remains just that, outside of himself, and he cannot benefit from her proximity. She, however, while externally imprisoned by Clegg, is not prevented from making the inward journey toward self-discovery. At the same time, there is within Clegg, although deeply buried, a desire to break away and move onto the mythic path, and Miranda sees that aspect of him, his essential innocence, which has caused him to be attracted to her in the first place. Nevertheless, it is too deeply buried for Miranda to extract, and his power over her becomes his obsession. When he blurts out, “I love you. It’s driven me mad,” he indicates the problem he faces. Love is madness when it takes the form of possession, and Clegg is possessed by his feelings in the same way that he possesses Miranda. As Miranda asserts her individuality and Clegg becomes repulsed by her, he is able to shift blame for her death to her as a direct consequence of her actions. While Clegg learns nothing from his experience and uses his narrative to vindicate himself, Miranda uses her narrative to describe her growing understanding and sense of self-discovery, aborted by her illness and subsequent death. After her death, Clegg cleans out the cellar, restoring it to its original state before Miranda’s arrival. This circular structure, returning the reader to the empty cellar, echoes the circular structure of The Magus, except that Clegg has learned nothing from his experience, and Nicholas has learned everything. It is not that Nicholas is essentially good and Clegg essentially bad; rather, it is that Clegg cannot respond to the good within him, rendered inert by the warring aspects of his personality. Clegg’s failure to respond to the elements of the quest is, in some respects, more tragic than Miranda’s death, because he must continue his death-in-life existence, moving in ever-decreasing circles, never profiting or growing from the experience of life. In his next conquest, he will not aim so high; this time it will not be for love but for “the interest of the thing.” Reflecting the bleakness of Clegg’s situation, the novel is filled with images of darkness. The pattern of The Collector is away from the light toward the darkness. Miranda’s dying becomes a struggle against “the black and the black and the black” and her last words to Clegg—“the sun”—are a grim reminder of the struggle between them: the age-old struggle of the forces of light against those of darkness. Miranda’s movement in the novel is upward toward light, life, and understanding; Clegg’s is one of helpless descent toward darkness, evil, and psychic death. The French Lieutenant’s Woman · With The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles returns to the theme of the successful quest. Here the quester is Charles Smithson, much like Nicholas in social standing and education. The important differences between the novels are that The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in Victorian England and that

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Charles, in his thirties, a decade older than Nicholas, reflects the older viewpoint of the author. Like Nicholas, his twentieth century counterpart, Charles is representative of his age and class. Also like Nicholas, Charles is somewhat bored with his circumstances, despite the fact that he is finally taking the proper course of marriage to the proper lady, Ernestina. Not nearly so aware of his boredom as is Nicholas, Charles is nevertheless immediately attracted to Sarah upon their first meeting, sensing instantly that she is not like other women. Meeting her again in Ware Commons and its more secret Undercliff, Charles finds in this “other world” the mythic encounter for which he unconsciously yearns. A seeker after fossils, he subconsciously fears his own extinction in the receding waters of the Victorian age, a gentleman left behind in the face of the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution. Sarah, having recognized her uniqueness in a world of conformity, relishes her position apart from others, particularly in its ability to give her a freedom other women do not possess. As the French lieutenant’s woman (a euphemism for whore), she is outside society’s bonds. Capitalizing on her position, she has already begun her own quest when she meets Charles; thus, she leads him to his own path for the journey. Ernestina represents the known, the predictable, the respectable; Sarah, the opposite: the unknown, the mysterious, the forbidden. Torn between the two choices, Charles eventually comes to know himself well enough to be able to make the more hazardous choice, the one more fraught with danger, yet far more likely to lead to wholeness. The feeling and reasoning aspects of Charles’s psyche war within him. Seeking advice from Dr. Grogan, he gets the proper scientific viewpoint of Sarah and is prescribed the proper course of action: return to Ernestina. One side of Charles, the rational, longs to do so; the other side, the feeling, cannot. Thus, after much wrestling with the problem, Charles chooses Sarah, breaks his engagement to Ernestina, and returns to Sarah for what he thinks will be the beginning of their beautiful life in exile together—only to find her gone. At this point, Charles’s real journey begins. Sarah has brought him to the point of resisting the predictable and recognizing his feeling side; he must now learn to live alone with such newfound knowledge. Such a choice is not a simple one, and the reader must choose as well, for there are three “endings” in the novel. The first is not really an ending, as it comes in the middle of the book. In it, Charles rejects Sarah, marries Ernestina and lives, as it were, happily ever after. One knows, if only by the number of pages remaining in the book, that this is not really the ending; it is merely Victorian convention, which the author-god Fowles quickly steps in to tell the reader is not the actual ending. Thus, the reader passes through another hundred pages before he comes to another choice of endings, these more realistic. The first is happy; the second is not. The endings themselves indicate the evolutionary process that Charles, as well as the novel, takes; for if one includes the hypothetical early ending, one moves from the traditional Victorian view to the emancipated view of Charles’s and Sarah’s union to the final existential view of the cruelty of freedom which denies Charles the happy ending. Fowles wanted his readers to accept the last ending as the right choice, but feared that they would opt for the happy ending; he was pleased when they did not. In the first ending, the gap between Charles and Sarah is bridged through the intercession of Lalage, the child born of their one sexual encounter. The assertion that “the rock of ages can never be anything but love” offers the reader a placebo that does not effect a cure for the novel’s dilemma. Fowles then enters, turns the clock back,

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and sets the wheels in motion for the next ending. In this one, the author-god Fowles drives off, leaving Sarah and Charles to work out their fate alone in much the same way that Conchis absconds from the “godgame” when Nicholas and Alison are reunited in The Magus. In both cases, Fowles is trying to demonstrate that the freedom of choice resides with the individual, not with the “author.” Since Sarah fears marriage for its potential denial of her hard-won freedom and sense of individuality, she cannot accept Charles’s offer to marry, nor can he accept hers of friendship in some lesser relationship. Sarah then gives Charles no choice but to leave, and in his leaving he is released from his bonds to the past, experiencing a new freedom: “It was as if he found himself reborn, though with all his adult faculties and memories.” Like Nicholas in The Magus, the important point is not whether he wins this particular woman but that he has learned to know himself and to love another. This is what sets him apart as an individual, saves him from extinction, and propels him into the modern age. The Ebony Tower · Intending to name his collection of short works Variations because of its reflection of various themes and genres presented in his longer fiction, Fowles changed the name to The Ebony Tower (after the title novella) when first readers thought the original title too obscure. Anyone familiar with Fowles’s themes, however, immediately sees their variations in this collection. The volume contains the title novella, followed by a “Personal Note,” followed by Fowles’s translation of Marie de France’s medieval romance Eliduc (c. 1150-1175), followed by three short stories: “Poor Koko,” “The Enigma,” and “The Cloud.” In his “Personal Note,” Fowles explains the inclusion of the medieval romance, relating it first to “The Ebony Tower,” more generally to all of his fiction, and finally to fiction in general. The title story describes a quester who inadvertently stumbles into the realm of myth only to find that he cannot rise to the challenge of the quest and is therefore ejected from the mythic landscape. The other three stories are all centered on enigmas or mysteries of modern life. These mysteries arise because “mystery” in the sacred sense no longer appears valid in modern humanity’s existence. The movement of the stories is generally downward toward darkness, modern humankind being depicted as less and less able to take the journey of self-discovery because it is trapped in the wasteland of contemporary existence. Thus, the variations in these stories present aspects of the less-than-successful quest. David Williams of “The Ebony Tower” leaves his comfortable home and lifestyle in England and enters the forests of Brittany, the land of the medieval romance, to face an encounter with Henry Breasley, a famous (and infamous) painter. Because David is a painter himself, he is interested in the journey from an artist’s perspective; he does not anticipate the mythic encounter that awaits him in this “other” world. Within this other world, Breasley attacks the “architectonic” nature of David’s work in its abstraction, in contrast to Breasley’s art, which has been called “mysterious,” “archetypal,” and “Celtic.” In defaming David’s art for its rigidity and lack of feeling, Breasley serves as a guide to David. David also finds the essential woman here in the figure of Diana, “The Mouse.” The two characters offer him the potential of becoming a quester. The story represents the forsaken opportunity and its aftermath. David’s problem, like that of Nicholas and Charles at the beginning of their quests, is that he is so caught up with the rational that he cannot understand the emotional, in others or in himself. To all that he finds bewildering, he tries to attach a rational explanation. When finally confronted with pure emotion in his meeting with Diana in the Edenic garden, he hesitates, fatally pausing to consider rationally what his

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course of action should be. In that moment, he loses the possibility of responding to his innermost feelings, failing to unite with the woman who represents his feeling side; as a result, he is evicted from the mythic landscape. Caught between two women, his wife and Diana, David cannot love either. His situation is in sharp contrast to that of Eliduc, who also encounters two women, and can love both. For Eliduc, love is a connecting force; for David, a dividing force. Thus, when David leaves the Brittany manor, he runs over an object in the road, which turns out to be a weasel. Here the weasel is dead with no hope of being restored to life. In Eliduc, love restores the weasel to life. The rest of the story is David’s rationalization of his failure. Like Clegg of The Collector, David first recognizes his failure but knows that he will soon forget the “wound” he has suffered and the knowledge of his failure. Already the mythic encounter seems far away. By the time he arrives in Paris, he is able to tell his wife that he has “survived.” Had David succeeded in his quest, he would have done far more than survive: He would have lived. The remaining stories in the collection are connected to the title story by the theme of lost opportunities. In “Poor Koko” the narrator, a writer, is robbed by a young thief who burns his only possession of value, his manuscript on Thomas Love Peacock. The story is the writer’s attempt to understand the seemingly meaningless actions of the thief, which he finally comes to realize extend from the breakdown in communication between them. On a larger scale, the clash between the boy and the old man is the clash between generations, between a world in which language is meaningful and one in which it is empty. In the succeeding story, “The Enigma,” a mystery of a different kind is presented: the disappearance of John Marcus Fielding, member of Parliament, and the subsequent investigation by Sergeant Jennings. The first mystery focuses on the reason behind the disappearance of Fielding, whose body is never discovered and whose motive is never revealed. What is hinted at by Isobel Dodgson, the former girlfriend of Fielding’s son and the last person to have seen Fielding before he disappeared, is that Fielding absconded from life because it offered no mystery; thus he provided his own by disappearing. The second and more engaging mystery is seen in the developing relationship between Jennings and Isobel. While theirs is not of the dimensions of the relationship between Charles and Sarah, Nicholas and Alison, or even David and Diana, since they are not on the mythic journey, it is nevertheless interesting because it provides a sense of mystery. In a world that motivates a Fielding to walk out, it will have to suffice. The last story, “The Cloud,” is probably the most mysterious in the literal sense, although it describes a world most lacking in mystery in the sacred or mythic sense. The setting is a picnic with two men, Peter and Paul, and two women, sisters, Annabel and Catherine. While the setting describes an idyllic day, one senses from the outset that this is not paradise, because the women are lying in the sun, “stretched as if biered,” an image of death that pervades the story. Catherine has apparently suffered the loss of a loved one, presumably her husband, and is in deep depression. She seems unable to make the crossing back into the world. Language does not serve as a bridge, and her feelings elicit no depth of response from the others. Thus, by the end of the story, she enters a myth of her own making, which is described in the story she invents for her niece about the princess abandoned by her prince. Catherine remains behind, unbeknown to the others when they leave the woods, and the reader is left with the

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assumption that she commits suicide, symbolized by the presence of the dark clouds rolling over the scene. Thus, the dark image of the ebony tower in the first story is replaced by the dark cloud in the last, and the reader has come full circle once again. Daniel Martin · Having described aspects of the failed quest in The Ebony Tower, Fowles once again returns to the theme of the successful quest in Daniel Martin. This time the quester is a mature man in his forties, as was the author at the time of the novel’s composition, and this time Fowles is able to write the happy ending that had eluded him in his other fiction. The first sentence of the novel contains its thesis and the summation of Fowles’s philosophy: “WHOLE SIGHT OR ALL THE REST IS DESOLATION.” Like the questers in The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin must take the mythic journey to learn the meaning of whole sight and to change his world from a place of desolation to one of fulfillment. While the first sentence of the novel states the thesis, the epigraph states the problem: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” Trapped in the wasteland of contemporary existence, Daniel experiences “morbid symptoms” in his failure to feel deeply and to be connected to a meaningful past. It is the movement of the novel from the crisis to whole sight that constitutes the quest. The call to adventure comes with a phone call announcing the impending death of Anthony, an old friend. In going to England to be at his friend’s bedside, he returns to the land of his youth and to the time when love was real. That love was with Jane, who later married Anthony, forcing both Daniel and Jane to bury their true feelings for each other. With Anthony’s death, Daniel is once again faced with the dilemma of his own happiness and the role that Jane can play in it. At the same time, Daniel is wrestling with the problem of his desire to write a novel; subsequently, as the story unfolds, Daniel’s novel unfolds, such that at the completion of the story one also has the completion of Daniel’s novel, the demonstrable product of his successful quest. Moving in and out of time, the novel skips from Daniel’s boyhood to his present life in Hollywood with Jenny, a young film actress, to his memories of happy days at Oxford, and to his continuing relationship with Jane in the present. It also has several narrative points of view: Daniel tells certain sections, the omniscient author tells others, and still others are told by Jenny. Daniel is aided on his journey by several wise old men: among them, Otto Kirnberger, the professor he and Jane meet on their trip up the Nile; and the Hungarian Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács, whose writings explain Daniel’s choices as a writer. Daniel also describes several Edenic settings which he calls the experience of the “bonne vaux.” Remembrance of these experiences at Thorncombe, at Tsankawi, and at Kitchener’s Island reinforce his desire to bring them more fully into his life; thus he quests on. Realizing that the essential element of the quest is his ability to express his love for Jane, he worries that he will be rejected by her. Jane, less certain of her ability to choose her own future, tries to retreat from his declaration of love, telling him that she sees love as a prison. Jane is not yet ready to accept Daniel, but they journey on together, this time to Palmyra, a once beautiful but now desolate and remote outpost. In this wasteland, they experience the renewal of love. The catalyst comes in the form of a sound, “a whimpering, an unhappiness from the very beginning of existence.” The sound is that of a litter of forlorn puppies, followed by another sound from their bedraggled mother, who tries to protect her puppies by acting as a decoy to distract

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the couple. The scene propels Jane out of her own wasteland into an enactment of a private ritual. Burying her wedding ring in the sand, she symbolically severs herself from her restrictive past to connect with the present and Daniel. On his return to England, Daniel then severs himself from his remaining past by rejecting Jenny, recognizing all the while the importance of compassion in his relations with her and others. Following their last meeting, he enters a nearby church and is confronted with a living picture of all that he has learned: the famous late Rembrandt self-portrait. In this vision of compassion and whole sight, Daniel sees how far he has come and where the path into the future will lead. In Daniel’s experience of the happy ending, the reader sees also a beginning. Thus, the last sentence of the novel one reads becomes the first sentence of the novel that Daniel will write. Again the experience is a circle, arriving where it started, with the circle expanding as it does in The Magus and in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The movement of Fowles’s fiction through Daniel Martin suggested the completion of a cycle: from a statement of the thesis in The Magus, to a statement of its opposite in The Collector, to an examination of the thesis from a different historical perspective in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, to variations in The Ebony Tower, and to arrival at the long-sought happy ending in Daniel Martin. One could easily anticipate that the next novel would be very different, and so it was. Mantissa, which Fowles defines in a footnote, is a term meaning “an addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse.” The novel’s critical reception was mixed, some critics applauding the obvious departure from Fowles’s customary style and others deploring its seeming frivolousness. Fowles contends that it should be taken as “mantissa,” a kind of lark on his part. In it, he explores the role of creativity and freedom for the author, expressed through his protagonist Miles Green, as he wakes up to find himself an amnesiac in a hospital. The action of the novel, although it appears to have numerous characters entering and leaving the hospital, is really taking place in the protagonist’s head, with the various characters representing manifestations of the muse Erato. The debate between muse and author gives Fowles the opportunity to turn the essential question of “freedom to choose,” which he makes the object of the quest for his protagonists in his novels, into the object of the quest for the author/protagonist in this one. It also gives Fowles the opportunity to poke fun at the literary-critical approaches of the day, especially deconstruction. Finally, it gives Fowles the perfect opportunity to write graphically about sexual encounter, which he claims is one of the reasons he revised The Magus: to correct a “past failure of nerve.” A Maggot · In his next novel, A Maggot, he again chooses a title that requires explanation, his use of the term being in the obsolete sense of “whim or quirk.” He goes on to explain in his prologue that he was obsessed with a theme arising out of an image from his unconscious of an unknown party of riders on horseback, and his desire was to capture this “remnant of a lost myth.” This same obsession with an image is what led to the writing of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the historical novel set in the nineteenth century. In A Maggot, the temporal setting is the eighteenth century, and, as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the struggle of a man and a woman to break out of their trapped existence is once again the focus. The man is Bartholomew, the son of a wealthy lord, and the woman is a prostitute named Fanny whose real name is Rebecca Lee. Bartholomew leads Rebecca into the quest, but he disappears, and the remainder of the novel becomes a search for the truth behind the events leading to his disappearance. To conduct this investigation, Bartholomew’s father hires the

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lawyer Henry Ayscough, and the form of the novel shifts from third-person omniscient to first-person depositions, as Ayscough locates and questions everyone connected with the journey leading to the mysterious disappearance of Bartholomew. Everyone has a different view of the event, none of which Ayscough finds convincing. His desire for the truth is based on a belief that there is a rational, logical explanation; yet, despite the thoroughness of his inquiries, he cannot come up with one, finally concluding, without the evidence to prove it, that it must have been a murder. The crux of the problem lies in his statement to Rebecca, “There are two truths, mistress. One that a person believes is truth; and one that is truth incontestible. We will credit you with the first, but the second is what we seek.” Rebecca’s belief, that Bartholomew has been transported by a maggot-shaped spaceship to June Eternal and that she has been reborn into a new life, frees her to break out of the trap of her existence by founding what will become the Shaker Movement, which the daughter to whom she gives birth at the end of the novel will take to America. The mystery of Bartholomew’s disappearance is never solved, and the reader is left to decide where the truth lies. For Rebecca, the central quester, the truth she experienced in the cave gives her the freedom to choose a new life, which is the object of the quest. Carol M. Barnum, updated by David W. Cole Other major works POETRY: Poems, 1973. NONFICTION: The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas, 1964; Shipwreck, 1974; Islands, 1978; The Tree, 1980; The Enigma of Stonehenge, 1980 (with Barry Brukoff); A Brief History of Lyme, 1981; Lyme Regis Camera, 1990; Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, 1998; Conversations with John Fowles, 1999 (Diane L. Vipond, editor). MISCELLANEOUS: The Ebony Tower, 1974 (novella, 3 short stories, and translation of a French medieval romance). Bibliography Acheson, James. John Fowles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. An excellent introduction to the life and works of Fowles. Aubrey, James R. John Fowles: A Reference Companion. New York: Greenwood, 1991. An indispensable tool for the student of Fowles. Contains a biography, summary descriptions of Fowles’s principal works and their receptions, a perceptive and judicious survey of the principal secondary works treating the Fowles canon, an extensive set of explanatory notes on Fowles’s fiction, and a comprehensive bibliography. Baker, James R., and Dianne Vipond, eds. “John Fowles Issue.” Twentieth Century Literature 42 (Spring, 1996). A collection of essays on Fowles’s work, together with two poems by Fowles and an interview with Fowles conducted by Dianne Vipond. Barnum, Carol M. The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1988. Discusses six novels and the short-story collection from the point of view of the quest motif, which unites the seemingly disparate approaches of the fiction under a central theme. Includes notes, index, and a subdivided bibliography. Foster, Thomas C. Understanding John Fowles. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. An accessible critical introduction to Fowles’s principal works. Contains an annotated bibliography.

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Huffaker, Robert. John Fowles. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A good overview and introduction to Fowles, including chronology through 1980. Discusses fiction through Daniel Martin, focusing on the theme of naturalism. Includes notes, selected bibliography, and index. Loveday, Simon. The Romances of John Fowles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Includes a chronology through 1983 plus an introductory chapter on the author’s life and work. Discusses the fiction through Daniel Martin, with a concluding chapter that places Fowles in the romance tradition. Notes, subdivided bibliography, and index. Palmer, William J., ed. “Special Issue: John Fowles.” Modern Fiction Studies 31 (Spring, 1985). An excellent collection of essays on the fiction through Daniel Martin, plus an interview and a good, selected bibliography, subdivided by individual works, as well as general essays and interviews. Pifer, Ellen, ed. Critical Essays on John Fowles. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. A collection of essays previously published elsewhere in journals. A good introduction by the editor is followed by essays organized under two themes: the unity of Fowles’s fiction and discussions of individual works. Coverage through Mantissa. Includes notes and an index. Tarbox, Katherine. The Art of John Fowles. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Discusses the novels through A Maggot with emphasis on Fowles’s dictum to “see whole.” Does not include a chapter on The Ebony Tower. The last chapter is an interview with the author. Notes, subdivided bibliography, and index.

John Galsworthy John Galsworthy

Born: Kingston Hill, England; August 14, 1867 Died: London, England; January 31, 1933 Principal long fiction · Jocelyn, 1898 (as John Sinjohn); Villa Rubein, 1900 (as Sinjohn); The Island Pharisees, 1904; The Man of Property, 1906; The Country House, 1907; Fraternity, 1909; The Patrician, 1911; The Dark Flower, 1913; The Freelands, 1915; Beyond, 1917; The Burning Spear, 1919; Saint’s Progress, 1919; In Chancery, 1920; To Let, 1921; The Forsyte Saga, 1922 (includes The Man of Property, “Indian Summer of a Forsyte,” “Awakening,” In Chancery, and To Let); The White Monkey, 1924; The Silver Spoon, 1926; Swan Song, 1928; A Modern Comedy, 1929 (includes The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon, Two Forsyte Interludes, and Swan Song); Maid in Waiting, 1931; Flowering Wilderness, 1932; Over the River, 1933; End of the Chapter, 1934 (includes Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, and Over the River). Other literary forms · John Galsworthy attempted and succeeded at writing in all major literary forms. His earlier short fiction is collected in Caravan: The Assembled Tales of John Galsworthy (1925); among the individual collections, some of the best known are A Man of Devon (1901), published under the pseudonym “John Sinjohn,” Five Tales (1918), Two Forsyte Interludes (1927), and On Forsyte ‘Change (1930). His plays made him, along with George Bernard Shaw, James M. Barrie, and Harley GranvilleBarker, a leading figure in British drama during the early decades of the twentieth century. Galsworthy’s most enduring plays include The Silver Box (1906), Justice (1910), The Skin Game (1920), and Loyalties (1922). Collections of Galsworthy’s literary sketches and essays include A Motley (1910), The Inn of Tranquility (1912), and Tatterdemalion (1920). Galsworthy wrote poetry throughout his life, and the Collected Poems of John Galsworthy were published in 1934. Achievements · Galsworthy was a writer who reaped the rewards of literary acclaim in his own time—and suffered the pangs that attend artists who prove truer to the tastes of the public than to an inner vision of personal potential. Galsworthy won the esteem of his countrymen with a play, The Silver Box, and a novel, The Man of Property, published in his annus mirabilis, 1906. From that time on, he was a major figure in the British literary establishment, even winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. Idealist, optimist, and activist, Galsworthy was a perennial champion of the underprivileged in his works. Women (especially unhappily married ones), children, prisoners, aliens, and animals (especially horses and dogs) engaged Galsworthy’s sympathies. His literary indictments of the injustices forced upon these victims by an unfeeling society helped to arouse public support for his causes and frequently resulted in elimination of the abuses. After World War I, Galsworthy’s crusading spirit was somewhat dampened. Despite his disillusionment, though, Galsworthy’s conscience remained sensitive to inequities of all sorts. Although popular as a writer of fiction and influential as a spokesman for humane, enlightened personal behavior and public policy, Galsworthy was not the sort of writer who changes the course of literature. His early works contain some powerful 380

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satire and some interesting experiments in probing and expressing his internal conflicts. By upbringing and inclination, however, Galsworthy was too “gentlemanly” to be comfortable with self-revelation or even with introspection. Thus, while the English novel was becoming increasingly psychological because of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence, Galsworthy continued in the nineteenth century tradition of Ivan Turgenev and Guy de Maupassant, carefully describing social phenomena and assessing their impact on private lives. Most of his characters are individualized representatives of particular social classes, whether the rural gentry, the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, or the London professional elite. He excelled at presenting the fashions, politics, manners, and phrases peculiar to certain milieus at certain times. In creating the Forsytes—and most notably Soames, “the man of property”—Galsworthy’s talent transcended that of the memorialist or mere novelist of manners and provided England with a quintessential expression of the shrewd, rich, upright middle class of Victorian London, a group whose qualities subsequent generations found easy to mock, possible to admire, but difficult to love. Biography · John Galsworthy, son and namesake of a solicitor, company director, and descendant of the Devonshire yeomanry, was born into the rich Victorian middle class he so accurately describes in The Forsyte Saga. His early years followed the prescribed pattern of that class. Having spent his childhood at a series of large, grand, ugly country houses outside of London, Galsworthy was graduated from Harrow School and New College, Oxford. Called to the bar in 1890, he commenced a languid practice of maritime law and traveled widely, to Canada, Australia, and the Far East. On returning to England, he committed an unpardonable breach of middle-class manners and morals: He openly became the lover, or more accurately husband manqué, of Ada, the unhappy wife of his cousin Major Galsworthy. Having placed themselves beyond the pale, the lovers traveled abroad and in England and, with Ada’s encouragement and assistance, Galsworthy began his literary career by writing books under the pen name “John Sinjohn.” In 1905, after Ada’s divorce, the Galsworthys were able to regularize their relationship, and, in 1906, public acclamation of The Man of Property and The Silver Box gave Galsworthy a secure place in the ©The Nobel Foundation British literary establishment. Sub-

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stantial resources permitted the Galsworthys to maintain London and country residences and to continue what was to be their lifelong habit of extensive traveling. A kindly, courtly, almost hypersensitive person concerned throughout his life with altruistic ventures large and small, Galsworthy was distressed that his age and physical condition precluded active service in World War I. During these years, Galsworthy donated half or more of his large income to the war effort, wrote patriotic pieces, and for some time served as a masseur for the wounded at a hospital in France. Friends observed that neither John nor Ada Galsworthy ever truly recovered from the war, and the last decade or so of Galsworthy’s life was, beneath a smooth surface, not particularly happy. He had achieved all the trappings of success. Born rich, married to a woman he adored, he owned an elegant town house at Hampstead and an imposing country place at Bury, in Sussex. He was president of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists (PEN). The public honored him as a humanist and philanthropist, acknowledged him as one of the foremost British men of letters, and even—thanks to the nostalgic novels written during the 1920’s which, along with The Man of Property, constitute The Forsyte Saga and its sequel A Modern Comedy—made him a best-selling author. Nevertheless, Galsworthy keenly felt that he had never made the most of his talent or fulfilled the promise of his early works. Furthermore, though he was the sort of gentleman who found complaints and even unarticulated resentment “bad form,” Galsworthy must have felt some unconscious hostility toward his wife, who, for all her devotion, was superficial, hypochondriacal, demanding, and possessive in the Forsyte way that Galsworthy found deplorable (at least in people other than Ada) and who, by obliging him to live life on her terms, was perhaps the principal force in the circumspection of his talents. He also felt anxious realizing that the intense, even claustrophobic bond of love that had joined him and Ada would eventually be severed by the death of one or the other. Ironically, in 1932, it became evident that the “stronger” of the two would not survive his “frail” companion. Galsworthy was stricken with an initially vague malaise that, though never satisfactorily diagnosed, was very likely a brain tumor. Galsworthy died at home in London on January 31, 1933, two months after having been awarded in absentia the Nobel Prize in Literature. Analysis · John Galsworthy is one of those authors whose works are valued most highly by their contemporaries. Once placed in the first rank by such discriminating readers as Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Gilbert Murray, and E. V. Lucas (though Virginia Woolf despised him as a mere “materialist”), Galsworthy is now remembered as the workmanlike chronicler of the Forsyte family. Most of his other works are ignored. Changing fashions in literature do not suffice to explain this shift in critical esteem. Rather, the way Galsworthy chose to employ his talents—or the way his upbringing and personal situation obliged him to use them—guaranteed him the esteem of his peers but in large measure lost him the attention of posterity. Galsworthy’s literary strengths are impressive. His works are acutely observant and intensely sympathetic. In his novels, one finds carefully detailed presentations of the manners, codes, pastimes, and material surroundings of England’s ruling classes as well as enlightened consideration of the diverse injustices these classes deliberately and inadvertently inflicted on those below them. Temperamentally inclined to support the “underdog”—whether an unhappily married woman, a poor workingman less honest than those in happier circumstances would like him to be, an ostracized

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German-born Londoner in wartime, or a badly treated horse—Galsworthy does not treat his characters as stereotypes of good or evil. Even when he is a partisan in one of the ethical dilemmas he presents (such as Soames Forsyte’s sincerely enamored but brutally proprietary attitude toward Irene, the woman who passively marries him but actively repents of that decision), he strives to show the mixture of good and bad, commendable and culpable, in all parties. Galsworthy writes best when he deals with characters or situations from his own experience (for example, the various loves in The Dark Flower), comments on his own background or family history (as in the satirical group portrait of the Forsytes), or attempts to externalize the intricate course of motivations and ambivalences in his own mind (as does his study of Hilary Dallison, a prosperous writer suffering under the curse of “over-refinement,” in Fraternity). Nevertheless, Galsworthy’s reserve and stoicism, innate qualities further cultivated by his gentlemanly upbringing, made him increasingly unwilling to look within himself and write. His peripatetic existence and desire to grind out work for good causes must have made concentration on truly ambitious projects difficult. His wife’s wishes and values, closer than he ever acknowledged to the more blighting aspects of Forsyteism, cut him off from many of the experiences and relationships that writers tend to find enriching. As a result, most of his carefully crafted literary works remain topical productions: He fails to confer suggestions of universality or living particularity on the social types and situations he describes, and thus, as novels of manners tend to do, his works seemed more profound and interesting to the age and society whose likenesses they reflect than they have to succeeding generations. The first of the Forsyte novels, The Man of Property, is generally agreed to be Galsworthy’s finest work, and the excellence of this book in great measure guaranteed that its less skillfully realized sequels and the peripheral Forsyte collections such as Two Forsyte Interludes and On Forsyte ‘Change would attract and interest readers. If these social novels typify Galsworthy’s achievement, two other works deserve mention, not for their continued popularity or complete artistic success but because they indicate the other avenues Galsworthy might have explored had he not directed his talent as he chose to do. The Dark Flower, one of Galsworthy’s favorites among his works, displays his ability to handle emotional relationships; Fraternity, which he termed “more intimate than anything I’ve done . . . less machinery of story, less history, more life,” is his most complex psychological study, a flawed but ambitious attempt at writing a “modern” novel. Fraternity · In the spring of 1909, ensconced in the Devonshire countryside he loved, Galsworthy worked on the study of London life that would be Fraternity. The book’s first title, however, was Shadows, a word that gives perhaps a clearer indication of the novel’s ruling concern. In Fraternity, Galsworthy presents two adjacent but contrasting neighborhoods, elegant Campden Hill (where he and Ada then had their town residence) and disreputable Notting Hill Gate, and two sets of characters, the genteel, prosperous, enlightened Dallisons and their “shadows,” the impoverished Hughs family. Aware of the existence of their less fortunate brothers (Mrs. Hughs does household chores for Cecelia, wife of Stephen Dallison, and the Hughses’ tenant models for Bianca, the artist wife of Hilary Dallison) and rationally convinced of the unity of humankind and the falseness of the divisions fostered by the class system, the Dallisons would like to take positive actions to help their “shadows” but find them-

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selves unable to succeed at putting their theories into practice. Hilary in particular—like his creator Galsworthy a fortyish writer with a comfortable income and an uncomfortably sensitive conscience—is willing but unable to do some good. Discovering in one of many episodes of self-scrutiny that his benevolent intentions toward his wife’s “little model” are far from disinterested and, worse yet, learning that the poor girl loves him, Hilary suffers a fit of repulsion. He is, as Catherine Dupre observes in John Galsworthy: A Biography (1976), “horrified by the prospect of any sort of union with someone whose difference of class and outlook would doom from the start their relationship.” For Hilary and all the Dallisons, the common bond of shared humanity is ultimately less significant than the web of social life that separates the privileged from their “shadows,” that permits observation without true empathy. Galsworthy’s friend Joseph Conrad was not alone in appraising Fraternity as “the book of a moralist.” The great danger and difficulty of such a novel, Conrad argued to Galsworthy, is that its “negative method” of stressing a moral problem without prescribing a remedy leaves the reader dissatisfied: “It is impossible to read a book like that without asking oneself—what then?” In that sentence, Conrad characterizes a recurrent quality of Galsworthy’s writing. Except in specific cases (and there were many of these—among them women’s suffrage, slaughterhouse reform, docking of horses’ tails, vivisection, slum clearance, the condition of prisons, the state of zoos), Galsworthy tended to be a moralist without a gospel. His scrutiny of human behavior and social conditions detracted from the artistic success of his novels without providing anything but a sense of unease. Still, as Galsworthy explained to another critic of Fraternity, cultivating this awareness of moral problems is a step, albeit an oblique one, toward “sympathy between man and man.” The Dark Flower · The Dark Flower was one of Galsworthy’s particular favorites among his novels. His professed intention in writing the book was to offer “a study [I hoped a true and a deep one] of Passion—that blind force which sweeps upon us out of the dark and turns us pretty well as it will.” The book was taken by various readers, the most articulate among them being Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who reviewed it in The Daily Mail, as a case for free love, an assertion that commitment to a marriage should end when love ends. Interestingly, as Catherine Dupre suggests, the gist of The Dark Flower is something less general than either the authorial statement of purpose or the critical view would have it be: It is an emotionally faithful representation of Galsworthy’s own loves, most immediately, of his 1912 infatuation with a young actress and dancer named Margaret Morris. The Dark Flower is divided into three parts, “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Autumn,” each depicting a romantic experience in the life of the protagonist, Mark Lennan. Attracted to his tutor’s wife in “Spring,” the youthful Lennan is rejected and advised to find a woman of his own age. In “Summer,” he meets and comes to love a beautiful, charming married woman, Olive Cramier, whose unyielding antipathy for the man to whom she has unwisely yoked herself obviously parallels Ada’s revulsion for Major Galsworthy. Olive, the great love of Lennan’s life, drowns; in “Autumn” he is happily but not passionately married to a wife of fifteen years, Sylvia, and infatuated with a lovely young girl, Nell. The middle-aged lover fondly hopes that he can retain Sylvia without giving up Nell. Like Ada in real life, Sylvia says she can be broad-minded but clearly demonstrates that she cannot. Lennan, like Galsworthy, accordingly sacrifices the more intense love for the long-standing one—in fact, his speeches and Nell’s are, as Margaret Morris recalls in My Galsworthy Story (1967), accurate quotations of

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real-life dialogue. It is not surprising that having laid out his emotional autobiography, discreetly veiled though it may have been, and having been charged with promoting the sentimental and irresponsible sort of spiritual polygamy advocated by the very young Percy Bysshe Shelley, the reserved and dutiful Galsworthy was afterward reluctant to commit his deepest feelings to print. The Man of Property · The trilogy for which Galsworthy is principally known was launched with the publication of The Man of Property in 1906. Although Galsworthy thought at the time of continuing his satirical work and mentioned various possibilities in his letters to Conrad, not until 1917, when he returned to England from his stint of hospital service in France and began writing “Indian Summer of a Forsyte,” did Galsworthy resume the work that would be his magnum opus. The Man of Property, the finest and fiercest of the Forsyte novels, combines portraiture of a whole gallery of Galsworthy’s Victorian relations with a particular focus on one example of the tenacious Forsyte instinct for possession: Soames Forsyte’s refusal to free his beautiful and intensely unhappy wife Irene from a marriage she sees as dead; Irene’s affair with a “bohemian” ( June Forsyte’s fiancé Bosinney); and the grim but temporary victory of Soames over Irene, of Victorian convention over love. The triangular romance can be seen as symbolic or schematic—the two men, representing the possessive spirit and the creative temperament, both aspire in their different ways for Beauty—but it is also Galsworthy’s thinly disguised account of Ada’s tragic marriage with his cousin. The personal involvement results in what is least satisfactory about a fine book: Galsworthy’s inability, despite an attempt to be philosophical, to moderate his extreme sympathy for Irene and his emotional if not rational assignment of total guilt to Soames, a man both sinned against and sinning. The Man of Property begins with an “At Home” at the house of Old Jolyon, eldest of the Forsyte brothers and head of the family. At this gathering on June 15, 1886, a party honoring the engagement of old Jolyon’s granddaughter June to the architect Philip Bosinney, the reader is privileged to observe “the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes.” In the senior generation, the sons and daughters of “Superior Dosset” Forsyte, who had come from the country and founded the family’s fortunes, are a variety of Victorian types, among them Aunt Ann, an ancient sybil tenaciously holding onto the life that remains to her; Jolyon, imperious and philosophical; Soames’s father James, milder than Jolyon but even more single-minded in his devotion to the Forsyte principles of property and family; James’s twin Swithin, an old pouter-pigeon of a bachelor whose hereditary prudence is tinged with antiquated dandyism; and Timothy, the youngest of the ten brothers and sisters and perhaps the Forsyte’s Forsyte. He is a man whose caution and whose saving nature are so highly developed that he has retired early and placed all his resources in gilt-edged “Consols,” retreating so successfully from the world’s demands that even at his own house, the “Exchange,” where Forsytes meet and gossip, his presence is felt more often than seen or heard. The common bond that unites these superficially variegated characters and makes them representative of their whole class is described by young Jolyon, Galsworthy’s mouthpiece in the novel: “A Forsyte takes a practical—one might say a commonsense—view of things, and a practical view of things is based fundamentally on a sense of property.” The Forsytes, who know good things when they see them, who never give themselves or their possessions away, are the “better half” of England—the “cornerstones of convention.”

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The novel’s principal demonstration of the Forsyte “sense of property” centers on the marriage of Soames, a prospering young solicitor, and the mysterious and lovely Irene. Troubled by his wife’s chilly indifference to his strong and genuine love for her and the fine possessions which are his way of showing that feeling, Soames engages June’s fiancé Bosinney to design and erect an impressive country house for him and Irene at Robin Hill, in the Surrey countryside outside of London. While building this house, a process which posits Bosinney’s aesthetic scorn for base monetary matters against Soames’s financial precision and passion for a bargain, the architect falls in love with Irene. She, seeing him as an emblem of all that her detested husband is not, reciprocates. The two of them betray their respective Forsytes and enter into a clandestine relationship. These complicated circumstances pit Soames, determined to retain his property, against Irene, equally determined in her stubbornly passive way to be free of her enslaver. The outcome is tragedy. Bosinney, bankrupt because Soames has justly but vengefully sued him for overspending on the house, and crazed with jealousy and sorrow because Soames has forcibly exercised his conjugal rights, falls under a cab’s wheels in a fog and is killed. As the novel ends, the errant Irene has returned to her prison-home, not out of inclination but because like a “bird that is shot and dying” she has nowhere else to fall. Young Jolyon, arriving with a message from his father, has one glimpse into the well-furnished hell that is Soames and Irene’s abode before Soames slams the door shut in his face. Galsworthy’s friends and literary advisers Edward and Constance Garnett felt that this ending was unsuitable and wished for the telling defeat of Forsyteism that would be afforded by Irene and Bosinney succeeding in an elopement. Galsworthy, with better instincts, stuck to his “negative method” as a stronger means of arousing public feeling against the possessive passion he attacked. Still, if the crushing forces of property were allowed a victory, albeit a comfortless one, at the novel’s end, Soames’s triumph was to prove short-lived, though contemporary readers would have to wait eleven years to make the discovery. In “Indian Summer of a Forsyte,” Old Jolyon, who has bought Robin Hill from Soames and lives there with his son and grandchildren, encounters Irene, now living on her own, and makes her a bequest that enables her to enjoy a comfortable independence. In Chancery · In Chancery continues the conflict between the two hostile branches of the Forsyte clan. Soames, who feels the need for a child and heir to his property, is still in love with Irene and hopeful of regaining her. Young Jolyon, made Irene’s trustee by his father’s will, opposes Soames in his efforts and finds himself attracted by more than sympathy for the lovely, lonely woman. At length, Soames’s persistent importunities drive Irene to elope with Jolyon. The infidelity gives Soames grounds for a divorce. Freed at last from any connection with the man she loathes, Irene marries Jolyon. Soames in his turn makes a convenient match with a pretty young Frenchwoman, Annette. The novel ends with the birth of children to both couples. To Let · To Let, the final volume of the trilogy, brings the family feud to a new generation. Fleur, daughter of Annette and Soames, and Jon, son of Irene and Jolyon, meet first by chance, then, mutually infatuated, by strategy. The cousins intend to marry but are dramatically separated by the dead hand of the past enmity. Jon goes off to America, where after some years he marries a Southern girl. Fleur, as passionately proprietary in her feeling for Jon as her father was toward Irene, believes that

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she has lost her bid for love and settles for a milder sort of happiness. She accepts the proposal of Michael Mont, the amiable, humorous, eminently civilized heir to a baronetcy. A Modern Comedy · The second Forsyte series, A Modern Comedy (consisting of The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon, Two Forsyte Interludes, and Swan Song) centers on the adventures of the fashionable young Monts—Michael’s stints in publishing and politics, Fleur’s career as society hostess, femme fatale to a promising poet, canteenkeeper during the General Strike, mother, and most of all spoiled daughter to a fond yet wise father. In his love for his child, old Soames proves as selfless and giving as young Soames was possessive in his passion for Irene. Some twenty years after introducing Soames to the world, Galsworthy had come to admire, and at moments even to like, aspects of this gruff, practical, scrupulous incarnation of the possessive instinct, a character who as the years passed had usurped the place of Irene in the artist’s imagination. Soames’s death at the end of Swan Song—he succumbs to a blow on the head inflicted by a falling painting from which he saves Fleur—is at once an ironically appropriate end to the career of a man of property and a noble gesture of self-sacrifice. When Galsworthy chose to terminate the life of Soames Forsyte, he symbolically presented the close of an age but also implicitly acknowledged the end of what was finest in his own literary career. However wide-ranging his talent might have been if possessed by another man, his personal temperament, training, and circumstances constrained it to a certain limited excellence. Galsworthy the artist was at his best depicting conflicts typical of the Victorian period, that consummate age of property, and relevant to his own life: the contradictory urges of artistic integrity and worldly wisdom, the foolish desire to possess beauty at war with the wise inclination to contemplate and appreciate it, the altruistic motto “do good” contending with the sanely middle-class imperative “be comfortable.” Because he knew the overfurnished Victorian and post-Victorian world of the Forsytes and their kind from the inside, Galsworthy’s best moral fables are credibly human as well, but when the old order he comprehended, if never endorsed, gave way to a new and unfathomable one, the novelist of principle dwindled to a kind of literary curator. Peter W. Graham Other major works SHORT FICTION: From the Four Winds, 1897 (as John Sinjohn); A Man of Devon, 1901 (as Sinjohn); Five Tales, 1918; Captures, 1923; Caravan: The Assembled Tales of John Galsworthy, 1925; Two Forsyte Interludes, 1927; On Forsyte ‘Change, 1930; Soames and the Flag, 1930; Forsytes, Pendyces, and Others, 1935. PLAYS: The Silver Box, pr. 1906; Joy, pr. 1907; Strife, pr., pb. 1909; Justice, pr., pb. 1910; The Little Dream, pr., pb. 1911; The Eldest Son, pr., pb. 1912; The Pigeon, pr., pb. 1912; The Fugitive, pr., pb. 1913; The Mob, pr., pb. 1915; A Bit o’ Love, pr., pb. 1915; The Little Man, pr., pb. 1915; The Foundations, pr. 1917; Defeat, pr. 1920; The Skin Game, pr., pb. 1920; A Family Man, pr. 1921; The First and the Last, pr., pb. 1921; Hall-marked, pb. 1921; Punch and Go, pb. 1921; The Sun, pb. 1921; Loyalties, pr., pb. 1922; Windows, pr., pb. 1922; The Forest, pr., pb. 1924; Old English, pr., pb. 1924; The Show, pr., pb. 1925; Escape, pr., pb. 1926; Exiled, pr., pb. 1929; The Roof, pr., pb. 1929. POETRY: The Collected Poems of John Galsworthy, 1934 (Ada Galsworthy, editor).

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NONFICTION: A Commentary, 1908; A Motley, 1910; The Inn of Tranquility, 1912; A Sheaf, 1916; Another Sheaf, 1919; Tatterdemalion, 1920; Castles in Spain, 1927; Candelabra: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1932; Letters from John Galsworthy, 1900-1932, 1934 (Edward Garnett, editor). MISCELLANEOUS: The Works of John Galsworthy, 1922-1936 (30 volumes).

Bibliography Batchelor, John. The Edwardian Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Begins by defining “Edwardian” literature and discusses Galsworthy in terms of his surprising similarities to D. H. Lawrence. The Man of Property and Fraternity are analyzed in detail, and the overall attitude toward Galsworthy is very positive. Contains an excellent bibliography of Edwardian fiction. Dupre, Catherine. John Galsworthy: A Biography. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976. A well-written and well-researched account of Galsworthy’s life, relying heavily on letters and other primary sources. Also contains information about the writing of his literary works. Provides an excellent index, bibliographic notes, and several photographs. Gindin, James. John Galsworthy’s Life and Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Utilizing new sources, Gindin has written a masterful literary biography, particularly appropriate since Galsworthy’s fiction is itself so closely tied to his personal life, social criticism, and historic times. Galsworthy moved from apprenticeship to “public edifice,” but that image was tarnished and he became a “private edifice.” This well-researched biography succeeds in relating Galsworthy’s literary work to his life. Mottram, Ralph H. For Some We Loved: An Intimate Portrait of Ada and John Galsworthy. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1956. This informal, undocumented account of Galsworthy’s life, written by a personal friend of his, is anecdotal and laudatory. Mottram’s focus is biographical, not critical, and he devotes little attention to Galsworthy’s literary work. Contains a serviceable index. Rønning, Anne Holden. Hidden and Visible Suffrage: Emancipation and the Edwardian Woman in Galsworthy, Wells, and Forster. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. See chapter 1, “The Social Context of Edwardian Literature,” chapter 4, “Marriage in Galsworthy, Wells, and Forster,” and chapter 6, “Galsworthy’s View on Suffragism.” Includes notes and bibliography. Ru, Yi-ling. The Family Novel: Toward a Generic Definition. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Examines Galsworthy’s Forsyte saga as an example of the family novel. Other authors, including Roger Martin du Gard and Chin Pa, are examined as well. Sternlicht, Sanford. John Galsworthy. Boston: Twayne, 1987. The most helpful critical volume on Galsworthy’s literary and dramatic works despite being relatively brief. Four chapters are devoted to his novels, some of which, notably A Modern Comedy, are analyzed in some depth. His short stories, plays, and literary criticism are the subjects of three additional chapters. Provides a chronology, a biographical chapter, an excellent bibliography, including annotated secondary sources, and a helpful index.

Elizabeth Gaskell Elizabeth Gaskell

Born: Chelsea, London, England; September 29, 1810 Died: Holybourne, England; November 12, 1865 Principal long fiction · Mary Barton, 1848; Cranford, 1851-1853; Ruth, 1853; North and South, 1854-1855; Sylvia’s Lovers, 1863; Cousin Phillis, 1863-1864; Wives and Daughters, 1864-1866. Other literary forms · The novels of Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell appeared in serial form in journals such as Household Words and All the Year Round edited by Charles Dickens and Cornhill Magazine edited by William Makepeace Thackeray. During the years of novel-writing, she also published travel sketches, essays, and short stories. Her collections of stories which appeared in serial as well as hardcover form were Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (1855); Round the Sofa (1859), containing also the separate tales inset in “My Lady Ludlow”; Right at Last and Other Tales (1860); Lois the Witch and Other Tales (1861); and Cousin Phillis and Other Tales (1865). Sketches of Manchester life appeared as Life in Manchester (1847) under the pseudonym “Cotton Mather Mills, Esq.” A biography of Charlotte Brontë, still regarded as a standard source, appeared in 1857. The standard edition of Gaskell’s work is the Knutsford edition (1906), which includes both fiction and nonfiction. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (1966) was edited by Arthur Pollard and J. A. V. Chapple. Achievements · The reputation of Gaskell sank in the modernist reaction to Victorian literature in the post-World War I period, and she was relegated to the status of a second- or third-rate novelist, markedly inferior to Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Anthony Trollope, and even placed below Charles Kingsley and Wilkie Collins. With the reassessment of Victorian writers that has gone on since World War II, her reputation has risen, and the concerns of the feminist movement in the 1970’s have led to such a revaluation that the scholar Patricia M. Spacks refers to her as “seriously underrated” in the twentieth century. Other writers about the women’s movement, including Elaine Showalter, Jenni Calder, and Ellen Moers, have praised Gaskell for detailing faithfully in her fiction the relation between women and marriage, the struggle for self-achievement, and the intermixture of women’s careers and public history. The sense in her work of women of all classes as victims of economic and social restrictions has caused scholars to study her work and life more closely in the last decade. She has been elevated to the ranks of the major Victorian novelists. Biography · Elizabeth Gaskell’s life was divided between the industrial Midlands of the north and London and rural Hampshire in the south of England, as was that of her heroine, Margaret Hale, in North and South. Her mother’s family, the Hollands, substantial landowners, were established near Knutsford, Cheshire, which became the “Cranford” of her best-known work. Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born on September 29, 1810, in Chelsea, then just outside London, where the family had settled after a period in Scotland. Because of her mother’s death, Elizabeth was taken 389

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to Knutsford, where she spent the next thirteen years in the care of her aunt, Mrs. Hannah Lumb. The years at Knutsford were very happy ones, and her affection for the town is indicated by the tales in Cranford about its inhabitants. Her brother, John, twelve years older, went into the merchant navy but simply disappeared on a voyage to the Far East in 1823, an event marked in Gaskell’s fiction by various lost and recovered brothers. Her father remarried, having two more children, and at fourteen Elizabeth was sent to Avonbank School in Stratford, which was kept by the Byerley sisters, her stepmother’s aunts. It was a progressive school by Victorian standards of feminine education, serving Unitarian and other liberal religious groups. She left school at seventeen to tend her paralyzed father, the relationship between the two having been somewhat strained in the preceding years. From 1827 until his death in 1829, she faithfully nursed him, her dedication to the task bringing forth a grateful testimony from her stepmother. The experience furnished the basis for Margaret Hale’s nursing of her critically ill mother. The experience of Margaret in the fashionable home of her London relations appears to parallel the months spent by Elizabeth with her uncle, Swinton Holland, a banker, and her cousin, Henry Holland, a London physician. Following the fashion for educated and leisured Victorian women, she visited various places during the next few years: in and out of Knutsford (like her narrator, Mary Smith, in Cranford), two winters in Newcastle with a minister, William Turner (the model for the kindly Unitarian minister, Thurstan Benson, in Ruth), and his daughter, Anne, a visit to Manchester to Anne’s sister, Mary, and a winter in Edinburgh with the intellectual and artistic company there. At Manchester, she met William Gaskell, assistant minister of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, and their warm relationship eventuated in marriage at Knutsford in August, 1832. At her various residences in Manchester, to whose busy industrial life and brusque manners she had to adjust, Gaskell became the mother of four daughters and a son: Marianne, Margaret Emily, Florence, Julia, and William, whose death at the age of ten months caused her great sorrow and resulted in the writing of an idealized portrait of a boy, found in her novel Ruth. Gaskell’s husband, who became senior minister in 1854, had a solid reputation as a public speaker, teacher of English history and literature, editor of church publications, and preacher. Despite the uncomfortable weather and atmosphere of Manchester, it was a gathering place for well-educated Unitarians and other non-Anglicans, Cross Street Chapel being a center of lively discussion and numbering many selfmade mill-owners among its members. It was also true, however, that class divisions between owners and mill-workers were strongly evident to Gaskell, whose character, Margaret Hale, wonders why two groups dependent upon each other regard their interests as opposed. To understand Gaskell’s preoccupation with social problems in her fiction, one must note her constant involvement in social welfare with Sunday and weekday schools for children of workers, her visits to working-class homes in the course of parish duties, and her concern for victims of the social system such as unwed mothers. The depression of 1839 to 1840, the Chartist movement aimed at gaining more political power for workers, the Factory Act of 1832 opposed by industrialists and widely evaded in its purpose of restricting hours of labor for women and children—all these conditions provided Gaskell with subject matter. Gaskell’s immediate impulse to write came from grief over her son’s death, a decision which her husband hoped to channel constructively by encouraging her in

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her efforts. Her first attempt at a diary and further encouragement from publisher friends resulted in sketches about Life in Manchester, but this was a prelude to her first success as a novelist, Mary Barton. This novel presented the sufferings of the workers during labor unrest, the resistance of the mill-owners, the failure of parliament to respond to labor grievances, and the need for reconciliation. The book was praised by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx and condemned as unfair by the wealthy parishioners of Cross Street Chapel, a denouncement which led Gaskell to present what she considered an account more favorable to the industrialists in North and South. The acclaim and damnation of Mary Barton made Gaskell rather visible among British intellectuals such as Thomas Carlyle, the social Library of Congress critic; Walter Savage Landor, the poet; Benjamin Jowett, the classicist; John Ruskin, the reformer of industrial ugliness; Charles Kingsley, author of Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851) and a founder of Christian socialism; Antony Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, the prime mover of legislative reform in mid-Victorian England; and Dickens. Thus, Gaskell joined the reforming group bent on altering the unsatisfactory living and working conditions among the laboring class in Britain. Gaskell’s friendship with Dickens inspired her to produce a story about an unmarried mother, “Lizzie Leigh,” for Dickens’s journal Household Words and created a writer-editor relationship that lasted more than a dozen years. Having become interested in the fate of the “fallen woman,” she used, as the basis for her novel Ruth (first serialized and then published in 1853), the actual case of a sixteen-year-old female dressmaking apprentice who had been seduced, abandoned, and then imprisoned for theft in trying to keep herself alive. In the novel, a similar young girl is saved from a parallel disgrace by the intervention of a kindly minister and his sister and brought back to respectability and social usefulness by their tender concern. The presentation of Ruth’s case, mild by modern standards, became almost instantly controversial, various prudish fathers refused to allow their wives and daughters to read it, and even Gaskell kept the book from her own daughters. Gaskell had already interested herself in promoting immigration by unwed mothers to the colonies as a practical way of restoring their reputations and building new futures; the book was an outcome of her own concern, though Ruth is rehabilitated within the community rather than leaving it and must still suffer unfair stigmatization, precisely the kind which the novel itself received. While visiting another reformer, James Kay-Shuttleworth, who promoted educa-

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tional advancements for the workers, Gaskell met Charlotte Brontë, who had recently risen to prominence with Jane Eyre (1847); a strong friendship developed from this meeting and continued until Brontë’s death in 1855. In fact, the riot of the workingmen against their employer in North and South has similarities to a scene in Brontë’s Shirley, which appeared six years before Gaskell’s novel. While Ruth was exciting controversy, Cranford, the work which for a long time overshadowed Gaskell’s reputation as a social critic, created a nostalgic and melancholic mood. Yet even in this novel, Gaskell expresses a concern for lives that are close to poverty, genteel survivors of once lively and secure families. To please Dickens, in 1863 Gaskell added one more story to the collection for All the Year Round, his second magazine. Gaskell had by then established the parameters of her work: the creation of moving depictions of life under an industrializing social order; the alertness to social injustice; the longings for a more rural, innocent, and organic world of natural feelings and associations; and the melancholy strain of hopes unrealized because of social or financial constraints. In North and South, completed two years after Cranford, Gaskell made a determined effort to present the mill-owner, Thornton, as a man with integrity, initiative, and humanitarian concern for his workers, a sort of Samuel Greg who weathers the financial crisis both with the support of his wife, Margaret Hale, newly rich, and that of his workers, drawn to him by his philanthropy. Northern energy, brusque efficiency, and the rough democracy of industrialists sprung from the humble origins of their own workers are set against the arduous toil and isolation of Southern farm laborers and the class-consciousness of Southern workers, town-dwellers, and professional people. In the same year, Gaskell drew upon memories of Avonbank School for stories, which she inset in a frame story narrated by an aristocrat, Lady Ludlow. These appeared as “My Lady Ludlow,” later added to and published as Round the Sofa. During these years, Gaskell also wrote various sketches, such as “Cumberland Sheep Shearers” with its Wordsworthian setting of rough toil among natural beauties, and Christmas stories, some with ghostly apparitions in the style of Dickens’s own stories, which appeared in Household Words. Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) provoked some anxiety in Gaskell since it dealt in part with union agitation and industrial unrest, as did North and South. What strained the relationship with Dickens, however, was the leisurely description and extended characterization in North and South together with difficulties of episodic compression for weekly publication in his journal. Though Dickens eventually came to appreciate the virtues of North and South, the editorial struggle over it induced Gaskell to look for publication elsewhere in more prestigious journals run on a monthly basis. Upon the death of Charlotte Brontë in March, 1855, Gaskell undertook to write the authorized biography, using Brontë’s words where possible but interpreting the facts somewhat freely. The biography, published in March, 1857, led to a continuing friendship with her new publisher, George Smith, Jr., whose firm, Smith, Elder, and Company, had been Brontë’s publishers. Smith’s support proved most helpful when questions of libelous statements in the biography necessitated apologies and vexatious changes in the third edition. Despite the partisanship evident in certain passages, the feeling for its subject and the general fairness in its presentation make it a good study of a writer by another writer. Gaskell’s work from 1858 to 1863 was uneven. She desired sales apparently to pay for increasing amounts of travel with her daughters, expenses of weddings for two of them, and new property. In Rome, in 1857, a new friend and major correspondent

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appeared, an American, Charles Eliot Norton, future president of Harvard University, who probably gave her information on Puritan New England to add to her lore of withcraft and demonism on which she drew for the stories found in Lois the Witch and Other Tales. A trip to Heidelberg, Germany, provided legendary matter for Right at Last and Other Tales. At this time, there was much interest in Great Britain in folklore materials and romantic wonders derived from ghostly and spiritual legends, and Gaskell, among others, was willing to fictionalize this type of literature. Writing in another contrary strain, Gaskell employed rural settings in her next two novels, Sylvia’s Lovers and Cousin Phillis; the novel or novella following these two was A Dark Day’s Night, intended to capture part of the market for intriguing mystery-andsuspense stories. As Cousin Phillis was winding up its serial publication in August, 1864, Gaskell started what some critics consider her major work, Wives and Daughters, an exploration of the role of women in Victorian intellectual and social life. It was never completed. Gaskell’s unceasing activity, including essays for the Sunday School Magazine, was taking its physical toll. She had already had fainting spells. Hoping to retire to Holybourne, Hampshire, which she had used a decade earlier as Margaret Hale’s beloved home community, she had purchased a home there as a surprise for her husband. While spending a trial weekend with family and guests there, she suffered a sudden and fatal stroke on November 12, 1865. She was buried at Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford, where her husband was also buried in June, 1884. Analysis · Despite her own creativity, which certainly had the support of her husband, Elizabeth Gaskell, when questioned by a young writer, insisted that a woman’s first duty was to husband and family. Friends recollected her carrying out her early career in the midst of household activities. Later, however, she often went traveling alone or with her daughters but—except for jaunts to a beloved vacation spot near Manchester—never with her husband. The traveling periods gave her isolation for writing, suggesting that her own practice ran counter to her advice. Enid L. Duthie has found in Gaskell’s fiction a strong interest in natural scenery, in country customs, crafts, and tales; a sympathy for conservative small towns, yet equally a concern for working men and women; a desire for practical knowledge to enhance living; a focus upon the family as the stable social unit where affections are close but able, on occasion, to extend to others in need; and an insistence that violence is futile, the human condition precarious, faith necessary. John McVeagh sees Gaskell as insisting that absolute judgments become meaningless when related to concrete human situations requiring compromise. In Gaskell’s treatment of the laboring element, Jenni Calder sees her as avoiding the duality of other portrayers of workingclass families—sympathetic yet condescending—and refers to Gaskell as one of the few major Victorian writers showing marriage from a woman’s viewpoint and not simply as an escape, a bid for social status, or a profitable contract. Gaskell has been praised for her concrete presentation of social milieus, in the spirit of seventeenth century Dutch genre painters, and her gift for recording the relationship between work and home and between husbands and wives is a special one. Patricia M. Spacks refers to a “steady integrity of observation” and “penetrating accuracy,” especially as Gaskell draws, tacitly, the analogy between the plight of women in their dependency and that of workers in relation to their employers. Gaskell’s dilemma for a feminist such as Elaine Showalter lies in Victorian expectations of feminine domesticity and marriage as an end to intellectual creativity. Gaskell herself surmounted the problem, but her characters find it a difficult chal-

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lenge. Spacks points out that Margaret Hale, Gaskell’s greatest heroine, from North and South, tries to mediate between an impoverished working class which really does respect its own labor and an enlightened upper-class self-interest which enjoys emotional and cultural richness. In the end, however, Margaret must inherit property as a defense for her own introspective feeling and the diminution of her former social vitality. It is her way of surviving in a materialistic world. Mary Barton · The titular heroine of Mary Barton has a true lover, Jem Wilson, and a potential seducer, Henry Carson, son of a textile mill-owner. The love interest is established as the background for a social problem which Gaskell treats with historical accuracy. John Barton, Mary’s father, aware of the sufferings of his fellow mill-workers during a lockout by the employers, is enraged by the death of the wife of his friend, Davenport, while the masters enjoy leisure, modernize their mills, and keep up profits by using scabs and decreasing wages when they reopen. Barton is hopeful that the workers will find redress for their grievances from a sympathetic parliament, to which the unionists will present the Chartist Petition. The charter is rejected, however, and the embittered workers are further incensed by Henry Carson’s casual caricature of the striking workers, which he passes around at a meeting of employers. He is selected as the target of assassination, Barton being chosen to murder him. Jem is accused of the murder, and Mary faces a conflict, since she can clear Jem only by exposing her father. Though Jem’s acquittal makes this step unnecessary, the other workers shun him (a situation Gaskell borrowed from the true story of a former convict ostracized by those in the workplace), and he and Mary are forced to emigrate. Her father, still publicly innocent, confesses, somewhat implausibly, to Carson, Sr., and gains forgiveness. The solution to class conflict comes through mutual goodwill, recognition of wrongdoing, and restitution. Ruth · The heroine of Ruth, which takes issue with Victorian hostility toward the unmarried mother, is seduced among the romantic clouds and mountains of Wales. The idyllic moment turns to desperation when she is abandoned by her lover, Bellingham. A kindly, crippled Unitarian minister, Thurstan Benson, and his sister, Faith, take Ruth into their home and community, modeled on Knutsford, and deceive people about her condition to protect her reputation. The lie is the price of social respectability. Ruth’s discreet conduct from this point on gains her admittance to the mill-owning Bradshaw family as companion to their daughter, Jemima. The electoral reforms of 1832 give Bellingham a chance to stand for political office, his reappearance in Ruth’s life leading to a renewal of his interest in her and a new temptation for her to forgo her independence by accepting an offer of marriage. Her pride in her child, Leonard, makes Ruth reject Bellingham. Unfortunately, Bradshaw learns the truth about Ruth, and his self-righteous indignation leads him to repel Ruth and denounce his friend, Thurstan. Denied the opportunity for further cultural development in the Bradshaw family, Ruth must turn to nursing to establish her social usefulness. As a visiting nurse, her conscientious assistance during a typhoid epidemic brings the praise of the community. Critics have said that Gaskell, having made her point that unmarried mothers should be treated humanely so that their talents can be made productive, should have ended her novel. Unfortunately, three-volume publication, extended serialization, and a tendency toward melodrama fostered by Charles Dickens, led Gaskell to have Bradshaw’s son forge a signature on some stocks entrusted to him by Thurstan.

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Bradshaw denounces his son, comes back ignominiously to the chapel worship he has furiously abandoned, and eventually breaks down and is reconciled to Thurstan, having repented of his harshness toward Ruth. Ruth, however, is not permitted to live since Gaskell apparently felt that her rehabilitation was not enough to gain sympathy. Wearied by constant care of the sick, Ruth falls sick while somewhat improbably tending her former lover, Bellingham. She dies possessing an aura of sanctity, and perhaps it was this martyrdom which Victorian critics found too much to accept. North and South · In North and South, the protagonist Margaret Hale must adjust to life in industrial Darkshire (Derbyshire) after living in rural Hampshire, and, through her perceptions, Margaret guides the reader to a major issue: the way in which a money-oriented competitive society challenges a more leisured, socially stratified one. The abrasive confrontations of Margaret and John Thornton, a mill-owner being tutored in classics by Margaret’s father, define the mutual incomprehension of north and south in England. Thornton wants to have a “wise despotism” over his workers; Margaret contends for understanding based upon common destiny in the mills. The question of authority is raised in another dimension in the Hale family’s personal travail over the enforced exile of Margaret’s brother, Frederick, because of charges, unwarranted, of inciting the crew of his naval vessel to mutiny. Through friendship with Bessy Higgins, a mill girl dying of a disease fostered by textile manufacturing, Margaret, the central consciousness of the novel, is able to observe the sufferings of the working class during a strike caused by union efforts to prevent wage cuts, which the mill-owners justify because of American competition. The owners themselves, while cooperating in opposition to workers, fight one another for economic survival, according to Thornton, who sees an analogy with the theory of survival of the fittest. Though Margaret can see the closeness of working men and women in their common suffering, a riot, instigated without union approval by Nicholas Boucher, a weak agitator, against Irish scab labor, seriously compromises the position of the union in terms of its own self-discipline. The issue is posed whether coercive tactics to enlist worker support of unions can be justified when a weak leader can jeopardize legitimate demands. Margaret terminates the riot, in fact, by heroically intervening between Thornton and the rioters. She quite literally mediates between the two sides. The difficulty of reconciliation is made evident, however, when Bessy’s father, Nicholas Higgins, a unionist, argues that Christian forbearance will not answer the industrialists, though he admits that workers and employers might compromise if they could understand one another. The blacklisting of Nicholas by other employers leads to Margaret’s intervention, encouraging Thornton to rehire him, his own persistence equally helping to regain a job. Thornton realizes that employer responsibility must be broadened. The turmoil of the riot, in which Margaret must confront social disruption, has its counterpart in her own turmoil over the approaching death of her mother and the secret reappearance of her brother to be with their mother. Unfortunately, Frederick’s departure from town involves a scuffle with a drunken informer which later requires that Margaret lie to protect Frederick. This lie, like that in Ruth, produces its painful outcome when Thornton, who has observed the scuffle, thinks that she is lying to protect a lover, thus causing further altercations. Margaret realizes, however, that her moral condemnation of manufacturers has been too harsh. Indeed, to an Oxford don, an old family friend who comes to her mother’s funeral, she suggests that it would be well if intellectuals associated with manufacturers. Margaret’s opinions about the south as a preferable society also undergo change.

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She counsels Nicholas that his going to the south, when he is blacklisted, would lead to deadening toil, no real companionship, and intellectual decay because of the rural isolation. Visiting Helstone, her old home, Margaret encounters an old native superstition when a live cat is boiled to avert a curse. A meeting with her former lover, Lennox, confirms that Thornton is the more vital man. A fortunate inheritance from the Oxford don, Mr. Bell, enables Margaret to save Thornton, who is faced with mounting debts because of competition. He, too, has faced a moral dilemma: whether it is right to borrow money to keep himself afloat knowing that the lenders are at a strong risk. Thornton wishes to start again, seeking an opportunity for social interchange with his workers beyond the cash nexus. Margaret, now an heiress, helps Thornton stay afloat and marries him. Higgins, providentially having witnessed the scuffle, knows who Frederick really is. Thus, north and south are united, and Thornton becomes a philanthropist. Wives and Daughters · In Wives and Daughters, Gaskell explores the question of the middle-class woman seeking to define herself and her goals in an atmosphere uncongenial to intellectual independence. Molly Gibson, whose mother has died, must cope in her teens with the remarriage of her father, who has sought a wife as much to guide Molly as out of real love. Her father’s new wife, Hyacinthe Kirkpatrick, is the epitome of the parasitical woman, a former governess previously married out of necessity and then forced back into supporting herself and her daughter, Cynthia, upon her husband’s death. She has become a companion to the newly aristocratic Cumnor family, but, wanting comfort, she can achieve it only by marrying Gibson. Molly receives her moral education, in part, by seeing through her stepmother’s pretenses. Cynthia, shuffled off while her mother has pursued Gibson, comes to reside in the household and establishes a close friendship with Molly despite her moral skepticism and social opportunism. Thus, the daughters are contrasted, not in black and white, but as possible responses to the dependency of women. Cynthia’s mother tries to marry her to Osborne Hamley, eldest son of an old family, not knowing that he is already married, and that the child of the marriage has been kept secret for some time. The event has caused Hamley to fail in attaining his degree, and he returns home to mope, thus arousing the antagonism of his father, to whom he cannot acknowledge his liaison. Hamley finally dies, causing Mrs. Kirkpatrick to shift her sights for Cynthia to the second son, Roger. Molly meanwhile has naïvely pledged herself at sixteen to the odious Preston, a situation from which she is rescued by the more forthright Cynthia, who is in love with Roger but also the object of the affections of Walter Henderson, Gaskell’s ideal of the practical, creative scientist, a new social type. Cynthia, socially ambitious, realizes that the Hamley family enjoys ancient honor but is materially threatened, and she transfers her affections to a superficial, weak, but socially prominent young man. Molly is left to marry Roger, but the problem remains as to whether she can forge for herself a free life with her husband’s support. The lifestyles of the two older women, Lady Harriet Cumnor and Mrs. Hamley, provide alternatives for her development. Lady Harriet is a realist about feminine hypocrisy as the price of dependency and wishes to challenge it, but Mrs. Hamley, despite her efforts to mother Molly, is emotionally sterile. Her death leaves Squire Hamley bereft and helplessly alienated from his infant grandson. The other, older men in the novel fare no better; Mr. Gibson suppresses his feelings about his wife to the point of emotional numbness, Lord Cumnor takes refuge in foolish snobbery, and even the younger Osborne painfully learns the price

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of romantic impulsiveness. The novel’s probing analysis of the dilemma of femininity in a world guided by material values and restricted social consciousness, a world in which men too are caught by the inhibitions of social position and frozen into immobility, gives it peculiar power. It is an indication of what Gaskell could have accomplished if she had lived longer, and it shows her continuing effort to link broader social issues to very specific circumstances with careful attention to detail. Roger E. Wiehe Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Moorland Cottage, 1850; Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales, 1855; The Manchester Marriage, 1858; Round the Sofa, 1859; Right at Last and Other Tales, 1860; Lois the Witch and Other Tales, 1861; The Cage at Cranford, 1863; Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, 1865. NONFICTION: Life in Manchester, 1847 (as “Cotton Mather Mills, Esq.”); The Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1857; The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, 1966 (Arthur Pollard and J. A. V. Chapple, editors). Bibliography Chapple, J. A. V. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1997. A good biography of Gaskell, focusing on her beginning years as a writer. Craik, W. A. Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. A major rehabilitation of Gaskell as an important novelist, comparing her with her contemporaries. Sets her five long fictions within the provincial novel tradition and demonstrates how she expanded the possibilities and universality of that tradition. A short bibliography and a chronology of major nineteenth century provincial novels are included. Duthie, Enid. The Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1980. Despite their contrasting settings and plots, there is a unity of themes in all Gaskell’s fiction. Her entire work and letters are drawn upon to reconstruct her imaginative world and the themes central to it. Contains a select bibliography and an index. Easson, Angus. Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Examines the relationship of all Gaskell’s writings to her life and times, tracing the source of her fiction to her culture. A select bibliography and index are included. Gerin, Winifred. Elizabeth Gaskell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. The first biography able to make use of the publication in 1966 of The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, and still one of the best. Contains a select bibliography and an index. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Part of the Victorian Literature and Culture series, this volume puts Gaskell’s writing in the context of the Victorian era. Includes bibliographical references. Spencer, Jane. Elizabeth Gaskell. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Chapters on Gaskell’s career, Mary Barton, her biography of Charlotte Brontë, Cranford and North and South, Sylvia’s Lovers, and Wives and Daughters. Includes notes and bibliography. Stoneman, Patsy. Elizabeth Gaskell. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1987. This feminist reading claims that previous accounts of Gaskell have seriously misread

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her and that the interaction of class and gender must be made central in any interpretation of her. A select bibliography and index are provided. Uglow, Jenny. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. A major critical biography, exploring in detail both Gaskell’s life and work. Paying close attention to primary source material, especially letters, Uglow has produced a definitive life. Includes illustrations and notes but no bibliography.

George Gissing George Gissing

Born: Wakefield, England; November 22, 1857 Died: St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, France; December 28, 1903 Principal long fiction · Workers in the Dawn, 1880; The Unclassed, 1884; Isabel Clarendon, 1886; Demos, 1886; Thyrza, 1887; A Life’s Morning, 1888; The Nether World, 1889; The Emancipated, 1890; New Grub Street, 1891; Denzil Quarrier, 1892; Born in Exile, 1892; The Odd Women, 1893; In the Year of Jubilee, 1894; Eve’s Ransom, 1895; The Paying Guest, 1895; Sleeping Fires, 1895; The Whirlpool, 1897; The Town Traveller, 1898; The Crown of Life, 1899; Our Friend the Charlatan, 1901; The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 1903; Veranilda, 1904; Will Warburton, 1905. Other literary forms · Though George Gissing will be remembered primarily as a novelist, he tried his hand at a variety of literary projects. In the 1890’s especially, he found it profitable to write short stories; these were generally published in periodicals, but one volume—Human Odds and Ends (1897)—was published during his lifetime. Many of his other short stories, some from his early contributions to Chicago newspapers, have since been collected: The House of Cobwebs (1906), Sins of the Fathers (1924), A Victim of Circumstances (1927), and Brownie (1931). Gissing also wrote essays for a number of periodicals. Notes on Social Democracy (1968, with an introduction by Jacob Korg), reprints three articles he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880. George Gissing: Essays and Fiction (1970) prints nine prose works published for the first time. Late in his life, Gissing published Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898) and By the Ionian Sea (1901), his “notes of a ramble in southern Italy.” Achievements · During his lifetime, Gissing achieved neither the fame nor the fortune that he would have liked. His reputation, though it grew steadily, especially in the 1890’s, was always overshadowed by the powerhouse writers of the late Victorian era. Gissing was nevertheless seriously reviewed and often applauded by the critics for his objective treatment of social conditions in England. After his death, his reputation was eclipsed for many years, and it was only in the late twentieth century that Gissing began to receive the reevaluation needed to determine his place in English literary history. The renewed academic attention, manifested by numerous new editions of his novels, critical biographies, full-length studies of his novels, and several volumes of his correspondence, suggested that Gissing’s niche would become more firmly established. Biography · Born on November 22, 1857, in Wakefield, Yorkshire, George Robert Gissing was the eldest of five children of Thomas Waller and Margaret Bedford Gissing. Thomas Gissing was a chemist in Wakefield and something of a religious skeptic whose extensive library provided the young George with convenient access to a variety of reading material. The early years of financial security and familial harmony were disrupted when Thomas Gissing died in December, 1870. George, only thirteen, and his two brothers were sent to Lindow Grove School at Alderley Edge, Cheshire. There, the young Gissing’s studious habits gained for him the first of many 399

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academic accolades. His performance on the Oxford Local Examination in 1872 was especially encouraging, but financial circumstances made it necessary for him to attend Owens College in Manchester, where he had won free tuition for three sessions and where he continued with his academic success. Gissing was not, however, enjoying the same success in his personal life. Living a lonely and studious life in Manchester, he fell in love with a young prostitute named Marianne Helen Harrison (“Nell”). With the zeal of the reformer, Gissing tried to save her from her profession and her penury, apparently not realizing at first that she was an alcoholic as well. Exhausting his own funds, the young Gissing stole miscellaneous property from his fellow students at Owens College. He was soon caught, and the course of his life was radically altered, for he was forced to abandon all thoughts of an academic life. With the aid of friends, he sailed for the United States in the fall of 1876 and worked briefly as a high school teacher in Waltham, Massachusetts. Why he left Waltham, where he apparently enjoyed a reasonably good life, is not known, but in the spring of 1877 he moved to Chicago, where he tried to eke out an existence as a writer. Though he did publish his first work (a short story called “The Sins of the Fathers,” in the Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1877), he was not well paid for his endeavors and left after only four months. He worked at odd jobs in New England and elsewhere, and then in the fall of 1877 he made his way back to England. In London, he lived in near-poverty, working sporadically as a tutor and drafting his first novels. Nell came to live with him, and in October, 1879, they were married. Despite Gissing’s noble intention to reform her apparently self-destructive character, the marriage was not successful. A vivid fictionalized account of the sordidness of their married life is given in Workers in the Dawn, Gissing’s first published novel. He lived a turbulent life with Nell until he put her in an invalids’ home in January, 1882. Even after that, she gave him trouble, both financial and emotional, until she died in 1888. The direction of Gissing’s writings in the 1880’s was influenced not only by his failed marriage but also by a number of other lifelong interests which were well established by the end of the decade: his friendship with the budding German writer Eduard Bertz, his reading of Auguste Comte, his unfailing compassion for the poverty of late Victorian England, his friendship with Frederic Harrison, who read his first novel and provided much-needed encouragement, and his friendship with Morley Roberts, who later became Gissing’s first biographer with the thinly disguised The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912). Not until 1886, with the publication of Demos, did Gissing gain moderate success with his writing. Buoyed by more favorable circumstances, especially the sense of freedom once Nell died, Gissing left for an extended tour of Europe in September, 1888. He also shifted the emphasis of his novels from the working class to the middle class, beginning in 1890 with The Emancipated. The 1890’s began auspiciously for Gissing’s literary career, particularly with the publication of New Grub Street and Born in Exile. His personal life, however, was following a different course. On a trip to Italy in 1890, he noticed the first signs of the respiratory illness which would plague him the rest of his life. On February 25, 1891, he married Edith Underwood, a “work-girl,” as he described her, with whom he was not in love. The marriage was a complete failure, despite the birth of two sons (Walter Leonard, born 1891, and Alfred Charles, born 1895). Gissing’s literary success in the 1890’s, as moderate as it was, was achieved in spite of his loveless marriage and domestic unrest. He persevered until September, 1897, when he permanently separated from his wife and went to Italy. In the summer of 1898, he met Gabrielle Fleury, a Frenchwoman who was the complete opposite of his two wives in her refined and

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cultured manner. Gissing was immediately attracted to her and would have legally married her had a divorce from Edith been possible. Instead, the two sanctified their relationship with each other in a private ceremony on May 7, 1899, in Rouen. Living in France under the most favorable circumstances of his entire life, Gissing continued to write, and in 1903 he saw The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, his most popular work, go through three editions. His health, however, had been growing steadily worse, and his short-lived happiness came to an end when he died on December 28, 1903, of myocarditis at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in France. Analysis · In his personal life, George Gissing was a man of divided mind, and the biographical antitheses were paralleled by the literary and philosophical influences on his work. In private life, he gravitated toward Frederic Harrison’s circle of intellectuals and sophisticated people; at the same time, he was drawn into marriages with psychologically, intellectually, and socially unsuitable women. He was attracted, on the one hand, to a scholarly career as a historian, philosopher, and classicist; on the other, he was drawn to journalism, hackwork, and lectures to workingmen’s associations with an emphasis on social reform. Like many writers at the end of the nineteenth century, he was caught between the sociological realists with reform instincts and the adherents of an aesthetic movement with their emphasis on the attainment of ideal beauty. His sensuousness conflicted with his intellectual idealism; his desire for popularity and material success with his austere integrity as an artist. Gissing’s career as a novelist, at least until the late twentieth century, has been assessed in the context of nineteenth century realism and naturalism. Certainly, the techniques employed in his novels, especially the early ones, owe much to the Victorian conventions that had become well established by the time of Gissing’s first published novel. He was thoroughly acquainted with the work of Charles Dickens; his own novels are often sentimental, cautiously admonitory, and riddled with subplots. Gissing, however, never treated his subject matter as humorously as did Dickens in his early novels. Dickens’s treatment of poverty, for example, is sometimes used for picturesque effects; Gissing saw poverty in a solemn manner, finding it both lamentable and execrable. For other literary precedents, Gissing turned to the French and Russian writers, discovering in the French naturalists such as Émile Zola the pervasive effects of physical and social environments and finding in the Russian naturalistic psychologists the precise and complete analysis of character. Like Zola, he described the squalor of poverty, probed the psychology of sex (though with more reserve), and generally ended his novels in dismal defeat. Yet, unlike the naturalists, Gissing was not so much concerned with the particular details of the workshop, with conflicts between capital and labor, but with the whole atmosphere of poverty, especially the resultant loss of integrity on the part of those who struggle to rise beyond and above it. To divide Gissing’s career into neat stages is not an easy task. For the purposes of an overview, however, it is convenient to look at three large, if not always distinct, groups of his novels. In the 1880’s, beginning with Workers in the Dawn and ending with The Nether World, Gissing was most often concerned with the lower class and social reform. In the first half of the 1890’s, beginning with The Emancipated, Gissing turned to the middle class, examining the whole middle-class ethic and ranging his focal point from the tradesman to the “new woman.” In the last half of the 1890’s and until his death in 1903, Gissing’s work was more varied, ranging from a historical romance to a travel book to reworkings of his early themes. In those last years, his

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works were not always successful, either commercially or critically, but that was the period of his most popular work, the semiautobiographical The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. In an early and important ressessment of Gissing’s career, Jacob Korg (“Division of Purpose in George Gissing,” in PMLA, June, 1955) points out that the dichotomy between Gissing’s artistic principles and his anger over Victorian England’s social problems is evident in five of his novels published in the 1880’s: Workers in the Dawn, The Unclassed, Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World. In each of these novels, Gissing the reformer contends with Gissing the artist; in none of them is the tension resolved satisfactorily. Workers in the Dawn · Most of the material Gissing used in Workers in the Dawn can be found repeatedly in the other novels of the 1880’s, and most of that material springs from his own experiences. Clearly, his early marriage to a girl from the slums underlined his interest in social themes throughout his life. In the late 1870’s and 1880’s, he had also become enthusiastic about the radical party, read Comte, promoted positivist doctrines, and spoke at various radicalist meetings. Between 1879 and 1880, Gissing began writing Workers in the Dawn, a novel of avowed social protest in which he serves, as he says in a letter of June 8, 1880, as “a mouthpiece of the advanced Radical party.” Equally obvious in the novel, however, is the fact that Gissing is perturbed about placing art in service to political and moral dogma. Arthur Goldring, the hero of the novel, is both a painter and a social reformer, but he is clearly upset with this duality in his life. Convinced that the aims of his two avocations are antithetical, he looks for consolation from Helen Norman, the woman he loves. Through the mouth of Helen, George Gissing propounds the ideas that he had gleaned from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1840)—most specifically that art is the true legislator of the moral order. Gissing, however, found it difficult to practice what he held to be intellectually valid; thus, the early Gissing, like Goldring, constantly found difficulty in accepting the tenet that art should not attempt to teach morality directly. The Unclassed · In The Unclassed, Gissing continued to struggle with the intricacies of the artist’s world. The result, unfortunately, was a novel in which the fall of the two artist-figures is in one case oversimplified and in the other, muddled. Confused and worried about his own failings, Gissing attempted to analyze the artistic temperament and the forces operating against such a temperament by segmenting the artist into Julian Casti and Osmond Waymark. Casti’s story is Gissing’s attempt to depict an artist undone by an overriding sense of moral obligation to a shrewish and possessive woman, Harriet Smales, a character with clear similarities to Gissing’s own wife Nell. Not until the last chapter is the physically debilitated and intellectually frustrated Casti convinced that his moral obligation to Harriet is futile. He leaves for the Isle of Wight, where he quietly spends his last days plaintively talking of the epic he will never write. The portrait of Waymark is Gissing’s attempt to counterbalance the oversimplified Casti. Waymark is a more complex figure, and his role as an artist is more thoroughly scrutinized by Gissing. Waymark is thwarted in his pursuit of art by a variety of causes: his aborted social consciousness, his vaguely defined ideological tenets, his relationship with women, and his pecuniary predicament. By the end of the novel, after a plethora of complications, Waymark is neither a complete success nor a complete

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failure. His one published novel receives mediocre reviews, and Waymark himself shows little concern either for its intrinsic value or for its critical reception. By placing his artist-hero in the grips of consuming personal, political, and economic woes, Gissing tries to suggest that art cannot flourish with integrity or purity. The portrait of Waymark, however, is finally very muddled, for it is not clear to which forces Waymark the artist succumbs. Questions about the role of art in the political and moral order continued to dominate Gissing’s thinking in much the same way throughout the 1880’s, and he entered the 1890’s very much in the middle of the two main currents of literary thought, drawn both to the angry didacticism of the realists and naturalists and to the ivory towers of the aesthetes. In the 1890’s, Gissing broadened the range of his novels and produced his best work. At the beginning of the decade, he published The Emancipated, the story of a young middle-class widow restricted by religious scruples until she finds release in art. In Denzil Quarrier, Gissing tried his hand at a political novel and produced one of his more popular works. In Eve’s Ransom, a short novel that was first serialized, he focused on the pangs of unrequited love. In Born in Exile, Gissing examined the life of one born in the lower classes who has the opportunity to rise to a higher socioeconomic level. In The Odd Women, Gissing focused his attention on early feminists, making a careful study of women who never marry but who must support themselves in a male-dominated society. New Grub Street · The novel on which Gissing’s reputation has most depended is New Grub Street, his full-length study of the artist’s role in society. From Jasper Milvain to Whelpdale to Alfred Yule to Edwin Reardon to Harold Biffin, Gissing offers a finely graduated hierarchy of the late nineteenth century artist. He is particularly interested in characterizing the artist manqué and the forces which have contributed to his failure. Unlike the earlier novels, however, New Grub Street presents a wider-ranging understanding of the artist’s dilemma. It is no longer a simple case of idealized social reform versus an even more idealized artistic purity. In keeping with his social interests of the early 1890’s, Gissing sees the factors operating against the artist arising more from without than from within. He concentrates on two particularly potent forces which militate against the artist and ultimately ensure his downfall. The first force is the woman, and her influence on the artist is subtle, pervasive, and lasting. Often sensitive and frequently lonely, the nascent artists of Gissing’s Grub Street are prime targets for the love of a good woman. She appeals particularly to the psychologically insecure artist, promising a lifetime of emotional stability. At the outset, she is a source of inspiration, yet time and disillusionment reveal more distressing realities. It is the age-old femme fatale who lures the artist away from his art into an emotionally draining existence, thwarting his inclination and energy for production. It is “the other woman” who instigates a complicated triangle with like results. It is the husband-hunting woman who tantalizes the frustrated artist with the attraction of domestic security, but soon she either stifles that inexplicable drive to write for the sake of writing or provides a marriage so socially disadvantageous that advancement is precluded. Economics is the second, equally potent, force militating against the three failed artists (Reardon, Biffen, Yule) of New Grub Street. While the force of woman is chiefly felt on a psychological level, her destructive influence within the economic sphere is evident. After all, the necessity of supporting a wife and children increases the financial difficulties the artist must face. Monetary matters also prove a problem in

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and of themselves. An artist such as Biffen easily falls victim to the myth of so many struggling artists, convinced that poverty and hardship are essential in the experience of any would-be writer. In the portrait of Reardon, however, one quickly sees the artist at odds with real poverty, rarely an inspiration and usually a deterrent to his work. Edwin Reardon is the novel’s central character, and it is Reardon who is subjected to the greatest number of debilitating forces. When he is introduced, it is immediately clear that his marriage to Amy has entangled him in the finely woven web of woman. At the outset, Reardon is thirty-two, has been married two years, and has a ten-monthold child. None of his decisions, artistic or otherwise, can be wholly unaffected by this domestic responsibility. Gissing makes his viewpoint clear in the very first scene with Reardon and Amy. In this scene, largely a heated discussion over Reardon’s approach to writing, Amy chides her husband for not compromising his artistic integrity and forcibly reminds him that “art must be practised as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade.” Thus, in this one early scene, the two powerful influences of woman and commerce come together, and there is little doubt that they will take a heavy toll on Reardon the artist. Reardon’s failure as an artist, both aesthetically and materially, runs in direct proportion to the failure of his marriage and the decline of his economic status. Obviously lending itself to autobiographical interpretation, the artist-novel is the means by which the real-life writer works out—or fails to work out—his own aesthetic and personal conflicts. New Grub Street, like Gissing’s earlier novels, has its share of autobiographical elements, but his analysis of his emotional and intellectual condition is far more perceptive. He has gained tighter control on the raw materials of the artist’s world which are treated ambiguously in the early novels. The eleven years between Workers in the Dawn and New Grub Street were the training ground for an increased self-insight and a more encompassing, objective portraiture of the artist-figure and the gray areas with which he must cope. The work Gissing produced in the last half of the 1890’s has not generally contributed to his critical reputation. Part of his later years he spent on a variety of projects that are not especially characteristic of his overall career. In 1898, he published Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. In 1901, he published By the Ionian Sea, a travel book about his experiences in Italy. He also worked on a historical novel which was never completed but published posthumously as Veranilda in 1904. The novels that Gissing published in his last years are for the most part undistinguished and often are reworkings of his earlier themes. The Whirlpool is a study of marriage in the “whirlpool” of modern life. The Crown of Life is his paean to the perfect marriage, significantly begun shortly after he met Gabrielle Fleury in 1898. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft · In 1900, Gissing did most of the writing of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, though it was not published until 1903. The book is not really a novel. Pretending to be merely the book’s editor, Gissing provides a short preface saying that he has come across the papers of his friend Ryecroft and has ordered them in an arbitrary way. There are four main sections, each labeled with one of the seasons, beginning with spring and ending with winter. The book is a mixture of autobiography and reverie, providing the author a platform on which he can discuss sundry subjects. Thus, there are memories of childhood, of poverty in London, of peaceful trips to Italy. There are descriptive sketches of rural scenes in England. There are short essays on philosophical ideas and terse confessions of various preferences, ranging from food to countries. The book provides delightful if

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not exciting reading and gives a memorable portrait of the aging author who has retired to the calmness of Exeter to ruminate. When Gissing died in 1903, he left behind an impressive corpus, but the reputation he had at the time of his death did not continue to grow. By some, he was criticized as being too ponderous and undramatic, inclined to publish an analytical study rather than a dramatized story. By others, he was accused of being melodramatic, relying too exclusively on the contrivances of the Victorian “triple-decker.” In the second half of the twentieth century, however, especially during the last two decades, Gissing attracted more attention in academic circles. His seriousness as a novelist has slowly been recognized, both for his historic role in the heyday of English realism and for his integrity as an individual novelist. David B. Eakin Other major works SHORT FICTION: Human Odds and Ends, 1897; The House of Cobwebs, 1906; Sins of the Fathers, 1924; A Victim of Circumstances, 1927; Brownie, 1931. NONFICTION: Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 1898; By the Ionian Sea, 1901; The Immortal Dickens, 1925; Letters of George Gissing to Members of His Family, 1927; George Gissing and H. G. Wells: Their Friendship and Correspondence, 1961; The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz, 1961; George Gissing’s Commonplace Book, 1962; The Letters of George Gissing to Gabrielle Fleury, 1964; George Gissing: Essays and Fiction, 1970; The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist, 1978. Bibliography Connelly, Mark. Orwell and Gissing. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Compares New Grub Street with George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Also, a chapter on “Doomed Utopias: Animal Farm and Demos.” Coustillas, Pierre, and Colin Partridge, eds. Gissing: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. A very important research tool for the study of Gissing, containing a large selection of reviews dating from his own time to the late 1960’s. Among the notable essays is a notice by the great Victorian critic George Saintsbury, who claimed that Gissing had an obsessional interest in attacking the social order, but who nevertheless liked Gissing because his writing was difficult to forget. Paul Elmer More argued that Gissing overcame the undue realism of his first novels. Gissing’s study of the classics and philosophy tempered his overblown portrayal of society. Grylls, David. The Paradox of Gissing. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Maintains that paradox is the key to reading Gissing properly. He was attracted to conflicting points of view on various topics, including women, social reform, poverty, and art. His novels express these contradictions, often by a sharp break in the middle. In New Grub Street, Gissing achieved an integration of diverse opinions. Halperin, John. Gissing: A Life in Books. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982. The most comprehensive life of Gissing. Its dominant theme is that he wrote about his own life in his novels, and much of the book discusses Gissing’s fiction from this point of view. Halperin does not confine himself to Gissing’s life, devoting considerable attention to the critical reaction to Gissing after his death. Maintains that H. G. Wells launched a campaign of vilification against Gissing. Also includes a section that offers acidulous remarks of other writers about Gissing.

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Michaux, Jean-Pierre, ed. George Gissing: Critical Essays. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981. This valuable anthology gives a good selection of twentieth century critics’ discussions of Gissing. Includes an influential essay by Q. D. Leavis, who praised Gissing’s portrayal of the misery of the Victorian world. His careful and realistic observations achieved their culmination in New Grub Street, which Leavis places among the outstanding English novels. An essay by George Orwell lauds Gissing’s attack on respectability. Selig, Robert L. George Gissing. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1995. An excellent introduction, with chapters on Gissing’s major works, his career as a man of letters, and his biography. Includes chronology, notes, and annotated bibliography. Sloan, John. George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Chapters on Gissing’s “Hogarthian beginnings,” his working-class novels, his career from The Emancipated to New Grub Street, and The Odd Women. Includes detailed notes and bibliography.

William Golding William Golding

Born: St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England; September 19, 1911 Died: Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England; June 19, 1993 Principal long fiction · Lord of the Flies, 1954; The Inheritors, 1955; Pincher Martin, 1956 (also known as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin); Free Fall, 1959; The Spire, 1964; The Pyramid, 1967; Darkness Visible, 1979; Rites of Passage, 1980; The Paper Men, 1984; Close Quarters, 1987; Fire Down Below, 1989; The Double Tongue, 1995. Other literary forms · William Golding’s first and only book of poetry, entitled simply Poems, was published in 1934. “Envoy Extraordinary,” a 1956 novella, was recast in 1958 in the form of a play, The Brass Butterfly; set in Roman times, The Brass Butterfly uses irony to examine the value of “modern” inventions. “Envoy Extraordinary” was published along with two other novellas, “The Scorpion God” and “Clonk Clonk,” in a 1971 collection bearing the title The Scorpion God. Golding also produced nonfiction; his book reviews in The Spectator between 1960 and 1962 frequently took the form of personal essays. Many of his essays and autobiographical pieces were collected in The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces (1965). A Moving Target (1982) is another set of essays; An Egyptian Journal (1985) is a travelogue. Golding also gave numerous interviews explaining his work; these have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines. Achievements · Sir William Gerald Golding is without doubt one of the major British novelists of the post-World War II era. He depicted in many different ways the anguish of modern humanity as it gropes for meaning and redemption in a world where the spiritual has been all but crushed by the material. His themes deal with guilt, responsibility, and salvation. He depicts the tension between individual fallenness and social advance, or, to put it differently, the cost of progress to the individual. Golding’s work portrays a period in which the last vestiges of an optimistic belief in evolutionary progress collapsed under the threat of nuclear destruction. In doing this, he moved the classic British novel tradition forward both in stylistic and formal technique and in the opening up of a new, contemporary social and theological dialectic. Golding was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected in 1955), and in 1983 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979 for Darkness Visible and the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage. He was knighted in 1989. Biography · Born in the county of Cornwall in the southwest corner of England, the son of a rationalistic schoolmaster, William Golding had a relatively isolated childhood. Eventually his family moved to Marlborough, in Wiltshire, where his father was a science teacher. There Golding received his high school education, while revisiting Cornwall frequently. He graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, in science and literature. The choice of arts over science was made at the university, but scientific interests and approaches can be easily discerned in his literary work. Each 407

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novel is, in a way, a new experiment set up to test a central hypothesis. After the unsuccessful publication of a book of poetry in 1934, Golding moved to London and participated in fringe theater without achieving anything of significance. In 1939 he married Ann Brookfield and accepted a teaching position at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury, also in Wiltshire. Soon after the outbreak of war, he joined the Royal Navy, seeing extensive action against German warships, being adrift for three days in the English Channel, and participating in the Normandy landings. After the war, Golding resumed teaching and tried writing novels. His first four were highly imitative and met only by editorial refusals. He then decided to write as he wanted, not as he thought he should. This shift in approach led to the immediate publication of ©The Nobel Foundation Lord of the Flies in 1954; this work became almost at once a landmark on the British literary scene. Golding was able to follow this achievement with three more novels in the space of only five years, by which time paperback versions were being issued on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1961 he retired from teaching, becoming for two years a book reviewer with The Spectator, one of the leading British weekly cultural reviews. In The Paper Men, Golding depicts a novelist whose first novel turned out to be a gold mine for him—an autobiographical echo, no doubt. After the publication of The Pyramid in 1967, when Golding was fifty-six years old, there came rather a long silence, and many people assumed that he had brought his career to a close. With the publication of Darkness Visible twelve years later, however, a steady stream of new novels emerged, including a trilogy. This second phase also marked the reception of various prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his being knighted, a comparatively rare honor for a novelist in Britain. Golding had one son and one daughter. He and his wife returned to Cornwall to live in 1984. Two years after his death in 1993, a nearly completed novel, The Double Tongue, was published. Analysis · William Golding, like his older British contemporary Graham Greene, is a theological novelist: That is to say, his main thematic material focuses on particular theological concerns, in particular sin and guilt, innocence and its loss, individual responsibility and the possibility of atonement for mistakes made, and the need for spiritual revelation. Unlike Greene, however, he does not write out of a particular

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Christian, or even religious, belief system; the dialectic he sets up is neither specifically Catholic (like Greene’s) nor Protestant. In fact, Golding’s dialectic is set up in specific literary terms, in that it is with other works of literature that he argues, rather than with theological or philosophical positions per se. The texts with which he argues do represent such positions or make certain cultural assumptions of such positions; however, it is through literary technique that he argues—paralleling, echoing, deconstructing—rather than through narratorial didacticism. Golding’s achievement is a literary tour de force. The British novel has never contained theological dialectic easily, except at a superficial level, let alone a depiction of transcendence. Golding has accepted the nineteenth century novel tradition but has modified it extensively. Each novel represents a fresh attempt for him to refashion the language and the central consciousness of that tradition. Sometimes he has pushed it beyond the limits of orthodox mimetic realism, and hence some of his novels have been called fables, allegories, or myths. In general, however, his central thrust is to restate the conflict between individuals and their society in contemporary terms, and in doing this, to question at a fundamental level many cultural assumptions, and to point up the loss of moral and spiritual values in twentieth century Western civilization—an enterprise in which most nineteenth century novelists were similarly involved for their own time. Lord of the Flies · Golding’s first and most famous novel, Lord of the Flies, illustrates this thesis well. Although there is a whole tradition of island-castaway narratives, starting with one of the earliest novels in English literature, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the text which Golding clearly had in mind to argue with was R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), written almost exactly one hundred years before Golding’s. The names of Ballantyne’s three schoolboy heroes (Ralph, Jack, and Peterkin) are taken over, with Peterkin becoming Simon (the biblical reversion being significant) and various episodes in Ballantyne being parodied by Golding—for example, the pig-sticking. Ballantyne’s yarn relied on the English public-school ethos that boys educated within a British Christian discipline would survive anything and in fact would be able to control their environment—in miniature, the whole British imperialistic enterprise of the nineteenth century. Most desert-island narratives do make the assumption that Western men can control their environment, assuming that they are moral, purposeful, and religious. Golding subverts all these suppositions: Except for a very few among them, the abandoned schoolboys, significantly younger than Ballantyne’s and more numerous (making a herd instinct possible), soon lose the veneer of the civilization they have acquired. Under Jack’s leadership, they paint their faces, hunt pigs, and then start killing one another. They ritually murder Simon, the mystic, whose transcendental vision of the Lord of the Flies (a pig’s head on a pole) is of the evil within. They also kill Piggy, the rationalist. The novel ends with the pack pursuing Ralph, the leader democratically elected at the beginning; the boys are prepared to burn the whole island to kill him. Ironically, the final conflagration serves as a powerful signal for rescue (earlier watchfires having been pathetically inadequate), and, in a sudden reversal, an uncomprehending British naval officer lands on the beach, amazed at the mud-covered, dirty boys before him. Allegorically it might be thought that as this world ends in fire, a final divine intervention will come. Ironically, however, the adult world that the officer represents is also destroying itself as effectively, in a nuclear war. Salvation remains problematic and ambiguous.

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What lifts the novel away from simple allegory is not only the ambiguities but also the dense poetic texture of its language. The description of Simon’s death is often quoted as brilliantly heightened prose—the beauty of the imagery standing in stark contrast to the brutality of his slaying. Yet almost any passage yields its own metaphorical textures and suggestive symbolism. Golding’s rich narrative descriptions serve to point up the poverty of the boys’ language, which can only dwell on basics—food, defecation, fears and night terrors, killings. Golding’s depiction of the children is immediately convincing. The adult intervention (the dead airman, the naval officer) is perhaps not quite so, being too clearly fabular. In general, however, the power of the novel derives from the tensions set up between the book’s novelistic realism and its fabular and allegorical qualities. The theological dialectic of humanity’s fallenness (not only the boys’) and the paper-thin veneer of civilization emerges inexorably out of this genre tension. The Inheritors · The thinness of civilization forms the central thesis of Golding’s second novel, The Inheritors. The immediate literary dialectic is set up with H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920), which propounds the typical social evolutionism common from the 1850’s onward. At a more general level, Golding’s novel might also be seen as an evolutionary version of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): Satan’s temptation to Eve is a temptation to progress; the result is the fall. Just as Adam and Eve degrade themselves with drunken behavior, so do Golding’s Neanderthal protagonists, Lok and Fa, when they stumble over the remains of Homo sapiens’ cannibalistic “festivities.” Golding has subverted the Wellsian thesis that Neanderthals were totally inferior by depicting them as innocent, gentle, intuitive, playful, and loving. They stand in ironic contrast to the group of Homo sapiens who eventually annihilate them, except for a small baby whom they kidnap (again reversing a short story by Wells, where it is Neanderthals who kidnap a human baby). The humans experience terror, lust, rage, drunkenness, and murder, and their religion is propitiatory only. By contrast, the Neanderthals have a taboo against killing anything, and their reverence for Oa, the Earth Mother, is gentle and numinous in quality. As in Lord of the Flies, the conclusion is formed by an ironic reversal—the reader suddenly sees from the humans’ perspective. The last line reads, “He could not see if the line of darkness had an ending.” It is a question Golding is posing: Has the darkness of the human heart an end? Golding’s technique is remarkable in the novel: He succeeds in convincing the reader that primitive consciousness could have looked like this. He has had to choose language that conveys that consciousness, yet is articulate enough to engage one imaginatively so that one respects the Neanderthals. He explores the transition from intuition and pictorial thinking to analogous and metaphoric thought. The ironic treatment of Homo sapiens is done also through the limits of Neanderthal perceptions and consciousness. Unfortunately, humans, as fallen creatures, can supply all too easily the language for the evil that the Neanderthals lack. Pincher Martin · Golding’s third novel, Pincher Martin (first published in the United States as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin), returns to the desert-island tradition. The immediate dialectic is perhaps with Robinson Crusoe, the sailor who single-handedly carves out an island home by the strength of his will aided by his faith. Pincher Martin is here the faithless antihero, although this is not immediately apparent. He,

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like Crusoe, appears to survive a wreck (Martin’s destroyer is torpedoed during the war); he kicks off seaboots and swims to a lonely island-rock in the Atlantic. With tremendous strength of will, he appears to survive by eating raw shellfish, making rescue signals, forcing an enema into himself, and keeping sane and purposeful. In the end, however, his sanity appears to disintegrate. Almost to the end it is quite possible to believe that Christopher Martin finally succumbs to madness and death only after a heroic, indeed Promethean, struggle against Fate and the elements. The last chapter, however, presents an even greater reversal than those in the first two novels, dispelling all of this as a false reading: Martin’s drowned body is found washed up on a Scottish island with his seaboots still on his feet. In other words, the episode on the rock never actually took place. The reading of Pincher Martin thus becomes deliberately problematic in a theological sense. The rock must be an illusion, an effort of the will indeed, but an effort after physical death. Yet it is not that all of one’s life flashes in front of one while one drowns, though that does happen with Martin’s sordid memories of his lust, greed, and terror. It is more that the text is formed by Martin’s ongoing dialectic with, or rather against, his destiny, which he sees as annihilation. An unnameable god is identified with the terror and darkness of the cellar of his childhood memories. His will, in its Promethean pride, is creating its own alternative. Theologically, this alternative can only be Purgatory or Hell, since it is clearly not heaven. Satan in Paradise Lost says, “Myself am Hell”: Strictly, this is Martin’s position, since he refuses the purgatorial possibilities in the final revelation of God, with his mouthless cry of “I shit on your heaven!” God, in his compassion, strikes Martin into annihilation with his “black lightning.” Free Fall · Golding’s first three novels hardly suggested that he was writing from within any central tradition of the British novel. All three are highly original in plot, for all of their dialectic with existing texts, and in style and technique. In his next novel, Free Fall, Golding writes much more recognizably within the tradition of both the Bildungsroman (the novel of character formation) and the Künstlerroman (the novel of artistic development). Sammy Mountjoy, a famous artist, is investigating his past life, but with the question in mind, “When did I lose my freedom?” The question is not in itself necessarily theological, but Sammy’s search is conducted in specifically theological categories. It has been suggested that the literary dialectic is with Albert Camus’s La Chute (1956; The Fall, 1957), a novella published some three years earlier. Camus’s existentialism sees no possibility of redemption or regeneration once the question has been answered; his protagonist uses the question, in fact, to gain power over others by exploiting their guilt, so the whole search would seem inauthentic. Golding sees such a search as vital: His position seems to be that no person is born in sin, or fallen, but inevitably at some stage, each person chooses knowingly to sin. At that moment he falls and loses his freedom to choose. The only possibility of redemption is to recognize that moment, to turn from it, and to cry out, “Help me!” This is Sammy’s cry when he is locked in a German prisoner-of-war camp and interrogated. His physical release from his cell is also a spiritual release, a moment of revelation described in Pentecostal terms of renewal and a new artistic vision. His moment of fall, which he discovers only near the end of the book (which is here culmination rather than reversal), was when he chose to seduce Beatrice (the name of Dante’s beloved inspiration also), whatever the cost and despite a warning that “sooner or later the sacrifice is always regretted.”

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Other theological perspectives are introduced. Two of Sammy’s teachers form an opposition: the rational, humanistic, likable Nick Shales and the religious, intense, but arrogant Miss Pringle. Sammy is caught in the middle, wanting to affirm the spiritual but drawn to the materialist. The dilemma goes back in the English novel to George Eliot. Though Golding cannot accept Eliot’s moral agnosticism, he has to accept her inexorable moral law of cause and effect: Sammy’s seduction of Beatrice has left her witless and insane. The scene in the prison cell is balanced by the scene in the mental institution. Redemption costs; the past remains. The fall may be arrested and even reversed, but only through self-knowledge and full confession. In Free Fall, Golding chose for the first time to use first-person narrative. Before that he had adopted a third-person narrative technique that stayed very close to the consciousness of the protagonists. In The Spire, Golding could be said to have perfected this latter technique. Events are seen not only through the eyes of Dean Jocelin but also in his language and thought processes. As in Henrik Ibsen’s Bygmester Solness (1892; The Master Builder, 1893), Golding’s protagonist has an obsessive drive to construct a church tower, or rather a spire on a tower, for his cathedral lacks both. (Inevitably one takes the cathedral to be Salisbury, whose medieval history is almost identical, although it is not named.) Ibsen’s play deals with the motivation for such an obsession, the price to be paid, and the spiritual conflicts. Golding, however, is not so much in a dialectic situation with the Ibsen play as using it as his base, agreeing with Ibsen when the latter talks of “the power of ideals to kill.” At the end of the novel, the spire has been built in the face of tremendous technical difficulties, but Jocelin lies dying, the caretaker and his wife have been killed, the master builder, Roger, is a broken man, and the whole life of the cathedral has been disrupted. Thus Golding raises the question of cost again: What is the cost of progress? Is it progress? The power of the book is that these questions can be answered in many different ways, and each way searches out new richness from the text. The patterning of moral and theological structures allows for almost endless combinations. The novel can also be read in terms of the cost of art—the permanence of art witnessing to humanity’s spirituality and vision, as against the Freudian view of art as sublimation and neurotic outlet, the price of civilization. By staying very close to Jocelin’s consciousness, the reader perceives only slowly, as he does, that much of his motivation and drive is not quite as visionary and spiritual as he first thinks. Freudian symbolism and imagery increasingly suggest sexual sublimation, especially centered on Goody Pangall, whom he calls “his daughter in God.” In fact, much later one learns that he received his appointment only because his aunt was the king’s mistress for a while. Jocelin manipulates people more and more consciously to get the building done and chooses, perhaps unconsciously at first, to ignore the damage to people, especially the four people he regards as his “pillars” to the spire. Ironically, he too is a pillar, and he damages himself, physically, emotionally, and spiritually (he is almost unable to pray by the end, and has no confessor). Yet despite all the false motives, the novel suggests powerfully that there really has been a true vision that has been effected, even if marred by humanity’s fallenness and “total depravity,” every part affected by the fall. The Spire · The language of The Spire is the most poetic that Golding attempted. The density of imagery, recurring motifs, and symbolism both psychological and theological blend into marvelous rhythms of ecstasy and horror. The interweaving of inner monologue, dialogue, and narrative dissolves the traditional tight bounds of time and

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space of the novel form, to create an impassioned intensity where the theological dialectic takes place, not with another text, but within the levels of the moral, spiritual, and metaphoric consciousness of the text itself. The Pyramid · After the verbal pyrotechnics of The Spire, Golding’s next novel, The Pyramid, seems very flat, despite its title. It returns to Free Fall in its use of first-person narrative, to a modified form of its structure (flashbacks and memories to provide a personal pattern), and to contemporary social comedy, strongly echoing Anthony Trollope. The language is spare and unadorned, as perhaps befits the protagonist, Olly, who, unlike Sammy Mountjoy, has turned away from art and spirit to become un homme moyen sensual. His life has become a defense against love, but as a petit bourgeois he has been protected against Sammy’s traumatic upbringing, and so one feels little sympathy for him. Theological and moral dialectic is muted, and the social commentary and comedy have been better done by other novelists, although a few critics have made out a case for a rather more complex structuring than is at first evident. Darkness Visible · Perhaps the flatness of The Pyramid suggests that Golding had for the time being run out of impetus. Only two novellas were published in the next twelve years, and then, quite unexpectedly, Darkness Visible appeared. In some ways it echoes Charles Williams, the writer of a number of religious allegorical novels in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The reality of spiritual realms of light and darkness is made by Golding as explicitly as by Williams, especially in Matty, the “holy fool.” Yet Golding never quite steps into allegory, any more than he did in his first novel. His awareness of good and evil takes on a concreteness that owes much to Joseph Conrad. Much of the feel of the novel is Dickensian, if not its structure: The grotesque serves to demonstrate the “foolishness of the wise,” as with Charles Dickens. The book divides into three parts centering on Matty, orphaned and hideously burned in the bombing of London during the war. At times he keeps a journal and thus moves the narrative into the first person. The second part, by contrast, focuses on Sophy, the sophisticated twin daughter of a professional chess-player (the rationalist), and overwhelmingly exposes the rootlessness and anomie of both contemporary youth culture and the post-1960’s bourgeoisie (the children of Olly’s generation). The third part concerns a bizarre kidnapping plot where Matty and Sophy nearly meet as adversaries; this is the “darkness visible” (the title coming from the hell of Paradise Lost). The end remains ambiguous. Golding attempts a reversal again: The kidnap has been partially successful. Matty has not been able to protect the victims, nor Sophy to complete her scheme, but still children are kidnapped. Central themes emerge: childhood and innocence corrupted; singleness of purpose, which can be either for good or for evil (contrast also Milton’s single and double darkness in Comus, 1634); and the foolishness of the world’s wisdom. Entropy is a key word, and Golding, much more strongly than hitherto, comments on the decline of Great Britain. Above all, however, Golding’s role as a novelist of transcendence is reemphasized: Moments of revelation are the significant moments of knowledge. Unfortunately, revelation can come from dark powers as well as from those of the light. Ultimately, Golding’s vision is Miltonic, as has been suggested. The theological dialectic is revealed as that between the children of light and the children of darkness. Rites of Passage · When Rites of Passage followed Darkness Visible one year later, Golding had no intention of writing a trilogy (now generally called To the Ends of the

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Earth: A Sea Trilogy). It was only later he realized that he had “left all those poor sods in the middle of the sea and needed to get them to Australia.” The trilogy was well received, perhaps because the plot and themes are relatively straightforward and unambiguous, and the social comedy is more obvious than the theological dialectic. The trilogy fits well into the Bildungsroman tradition of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861), in that it follows the education of a snob, Edmund Talbot, who, under the patronage of an aristocratic and influential godfather, is embarking on a political career by taking up an appointment in the new colony of New South Wales, Australia, in 1810. It is also enlivened by Golding’s wide knowledge of sailing ships and life at sea; the trilogy is the fullest literary expression of this interest he has allowed himself. The narrative proceeds leisurely in the first person as Edmund decides to keep a diary. In Rites of Passage, the plot focuses on the death of one of the passengers, a ridiculous young clergyman, the Reverend Robert James Colley. He is made the butt of everyone’s fun, including that of the ordinary sailors. As the result of the shame of a joke, where he is made drunk and then engages in homosexual activities, he more or less wills himself to die. Captain Anderson covers up the incident—at which Edmund, for the first time, feels moral outrage and vows to expose the captain to his godfather when he can. The moral protest is vitiated, however, by Edmund’s use of power and privilege. Close Quarters · In Close Quarters, Edmund’s education continues. As conditions on board ship deteriorate, he increases in stature, losing his aristocratic bearing and becoming willing to mix socially. His relationship with Summers, the most morally aware of the ship’s lieutenants, is good for him in particular. He also shows himself sensitive: He weeps at a woman’s song, he falls in love (as opposed to the lust in Rites of Passage), and he admires Colley’s written style (Colley, too, has left behind a journal). He suffers physically and shows courage. His falling in love is delightfully described, quite unselfconsciously. He learns, too, the limits of his power: The elements control everything. The speed of the ship runs down as weeds grow on its underside, reintroducing the entropy motif of Darkness Visible. He cannot prevent suicide or death. As the novel proceeds, the “ship of fools” motif of late medieval literature becomes very strong. Edmund is no more and no less a fool than the others. Fire Down Below · Fire Down Below closes the trilogy as the ship docks in Sidney Cove, and Edmund is reunited happily with the young lady he met. The ending seems to be social comedy, until one realizes that Summers’s fear, that a fire lit below decks to forge a metal band around a broken mast is still smoldering, is proved true. The anchored ship bursts into flame, and Summers is killed, having just been given promotion, partly through Edmund’s efforts. Despite this tragedy, the ending is Dickensian, for the voyage has turned into a quest for love for Edmund, and love has helped mark his way with moral landmarks. Edmund has learned much, although at the end he has still far to go. The ending is perhaps the most mellow of all Golding’s endings: If Australia is not “the new Jerusalem,” it is not hell either, and if Edmund lacks spirituality, he is yet more than un homme moyen sensual. The Paper Men · The Paper Men is, like Free Fall, a Künstlerroman. The style is much more akin to that of twentieth century American confessional literature, especially Saul Bellow’s. Golding’s Wilfred Barclay could easily be a Henderson or a Herzog, with the same energetic, somewhat zany style, and with the themes of flight and

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pursuit in a frantic search for identity. Unusually for Golding, the novel seems to be repeating themes and structures, if not style, and perhaps for that reason has not made the same impact as his other novels. Wilfred’s revelation of the transcendent in an ambiguous spiritual experience of Christ (or Pluto) marks the high point of the novel. The Double Tongue · Golding’s final novel, The Double Tongue, was still in its third draft at the time of his death. For the first time he uses a female first-person voice; also for the first time, there is a classical Greek setting. Arieka is the prophetess, or “Pythia,” of the renowned Delphic oracle, but during a period of its decline after the Roman occupation. She tells of her own calling, her first experience of the prophetic, and of the continuing marginalization of the oracle. The male presence is represented by Ionides, the high priest of Zeus and master in charge of the sacred complex of Delphi and its wider network. The only other full character is the slave-librarian, Perseus. The style of the novel is sparer and more relaxed than that of Golding’s earlier novels, with few characters and minimal plot. Its interest lies, as in The Paper Men, with the nature of epiphany and with whether the experience of transcendence actualizes anything of significance in an increasingly secular world. The political genius of Rome, and even the literary legacy of the Ancient Greek writers, seem much more powerful influences. The sacred is reduced almost to superstition: The questions posed to the oracle become more and more trivial. Ionides, while institutionally having to acknowledge the sacred, behaves as if the human spirit is the ultimate source of the prophetic. Arieka, having been seized, or “raped,” by Dionysos, the god of prophecy, knows the truth to be otherwise, but even she increasingly feels that her prophetic gift has ceased to be supernatural and has become a natural expression of her human wisdom. In a way, this concern with the prophetic can be traced back to Simon in The Lord of the Flies, and then to the form of the Künstlerroman. Unlike the latter, however, the context here is specifically sacred, and it would be a mistake to deconstruct the novel in terms of the nature of artistic inspiration. Nevertheless, the problematic nature of inspiration, whether divine or poetic, is as real to Golding in his last novel as in, say, The Spire. The setting of a declining Greece continues the concern with entropy so powerfully expressed in Darkness Visible. Signs of cultural entropy include the growth of “copying” manuscripts rather than creating texts, the marginalization of the transcendent, and the trahison des clercs—Ionides is found to be plotting a pathetic revolt against Roman hegemony. Politics has undermined any integrity he had. There would not appear to be a specific subtext with which Golding is arguing. The Double Tongue bears remarkable similarities to C. S. Lewis’s final, and most literary, novel, Till We Have Faces (1956), also set in classical Greek times. In both, a female consciousness aware of its own physical ugliness, yet possessing real power, undergoes a spiritual journey with multifarious symbolic levels. Lewis’s novel, however, ends with epiphany as closure; Golding’s begins with it, and the rest of the novel seeks ambiguously to give it meaning. Golding’s epiphany here is the god’s laughter, at least that laughter of which Arieka is aware. Although each Golding novel, with a few exceptions, is a new “raid on the inarticulate,” certain thematic and technical features remain constant over the years. Golding’s moral and didactic concerns consistently sought theological grounding out of which to construct a critique of the lostness and fallenness of humankind, and specifically of contemporary Western civilization, with its spiritual bankruptcy. In this quest there is a line of continuity back to George Eliot and Charles Dickens in the

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English novel tradition. In his affirmation of the primacy of the spiritual over the material he echoes not only them but also, in different ways, Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. In his vision of the darkness of the human soul, unenlightened by any transcendent revelation, he follows Joseph Conrad. He also seeks, as did E. M. Forster and Lawrence, to find a style that escapes the materiality of prose and attains to the revelatory transcendence of poetry. The result is usually dramatic, incarnational metaphors and motifs. The mode is usually confessional, almost Augustinian at times, coming from a single consciousness, though often with a sudden reversal at the end to sustain an ambiguous dialectic. There is in Golding no articulated framework of beliefs: Transcendence lies ultimately beyond the articulate. God is there, and revelation is not only possible but indeed necessary and salvific. Yet the revelation remains ambiguous, fleeting, and numinous, rather than normative. In the end, this often means that Golding’s social critique, of the moral entropy of Britain in particular, comes over more powerfully than the darkness that is the refusal of the terror of believing in God. David Barratt Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Scorpion God, 1971. PLAY: The Brass Butterfly, pr., pb. 1958. RADIO PLAYS: Miss Pulkinhorn, 1960; Break My Heart, 1962. POETRY: Poems, 1934. NONFICTION: The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces, 1965; A Moving Target, 1982; An Egyptian Journal, 1985. Bibliography Baker, James R., ed. Critical Essays on William Golding. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. A collection of the best essays on Golding’s novels through The Paper Men. It also includes Golding’s Nobel Lecture and an essay on trends in Golding criticism. Bloom, Harold, ed. Lord of the Flies. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1998. Of the many collections of essays on Golding’s best-known novel, this is probably the best. Boyd, S. J. The Novels of William Golding. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Provides a chapter on each of Golding’s novels through The Paper Men. Includes a full bibliography. Dick, Bernard F. William Golding. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Excellent introduction to Golding’s life and works. Dickson, L. L. The Modern Allegories of William Golding. Tampa: University of Southern Florida Press, 1990. Renewed theoretical interest in fantasy and allegory have produced this reading of Golding’s novels, suggesting a useful balance to earlier studies that looked to psychological realism. Gindin, James. William Golding. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1988. Golding’s novels are paired in essays that compare them. Additional chapters examine themes in Golding’s work and its critical reception. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, and Ian Gregor. William Golding: A Critical Study. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. Still one of the standard critical accounts of Golding. A full analysis of the first five novels, showing imaginative development and interconnection. An added chapter deals with three later novels. McCarron, Kevin. The Coincidence of Opposites: William Golding’s Later Fiction. Shef-

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field, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Analyzes Golding’s late works, from Darkness Visible to Fire Down Below. Page, Norman, ed. William Golding: Novels, 1954-1967. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Part of the excellent Casebook series, this volume consists of an introductory survey, several general essays on Golding’s earlier work, and eight pieces on specific novels through The Pyramid. Redpath, Philip. William Golding: A Structural Reading of His Fiction. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1986. Redpath explores the way the novels create meaning, especially through their structures. The novels are treated thematically, not chronologically as in most studies. The final chapter offers suggestions for the future of Golding criticism.

Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith

Born: Pallas, County Longford(?), Ireland; November 10, 1728 or 1730 Died: London, England; April 4, 1774 Principal long fiction · The Citizen of the World, 1762 (collection of essays first published in The Public Ledger, 1760-1761); The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766. Other literary forms · Oliver Goldsmith contributed significantly to several literary genres. His works of poetry include The Traveller: Or, A Prospect of Society (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770), a classic elegiac poem of rural life. He wrote the biographies Memoirs of M. de Voltaire (1761), particularly interesting for its anecdotes, and The Life of Richard Nash of Bath (1762), especially valuable as a study in the social history of the period. Goldsmith developed principles of literary criticism in An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a history of literature in which he laments the decline of letters and morals in his own day. Specimens of his literary journalism are found in Essays. By Mr Goldsmith (1765), which includes well-written humorous studies of London society. He wrote two comic plays, The Good-NaturedMan (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer: Or, The Mistakes of a Night (1773), a rollicking lampoon of the sentimental comedy then in vogue, which is still performed today. In addition, Goldsmith published translations, histories, and even a natural history, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (1774), containing some quaint descriptions of animals. Achievements · Goldsmith’s contemporaries and posterity have been somewhat ambivalent about his literary stature, which is epitomized in English writer Samuel Johnson’s estimate of him: “Goldsmith was a man who, whatever he wrote, did it better than any other man could do.” However, Johnson demurred on Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, judging it “very faulty.” Yet there can be little dispute over critic A. Lytton Sells’s judgment that Goldsmith’s “versatility was the most remarkable of his gifts.” Although the novel The Vicar of Wakefield has usually been considered his best work, Goldsmith despised the novelist’s art and regarded himself principally as a poet. His most famous poem is the reflective and melancholic The Deserted Village, a serious piece in heroic couplets; however, perhaps his real poetic gift was for humorous verse, such as The Haunch of Venison (1776) and Retaliation (1774). Indeed, humor and wit are conspicuous in all his major works: There is the gentle irony of The Vicar of Wakefield, the comic portraits and satirical observations in The Citizen of the World, and the outright farce of She Stoops to Conquer. Goldsmith was not a Romantic but a classicist by temperament, whose taste was molded by the Latin classics, the Augustan poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and seventeenth century French literature, and for whom the canons of criticism laid down by Nicolas Boileau and Voltaire were authoritative. Reflecting that background, Goldsmith’s style is, in Johnson’s words, “noble, elegant, and graceful.” Biography · Oliver Goldsmith was born of English stock to Ann Jones and the Reverend Charles Goldsmith, an Anglican curate. He first attended the village school 418

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o f L i s s o y an d w as ta ug h t b y Thomas Byrne, a veteran of the War of the Spanish Sucession. Byrne, a versifier who regaled his pupils with stories and legends of old Irish heroes, perhaps inspired Goldsmith with his love of poetry, imaginative romance, and adventure. In 1747, Goldsmith attended Patrick Hughes’s school at Edgeworthstown, where he received a thorough grounding in the Latin classics. While there he probably first heard Turlogh O’Carolan, “the last of the bards,” whose minstrelry left a lasting impression on him. In 1745, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar, a position which required him to do menial work in exchange for room, Library of Congress board, and tuition. Goldsmith earned his B.A. degree in either 1749 or 1750. In 1752, he journeyed to Edinburgh to study medicine, pursuing his medical studies in Leyden in 1754. The next year he set out on a grand tour of the Continent. In February, 1756, he arrived in London, where he briefly taught in Dr. Milner’s school for nonconformists and eked out a living doing hack writing. A reversal of his fortune occurred in 1759, with the publication of his first substantial work, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe. Goldsmith subsequently befriended such luminaries as the great critic and writer Johnson, the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett, the actor David Garrick, the writer and statesman Sir Edmund Burke, and the aesthetician and portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1763, they formed themselves into the famous Literary Club, which is memorialized in James Boswell’s great biography of Johnson. Goldsmith died in 1774, possibly of Bright’s disease exacerbated by worry over debts, and was buried in Temple Churchyard. Two years later, the Club erected a monument to him in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, for which Johnson wrote an inscription. Analysis · Themes that run through Goldsmith’s long fiction are his philosophical inquiries into human nature, the problem of evil, the vying of the good and the bad within the human breast, and the conflict between “reason and appetite.” His fiction addresses at its deepest level the perennial problem of theodicy, or why God allows the innocent to suffer so grievously. Lien Chi in The Citizen of the World exclaims, “Oh, for the reason of our creation; or why we were created to be thus unhappy!” Dr. Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield ruminates, “When I reflect on the distribution of good and evil here below, I find that much has been given man to enjoy, yet still more to suffer.” Both come to terms with the conundrum of evil practically, by resolving, in Lien Chi’s words, “not to stand unmoved at distress, but endeavour to turn every disaster to our own advantage.”

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The Citizen of the World · The ninety-eight essays of The Citizen of the World were originally published as the “Chinese Letters” in various issues of The Public Ledger from January 24, 1760, to August 14, 1761. They were subsequently collated and published in book form in 1762. These essays purport to be letters from Lien Chi Altangi, a Mandarin philosopher from Peking who is visiting London, to his son Hingpo and to Fum Hoam, first President of the Ceremonial Academy of Peking. What qualifies this work as long fiction are the well-delineated characters it creates and the interwoven stories it relates. The principal character is Lien Chi, a type made familiar in the eighteenth century by Charles de Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters, 1722). Lien Chi represents the man who, through travel, has overcome provincialism and prejudice and has achieved a cosmopolitan outlook. More specifically, perhaps, he represents the sociable, sanguine, and rational side of Goldsmith, who himself had traveled extensively in Europe. To reinforce the notion that these are the letters of a Chinese man, Goldsmith studs them with Chinese idioms and makes references throughout to Asian beliefs, manners, and customs. Lien Chi cites the philosopher Confucius, and he compares the enlightenment of the East with the ignorance and folly of the West. The Citizen of the World capitalizes on the enthusiasm in eighteenth century England for anything Eastern—particularly Chinese—in the way of literature, fashion, design, and art, a vogue which Goldsmith satirizes through the bemused observations of Lien Chi. Through the character of Lien Chi, a naïve but philosophically astute observer of the human scene, Goldsmith presents a full-blown satire of English society (reminiscent of his compatriot Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels [1726], but not so savage). In his letters, Lien Chi gives his impressions of the English, particularly of London society—their institutions, traditions, customs, habits, manners, foibles, and follies. He describes for readers a series of charming and funny pictures of London life in the eighteenth century, the literary equivalent of a William Hogarth painting. He shows us the coffeehouses, literary clubs, theaters, parks and pleasure gardens, churches, and private homes. Two scenes are particularly memorable: In one, Lien Chi describes a church service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he mistakes the organ for an idol and its music for an oracle. In another scene, he attends a dinner for some clergy of the Church of England and is shocked to find that their sole topic of conversation is nothing more spiritual than the merits of the victuals they are intent on devouring. Aside from the entertainment and edification they afford, these letters are a document in social history, much like Samuel Pepys’s diary. While touring Westminster Abbey, Lien Chi meets and befriends the Man in Black, who represents the “melancholy man,” a stock character of the Renaissance. He more particularly can be seen to represent Goldsmith’s introverted and melancholy side. Through the Man in Black, Lien Chi meets Beau Tibbs, “an important little trifler” who is a rather shabby, snobbish, and pathetic fop who lives by flattering the rich and the famous. A particularly comic scene describes the visit of Lien Chi, the Man in Black, the pawnbroker’s widow, Beau Tibbs, and his wife to Vauxhall Gardens. The Tibbses insist upon having supper in “a genteel box” where they can both see and be seen. The pawnbroker’s widow, the Man in Black’s companion, heartily enjoys the meal, but Mrs. Tibbs detests it, comparing it unfavorably to a supper she and her husband lately had with a nobleman. Mrs. Tibbs is asked to sing but coyly declines; however, with repeated entreaties she obliges. During her song, an official announces that the waterworks are about to begin, which the widow is especially bent on seeing. Mrs. Tibbs, however, continues her song, oblivious to the discomfort she is causing,

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right through to the end of the waterworks. Goldsmith here anticipates Charles Dickens in his comic portrayal of character. In addition to the stories featuring the above characters, there are Asian fables interspersed throughout the book, inspired no doubt by English translations of the The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (fifteenth century). The British Magazine aptly described The Citizen of the World as “light, agreeable summer reading, partly original, partly borrowed.” Sells regards the work as fundamentally a parody of the genre of satiric letters, to which Montesquieu and JeanBaptiste de Boyer had earlier contributed. It reveals Goldsmith at the top of his form as a humorist, satirist, and ironist. The Vicar of Wakefield · The Vicar of Wakefield, Goldsmith’s only true novel, was published in 1766. It is a first-person narrative set in eighteenth century Yorkshire. It is largely autobiographical, with Dr. Primrose modeled on Goldsmith’s father and brother, and George modeled on Goldsmith himself. It was likely intended to satirize the then-fashionable sentimental novel, particularly Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). Its style and conventions, such as the digressions, charming pastoral scenes, and mistaken identities, are those of the eighteenth century English novel. Dr. Charles Primrose, the vicar, narrates the story of his family’s misfortunes. In addition to his wife, there are six children, among whom George, Olivia, and Sophia figure most prominently in the story. The vicar loses most of his inherited wealth to an unscrupulous banker, necessitating the removal of him and his family to a humbler abode. Their new landlord is Squire Thornhill, a notorious rake, whose uncle is Sir William Thornhill, a legendary benefactor. There they are befriended by a Mr. Burchell and cheated by an Ephraim Jenkinson. Olivia is then abducted. After a search, her father finds her in an inn, where she informs him that the squire had arranged her abduction and married her, as he had other women, in a false ceremony. The squire visits and invites Olivia to his wedding with a Miss Wilmot, assuring Olivia that he will find her a suitable husband. Dr. Primrose is outraged, insisting that he would sanction only the squire’s marriage to Olivia. He is subsequently informed of Olivia’s death and of Sophia’s abduction. Presently Mr. Burchell enters with Sophia, whom he had rescued from her abductor. It is now that Mr. Burchell reveals his true identity as Sir William Thornhill. Witnesses testify that the squire had falsely married Olivia and was complicit in Sophia’s abduction. However, on the occasion of the squire’s marriage to Olivia, the squire was tricked by Jenkinson with a real priest and marriage license. Jenkinson produces both the valid license and Olivia, having told Dr. Primrose that Olivia was dead in order to induce him to submit to the squire’s terms and gain his release from prison. The Vicar of Wakefield can be read on many levels. First, it is a charming idyll depicting the joys of country life. Second, it dramatizes the practical working-out of virtues such as benevolence and vices such as imprudence. Third, it severely tests seventeenth century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s dictum that we live in the best of all possible worlds where all things ultimately work for good. Thus, The Vicar of Wakefield is a philosophical romance, like Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), which challenges the shallow optimism of the Enlightenment. The Vicar of Wakefield has been criticized for its overly sentimentalized and idealized picture of English country life, its virtuous characters whose displays of courage in the face of adversity strain credulity, and its villains bereft of any redeeming virtue.

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However, some commentators see these apparent faults as being integral to Goldsmith’s ironic intention. E. A. Baker was the first to recognize that the work is ironic and comic. Robert Hopkins went further by claiming that Goldsmith intended Dr. Primrose “to satirise the complacency and materialism of a type of clergy.” Richard A. Spurgeon Hall Other major works PLAYS: The Good Natured-Man, pr., pb. 1768; She Stoops to Conquer: Or, The Mistakes of a Night, pr., pb. 1773. POETRY: “An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex: Mrs. Mary Blaize,” 1759; “The Logicians Refuted,” 1759; The Traveller: Or, A Prospect of Society, 1764; “Edwin and Angelina,” 1765; “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,” 1766; The Deserted Village, 1770; “Threnodia Augustalis,” 1772; “Retaliation,” 1774; The Haunch of Venison: A Poetical Epistle to Lord Clare, 1776; “The Captivity: An Oratoria,” 1820 (wr. 1764). NONFICTION: An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 1759; The Bee, 1759 (essays); Memoirs of M. de Voltaire, 1761; The Life of Richard Nash of Bath, 1762; A History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son, 1764 (2 volumes); Essays. By Mr. Goldsmith, 1765; Life of Bolingbroke, 1770; Life of Parnell, 1770; An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, 1774 (8 volumes; unfinished). MISCELLANEOUS: The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1966 (5 volumes; Arthur Friedman, editor). Bibliography Dixon, Peter. Oliver Goldsmith Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. An updated introduction to the life and works of Goldsmith. Ginger, John. The Notable Man: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith. London: Hamilton, 1977. Possibly the most engrossing of the modern biographies of Goldsmith. Irving, Washington. Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1849. A biography of one distinguished man of letters by another. Goldsmith and Irving were kindred spirits. Mikhail, E. H., ed. Goldsmith: Interviews and Recollections. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Contains interviews with Goldsmith’s friends and associates. Includes bibliographical references and index. Sells, A. Lytton. Oliver Goldsmith: His Life and Works. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1974. The author sets out to remedy the defects in many of the earlier biographies of Goldsmith that omit facts or tend to overlook or diminish his faults. Sells particularly criticizes Goldsmith for plagiarism. Wardle, Ralph Martin. Oliver Goldsmith. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1957. A scholarly and thorough study by one who is sympathetic to Goldsmith.

Robert Graves Robert Graves

Born: Wimbledon, England; July 24, 1895 Died: Deyá, Majorca, Spain; December 7, 1985 Principal long fiction · My Head! My Head!, 1925; No Decency Left, 1932 (as Barbara Rich, with Laura Riding); I, Claudius, 1934; Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina, 1934; “Antigua, Penny, Puce,” 1936 (also known as The Antigua Stamp, 1937); Count Belisarius, 1938; Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, 1940 (also known as Sergeant Lamb’s America); Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, 1941; The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton, 1943 (also known as Wife to Mr. Milton, the Story of Marie Powell); The Golden Fleece, 1944 (also known as Hercules, My Shipmate, 1945); King Jesus, 1946; Watch the North Wind Rise, 1949 (also known as Seven Days in New Crete); The Islands of Unwisdom, 1949 (also known as The Isles of Unwisdom); Homer’s Daughter, 1955; They Hanged My Saintly Billy, 1957. Other literary forms · Robert Graves considered himself primarily a poet. Beginning with Over the Brazier (1916) and ending with New Collected Poems (1977), he published more than fifty books of poetry. His poems during and for some years after World War I explored themes of fear and guilt, expressive of his experience of trench warfare in France. He later became more objective and philosophical. Since he developed his theory of the White Goddess in the 1940’s, he wrote love poetry almost exclusively. Graves also had more than fifty publications in the nonfiction category, including literary criticism, books about writing and language, an autobiography (Goodbye to All That, 1929), a biography of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence and the Arabs, 1927), social commentaries, and studies in Greek and Hebrew myths. In addition, he translated such writers as Suetonius, Homer, Hesiod, Lucius Apuleius, and Lucan. He had one volume of Collected Short Stories (1964). Achievements · Graves was one of the most versatile writers of the twentieth century, known not only as an excellent poet but also as a mythologist, novelist, translator, lecturer, and persistent intellectual maverick. He has perhaps the clearest claim among twentieth century poets as the inheritor of the Romantic tradition, although he purified his poetry of the kind of flowery elaboration that is often associated with Romanticism. He avoided fads and schools in poetry, perfecting a delicate craftsmanship generally outside the modernist trends inspired by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. For the novel I, Claudius, Graves received the Hawthornden Prize, oldest of the famous British literary prizes, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, administered through the University of Edinburgh for the year’s best novel. Collections of his poetry brought the Loines Award for Poetry (1958), the William Foyle Poetry Prize (1960), the Arts Council Poetry Award (1962), and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (1968). The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948) and Graves’s other studies in mythology, particularly The Greek Myths (1955, 2 volumes), Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (1964, with Raphael Patai), and The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953, with Joshua Podro), together with his novels based on myth, have undoubtedly had a subtle and pervasive influence on modern literature. He was a prominent spokesper423

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son for the view that women and matriarchal values were much more prominent in the ancient world than once realized and that civilization has suffered from the overthrow of women as social and spiritual leaders. The demotion of women from their former prominence, Graves said, is recorded and rationalized in Hebrew texts and classical Greek mythology. Biography · Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon (outside of London) on July 24, 1895, to Alfred Percival Graves and Amalie von Ranke Graves. His father was an inspector of schools, a Gaelic scholar, and a writer of poetry of a conventional sort. His mother was German, descended from Leopold von Ranke, whom Graves has called the first modern historian. Graves had a conventional Victorian home and upbringing, with summer visits to German relatives. These included an aunt, Baronin von Aufsess, who lived in an imposing medieval castle in the Bavarian Alps. Because his name was listed as R. von R. Graves, his obvious German connections became an embarrassment during his years at Charterhouse, a private boarding school for boys, during the period before World War I when anti-German sentiment was on the rise. He finally earned his classmates’ respect, however, by becoming a good boxer. He also became friends with George Mallory, a famous mountaineer who later died on Everest. Mallory interested Edward Marsh, patron of the contemporary Georgian school of poetry, in the poetry Graves was writing. Marsh encouraged Graves in his writing but advised him to modernize his diction, which was forty years behind the time. When World War I began, Graves joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and soon went to France as a nineteen-year-old officer. In his autobiography, written when he was thirty-five, he provides one of the best descriptions of trench warfare to come out of the war—a gritty, objective account of a soldier’s daily life. He was badly wounded, however, both physically and mentally, by his war experiences. The autobiography, which followed a long siege of war neurasthenia during which his poetry was haunted by images of horror and guilt, was a conscious attempt to put that part of his life behind him forever. Graves continued to use his gift for narrating war experiences, however, in subsequent novels, such as Count Belisarius, the Sergeant Lamb novels, and the Claudius novels. During the war, Graves married Nancy Nicholson, a young painter, socialist, and vehement feminist. They were in essential agreement about the ruinous effect of male domination in modern society. ©Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library Graves, along with his wartime

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friend, the famous war poet Siegfried Sassoon, was already thoroughly disillusioned with war and the leaders of society who supported it. Graves and his wife parted company in 1929 after a shattering domestic crisis involving the American poet Laura Riding. Riding was Graves’s companion for the next thirteen years. They established themselves in Deyá, Majorca, Spain, published the critical magazine Epilogue on their own Seizin Press, and devoted themselves to writing both poetry and prose. Graves wrote his best historical novels during that period—the Claudius novels and Count Belisarius. After Riding met and married the American poet Schuyler Jackson, Graves—during the Spanish Civil War, when British nationals were evacuated from Majorca—married Beryl Hodge. Graves returned to Majorca with his new wife, where he stayed until his death in 1985. Graves had eight children, four by Nancy Nicholson, four by his second wife. During the 1940’s, Graves became fascinated with mythology. While he was doing research for his novel about Jason and the Golden Fleece, he became engrossed in the ubiquitous presence of a great goddess associated with the moon, the earth, and the underworld. She was not only the source of life and intuitive wisdom, but also, as Muse, the patron of the poets and musicians. She bound humans both to the seasons of nature and the demands of the spirit. When Graves discovered a similar pattern in Celtic folklore and literature and correlated the findings of such anthropologists as Robert Briffault, J. J. Bachofen, James Frazer, Jane Harrison, and Margaret Murray and some of the recent discoveries in archaeology, he was convinced that the goddess cult once permeated the whole Western world. In this pattern of myth, as explained in The White Goddess, Graves found the unified vision he needed to animate his poetry and much of his subsequent prose for the rest of his life. It not only inspired some of the best love poetry of his time, but also led to some lively treatments of Greek and Hebrew myth in both fiction and nonfiction. Analysis · The novels of Robert Graves are usually a curious combination of detective work in history, legend, or myth and a considerable gift for narration. He never claimed any particular ability to invent plots, but he could flesh out imaginatively the skeletal remains of adventures he discovered in the past. Thus, the Emperor Claudius lives again as the gossipy information in Suetonius and other Roman chroniclers passes through Graves’s shaping imagination. Sometimes, as in King Jesus, a traditional tale takes on a startling new dimension through an unconventional combination with other legendary material. My Head! My Head! · Graves’s first attempt at converting ancient history or myth into fiction was a short novel about Elisha and Moses, somewhat inauspiciously entitled My Head! My Head! It was begun, as most of Graves’s subsequent novels were, because the original accounts were somewhat mysterious, leaving much unsaid about what really happened and why. The novel elaborates on the biblical story of Elisha and the Shunamite woman (2 Kings, Chapters 8-37) and, secondarily, through Elisha’s narration, on the career of Moses. The novel demonstrates both Graves’s tendency to explain miracles in naturalistic terms and his contrary fascination with a certain suprarational possibility for special persons. The writer’s curious views on magic are not entirely consistent with his debunking of miracles. The inconsistency is quite noticeable here because of the

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omniscient point of view. In most later novels, Graves wisely used a first-person narrator, which makes seeming inconsistencies the peculiar bias of a persona, rather than of the author. Thus, King Jesus is told by a first century narrator who is neither Jewish nor Christian. In such a person, rational skepticism about specific miracles such as the virgin birth might well coexist with a general acceptance of magic. In spite of its technical shortcomings, My Head! My Head! shows Graves’s interest in a number of themes which would continue to concern him for the rest of his life: the changing relationships between men and women, the nature of the gods, and the way in which knowledge of the past and of the future must depend upon an understanding of the present. No Decency Left · On those two occasions when Graves did not depend on mythological or historical sources for his fiction, the results were strange, satirical compositions, lucidly told, but somehow disquieting. The first of these, a collaboration with Laura Riding, appeared under a pseudonym as No Decency Left by “Barbara Rich.” It is a satirical potpourri of events, drawing on such discordant elements as the rise of dictators, the man in the iron mask, the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the Bible, and comic-opera romance. The ideas in his fantasy may be attributable more to Riding than to Graves, though the attitudes displayed are quite consistent with Graves’s views on the follies of men and the hidden strengths of women. The action occurs in one day, the twenty-first birthday of Barbara Rich, who decides that on this special day she is going to get everything she wants. She forthwith crashes high society, becomes incredibly rich, marries the heir to the throne, feeds a multitude of hungry unemployed people by invading the zoo and arranging for the slaughter and cooking of zoo animals, captures the Communists who try to take over the country when the old king dies, and becomes a dictator in her own almost-bloodless revolution. If the tone of this outrageous fable were lighter and its protagonist more lovable, it could be converted into Hollywood farce or Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, but everyone in it is disagreeable. People are either uniformly stupid and cowardly or utterly unscrupulous. The book was probably written primarily to make money when Riding and Graves were short of cash. (Graves has always claimed that he wrote novels primarily to support himself while he wrote poetry.) It is obviously accidental that the novel, written in 1932, might seem to satirize the blanket powers given to Adolf Hitler by the Reichstag in 1933, or the famous love affair of King Edward with the commoner Wallis Simpson in 1936. The Antigua Stamp · The view of the human animal, male or female, as vicious, with superior cleverness and ingenuity the mark of the female, also dominates Graves’s novel The Antigua Stamp. The everlasting battle of the sexes is dramatized here as sibling rivalry that is never outgrown—a controversy over the ownership of an exceedingly valuable stamp. A long-standing, sour feud between brother and sister ends with the latter’s victory because she is by far the more clever and conniving of the two. The Antigua Stamp and No Decency Left are potboilers, though interesting for the eccentric attitudes they exhibit toward human character and social affairs. These biases concerning the essential stupidity and greed of men and the intelligence and ruthlessness of women emerge in a somewhat softened form in Graves’s better novels. Eight of Graves’s novels are based, at least in part, upon historical characters and events. The first of these is still the best—I, Claudius, which is probably also the best

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known because of the sensitive portrayal of Claudius by Derek Jacoby in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television series based on the Claudius novels. Count Belisarius, about the brilliant general to the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, is also a fascinating excursion into an exciting time, even though the character of Belisarius is not so clearly drawn as that of the stuttering Claudius. They Hanged My Saintly Billy · Although Count Belisarius deserves more attention than it has received, the other historical novels appeal to a rather limited audience. The exception is the last, They Hanged My Saintly Billy, which Graves facetiously described in lurid terms: “My novel is full of sex, drink, incest, suicides, dope, horse racing, murder, scandalous legal procedure, cross-examinations, inquests and ends with a good public hanging—attended by 30,000. . . . Nobody can now call me a specialized writer.” The novel is hardly as shocking as this dust-jacket rhetoric implies. The case of Dr. William Palmer, convicted of poisoning his friend, John Parsons Cook, and executed in 1856, instigated a popular protest against capital punishment in Britain. The notorious case was rife with vague, unsubstantiated suspicions about Dr. Palmer’s past and irrelevant disapproval of his taste for gambling and race horses. Moreover, supposed medical experts could never agree about the actual cause of Cook’s death. The novel’s best feature is the technique by which Graves preserves the confusion and ambiguity of the case. Most of the novel consists of personal testimony from persons who had known Palmer. Thus, each speaker talks from his or her own biases and limited contact, some insisting that “he never had it in him to hurt a fly.” Others reveal an incredibly callous schemer who takes out insurance on his brother’s life, knowing him to be an alcoholic, then arranges that he drink himself to death. No sure conclusion is ever reached about the justice of the case. As a member of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during World War I, Graves became interested in the history of his regiment and discovered the makings of two novels in the career of Roger Lamb, who served in the Ninth Regiment during the American Revolution but joined the Fusiliers after the surrender of General Burgoyne and the incarceration of the Ninth. Sergeant Lamb’s America · Graves is more chronicler than novelist in the two books about Roger Lamb, much of which are devoted to details of military life, curious anecdotes about the colonists, the Indians, the French Canadians, the fiascos and triumph of generals. Graves explains in his foreword to Sergeant Lamb’s America that this story is not “straight history,” though he has invented no main characters. The reader has no way of knowing exactly how accurately he conveys the texture of life in the colonies. “All that readers of an historical novel can fairly ask from the author,” Graves writes, “is an assurance that he has nowhere willfully falsified geography, chronology, or character, and that information contained in it is accurate enough to add without discount to their general stock of history.” This is a statement to remember, perhaps, in connection with any of Graves’s historical novels. Although Graves seemed to have no particular rancor against Americans, the books do reveal a very iconoclastic attitude toward the Founding Fathers. His view of such notables as Benedict Arnold, Major André, and George Washington at least challenges the American reader’s preconceptions. Sergeant Lamb, like Count Belisarius, seems a bit wooden for all his military ingenuity. The protagonist’s on-and-off love affair with Kate Harlowe provides only

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a tenuous thread on which to hang the semblance of a plot. The novels seem to be a scholar’s compilation of interesting anecdotes and factual data about the time. Of course, this unimpassioned tone could be defended as exactly appropriate, since the novels are ostensibly the memoirs of a much older Roger Lamb, written when he is a schoolmaster in Dublin. This cool, dispassionate tone is often typical of Graves’s style, however, even when he is describing his own experience in warfare in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That. The Islands of Unwisdom · The Islands of Unwisdom celebrates, or rather exposes in its pettiness and greed, an abortive sixteenth century Spanish expedition to colonize the Solomon Islands. The leader of the expedition, Don Alvaro de Mendaña y Castro, had discovered the islands many years before. He called them the Isles of Solomon, thinking perhaps they were the location of the famous gold mines of the biblical King Solomon. The natives adorned themselves with gold. When the King of Spain finally gave permission for the expedition, therefore, a great many avaricious participants joined in the venture ostensibly devoted to Christianizing the heathen. Though a few devout persons, such as the three priests and the chief pilot, tried to maintain the Christian charity of their mission, their feeble efforts were in vain. Practically all the islanders greeted the Spaniards with affection and open hospitality, but sooner or later, the senseless slaughter of innocents converted friends into enemies. The combined stupidity and violence of the military and of the three Barretos, Don Alvaro’s brothers-in-law, insured disaster wherever they went. Moreover, Doña Ysabel Barreto, Don Alvaro’s beautiful wife, was as proud and cruel as her arrogant brothers. Don Alvaro was devout but indecisive and unable to control the stubborn wills that surrounded him. Graves uses the narrator, Don Andrés Serrano, an undersecretary to the general, to propose a theory to account for the superiority of the English over the Spanish in such situations. The English soldier could and often did do a sailor’s work when help was needed on shipboard. The more rigid class structure of the Spanish, however, prevented a Spanish soldier from doing anything but fighting. During long and hazardous voyages, the Spanish soldier was idle and bored, while the Spanish sailor was overworked and resentful. When a new land was reached, the Spanish soldier felt impelled to demonstrate his function by killing enemies. If none existed, he soon created them. Graves was particularly drawn to this sordid bit of history not so much because of the too often repeated folly of bringing civilization to the heathen by murdering them, but because of a truly unique feature of this historical event. After the death of her husband, Doña Ysabel achieved the command of a naval vessel—surely an unusual event in any age, and unprecedented in the sixteenth century. Doña Ysabel is not the conventional kind of heroine, to be sure, but a kind that Graves finds most fascinating: beautiful, cruel, and ruthless. This novel was published in the year following The White Goddess, and the reader who is familiar with that study may see an uncanny resemblance between Doña Ysabel and the moon goddess in her most sinister phase. The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton · The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton is also rooted in history, yet it echoes Graves’s own views of feminine nature, as well as his antipathy to John Milton, both as a poet and as a man. That Milton did, indeed, have some marital problems is clear; they were the inspiration for his pamphlet arguing that incompatibility should be sufficient grounds for divorce, which

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was followed by his brilliant “Areopagitica” against censorship of the press. (Graves notes that in spite of the admitted wisdom of the latter, Milton himself became an official censor under Cromwell.) In Graves’s treatment, Milton is the epitome of the self-righteous, dominating male, drawn to the poetic, half-pagan rural England from which his young wife emerges but determined in his arid Calvinism to squelch these poetic yearnings in himself and his bride. Milton chooses head over heart, always a mistake in a poet, from Graves’s point of view. Though Milton desires love, like any man, he has a preconceived set of rules that would define and coerce love, which can only be freely given. He resolutely divorces sexuality from pleasure, for example, knowing his wife only when trying to impregnate her—in compliance, presumably, with God’s orders. Marie is the weakest of Graves’s fictional women, a kind of dethroned queen, a person of independent mind doomed to mental and emotional starvation in Milton’s household. T. S. Matthews, in his autobiography Jacks or Better (1977), makes the provocative suggestion that Graves poured his frustration and resentment about the marriage of Laura Riding to Schuyler Jackson into the book. It was written immediately after Graves fled to England, bereft of his longtime companion. Matthews has considerable background for this opinion, since he and his wife were living in America with the group (including Riding, Graves, Alan and Beryl Hodge, Schuyler and Kit Jackson) when the fruit basket was upset. Even though Graves and Riding were not lovers at that time, according to James McKinley in his introduction to Graves’s last book, Graves was profoundly shocked at what he may have perceived as Riding’s abdication from her proper role. Whether this explanation is valid or not, this novel seems to touch a more personal vein of frustration, resentment, and sadness than his other historical novels. Moreover, Graves indulges in a bit of romantic mysticism in this novel, more characteristic of his poetic than his prose style. Marie Milton falls into a three-day swoon during her third pregnancy, at the precise moment that her secret “true love” is killed in Ireland. According to her own account, she spends those three days with her beloved. When she awakens she knows that her cousin, with whom she had fallen in love at the age of eleven, is dead. The child she bears thereafter, her first son, looks like her cousin, not Milton, and Marie is more peaceful than she has ever been. Perhaps this touch of fantasy expresses more about Graves than about Marie Powell Milton, but the author is careful to note in the epilogue that when Marie died giving birth to a third daughter, the one son followed her to the grave shortly after. Readers may find the style of this novel somewhat ponderous, but Graves tries to adjust his diction to the times about which he writes. He has deliberately used some archaic, seventeenth century terms, for which he provides a glossary at the end; most of these words are easily understood in context. Count Belisarius · If the pathetic Marie Milton shows the White Goddess in her pitiable decline, one need only return to the powerful women in Count Belisarius to see her in her glory. This is true, despite the fact that Graves had not yet formulated his theory of the monomyth which he expressed in The White Goddess. In retrospect, his fictional women suggest that the goddess haunted his psyche before he knew her name. In Count Belisarius, not one but two striking women demonstrate the strength of the female. These are the Empress Theodora, wife to Justinian, and Antonina, Belisarius’s wife. Both had been carefully educated, pagan courtesans, but they acquired Christianity when it became possible to marry prominent Christians. They

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inevitably display more good sense than most of the men around them. More than once, Theodora saves Belisarius from the vindictive jealousy of Justinian or convinces the negligent monarch that he should send some relief in troops or supplies to his champion on the frontier. When Belisarius’s situation becomes desperate because he is almost always vastly outnumbered on the battlefield and short of supplies as well, Antonina sends a private letter to Empress Theodora, who manages, by flattery or guile, to cajole Justinian into at least some action not altogether disastrous. Of the two prominent men in the novel, Justinian is the more carefully characterized, even though he is invariably presented in a negative light. After Theodora dies and Belisarius throws out Antonina, because of the emperor’s campaign to discredit her virtue, nothing remains to protect Belisarius from Justinian’s jealousy and fear. Like Samson shorn of his hair, Belisarius is imprisoned and blinded. Belisarius, the central figure, is the least understandable in psychological terms. Though his exploits against the Persians and against the many tribes that threatened early Christendom are truly remarkable and well told, he himself seems larger than life in moral terms as well as in his undoubted military genius. He is seemingly incorruptible in a world riddled with intrigue and deception, and as such, almost too good to be true. The jealousy of Justinian is more understandable than Belisarius’s unswerving loyalty, devotion, and piety. The reader never knows what preserves Belisarius from the corrupting influence of power and popular adulation. Ultimately, the effect of the novel is ironic, in spite of the total absence of ambiguity in Belisarius’s character. The irony rests in the observation that for all the lifelong efforts of one of history’s military geniuses, his accomplishments mattered little, since they were so soon negated by Justinian’s bad judgment after the death of his greatest general. All the drama and the pageantry of war cannot compensate for its futility and incredible waste and its glorification of destruction in the name of true religion. For his portrait of Claudius, grandchild of Mark Antony and grandnephew of Octavius Augustus, Graves had rich sources of information on which to draw; perhaps that accounts for the greater depth and complexity Claudius seems to exhibit in comparison with Belisarius. Both The Annals of Tacitus (c. 119) and Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars (c. 120, a book that Graves translated from the Latin in 1957) contain much of the gossipy, possibly slanted history that fills Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God. I, Claudius · I, Claudius is a more successful novel than its sequel. It builds to a natural climax as the protagonist, who calls himself “the cripple, the stammerer, the fool of the family,” is proclaimed emperor by riotous Roman soldiers after the assassination of Caligula. Claudius captures the sympathy of the reader in this novel as a survivor of a fifty-year reign of terror in which all the more likely prospects for promotion to emperor are eliminated by Livia, Augustus’s wife, to assure the elevation of her son Tiberius to the throne. Claudius owes his survival mostly to his physical defects, which seemingly preclude his being considered for high office, and to a ready intelligence and wit which protect him somewhat from the cruelties of Caligula, who is the first to give him any role at all in government. The caprice of the troops in choosing the “fool of the family” as emperor is as great a surprise to Claudius as to anyone else. Presumably the terrified Claudius acquiesces to the whim of the military because the only other alternative is assassination along with the rest of Caligula’s close relatives.

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Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina · With Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina, the reader can no longer cheer the innocent victim of the vicious intrigues of court life. Claudius now has power and, in some respects, wields it effectively and humanely. He acquires, however, many of the tastes and faults of his class. The man who, as a boy, fainted at bloodshed now has a taste for violent entertainment. The scholar who despised ostentatious show now invades Britain so he may have a glorious triumph on his return. Worse yet, the unassuming person who knew how to survive the formidable machinations of Livia now foolishly succumbs to younger women, as ruthless as Livia but without her intelligence and executive ability. He dies of poison administered by a faithless wife. Graves seems to be making a case for the older Claudius as a kind of tragic hero, who has come to a realization of his own shortcomings as well as those of his contemporaries. He had once idealistically hoped for the return of the Republic, but in his later years he understands that he has actually made self-government less attractive, simply because his rule has been more benevolent than that of his predecessors, Tiberius and Caligula. He decides that the Rupublican dream will not arise until the country again suffers under an evil emperor. The government must be worse before it can be better. Graves attributes to Claudius a rather improbable scheme of secluding his son from the temptations of court life by sending him to Britain, then letting his ambitious second wife secure the throne for her own son, Nero, whose cruelty and decadence Claudius foresees. In the debacle that will occur in the reign of Nero, Claudius hopes his own son can come back as a conquering hero and reestablish the Republic. This rather fanciful scheme misfires because Claudius’s son refuses to cooperate, confident that he can deal with his foster brother, Nero, himself. Actually, Claudius’s son was assassinated after his father’s death, presumably at Nero’s orders. This attempted explanation of Claudius’s seeming gullibility in his last days is probably intended to lend dignity to his unfortunate decline into a rather foolish old age. Part of the problem with the second novel is simply the intractability of historical facts, which do not necessarily make the most effective plots. One of the usual requirements of tragic heroes is that they attain some measure of self-knowledge and that they are at least partially responsible for their own fall from greatness. Graves has tried to retain empathy for a well-intentioned, thoughtful man who foresaw and accepted his fate, to be murdered by his wife, as a means to a greater good. This attempt to salvage a fading protagonist is understandable, but not wholly successful. Hercules, My Shipmate · As Graves’s historical novels depend partially upon the intrinsic interest of a historical period, so do his novels based on myth depend upon an intrinsic interest in myth interpretation. Quite aside from the familiar story of Jason and the Argonauts, for example, Hercules, My Shipmate offers sometimes believable explanations of some of the common ideas found in myth. The centaurs, for example, were not half-horse, half-men, but a barbaric tribe whose totem animal was the horse. They wore horses’ manes and worshiped a mare-headed mother goddess. Many of Jason’s shipmates were demigods; that is, one parent was a deity. This convention has a nonsupernatural explanation as well: Their births were traceable to the ancient custom of temple prostitutes or priests whose offspring were attributed to the god or goddess under whose auspices they were conceived. This does not mean that all supernaturalism is rooted out of Graves’s treatment of

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mythic material. Hercules has exaggerated powers analogous to those of Paul Bunyan, a parody of the Greek ideal of the hero, a man so strong he is dangerous to foe and friend as well. Nor does Graves eliminate all supernaturalism from his King Jesus, the most controversial of his novels, which fuses biblical myth with his own ideas about the ancient goddess cult. King Jesus · King Jesus creates a new myth about Jesus—a Jesus who is literally the King of the Jews, or at least the proper inheritor of that title. He is inheritor as the grandson of King Herod (through a secret marriage between Mary and Antipater, Herod’s son), but also because he is annointed by God’s prophet, John the Baptist, which was the traditional Hebrew way of choosing a king. In the latter sense, Herod had less right to the throne than Jesus, since Herod derived his authority from the Romans, not from ancient Hebrew custom. Moreover, Jesus fulfills other expectations built into what Graves presents as ancient Hebrew ritual, such as a marriage to the inheritor of the land. Graves claims that ownership of the land was matrilinear and that in order to become a king, a man had to marry the youngest daughter of the hereditary line, in this case Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. (Graves points out that this matrilinear descent accounts for Egyptian pharaohs marrying their sisters and King David marrying a woman from each of the tribes of Israel in order to unify the tribes.) Jesus is an ascetic, however, and refuses to cohabit with Mary. Moreover, one of his chief adversaries in the novel is the cult of the goddess, whose chief priestess is yet another Mary, called the Hairdresser—the character known in the bible as Mary Magdalene. It is no accident that the three vital women who attend Jesus in his crucifixion conveniently represent the Triple Goddess: Mary the mother, Mary the wife, and Mary the crone, who lays out the mythic hero in death. The irony of the situation is that in spite of consciously choosing the pattern of the Suffering Servant, described in Isaiah, and trying his best to overthrow the cult of the fertility goddess, Jesus nevertheless fulfills the role of the sacrificial hero in the goddess mythology. Though some may be offended by the liberties Graves has taken with a sacred story, those who are fascinated by the whole of the mythic heritage from the ancient world will appreciate this imaginative retelling. Watch the North Wind Rise · If King Jesus is the most serious of Graves’s treatments of the goddess mythology, the most lighthearted is Watch the North Wind Rise, a futuristic utopian novel in which the great goddess cult has been revived in Crete (its stronghold in the ancient world) as a social experiment. The protagonist is a time traveler, conjured into the future by a witch, in obedience to the goddess. He also serves a Pandora-like function, bringing unrest into a land made dull by continuous peace. Great art, after all, demands conflict, which this ideal land has left behind. The novel is entertaining as a satire of utopian ideas, but also provides an interesting exploration of the relationship between an artist (the protagonist) and his muse (the goddess). Homer’s Daughter · Graves’s last novel on a mythic theme, Homer’s Daughter, borrows heavily from Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 B.C.) and from Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the “Odyssey” (1897), which argues that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman. Graves’s protagonist is the princess Nausicaa, who in the Odyssey befriended the shipwrecked Odysseus. In the novel, it is Nausicaa who endures many rude and insistent suitors as Penelope does in Homer’s epic. A shipwrecked stranger rescues her in a manner attributed to Odysseus, by shooting the unwanted suitors and

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winning the fair lady for himself. She is the one who composes the Odyssey, incorporating her experience into the story. In spite of the fact that Graves himself dismissed his fiction as a means of providing support for his writing of poetry, his best novels deserve to live on as imaginative treatments of history and myth. While he may not always have captured the “real” past, he helped to make the past important in a time when many people considered it irrelevant. He showed how ancient symbol-systems may still capture the imagination of one of the most versatile writers of our time. He also helped to overthrow the stereotype of women as weak in intelligence and will. This does not mean that Graves was particularly accurate in his perception of women, but his biases do offer a welcome antidote to the more insipid variety of fictional women. He must be partially responsible for the contemporary interest in mythology and the beginnings of civilization. Part of this is the result of his nonfiction works, such as The White Goddess, The Greek Myths, and Hebrew Myths, but his use of myth in popular novels has probably reached an even wider audience. Katherine Snipes Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Shout, 1929; ¡Catacrok! Mostly Stories, Mostly Funny, 1956; Collected Short Stories, 1964. POETRY: Over the Brazier, 1916; Goliath and David, 1916; Fairies and Fusiliers, 1917; Treasure Box, 1919; Country Sentiment, 1920; The Pier-Glass, 1921; The Feather Bed, 1923; Whipperginny, 1923; Mock Beggar Hall, 1924; The Marmosite’s Miscellany, 1925 (as John Doyle); Welchman’s Hose, 1925; Poems: 1914-1926, 1927; Poems: 1914-1927, 1927; Poems: 1929, 1929; Ten Poems More, 1930; Poems: 1926-1930, 1931; To Whom Else?, 1931; Poems: 1930-1933, 1933; Collected Poems, 1938; No More Ghosts: Selected Poems, 1940; Work in Hand, 1942 (with others); Poems: 1938-1945, 1946; Collected Poems: 1914-1947, 1948; Poems and Satires: 1951, 1951; Poems: 1953, 1953; Collected Poems: 1955, 1955; Poems Selected by Himself, 1957; The Poems of Robert Graves Chosen by Himself, 1958; Collected Poems: 1959, 1959; The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children, 1960; Collected Poems, 1961; More Poems: 1961, 1961; The More Deserving Cases: Eighteen Old Poems for Reconsideration, 1962; New Poems: 1962, 1962; Ann at Highwood Hall: Poems for Children, 1964; Man Does, Woman Is, 1964; Love Respelt, 1965; Collected Poems: 1965, 1965; Seventeen Poems Missing from “Love Respelt,” 1966; Colophon to “Love Respelt,” 1967; Poems: 1965-1968, 1968; The Crane Bag, 1969; Love Respelt Again, 1969; Beyond Giving: Poems, 1969; Poems About Love, 1969; Advice from a Mother, 1970; Queen-Mother to New Queen, 1970; Poems: 1969-1970, 1970; The Green-Sailed Vessel, 1971; Poems: Abridged for Dolls and Princes, 1971; Poems: 1968-1970, 1971; Poems: 1970-1972, 1972; Poems: Selected by Himself, 1972; Deyá, 1972 (with Paul Hogarth); Timeless Meetings: Poems, 1973; At the Gate, 1974; Collected Poems: 1975, 1975 (2 volumes); New Collected Poems, 1977. NONFICTION: On English Poetry, 1922; The Meaning of Dreams, 1924; Poetic Unreason and Other Studies, 1925; Contemporary Techniques of Poetry: A Political Analogy, 1925; Another Future of Poetry, 1926; Impenetrability: Or, The Proper Habit of English, 1926; The English Ballad: A Short Critical Survey, 1927; Lars Porsena: Or, The Future of Swearing and Improper Language, 1927; A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927 (with Laura Riding); Lawrence and the Arabs, 1927 (also known as Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure, 1928); A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, 1928 (with Riding, also known as Against Anthologies); Mrs. Fisher: Or, The Future of Humour, 1928; Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography, 1929;

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T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer Robert Graves, 1938; The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1938, 1940 (with Alan Hodge); The Reader over Your Shoulders: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, 1943 (with Hodge); The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 1948; The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 19221949, 1949; Occupation: Writer, 1950; The Nazarene Gospel Restored, 1953 (with Joshua Podro); The Crowning Privilege: The Clark Lectures, 1954-1955, 1955; Adam’s Rib and Other Anomalous Elements in the Hebrew Creation Myth: A New View, 1955; The Greek Myths, 1955 (2 volumes); Jesus in Rome: A Historical Conjecture, 1957 (with Podro); Five Pens in Hand, 1958; Greek Gods and Heroes, 1960; Oxford Addresses on Poetry, 1962; Nine Hundred Iron Chariots: The Twelfth Arthur Dehon Little Memorial Lecture, 1963; Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, 1964 (with Raphael Patai); Majorca Observed, 1965 (with Paul Hogarty); Mammon and the Black Goddess, 1965; Poetic Craft and Principle, 1967; The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects, 1969; On Poetry: Collected Talks and Essays, 1969; Difficult Questions, Easy Answers, 1972. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Big Green Book, 1962; The Siege and Fall of Troy, 1962; Two Wise Children, 1966; The Poor Boy Who Followed His Star, 1968. TRANSLATIONS: Almost Forgotten Germany, 1936 (Georg Schwarz; trans. with Laura Riding); The Transformation of Lucius, Otherwise Known as “The Golden Ass,” 1950 (Lucius Apuleius); The Cross and the Sword, 1954 (Manuel de Jesús Galván); Pharsalia: Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars, 1956 (Lucan); Winter in Majorca, 1956 (George Sand); The Twelve Caesars, 1957 (Suetonius); The Anger of Achilles: Homer’s “Iliad,” 1959; The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1967 (with Omar Ali-Shah). EDITED TEXTS: Oxford Poetry: 1921, 1921 (with Alan Porter and Richard Hughes); John Skelton: Laureate, 1927; The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes, 1927; The Comedies of Terence, 1962; English and Scottish Ballads, 1975. MISCELLANEOUS: Steps: Stories, Talks, Essays, Poems, Studies in History, 1958; Food for Centaurs: Stories, Talks, Critical Studies, Poems, 1960; Selected Poetry and Prose, 1961. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Robert Graves. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Essays on Graves’s historical novels, autobiography, and major themes. Includes chronology and bibliography. Canary, Robert H. Robert Graves. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A good general introduction to Graves’s work. Emphasizes Graves the poet, but also contains helpful information on his novels and literary criticism. Includes a chronology, notes, a selected bibliography, and an index. Day, Douglas. Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. The first full-length study of Graves’s poetry and criticism. Graves’s work is examined chronologically in four major phases, concluding with his emerging concept of the “White Goddess.” Includes a bibliography, secondary reading materials, and an index. Quinn, Patrick J., ed. New Perspectives on Robert Graves. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1999. A thoughtful, updated volume on the works of Graves. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: His Life and Works. New York: Paragon House, 1988. Intimate, fascinating glimpse of Graves the man. Seymour-Smith had known Graves since 1943 and has written extensively on him since 1956. An excellent introduction to Graves’s remarkable life and literary career.

Graham Greene Graham Greene

Born: Berkhamsted, England; October 2, 1904 Died: Vevey, Switzerland; April 3, 1991 Principal long fiction · The Man Within, 1929; The Name of Action, 1930; Rumour at Nightfall, 1931; Stamboul Train: An Entertainment, 1932 (pb. in U.S. as Orient Express: An Entertainment, 1933); It’s a Battlefield, 1934; England Made Me, 1935; A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment, 1936 (pb. in U.S. as This Gun for Hire: An Entertainment); Brighton Rock, 1938; The Confidential Agent, 1939; The Power and the Glory, 1940 (reissued as The Labyrinthine Ways); The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment, 1943; The Heart of the Matter, 1948; The Third Man: An Entertainment, 1950; The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, 1950; The End of the Affair, 1951; Loser Takes All: An Entertainment, 1955; The Quiet American, 1955; Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment, 1958; A Burnt-Out Case, 1961; The Comedians, 1966; Travels with My Aunt, 1969; The Honorary Consul, 1973; The Human Factor, 1978; Dr. Fischer of Geneva: Or, The Bomb Party, 1980; Monsignor Quixote, 1982; The Tenth Man, 1985. Other literary forms · In addition to his novels, Graham Greene published many collections of short stories, including The Basement Room and Other Stories (1935); Nineteen Stories (1947); Twenty-one Stories (1954), in which two stories from the previous collection were dropped and four added; A Sense of Reality (1963); May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life (1967); and Collected Stories (1972). He also wrote plays, including The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), The Complaisant Lover (1959), Carving a Statue (1964), and Yes and No (1980). With the exception of his first published book, Babbling April: Poems (1925), he did not publish poetry except in two private printings, After Two Years (1949) and For Christmas (1950). He wrote some interesting travel books, two focusing on Africa, Journey Without Maps: A Travel Book (1936) and In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961), and one set in Mexico, The Lawless Roads: A Mexican Journal (1939). He published several books of essays and criticism, including British Dramatists (1942); The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951); Essais Catholiques (1953); Collected Essays (1969); and The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40, of Graham Greene (1972), edited by John RussellTaylor. He also wrote a biography, Lord Rochester’s Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1974), and two autobiographical works, A Sort of Life (1971), carrying the reader up to Greene’s first novel, and Ways of Escape (1980), bringing the reader up to the time of its writing. A biographical-autobiographical work, Getting to Know the General (1984), spotlights Greene’s relationship with General Omar Torrijos Herrera of Panama. Finally, he also wrote four children’s books: The Little Train (1946), The Little Fire Engine (1950), The Little Horse Bus (1952), and The Little Steam Roller: A Story of Mystery and Detection (1953). Achievements · Greene’s style has often been singled out for praise. He learned economy and precision while with The Times in London. More than anything else, he struggled for precision, “truth” as he called it, in form as well as in substance. The Power and the Glory won the Hawthornden Prize in 1941. Additionally, his experience 435

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as a film reviewer seems to have given him a feel for cinematic technique. What Greene’s reputation will be a century hence is difficult to predict. Readers will certainly find in him more than a religious writer, more—at least—than a Catholic writer. They will find in him a writer who used for his thematic vehicles all the pressing issues of his era: the Vietnam War, Papa Doc Duvalier’s tyranny over Haiti, the struggle between communism and capitalism, apartheid in South Africa, poverty and oppression in Latin America. Will these issues seem too topical for posterity, or will they prove again that only by localizing one’s story in the specifics of a time and place can one appeal to readers of another time, another place? Biography · Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904, in the town of Berkhamsted, England. The fourth of six children, he was not especially close to his father, perhaps because of his father’s position as headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended. Some of the boys took sadistic delight in his ambiguous position, and two in particular caused him such humiliation that they created in him an excessive desire to prove himself. Without them, he claimed, he might never have written a book. Greene made several attempts at suicide during these unhappy years; he later insisted these were efforts to avoid boredom rather than to kill himself. At Oxford, he tried for a while to avoid boredom by getting intoxicated each day of an entire semester. During these Oxford days, Greene met Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a young Catholic woman who had written to him of his error in a film review in referring to Catholic “worship” of the Virgin Mary. He inquired into the “subtle” and “unbelievable theology” out of interest in Vivien and concluded by becoming a Catholic in 1926. Greene married Vivien, and the couple had two children, a boy and a girl. He separated from his parents’ family after the wedding and was scrupulous about guarding his own family’s privacy. In 1926, Greene moved from his first, unsalaried, position writing for the Nottingham Journal to the position of subeditor for The Times in London. There, he learned writing technique, pruning the clichés of reporters and condensing their stories without loss of meaning or effect. Moreover, he had mornings free to do his own writing. When, in 1928, Heinemann accepted Greene’s first novel, The Man Within, for publication, Greene rashly quit The Times to make his living as a writer. Greene’s next two novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, failed, and he later suppressed them. Still, in trying to understand what went wrong with these works, he discovered that he had tried to omit the autobiographical entirely; as a result, the novels lacked life and truth. He would not make that mistake again. In 1934, Greene took the first of a seemingly endless series of trips to other parts of the world. With his cousin Barbara, he walked without maps across the heart of Liberia. Recorded in his Journey Without Maps, this hazardous venture became a turning point in his life. He had once thought death desirable; in the desert, he became a passionate lover of life. He came even to accept the rats in his hut as part of life. Perhaps more important for his writing, he discovered in Liberia the archetypal basis for his earliest nightmares. The frightening creatures of those dreams were not originally evil beings but rather devils in the African sense of beings who control power. Humankind, Greene came to believe, has corrupted these primitive realities and denied its inherited sense of supernatural evil, reducing it to the level of merely human evil. To do so is to forget “the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on

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which we might have built.” Greene had found the basis for themes that made their way into his novels. Greene began his great fiction with Brighton Rock, the publication of which, in 1938, followed a trip to Mexico that delighted him much less than the one to Africa. Nevertheless, his observations in Mexico provided the substance of what many consider his finest achievement, The Power and the Glory. For the reader interested in a genuine insight into the way Greene moves from fact to fiction, the travel book that emerged from the Mexican journey, The Lawless Roads, is very rewarding, showing for example how his fictional whiskey priest was an amalgam of four real-life priests. ©Amanda Saunders With the outbreak of the second world war, Greene was assigned to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, as it was then called. The experience—including his work for the notorious spy Kim Philby— gave him the material for several later works, including Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor, and nurtured in him that “virtue of disloyalty” which informs his novels. Greene ceased his writing of explicitly religious novels with The End of the Affair in 1951, when people began to treat him as a guru. Although his novels continued to treat religious concerns, none—with the possible exception of A Burnt-Out Case in 1961—was a religious problem novel. Increasingly, Greene turned to political concern in novels such as The Quiet American and The Comedians, but these political concerns transcend the topical and speak more enduringly of human involvement. In his later years, Greene slowed his production somewhat. He continued, however, to write two hundred words every morning, then corrected in great detail in the evening. His practice was to dictate his corrected manuscript into a tape recorder and send the tapes from his home in Antibes, on the French Riviera, to England, where they were typed and then returned. Greene also continued to indulge his taste for travel: He visited Fidel Castro in Cuba, General Omar Torrijos Herrera in Panama, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. A full catalog of his travels would be virtually endless. Despite the reductive label critics have applied to his settings—“Greeneland”— Greene’s novels have more varied settings than those of almost any other novelist, and his settings are authentic. Greene died on April 3, 1991, at the age of eighty-six. Analysis · In an address he called the “Virtue of Disloyalty,” which he delivered at the University of Hamburg in 1969, Graham Greene contended that a writer is driven “to be a protestant in a Catholic society, a catholic in a Protestant one,” or to be a communist in a capitalist society and a capitalist in a communist one. While loyalty confines one to accepted opinions, “disloyalty gives the novelist an extra dimension of understanding.”

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Whatever the reader may think of Greene’s theory, it is helpful in explaining most of his own novels. From The Man Within in 1929, which justified a suicide in the face of Catholic morality’s abhorrence for such an act, to The Human Factor, forty-nine years later, which comes close to justifying treason, Greene practiced this “virtue of disloyalty.” Most of Greene’s obsessions originated in his childhood. Where did the desire to be “disloyal,” to play devil’s advocate, arise? Certainly his serving in MI6 under the authority of Kim Philby was a factor. Greene admired the man in every way except for what appeared to be a personal drive for power. It was this characteristic of Philby that caused Greene finally to resign rather than accept a promotion and become part of Philby’s intrigue. Yet Greene later came to see that the man served not himself but a cause, and all his former admiration of Philby returned. Greene continued his friendship even after Philby’s treason. As he saw it, Philby had found a faith in Communism, and he would not discard it because it had been abused by Joseph Stalin any more than Catholics would discard a faith that had been abused by the Inquisitors or the Roman Curia. Clearly, however, Greene’s “disloyalty” or sympathy for the rebel did not originate here. It too must be traced to his childhood, to his isolation at school, where neither the students nor his headmaster father could treat him unambiguously; it can be traced also to his love of poet Robert Browning, who very early instilled in him an interest in the “dangerous edge of things,” in “the honest thief, the tender murderer.” It was an influence more lasting, Greene said, than any religious teaching. Religiously, though, Greene’s fierce independence manifested itself when, upon conversion to Catholicism, he took the name Thomas, not after the angelic doctor but after the doubter. Though Greene wrote in so many genres, the novel is the form upon which his reputation will rest. His strengths in the genre are many. Like all novelists who are more than journeymen, he returns throughout his oeuvre to certain recurring themes. Another strength is his gift for playing the devil’s advocate, the dynamics that occur when his character finds himself divided between loyalties. In Greene’s first novel, The Man Within, that division was handled crudely, externalized in a boy’s attraction to two different women; in later novels, the struggle is internalized. Sarah Miles of The End of the Affair is torn between her loyalty to God and her loyalty to her lover. Fowler of The Quiet American cannot decide whether he wants to eliminate Pyle for the good of Vietnam or to get his woman back from a rival. The characters are shaded in, rendered complex by internal division. Brighton Rock · Because he was a remarkable self-critic, Greene overcame most of his early weaknesses. He corrected an early tendency to distrust autobiographical material, and he seemed to overcome his difficulty in portraying credible women. In his first twenty-four years as a novelist, he depicted perhaps only two or three complex women: Kate Farrant of England Made Me, Sarah Miles of The End of the Affair, and possibly Ida Arnold of Brighton Rock. His later novels and plays, however, feature a host of well-drawn women, certainly the best of whom is Aunt Augusta of Travels with My Aunt. If there is one weakness that mars some of Graham Greene’s later novels, it is their prolixity. Too often in his late fiction, characters are merely mouthpieces for ideas. Brighton Rock was the first of Greene’s novels to treat an explicitly religious theme. Moreover, in attempting to play devil’s advocate for Brighton Rock’s protagonist,

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Pinkie, the author had chosen one of his most challenging tasks. He made this Catholic protagonist more vicious than he was to make any character in his entire canon, yet Greene demonstrated that Catholic moral law could not condemn Pinkie, could not finally know “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” Pinkie takes over a protection-racket gang from his predecessor, Kite, and must immediately avenge Kite’s murder by killing Fred Hale. This murder inspires him to commit a series of other murders necessary to cover his tracks. It also leads to Pinkie’s marrying Rose, a potential witness against him, and finally to his attempt to induce Rose to commit suicide. When the police intervene, Pinkie takes his own life. Vicious as he is, with his sadistic razor slashings, his murders to cover murders, and his cruelty to Rose, Pinkie’s guilt is nevertheless extenuated, his amorality rendered somewhat understandable. Pinkie’s conscience had not awakened because his imagination had not awakened: “The word ‘murder’ conveyed no more to him than the word ‘box,’ ‘collar,’ ‘giraffe’. . . . The imagination hadn’t awoken. That was his strength. He couldn’t see through other people’s eyes, or feel with their nerves.” As with so many of Greene’s characters, the explanation for Pinkie’s self-destructive character lies in his lost childhood: “In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.” In a parody of William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), Greene said that Pinkie came into the world trailing something other than heavenly clouds of his own glory after him: “Hell lay about him in his infancy.” Though Wordsworth might write of the archetypal child that “heaven lay about him in his infancy,” Greene saw Pinkie in quite different terms: “Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.” Pinkie’s vivid memory of his father and mother having sexual intercourse in his presence has turned him from all pleasures of the flesh, tempting him for a while with thoughts of the celibate priesthood. When Pinkie is seventeen, Kite becomes a surrogate father to him. Pinkie’s lack of conscience, his unconcern for himself, his sadomasochistic tendencies, which early showed themselves as a substitute for thwarted sexual impulses, stand the youth in good stead for a new vocation that requires unflinching loyalty, razor slashings, and, if necessary, murder. His corruption is almost guaranteed. To say this is not to reduce the novel from a theological level to a sociological one on which environment has determined the boy’s character. Rose survives somewhat the same circumstances. Pinkie’s guilt is extenuated, never excused. Pinkie, however, is not the only character in the novel on whose behalf Greene invoked his “virtue of disloyalty.” Rose is a prefiguration of the unorthodox “saint” that Greene developed more subtly in his later novels, in the Mexican priest of The Power and the Glory, in Sarah Miles of The End of the Affair, and to some extent in Scobie of The Heart of the Matter. Like Scobie, Rose wills her damnation out of love. She is not so well drawn as Scobie, at times making her naïve goodness less credible than his, but she is motivated by selfless concern for another. When she refuses to reject Pinkie and when she chooses to commit suicide, Rose wants an afterlife with Pinkie. She would rather be damned with him than see him damned alone: Rose will show “them they couldn’t pick and choose.” This seems unconvincing, until one hears the old priest cite the actual case of Charles Peguy, who would rather have died in a state of sin than have believed that a single soul was damned. In her confession to the old priest, Rose learns of God’s mercy and also of the “saintly” Peguy, who, like Rose, preferred to be damned rather than believe that another person had been. One is asked, then, to be sympathetic both to a character who has willed her own damnation and to one who leads a life of thorough viciousness, to believe that the

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salvation of both is a real possibility. In asking for this sympathy, for this possibility, Greene is not doctrinaire. As an effective problem novelist, Greene makes no assertions but merely asks questions that enlarge one’s understanding. Greene does not equate the Church with Rose’s official moral teaching, suggesting that the old priest in this novel and Father Rank in The Heart of the Matter are as representative as the teachers of Rose and Pinkie. Still, the moral doctrine provided Greene with the material that he liked to stretch beyond its customary shape. The Heart of the Matter · In The Heart of the Matter, Greene achieved the genuine tragedy that he came close to writing in many of his other novels. His protagonist, Major Scobie, is a virtuous man whose hamartia lies in an excess of pity. In Scobie, pity exceeds all bounds and becomes as vicious as Macbeth’s ambition. His pity wrecks a marriage he had wanted to save, ruins a lover he had hoped to help, kills his closest friend—his “boy,” Ali—and brings about his own moral corruption. Compared with Aristides the Just by one character and to the Old Testament’s Daniel by another, Scobie becomes guilty of adultery, smuggling, treason, lies, sacrilege, and murder before he kills himself. A late edition of the novel restores to the story an early scene between the government spy, Wilson, and Louise Scobie. Greene had written it for the original, then withdrew it since he believed that, told as it was from Wilson’s point of view, it broke Scobie’s point of view prematurely. When this scene is restored, Louise is seen in a more sympathetic light, and one can no longer see Scobie as hunted to his death by Louise. Though the reader still likes Scobie and is tempted to exonerate him, it is difficult to read the restored text without seeing Scobie’s excess of pity for what it is. The novel’s three final, anticlimactic scenes effectively serve to reduce the grandeur of Scobie’s act of self-sacrifice, showing the utter waste of his suicide and the fearful pride contained in his act. It is not that the final scenes make Scobie seem a lesser person. On the contrary, his wife and Helen are made to appear more unworthy of him: Louise with her unkind judgments about Scobie’s taking money from Yusef when that very money was borrowed to send her to South Africa as she wanted, and Helen giving her body to Bagster immediately after Scobie’s death. Nevertheless, the very criticism of these women makes Scobie’s suicide more meaningless and even more effectively shows the arrogance of his action. Scobie’s suicide, then, is not meant to be seen as praiseworthy but rather as the result of a tragic flaw—pity. In this respect, it differs from Elizabeth’s suicide in The Man Within. Still, though his suicide is presented as wrong, the final fault in a good man disintegrating spiritually, the reader is compelled to feel sympathy for Scobie. Louise’s insistence on the Church’s teaching that he has cut himself off from mercy annoys the reader. One is made to see Scobie through the eyes of Father Rank, who angrily responds to Louise that “the Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.” In this novel’s complex treatment of suicide, then, Greene does not use the “virtue of disloyalty” to justify Scobie’s act, but rather “to comprehend sympathetically [a] dissident fellow.” The Human Factor · The epigraph for The Human Factor is taken from Joseph Conrad: “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.” Maurice Castle’s soul is corrupted because a tie of gratitude exists between him and a Communist friend. The Human Factor may, in part, have been suggested by Greene’s friend and former

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superior in British Secret Intelligence, Kim Philby, although Greene had written twenty-five thousand words of the novel before Philby’s defection. When Philby wrote his story, My Silent War (1968), Greene put the novel aside for ten years. In any case, Greene anticipated the novel long before the Philby case in his 1930 story, “I Spy,” in which a young boy watches his father being whisked off to Russia after the British have detected his spying. The Human Factor was Greene’s first espionage novel since Our Man in Havana in 1958. Greene’s protagonist, Maurice Castle, works for the British Secret Service in London and has, the reader learns halfway through the novel, become a double agent. He has agreed to leak information to the Russians to help thwart “Uncle Remus,” a plan devised by England, the United States, and South Africa to preserve apartheid, even to use nuclear weapons for the purpose if necessary. Castle has not become a Communist and will not support them in Europe, but he owes a Communist friend a favor for helping his black wife, Sarah, escape from South Africa. Also, he owes his wife’s people something better than apartheid. Castle’s spying is eventually discovered, and the Russians remove him from England. They try to make good their promise to have his wife and child follow, but the British Secret Service makes it impossible for Sarah to take the boy when it learns that Sam is not Castle’s boy, but the boy of an African who is still alive. The novel ends in bleak fashion when Maurice is permitted to phone from Moscow and learns that his family cannot come. He has escaped into a private prison. The Human Factor exemplifies again the “virtue of disloyalty,” but even more, it demonstrates that Greene does not merely flesh out a story to embody that disloyalty. Though he does everything to enlist the reader’s sympathies for Castle, demonstrating his superiority to those for whom he works, Greene ultimately condemns his actions as he condemned Scobie’s. As Scobie had been a victim of pity, Castle is a victim of gratitude. In chatting with his wife, Sarah, before she learns that he has been spying, Castle defends his gratitude, and his wife agrees it is a good thing “if it doesn’t take you too far.” Moreover, as Scobie had an excessive pity even as a boy, Maurice Castle had an exaggerated gratitude. At one point, he asks his mother whether he was a nervous child, and she tells him he always had an “exaggerated sense of gratitude for the least kindness.” Once, she tells him, he gave away an expensive pen to a boy who had given him a chocolate bun. At novel’s end, when Castle is isolated in Russia, Sarah asks him in a phone conversation how he is, and he recalls his mother’s words about the fountain pen: “My mother wasn’t far wrong.” Like Scobie as well, Castle is the most appealing character in the book, and many a reader will think his defection justified. The Power and the Glory · The novels considered above are perhaps extreme examples of Greene’s “virtue of disloyalty,” but the same quality can be found in most of his novels. In his well-known The Power and the Glory, for example, Greene sets up a metaphorical conflict between the powers of God and the powers of atheism, yet it is his “disloyalty” that prevents the allegory from turning into a medieval morality play. The forces of good and the forces of evil are not so easily separated. Although his unnamed priest acquires a real holiness through suffering, the author depicts him as a much weaker man than his counterpart, the atheistic lieutenant. The latter is not only a strong man, but also a good man, who is selflessly devoted to the people. His anti-Catholicism has its origin in his boyhood memory of a Church that did not show a similar concern for its people. Perhaps Greene’s fairness to Mexico’s dusty ration-

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alism, which he actually despised, can be seen by contrasting the novel with its film version. In John Ford’s 1947 film, renamed The Fugitive, the viewer is given a hero, the priest, played by Henry Fonda, opposed by a corrupt lieutenant. The Quiet American · That writer’s judgment, so firmly founded on “disloyalty,” also helped Greene to overcome his tendency to anti-Americanism in The Quiet American. While Greene is critical of the naïve and destructive innocence of the young American, Pyle, he is even more critical of the English narrator, Fowler, who is cynically aloof. In the end, Greene’s “disloyalty” permits him to show Vietnam suffering at the hands of any and all representatives of the Western world. Greene’s painstaking attempt to see the other side, and to be as “disloyal” as possible to his own, animated his fictional worlds and gave both him and his readers that “extra dimension of understanding.” Henry J. Donaghy Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Basement Room and Other Stories, 1935; The Bear Fell Free, 1935; Twenty-four Stories, 1939 (with James Laver and Sylvia Townsend Warner); Nineteen Stories, 1947; Twenty-one Stories, 1954; A Visit to Morin, 1959; A Sense of Reality, 1963; May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life, 1967; Collected Stories, 1972. PLAYS: The Heart of the Matter, pr. 1950 (adaptation of his novel; with Basil Dean); The Living Room, pr., pb. 1953; The Potting Shed, pr., pb. 1957; The Complaisant Lover, pr., pb. 1959; Carving a Statue, pr., pb. 1964; The Return of A. J. Raffles: An Edwardian Comedy in Three Acts Based Somewhat Loosely on E. W. Hornung’s Characters in “The Amateur Cracksman,” pr., pb. 1975; For Whom the Bell Chimes, pr. 1980; Yes and No, pr. 1980; The Collected Plays of Graham Greene, pb. 1985. SCREENPLAYS: Twenty-one Days, 1937; The New Britain, 1940; Brighton Rock, 1947 (adaptation of his novel; with Terence Rattigan); The Fallen Idol, 1948 (adaptation of his novel; with Lesley Storm and William Templeton); The Third Man, 1949 (adaptation of his novel; with Carol Reed); The Stranger’s Hand, 1954 (with Guy Elmes and Giorgino Bassani); Loser Takes All, 1956 (adaptation of his novel); Saint Joan, 1957 (adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play); Our Man in Havana, 1959 (adaptation of his novel); The Comedians, 1967 (adaptation of his novel). TELEPLAY: Alas, Poor Maling, 1975. RADIO PLAY: The Great Jowett, 1939. POETRY: Babbling April: Poems, 1925; After Two Years, 1949; For Christmas, 1950. NONFICTION: Journey Without Maps: A Travel Book, 1936; The Lawless Roads: A Mexican Journal, 1939 (reissued as Another Mexico); British Dramatists, 1942; Why Do I Write?: An Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett, 1948; The Lost Childhood and Other Essays, 1951; Essais Catholiques, 1953 (Marcelle Sibon, translator); In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, 1961; The Revenge: An Autobiographical Fragment, 1963; Victorian Detective Fiction, 1966; Collected Essays, 1969; A Sort of Life, 1971; The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40, of Graham Greene, 1972 ( John Russell-Taylor, editor); Lord Rochester’s Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, 1974; Ways of Escape, 1980; Getting to Know the General, 1984. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Little Train, 1946; The Little Fire Engine, 1950 (also as

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The Little Red Fire Engine); The Little Horse Bus, 1952; The Little Steam Roller: A Story of Mystery and Detection, 1953. EDITED TEXTS: The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands, 1934; The Best of Saki, 1950; The Spy’s Bedside Book: An Anthology, 1957 (with Hugh Greene); The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, 1962, 1963 (4 volumes); An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri, 1975. MISCELLANEOUS: The Portable Graham Greene, 1973 (Philip Stout Ford, editor). Bibliography De Vitis, A. A. Graham Greene. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1986. This readable, well-organized treatment evaluates the different ways Greene seeks to embody his religious belief in his fiction. Establishes both the intellectual and the social setting in which he developed as a writer and includes detailed discussions of his novels, plays, and short stories. Places particular emphasis on publications after 1938 in which religious themes become clearly apparent. Includes a chronology, a selected bibliography, and an index. Evans, Robert O., ed. Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1963. This lively collection of fourteen critical essays offers a variety of approaches to Greene’s novels along with frequent references to the “entertainments” and travel books. Topics include Greene’s Catholicism, his similarities as a writer to François Mauriac, his intellectual background, and his accomplishments as a dramatist, short-story writer, and motion-picture critic. Includes a comprehensive bibliography of his works and the criticism of them published by 1963. Hill, William Thomas. Graham Greene’s Wanderers: The Search for Dwelling—Journeying and Wandering in the Novels of Graham Greene. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999. Examines the motif of the dwelling in Greene’s fiction. Deals with the mother, the father, the nation, and the Church as the “ground” of dwelling. Hoskins, Robert. Graham Greene: An Approach to the Novels. New York: Garland, 1999. An updated look at Greene’s oeuvre. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Sheldon, Michael. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York: Random House, 1994. In this unauthorized biography, Sheldon takes a much more critical view of Greene’s life, especially of his politics, than does Norman Sherry, the authorized biographer. A lively, opinionated narrative. Notes and bibliography included. Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene. New York: Viking Press, 1989. This is the first part of what is certainly the most comprehensive, most authoritative account of Greene’s life yet published, written with complete access to his papers and the full cooperation of family, friends, and the novelist himself. Leads the reader to 1939 to offer a rich account of the novelist’s formative years, struggles, and experiences as a journalist. Includes a generous collection of photographs, a bibliography, and an index. ____________. The Life of Graham Greene. Volume II: 1939-1955. New York: Viking, 1995. Sherry continues his superb exploration of Greene’s life and the sources of his fiction. Turnell, Martin. Graham Greene: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1967. This brief study explores the factors which determine the quality of the religion in Greene’s work from a Christian perspective. Discusses his novels and dramas, includes biographical background, and considers Greene’s dilemma

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as a Christian writer along with those of François Mauriac and Jean Cayrol. A selected primary/secondary bibliography is included. Wolfe, Peter. Graham Greene the Entertainer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. The first book-length treatment of Greene’s “entertainments.” Opens by discussing the varying critical approaches that his novels have received and then offers a readable, book-by-book analysis of each novel’s characterization, plot, setting, themes, and style. Includes a selected primary/secondary bibliography and an index.

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy

Born: Higher Bockhampton, England; June 2, 1840 Died: Dorchester, England; January 11, 1928 Principal long fiction · Desperate Remedies, 1871; Under the Greenwood Tree, 1872; A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1872-1873; Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874; The Hand of Ethelberta, 1875-1876; The Return of the Native, 1878; The Trumpet-Major, 1880; A Laodicean, 1880-1881; Two on a Tower, 1882; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886; The Woodlanders, 1886-1887; Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891; Jude the Obscure, 1895; The Well-Beloved, 1897. Other literary forms · In addition to his novels, Thomas Hardy published four collections of short stories, Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894), and A Changed Man, The Waiting Supper and Other Tales (1913). In the latter part of his life, after he had stopped writing novels altogether, he published approximately one thousand poems in eight separate volumes, which have since been collected in one volume by his publisher, Macmillan & Company. In addition to this staggering body of work, Hardy also published an epic-drama of the Napoleonic wars in three parts between 1903 and 1908 entitled The Dynasts, a one-act play entitled The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923), and a series of essays on fiction and other topics, which have been collected in individual volumes. All the novels and stories are available in a uniform library edition in eighteen volumes, published in the early 1960’s by Macmillan & Company. Finally, The Early Life of Hardy (1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), although ostensibly a two-volume biography of Hardy by his second wife, Florence Hardy, is generally recognized to be Hardy’s own autobiography compiled from his notes in his last few years. Achievements · Hardy is second only to Charles Dickens as the most written-about and discussed writer of the Victorian era. At least one new book and dozens of articles appear on his work every year. Certainly in terms of volume and diversity alone, Hardy is a towering literary figure with two admirable careers—one as novelist and one as poet—to justify his position. Interest in Hardy’s work has followed two basic patterns. The first was philosophical, with many critics creating metaphysical structures that supposedly underlay his fiction. In the late twentieth century, however, interest shifted to that aspect of Hardy’s work most scorned before, his technical facility and generic experimentation. One hundred years after his heyday, what once was termed fictional clumsiness was reevaluated in terms of poetic technique. Furthermore, Hardy’s career as a poet, which has always been under the shadow of his fiction, has been reevaluated. Hardy was a curious blend of the old-fashioned and the modern. With a career that began in the Victorian era and did not end until after World War I, Hardy was contemporary both with Matthew Arnold and with T. S. Eliot. Critics such as Babette Deutsch and Vivian De Sola Pinto claim that Hardy bridged the gulf between the Victorian sensibility and the modern era. In his unflinching confrontation with meaninglessness in the universe, Hardy embodied Albert Camus’s description of the absurd creator in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942); he rebelled 445

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against the chaos of the world by asserting his own freedom to persist in spite of that meaninglessness. Hardy was a great existential humanist. His hope for humanity was that people would realize that creeds and conventions which presupposed a god-oriented center of value were baseless. He hoped that humans would loosen themselves from those foolish hopes and creeds and become aware of their freedom to create their own value. If human beings would only realize, Hardy felt, that all people were equally alone and without hope for divine help, then perhaps they would realize also that it

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was the height of absurdity for such lost and isolated creatures to fight among themselves. Biography · Thomas Hardy was born in the small hamlet of Higher Bockhampton in Stinsford parish on June 2, 1840. His father was a master mason, content with his low social status and at home in his rural surroundings. His mother, however, whom Hardy once called “a born bookworm,” made Hardy aware of his low social status and encouraged his education. John Hicks, a friend of Hardy’s father and a Dorchester architect, took the boy on as a pupil at the age of sixteen. The well-known poet William Barnes had a school next door to Hicks’s office, and Hardy developed an influential friendship with the older man that remained with him. Another early influence on the young Hardy was Horace Moule, a classical scholar with a Cambridge education who was an essayist and reviewer. Moule introduced Hardy to intellectual conversation about Greek literature as well as contemporary issues; it was at Moule’s suggestion that Hardy read John Stuart Mill as well as the infamous Essays and Reviews (1860, Reverend Henry Bristow Wilson, editor), both of which contributed to the undermining of Hardy’s simple religious faith. Hardy was twenty-two when he went to London to pursue his architectural training. By that time he also entertained literary ambitions and had begun writing poetry. The publication of A. C. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1866 so influenced Hardy that he began a two-year period of intensive study and experimentation in writing poetry; none of the many poems he sent out was accepted, however, and he returned to Bockhampton in 1867. It was at this point that Hardy decided to turn to writing fiction. In his old age, he wrote in a letter that he never wanted to write novels at all, but that circumstances compelled him to turn them out. Hardy’s first fictional effort, The Poor Man and the Lady, based on the contrast between London and rural life, received some favorable responses from publishers, but after a discussion with George Meredith, Hardy decided not to publish it and instead, on Meredith’s advice, wrote Desperate Remedies in imitation of the detective style of Wilkie Collins. Later, eager to publish works that would establish his career as a writer, Hardy took the advice of a reader who liked the rural scenes in his unpublished novel and wrote the pastoral idyll Under the Greenwood Tree. The book was well received by the critics, but sales were poor. One editor advised him to begin writing serials for periodical publication. With the beginning of A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy said good-bye to architecture as a profession and devoted the rest of his life to writing. In 1874, Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, a dynamic and socially ambitious young woman who shared his interests in books. In the meantime, Far from the Madding Crowd had appeared to many favorable reviews, and editors began asking for Hardy’s work. While living with his wife in a cottage at Sturminister Newton, Hardy composed The Return of the Native and enjoyed what he later called the happiest years of his life. Hardy and his wife began a social life in London until he became ill and they decided to return to Dorset, where, while writing The Mayor of Casterbridge, he had his home, “Max Gate,” built. For the next several years, Hardy continued his writing, traveled with his wife, and read German philosophy. His enthusiasm for Tess of the D’Urbervilles was dampened when it was turned down by two editors before being accepted for serial publication by a third. The publication of the work brought hostile reaction and notoriety—a notoriety that increased after the publication of Jude the Obscure. Hardy was both puzzled and cynical about these reactions, but he was by then financially secure and decided to return to his first love:

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After 1897 he wrote no more fiction but concentrated solely on poetry. His volumes of poetry were well received, and his experiment with metaphysics in the epic-drama, The Dynasts, brought him even more respect, honor, and fame. These final years of Hardy’s life appear to have been spoiled only by the death of his wife in 1912. Within four years, however, he married Florence Dugdale, who had been a friend of the family and had done secretarial work for him. She cared for him for the remainder of his life. Hardy continued to write poetry regularly. His final volume of poems, Winter Words, was ready to be published when he died on January 11, 1928. His ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey. Analysis · In The Courage to Be (1952), Paul Tillich has said that “the decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the twentieth century is the loss of God in the nineteenth century.” Most critics of the literature of the nineteenth century have accepted this notion and have established a new perspective for studying the period by demonstrating that what is now referred to as the “modern situation” or the “modern artistic dilemma” actually began with the breakup of a value-ordered universe in the Romantic period. Thomas Hardy, in both philosophical attitude and artistic technique, firmly belongs in this modern tradition. It is a critical commonplace that at the beginning of his literary career Hardy experienced a loss of belief in a divinely ordered universe. The impact of this loss on Hardy cannot be overestimated. In his childhood recollections he appears as an extremely sensitive boy who attended church so regularly that he knew the service by heart, and who firmly believed in a personal and just God who ruled the universe and took cognizance of the situation of humanity. Consequently, when he came to London in his twenties and was exposed to the concept of a demythologized religion in the Essays and Reviews and the valueless nonteleological world of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), the loss of his childhood god was a traumatic experience. What is often called Hardy’s philosophy can be summed up in one of his earliest notebook entries in 1865: “The world does not despise us; it only neglects us.” An interpretation of any of Hardy’s novels must begin with this assumption. The difference between Hardy and other nineteenth century artists who experienced a similar loss of belief is that while others were able to achieve a measure of faith, William Wordsworth reaffirmed an organic concept of nature and of the creative mind which can penetrate it, and Thomas Carlyle finally entered the Everlasting Year with a similar affirmation of nature as alive and progressive—Hardy never made such an affirmative leap to transcendent value. Hardy was more akin to another romantic figure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who, having experienced the nightmarish chaos of a world without meaning or value, can never fully get back into an ordered world again. Hardy was constantly trying to find a way out of his isolated dilemma, constantly trying to find a value to which he could cling in a world of accident, chance, and meaningless indifference. Since he refused to give in to hope for an external value, however, he refused to submit to illusions of transcendence; the only possibility for him was to find some kind of value in the emptiness itself. Like the Ancient Mariner, all Hardy had was his story of loss and despair, chaos and meaninglessness. If value were to be found at all, it lay in the complete commitment to this story—“facing the worst,” and playing it back over and over again, exploring its implications, making others aware of its truth. Consequently, Hardy’s art can be seen as a series of

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variations in form on this one barren theme of loss and chaos—“questionings in the exploration of reality.” While Hardy could imitate popular forms and create popular novels such as Desperate Remedies, an imitation of Wilkie Collins’s detective novel, or The Hand of Ethelberta, an imitation of the social comedy popular at the time, when he wished to write a serious novel, one that would truly express his vision of humanity’s situation in the universe, he could find no adequate model in the novels of his contemporaries. He solved this first basic problem in his search for form by returning to the tragic drama of the Greek and Elizabethan ages, a mode with which he was familiar through extensive early reading. Another Greek and Elizabethan mode he used, although he was less conscious of its literary tradition, was the pastoral narrative—a natural choice because of its surface similarity to his own subject matter of isolated country settings and innocent country people. Hardy’s second problem in the search for form arose from the incompatibility between the classical tragic vision and his own uniquely modern view. The classical writers saw humanity within a stable and ordered religious and social context, while Hardy saw humanity isolated, alone, searching for meaning in a world that offered none. Because Hardy denied the static and ordered worldview of the past, he was in turn denied the broad context of myth, symbol, and ritual which stemmed from that view. Lost without a God-ordered mythos, Hardy had to create a modern myth that presupposed the absence of God; he needed a pattern. Hardy’s use of the traditional patterns of tragedy and pastoral, combined with his rejection of the old mythos that formerly gave meaning to these patterns, resulted in a peculiar distortion as his novels transcended their original patterns. Nature in Hardy’s “pastoral” novels, The Woodlanders and Far from the Madding Crowd, is neither benevolent nor divinely ordered. Similarly, the human dilemma in his “tragic” novels, The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge, is completely antithetical to what it was for the dramatists of the past. The Greek hero was tragic because he violated a cosmic order; Hardy’s heroes are tragic precisely because there is no such order. For the Greek hero there is a final reconciliation which persuades him to submit to the world. For Hardy’s hero there is only the never-ending dialectic between people’s nostalgia for value and the empty, indifferent world. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy rejected the traditional tragic and pastoral patterns and allowed the intrinsic problem of his two protagonists to order the chaotic elements of the works. The structure of these novels can be compared to that of the epic journey of Wordsworth in The Prelude (1850) and Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). As critic Morse Peckham has said in Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century (1962), the task of the nineteenth century artist was no longer to find an external controlling form, but to “symbolize the orientative drive itself, the power of the individual to maintain his identity by creating order which would maintain his gaze at the world as it is, at things as they are.” The loss of order is reflected in the structure of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, as the young heroine is literally evicted from the familiarity of her world and must endure the nightmarish wandering process of trying to get back inside. The structuring drive of Jude the Obscure is Jude’s search for an external order that will rid him of the anguish of his own gratuitousness. Far from the Madding Crowd · Hardy’s first important novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, was the first in which he successfully adapted a traditional form, the pastoral,

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to his own purposes, greatly altering it in the process. In Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning and Expression (1952), Hallet Smith has described the pastoral as constituting the ideal of the good life: In the pastoral world, nature is the true home of man; the gods take an active concern in man’s welfare; the inhabitants of this world are content and self-sufficient. The plot complications of the pastoral usually arise by the intrusion of an aspiring mind from the outside, an antipastoral force which seeks to overthrow the idyllic established order. On the surface, Far from the Madding Crowd conforms perfectly to this definition of the pastoral. The story is set in an agricultural community, the main character is a shepherd, and the bulk of the inhabitants are content with their lives. The plot complications arise from the intrusion of the antipastoral Sergeant Troy and the love of three different men for the pastoral maid, Bathsheba. To see the novel as a true pastoral, however, is to ignore living form in order to see a preestablished pattern. The pastoral ideal cannot be the vision of this novel because Hardy was struggling with the active tension between human hopes and the world’s indifference. Far from the Madding Crowd begins in a lighthearted mood with the comic situation of Gabriel Oak’s unsuccessful attempts to woo the fickle maid Bathsheba, but Oak, often called the stabilizing force in the novel, is an ambiguous figure. Although he is described as both a biblical and a classical shepherd, he is unequivocally neither. Moreover, the first section of the novel hovers between tragedy and comedy. Even the “pastoral tragedy,” the “murder” of all of Gabriel’s sheep by the foolish young dog, is equivocal; the dog is not so much destroyed for his crime as he is executed. Gabriel’s character, as well as the entire tone of the novel, shifts after this short prologue. When he next appears he is no longer the contented shepherd with modest ambitions; rather, he has developed the indifference to fate and fortune which, Hardy says, “though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.” The change that takes place in Gabriel is caused by his loss and is more significant than the change in Bathsheba because of her gain of an inheritance. Bathsheba, a typical pastoral coquette in the prologue of the novel, makes an ostensible shift when she inherits a farm of her own, but she is still coquettish and vain enough to be piqued by Farmer William Boldwood’s indifference to her charms and to send him the valentine saying “Marry Me.” Boldwood, “the nearest approach to aristocracy that this remote quarter of the parish could boast of,” is a serious, self-sufficient man who sees “no absurd side to the follies of life.” The change the valentine causes in him is so extreme as to be comic. The Bathsheba-Gabriel relationship is complicated by this new wooer. In this section of the novel, until the appearance of Sergeant Troy, there appears a series of scenes in which Gabriel, Boldwood, and Bathsheba are frozen into a tableau with the ever present sheep in the background. The death and physical suffering of the sheep take on a sinister, grotesque imagery to make an ironic commentary on the absurdity of humanity’s ephemeral passions in a world dominated by cruelty and death. The irrationality of physical passion is more evident when Bathsheba is overwhelmed by Troy. Their relationship begins with the feminine frill of her dress being caught in his masculine spur and blossoms with her submission to his dazzling sword exercises. After Boldwood’s complete demoralization and the marriage of Bathsheba and Troy, the antipastoral Troy corrupts the innocent harvest festival until it becomes a wild frenzy and then a drunken stupor. The pastoral world of the “good life” is turned upside down as the approaching storm transforms the landscape into something sinister. It is significant that the rustics are asleep during the storm, for they are truly

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unaware of the sickness of the world and its sinister aspect. Troy, too, is unaware of the storm, as he is always unaware of an incongruity between humanity and the indifferent world. Only Gabriel, Bathsheba, and Boldwood, the involved and suffering characters of the novel, react to this symbolic storm. Just as the death of the sheep formed the ever present background to the first two parts of the novel, the death of Fanny Robin dominates the third section. From the time her body begins its journey in Joseph Poorgrass’s wagon until the “Gurgoyle” washes Troy’s flowers off her grave, death becomes the most important element in the book. By far the most important effect of Fanny Robin’s death is on Bathsheba. When she opens the coffin to find out that Fanny was pregnant with Troy’s child, the scene is “like an illusion raised by some fiendish incantation.” Her running away to seclude herself in the wood is called by many critics her reconciliation with the natural world of the pastoral, but this view is wholly untenable: Her retreat is on the edge of a swamp of which the “general aspect was malignant.” There is no pastoral goodness about the hollow in which she hides. It is a “nursery of pestilences. . . . From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth.” This is one of those grotesque situations in which people become aware of their isolated state, when their need for solace in the natural world is met with only indifference, when they become aware of the absurdity of their demands on a barren and empty world. Bathsheba changes after her experience in this “boundary situation”; she gains the awareness which has characterized Gabriel all along. After this climactic scene of confrontation with the indifferent world, the book loses its focus. In a diffuse and overlong denouement, Boldwood presses his advantage with Bathsheba until the night of the party, when she is on the point of giving in. Troy’s return at this moment and his murder by Boldwood seems forced and melodramatic. Bathsheba’s return to marry Gabriel is a concession to the reading public as much as it is to the pastoral pattern of the novel itself. Far from the Madding Crowd, a fable of the barrenness and death of the pastoral world and the tragic results of wrong choice through the irrationality of sexual attraction, truly ends with Bathsheba’s isolation and painful new awareness in the pestilent swamp. The Woodlanders · The Woodlanders, although more explicit in its imagistic presentation of the unhealthy natural world and more complex in its conflicts of irrational sexual attraction, manifests much of the same kind of formal distortion as is found in Far from the Madding Crowd. The world of Little Hintock, far from being the ideal pastoral world, is even more valueless, more inimical a world than Weatherbury. Instead of the grotesque death of sheep, trees become the symbolic representation of humanity’s absurd situation in an empty world. Little Hintock is a wasteland, a world of darkness, isolation, guilt, and human cross-purposes. One’s nostrils are always filled with the odor of dead leaves, fermenting cider, and heavy, blossomy perfume. One cannot breathe or stretch out one’s arms in this world. The so-called “natural” inhabitants of the Wood are dissatisfied with the nature of the world around them. Grace’s father, Mr. Melbury, cramped and crippled by his lifetime struggle to make his living from the trees, wants his daughter to be able to escape such a world by marrying an outsider. A conflict is created, though, by the guilt he feels for a wrong he did to Giles Winterborne’s father; he tries to atone for it by promising Grace to Giles. John South, Marty’s father, on whose life the landholdings of Giles depend, is neurotically afraid of the huge tree in his yard. The tree takes on a symbolic aura as representative of the uncontrollable force of the natural world.

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Furthermore, the sophisticated outsiders in the novel are cut off from the world they inhabit and are imaged as “unnatural.” Strange unnatural lights can be seen from the house of the young Dr. Fitzpiers, who is said to be in league with the devil. The bored Felice Charmond is so unnatural that she must splice on the luxuriance of natural beauty by having a wig made of Marty South’s hair. The isolated and cramped Hintock environment creates a boredom and ennui in these two characters that serve to further the narrative drive of the novel. Grace, the most equivocal character in the novel, is the active center of its animating conflicts. Her wavering back and forth between the natural world and the antinatural is the central tension that crystallizes the tentative and uncomfortable attitude of all the characters. It is her dilemma of choice that constitutes the major action, just as it was Bathsheba’s choice that dominated Far from the Madding Crowd. The choices that the characters make to relieve themselves of tension are made through the most irrational emotion, love, in a basically irrational world. Grace marries Fitzpiers in an effort to commit herself to a solid world of value. Fitzpiers sees in Grace the answer to a Shelleyan search for a soul mate. To commit oneself to a line of action that assumes the world is ordered and full of value, to choose a course of action that hopes to lessen the tentativeness of life, to deceive oneself into thinking that there is solidarity—these are the tragic errors that Hardy’s characters repeatedly make. The marriage begins to break up when Fitzpiers, aware that Grace is not the ideal he desired, goes to the lethargic Mrs. Charmond, and when Grace, aware that her hope for solidarity was misdirected, tries to go back to the natural world through the love of Giles. Social conventions, however, which Hardy says are holdovers from outworn creeds, interfere. Grace is unable to obtain a divorce, for the law makes her irrational first choice inflexible. Despairing of the injustice of natural law as well as of social law, she runs away to Giles, who, too self-effacing to rebel against either code, lets her have his house while he spends the night in an ill-sheltered hut. At this point, confused and in anguish about what possibility there is left for her, uncertain of the value of any action, Grace confronts the true nature of the world and the absurdity of her past hopes for value in it. The storm that catches Grace alone in the house is a climactic representation for her of the inimical natural world, just as the pestilent swamp was for Bathsheba. “She had never before been so struck with the devilry of a gusty night in the wood, because she had never been so entirely alone in spirit as she was now. She seemed almost to be apart from herself—a vacuous duplicate only.” Grace’s indecision and absurd hopes have been leading to this bitter moment of realization in which she is made aware of the ephemeral nature of human existence and the absurdity of human hopes in a world without intrinsic value. Just as in Far from the Madding Crowd, the tension of the action collapses after this confrontation. Giles dies, and Fitzpiers returns after having ended his affair with Mrs. Charmond. After a short period of indifference, Grace, still his wife by law, returns to him. In his customary ironic way, however, Hardy does not allow this reconciliation to be completely satisfying, for it is physical only. Grace, having narrowly missed being caught in a mantrap set for Fitzpiers, is enticingly undressed when Fitzpiers rushes to her and asks to be taken back. This physical attraction is the only reason that Fitzpiers desires a reconciliation. Grace is still indifferent to him, but it is now this very indifference that makes their reunion possible. Seeing no one reaction as more valuable than another, she takes the path of least resistance. The rural chorus ends the novel by commenting that they think the union will not last.

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The Return of the Native · Although many critics have pointed out the formal framework of The Return of the Native—the classical five-act division; the unity of time, place, and line of action; and the character similarities to Oedipus and Prometheus—other studies have struggled with the book’s ambiguities and the difficulties involved in seeing it as a classical tragedy. Certainly, the pattern is classical, but the distortion of the pattern becomes the more significant structuring principle. Egdon Heath is the landscape from which God has departed. People in such an empty world will naturally begin to feel an affinity with the wasteland, such as islands, moors, and dunes. Little more needs to be said here about the part the Heath plays in the action, for critics have called it the principal actor in the drama. Indeed, it does dominate the scene, for the actions of all the characters are reactions in some way to the indifference the Heath represents. As in Far from the Madding Crowd, there is a chorus of rustics in The Return of the Native. They belong on the Heath because of their ignorance of the incongruity between human longing for meaning and the intractable indifference of the world. They still maintain a mythical, superstitious belief in a pagan animism and fatalistically accept the nature of things. The Druidical rites of the opening fires, the unimportance of Christian religion, the black mass and Voodoo doll of Susan Nonesuch: All these characterize the pagan fatalism of the rustics. The main characters, however, do not belong with the rustics. They make something other than a fatalistic response to the Heath and are characterized by their various reactions to its indifference. Mrs. Yeobright is described as having the very solitude exhaled from the Heath concentrated in her face. Having lived with its desolation longer than any of the others, she can no longer escape, but she is desperate to see that Clym does. Damon Wildeve does not belong to the Heath but has taken over a patch of land a former tenant died in trying to reclaim. Although he is dissatisfied, he is not heroic; he is involved in no search, no vital interaction with the indifferent world. Tomasin Yeobright is characterized in a single image, as she is in the house loft, selecting apples: “The sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft brown fern.” She aligns herself with the natural world through her innocence and consequently perceives no incongruity. Diggory Venn, the most puzzling figure in the novel, is an outcast. The most typical image of him is by his campfire alone, the red glow reflecting off his own red skin. He simply wanders on the open Heath, minding other people’s business, and waiting for his chance to marry Tomasin. These characters, regardless of their conflicts with the irrationality of human choice or the indifference of the Heath, are minor in comparison with the two antithetical attitudes of Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright. The most concrete image of Eustacia is of her wandering on the Heath, carrying an hourglass in her hand, gazing aimlessly out over the vast wasteland. Her search for value, her hope for escape from the oppressive indifference of the Heath, lies in being “loved to madness.” Clym, however, sees friendliness and geniality written on the Heath. He is the disillusioned intellectual trying to make a return to the mythic simplicity of the natural world. Clym would prefer not to think, not to grapple with the incongruities he has seen. The very disease of thought that forces him to see the “coil of things” makes him desire to teach rather than to think. He is indeed blind, as his mother tells him, in thinking he can instill into the peasants the view that “life is a thing to be put up with,” for they have always known it and fatalistically accepted it. Furthermore, he shows his blindness by marrying Eustacia, thinking she will remain with him on the Heath, while Eustacia

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reveals that she is as misdirected as he is by idealizing him and thinking that he will take her away from the Heath. Both characters search for a meaning and basis for value, but both are trapped by the irrationality of love and vain hopes in an irrational world. At the beginning of book 4, Clym literally goes blind because of his studying and must actually look at the world through smoked glasses. He welcomes the opportunity to ignore the incongruities of the world by subsuming himself in the Heath and effacing himself in his furze-cutting. In his selfish attempt to “not think” about it, he ignores what this means to Eustacia. She can find no meaning at all in such self-effacing indifference; it is the very thing against which she is rebelling. She returns again to her old pagan ways at the village dance and considers the possibility of Wildeve once more. Mrs. Yeobright’s journey across the Heath, a trip colored by grotesque images of the natural world—the tepid, stringy water of nearly dried pools where “maggoty” shapes cavort; the battered, rude, and wild trees whose limbs are splintered, lopped, and distorted by the weather—is a turning point in the action of the book. In a concatenation of chance events and human misunderstanding, Eustacia turns Mrs. Yeobright away from the door, and the old woman dies as a result. At this point, Eustacia blames some “colossal Prince of the world for framing her situation and ruling her lot.” Clym, still selfish, ignores the problems of the living Eustacia and concentrates on the “riddle of death” of his mother. Had he been able to practice what he professed—human solidarity—he might have saved Eustacia and himself, but instead he bitterly blames her for his mother’s death and is the immediate cause of Eustacia’s flight. Eustacia’s trip across the Heath to her death is similar to Mrs. Yeobright’s in that the very natural world seems antagonistic to her. She stumbles over “twisted furze roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshly fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the Heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal.” Her leap into the pool is a noble suicide. It is more a rebellion against the indifference of the world around her than it is a submission to its oppressiveness. It is the admission of the absurdity of human hopes by a romantic temperament that refuses to live by such absurdity. The Mayor of Casterbridge · The tragic pattern of The Mayor of Casterbridge has been said by most critics to be more explicit than that of The Return of the Native; in the late twentieth century, however, critics were quick to point out that there are serious difficulties involved in seeing The Mayor of Casterbridge as an archetypal tragic ritual. Although Henchard is Oedipus-like in his opposition to the rational, Creon-like Farfrae, the plot of the novel, like that of The Return of the Native, involves the reactions of a set of characters to the timeless indifference of the world. In this case, the mute and intractable world is imaged in the dead myths and classical legends of Casterbridge. Secluded as much as Little Hintock, the world of The Woodlanders, Casterbridge is “huddled all together, shut in by a square wall of trees like a plot of garden by a box-edging.” The town is saturated with the old superstitions and myths of the past. The primary image of the desolate world of the town and its dead and valueless past is the Casterbridge Ring, a relic of an ancient Roman amphitheater. The Ring is a central symbol which embodies the desolation of the old myths of human value. It formerly had been the gallows site, but now it is a place for illicit meetings of all kinds, except, Hardy notes, those of happy lovers. A place of man’s inhumanity to man is no place for the celebration of love.

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The inhumanity of one person to another and the human need for love play an important part in the action of the novel. While the classical Oedipus is guilty of breaking a cosmic law, Henchard is guilty of breaking a purely human one. By selling his wife, he treats her as a thing, not a human being. He rejects human relationships and violates human interdependence and solidarity. This is the sin that begins to find objectification years later when the blight of the bread agitates the townspeople and when his wife, Susan, returns. It is not this sin alone that means tragedy for Henchard, just as it is not Oedipus’s violation alone that brings his downfall. Henchard’s character—his irrational behavior, his perverse clinging to the old order and methods, his rash and impulsive nature—also contributes to his defeat. Henchard is an adherent of the old ways. Though he is ostensibly the mayor, an important man, he is actually closer to the rustic, folk characters than the hero of any other Hardy novel. He is not a rebel against the indifference of the world so much as he is a simple hay-stacker, trying desperately to maintain a sense of value in the worn-out codes and superstitions of the past. In the oft-quoted “Character is Fate” passage in the novel, Hardy makes explicit Henchard’s problem. He calls him a Faust-like character, “a vehement, gloomy being who had quitted the ways of vulgar men without light to guide him on a better way.” Thus, Henchard is caught between two worlds, one of them dead and valueless, the other not worthy enough to be a positive replacement. The levelheaded business sense of Farfrae, the social climbing and superficiality of Lucetta, the too-strict rationality of Elizabeth-Jane—all who represent the new order of human attitudes—appear anemic and self-deceived in the face of Henchard’s dynamic energy. It often seems that the nature of things is against Henchard, but the nature of things is that events occur that cannot be predicted, and that they often occur just at the time when one does not want them to. Many such unpredicted and ill-timed events accumulate to cause Henchard’s tragedy. For example, just when he decides to marry Lucetta, his wife Susan returns; just at the time of Susan’s death, he is once more reminded of his obligation to Lucetta; just at the time when he tells Elizabeth-Jane that she is his daughter, he discovers that she is not; and just at the time when he calls on Lucetta to discuss marriage, she has already met and found a better mate in Farfrae. Many of the events that contribute to his own downfall are a combination of this “unholy brew” and his impulsive nature. That the weather turned bad during his planned entertainment he could not prevent, but he could have been more prepared for the rain had he not been in such a hurry to best Farfrae. The unpredictable nature of the weather at harvest time was also beyond his control, but again had he not been so intent on ruining Farfrae he might have survived. He begins to wonder if someone is roasting a waxen image of him or stirring an “unholy brew” to confound him. Moreover, the attitudes of other characters accumulate to contribute to Henchard’s downfall. Farfrae, as exacting as a machine, rejects Henchard’s fatherly love and makes few truly human responses at all. Lucetta, once dependent on Henchard, becomes so infatuated with her new wealth that she no longer needs him. At the beginning of the novel, Susan’s simple nature is incapable of realizing that Newsom’s purchase of her is not valid, and at the end, her daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, is so coldly rational that she can cast Henchard off without possibility of reconciliation. None of these characters faces the anguish of being human as Henchard does. The ambiguity that arises from the combination of all these forces makes it difficult to attribute Henchard’s tragedy to any one of them. His death in the end marks the inevitable disappearance of the old order, but it is also the only conclusion possible

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for the man who has broken the only possible existing order when a cosmic order is no longer tenable—the human order. The reader is perhaps made to feel that Henchard has suffered more than he deserved. As a representative of the old order, his fall must be lamented even as the search is carried on for a new foundation of value and order. At the death of the old values in The Mayor of Casterbridge, a new order is not available. Tess of the D’Urbervilles · The form and meaning of Tess of the D’Urbervilles springs from Tess’s relation to the natural world. At the beginning of the novel she is a true child of nature who, although sensitive to painful incongruities in her experience, is confident that the natural world will provide her with a basis of value and will protect and sustain her. When nature fails her, her perplexity throws her out of the comfortable world of innocence and natural rapport. Tess then begins a journey both inward and outward in search of a stable orientation and a reintegration into a relationship with the natural world. Tess first appears in her “natural home” in the small hamlet of Marlott, where her innocence is dramatized as she takes part in the May Day dance. There is a sensitivity in Tess that sets her apart from the other inhabitants. Shame for her father’s drunken condition makes her volunteer to take the beehives to market, and despair for the laziness of her parents makes her dreamily watch the passing landscape and ignore where she is going. When, as a result, the horse Prince is killed, Tess’s sense of duty to her family, now in economic difficulties, overcomes her pride, and she agrees to go to her aristocratic relatives for help. It is her first journey outside the little world of Marlott and her first real encounter with corruption. Alec, her cousin, is a stock figure of the sophisticated, antinatural world. Their first scene together is formalized into an archetypal image of innocence in the grasp of the corrupt. Just as it is Tess’s natural luxuriance and innocence that attracts Alec, it is also her innocence that leads to her fall. When he takes her into the woods, strangely enough she is not afraid of him as before. She feels that she is in her natural element. She so trusts the natural world to protect her that she innocently falls asleep and is seduced by Alec. The antinatural force that began with her father’s alleged nobility, coupled with Tess’s own innocence and sensitivity and her naïve trust in the world, all work together to make her an outcast. When her illegitimate child dies and the church refuses it a Christian burial, Tess unequivocally denies the validity of organized religion. She probes within herself to try to find some meaning in her despair. Suddenly she becomes quite consciously aware of the abstract reality of death: “Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.” The facing of the idea of death without a firm hope for transcendence is the conclusion of Tess’s inward search in this second phase of her experience, when, still maintaining a will to live and enjoy, she has hopes of submerging herself into the natural world again. The Valley of the Great Dairies where Tess goes next is the natural world magnified, distorted, thrown out of proportion. It is so lush and fertile as to become a symbolic world. As Tess enters the valley, she feels hope for a new reintegration. For the time being, she dismisses the disturbing thought of her doubt in her childhood God and is satisfied to immerse herself within the purely physical world of the farm’s lushness. She manages to ignore her moral plight until she meets the morally ambiguous Angel Clare. In contrast to Tess, Angel’s moral perplexity arises from intellectual questioning rather than from natural disillusionment. Intellectually con-

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vinced that he has lost faith, Angel rebels against the conventions of society and the church and goes to the Valley of the Great Dairies where he believes innocence and uncontaminated purity and goodness prevail. For Angel, Tess represents the idealistic goal of natural innocence, but the natural world no more affirms this relationship than it did condemn the former one. On the first night of their marriage, Tess confesses to Angel her relationship with Alec. Angel, the idealist, has desired to see a natural perfection in Tess. Doubting that perfection, he rejects her as antinatural. Angel cannot accept the reality of what nature is truly like; he is tied to a conventional orientation more than he realizes. After Angel leaves her, Tess wanders about the countryside doing farm work at various places until one morning on the road she awakes to find dead pheasants around her. At this point, Tess becomes aware that in a Darwinistic universe, without teleological possibility and without inherent goodness, violation, injury, even death are innate realities. Tess realizes that she is not guilty by the laws of such a world. After this realization she can go to the barren world of Chalk-Newton and not feel so much the incongruity of the place. With its “white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone,” Chalk-Newton represents the wasteland situation of a world without order or value. Tess can remain indifferent to it because of her new realization of its indifference to her. Cold indifference, however, offers no escape from her moral conflict. Alec D’Urberville comes back into her life, proclaiming that he has accepted Christianity and exorting her not to “tempt” him again. Ironically, by trying to convince him of her own realization of a world without God and by propounding Angel’s uncommitted humanism to him, she only succeeds in reconverting Alec back to his old demonic nature and thus creates another threat to herself. When her father dies and the family loses its precarious freehold, Tess gives in to Alec’s persistent urging once more. When Angel, in the rugged South American mountains, comes to the same realization that Tess experienced on the road, he returns to find that Tess has renounced life and self completely, allowing her body to drift, “like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from the living will.” After the return of Angel, when Tess finds her last hopes dashed, she sees in Alec all the deception and meaninglessness of a world she trusted. When she kills him, she is transformed by her rebellion. Like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci, she is aware of no guilt; she transcends any kind of moral judgment. She acknowledges her absolute freedom, and in that fearful moment, she is willing to accept the human penalties for such freedom. In the last part of the novel, when Angel and Tess wander without any real hope of escape, Tess is already condemned to die. Isolated in the awareness of her own ephemerality in a valueless world, Tess vows she is “not going to think of anything outside of now.” The final scene at Stonehenge is a triumph of symbolic realization of place; the silent, enigmatic stones, mysterious and implacable, resist any attempt at explanation. Tess, in saying that she likes to be there, accepts the indifferent universe. Lying on the altar of a heathen temple, she is the archetypal sacrifice of human rebellion against an empty world. When the carriers of the law of nature and society arrive, Tess, having rebelled against these laws and rejected them, can easily say, “I am ready.” Tess’s real tragedy springs from her insistent hope throughout the novel to find external meaning and justification for her life. Only at the end of the novel, when she rebels by killing Alec, does she achieve true awareness. Unlike the classical tragic hero, she is not reconciled to the world through an acceptance of universal justice.

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Her very salvation, the only kind of salvation in Hardy’s world, lies in her denial of such a concept. Jude the Obscure · With some significant differences, Jude the Obscure is concerned with the same problem that animates Tess of the D’Urbervilles—the absurdity and tragedy of human hopes for value in an indifferent universe. As a literary creation, it is a “process” through which Hardy tries to structure the symbolic journey of every person who searches for a foundation, a basis for meaning and value. The problem, however, is that all the symbols that represent meaning to Jude—the colleges, the church, the ethereal freedom of Sue Bridehead, and even the physical beauty of his wife Arabella—are illusory. By contrast, those things that have real symbolic value in the world are the forbidding, sacrosanct walls of the college complex, which Jude cannot enter; the decaying materiality of the churches which he tries to restore; the neurotic irrationality of Sue, which he fails to understand; and his own body, to which he is inextricably tied. It is precisely Jude’s “obscurity,” his loss of “at-homeness” in the world, with which the novel is concerned. He is obscure because he is without light, because he tries in every way possible to find an illumination of his relation to the world, but without success. It is significant that the novel opens with the departure of the schoolmaster Phillotson, for to Jude, orphaned and unwanted by his aunt, the teacher has been the center of the world. His leaving marks the necessity of Jude’s finding a new center and a new hope to relieve his loneliness. The first projection of his hopes to find value is naturally toward Christminster, the destination of his teacher. In the first part of the book his dream is seen only as an indefinable glow in the distance that offers all possibilities by its very unknown nature. Although he consciously devotes himself to the Christian framework, one night after having read a classical poem, he kneels and prays to Diana, the goddess of the moon. Both of these value systems—Christian faith and Greek reason—are projected on his vision of Christminster, but both of them are temporarily forgotten when he meets Arabella, “a substantial female animal.” Later, when she tells him that she is pregnant, although it destroys all his former plans, he idealizes the marriage state, calls his hopes for Christminster “dreams about books, and degrees and impossible fellowships,” and dedicates himself to home, family, and the pedestrian values of Marygreen. His discovery that Arabella has deceived him is only the first reversal in his search for unity and value. In the second phase of Jude’s development, the long-planned journey to Christminster is prompted by the immediacy of seeing a picture of Sue Bridehead; she becomes a concrete symbol of his vision. His first glimpse of Sue has the quality of idealistic wish fulfillment. His growing desire for her expresses a need for an “anchorage” to his thoughts. He goes to the church she attends, and this church, associated with his vision of Sue, temporarily becomes that anchorage. Sue is not, however, representative of Christian values; she is rather the classical pagan. This dichotomy of values creates a recurring tension in Jude’s search throughout the book. Jude’s first major disillusionment at Christminster comes when he is turned down by all five colleges to which he has applied. After this disappointment, he shifts his hopes from the reason and knowledge of the schools to the faith of the Church. This religious impulse dominates Jude’s hopes in the third phase of his development. He practices the rituals of the Church in the hope that he can find a meaning for himself, but Sue, who laughed at his idealistic notions of the intellectual life, tells him that the Church is not the way either. Sue, who changes in Jude’s eyes as his goals change, is

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always important to him as a symbol of his aspirations and ideals. When he loses her to Phillotson, he is struck even more by the “scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions and her lack of interest in his aspirations.” Phase four of Jude’s search is a transition section presenting the decay of the values of the past. Jude, studying theology and church ritual with a last weakening hope, is only vaguely aware of the decay and aridity around him. His need for Sue, an ambiguous mixture of desire for the ideal and the physical, begins to take on more importance for him until he decides that he is unfit “to fill the part of a propounder of accredited dogma” and burns all his theology books. Sue, a spiritual creature, cannot live with Phillotson any longer. She goes to Jude, who, having rejected everything else, is ready to project his desires for meaning entirely on an ambiguous union with her as both physical wife and Shelleyan soul mate. The fifth part of the novel is a phase of movement as Jude and Sue wander from town to town, living as man and wife in all respects except the sexual. Not until Arabella returns and Sue fears she will lose Jude does she give in to him, but with infinite regret. In the final phase of Jude’s development, after the birth of his children, including the mysterious child named “Father Time,” the family moves back to Christminster. Instead of being optimistic, Jude is merely indifferent. He recognizes himself as an outsider, a stranger to the universe of ideals and hopes of other men. He has undergone a process that has slowly stripped him of such hopes for meaning. He sees the human desire for meaning as absurd in a world that has no concern for humanity, a universe that cannot fulfill dreams of unity or meaning. The tragedy of Father Time causes Sue to alter her belief that she can live by instinct, abjuring the laws of society. She makes an extreme shift, accepting a supreme deity against whose laws she feels she has transgressed; her self-imposed penance for her “sin” of living with Jude is to go back to Phillotson. After Sue leaves, Jude goes to “a dreary, strange flat scene, where boughs dripped, and coughs and consumption lurked, and where he had never been before.” This is a typical Hardy technique for moments of realization: The natural world becomes an inimical reflection of the character’s awareness of the absurd. After this, Jude’s reaction to the world around him is indifference: He allows himself to be seduced by Arabella again and marries her. Jude’s final journey to see Sue is a journey to death and a final rejection of the indifferent universe of which his experiences have made him aware. In his relentless vision of a world stripped of transcendence, Hardy is a distinctly modern novelist. As Nathan A. Scott has said of him, “not only does he lead us back to that trauma in the nineteenth century out of which the modern existentialist imagination was born, but he also brings us forward to our own time.” Charles E. May Other major works SHORT FICTION: Wessex Tales, 1888; A Group of Noble Dames, 1891; Life’s Little Ironies, 1894; A Changed Man, The Waiting Supper and Other Tales, 1913; The Complete Short Stories, 1989 (Desmond Hawkins, editor). PLAYS: The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars, pb. 1903, 1906, 1908, 1910 (verse drama), pr. 1914 (abridged by Harley Granville-Barker); The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall, pr., pb. 1923 (one act). POETRY: Wessex Poems and Other Verses, 1898; Poems of the Past and Present, 1901; Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses, 1909; Satires of Circumstance, 1914; Moments of

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Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, 1917; Late Lyrics and Earlier, 1922; Human Shows, Far Phantasies: Songs and Trifles, 1925; Winter Words, 1928; Collected Poems, 1931; The Complete Poetical Works, 1982-1985 (3 volumes; Samuel Hynes, editor). NONFICTION: Life and Art, 1925 (E. Brennecke, editor); The Early Life of Hardy, 1928; The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1930; Personal Writings, 1966 (Harold Orel, editor); The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 1978, 1980 (2 volumes; Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, editors). Bibliography Bayley, John. An Essay on Hardy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Gives a close reading of most of Hardy’s major novels, stressing the instability in his style. Hardy’s writing was often ambiguous and, by arousing uncertain expectations in the reader, he was able to enhance suspense. His later novels, culminating in Jude the Obscure, were more tightly organized, a feature not to Bayley’s liking, who prefers the adventitious and unplanned. Also notes that Hardy’s attitude toward his male heroes is often determined by their relations with the novel’s central female personality. Campbell, Matthew. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Examines the literature and poetry of Victorian greats Hardy, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Kramer, Dale, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999. An indispensable tool for students of Hardy. Includes bibliographical references and an index. ____________. Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Divided into a section of overviews and a section on individual novels: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Includes an introduction but no bibliography. Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982. The most scholarly biography by one of Hardy’s best critics. Includes detailed notes and bibliography. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Hardy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. An opinionated major biography, taking issue with but not superseding Michael Millgate’s important work. No notes, brief bibliography. Southerington, F. R. Hardy’s Vision of Man. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. Defends at considerable length a revolutionary account of Hardy. Most authorities see Hardy as a pessimist: His “President of the Immortals” is indifferent to human concerns. However, for Southerington, he is an optimist; his novels show that given appropriate attitudes, one need not be overcome by adversity. The novels also contain many autobiographical passages, which the book traces in detail.

L. P. Hartley L. P. Hartley

Born: Whittlesea, England; December 30, 1895 Died: London, England; December 13, 1972 Principal long fiction · Simonetta Perkins, 1925; The Shrimp and the Anemone, 1944; The Sixth Heaven, 1946; Eustace and Hilda, 1947; The Boat, 1949; My Fellow Devils, 1951; The Go-Between, 1953; A Perfect Woman, 1955; The Hireling, 1957; Facial Justice, 1960; The Brickfield, 1964; The Betrayal, 1966; Poor Clare, 1968; The Love-Adept, 1969; My Sisters’ Keeper, 1970; The Harness Room, 1971; The Collections, 1972; The Will and the Way, 1973. Other literary forms · L. P. Hartley published, in addition to eighteen novels, six collections of short stories: Night Fears (1924), The Killing Bottle (1932), The Traveling Grave (1948), The White Wand (1954), Two for the River (1961), and Mrs. Carteret Receives (1971). Reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley (1973), with the exception of ten apprentice pieces from Night Fears, the stories reveal Hartley’s reliance on the gothic mode. At their least effective, they are workmanlike tales utilizing conventional supernatural machinery. At their best, however, they exhibit a spare symbolic technique used to explore individual human personalities and to analyze the nature of moral evil. The best of Hartley’s ghost and horror stories include “A Visitor from Down Under,” “Feet Foremost,” and “W. S.,” the last dealing with an author murdered by a character of his own creation. “Up the Garden Path,” “The Pampas Clump,” and “The Pylon” reveal a more realistic interest in human psychology, and they deal more directly with the theme central to Hartley’s major fiction: the acquisition, on the part of an innocent, even morally naïve, protagonist, of an awareness of the existence of evil. A frequent lecturer, and a reviewer for such periodicals as The Observer, Saturday Review, and Time and Tide from the early 1920’s to the middle 1940’s, Hartley published a volume of essays entitled The Novelist’s Responsibility: Lectures and Essays (1967), in which he deplored the twentieth century devaluation of a sense of individual moral responsibility. These essays explain Hartley’s fictional preoccupation with identity, moral values, and spiritual insight. His choice of subjects, particularly the works of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, suggests the origins of the realistic-symbolic technique he employs in both his short stories and his novels. Achievements · While Hartley’s novels from Simonetta Perkins to Facial Justice were published in the United States, they did not enjoy the popularity there which they earned in England. The Go-Between, for example, continued to be in print in England since its publication in 1953, and the Eustace and Hilda trilogy—composed of The Shrimp and the Anemone, The Sixth Heaven, and Eustace and Hilda—was given a radio dramatization by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In the course of a literary career of roughly fifty years, Hartley came to be a noted public figure, and his work received favorable attention from Lord David Cecil, Walter Allen, and John Atkins. Only in the United States, however, did his novels receive detailed critical attention. The three 461

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full-length studies of his fiction—Peter Bien’s L. P. Hartley (1963), Anne Mulkeen’s Wild Thyme, Winter Lightning: The Symbolic Novels of L. P. Hartley (1974), and Edward T. Jones’s L. P. Hartley (1978)—are all American, as are the notable treatments of Hartley’s work by James Hall and Harvey Curtis Webster. Biography · Born on December 30, 1895, near Whittlesea in Cambridgeshire, Leslie Poles Hartley was named for Sir Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and himself a noted late Victorian literary man. Hartley’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Thompson, according to Edward T. Jones, whose book on the novelist contains the most complete biographical account, was the daughter of a farmer named William James Thompson of Crawford House, Crowland, Lincolnshire. His father, H. B. Hartley, was a solicitor, justice of the peace, and later director of the successful brickworks founded by the novelist’s paternal grandfather. This information figures as part of the background to Hartley’s The Brickfield and The Betrayal. Hartley was the second of his parents’ three children; he had an older sister, Enid, and a younger, Annie Norah. None of the three ever married. Reared at Fletton Tower, near Peterborough, Hartley was educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, his stay at the latter interrupted by military service as a second lieutenant in the Norfolk Regiment during World War I. He was discharged for medical reasons and did not see action in France. In Oxford after the war, Hartley came into contact with a slightly younger generation of men, among them the future novelists Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. His closest literary friend at this period, however, may have been Lord David Cecil. After leaving Balliol with a Second Honours Degree in 1921, Hartley worked as a reviewer for various periodicals, wrote the stories later collected in Night Fears and The Killing Bottle, and cultivated friendships with members of both Bohemian Bloomsbury and British society. His novella Simonetta Perkins, a Jamesian story of a young American woman’s inconclusive passion for a Venetian gondolier, was published in 1925. Hartley made many trips to Venice. From 1933 to 1939, he spent part of each summer and fall there, and he drew on this experience for parts of Eustace and Hilda, The Boat, and My Fellow Devils. Returning to England just before the start of World War II, Hartley started work on the series of novels which earned for him a place in the British literary establishment. Given the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Eustace and Hilda in 1947 and the Heinemann Foundation Prize for The Go-Between in 1953, he served as head of the British Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) and on the management committee of the Society of Authors. In 1956, he was created a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In his later years, Hartley gave frequent talks, most notably the Clark Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1964. Joseph Losey won the Grand Prize at Cannes, France, in 1971 for a film version of The Go-Between, for which Harold Pinter wrote the script, and in 1973, Alan Bridges’s film of The Hireling, from a script by Wolf Mankowitz, won the same prize. Hartley died in London on December 13, 1972. Analysis · Indebted to Bloomsbury, as shown by a concern with personal conduct and a highly impressionistic style, L. P. Hartley betrays affinities with D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell in a more fundamental concern with larger social and moral issues. His best books argue for the existence of a spiritual dimension to life and demonstrate that recognition of its motive force, even union of oneself with its will, is a moral imperative. In this emphasis on connection, his novels recall those

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of E. M. Forster, but unlike his predecessor, Hartley insists that the nature of the motive force is supernatural, even traditionally Christian. In his most successful books, Hartley draws upon elements of both novel and romance, as Richard Chase defines them in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), and the uniqueness of the resulting hybridization precludes comparisons with the work of most of his contemporaries. Hartley’s moral vision, revealed by the gradual integration of realism and symbolism in his novels, is the most striking characteristic of his long fiction. In a book such as The Go-Between, he shows that all men are subject to the power of love, even when they deny it, and that achievement of insight into love’s capabilities is a prerequisite to achieving moral responsibility. This pattern of growth at the center of Hartley’s novels is conventionally Christian in its outlines. The protagonist of each book, beginning with Eustace Cherrington in the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, accepts his status as a “sinner” and experiences, if only briefly and incompletely, a semimystical transcendence of his fallen state. The epiphanic technique Hartley develops in the trilogy to objectify these moments of insight recurs in various forms in all of his novels, coming in time to be embodied not in symbolism but in the pattern of action in which he casts his plots. Without suggesting that Hartley’s fiction is about theology, it is clear that his concern with the subject of morality cannot avoid having religious overtones. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, he traces the process of spiritual growth in innocent, morally self-assured, and thereby flawed personalities who experience temptation, even commit sins, and eventually attain spiritual kinship with their fellow people. These encounters, in a book such as Facial Justice, occur in settings symbolic of traditional religious values, and so while Hartley’s novels may be read from psychoanalytic or mythic points of view, they are more fully comprehended from a metaphysical vantage point. There is a thematic unity to all of Hartley’s longer fiction, but after 1960, there is a marked decline in its technical complexity. In one sense, having worked out his thematic viewpoint in the process of fusing realism and symbolism in his earlier books, Hartley no longer feels the need to dramatize the encounter of good and evil and to set it convincingly in a realistic world. His last novels are fables, and in The Harness Room, the most successful of them, the lack of realism intensifies his treatment of the psychological and sexual involvement of an adolescent boy and his father’s slightly older chauffeur. This book brings Hartley’s oeuvre full circle, back to the story of the American spinster and the Venetian gondolier he produced in Simonetta Perkins at the start of his career. The Eustace and Hilda trilogy · The three novels constituting the Eustace and Hilda trilogy—The Shrimp and the Anemone, The Sixth Heaven, and Eustace and Hilda—objectify a process of moral growth and spiritual regeneration to be found in or behind all of Hartley’s subsequent fiction. The process is not unlike that which he describes, in the Clark Lectures reprinted in The Novelist’s Responsibility, as characteristic of Hawthorne’s treatment of the redeeming experience of sin in The Marble Faun (1860). The epiphanic moments Hartley uses to dramatize his protagonist’s encounters with Christ the Redeemer reveal truths which can be read on psychological, sociological, and theological levels. In The Shrimp and the Anemone, Hartley depicts the abortive rebellion of Eustace Cherrington, aged nine, against the moral and psychological authority of his thirteenyear-old sister Hilda. Set in the summers of 1905 and 1906, the novel reveals young Eustace’s intimations of a spiritual reality behind the surface of life. Unable to act in

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terms of these insights, for they are confused with his aesthetic sense, Eustace feeds his romantic inclination to construct an internal fantasy world and refuses to see the moral necessity of action. In The Sixth Heaven, Hartley details Eustace’s second effort to achieve his freedom from Hilda, this time by engineering a socially advantageous marriage for her with Dick Staveley, a war hero and rising young member of Parliament. This novel focuses on a visit the Cherringtons make in June, 1920, to the Staveleys, acquaintances who live near their childhood home at Anchorstone. Eustace’s adult epiphanic experiences are more insistent. Less tied to his childish aestheticism, they emerge in the context of the novel as hauntingly ambiguous intimations of a moral and spiritual realm which he unconsciously seeks to avoid acknowledging. In Eustace and Hilda, the final novel in the trilogy, Hartley brings his protagonist face to face with Christ during the Venetian Feast of the Redeemer, the third Sunday in July, 1920. This encounter leads to Eustace’s return to Anchorstone and acceptance of moral responsibility for the emotionally induced paralysis Hilda experienced at the end of her love affair with Dick Staveley. Back in his childhood home, Eustace learns the lesson of self-sacrificial love in Christ’s example, and he effects a cure for Hilda by staging a mock-accident for her at the edge of Anchorstone Cliff. Because of the strain this involves, he suffers a fatal heart attack, and the novel ends. His death signals the genuineness of the moral growth and spiritual regeneration which had begun in Venice. The interpenetration of realistic narrative and symbolic subtext which occurs by the end of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy objectifies Hartley’s vision of the world. The Boat · Hartley’s equivalent of Ford Madox Ford’s and Evelyn Waugh’s treatments of men at war, The Boat presents the mock-epic struggle of Timothy Casson, a forty-nine-year-old bachelor writer, to gain permission to use his rowing shell on the fishing stream that runs through Upton-on-Swirrell. Timothy, settling back in England in 1940 after an eighteen-year stay in Italy, consciously attempts to isolate himself from the effects of the war in progress in the larger world. He devotes himself to collecting china, to cultivating friends, to raising a dog, and to forcing the village magnates to allow him to row on the Swirrell. In the process, Timothy violates his own self-interest, as well as that of his nation and his class, but he is not the tragicomic figure that Eustace Cherrington becomes in the trilogy. In Hartley’s hands, Timothy achieves only a degree of the self-awareness that Eustace does, and this enables the novelist to label him the “common sinner” that all people are, a figure both sinned against and sinning. Timothy’s desire to take his boat out on the river is an assertion of individuality that polarizes the community. His attachment to his boat becomes a measure of his moral and political confusion, for Timothy is torn between the influences of Vera Cross, a Communist secret agent sent to Upton-on-Swirrell to organize unrest among the masses, and Volumnia Purbright, the wife of the Anglican vicar and an unconventional, perhaps mystical, Christian. The emblematic names suggest the comic possibilities Hartley exploits in his treatment of the two, but The Boat is a serious novel. Vera represents a social disharmony resultant upon the advocacy of ideology, while Volumnia reflects both social harmony and personal tranquillity resulting from sacrifice of self. Indeed, when Timothy persists in his protest against the prohibition against rowing and sets forth on the flooded Swirrell with two children and his dog as passengers, Volumnia confronts Vera on the riverbank. Vera attacks the vicar’s wife, and the two women tumble into the water. When Vera drowns in the Devil’s Staircase, Volumnia blames herself for the younger woman’s death and subsequently dies from

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exposure and pneumonia. When at the end of The Boat Timothy, who had to be rescued from the river when his boat capsized in the flooded stream, dreams he receives a telephone call from Volumnia inviting him to tea, he hears Vera’s voice as well as Volumnia’s, and the two women tell him that they are inseparable, as are the moral and ethical positions they represent. Near the end of the novel, Timothy prepares to leave Upton-on-Swirrell in the company of two old friends, Esther Morwen and Tyrone MacAdam. The two discuss the prospects for Timothy’s acceptance of himself as an ordinary human being. At the time of the boating accident, he had managed to rescue one of the children with him, but he needed the fortuitous help of others to rescue the second child and to reach safety himself. Timothy is clearly partially responsible for the deaths of Vera Cross and Volumnia Purbright, and the “true cross” he must bear is an acceptance of moral complexity. Whether he will achieve this insight is an open question at the end of The Boat, and Hartley’s refusal to make the book a neat statement reinforces its thematic point. The Go-Between · Hartley’s The Go-Between, arguably his finest novel, is the only one with a first-person narrator as protagonist. Leo Colston, like the focal characters of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy and The Boat, frees himself from psychological constraints and achieves a measure of moral insight. Indeed, Leo’s story amounts to a rite of passage conforming to the pattern of initiation characteristic of the Bildungsroman. More significantly, The Go-Between is a study of England on the verge of its second Elizabethan Age, and the patterns of imagery which Hartley uses to reveal the personality of Leo suggest indirectly that the Age of Aquarius will be a golden one. These linguistic patterns, introduced into the novel by Leo himself, derive from the signs of the zodiac. On one hand, they are a pattern manufactured by Leo as a schoolboy and utilized to explain his conviction that the start of the twentieth century, which he dates incorrectly as January 1, 1900, is the dawn of a second Golden Age. On the other hand, the zodiac motifs, as associated with Leo and other characters in the novel, underscore Hartley’s thematic insistence on the power of self-sacrificial love to redeem both individuals and society from error. At the start of the novel in 1951 or 1952, Leo is an elderly man engaged in sorting through the accumulated memorabilia of a lifetime. Coming upon his diary for the year 1900, inside the cover of which are printed the zodiac signs, he recalls his experiences at Southdown Hill School and his vacation visit to a schoolmate, Marcus Maudsley. In the body of the novel, the account of that nineteen-day visit to Brandham Hall, the narrative voice is split between that of the thirteen-year-old Leo of 1900 and that of the aged man with which the book begins. Used by Marcus’s sister Marian to carry messages to her lover, the tenant farmer Ted Burgess, Leo finds himself faced with the dubious morality of his actions when Marcus tells him that Marian is to marry Viscount Trimingham, the owner of Brandham Hall and a scarred veteran of the Boer War. In Leo’s mind, Marian is the Virgin of the zodiac, Trimingham the Sagittarian archer, and Burgess the Aquarian water-carrier. Determined to break the bond between Marian and Ted and to restore her to Viscount Trimingham, Leo resorts to the schoolboy magic with which he had handled bullies at school. He plans a spell involving the sacrifice of an atropa belladonna or deadly nightshade growing in a deserted outbuilding, but the ritual goes awry and he finds himself flat on his back with the plant on top of him. The next day, his thirteenth birthday, Leo is forced to lead Marian’s mother to the spot where the girl meets her lover, and they discover

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the pair engaged in sexual intercourse. For Leo, whose adult sexuality has just begun to develop, this is a significant shock, and he feels that he has been defeated by the beautiful but deadly lady, both the deadly nightshade and Marian herself. In the epilogue to The Go-Between, the elderly Leo Colston returns to Norfolk to find out the consequences of the mutual betrayal. Encountering Marian, now the dowager Lady Trimingham, once more, he undertakes again to be a messenger. This time he goes to her grandson Edward in an effort to reconcile him to the events of the fateful year 1900, to the fact that his father was really the son of Ted Burgess. This action on Leo’s part embodies the theme of all of Hartley’s fiction: The only evil in life is an unloving heart. At the end of his return journey to Brandham Hall, Leo Colston is a more vital man and a more compassionate one. Having faced the evil both inside and outside himself, he is open to love, and the Age of Aquarius can begin. That it will also be the age of Elizabeth II, given the political and sociological implications of the central action, gives Hartley’s The Go-Between its particular thematic rightness. Robert C. Petersen Other major works SHORT FICTION: Night Fears, 1924; The Killing Bottle, 1932; The Traveling Grave, 1948; The White Wand, 1954; Two for the River, 1961; Mrs. Carteret Receives, 1971; The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley, 1973. NONFICTION: The Novelist’s Responsibility: Lectures and Essays, 1967. Bibliography Bien, Peter. L. P. Hartley. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1963. The first book on Hartley’s fiction, important for its Freudian analysis of his novels; its identification of his indebtedness to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Emily Brontë; and its examination of Hartley’s literary criticism. At its best when discussing the novels about the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Includes a brief bibliography. Bloomfield, Paul. L. P. Hartley. London: Longmans, Green, 1962. An early short monograph by a personal friend of Hartley, coupled with one on Anthony Powell by Bernard Bergonzi. Focuses on character analysis and thematic concerns, providing a brief discussion of Hartley’s novels. Laudatory, perceptive, and very well written. Fane, Julian. Best Friends. London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1990. Contains a memoir of Hartley that helps to situate his fiction in terms of his sensibility and his time. Hall, James. The Tragic Comedians: Seven Modern British Novelists. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Claims that the Hartley protagonist possesses an inadequate emotional pattern that leads inevitably to failure. This neurotic behavior is discussed in his major fiction: The Boat, Eustace and Hilda, My Fellow Devils, and The Hireling. In these novels Hartley demonstrates that confidence is accompanied by a contradictory desire to fail. Jones, Edward T. L. P. Hartley. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Provides an excellent analysis of Hartley’s literary work, particularly of his novels, which are conveniently grouped. Also contains a chronology, a biographical introductory chapter, a discussion of Hartley’s literary criticism, and an excellent annotated bibliography. Of special interest are Jones’s definition of the “Hartleian novel” and his discussion of Hartley’s short fiction.

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Mulkeen, Anne. Wild Thyme, Winter Lightning: The Symbolic Novels of L. P. Hartley. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1974. Focuses on Hartley’s fiction until 1968, stressing the Hawthornian romance elements in his early novels. Particularly concerned with his adaptations of the romance and how his characters are at once themselves and archetypes or symbols. An extensive list of helpful secondary sources is provided. Webster, Harvey Curtis. After the Trauma: Representative British Novelists Since 1920. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970. The chapter on Hartley, entitled “Diffident Christian,” concerns his protagonists’ struggles to distinguish between God’s orders and society’s demands. Discusses Facial Justice, Eustace and Hilda, The Boat, and The Go-Between extensively, concluding that Hartley merits more attention than he has been given. Wright, Adrian. Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley. London: A. Deutsch, 1996. A good biography of Hartley for the beginning student. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Aldous Huxley Aldous Huxley

Born: Laleham, near Godalming, Surrey, England; July 26, 1894 Died: Los Angeles, California; November 22, 1963 Principal long fiction · Crome Yellow, 1921; Antic Hay, 1923; Those Barren Leaves, 1925; Point Counter Point, 1928; Brave New World, 1932; Eyeless in Gaza, 1936; After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 1939; Time Must Have a Stop, 1944; Ape and Essence, 1948; The Genius and the Goddess, 1955; Island, 1962. Other literary forms · Besides the novel, Aldous Huxley wrote in every other major literary form. He published several volumes of essays and won universal acclaim as a first-rate essayist. He also wrote poetry, plays, short stories, biographies, and travelogues. Achievements · Huxley achieved fame as a satirical novelist and essayist in the decade following World War I. In his article “Aldous Huxley: The Ultra-Modern Satirist,” published in The Nation in 1926, Edwin Muir observed, “No other writer of our time has built up a serious reputation so rapidly and so surely; compared with his rise to acceptance that of Mr. Lawrence or Mr. Eliot has been gradual, almost painful.” In the 1920’s and the early 1930’s, Huxley became so popular that the first London editions of his books were, within a decade of their publication, held at a premium by dealers and collectors. Huxley’s early readers, whose sensibilities had been hardened by the war, found his wit, his iconoclasm, and his cynicism to their taste. They were also impressed by his prophetic gifts. Bertrand Russell said, “What Huxley thinks today, England thinks tomorrow.” Believing that all available knowledge should be absorbed if humanity were to survive, Huxley assimilated ideas from a wide range of fields and allowed them to find their way into his novels, which came to be variously identified as “novels of ideas,” “discussion novels,” or “conversation novels.” His increasing store of knowledge did not, however, help him overcome his pessimistic and cynical outlook on life. Huxley’s reputation as a novelist suffered a sharp decline in his later years. In The Novel and the Modern World (1939), David Daiches took a highly critical view of Huxley’s novels, and since then, many other critics have joined him. It is often asserted that Huxley was essentially an essayist whose novels frequently turn into intellectual tracts. It has also been held that his plots lack dramatic interest and his characters are devoid of real substance. Attempts were made in the late twentieth century, however, to rehabilitate him as an important novelist. In any case, no serious discussion of twentieth century fiction can afford to ignore Huxley’s novels. Biography · Aldous Leonard Huxley was born at Laleham, near Godalming, Surrey, on July 26, 1894. His father, Leonard Huxley, a biographer and historian, was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, the great Darwinist, and his mother, Julia, was the niece of Matthew Arnold. Sir Julian Huxley, the famous biologist, was his brother. With this intellectual and literary family background, Huxley entered Eton at the age of fourteen. Owing to an attack of keratitis punctata, causing blindness, he had to withdraw 468

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from school within two years, an event which left a permanent mark on his character, evident in his reflective temperament and detached manner. He learned to read Braille and continued his studies under tutors. As soon as he was able to read with the help of a magnifying glass, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature and philosophy. Huxley started his career as a journalist on the editorial staff of The Athenaeum under J. Middleton Murry. He relinquished his journalistic career when he could support himself by his writing. By 1920, he had three volumes of verse and a collection of short stories to his credit. He had also become acquainted with a number of writers, including D. H. Lawrence. While in Italy in the 1920’s, he met Lawrence again, and the two became close friends. Lawrence exercised a profound influence on Library of Congress Huxley, particularly in his distrust of intellect, against his faith in blood consciousness. Later, Huxley became a disciple of Gerald Heard, the pacifist, and took an active part in Heard’s pacifist movement. In 1937, he moved to California, where he came into contact with the Ramakrishna Mission in Hollywood. In Hinduism and Buddhism, Huxley found the means of liberation from man’s bondage to the ego, a problem which had concerned him for a long time. To see if the mystical experience could be chemically induced, Huxley took drugs in 1953, and his writings concerning hallucinogenic drugs helped to popularize their use. Huxley married Maria Nys in 1919. After her death in 1955, he married Laura Archera in 1956. On November 22, 1963, Huxley died in Los Angeles, where his body was cremated the same day. There was no funeral, but friends in London held a memorial service the next month. Analysis · Aldous Huxley’s novels present, on the whole, a bitterly satirical and cynical picture of contemporary society. A recurring theme in his work is the egocentricity of the people of the twentieth century, their ignorance of any reality transcending the self, their loneliness and despair, and their pointless and sordid existence. Devoid of any sense of ultimate purpose, the world often appears to Huxley as a wilderness of apes, baboons, monkeys, and maggots, a veritable inferno, presided over by Belial himself. The dominant negativism in the novelist’s outlook on life is pointedly and powerfully revealed by Will Farnaby, a character in his book Island, who is fond of saying that he will not take yes for an answer.

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Though Huxley finds the contemporary world largely hopeless, he reveals the possibility of redemption. Little oases of humanity, islands of decency, and atolls of liberated souls generally appear in his fictional worlds. A good number of his characters transcend their egos, achieve completeness of being, recognize the higher spiritual goals of life, and even dedicate their lives to the service of an indifferent humanity. Even Will Farnaby, who will not take yes for an answer, finally casts his lot with the islanders against the corrupt and the corrupting world. It is true that these liberated individuals are not, in Huxley’s novels, a force strong enough to resist the onward march of civilization toward self-destruction, but they are, nevertheless, a testimony to the author’s faith in the possibilities of sanity even in the most difficult of times. No one who agrees with Huxley’s assessment of the modern world will ask for a stronger affirmation of faith in human redemption. Huxley believed that man’s redemption lies in his attainment of “wholeness” and integrity. His concept of wholeness did not, however, remain the same from the beginning to the end of his career. As he matured as a novelist, Huxley’s sense of wholeness achieved greater depth and clarity. Under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, Huxley viewed wholeness in terms of the harmonious blending of all human faculties. Writing under the influence of Gerald Heard, he expanded his idea of wholeness to include a mystical awareness of the unity of man with nature. Coming under the influence of the Eastern religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, he gave his concept of wholeness further spiritual and metaphysical depth. Crome Yellow · In Crome Yellow, his first novel, Huxley exposed the egocentricity of modern man, his inability to relate to others or recognize any reality, social or spiritual, outside himself, and the utter pointlessness of his life. Jenny Mullion, a minor character in the novel, symbolically represents the situation that prevails in the modern world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness. It is difficult for anyone to carry on an intelligent conversation with her. Once early in the book, when Denis Stone, the poet, inquires if she slept well, she speaks to him, in reply, about thunderstorms. Following this ineffectual conversation, Denis reflects on the nature of Jenny Mullion. Parallel straight lines . . . meet only at infinity. He might talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most. Almost every character in the novel is set fast in the world that he has made for himself and cannot come out of it to establish contact with others. Henry even declaims, “How gay and delightful life would be if one could get rid of all the human contacts!” He is of the view that “the proper study of mankind is books.” His history of his family, which took him twenty-five years to write and four years to print, was obviously undertaken in order to escape human contacts. If Henry is occupied with the history of Crome, Priscilla, his wife, spends her time cultivating a rather ill-defined malady, betting, horoscope reading, and studying Barbecue-Smith’s books on spiritualism. Barbecue-Smith busies himself with infinity. Bodiham, the village priest, is obsessed by the Second Coming. Having read somewhere about the dangers of sexual repression, Mary Bracegirdle hunts for a lover who will provide her with an outlet for her repressed instincts. Denis constantly broods over his failure as a writer, as a lover, and as a man. Scogan, disdainful of life, people, and the arts, finds consolation only in

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reason and ideas and dreams about a scientifically controlled Rational State where babies are produced in test tubes and artists are sent to a lethal chamber. Though there is a good deal of interaction among the guests at Crome, no real meeting of minds or hearts takes place among them; this failure to connect is best illustrated by the numerous hopeless love affairs described in the novel. Denis, for example, loves Anne, but his repeated attempts to convey his love for her fail. Anne, who is four years older than Denis, talks to him as if he were a child and does not know that he is courting her. Mary falls in love with Denis only to be rebuffed. Then, she makes advances to Gombauld, the painter, with no better result. Next, she pursues Ivor, the man of many gifts and talents, and is brokenhearted to learn that she means nothing to him. She is finally seen in the embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions, and it is anybody’s guess what comes of this affair. Even the relationship between Anne and Gombauld, which showed every promise of maturation into one of lasting love, meets, at the end, the same fate as the others. Thumbing through Jenny’s red notebook of cartoons, Denis suddenly becomes conscious of points of view other than his own. He learns that there are others who are “in their way as elaborate and complete as he is in his.” Denis’s appreciation of the world outside himself comes, however, too late in the novel. Though he would like to abandon the plan of his intended departure from Crome, particularly when he sees that it makes Anne feel wretched, he is too proud to change his mind and stay in Crome to try again with her. Thus, the characters in Crome Yellow remain self-absorbed, separated from one another, and hardly concerned with the ultimate ends of life. Scogan betrays himself and others when he says, “We all know that there’s no ultimate point.” Antic Hay · Antic Hay, Huxley’s second novel, presents, like Crome Yellow, an infernolike picture of contemporary society, dominated by egocentric characters living in total isolation from society and suffering extreme loneliness, boredom, and despair. Evidence of self-preoccupation and isolation is abundant. Gumbril Junior continually dwells on his failings and on his prospects of getting rich. He retires every now and then to his private rooms at Great Russell Street, where he enjoys his stay, away from people. Lypiatt, a painter, poet, and musician, is without a sympathetic audience. “I find myself alone, spiritually alone,” he complains. Shearwater, the scientist, has no interest in anything or anyone except in the study of the regulative function of the kidneys. Mercaptan is a writer whose theme is “the pettiness, the simian limitations, the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of Homo soi-disant Sapiens.” The men and women in Antic Hay, each living in his or her private universe, are unable to establish any true and meaningful relationships with one another. Myra Viveash is cold and callous toward men who come to her and offer their love: Gumbril Junior, Lypiatt, Shearwater, and others. She contemptuously lends herself to them. Lypiatt, hopelessly in love with her, finally takes his life. Gumbril, deserted by Myra, feels revengeful; in turn, he is cruelly cynical in his treatment of Mrs. Rosie Shearwater. Because of his carelessness, he loses Emily, who might have brought some happiness and meaning into his life. Engaged in his scientific research, Shearwater completely ignores his wife, with the result that she gives herself to other men. Men and women can easily find sexual partners, which does not, however, close the distance between them: They remain as distant as ever. On the eve of Gumbril’s intended departure from London for the Continent, Gumbril and Myra taxi the entire length and breadth of the West End to meet friends and invite them to a dinner that night. Their friends are, significantly enough, engaged

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in one way or another and shut up in their rooms—Lypiatt writing his life for Myra; Coleman sleeping with Rosie; and Shearwater cycling in a hot box in his laboratory. Despite the lovely moon above on the summer night and the poignant sorrow in their hearts, Gumbril and Myra make no attempt to take advantage of their last ride together and come closer. Instead, they aimlessly drive from place to place. Those Barren Leaves · Huxley’s next novel, Those Barren Leaves, shows how people who might be expected to be more enlightened are as self-centered as the mass of humanity. The setting of the novel, which deals with a circle of British intellectuals in Italy, immediately and powerfully reinforces the fact of their social isolation. Mrs. Lilian Aldwinkle, a patroness of the arts and a votary of love, wants to believe that the whole world revolves around her. As usual, she is possessive of her guests who have assembled at her newly bought palace of Cybo Malaspina in the village of Vezza in Italy, and she wants them to do as she commands. She is unable, however, to hold them completely under her control. In spite of all her efforts, she fails to win the love of Calamy, and later of Francis Chelifer; Chelifer remains unmoved even when she goes down on her knees and begs for his love. She sinks into real despair when her niece escapes her smothering possessiveness and falls in love with Lord Hovenden. Well past her youth, Mrs. Aldwinkle finds herself left alone with nobody to blame but herself for her plight. Miss Mary Thriplow and Francis Chelifer are both egocentric writers, cut off from the world of real human beings. Miss Thriplow is obsessed with her suffering and pain, which are mostly self-induced. Her mind is constantly busy, spinning stories on gossamer passions she experiences while moving, talking, and loving. Conscious of the unreality of the life of upper-class society, Chelifer gives up poetry and also the opportunity of receiving a fellowship at Oxford in favor of a job as editor of The Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette in London. The squalor, the repulsiveness, and the stupidity of modern life constitute, in Chelifer’s opinion, reality. Because it is the artist’s duty to live amid reality, he lives among an assorted group of eccentrics in a boardinghouse in Gog’s court, which he describes as “the navel of reality.” If Miss Thriplow is lost in her world of imagination and art, Chelifer is lost in “the navel of reality”—equidistant from the heart of reality. Through the character of Calamy, Huxley suggests a way to overcome the perverse, modern world. Rich, handsome, and hedonistic, Calamy was once a part of this world, but he no longer enjoys running after women, wasting his time in futile intercourse, and pursuing pleasure. Rather, he spends his time reading, satisfying his curiosity about things, and thinking. He withdraws to a mountain retreat, hoping that his meditation will ultimately lead him into the mysteries of existence, the relationship between men, and that between man and the external world. Calamy’s withdrawal to a mountain retreat is, no doubt, an unsatisfactory solution, particularly in view of the problem of egocentricity and isolation of the individual from society raised in Those Barren Leaves and Huxley’s two preceding novels. It may, however, be noted that Calamy’s isolation is not a result of his egocentricity: He recognizes that there are spheres of reality beyond the self. Point Counter Point · Point Counter Point, Huxley’s first mature novel, is regarded by many critics as his masterpiece, a major work of twentieth century fiction. By introducing similar characters facing different situations and different characters facing a similar situation, a technique analogous to the musical device of counterpoint,

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Huxley presents a comprehensive and penetrating picture of the sordidness of contemporary society. Mark Rampion, a character modeled upon D. H. Lawrence, sees the problem of modern humanity as one of lopsided development. Instead of achieving a harmonious development of all human faculties—reason, intellect, emotion, instinct, and body— modern humankind allows one faculty to develop at the expense of the others. “It’s time,” Rampion says, “there was a revolt in favor of life and wholeness.” Huxley makes a penetrating analysis of the failure of his characters to achieve love and understanding. Particularly acute is his analysis of Philip Quarles, a critical self-portrait of the author. Since a childhood accident, which left him slightly lame in one leg, Philip has shunned society and has developed a reflective and intellectual temperament. As a result of his constant preoccupation with ideas, the emotional side of his character atrophies, and he is unable to love even his wife with any degree of warmth. In the ordinary daily world of human contacts, he is curiously like a foreigner, not at home with his fellows, finding it difficult or impossible to enter into communication with any but those who can speak his native intellectual language of ideas. He knows his weakness, and he tries unsuccessfully to transform a detached intellectual skepticism into a way of harmonious living. It is no wonder that his wife, Lilian, feels exasperated with his coldness and unresponsiveness and feels that she could as well love a bookcase. Philip, however, is not as hopeless a case of lopsided development as the rest of the characters who crowd the world of Point Counter Point. Lord Edward Tantamount, the forty-year-old scientist, is in all but intellect a child. He is engaged in research involving the transplantation of the tail of a newt onto the stump of its amputated foreleg to find out if the tail will grow into a leg or continue incongruously to grow as a tail. He shuts himself up in his laboratory most of the day and a good part of the night, avoiding all human contact. Lady Edward, his wife, and Lucy Tantamount, his daughter, live for sexual excitement. Spandril, who prides himself on being a sensualist, actually hates women. Suffering from a sense of betrayal by his mother when she remarries, he attracts women only to torture them. Burlap wears a mask of spirituality, but he is a materialist to the core. Molly, pretty and plump, makes herself desirable to men but lacks genuine emotional interest. The novel contains an assortment of barbarians (to use the language of Rampion) of the intellect, of the body, and of the spirit, suffering from “Newton’s disease,” “Henry Ford’s disease,” “Jesus’ disease,” and so on—various forms of imbalance in which one human faculty is emphasized at the expense of the others. Point Counter Point presents an extremely divided world. None of the numerous marriages, except that of the Rampions, turns out well, nor do the extramarital relationships. Both Lilian Quarles and her brother, Walter Bidlake, have problems with their spouses. Lilian plans to leave her husband, Philip Quarles, and go to Everard Webley, a political leader, who has been courting her, but the plan is terminated with Webley’s murder. After leaving his wife, Walter lives with Marjorie Carling but finds her dull and unexciting within two years. Ignoring Marjorie, who is pregnant with his child, Walter begins to court Lucy Tantamount, a professional siren, who, after keeping him for a long time in a state of uncertainty, turns him away. John Bidlake, the father of Lilian and Walter, has been married three times and has had a number of love affairs. Sidney Quarles, the father of Philip, has had many secret affairs. Disharmony thus marks the marital world presented in the novel, effectively dramatized by means of parallel, contrapuntal plots.

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Mark and Mary Rampion serve as a counterpoint to the gallery of barbarians and lopsided characters in the novel. Although Mary comes from an aristocratic family and Mark belongs to the working class, they do not suffer from the usual class prejudices. Transcending their origins, they have also transcended the common run of egocentric and self-divided personalities. They have achieved wholeness and integrity in personality and outlook. There is no dichotomy between what they say and what they do. Mark’s art is a product of lived experience, and his concern for it is inseparable from his concern for life. Though the dominant mood of Huxley’s early novels is one of negativism and despair, the Rampions exemplify his faith in the possibility of achieving individual wholeness and loving human relationships. The Rampions may not be able to change the state of affairs in the modern world, but their presence itself is inspiring; what is more, they are, unlike Calamy of Those Barren Leaves, easily accessible to all those who want to meet them. Brave New World · Brave New World, Huxley’s best-known work, describes a centrally administered and scientifically controlled future society in A.F. 632 (A.F. standing for After Ford), around six hundred years from the twentieth century. It is difficult to recognize the people of Huxley’s future World State as human beings. Decanted from test tubes in laboratories, the population of the Brave New World comes in five standardized varieties: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Each group is genetically conditioned to carry out different tasks. By various methods of psychological conditioning, they are trained to live in total identification with society and to shun all activities that threaten the stability of the community. The State takes full care of them, including the emotional side of their life. All their desires are satisfied; they do not want what they cannot get. With substitutes and surrogates such as the Pregnancy Substitute and the Violent Passion Surrogate, life is made happy and comfortable for everyone. Although people have nothing of which to complain, they seem to suffer pain continually. Relief from pain is, however, readily available to them in soma, which is distributed by the State every day. Sentiments, ideas, and practices which liberate the human spirit find no place in Huxley’s scientific utopia and are, in fact, put down as harmful to the stability of the community. Parentage, family, and home become obsolete; sex is denuded of all its mystery and significance. Small children are encouraged to indulge in erotic play so that they learn to take a strictly matter-of-fact view of sex. Men and women indulge in copulation to fill idle hours. Loyalty in sex and love is regarded as abnormal behavior. Love of nature, solitude, and meditation are looked upon as serious maladies requiring urgent medical attention. Art, science, and religion are all considered threatening. Patience, courage, self-denial, beauty, nobility, and truth become irrelevant to a society that believes in consumerism, comfort, and happiness. Huxley shows how some people in the Brave New World, despite every care taken by the State to ensure their place in the social order, do not fall in line. Bernard Marx yearns for Lenina Crowne and wants to take her on long walks in lonely places. Helmholtz Watson’s creative impulses demand poetic expression. Even Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller of Western Europe, is somewhat regretful over his abandonment of scientific research in favor of his present position. People who stubbornly refuse to conform to the social order are removed promptly by the State to an island where they can live freely according to their wishes. It is through the character of John, the Savage, from the Reservation, that Huxley

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clearly exposes the vulgarity and horror of the Brave New World. Attracted to civilization on seeing Lenina, the Savage soon comes to recoil from it. In his long conversation with Mustapha Mond, he expresses his preference for the natural world of disease, unhappiness, and death over the mechanical world of swarming indistinguishable sameness. Unable to get out of it, he retires to a lonely place where he undertakes his purification by taking mustard and warm water, doing hard labor, and resorting to self-flagellation. In Brave New World, Huxley presents a world in which wholeness becomes an object of a hopeless quest. Looking back at the novel, he observed that this was the most serious defect of the story. In a foreword written in 1946, he said that if he were to rewrite the book, he would offer the Savage a third alternative: Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity—a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. Eyeless in Gaza · In Eyeless in Gaza, Huxley returns to the subject of egocentric modern man deeply buried in intellectual preoccupations, sensuality, ideology, and fanaticism. Sensualists abound in Eyeless in Gaza. The most notorious among them are Mrs. Mary Amberley and her daughter, Helen Ledwidge, both mistresses at different times to Anthony Beavis, the central character in the novel. Believing in “sharp, short, and exciting” affairs, Mary keeps changing her lovers until she gets prematurely old, spent, and poor. When nobody wants to have her any more, she takes to morphine to forget her misery. Helen marries Hugh Ledwidge but soon realizes that he is incapable of taking an interest in anything except his books. To compensate for her unhappy married life, she goes from man to man in search of emotional satisfaction. Indeed, sensuality marks the lives of most of the members of the upper-class society presented in the novel. In addition to sensualists, various other types of single-minded characters share the world of Eyeless in Gaza. Brian, one of Anthony’s classmates and friends, suffers from a maniacal concern for chastity, and his mother shows a great possessiveness toward him. Mark, another of Anthony’s classmates, becomes a cynical revolutionary. John Beavis, Anthony’s father, makes philology the sole interest of his life. There are also Communists, Fascists, Fabians, and other fanatics, all fighting for their different causes. Anthony Beavis is estranged early in his life from men and society after the death of his mother. He grows into manhood cold and indifferent to people. He finds it a disagreeable and laborious task to establish contacts; even with his own father, he maintains a distance. He does not give himself away to his friends or to the women he loves. Elements of Sociology, a book Beavis is engaged in writing, assumes the highest priority in his life, and he is careful to avoid the “non-job,” personal relations and emotional entanglements which might interfere with his work’s progress. As he matures, however, Beavis aspires to achieve a sense of completeness above the self: “I value completeness. I think it’s one’s duty to develop all one’s potentialities—all of them.” At this stage, he believes in knowledge, acquired by means of intellect rather than by Laurentian intuition. He is interested only in knowing about truth, not experiencing it like a saint: “I’m quite content with only knowing about the way of perfection.” He thinks that experience is not worth the price, for it costs one’s liberty. Gradually, he realizes that knowledge is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, a means to achieve freedom from the self. After being so enlightened, he feels

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genuine love for Helen, who remains unmoved, however, because of her past experiences with him. From Dr. Miller, the anthropologist, Beavis learns how to obliterate the self and achieve wholeness through love and selfless service. He has a mystic experience of the unity of all life and becomes a pacifist to serve humankind. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan · In After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, his first novel after his move to California, Huxley satirized the frenzied attempts made by men of the twentieth century to enrich their lives, stressing that the peace that comes with transcendence can bring an enduring joy. Huxley illustrates the vacuity of modern life through the character of Mr. Stoyte, an old California oil magnate living amid every conceivable luxury and comfort. With endless opportunities before him to make more money and enjoy life (he keeps a young mistress of twenty-two), Stoyte wants to live as long as he can. He finances Dr. Obispo’s research on longevity in the hope that he will be able to benefit from the results of the doctor’s experiments. He acquires the valuable Haubert Papers, relating to the history of an old English family, in order to discover the secret of the long life of the Fifth Earl, and he hires Jeremy Pordage, an English scholar, to arrange the papers. Dr. Obispo and his assistant, Pete, are basically no different from Mr. Stoyte in their outlooks. They believe that they will be rendering a great service to humanity by extending man’s life, little realizing that growing up, as they conceive it, is really growing back into the kind of apelike existence represented by the life of the Fifth Earl. Jeremy Pordage has no real interest in anything except literature, and he too betrays a narrowness of outlook. Propter exemplifies Huxley’s dedicated search for more-than-personal consciousness. Retired from his university job, he spends his time helping poor migrant workers, trying to find ways of being self-reliant, and thinking about the timeless good. He argues that nothing good can be achieved at the human level, which is the level of “time and craving,” the two aspects of evil. He disapproves most of what goes on in the name of patriotism, idealism, and spiritualism because he thinks that they are marks of man’s greed and covetousness. One should, in his view, aim at the highest ideal: the liberation from personality, time, and craving into eternity. Time Must Have a Stop · Bruno Rontini, the mystic saint in Time Must Have a Stop, observes that only one out of every ten thousand herrings manages to break out of his carapace completely, and few of those that break out become full-sized fish. He adds that the odds against a man’s spiritual maturation today are even greater. Most people remain, according to him, spiritual children. Time Must Have a Stop presents the obstacles that Sebastian Barnack has to face before he can reach full spiritual maturation. If egocentricity and single-mindedness were the main hurdles for Philip Quarles and Anthony Beavis, Sebastian’s problems are created by his weak personality, shaped by his puritanical and idealistic father. He possesses fine poetic and intellectual endowments, but he is disappointed with his own immature appearance. Even though he is aware of his superior gifts, he looks “like a child” at seventeen. Naturally, his relatives and friends take an adoptive attitude toward him and try to influence him in different ways. Eustace, his rich and self-indulgent uncle, teaches him how to live and let live and enjoy life. Mrs. Thwale helps him to overcome his shyness in a most outrageous manner. There are many others who try to mold Sebastian’s destiny and prevent him from true self-realization. Huxley offers further insights into Propter’s mystical faith through the character of Bruno Rontini, under whose guidance Sebastian finally receives enlightenment.

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Bruno believes that there is only one corner of the universe that one can be certain of improving, and that is one’s own self. He says that a man has to begin there, not outside, not on other people, for a man has to be good before he can do good. Bruno believes that only by taking the fact of eternity into account can one free one’s enslaved thoughts: “And it is only by deliberately paying our attention and our primary allegiance to eternity that we can prevent time from turning our lives into a pointless or diabolic foolery.” Under the guidance of Bruno, Sebastian becomes aware of a timeless and infinite presence. After his spiritual liberation, he begins to work for world peace. He thinks that one of the indispensable conditions for peace is “a shared theology.” He evolves a “Minimum Working Hypothesis,” to which all men of all countries and religions can subscribe. Ape and Essence · Huxley’s increasing faith in the possibility of man’s liberation in this world did not, at any time, blind him to man’s immense capacity for evil. Ape and Essence describes how man’s apelike instincts bring about the destruction of the world through a nuclear World War III. New Zealand escapes the holocaust, and in A. D. 2108, about one hundred years after the war, the country’s Re-Discovery Expedition to North America reaches the coast of Southern California, at a place about twenty miles west of Los Angeles, where Dr. Poole, the Chief Botanist of the party, is taken prisoner by descendants of people who survived the war. Though some Californians have survived the war, the effects of radioactivity still show in the birth of deformed babies, who are liquidated one day of the year in the name of the Purification of the Race. Men and women are allowed free sexual intercourse only two weeks a year following the Purification ceremony so that all the deformed babies that are born in the year are taken care of at one time. Women wear shirts and trousers embroidered with the word “no” on their breasts and seats, and people who indulge in sex during any other part of the year, “Hots” as they are called, are buried alive or castrated and forced to join the priesthood, unless they are able to escape into the community of “Hots” in the north. The California survivors dig up graves to relieve the dead bodies of their clothes and other valuable items, roast bread over fires fueled by books from the Public Library, and worship Belial. Introducing the film script of Ape and Essence, Huxley suggested that present society, even under normal conditions, is not basically different from the society of the survivors depicted in the novel. Gandhi’s assassination, he says, had very little impact on most people, who remained preoccupied with their own petty personal problems. Under normal conditions, this unspiritual society would grow into the kind of society represented by Dr. Poole and his team. Dr. Poole is portrayed as a middle-aged child, full of inhibitions and suppressed desires, suffering under the dominance of his puritanical mother. Ironically, Dr. Poole experiences a sense of wholeness in the satanic postatomic world, as he sheds his inhibitions and finds a free outlet for his suppressed desires during the sexual orgies following the Purification ceremony. Declining the invitation of the Arch Vicar to join his order, Dr. Poole escapes with Loola, the girl who has effected his awakening, into the land of the “Hots.” Through the episode of Dr. Poole, Huxley suggests that self-transcendence is possible even in the worst of times. The Genius and the Goddess · The Genius and the Goddess describes how Rivers, brought up like Dr. Poole of Apes and Essence in a puritanical family, undergoes a series of disturbing experiences in the household of Henry and Katy Maartens, which appar-

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ently lead him into a spiritual awakening in the end. Rivers joins the Maartens household to assist Henry, the “genius,” in his scientific research. He is shocked when Katy, the “goddess,” climbs into his bed and shocked again when he sees Katy, rejuvenated by her adultery, performing her wifely devotions with all earnestness, as if nothing had happened. To his further bewilderment and shock, he discovers that he is sought by the daughter as well. The mother outwits the daughter, but Katy and Rivers face the danger of being exposed before Henry. Rivers is, however, saved from disgrace when the mother and daughter both are killed in a car accident. Rivers is an old man as he narrates the story of his progress toward awareness. Though his final awakening is not described, one can safely infer from his attitude toward his past experiences that he has risen above Katy’s passion and Henry’s intellect to a level outside and above time and has achieved a sense of wholeness. There is, indeed, no way of telling how grace comes. Island · As previously noted, Huxley creates in almost every novel an island of decency to illustrate the possibility of achieving liberation from bondage to the ego and to time, even amid the chaos of modern life. This island is generally represented by an individual or a group of individuals, or it is simply stated to be located in some remote corner of the world. In his last novel, Island, Huxley offers a picture of a whole society that has evolved a set of operations, such as yoga, dhyana (meditation), maithuna (yoga of love), and Zen, to achieve self-transcendence and realize the Vedantic truth, tat tvam asi, “thou art That.” In Huxley’s island of Pala, the chief concern underlying child care, education, religion, and government is to ensure among its citizens a harmonious development of all human faculties and an achievement of a sense of completeness. To save their children from crippling influences, the parents of Pala bring up one another’s children on a basis of mutual exchange. In school, children are taught the important aspects of life from biology to ecology, from sex to religion. They are taken to maternity hospitals so that they can see how children are born; they are even shown how people die. No one subject or area is given exclusive importance. The credo is that “nothing short of everything will really do.” When they come of age, boys and girls freely engage in sex. Suppressed feelings and emotions are given an outlet in a vigorous type of dance. An admixture of Hinduism and Buddhism is the religion of the people, but there is no orthodoxy about it. “Karuna” or compassion and an attention to “here and now,” to what is happening at any given moment, are the basic tenets of their way of life. Moksha medicines are freely available to those who want to extend their awareness and get a glimpse of the Clear Light and a knowlege of the Divine Ground. As people know how to live gracefully, they also know how to die gracefully when the time for death comes. The country has followed a benevolent monarchy for one hundred years. The nation is aligned neither with the capitalist countries nor with the communists. It is opposed to industrialization and militarization. It has rich oil resources but has refused to grant licenses to the numerous oil companies that are vying to exploit Pala. Will Farnaby, the journalist who has managed to sneak ashore the forbidden island, is so greatly impressed by the imaginative and creative Palanese way of life that he abandons the mission for which he went to the island, which was to obtain, by any means possible, a license for the South East-Asia Petroleum Company to drill for oil on the island. Huxley fully recognizes the extreme vulnerability of the ideal of integrity and wholeness in the modern world. The state of Pala has, for example, incurred the

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displeasure of both the capitalist and communist countries by its policy of nonalignment. Many big companies are resorting to bribery in an effort to get a foothold on the island. Colonel Dipa, the military dictator of the neighboring state of RandangLobo, has expansionist ambitions. While Pala is thus threatened by the outside world, corruption has also set in from within. Dowager Rani and Murugan, her son, disapprove of the isolationist policies of the island and want their country to march along with the rest of the world. On the day Murugan is sworn king, he invites the army from Randang-Lobo to enter the island and massacre the people who have been opposed to his progressive outlook. Huxley’s novels not only present the horrors of the modern world, but they also show ways of achieving spiritual liberation and wholeness. Huxley is among the few writers of the twentieth century who fought a brave and relentless battle against life-destroying forces. Untiringly, he sought ways of enriching life by cleansing the doors of perception, awakening his readers to the vital spiritual side of their beings. S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal Other major works SHORT FICTION: Limbo, 1920; Mortal Coils, 1922; Little Mexican and Other Stories, 1924 (pb. in U.S. as Young Archimedes, and Other Stories, 1924); Two or Three Graces, and Other Stories, 1926; Brief Candles: Stories, 1930; The Gioconda Smile, 1938 (first pb. in Mortal Coils). PLAYS: The Discovery, pb. 1924; The World of Light, pb. 1931; The Gioconda Smile, pr., pb. 1948. POETRY: The Burning Wheel, 1916; Jonah, 1917; The Defeat of Youth, 1918; Leda, 1920; Arabia Infelix, 1929; The Cicadas and Other Poems, 1931. NONFICTION: On the Margin: Notes and Essays, 1923; Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist, 1925; Jesting Pilate, 1926; Essays New and Old, 1926; Proper Studies, 1927; Do What You Will, 1929; Holy Face and Other Essays, 1929; Vulgarity in Literature, 1930; Music at Night, 1931; Texts and Pretexts, 1932; Beyond the Mexique Bay, 1934; The Olive Tree, 1936; Ends and Means, 1937; Grey Eminence, 1941; The Art of Seeing, 1942; The Perennial Philosophy, 1945; Themes and Variations, 1950; The Devils of Loudun, 1952; The Doors of Perception, 1954; Heaven and Hell, 1956; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1956 (pb. in England as Adonis and the Alphabet, and Other Essays, 1956); Brave New World Revisited, 1958; Collected Essays, 1959; Literature and Science, 1963. Bibliography Baker, Robert S. The Dark Historic Page: Social Satire and Historicism in the Novels of Aldous Huxley, 1921-1939. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Devotes separate chapters to close readings of Huxley’s novels, which are analyzed in terms of the protagonist’s conflict with the prevailing secular society. Claims that Huxley is concerned with dystopian dilemmas and the price to be paid for the protagonist’s losing struggle against change and society. Includes an excellent bibliography. Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1974. A superbly written life of the writer by one of England’s renowned authors. In addition to the well-informed narrative, Bedford includes a chronology, a chronological list of Huxley’s works, and a bibliography. Bowering, Peter. Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Treats Huxley as a novelist of ideas and attempts to treat the fiction

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and nonfiction as a whole. Each of his nine novels is analyzed in a separate chapter, and in a concluding chapter the complex relationship between the novelist and the artist is discussed. Well indexed. Deery, June. Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of Science. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Discusses Huxley’s use of science in his novels. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Firchlow, Peter. Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Although the focus is on Huxley’s novels, especially Point Counter Point and Brave New World, the book does provide a biographical chapter and one on his poetry, which is ignored by most writers. One of the highlights of the book is the parallel established between Huxley’s Island and Jonathan Swift’s book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels. May, Keith M. Aldous Huxley. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1972. Addresses the problem of how “novelistic” Huxley’s novels are and concludes that it is language rather than structure that determines the meaning of each of his novels. The eleven novels, each of which is analyzed in a separate chapter, are divided into two chronological groups: novels of exploration and novels of certainty, with the dividing line coming between Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). Also contains a helpful bibliography. Meckier, Jerome, ed. Critical Essays on Aldous Huxley. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Thoughtful essays on the author’s oeuvre. Bibliographical references and an index are included. Nance, Guinevera A. Aldous Huxley. New York: Continuum, 1988. Nance’s introductory biographical chapter (“The Life Theoretic”) reflects her emphasis on Huxley’s novels of ideas. The novels, which are discussed at length, are divided into three chronological groups, with the utopian novels coming in the second group. Supplies a detailed chronology and a fairly extensive bibliography. Watt, Donald, ed. Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. An invaluable chronological collection of book reviews and other short essays on Huxley’s work and life. Among the literary contributors are Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, William Inge, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and André Gide. The introduction traces the critical response to Huxley. Includes an extensive bibliography as well as information about translations and book sales.

P. D. James P. D. James

Born: Oxford, England; August 3, 1920 Principal long fiction · Cover Her Face, 1962; A Mind to Murder, 1963; Unnatural Causes, 1967; Shroud for a Nightingale, 1971; An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 1972; The Black Tower, 1975; Death of an Expert Witness, 1977; Innocent Blood, 1980; The Skull Beneath the Skin, 1982; A Taste for Death, 1986; Devices and Desires, 1989; The Children of Men, 1992; Original Sin, 1994; A Certain Justice, 1997. Other literary forms · Though P. D. James is known principally as a novelist, she is also a short-story writer and a playwright. The great bulk of James’s work is in the form of the long narrative, but her short fiction has found a wide audience through its publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other popular periodicals. It is generally agreed that James requires the novel form to show her literary strengths to best advantage. Still, short stories such as “The Victim” reveal in microcosm the dominant theme of the long works. James’s lone play, A Private Treason, was first produced in London on March 12, 1985. Achievements · James’s first novel, Cover Her Face, did not appear until 1962, at which time the author was in her early forties. Acceptance of her as a major crime novelist, however, grew very quickly. A Mind to Murder appeared in 1963, and with the publication of Unnatural Causes in 1967 came that year’s prize from the Crime Writers Association. In the novels which have followed, James has shown an increasing mastery of the labyrinthine murder-and-detection plot. This mastery is the feature of her work that most appeals to one large group of her readers, while a second group of readers would single out the subtlety and psychological validity of her characterizations. Critics have often remarked that James, more than almost any other modern mystery writer, has succeeded in overcoming the limitations of the genre. In addition, she has created one of the more memorable descendants of Sherlock Holmes. Like Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, James’s Adam Dalgliesh is a sleuth whose personality is more interesting than his skill in detection. Biography · Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford, England, on August 3, 1920. She graduated from Cambridge High School for Girls in 1937. She was married to Ernest C. B. White, a medical practitioner, from August 8, 1941, until his death in 1964. She worked as a hospital administrator from 1949 to 1968 and as a civil servant in the Department of Home Affairs, London, from 1968 to 1972. From 1972 until her retirement in 1979, she was a senior civil servant in the crime department. Although beginning her career as a novelist rather late in life, by 1997 James had authored fourteen books, nine of which were filmed for broadcast on television. In addition, her heroine, Cordelia Gray, was featured in a series of television dramas—not adapted from stories actually written by James—produced under the overall title An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. The temperament informing her fiction seems to be a conservative one, but she has stated that she belongs to no political party. 481

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Nigel Parry

Although not overtly a Christian writer, James, a long-time member of the Church of England, frequently touches upon religious themes. This tendency is more marked in the later novels and is reflected in several of her titles. Since her retirement from the Home Office, James has served as a magistrate in London and as a governor of the British Broadcasting Corporation. She has been the recipient of numerous literary prizes and other honors. In 1991, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park. Lady James is the mother of two daughters and has five grandchildren. She divides her time between homes in Oxford, her place of birth, and London, the city so intimately and lovingly described in her fiction.

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Analysis · P. D. James’s work is solidly in the tradition of the realistic novel. Her novels are intricately plotted, as successful novels of detection must be. Through her use of extremely well-delineated characters and a wealth of minute and accurate details, however, James never allows her plot to distort the other aspects of her novel. As a result of her employment, James had extensive contact with physicians, nurses, civil servants, police officials, and magistrates. She uses this experience to devise settings in the active world where men and women busily pursue their vocations. She eschews the country weekend murders of her predecessors, with their leisure-class suspects who have little more to do than chat with the amateur detective and look guilty. A murder requires a motive, and it is her treatment of motivation that sets James’s work apart from most mystery fiction. Her suspects are frequently the emotionally maimed who, nevertheless, manage to function with an apparent normality. Beneath their veneer, dark secrets fester, producing the phobias and compulsions they take such pains to disguise. James’s novels seem to suggest that danger is never far away in the most mundane setting, especially the workplace. She avoids all gothic devices, choosing instead to create a growing sense of menace just below the surface of everyday life. James’s murderers rarely kill for gain; they kill to avoid exposure of some sort. Shroud for a Nightingale · The setting for Shroud for a Nightingale is a nursing hospital near London. The student nurses and most of the staff are in permanent residence there. In this closed society, attachments—sexual and otherwise—are formed, rivalries develop, and resentments grow. When a student nurse is murdered during a teaching demonstration, Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard arrives to investigate. In the course of his investigation, Dalgliesh discovers that the murdered girl was a petty blackmailer, that a second student nurse (murdered soon after Dalgliesh’s arrival) was pregnant but unmarried and had engaged in an affair with a middle-aged surgeon, that one member of the senior staff is committing adultery with a married man from the neighborhood and another is homosexually attracted to one of her charges. At the root of the murders, however, is the darkest secret of all, a terrible sin which a rather sympathetic character has been attempting both to hide and expiate for more than thirty years. The murder weapon is poison, which serves also as a metaphor for the fear and suspicion that rapidly spread through the insular world of the hospital. Adam Dalgliesh carries a secret burden of his own. His wife and son died during childbirth. He is a sensitive and cerebral man, a poet of some reputation. These deaths have left him bereft of hope and intensely aware of the fragility of humanity’s control over its own life. Only the rules that humankind has painstakingly fashioned over the centuries can ward off degeneration and annihilation. As a policeman, Dalgliesh enforces society’s rules, giving himself a purpose for living and some brief respite from his memories. Those who commit murder contribute to the world’s disorder and hasten the ultimate collapse of civilization. Dalgliesh will catch them and see that they are punished. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman · In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, published within a year of Shroud for a Nightingale, James introduces her second recurring protagonist. Cordelia Gray’s “unsuitable job” is that of private detective. Gray unexpectedly falls heir to a detective agency and, as a result, discovers her vocation. Again, James avoids the formularized characterization. Gender is the most obvious but least interesting difference between Dalgliesh and Gray. Dalgliesh is brooding and introspective;

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although the narratives in which he appears are the very antithesis of the gothic novel, there are aspects of the gothic hero in his behavior. Gray, on the other hand, is optimistic, outgoing, and good-natured, despite her unfortunate background (she was brought up in a series of foster homes). She is a truth seeker and, like William Shakespeare’s Cordelia, a truth teller. Dalgliesh and Gray are alike in their cleverness and competence. Their paths occasionally cross, and a friendly rivalry exists between them. Death of an Expert Witness · In Death of an Expert Witness, James’s seventh novel, Dalgliesh again probes the secrets of a small group of coworkers and their families. The setting this time is a laboratory that conducts forensic examinations. James used her nineteen years of experience as a hospital administrative assistant to render the setting of Shroud for a Nightingale totally convincing, and she uses her seven years of work in the crime department of the Home Office to the same effect in Death of an Expert Witness. In her meticulous attention to detail, James writes in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, and the nineteenth century realists. Because the setting, characterizations, and incidents of a James novel are so solidly grounded in detail, it tends to be considerably longer than the ordinary murder mystery. This fact accounts for what little adverse criticism her work has received. Some critics have suggested that so profuse is the detail, the general reader may eventually grow impatient, that the pace of the narrative is too leisurely. These objections from some contemporary critics remind the reader once more of James’s affinity with the novelists of the nineteenth century. The laboratory in which the expert witness is killed serves as a focal point for an intriguing cast of characters. Ironically, the physiologist is murdered while he is examining physical evidence from another murder. The dead man leaves behind a rather vacant, superannuated father, who lived in the house with him. The principal suspect is a high-strung laboratory assistant, whom the deceased bullied and gave an unsatisfactory performance rating. The new director of the laboratory has an attractive but cruel and wanton sister, with whom he has a relationship that is at least latently incestuous. In addition, Dalgliesh investigates a lesbian couple, one of whom becomes the novel’s second murder victim; a melancholy physician, who performs autopsies for the police and whose unpleasant wife has just left him; the physician’s two curious children, the elder girl being very curious indeed; a middle-aged babysitter, who is a closet tippler; and a crooked cop, who is taking advantage of a love-starved young woman of the town. In spinning her complex narrative, James draws upon her intimate knowledge of police procedure, evidential requirements in the law, and criminal behavior. Innocent Blood · The publication in 1980 of Innocent Blood marked a departure for James. While the novel tells a tale of murder and vengeance, it is not a detective story. Initially, the protagonist is Philippa Rose Palfrey—later, the novel develops a second center of consciousness. Philippa is eighteen, the adopted daughter of an eminent sociologist and a juvenile court magistrate. She is obsessed with her unremembered past. She is sustained by fantasies about her real parents, especially her mother, and the circumstances which forced them to give her up for adoption. Despite these romantic notions, Philippa is intelligent, resourceful, and tenacious, as well as somewhat abrasive. She takes advantage of the Children Act of 1975 to wrest her birth record from a reluctant bureaucracy.

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The record shows that she was born Rose Ducton, to a clerk and a housewife in Essex. This revelation sends Philippa rushing to the dreary eastern suburb where she was born, beginning an odyssey which will eventually lead to her mother. She discovers that her fantasies cannot match the lurid realities of her past. Her father was a child molester, who murdered a young girl in an upstairs room of his house. Her mother apparently participated in the murder and was caught trying to take the body away in her car. Her father has died in prison, and her mother is still confined. Though horrified, Philippa is now even more driven to find explanations of some sort and to rehabilitate the image of her mother. She visits Mary Ducton in prison, from which she is soon to be released, and eventually takes a small flat in London, where they will live together. In chapter 8, James introduces the second protagonist, at which time the novel becomes as much his as it is Philippa’s. Norman Scase is fifty-seven and newly retired from his job as a government accounts clerk. Scase is the widowed father of the murdered girl. He retires when he learns of Mary Ducton’s impending release, for all of his time will be required to stalk her so that, at the appropriate moment, he may kill her. The murder of young Julia Mavis Scase robbed her father of the same years it stole from Philippa. Philippa is desperately trying to reclaim these lost years by learning to know, forgive, and love her mother. Scase is driven to a far more desperate act. In form, Innocent Blood resembles Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875-1877). Like Anna and Levin, the dual protagonists proceed through the novel along separate paths. Philippa has no knowledge of Scase’s existence, and he knows her only as the constant companion of the victim he is tracking all over London. James makes the city itself a character in the novel, and as Philippa shares her London with her mother, it is fully realized in Dickensian detail. Philippa is the more appealing protagonist, but Scase is a fascinating character study: the least likely of premeditating murderers, a little man who is insignificant in everything except his idée fixe. James created a similar character in “The Victim,” a short story appearing seven years earlier. There, a dim and diffident assistant librarian stalks and murders the man who took his beautiful young wife away from him. The novel form, however, affords James the opportunity to develop completely this unpromising material into a memorable character. As Scase lodges in cheap hotels, monitors the women’s movements with binoculars, and stares up at their window through the night, the reader realizes that the little man has found a purpose which truly animates his life for the first time. He and Philippa will finally meet at the uncharacteristically melodramatic climax (the only blemish on an otherwise flawless novel). A Taste for Death · Commander Adam Dalgliesh returns in A Taste for Death after an absence of nine years. He is heading a newly formed squad charged with investigating politically sensitive crimes. He is assisted by the aristocratic chief inspector John Massingham and a new recruit, Kate Miskin. Kate is bright, resourceful, and fiercely ambitious. Like Cordelia Gray, she has overcome an unpromising background: She is the illegitimate child of a mother who died shortly after her birth and a father she has never known. The title of the novel is evocative. A taste for death is evident in not only the psychopathic killer but also Dalgliesh and his subordinates, the principal murder victim himself, and, surprisingly, a shabby High Church Anglican priest, reminiscent of one of Graham Greene’s failed clerics. When Sir Paul Berowne, a Tory minister, is found murdered along with a tramp in

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the vestry of St. Matthew’s Church in London, Dalgliesh is put in charge of the investigation. These murders seem linked to the deaths of two young women previously associated with the Berowne household. The long novel (more than 450 pages) contains the usual array of suspects, hampering the investigation with their evasions and outright lies, but in typical James fashion, each is portrayed in three dimensions. The case develops an additional psychological complication when Dalgliesh identifies with a murder victim for the first time in his career and a metaphysical complication when he discovers that Berowne recently underwent a profound religious experience in the church, one reportedly entailing stigmata. Perhaps the best examples of James’s method of characterization are the elderly spinster and the ten-year-old boy of the streets who discover the bodies in chapter 1. In the hands of most other crime writers, these characters would have been mere plot devices, but James gives them a reality which reminds the reader how deeply a murder affects everyone associated with it in any way. Having begun the novel with Miss Wharton and Darren, James returns to them in the concluding chapter. Devices and Desires · Devices and Desires possesses the usual James virtues. The story is set at and around a nuclear power plant on the coast of Norfolk in East Anglia. The geographic details are convincing (even though the author states that she has invented topography to suit her purposes), and the nuclear power industry has obviously been well researched. Although the intricate plot places heavy demands of action upon the characters, the omniscient narrator analyzes even the most minor of them in such depth that they are believable. Finally, greater and more interesting than the mystery of “who did it” is the mystery of those ideas, attitudes, and experiences which have led a human being to murder. Ultimately, every James novel is a study of the devices and desires of the human heart. In some ways, however, the novel is a departure. The setting is a brooding, windswept northern coast, the sort of gothic background which James largely eschewed in her earlier novels. Devices and Desires is also more of a potboiler than were any of its predecessors. As the story begins, a serial killer known as the Whistler is claiming his fourth victim (he will kill again during the course of the novel). A group of terrorists is plotting an action against the Larksoken Nuclear Power Station. The intrigue is so heavy and so many people are not what they seem that at one point the following tangled situation exists: Neil Pascoe, an antinuclear activist, has been duped by Amy Camm, whom he has taken into his trailer on the headland. Amy believes that she is acting as an agent for an animal rights group, but she has been duped by Caroline Amphlett, personal secretary to the Director of Larksoken. Caroline has, in turn, been duped by the terrorists for whom she has been spying, they plot her death when she becomes useless to them. Eventually, shadowy figures turn up from MI5, Britain’s intelligence agency. In this instance, so much exposition and explication is required of James’s dialogue that it is not always as convincing as in the previous books. Adam Dalgliesh shares this novel with Chief Inspector Terry Rickards. Rickards is a mirror image of Dalgliesh. He is less intelligent and imaginative, but he has the loving wife and infant child whom Dalgliesh has lost. While Dalgliesh is on the headland, settling his aunt’s estate, he stumbles upon a murder (literally—he discovers the body). Hilary Robarts, the beautiful, willful, and widely disliked and feared Acting Administrative Officer of the station, is strangled, and the Whistler’s method is mimicked. As usual in a James novel, the suspects comprise a small and fairly intimate

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group. The author has totally mastered the detective story convention whereby at some point in the novel each of the suspects will seem the most plausible murderer. The action of Devices and Desires affords James the opportunity to comment upon the use and potential misuse of nuclear power, the phenomenon of terrorism, the condition of race relations in London, even the state of Christianity in contemporary Britain. Still, what James always does best is to reveal, layer by layer, the mind which has committed itself to that most irrevocable of human actions, murder. Original Sin · In Original Sin, Commander Dalgliesh’s investigative team has changed: Although he is still assisted by Kate Miskin, John Massingham has been replaced by Daniel Aaron. Inspector Aaron is a Jew who is exceedingly uncomfortable with his Jewishness—Jewishness that will become a critical factor in the last quarter of the novel. Original Sin is replete with religious metaphors, beginning with its title. Again, the reader is reminded that Adam Dalgliesh is the “first,” the dominant human being in each of the novels (despite the fact that he makes fewer and briefer appearances in Original Sin than in any novel heretofore). Dalgliesh is the son of a country rector. A minor character, a sister to one of the several members of the Peverell Press to die under mysterious circumstances, is also a sister in a larger sense: She is a nun in an Anglican convent. Frances Peverell, a major character, is a devout Catholic. She is also the near namesake of Francis Peverell, whose sin 150 years earlier has placed a sort of curse upon Innocent House, a four-story Georgian edifice on the Thames which serves as the home of the Peverell Press. Gabriel Dauntsey—a poet whose name suggests the Angel of Revelation—reveals the darkest secret of Innocent House toward the close of the novel. Innocent House, dating from 1792, is reached by launch and exudes the atmosphere of a Venetian palace. It is the site of five deaths, all initially giving the superficial appearance of suicide. Four are eventually revealed to be murders. Thus, the very name of the building is heavily ironic. Inspectors Miskin and Aaron do most of the detecting, aided by an occasional insight shared or interview perceptively conducted by Commander Dalgliesh. Several of the characters bear the burden of original sin, the sins of their parents and ancestors. The motivation for multiple murders turns out to be events that occurred fifty years earlier in wartime France. A Certain Justice · In her 1997 novel, A Certain Justice, P. D. James makes use of her whole bag of stylistic tricks, familiar but nevertheless effective. The appropriately ambiguous title refers to either, or both, justice of a particular sort and justice that is sure. The incidents of the novel support both interpretations. The conflicts within and between the members of Dalgliesh’s investigative team continue. Kate Miskin is sexually attracted to her boss but dares not acknowledge this fact to herself. Daniel Aaron has left the force, presumably as a result of his unprofessional behavior at the conclusion of Original Sin, and has been replaced by Piers Tarrant. As usual, Kate is not sure that she likes her male partner. Also as usual, the murder suspects are members of a small, self-contained professional group—this time, from the Inns of Court, where London’s lawyers practice. As in other of her later novels, James introduces religious overtones. The chief suspect in the second murder, and the victim of the third (there are four, in all), is a vicar’s widow who has lost her faith. Piers Tarrant has a theology degree from Oxford; he claims the study of theology is excellent preparation for police work. Detective Sergeant Robbins, who assists Kate and Piers in their enquiries, is a Methodist of

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impeccable Christian virtue. He combines two apparently paradoxical qualities, a benign view of his fellow human beings and a deeply sceptical view of human nature. The second quality makes him a very good detective. A key conflict in the latter part of the novel involves Father Presteign, a High Church Anglican priest. He initially receives crucial information about the second murder, but under the seal of the confessional. A Certain Justice is marked by a parallel structure. As the novel begins, an accused killer is acquitted and so is free to kill again. An earlier such instance drives the main plot. Two characters, their intentions unknown to each other, set out to achieve a certain justice outside the law. Both attempts lead to violent death. James experiments with epistolary form in chapter 36, which is written in the form of a long letter left by a murder victim. In short, James continues to embellish her murder mysteries with the best features of the realistic literary novel. Patrick Adcock Other major works PLAY: A Private Treason, pr. 1985. NONFICTION: The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliff Highway Murders, 1811, 1971 (with T. A. Critchley); Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, 2000. Bibliography Bakerman, Jane S. “Cordelia Gray: Apprentice and Archetype.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 5 (Spring/Summer, 1984): 101-114. A study of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which discusses James’s female detective as the heroine of a Bildungsroman, or apprenticeship novel. Cordelia is only twenty-two when, almost by accident, she becomes a private investigator. Her first case is her rite of passage from girlhood to maturity and professionalism. Barber, Lynn. “The Cautious Heart of P. D. James.” Vanity Fair 56 (March, 1993): 80. A profile of James in her seventies—commercially successful, titled, and highly honored as a literary craftsman. Includes a contemporary portrait of the novelist. Benstock, Bernard. “The Clinical World of P. D. James.” In Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas F. Staley. Vol. 16. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1982. Benstock’s essay is found on pages 104-129 of the volume. He discusses James’s use of setting, her narrative technique, and the relationship between the two. Gidez, Richard B. P. D. James. Boston: Twayne, 1986. An entry in Twayne’s English Authors series. Chapter 1 examines James’s place within the tradition of the English mystery novel. Chapters 2-10 discuss in chronological order her first nine novels. Chapter 11 is devoted to her handful of short stories, and chapter 12 summarizes her work through The Skull Beneath the Skin. Hubly, Erlene. “Adam Dalgliesh: Byronic Hero.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 3 (Fall/Winter, 1982): 40-46. The brooding Dalgliesh, aloof, often forbidding, constantly bearing the pain of a deep tragedy in his personal life, has often been likened to the heroes of nineteenth century Romantic fiction. Hubly’s article treats the appropriateness of this comparison. Macintyre, Ben. Review of A Certain Justice, by P. D. James. New York Times Book Review, Dec. 7, 1997, 26. Macintyre’s review, as reviews often do with James’s mysteries, praises her characterization, observing that each character is himself or herself an embryonic novel. He also notes that, as in other of the later novels, the

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protagonist, Dalgliesh, has become a token presence in the last two-thirds of A Certain Justice, “oddly distant and preoccupied.” Porter, Dennis. “Detection and Ethics: The Case of P. D. James.” In The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolution, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction, edited by Barbara A. Rader and Howard G. Zettler. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. Pages 11-18 are devoted to Porter’s essay on James, a writer for whom moral principles are an integral part of the crime and detection story. Porter concentrates upon Death of an Expert Witness, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, and Innocent Blood. Robin W. Wink, who has written elsewhere on James, contributes a foreword to the book. Siebenheller, Norma. P. D. James. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. The first four chapters discuss the eight novels, grouped by decades, that James had produced through 1980. Chapter 5 discusses the detective protagonists Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray. Chapter 6 takes up the major themes of the novels; chapter 7, the major characters other than the two detectives. The final chapter deals with the James “style,” in the sense both of her craftsmanship and of her elegance. Stasio, Marilyn. “No Gore, Please—They’re British.” The Writer 103 (March, 1990): 15-16. The basis of this article is an interview with James. In her questions and interpretations, Stasio stresses the elegant and highly civilized nature of James’s crime fiction.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Born: Cologne, Germany; May 7, 1927 Principal long fiction · To Whom She Will, 1955 (pb. in U.S. as Amrita, 1956); The Nature of Passion, 1956; Esmond in India, 1958; The Householder, 1960; Get Ready for Battle, 1962; A Backward Place, 1965; A New Dominion, 1972 (pb. in U.S. as Travelers, 1973); Heat and Dust, 1975; In Search of Love and Beauty, 1983; Three Continents, 1987; Poet and Dancer, 1993; Shards of Memory, 1995. Other literary forms · Though Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is known mainly as a novelist, she is also an accomplished writer of short stories, film scripts, and essays. Among her collections of short stories are Like Birds, Like Fishes, and Other Stories (1963), A Stronger Climate: Nine Stories (1968), An Experience of India (1971), and How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories (1976); Out of India (1986) is a selection of stories from these volumes. Shakespeare Wallah (1965; with James Ivory), Heat and Dust (1983), and A Room with a View (1986; based on E. M. Forster’s novel) are her best-known film scripts. Achievements · Jhabvala has achieved remarkable distinction, both as a novelist and as a short-story writer, among writers on modern India. She has been compared with E. M. Forster, though the historical phases and settings of the India they portray are widely different. The award of the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust in 1975 made her internationally famous. Placing Jhabvala in a literary-cultural tradition is difficult: Her European parentage, British education, marriage to an Indian, and—after many years in her adopted country—change of residence from India to the United States perhaps reveal a lack of belonging, a recurring “refugee” consciousness. Consequently, she is not an Indian writing in English, nor a European writing on India, but perhaps a writer of the world of letters deeply conscious of being caught up in a bizarre world. She is sensitive, intense, ironic—a detached observer and recorder of the human world. Her almost clinical accuracy and her sense of the graphic, the comic, and the ironic make her one of the finest writers on the contemporary scene. In 1984, Jhabvala won the British Award for Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for Best Screenplay for the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory adaptation of Heat and Dust, and in 1986 she won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for A Room with a View. In 1990, she was awarded Best Screenplay from the New York Film Critics Circle for Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, adapted from Evan S. Connell, Jr.’s novels. Jhabvala received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1992 for Forster’s Howards End and an Oscar nomination for her adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in 1993. In 1984, Jhabvala won a MacArthur Foundation Award, and in 1994 she received the Writers Guild of America’s Laurel Award. Biography · Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne, Germany, on May 7, 1927, the daughter of Marcus and Eleonora Prawer; her family’s heritage was German, Polish, and Jewish. She emigrated to England in 1939, became a British citizen in 1948, and obtained an M.A. in English from Queen Mary College, London, in 1951. That same year, she married C. H. S. Jhabvala, an Indian architect, and went to live in India. 490

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Jhabvala formed a profound, albeit conflicted, relationship with the country. With her Indian husband and Indian-born children, Renana, Ava, and Feroza, she has had a unique opportunity of seeing the subcontinent from the privileged position of an insider but through the eyes of an alien. Thus, rootedness in a culture and people, an issue with which she is intimate, provides a wellspring for her screenplays, novels, and stories. The author has returned to India, to millions a place of ancient wisdom and spiritual equilibrium, time and again. Her exposure to the waves of young foreigners who descended upon India in the 1960’s only to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous “mystics,” influenced such books as Three Continents. Indeed, the theme of religious charlatans permeates much of Jhabvala’s work. While she would spend three months of each year in New Delhi, Jhabvala settled in New York in 1975, living near her friends and film colleagues, the Merchant-Ivory duo. Her work on film scripts with the team, which began in the 1960’s, enriched her technique as a writer of fiction and widened her vision. One may well view this move to New York as initiating the second major influence on the author’s body of work, giving rise to her collection of short stories, East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi (1998). Jhabvala would contribute regularly to The New Yorker. Analysis · Ruth Prawer Jhbavala’s distinctive qualities as a novelist grow from her sense of social comedy. She excels in portraying incongruities of human behavior, comic situations which are rich with familial, social, and cultural implications. Marital harmony or discord, the pursuit of wealth, family togetherness and feuds, the crisis of identity and homelessness— these are among the situations that she repeatedly explores in her fiction. She writes with sympathy, economy, and wit, with sharp irony and cool detachment. Jhabvala’s fiction has emerged out of her own experience of India. “The central fact of all my work,” she once told an interviewer, “is that I am a European living permanently in India. I have lived here for most of my adult life . . . . This makes me not quite an outsider either.” Much later, however, in “Myself in India,” she revealed a change in her attitude toward India: “However, I must admit I am no longer interested in India. What I am interested in now is myself in India . . . my survival in India.” This shift in attitude has clearly Jerry Bauer affected Jhabvala’s fiction. There is

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a distinct Indianness in the texture and spirit of her first five novels, which are sunny, bright, social comedies offering an affirmative view of India. The later novels, darkened by dissonance and despair, reveal a change in the novelist’s perspective. In almost all of her novels, Jhabvala assumes the role of an omniscient narrator. She stands slightly aloof from her creations, an approach which has advantages as well as disadvantages. On the one hand, she does not convey the passionate inner life of her characters, many of whom are essentially stereotypes. Even her more fully developed characters are seen largely from the outside. On the other hand, she is a consummate observer. She has a fine eye for naturalistic detail, a gift for believable dialogue, but she is also an observer at a deeper level, registering the malaise that is characteristic of the modern world: the collapse of traditional values, the incongruous blending of diverse cultures: sometimes energizing, sometimes destructive, often bizarre. Thus, her fiction, while steeped in the particular reality of India, speaks to readers throughout the world. Amrita · Amrita inaugurates Jhabvala’s first phase, in which reconciliation between two individuals (symbolic as well of a larger, social integration) is at the center of the action. Amrita, a young, romantic girl, has a love affair with Hari, her colleague in radio. Their affair is portrayed with a gentle comic touch: She tells Hari of her determination to marry him at all costs; he calls her a goddess and moans that he is unworthy of her. Jhabvala skillfully catches the color and rhythm of the Indian phraseology of love. While this affair proceeds along expected lines, Pandit Ram Bahadur, Hari’s grandfather, is planning to get his grandson married to Sushila, a pretty singer, in an arranged match. When Hari confesses to his brother-in-law that he loves Amrita, he is advised that first love is only a “game,” and no one should take it seriously. Hari then is led to the bridal fire and married to Sushila. He forgets his earlier vows of love for Amrita, even the fact that he applied for a passport to go with her to England. The forsaken maiden, Amrita, finds her hopes for a happy union revived when another man, Krishna Sengupta, writes her a letter full of love and tenderness. Enthralled after reading his six-page letter, she decks her hair with a beautiful flower, a sign of her happy reconciliation with life. Amrita shares in the sunshine of love that comes her way. The original title of the novel, To Whom She Will (changed to Amrita for the American edition), alludes to a story in a classic collection of Indian fables, the Panchatantra (between 100 B.C.E. and 500 C.E.; The Morall Philosophie of Doni, 1570). In the story, which centers on a maiden in love, a Hindu sage observes that marriage should be arranged for a girl at a tender age; otherwise, “she gives herself to whom she will.” This ancient injunction is dramatized in the predicaments of Hari, Amrita, Sushila, and Sengupta, the four main characters. The irony lies in the fact that Amrita does not marry “whom she will.” Nevertheless, the regaining of happiness is the keynote of Jhabvala’s first novel of family relations and individual predicaments. The Nature of Passion · Alluding to Swami Paramananda’s translation of the Bhagavad Gtt3 (c. fifth century b.c.e.), which Jhabvala quotes, her second novel, The Nature of Passion, deals with one of the three kinds of passion which are distinguished in the Bhagavad Gtt3: that which is worldly, sensuous, pleasure-seeking. This passion, or rajas, rules the world of Lalaji and his tribe, who represent the rising middle class and whose debased values become the object of Jhabvala’s unsparing irony. She presents

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a series of vignettes of the life of the affluent—such as Lalaji and the Vermas—who migrated to India after the partition and continued to prosper. Here, Jhabvala’s characters are not intended to be fully rounded individuals; rather, they play their parts as embodiments of various passions. Lalaji’s role is to illustrate the contagious effects of greed and corruption. An indiscreet letter written by his older son finds its way into a government file controlled by Chandra, his second son. When Lalaji asks Chandra to remove the incriminating letter, Chandra’s self-righteous wife, Kanta, objects. She soon realizes, however, that their comforts and their holidays depend upon Lalaji’s tainted money, and she relents, allowing the letter to be removed. Lalaji’s daughter Nimmi, too, moves from revolt to submission. Lalaji’s tenderness for Nimmi is conveyed beautifully. When she cuts her hair short, Lalaji accepts this sign of modernity. Nevertheless, despite her attraction to another young man, she accepts the marriage partner chosen for her by her family. Jhabvala’s irony is cutting, but her style in this novel has an almost clinical precision, a detachment that discourages reader involvement. By concentrating on social types rather than genuinely individualized characters, she limits the appeal of the novel, which already seems badly dated. Esmond in India · Jhabvala’s third novel, Esmond in India, as its title suggests, is concerned with the conflict between cultures. Esmond is an Englishman, a shallow man with a handsome face who tutors European women in Hindi language and culture and serves as a guide to visitors. He is an egotistic, aggressive colonial, and Jhabvala is relentless in her irony in sketching him, especially in a scene at the Taj Mahal where he loses his shoes. The pretentious Esmond is cut down to size and becomes a puny figure. Esmond’s relationship with his wife, Gulab, is the novel’s central focus. She is a pseudoromantic Indian girl, very fond of good food. Their marriage is in ruins: Esmond feels trapped and speaks with scorn of her dull, alien mind, while she is keenly aware of his failure to care for her. Nevertheless, Gulab, as a true Hindu wife, bears Esmond’s abuse and his indulgence in love affairs, until their family servant attempts to molest her. She then packs her bag and leaves Esmond. Is Gulab a rebel or a complete conformist? In marrying Esmond, an Englishman, she surely seems to have become a rebel. Later, however, she is subservient in response to Esmond’s cruelty; the servant assaults her because he knows that Esmond does not love his wife. This sets into motion her second rebellion: separation from Esmond. Gulab is a complex, memorable character. Esmond, too, though he is drawn with sharp irony, is no mere caricature. At the heart of the novel is his overwhelming sense of a loss of identity, a crisis which grips his soul and makes him unequal to the task of facing India, that strange land. The Householder · The Householder is perhaps Jhabvala’s most successful, least problematic, most organically conceived novel. A true social comedy, it is a direct, simple “impression of life.” It centers on the maturation of its likable central character, Prem, a Hindi instructor in Mr. Khanna’s private college. Prem is a shy, unassuming young man, in no way exceptional, yet his growth to selfhood, presented with insight and humor, makes for compelling fiction. The title The Householder is derived from the Hindu concept of the four stages of a man’s life; the second stage, that of a family man, is the one which the novel explores.

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Prem’s relations with his wife, Indu, are most delicately portrayed. The scene of Prem loving Indu on the terrace in moonlight is both tender and touching. They both sense the space and the solitude and unite in deep intimacy. Prem realizes that Indu is pregnant and tenderly touches her growing belly, scenes that show Jhabvala at her best and most tender. Prem’s troubles are mainly economic—how to survive on a meager salary—and the comedy and the pathos which arise out of this distress constitute the real stuff of the novel. The indifference, the arrogance, and the insensitivity of the other characters are comically rendered, emphasizing Prem’s seeming helplessness, as he struggles to survive and to assert his individuality. (A minor subplot is contributed by Western characters: Hans Loewe, a seeker after spiritual reality, and Kitty, his landlady, provide a contrast with Prem’s struggle.) Nevertheless, Prem is finally able to overcome his inexperience and immaturity, attaining a tenderness, a human touch, and a balance which enable him to achieve selfhood and become a true “householder.” Get Ready for Battle · Get Ready for Battle, Jhabvala’s fifth novel, resembles The Nature of Passion. Like that earlier novel, it pillories the selfish, acquisitive society of postindependence India. In particular, it shows how growing urbanization affects the poor, dispossessing them of their land. Like The Nature of Passion, Get Ready for Battle derives its title from the Bhagavad Gtt3, alluding to the scene in which Lord Krishna instructs Arjuna to “get ready for battle” without fear; similarly, Jhabvala’s protagonist, Sarla Devi, urges the poor to get ready for battle to protect their rights. Get Ready for Battle is superior to The Nature of Passion, however, in its portrayal of interesting and believable characters. While the characters in the later novel still represent various social groups or points of view, they are not mere types. The central character, Sarla Devi, deeply committed to the cause of the poor, is separated from her husband, Gulzari Lal. They represent two opposite valuations of life: She leads her life according to the tenets of the Bhagavad Gtt3, while he, acquisitive and heartless, is a worshiper of Mammon. The main action of the novel centers on her attempt to save the poor from being evicted from their squatters’ colony and also to save her son from following her father’s corrupt lifestyle. She fails in both these attempts, yet she is heroic in her failure. Jhabvala brilliantly depicts the wasteland created by India’s growing cities, which have swallowed farms and forests, at the same time destroying the value-structure of rural society. Yet Get Ready for Battle also includes adroitly designed domestic scenes. Kusum, Gulzari Lal’s mistress, is shown with sympathy, while the relationship between two secondary characters, the married couple Vishnu and Mala, is portrayed with tenderness as well as candor. They show their disagreements (even speak of divorce), yet they are deeply in love. For them, “getting ready for battle” is a kind of game, a comic conflict, rather than a serious issue. A Backward Place · Jhabvala’s next novel, A Backward Place, initiated the second phase of her career, marked by dark, despairing comedies disclosing a world out of joint. In this novel, too, Jhabvala began to focus more attention on encounters between East and West and the resulting tensions and ironies. The novel’s title, which refers to a European character’s condescending assessment of Delhi, suggests its pervasive irony; neither Indians nor Europeans are spared Jhabvala’s scorn. While it features an appealing protagonist, the novel is too schematic, too much simply a vehicle for satire.

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Travelers · A Backward Place was followed by Travelers, a novel in the same dark mode, which presents the Western vision of contemporary India with telling irony. European girls seek a spiritual India, but the country that they actually experience is quite the opposite. Despite its satiric bite, the novel must be judged a failure: The great art of fiction seems to degenerate here into mere journalism, incapable of presenting a true vision of contemporary India. Heat and Dust · This forgettable novel was followed by Jhabvala’s most widely praised work, Heat and Dust, the complex plot of which traces parallels between the experiences of two Englishwomen in India: the unnamed narrator and her grandfather Douglas’s first wife, Olivia. In the 1930’s, Olivia came to India as Douglas’s wife. Bored by her prosaic, middle-class existence, Olivia is drawn to a Muslim nawab with whom she enjoys many escapades. Invited to a picnic close to a Muslim shrine, Olivia finds the nawab irresistible. They lie by a spring in a green grove, and the nawab makes her pregnant. She then leaves Douglas, aborts her child, and finally moves to a house in the hills as the nawab’s mistress. After a gap of two generations, the narrator, who has come to India to trace Olivia’s life story, passes through a similar cycle of experience. Fascinated by India, she gives herself to a lower-middle-class clerk, Inder Lal, at the same place near the shrine where Olivia lay with the nawab, and with the same result. The young narrator decides to rear the baby, though she gives up her lover; she also has a casual physical relationship with another Indian, Child, who combines sexuality with a spiritual quest. Heat and Dust is an extraordinary novel. Unlike many of Jhabvala’s novels, it has a strong current of positive feeling beneath its surface negativism. Olivia, though she discards her baby, remains loyal to her heart’s desire for the nawab, and the narrator, while not accepting her lover, wishes to rear her baby as a symbol of their love. This note of affirmation heightens the quality of human response in Heat and Dust, which is also notable for its fully realized characterizations. In Search of Love and Beauty · In Search of Love and Beauty, set primarily in the United States but ranging widely elsewhere, centers on the experience of rootlessness which Jhabvala knows so well, and which is so widespread in the twentieth century. The novel is a multigenerational saga, beginning with refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria and concluding in contemporary times. The rootlessness of that first generation to be dislocated from their culture is passed on to their children and their children’s children, all of whom go “in search of love and beauty.” The first generation, represented by Louise and Regi, wishes to retain its German heritage, concretely symbolized by their paintings and furniture. The second generation, represented by Marietta, is partly Americanized. The restless Marietta travels to India, falls in love with Ahmad, an Indian musician, and befriends Sujata, a courtesan, sketched with deft accuracy. The image of India is lovable, vital, and glorious, and seems almost a counterpart to Germany’s ideal image. The third-generation refugees, represented by Natasha and Leo, are more affluent and still more Americanized, yet they are trapped in drug abuse, depression, and meaninglessness. Three Continents · Three Continents is the lengthiest and broadest in scope of Jhabvala’s novels. Like the later Shards of Memory, the tale revolves around an Indian mystic and his followers. Young narrator Harriet Wishwell, the daughter of a rich but troubled

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American family, and her gay twin brother, Michael, are raised by their grandfather after their parents’ divorce. Educated at international schools, the twins go in search of a deeper meaning to life than what their American heritage provides. Their wishes are seemingly answered when they meet Rawul, whose movement, the Fourth World, is intended to transcend racial and political divisiveness and establish a state founded on peace and love. Michael believes he has found Nirvana in Rawul’s son, Crishi, while Harriet also falls under his spell. The twins and Crishi form a sexual threesome, and eventually Harriet, besotted by Crishi, weds him, only to find herself continually frustrated by his lack of devotion to her. Rawul’s, and by proxy Crishi’s, charismatic hold on his devotees proves Harriet and her family’s ultimate undoing. Poet and Dancer and Shards of Memory · Poet and Dancer explores the dangers of love and commitment. Set in modern-day Manhattan, the novel explores the complex relations between two young cousins, Angel and Lara, as they become enmeshed in one another and lose touch with the realities of the outside world. Shards of Memory concerns a young man, Henry, who has inherited all the correspondence and writings of a mysterious spiritual leader, known simply as the Master. It is with visits to his grandmother, Baby, in her Manhattan townhouse that Henry slowly uncovers bits and pieces of his family’s past involvement with the Master’s spiritual movement. Elsa, Baby’s mother, married an Indian poet but spent her later years with her lesbian lover, Cynthia. Baby married Graeme, a standoffish British diplomat, but she later admits they had nothing besides their daughter, Renata, in common. As Graeme continues traveling the world, Baby gives over the raising of Renata to the child’s grandfather, Kavi. Renata later falls in love with Carl, an idle German idealist. The son they produce, Henry, bears a striking resemblance to the Master. Baby sends young Henry from New York to London to be groomed by Elsa and Cynthia as the Master’s heir. After a car accident there that kills the women and cripples Henry, he is returned to New York. As trunks full of the Master’s writings arrive at the family apartment, Vera, the piano teacher’s vibrant daughter, assists Henry in categorizing the vast quantities of work. There is a resurgence of interest in the Master after Henry publishes a book on his teachings, and eventually his parents purchase the Head and Heart House, which was intended as a center for the spiritual movement. Involvement with the Master, a plumb sensualist, takes over the followers’ lives; parents become incapable even of rearing their children. Jhabvala’s comment about such a spiritual movement has overtones of contempt. The zombielike groupies around the Master, as well as his own shady dealings in foreign countries, provide a clear warning against placing one’s well-being in the hands of self-proclaimed gurus. Vasant A. Shahane, updated by Nika Hoffman Other major works SHORT FICTION: Like Birds, Like Fishes, and Other Stories, 1963; A Stronger Climate: Nine Stories, 1968; An Experience of India, 1971; How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories, 1976; Out of India, 1986; East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi, 1998. SCREENPLAYS: The Householder, 1963; Shakespeare Wallah, 1965 (with James Ivory); The Guru, 1968; Bombay Talkie, 1970; Autobiography of a Princess, 1975 (with Ivory and John Swope); Roseland, 1977; Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, 1978; The Europeans, 1979; Quartet, 1981; The Courtesans of Bombay, 1982; Heat and Dust, 1983

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(based on her novel); The Bostonians, 1984 (with Ivory; based on Henry James’s novel); A Room with a View, 1986 (based on E. M. Forster’s novel); Maurice, 1987 (based on Forster’s novel); Madame Sousatzka, 1988; Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, 1990 (based on Evan S. Connell, Jr.’s novels); Howards End, 1992 (based on Forster’s novel); The Remains of the Day, 1993 (based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel); Jefferson in Paris, 1995; Surviving Picasso, 1996; A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, 1998 (based on Kaylie Jones’s novel). TELEPLAYS: The Place of Peace, 1975; Jane Austen in Manhattan, 1980; The Wandering Company, 1985. Bibliography Agarwal, Ramlal G. Ruth Prawer Jhbavala: A Study of Her Fiction. New York: Envoy Press, 1990. Contains good criticism and interpretation of the novels. Includes index and bibliography. Booker, Keith M. Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Although discussion of the author is not central in this book, what proves engaging is the context into which Booker places Jhabvala’s contribution to India’s prominence in British literature. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Boston: Twayne, 1992. Crane begins with discussion of Jhabvala’s earliest novels and essays, then examines her American novels, then includes a section on Jhabvala and critics. Contains a valuable selected bibliography. ____________, ed. Passages to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1991. Features articles on Jhabvala’s fiction. Includes index and bibliographic references. Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile, and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 1983. A definitive work on Jhabvala, the title of which is taken from James Joyce’s definition of a writer, with which Jhabvala concurs. Comments on the theme of loneliness and displacement that runs throughout Jhabvala’s fiction as she explores the “sensibility of the Western expatriate in India.” Biographical detail is interwoven with discussion of Jhabvala’s fiction, including a chapter on her short stories and her writing for film. A strong critical study by an author who herself has a keen understanding of the India Jhabvala writes about. Mason, Deborah. “Passage to America: East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi.” The New York Times, November 29, 1998. An eloquent and appreciative analysis of Jhabvala’s collection of stories, which squarely places her skills as a consummate storyteller at the forefront. Pritchett, V. S. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Snares and Delusions.” In The Tale Bearers. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980. Discusses Jhabvala’s novel A New Dominion, exploring both its satirical content and the author’s role as “careful truth-teller.” Hails Jhabvala as a writer who knows more about India than any other novelist writing in English. A short but interesting piece that compares Jhabvala’s writing with that of Anton Chekhov. Shahane, V. A. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1976. The first full-length study on Jhabvala, covering her novels up to Heat and Dust in 1975 and three short stories, including “An Experience of India.” Shahane notes that Jhabvala’s literary gift lies less in her unique insider-outsider status in India as it does in her awareness of human dilemma within the constructs of society. In a style both spirited and opinionated, Shahane contributes significant criticism to the earlier work of Jhabvala.

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Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. In discussing Jhabvala’s nine novels and four books of short stories, Sucher emphasizes Jhabvala’s tragicomic explorations of female sexuality. Cites Jhabvala as a writer who deconstructs “romantic/Gothic heroism.” A valuable contribution to the literary criticism on Jhabvala. Includes a useful bibliography. Updike, John. “Louise in the New World, Alice on the Magic Molehill.” Review of In Search of Love and Beauty, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The New Yorker 59 (August 1, 1983): 85-90. Updike likens the novel to Marcel Proust’s “great opus concerning the search for lost time” but says it falls short of Proust in the flatness of its prose. Updike claims that, in spite of this, the novel contains many vivid scenes, and that “brilliance is to be found.”

Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson

Born: Lichfield, Staffordshire, England; September 18, 1709 Died: London, England; December 13, 1784 Principal long fiction · Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia: A Tale by S. Johnson, 1759 (originally pb. as The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale). Other literary forms · As the dominant figure of the mid-eighteenth century English literary world, Samuel Johnson’s published works—both what he wrote under his own name and for others under their names—ranged throughout practically every genre and form. In verse, he wrote London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated (1749); his poem “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet, A Practiser in Physic” appeared first in The Gentleman’s Magazine (August, 1783) and later in the London Magazine (September, 1783). His Irene: A Tragedy, performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in February, 1749, was printed later that same year. The prose efforts of Johnson tend to generate the highest degrees of critical analysis and commentary. Biographical studies include The Life of Admiral Blake (1740), An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744), and An Account of the Life of John Philip Barretier (1744). His critical and linguistic works are by far the most important and extensive, of which the best known are Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745), The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747), A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (1779-1781). Also, Johnson’s periodical essays for The Rambler (1750-1752), The Adventurer (1753-1754), and The Idler (1761) contain critical commentary as well as philosophical, moral, and religious observations. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) is his major travel piece, while his political prose includes such essays as The False Alarm (1770), a pamphlet in support of the Ministerial majority in the House of Commons and its action in expelling a member of Parliament; Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771), a seventy-five-page tract on the history of the territory and the reasons why England should not go to war with Spain; The Patriot: Addressed to the Electors of Great Britain (1774), in which Johnson defends the election of his friend Henry Thrale as MP for Southwark and writes to vindicate the Quebec Act; and Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (1775). Finally, he edited the works of Richard Savage (1775) and the plays of William Shakespeare (1765); he also translated Father Jerome Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735) and Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s Commentary on Pope’s “Essay on Man” (1738-1739). Achievements · The quantity and quality of firsthand biographical material compiled during Johnson’s life and immediately following his death have helped considerably in assessing the full measure of his contributions to British life and letters. Particularly through the efforts of James Boswell, John Hawkins, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Frances Burney, the remarkable personality began to emerge. Through his early biographers, Johnson became the property of his nation, representing the most 499

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positive qualities of the Anglo-Saxon temperament: common sense, honest realism, and high standards of performance and judgment. His critical judgments came forth as honest and rigorous pronouncements that left little room for the refinements and complexities of philosophical speculation; nevertheless, he must be considered a philosopher who always managed to penetrate to the essence of a given subject. Perhaps Johnson’s most significant contribution to eighteenth century thought focused upon what appeared to be a set of powerful prejudices that comprised the theses of his critical arguments. To the contrary, Johnson’s so-called prejudices proved, in reality, to have been clearly defined standards or principles upon which he based his conclusions. Those criteria, in turn, originated from concrete examples from the classical and traditional past and actual experiences of the present. Johnson strived to distinguish between authority and rules on one side and nature and experience on the other. As the initial lesson of life, the individual had to realize that not all experience is of equal value—that instinctive and emotional activities, for example, cannot be placed above the authority of rational thought. In literary criticism, especially, Johnson’s brand of classicism negated whim and idiosyncrasy

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and underscored the necessity for following universal nature—virtually the same criterion that gave strength to critical criteria during the earlier eighteenth century. Johnson’s domination of London intellectual life during the last half of the eighteenth century would by itself be sufficient to establish his reputation. As a writer, however, Johnson achieved distinction in several fields, and literary historians continue to cite him as a prominent poet, essayist, editor, scholar, and lexicographer. Although he failed to produce quality drama, he did succeed in writing a work of prose fiction that went through eight editions during his own lifetime and continues to be read. Certainly, his A Dictionary of the English Language has long since outlived its practical use; yet it, as well as The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language that preceded it, remains an important work in the history and development of English lexicography. Principally, though, the achievement of Samuel Johnson focuses on his criticism, especially his sense of rhetorical balance, which causes his essays to emerge as valid critical commentary rather than as untrustworthy, emotional critical reaction. Perhaps Johnson’s greatest achievement is his prose style, which constitutes the essence of intellectual balance. The diction tends to be highly Latinate; yet, Johnson proved his familiarity with the lifeblood of his own language—its racy idiom. He possessed the ability to select the precise words with which to express exact degrees of meaning; he carefully constructed balanced sentences that rolled steadily forward, unhampered by parentheticals or excessive subordination. As writer and as thinker, Johnson nevertheless adhered to his respect for classical discipline and followed his instinct toward a just sense of proportion. His works written prior to 1760 tend to be stiff and heavy, too reliant upon classical and seventeenth century models. Later, however, in The Lives of the Poets, Johnson wrote with the ease and the confidence that characterized his oral, informal discussions with the famous intellectuals over whom he presided. Indeed, Johnson rose as a giant among the prose writers of his age when the strength of his style began to parallel the moral and intellectual strength of his own mind and personality. In late February, 1907, Sir Walter Raleigh—professor of English literature at Oxford and respected scholar and critical commentator—delivered a lecture on Samuel Johnson in the Senate House at Cambridge. The final paragraph of that address is essential to any discussion of Johnson’s literary and intellectual achievements. Raleigh maintained, principally, that the greatness of the man exceeded that of his works. In other words, Johnson thought of himself as a human being, not as an author; he thought of literature as a means and not as an end. “There are authors,” maintained Raleigh, “who exhaust themselves in the effort to endow posterity, and distill all their virtue in a book. Yet their masterpieces have something inhuman about them, like those jewelled idols, the work of men’s hands, which are worshipped by the sacrifice of man’s flesh and blood.” Therefore, according to Raleigh, humankind really seeks comfort and dignity in the view of literature that characterized the name of Samuel Johnson: “Books without the knowledge of life are useless; for what should books teach but the art of living?” Biography · Born on September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England—the son of Michael and Sarah Ford Johnson—Samuel Johnson spent his formative years devouring the volumes in his father’s bookshop. Although such acquisition of knowledge came about in haphazard fashion, the boy’s tenacious memory allowed him to retain for years what he had read at a young age. Almost from birth, he evidenced those body lesions associated with scrofula; the malady affected his vision, and in 1710

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or 1711, his parents took him to an oculist. Searches for cures even extended to a visit to London in 1712, where the infant received the Queen’s Touch (from Anne) to rid him of the disease. The illness, however, had no serious effect upon Johnson’s growth; he became a large man with enormous physical strength and, given the hazards of life during the eighteenth century, endured for a relatively long period of time. Johnson’s early education was at Lichfield and Stourbridge grammar schools, followed by his entrance to Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1728. Unfortunately, he remained at the university for only one year, since lack of funds forced him to withdraw. He then occupied a number of tutoring posts in Lichfield and Birmingham before his marriage, in 1735, to Mrs. Elizabeth Jervis Porter, a widow twenty years his senior to whom he referred as “Tetty.” The following year, he attempted to establish a school at Edial, three miles to the southwest of Lichfield; despite his wife’s money, the project failed. Thus, in 1737, in the company of David Garrick (a former pupil), Johnson left his home and went to London, where he found employment with Edward Cave, the publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine. His imitation of Juvenal’s third satire, entitled London, appeared in 1738, and he followed that literary (but not financial) success with the biography of Richard Savage and The Vanity of Human Wishes, another imitation of a satire from Juvenal. By 1749, Garrick had established his reputation as an actor and then as manager of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, and he produced Johnson’s tragedy of Irene as a favor to his friend and former teacher. The play, however, lasted for only nine performances and put to an abrupt end any hopes of Johnson becoming a successful dramatist. Fortunately, Johnson’s abilities could be channeled into a variety of literary forms. The Rambler essays appeared twice weekly during 1750-1752. In 1752, Elizabeth Johnson died, a severe loss to her husband because of his fear (terror, in fact) of being alone. Nevertheless, he continued his literary labors, particularly his dictionary, sustained in part by his sincere religious convictions and his rigorous sense of order and discipline. His adherence to the Church of England and to the Tory philosophy of government, both characterized by tradition and conservatism, grew out of that need to discover and to maintain stability and peace of mind. A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, followed by essays for The Idler during 1758-1760. Another personal tragedy, the death of his mother in 1759, supposedly prompted the writing of Rasselas in the evenings of a week’s time so that he could pay for the funeral expenses. By 1762, however, his fortunes turned for the better, motivated initially by a pension of three hundred pounds per year from the Tory ministry of King George III, headed by John Stuart, third Earl of Bute. Simply, the government wished to improve its image and to appear as a sincere but disinterested patron of the arts; the fact that A Dictionary of the English Language had become a source of national pride no doubt provided the incentive for bestowing the sum upon Johnson. In mid-May of 1763, Johnson met young James Boswell, the Scotsman who would become his companion, confidant, and biographer—the one person destined to become the most responsible for promoting the name of Samuel Johnson to the world. The following year, the famous literary circle over which Johnson presided was formed; its membership included the novelist/dramatist/essayist Oliver Goldsmith, the artist/essayist/philospher Sir Joshua Reynolds, the politician/philosopher Edmund Burke, and, eventually, the actor/manager David Garrick and the biographer Boswell. Johnson further solidified his reputation as a scholar/critic with his edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1765, the same year in which he began his friendship with Henry and Hester Lynch Thrale—a relationship that was to remain of utmost impor-

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tance for him throughout the next fifteen years. In 1781, Henry Thrale died; shortly thereafter, his widow married an Italian music master and Roman Catholic, Gabriel Piozzi, much against the wishes of Johnson. That union and Mrs. Piozzi’s frequent departures from England brought to an end one of the most noteworthy intellectual and social associations of literary history. In 1773, Boswell convinced his friend and mentor to accompany him on a tour through Scotland. Thus, the two met in Edinburgh and proceeded on their travels, which resulted, in January, 1775, in Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Later that same year (in March), he received the degree of Doctor in Civil Law (LL.D.) from Oxford University, after which he spent the three months from September through November touring France with the Thrales. His last major work—Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (known popularly as The Lives of the Poets)—appeared between 1779 and 1781. Johnson died on December 13, 1784, and he received still one final honor: burial in Westminster Abbey. The poet Leigh Hunt remarked: One thing he did, perhaps beyond any man in England before or since; he advanced by the powers of his conversation, the strictness of his veracity and the respect he exacted towards his presence, what may be called the personal dignity of literature, and has assisted men with whom he little thought of co-operating in settling the claims of truth and beneficence before all others. Analysis · Although technically a work of prose fiction, Rasselas belongs to the classification of literature known as the moral tale. In Samuel Johnson’s specific case, the piece emerges as an essay on the vanity of human wishes, unified by a clear narrative strand. Some critics have maintained that, in Rasselas, Johnson simply continued the same themes that he set forth ten years earlier in his poetic The Vanity of Human Wishes and then later in The Rambler essays. Essentially, in all three efforts, the writer focused on the problem of what it means to be human and of the psychological and moral difficulties associated with the human imagination. Johnson, both a classicist and a philosophical conservative, took his cue from the poet of Ecclesiastes, particularly the idea of the mind’s eye not being satisfied with seeing or the ear with hearing. Instead, whatever the human being sees or possesses causes him only to imagine something more or something entirely different. Further, to imagine more is to want more and, possibly, to lose pleasure in that which is actually possessed. The inexhaustible capacity of the imagination (including specific hopes and wishes) emerges as the principal source of most human desires, an indispensable ingredient for human happiness. According to both the poet of Ecclesiastes and Samuel Johnson, however, human happiness must be controlled by reality, which is also the primary source of most human misery. Therefore, the line dividing happiness and enjoyment from pain, suffering, and torment remains thin and sometimes even indistinct. Johnson chose to clothe his moral speculations in a form particularly popular among fellow eighteenth century speculators: the Oriental tale, a Western genre that had come into vogue during the earlier Augustan Age. Its popularity was based on the Westerners’ fascination with the Orient: Writers set down translations, pseudotranslations, and imitations of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Chinese tales as backdrops for brief but direct moral lessons. Although the themes of Oriental tales tended toward the theoretical and the abstract, writers of the period tried to confront real and typical issues with which the majority of readers came into contact.

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Rasselas · Originally published as The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale, 1759, Johnson’s work of fiction is known simply as Rasselas. The common name, however, did not appear on the title page of any British edition published during the author’s lifetime. The heading on the first page of both volumes of the 1759 edition, however, reads “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.” Not until the so-called eighth edition of 1787 does one find the title by which the work is generally known: Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia: A Tale by S. Johnson. Although Johnson once referred to Rasselas as merely a “little story book,” the work enjoyed immediate and continuing success, which is an indication of its depth and seriousness of purpose. Literary historians agree that an English or American edition has appeared almost every year since the initial publication, while between 1760 and 1764, French, Dutch, German, Russian, and Italian editions were also released. Indeed, before long, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Greek, Danish, Armenian, Japanese, and Arabic translations were found, indicating clearly the universality of the piece. The theme of the vanity of human wishes contributes heavily to the appeal of Rasselas, even though such a theme may tend to suffer from an emphasis on skepticism. Certainly, Johnson seems to have conveyed to his readers the idea that no single philosophy of life can sustain all cultures and that no particular lifestyle can become permanently satisfying. This philosophy might lead people to believe that life is essentially an exercise in futility and wasted energy. The vanity of human wishes theme, however, as manipulated by Johnson, also allows for considerable positive interpretations that serve to balance its darker side. In Rasselas, Johnson does not deny the value of human experience (including desires and hopes), but he frankly admits to its obvious complexity; man needs to move between conditions of rest and turmoil, and he further needs to experiment with new approaches to life. The admission of that need by the individual constitutes a difficult and complex decision, particularly in the light of the fact that absolute philosophies do not serve all people nor apply to all situations. In joining Prince Rasselas in his search for happiness, the experienced philosopher and poet Imlac reveals his understanding that a commitment to a single course of action constitutes a stubborn and immature attempt to settle irritating problems. Continued movement, on the other hand, is simply a form of escape. The philosopher well knows that all men require a middle ground that considers the best qualities of stability and motion. What emerges from Rasselas, then, is a reinforcement of life’s duality, wherein motion and rest apply to a variety of issues and problems ranging from the nature of family life to the creation of poetry. For example, the idea of the Happy Valley dominates the early chapters of the work to the extent that the reader imagines it as the fixed symbol for the life of rest and stability. Within the remaining sections, however, there exists a search for action covering a wide geographical area outside the Happy Valley. Johnson guides his reader over an unchartered realm that symbolizes the life of motion. Eventually, the two worlds unite. Before that can happen, however, Rasselas must experience the restlessness within the Happy Valley, while Pequah, the warrior’s captive, must discover order in the midst of an experience charged with potential violence. In the end, Johnson offers his reader the simple but nevertheless pessimistic view that no program for the good life actually exists. In spite of that admission, though, humans will continue to perform constructive acts, realizing full well the absence of certainty. Rather than bemoan life, Johnson, through Rasselas, celebrates it. Typical of the classic novel, the themes and plot of Rasselas are supported by its

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structure. The story is about Prince Rasselas who, with his sister Nekayah, lives in the Happy Valley, where the inhabitants anticipate and satisfy every pleasure and where the external causes of grief and anxiety simply do not exist. Rasselas becomes bored with his prison-paradise, however, and with the help of Imlac, a man of the world, he escapes to search for the sources of happiness. Johnson leads his characters through the exploration of practically every condition of life. The rich suffer from anxiety, boredom, and restlessness; they seek new interests to make life attractive, yet others envy them. Believing political power to be the means for doing good, Rasselas discovers that it is both impotent and precarious in its attempts to change the human condition. Learning, which he had thought of in terms of promise and idealism, suffers, instead, from petty rivalries and vested interests. Rasselas observes a hermit who, after having fled from the social world of emptiness and idle pleasure, cannot cope with solitude, study, and meditation. Finally, Rasselas and his companions return to Abyssinia—but not to the Happy Valley—and hope that they can endure and eventually understand the meaning and responsibilities of life. Aside from its highly subjective moral issues and the variety of questions that the themes posed, Rasselas proved difficult for Johnson to write. Fundamentally an essayist, he belonged to a school of rhetoric that encouraged and even demanded formal argument; the task of developing fictional characters within a variety of settings, arranging various escapes and encounters, and then returning those same characters to or near their place of origin proved bothersome for him. To his credit, however, he carefully manipulated those characters into situations that would display the best side of his peculiar literary talents. As soon as Johnson’s characters began to speak, to engage in elaborate dialogues, to position themselves for argument, and to counter objections to those arguments, his style flowed easily and smoothly. Thus, Rasselas consists of a series of dissertations, the subjects of which scan the spectrum of human experience: learning, poetry, solitude, the natural life, social amusements, marriage versus celibacy, the art of flying, politics, philosophy. Johnson applied a thin layer of fictional episodes to unify the arguments, similar to such earlier sources as Joseph Addison’s The Spectator essays, Voltaire’s Candide (published in the same year as Rasselas), and the early seventeenth century series of travelers’ tales by Samuel Purchas known as Purchas: His Pilgrimage. As Johnson’s spokesmen, Rasselas and Imlac express the author’s own fear of solitude and isolation, the supernatural, and ghosts. The Abyssinian prince and his philosopher guide also convey Johnson’s horror of madness, his devotion to poetry, his thoughts on the relationship between hypocrisy and human grief, and his conviction (since the death of his wife and mother) that, although marriage can produce considerable trial and pain, celibacy evidences little or no pleasure. In Rasselas, the loose fictional structure and the serious philosophic discussions combine to control the pessimism and to produce an intellectual pilgrimage upon which the travelers’ questioning intellects and restless spirits seek purpose and meaning for life. In so doing, however, Johnson’s Abyssinian pilgrims mistakenly associate happiness with any object or condition that suggests to them the presence of peace, harmony, or contentment. Rasselas, Nekayah, and even Imlac do not always understand that a human being cannot secure happiness simply by going out and looking for it. Johnson titled the final chapter “The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded” probably because he sensed his own inability to suggest a solution to finding happiness, a condition he had not managed to achieve. Outside the realm of its obvious moral considerations, Rasselas succeeds because

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of its attention to an analysis of a significant, universal, and timeless issue: education. Both Rasselas and his sister, Nekayah, are guided by the teacher, philosopher, and poet Imlac, whose principal qualification is that he has seen the world and thus knows something of it. Whether he serves as the knowledge and experience of the author does not appear as important as the reader’s being able to recognize his function within the work and his contribution to the growth of the Prince and the Princess. At the outset, Imlac relates to Rasselas the story of his life, which serves as a prologue to what the young people will eventually come to know and recognize. Johnson knew well that the experience of one individual cannot be communicated to others simply; a person can only suggest to his listeners how to respond should they be confronted with similar circumstances. The Prince and Princess go forth to acquire their own experiences. They proceed to discover at first hand, to observe and then to ask relevant questions. Imlac hovers in the background, commenting upon persons and situations. As the narrative discussion goes forward, Rasselas and his sister gain experience and even begin to resemble, in their thoughts and statements, the sound and the sense of their teacher. Naturally, Imlac’s motives parallel those of the title character, which make him seem more real and more human than if he were only a teacher and commentator. Simply, Imlac believes that diligence and skill can be applied by the moral and intelligent person to help in the battle with and eventual triumph over the life of boredom, waste, and emptiness. In the development of the eighteenth century English novel, Johnson’s contemporaries did not embrace Rasselas and accept it on the basis of its having met or failed to meet the standards for fiction. Although not a strong example of the form, Johnson does provide his characters with sufficient substance to support the moral purpose of his effort. Nekayah appears more than adequately endowed with grace, intelligence, and the ability to communicate; in fact, stripped of the fashions and the artificial conventions of her time and place (eighteenth century London), the Princess well represents the actualities of feminine nature. Certainly, the male characters speak and act as pure Johnsonian Londoners, clothed in the intellectual habits and language of the mid-eighteenth century. Johnson’s intention was to convey the essential arguments of an intellectual debate, and his contemporary readers understood that Rasselas existed as nothing more or less than what its author intended it to be: a fictional narrative used as a vehicle for elevated style and thought. The noted British essayist of the first half of the nineteenth century, Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his encyclopedic essay on Johnson, observed that a number of those who read Rasselas “pronounced the writer a pompous pedant, who would never use a word of two syllables where it was possible to use a word of six, and who could not make a waiting-woman relate her adventures without balancing every noun with another noun, and every epithet with another epithet.” When considering the size of Rasselas, however, it seems the epitome of compression. By composing the work quickly, Johnson forced himself to ignore doubts or hesitations regarding the vanity of human wishes theme and to depend upon his experiences (as painful as they had been) and his skill in expressing them. The entire project also stood as a challenge to Johnson’s imaginative and rhetorical artistry. Thus, he again confronted the major thesis of The Vanity of Human Wishes and The Rambler essays within the context of his own moral thinking. Walter Jackson Bate, in his biography of Samuel Johnson, claimed that The Vanity of Human Wishes served as the prologue to the great decade of moral writing, while Rasselas was the epilogue. Indeed, such is the appropriate summation for any discus-

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sion of Johnson’s moral writing as well as moral thought. The wisdom found within both works—as well as in The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer essays—certainly solidifies a general understanding of Johnson’s religious and moral views. Rasselas, in particular, however, gives dimension to those views, reflects the writer’s acuteness, and displays the depth and meaning of his early disillusion with life. In writing Rasselas, Johnson sought to expose the exact nature of human discontent as it existed in a variety of specific contexts. Each episode in Rasselas proved worthy of serious consideration, and each instance revealed the extent to which Johnson could creatively apply his wisdom and his experience. Samuel J. Rogal Other major works PLAY: Irene: A Tragedy, pr. 1749. POETRY: London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal, 1738; The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated, 1749; Poems: The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1965 (vol. 6; E. L. McAdam, Jr., and George Milne, editors). NONFICTION: Marmer Norfolciense, 1739; A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage, 1739; The Life of Admiral Blake, 1740; An Account of the Life of John Philip Barretier, 1744; An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers, 1744; Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, 1745; The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, 1747; essays in The Rambler, 1750-1752; A Dictionary of the English Language: To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar, 1755 (2 volumes); essays in The Idler, 1758-1760; preface and notes to The Plays of William Shakespeare, 1765 (8 volumes); The False Alarm, 1770; Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands, 1771; The Patriot: Addressed to the Electors of Great Britain, 1774; Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress, 1775; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775; Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, 1779-1781 (10 volumes; also known as The Lives of the Poets); The Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson, 1923, 1961 ( Joseph Epes Brown, editor). TRANSLATIONS: A Voyage to Abyssinia, 1735 (of Jerome Lobo’s novel); Commentary on Pope’s “Essay on Man,” 1738-1739 (of Jean Pierre de Crousaz). Bibliography Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. A magisterial biography which is readable and sympathetic. Frankly Freudian, the book presents a troubled Johnson who remains lovable despite his flaws. Devotes a chapter to Rasselas, which is viewed as a sensible, moral treatment of life. Greene, Donald. The Politics of Samuel Johnson. 2d ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Divided into sections on his early years, first books, London career, and the reign of George III. Greene updated the scholarship of the first edition (1960) and included detailed notes and bibliography. Indispensable background reading for the Johnson student, written by one of the great Johnson scholars of the twentieth century. Holmes, Richard. Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage. New York: Pantheon, 1993. This distinguished biographer provides a fascinating insight into the origins of Johnson’s prose by conducting a keen psychological investigation of Johnson’s relationship with the controversial poet Richard Savage. This short book is ideal for the

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beginning student of Johnson, immersing him in Johnson’s period and making Johnson a vivid presence as man and writer. Holmes provides a succinct and very useful bibliography. Keener, Frederick M. The Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, the Novel, and a Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment; Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Johnson, and Austen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Argues for the psychological realism of philosophical tales like Rasselas and relates such works to the novels of Jane Austen. Lipking, Lawrence. Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. In Lipking’s terms, he is writing a life of an author, not the life of a man—by which he means that he concentrates on the story of how Johnson became a writer and a man of letters. A superb work of scholarship, Lipking’s book reveals a sure grasp of previous biographies and should be read, perhaps, after consulting Bate. Reinert, Thomas. Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Reinert’s fascinating work of scholarship should be consulted only after perusing earlier, introductory studies, for he is reexamining Johnson’s views of human nature, urban culture, and individualism. “The crowd” of the book’s title refers to Elias Canetti’s theories of crowds and power, which Reinert applies to his reevaluation of Johnson. Tomarken, Edward. Johnson, “Rasselas,” and the Choice of Criticism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. After surveying the various critical approaches to Rasselas, offers a fusion of formalist and other theories to explain Rasselas as a work in which life and literature confront each other. The second part of the book argues that Johnson’s other writings support this view. Wahba, Magdi, ed. Bicentenary Essays on “Rasselas.” Cairo: Cairo Studies in English, 1959. Issued as a supplement to Cairo Studies in English, this work collects a number of useful essays. Included are James Clifford’s comparison of Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and Rasselas, Fatma Moussa Mahmoud’s ”Rasselas and Vathek,” and C. J. Rawson’s discussion of Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas (1790) as a continuation of Johnson’s work. Walker, Robert G. Eighteenth-Century Arguments for Immortality and Johnson’s “Rasselas.” Victoria, British Columbia: University of Victoria, 1977. Places Johnson’s fiction “in the context of eighteenth century philosophical discussions on the nature of the human soul.” Reads the work as an orthodox Christian defense of the soul’s immortality and as a demonstration that happiness is not attainable in this world.

Elizabeth Jolley Elizabeth Jolley

Born: Birmingham, England; June 4, 1923 Principal long fiction · Palomino, 1980; The Newspaper of Claremont Street, 1981; Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, 1983; Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, 1983; Milk and Honey, 1984; Foxybaby, 1985; The Well, 1986; The Sugar Mother, 1988; My Father’s Moon, 1989; Cabin Fever, 1990; The Georges’ Wife, 1993; The Orchard Thieves, 1995; Lovesong, 1997. Other literary forms · Elizabeth Jolley’s reputation was first established by her short stories, one of which, “Hedge of Rosemary,” won an Australian prize as early as 1966. The first works she ever published were her short-story collections Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976) and The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories (1979); although her novel Palomino won a prize as an unpublished work in 1975, it did not appear in print until 1980. A third volume of short stories, Woman in a Lampshade, was published in 1983. Her radio plays have been produced on Australian radio and on the British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.) World Network. Achievements · Jolley had been writing for twenty years before her first book, a volume of short stories, was published in 1976. In 1975, her novel Palomino was given the Con Weickhardt Award for an unfinished novel. Palomino was not published, however, until 1980, after a second volume of short stories had already appeared. Not until 1984 was Jolley widely reviewed in the United States. Her honors and awards include a 1986 nomination for the Booker Prize for The Well, the 1986 Australian Bicentennial Authority Literary Award for The Sugar Mother, the 1987 Miles Franklin Award for The Well, and the 1991 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal Award for Cabin Fever. She also won the 1993 inaugural France-Australia Award for Translation of a Novel for The Sugar Mother and the 1993 West Australian Premier’s Prize for Central Mischief. In 1998 Jolley was named one of Australia’s Living Treasures. Sometimes compared to Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym, Jolley is unique in her characterization and tone. Critics variously refer to her novels as fantasy combined with farce, comedy of manners, moral satire, or black comedy. Although most reviewers see a moral dimension beneath the slapstick surface of her work, noting her compassion, her wisdom, and her penetration of complex human relationships, some have insisted that she is merely a comic entertainer. Yet to most thoughtful readers, it is obvious that Jolley’s humor often derives from characters who refuse to be defeated by their destinies, who boldly assert their individuality, and who dare to dream and to love, however foolish they may appear to the conformists. Biography · Elizabeth Monica Jolley was born in Birmingham, England, on June 4, 1923. Her mother, a German aristocrat, the daughter of a general, had married a young Englishman who had been disowned by his father because of his pacifist convictions. Privately educated for some years, Jolley and her sister were then sent to a Quaker school. Later, Jolley was trained as a nurse at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, and served in that capacity during World War II. In 1959, she moved to Western Australia with her husband and three children. After her move, Jolley began increas509

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ingly to divide her time between writing, tending to her farm, and conducting writing workshops. Jolley was a tutor at the Fremantle Arts Centre and a writer-in-residence at the Western Australian Institute of Technology in the School of English. In 1996, her orchard and goose farm—the subject of her book Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993)—was lost in bushfires that swept the area during the summer. Analysis · In “Self Portrait: A Child Went Forth,” a personal commentary in the one-volume collection Stories (1984), Elizabeth Jolley muses on the frequency with which the theme of exile appears in her works. Often her major characters are lonely, physically or emotionally alienated from their surroundings, living imaginatively in a friendlier, more interesting environment. Because of their loneliness, they reach out, often to grasping or selfish partners, who inevitably disappoint them. For Jolley’s lonely spinster, widow, or divorcé, the beloved may be another woman. Sometimes, however, the yearning takes a different form, and the beloved is not a person but a place, like the homes of the old men in Mr. Scobie’s Riddle. If there is defeat in Jolley’s fiction, there is also grace in the midst of despair. Despite betrayal, her characters reach for love, and occasionally an unlikely pair or group will find it. Another redeeming quality is the power of the imagination; it is no accident that almost every work contains a writer, who may, as in Foxybaby, appear to be imagining events into reality and characters into existence. Finally, Jolley believes in laughter. Her characters laugh at one another and sometimes at themselves; more detached, she and her readers laugh at the outrageous characters, while at the same time realizing that the characters are only slight exaggerations of those who view them. Palomino · The protagonist of Jolley’s novel Palomino is an exile desperate for love. A physician who has been expelled from the profession and imprisoned, Laura lives on an isolated ranch, her only neighbors the shiftless, dirty tenants, who inspire her pity but provide no companionship for her. Into Laura’s lonely life comes Andrea Jackson, a young woman whom the doctor noticed on her recent voyage from England but with whom she formed no relationship. Up until this point, Laura’s life has been a series of unsuccessful and unconsummated love affairs with women. At one time, she adored a doctor, to whom she wrote religiously; when the doctor arrived on a visit, she brought a husband. At another period in her life, Laura loved Andrea’s selfish, flirtatious mother, who eventually returned to her abusive husband. Perhaps, Laura hopes, Andrea will be different. She is delighted when Andrea agrees to run off with her, ecstatic when she can install her on the ranch, where the women live happily, talking, laughing, and making love. In her new joy, Laura does not realize that, like her other lost lovers, Andrea is obsessed with a man—her own brother, Christopher. It is Christopher’s marriage and fatherhood which has driven her into Laura’s arms, but Andrea continues to desire Chris, even at moments of high passion. When Andrea admits that she is pregnant with Chris’s baby and tries to use Laura’s love for her to obtain an abortion, Laura is forced to come to terms with the fact that the love between Andrea and her is imperfect, as it is in all relationships, doomed to change or to dwindle. Obviously, loneliness is the human condition. Although Jolley’s characters must face hard truths such as the inevitability of loneliness, often they move through suffering to new understanding. This is the pattern of Palomino. The novel derives its title from the horses on a nearby ranch,

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whose beauty Laura can appreciate even though she does not possess them. Joy is in perception, not possession; similarly, joy comes from loving, not from being loved. When Andrea and Laura agree that they must part, for fear that their brief love will dwindle into dislike or indifference, they know that they can continue to love each other, even though they will never again be together. Mr. Scobie’s Riddle · In the graphic dialogue of Laura’s tenants can be seen the accuracy and the comic vigor which characterize Jolley’s later works. Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, for example, begins with a series of communications between the matron of the nursing home where the novel takes place and the poorly qualified night nurse, whose partial explanations and inadequate reports, along with her erratic spelling, infuriate her superior. At night, the nursing home comes alive with pillow fights, medicinal whiskey, and serious gambling, at which the matron’s brother, a former colonel, always loses. In the daytime, the home is a prison: Old people are processed like objects, ill-fed, ill-tended by two rock-and-rolling girls, and supervised by the greedy matron, whose goal is to part her new guest, Mr. Scobie, from his property. Yet if the patients are prisoners, so are their supervisors. Having lost her husband to an old schoolmate, the matron cannot ignore the fact that the couple cavorts regularly in the caravan on the grounds; in turn, the lonely matron saddles her schoolmate with as much work as possible. Meanwhile, the matron is driven constantly closer to bankruptcy by her brother’s gambling and closer to a nervous breakdown by her inefficient and careless employees. Some of the most poignant passages in Mr. Scobie’s Riddle deal with the yearnings of two old men in Room One, who wish only to return to their homes. Unfortunately, one’s has been sold and bulldozed down; the other’s has been rented by a voracious niece and nephew. As the patients are driven toward their deaths, no one offers rescue or even understanding. There are, however, some triumphs. The would-be writer, Miss Hailey, never surrenders her imagination or her hope; ironically, her schoolfellow, the matron, who has taken all her money, must at last turn to Miss Hailey for understanding and companionship. In the battle for his own dignity, Mr. Scobie wins. Even though he is returned to the nursing home whenever he attempts to go home, and even though his uncaring niece and nephew finally acquire his beloved home, he wins, for he never surrenders to the matron, but dies before she can bully him into signing over his property. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance · The unique combination of farcical humor, lyrical description, pathos, and moral triumph which marks Jolley’s later work is also exemplified in Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, published, like Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, in 1983. In this novel, a woman writer is one of the two major characters. In response to a fan letter from a middle-aged, mother-ridden London typist, the novelist regularly transmits to her the rough episodes from her new novel, a Rabelaisian story of lesbian schoolmistresses and the troublesome, innocent girl whom they escort through Europe. When at last the typist travels to Australia to meet her writer-heroine, she finds that the writer, a bed-bound invalid, has died. Yet her courage, her imagination, and her manuscript remain for Miss Peabody, an inheritance which will enable her to live as fully and as creatively as the novelist. Milk and Honey · In Milk and Honey, there is no triumph of love, of laughter, or of the imagination. Alone among Jolley’s novels, Milk and Honey begins and ends in despair.

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At the beginning, a door-to-door salesman with a poor, unhappy wife expresses his loneliness, his loss of the woman he loved and of the music he enjoyed. The rest of the novel re-creates his life, from the time when he went to live with his cello teacher and his seemingly delightful family, through the salesman’s discovery that he was used and betrayed, to the final tragic climax, when his income vanished—his cellist’s hand was charred in a fire—and the woman who made his life worth living was brutally murdered. Although many of the scenes in the novel are grotesque, they are devoid of the humor which is typical of Jolley and which often suggests one way of rising above despair. Nor does the protagonist’s art—here, performing music, rather than creating fiction—enable him to transcend his situation. His love for his wife is destroyed with his illusions about her, his mistress is destroyed by his wife, and he and his wife are left to live out their lives together without love. Foxybaby · Foxybaby, published in 1985, is as grotesque as Milk and Honey, but its characters move through desperation to humor, love, imagination, and hope. The setting is a campus turned into a weight-loss clinic. Typically, the characters are trapped there, in this case by the rascally bus driver, who ensures a healthy wrecker and garage business by parking so that all approaching cars plow into him. The central character of Foxybaby is, once again, a woman writer, Alma Porch, who along with a sculptor and a potter has been hired to take the residents’ minds off food by submerging them in culture. Miss Porch’s mission is to rehearse an assorted group of residents in a film which she is creating as the book progresses. Brilliantly, Jolley alternates the wildly comic events at the campus with the poignant story that Miss Porch is writing, an account of a father’s attempt to rescue his young, drug-ruined, infected daughter and her sickly baby from the doom which seems to await them. From his affectionate nickname for her when she was a little girl comes the name of the book. Like the love story in Milk and Honey, the plot in Foxybaby illustrates the destructive power of love. Well-meaning though he is, the father cannot establish communication with his daughter. The reason is unclear, even to the writer who is creating the story or, more accurately, is letting the characters she has imagined create their own story. Perhaps the father’s love was crushing; perhaps in her own perverseness the daughter rejected it. At any rate, it is obvious that despite his persistence, he is making little headway in reaching the destructive stranger who is now his “Foxybaby” and who herself has a baby for whom she feels nothing. Meanwhile, like Jolley’s other protagonists, Porch considers escaping from the place which is both her prison and her exile but is prevented from doing so by the very confusion of events. Loquacious Jonquil Castle moves in with her; a Maybelle Harrow, with her lover and his lover, invites her to an orgy; and the indomitable Mrs. Viggars brings forth her private stock of wine and initiates Porch into the joys of the school-like midnight feast. Offstage, the bus driver is always heard shouting to his wife or his mistress to drop her knickers. Love, in all its variety, blooms on the campus, while it is so helpless in the story being shaped in the same place. Although the campus trap will be easier to escape, bus or no bus, than the nursing home in Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, Jolley stresses the courage of the residents, a courage which will be necessary in the lives to which they will return, whether those lives involve battling boredom and loneliness, like Miss Porch’s, or rejection, like that of Jonquil Castle, the doting mother and grandmother, or age and the loss of love, like the lascivious Maybelle Harrow’s. Just as they will survive the clinic, though probably

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without losing any weight, they will survive their destinies. At the end of the novel, there is a triumph of love, when Mrs. Viggars, admitting her loneliness, chooses to take a young woman and her three children into her home, in order to establish a family once again. There is also a triumph of imagination, when Miss Porch actually sees the characters whom she has created. For her loneliness, they will be companions. At the end of the novel, the bus stops and Miss Porch awakes, to find herself at the school. Jolley does not explain: Has Porch dreamed the events of the book? Will they now take place? Or is the awakening misplaced in time, and have they already taken place? Ultimately, it does not matter. What does matter is the power of the imagination, which, along with humor and love, makes life bearable. Hester Harper, another spinster protagonist, is somewhat like the doctor in Palomino in that she lives on an isolated ranch in Western Australia and yearns for love. In The Well, however, the beloved is an orphan girl, whom Hester takes home to be her companion. Refusing to admit her sexual desires, even to herself, Hester persuades herself that her feelings are merely friendly or perhaps maternal; yet she is so jealous of the orphan, Katherine, that she cannot bear to think of the friend who wishes to visit her or of the man who will ultimately take her away. The rival, when he appears, is mysterious, perhaps a thief, perhaps only an animal, whom Katherine hits on a late-night drive and whom Hester immediately buries in the well. Perhaps diabolical, perhaps distraught, Katherine insists that he is calling to her, demanding her love, threatening her and Hester. Although at last his voice is stilled, it is clear that Hester has lost control over Katherine, to whom the outside world of sexuality and adventure is calling with undeniable urgency. Unlike the doctor in Palomino, Hester cannot be contented with the memory of love. Imagination, however, once again mitigates the horror of life; at the end of the novel, Hester is making the mysterious nighttime adventure into a story to be told to children. The Georges’ Wife · In The Georges’ Wife, Jolley repeats themes of earlier books, particularly My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever, themes of discord and harmony between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. As in earlier books, her spare prose is a dramatic contrast to the abundance of compassion and understanding she demonstrates for the complexities of human relationships. Focusing on the relationship between Vera and Mr. George, Jolley explores the life they attempt to create together, while Vera’s mind continues to wander to her past and to her fear of repeating the past. The present and the past collide within her, just as the desire for peace collides with the reality of disharmony. The Orchard Thieves · A similar theme of discord versus harmony is present in The Orchard Thieves. Characters in this novel are also haunted by times of discord which destroy their desire for calm. Every member of the household deals with this specter, especially the grandmother, a mother of three grown-up daughters, who understands that the unspoken and unrevealed either perplex or console people in their dealings with family. A middle sister returns home from England, with no explanations about her private life, thus jeopardizing the peace in the grandmother’s house. In the face of this danger, the grandmother tries to rescue the situation and the people involved through her imagination, acceptance, and affection. The title for this novel, the first part of which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1994 as “Three Miles to One Inch,” is taken from a quotation from writer

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Herman Melville: “The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us.” Uncomfortable inflictions do indeed intrude into the lives of Jolley’s characters, especially those in this household. Lovesong · Another tale about uncomfortable inflictions is Lovesong, a novel which explores another of Jolley’s exiles, Thomas Dalton, who comes reluctantly to Mrs. Porter’s establishment, a Home away from Home for Homeless Gentlemen. He wants a fresh start, as does Miss Emily Vales, a fellow lodger and recipient of the predictions found in Mrs. Porter’s tea leaves. The study of these two wayfarers, typical examples of Jolley’s characters who are struggling with their human mixture of pathos and nobility, echoes the same struggle poet T. S. Eliot describes in his own love song, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917). Because she deals with cruelty, indifference, lust, greed, and, above all, with loneliness, Elizabeth Jolley cannot be considered a superficial writer. The great distances of her western Australia become a metaphor for the mysterious expanses of time; the small clumps of isolated individuals, trapped together on a ranch, on a weight-loss farm, or in a nursing home, represent society, as did Joseph Conrad’s microcosmic ships on an indifferent ocean. Jolley makes it clear that love is infrequent and imperfect, that childhood is endangered by cruelty, and that old age leads through indignity to death. Yet most of her works are enlivened by comic characters who defy destiny and death by their very insistence on living. Some of her characters transcend their isolation by learning to love, such as the doctor in Palomino or Mrs. Viggars in Foxybaby. Others, such as Miss Peabody and Miss Porch, triumph through their imaginations. There is redemption in nature, whether in the beauty of palomino horses or the sunlit shore where Miss Porch sees her characters. There is also triumph in the isolated courage of a human being such as Mr. Scobie, who defies institutionalized and personal greed to save the beloved home to which he can return only in memory. If Elizabeth Jolley’s characters are mixtures of the pathetic, the grotesque, and the noble, it is because they are human; if her stories keep the reader off balance between confusion, laughter, and tears, it is because they reflect life. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, updated by Marjorie Smelstor Other major works SHORT FICTION: Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories, 1976; The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories, 1979; Woman in a Lampshade, 1983; Stories, 1984. RADIO PLAYS: Night Report, 1975; The Performance, 1976; The Shepherd on the Roof, 1977; The Well-Bred Thief, 1977; Woman in a Lampshade, 1979; Two Men Running, 1981. NONFICTION: Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past, and Herself, 1992 (Caroline Lurie, editor), Diary of a Weekend Farmer, 1993. Bibliography Bird, Delys, and Brenda Walker, eds. Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. North Ryde, Australia: Angus and Robertson, 1991. Criticism and interpretation of Jolley’s works. Includes bibliographic references. Daniel, Helen. “A Literary Offering, Elizabeth Jolley.” In Liars: Australian New Novelists. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. In this comprehensive study, Jolley’s fiction is compared with a musical composition by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of

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component literary fugues. While each of her novels is separate, they all blend together to form a graceful totality, and Jolley’s handling of theme, time, characterization, and narrative is discussed in this light. The essay appears in a book devoted to Jolley and seven other contemporary Australian novelists, and includes a primary and selected secondary bibliography. Howells, Coral Ann. “In Search of Lost Mothers: Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners and Elizabeth Jolley’s Miss Peabody’s Inheritance.” Ariel 19, no. 1 (1988): 57-70. This comparison of two novels, one Canadian, the other Australian, places them in the tradition of postcolonial writing by women who are concerned not only with their political dispossession as former colonials but with their gender dispossession as well. After a thorough discussion of the two works in this light, the conclusion is drawn that both writers claim their female literary inheritance by rejecting masculinist-inspired tradition and creating their own aesthetic. Kirkby, Joan. “The Spinster and the Missing Mother in the Fiction of Elizabeth Jolley.” In Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth Century Novel, edited by Laura L. Doan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Considers Jolley’s use of single women in her fiction. Manning, Gerald F. “Sunsets and Sunrises: Nursing Home as Microcosm in Memento Mori and Mr. Scobie’s Riddle.” Ariel 18, no. 2 (1987): 27-43. This comparative study takes up the similarities in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori and Jolley’s Mr. Scobie’s Riddle. The two novels share setting (a nursing home) and theme (age, loneliness, and alienation), and both authors make imaginative use of tragicomic devices to enrich their tone. These works attempt to discover an answer that will lead to the acceptance of death. Salzman, Paul. Helplessly Tangled in Female Arms and Legs: Elizabeth Jolley’s Fictions. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1993. A small but useful book containing information about Jolley’s fiction. Includes bibliographic references. Westerly 31, no. 2 (1986). Entitled “Focus on Elizabeth Jolley,” this special issue of an Australian journal provides essays on various aspects of Jolley’s work, including one on the way her fiction connects to form a continuum, one on her novel Milk and Honey, and another on her handling of displaced persons. Also includes fiction by Jolley. Willbanks, Ray. “A Conversation with Elizabeth Jolley.” Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature 3 (1989): 27-30. While concentrating on Jolley’s fiction—its characters, themes, background, and development—this interview offers some interesting information on the author’s personal background. Jolley tells about her life in England, where she was born and lived to adulthood until she moved to Australia in 1959. She also recalls the impact Australia made on her when she first arrived and discusses its effect on her writing.

Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling

Born: Bombay, India; December 30, 1865 Died: Hampstead, London, England; January 18, 1936 Principal long fiction · The Light That Failed, 1890; The Naulahka: A Story of East and West, 1892 (with Wolcott Balestier); Captains Courageous, 1897; Kim, 1901. Other literary forms · Best known for his short fiction, Rudyard Kipling wrote more than 250 stories. His style of leaving a story open-ended with the tantalizing phrase “But that’s another story” established his reputation for unlimited storytelling. Although the stories are uneven in quality, W. Somerset Maugham considered Kipling to be the only British writer to equal Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov in the art of short fiction. His early stories both satisfied and glorified the Englishman in India. The empire builder, the man who devotes his life to “civilize the sullen race,” comes off in glowing colors, as in the story “The Bridge Builders.” Some of his best stories skillfully blend the exotic and the bizarre, and the early “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), which is about two drifters and their fantastic dream to carve out a kingdom for themselves in Central Asia, best illustrates such a story. “A Madonna of the Trenches,” with its strange, occult atmosphere; “The Children of the Zodiac,” about a young poet who dreads death by cancer of the throat; and “The Gardener” (1926), with its unrelieved sadness and autobiographical reflections on the death of his son, reflect the pain, the suffering, and the dark melancholy of Kipling’s later life. The stories that make up The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) were written in Brattleboro, Vermont, when Kipling’s mind “worked at the height of its wonderful creative power.” They are in the class of animal and folktales that make up such world literary creations as the ancient folktales of Aesop’s Fables (fourth century b.c.e.) and The Jataka Tales. Into the Jungle Book stories, Kipling incorporated not only the clear and clean discipline of the public school but also his favorite doctrine of the natural law. This law had a great impact on the Boy Scout movement and the origins of the Wolf Cub organization, found in the Mowgli tales. Kipling was a prolific writer, and, as a journalist, he wrote a considerable number of articles, stories, and poems not only for his own newspapers but also for a variety of literary journals in England and the United States. In addition, he was a prolific letter-writer and carried on lengthy literary and political correspondence with such men as President Theodore Roosevelt, financier Cecil Rhodes, and writer H. Rider Haggard. His correspondence with Haggard has been collected in Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, edited by Morton N. Cohen (1965). Two volumes of his Uncollected Prose were published in 1938, and even some of his desultory writing, such as American Notes, concerned with his travels in the United States in 1891, was reissued in the late twentieth century with editorial notes. Kipling personally supervised the publication of the Sussex edition of his work in thirty-five volumes (1937-1939). The Kipling Society, founded in 1927, publishes the quarterly Kipling Journal, which keeps Kipling enthusiasts informed of publications about Kipling. Biographical material on Kipling—including his autobiography, Something of 516

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Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown, published posthumously in 1937—is considerable, and the record of his literary achievement is now complete. Achievements · Kipling’s first book of fiction appeared in 1888. Since then, his works have undergone several editions, and several of his short stories and poems have found a permanent place in anthologies. Although England and India have both changed enormously since the turn of the twentieth century, Kipling’s stories continue to attract and fascinate new readers. He was a best-selling author during his lifetime—one of his animal stories, Thy Servant a Dog (1930), sold 100,000 copies in six months in 1932—and he continues to be extremely popular in the English-speaking countries of the world. Several of his works, notably Captains Courageous, Kim, The Jungle Book, and some short stories, have been made into motion pictures. Throughout his lifetime, and soon after his death, Kipling was associated with the British empire. He had become the laureate of England’s vast imperial power, his first book was praised by the viceroy in 1888, and the king used Kipling’s own words to address the empire on Christmas Day in 1932. The day Kipling’s ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey—January 23, 1936—King George V’s body lay in state in Westminster Hall and the comment that “the King has gone and taken his trumpeteer with him” appropriately described the image Kipling had projected. Kipling wanted to serve the empire through the army or the civil service. Because he had neither family connections with which to obtain a civil service job nor strong eyesight, which barred him from military service, Kipling turned to writing. He wrote with a passionate intensity coupled with admiration for the soldiers, the bridge builders, the missionaries, and the civil servants in remote places who served the empire under “an alien sky.” Many of the phrases he used to narrate their tales—“What do they know of England who only England know?,” “East is East and West is West,” “the white man’s burden,” “somewhere east of Suez”—have become part of the English language and are often repeated by those who are unfamiliar with his writings. To have used the pen in place of a gun to serve the imperial vision and have such lasting impact on British thinking constitutes a major achievement. In 1890, Kipling published or republished more than eighty stories, including the novelette The Light That Failed. At twenty-five, he had become a famous literary figure. At forty-two, he became the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for “the great power of observation, the original conception and also the virile comprehension and art of narrative that distinguish his literary creations.” He had also become a controversial personality, since critics Library of Congress and readers saw in his work the

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effort to mix the roles of the artist and the propagandist. Kipling’s writings would continue to be controversial and generate extremes of admiration or condemnation. He generates a love-hate response, and there are frequent Kipling studies that evaluate and interpret his writings from a new perspective. He is neither neglected nor ignored, which is a true testimony to his importance as a writer. Biography · Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, on December 30, 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling of Yorkshire, was a scholar and an artist. The elder Kipling went to India as a professor of architectural sculpture in the Bombay School of Fine Arts and later became the Curator of the Lahore Museum, which Kipling was to describe meticulously in Kim. He also served as the Bombay correspondent of The Pioneer of Allahabad. In 1891, he published Beast and Man in India with the help of A. P. Watt, his son’s literary agent. The book contains excerpts from Rudyard Kipling’s newspaper reports to The Civil and Military Gazette. The book provided inspiration for Kipling’s Jungle Books and several of his stories: “The Mark of the Beast,” “The Finances of the Gods,” and “Moti Guj, Mutineer” are some examples. Kipling’s mother, Alice Macdonald, was one of five Macdonald sisters, three of whom married into prominent families. Georgina Macdonald married the distinguished pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones; Agnes Macdonald married another painter, Sir Edward Poynter, who was influential in helping John Kipling obtain a position in India; and a third sister married Alfred Baldwin, the railroad owner, whose son Stanley Baldwin became prime minister of England. Kipling was therefore connected with creative and intellectually stimulating families through his mother, while from his father, he inherited a strong Wesleyan tradition. Rudyard and his sister, Trix, spent the first six years of their lives in India. Surrounded by Indian servants who told them Indian folktales, Kipling absorbed the Indian vocabulary and unconsciously cultivated the habit of thinking in that vocabulary, as illustrated in his short story “Tod’s Amendment.” Kipling recalls these early years in his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself, in which he recalls how he and his sister had to be constantly reminded to speak English to his parents, and that he spoke English “haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.” This contributed to the great facility with which he uses Indian words as part of his style. Edmund Wilson, in his essay “The Kipling That Nobody Read,” writes that Kipling even looked like an Indian as a young boy. Like other Anglo-Indian children who were sent home to England for their education, Kipling and his sister were shipped to London to live with a relative of their father in Southsea. The pain and agony of those six years under the supervision of this sadistic woman in what Kipling calls “the house of desolation” is unflinchingly re-created in the early part of his novelette The Light That Failed and in the short story “Baa, Baa, Blacksheep.” According to Edmund Wilson, the traumatic experiences of these six years filled Kipling with hatred for the rest of his life. Kipling studied at the United Services College, a public school for children from families with a military background or with the government civil service. Kipling served as editor of the school newspaper, The United Services College Chronicle, to which he contributed several youthful parodies of poets Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne. One poem, “Ave Imperatrix,” however, with its note of patriotism and references to England’s destiny to civilize the world, foreshadows Kipling’s later imperial themes. Although Kipling makes fun of flagwaving in “The Flag of Their Country,” in Stalky and Co. (1899), he did imbibe some of his imperial tendencies at

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the school because there was an almost universal desire among the boys to join either the army or the civil service for the glory of the empire. In 1882, when Kipling was sixteen, he returned to India, and his “English years fell away” and never “came back in full strength.” Through his father’s connections, Kipling had no difficulty in becoming assistant editor on The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore at the age of eighteen. Two horror stories written during this period, “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” and “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, C. E.,” have found a place among his best-known stories. After four years on The Civil and Military Gazette, Kipling moved to Allahabad as assistant editor to The Pioneer, and his writings began to appear in four major newspapers of British India. Young, unattached, with servants and horses at his disposal, enfolded in the warmth of his family, these years proved to be Kipling’s happiest and most productive. He wrote to a friend, “I’m in love with the country and would sooner write about her than anything else.” The poetry collection Departmental Ditties was published in 1886, and Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888. Soon, Kipling was known all over India, and a favorable review in the Saturday Review also created a demand for his writings in London. In March, 1899, he left Lahore on a leisurely sea journey to London by way of Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and San Francisco. After making several stops across the United States, the twenty-four-year-old Kipling arrived in London in October, 1899. He has described this journey in From Sea to Sea, published the same year. In London, Kipling came into contact with the American Wolcott Balestier, whom he met in writer Mrs. Humphry Ward’s drawing room. He collaborated with him on the novel The Naulahka: A Story of East and West. Balestier’s sister Caroline was later to become Kipling’s wife. Befriended by the poet W. E. Henley, Kipling published Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892. It was a completely new poetic voice in style, language, and content. Kipling won an audience, who were startled and shocked but fascinated and hypnotized by his style. Kipling left for America in June, 1891, and the short visit brought him into conflict with certain members of the American press. He returned to England and went on a long sea voyage with a sentimental stopover in India, his last visit to the subcontinent. He returned to London hurriedly because of Wolcott Balestier’s death, and a few weeks later, on January 18, 1892, he married Caroline Balestier. Henry James gave away the bride. The newly married couple returned to the Balestier home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote the Jungle Books and other stories. He also became a friend of Mark Twain. His desire for privacy, his recurrent conflicts with the press, the death of his eldest daughter, Josephine, his own illness, and the notorious publicity as a result of a quarrel with his brother-in-law all contributed to his decision to leave America in 1897, never to return. Kipling went to South Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902) and became a good friend of another empire builder, Cecil Rhodes. It was during the war that Kipling completed his most important novel, Kim. Published in 1901, it was Kipling’s farewell to India. In 1907, Kipling received the Nobel Prize. During World War I, Kipling lost his only son, John, and his melancholy deepened. The poem “My Boy Jack” (1916) articulates the grief and pain of that loss. In writing other works, he turned to the strange and the macabre, as in “A Madonna of the Trenches,” “The Wish House,” and “The Eyes of Allah.” Plagued by ill health during the last years of his life, he relied on his wife for

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support, but she also lost her health to the crippling effects of diabetes and rheumatism. Kipling published his last collection of stories, Limits and Renewals, in 1932 and continued to show interest in British and world affairs, angry at the complacency of his countrymen toward the growing fascism outside England. He died January 18, 1936, and his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey. Analysis · Rudyard Kipling wrote four novels, one of them, The Naulahka, in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier. Kipling was essentially a miniaturist, and his genius was for the short story, a single event dramatized within a specific time frame. His novels reflect an episodic quality, and although Kipling brings to them a considerable amount of technical information—about cod fishing in Captains Courageous, army and artistic life in The Light That Failed, authentic topography and local color in The Naulahka—he fails in the development of character and in evoking an emotional response from his readers. Kim, however, is an exception. The Light That Failed · The Light That Failed, dedicated to his mother, has often been described by critics as “the book that failed.” Kipling acknowledged a debt to the French novel Manon Lescaut (1731, 1733, 1753) by Abbé Prévost in writing the novel. It was first published in the January, 1891, issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and was later dramatized and filmed. When Macmillan and Co. published it two months later, there were four new chapters, and the story concluded with a tragic ending and the note, “This is the story of The Light That Failed as it was originally conceived by the writer.” The difference between the magazine version, with its more conventional ending, and the book version, with the sad ending, caused some consternation among readers and critics. The Light That Failed has many autobiographical elements. The novel opens with two children brought up by a sadistic housekeeper; Kipling drew upon his own early life in “the house of desolation” for some of the harrowing experiences of Dick and Maisie in the novel. Dick and Maisie are not related but have an adolescent crush on each other. They are separated, and while Dick goes to the Far East to serve on the frontiers of the empire, Maisie pursues her dream of becoming an artist. Dick wants Maisie to travel with him, but Maisie, committed to her art, remains in England. Dick later moves to Egypt as a war artist. He returns to London, and after a period of frustration, he enjoys fame and success. Kipling draws on his familiarity with the art world to describe the life of Dick in London. He had never been to Africa, however, and for the realism of his African scenes, Kipling relied on information he obtained from his friends. When Dick expresses fury and anger at unscrupulous art dealers, Kipling is lashing out at the publishers in America who boldly pirated his works. In Dick and Maisie’s doomed love and its impact on Dick, readers see echoes of Kipling’s own unrequited love for Violet Flo Garrard. Flo was a painter, like Maisie, and in the words of Kipling’s sister, Flo was cold and obsessed with “her very ineffective little pictures.” Writer Angus Wilson, in his study of Kipling, believes that Kipling found in Flo the quintessential femme fatale, “the vampire that sucks man’s life away.” Kipling has transferred some of the intensity of this feeling to Dick Heldar, almost his alter ego at certain times in the novel. Dick Heldar’s obsession with the single life and his desire for military life also express Kipling’s own passions. When Dick goes blind after being spurned by Maisie, Kipling is again drawing upon his own anxiety about the possible loss of his own vision. The Light That Failed ends very melodramatically with Dick’s death in the Sudanese

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battlefield amid bloody carnage. Apart from the autobiographical elements in the novel, The Light That Failed has little interest for the contemporary student of Kipling. The Naulahka · Subtitled “A Story of East and West” and written in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, The Naulahka compares the ways of the East, represented by the princely state of Rhatore in Central India, to those of the West, represented by the village of Topaz, Colorado. Balestier supplied the Western elements of the novel, and Kipling wrote the Eastern chapters. The result is a poorly written, melodramatic, and lackluster novel. Naulahka is a priceless necklace owned by the Maharaja of Rhatore. Tarvin, an aggressive American entrepreneur, wants to bring the railroad to feudalistic Rhatore; he enlists the services of Mutrie, the wife of the president of the railroad company, to influence her husband. He promises to get her the Naulahka as a gift. Tarvin’s fiancé, Kate, is also in India to help the Indian women. With her help, Tarvin tries to influence the Maharaja’s son. Kate wants a hospital; Tarvin wants the railroad. Kate then breaks off her relationship with Tarvin; he secures the necklace but returns it in order to save Kate’s life, which is threatened by a mad priest. Finally, Kate and Tarvin return to the United States. The characters in The Naulahka are one dimensional, and the narrative style is very episodic. Kipling has drawn heavily from his earlier book Letters of Marque (1891), lifting entire passages and incidents. Captains Courageous · A better novel than The Light That Failed, Captains Courageous is Kipling’s only completely American book in character and atmosphere. Kipling made several visits to Gloucester, Massachusetts, with his friend Dr. John Conland to saturate himself with considerable technical information about cod fishing. He has used this information extravagantly in telling the story of Captains Courageous. The novel was published serially in McClure’s Magazine, and Kipling was not pleased with its publication. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that the novel was really a series of sketches and that he had “crept out of the possible holes by labelling it a boy’s story.” Captains Courageous is the story of Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of a millionaire. On a voyage to Europe, Harvey falls overboard and is picked up by a fishing boat. He bellows out orders and insults the skipper, Disko. Disko decides to teach the boy a lesson and puts Harvey under a strict program of work and discipline. The plan succeeds, and Harvey emerges stronger and humanized. When the boat reaches Gloucester, laden with salted cod, a telegram is sent to Harvey’s father, who rushes from San Francisco to retrieve his son. Harvey returns with his father to resume his studies and prepare himself for taking over his father’s business empire. “Licking a raw cub into shape,” the central theme of Captains Courageous, is a favorite subject of Kipling. The technical knowledge about cod fishing is impressive, but the characters themselves have no individuality. Harvey Cheyne’s transformation from a stubborn, spoiled young man into a mature, responsible individual is achieved too speedily. Kipling has used the story merely to illustrate what Birkenhead describes as “the virtue of the disciplined life upon a spoiled immature mind.” Kim · T. S. Eliot considered Kim Kipling’s greatest work. Nirad C. Chaudhury, an Indian scholar, called Kim “not only the finest novel in English with an Indian theme but also one of the greatest of English novels in spite of the theme.” Kipling wanted to write a major book about India, and he started the project in 1885, in “Mother

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Maturin: An Anglo-Indian Episode.” That work concerned itself with the “unutterable horrors of lower class Eurasian and native life as they exist outside reports and reports and reports.” It was the story of an old Irishwoman who kept an opium den in Lahore but sent her daughter to study in London, where she marries, then returns to Lahore. Kipling’s father did not like it, however, and Kipling dutifully abandoned the project. Kim emerged instead. Published in 1901, Kim is Kipling’s last book set in India. In Something of Myself, he tells readers how he had long thought of writing about “an Irish boy born in India and mixed up with native life.” Written under the influence of his demon—Kipling’s word to describe his guardian muse—Kim takes in all of India, its rich diversity and intensity of life. In growing old and evaluating the past, Kipling turned to the best years of his life, his years in India. In Kim, Kipling relives his Indian years when everything was secure and his family intact. Kim’s yearning for the open road, for its smells, sights, and sounds, is part of the longing of Kipling himself for the land that quickened his creative impulse and provided his literary success. Kim is the story of an Irish orphan boy in India, a child of the streets. He grows up among Indian children and is aware of all the subtle nuances of Indian life. Yet, at the same time, he has the spirit of adventure and energy of his Irish ancestry. His joining the Red Lama from Tibet on his quest for the River of Healing, and Kim’s fascination for the British Indian secret service, “the Great Game,” results in his own self-discovery. Kim has the characteristic features of a boy’s story, the lovable boy involved in a quest filled with adventure and intrigue. One is reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881-1882) and Kidnapped (1886) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Kim, however, rises above the usual boy’s story in that it has a spiritual dimension. By coming into contact with the Lama, Kim emerges a sadder and wiser being at the end of the novel. Kim’s racial superiority is emphasized throughout the novel, but after his association with the Lama, Kim is able to say, “Thou hast said there is neither black nor white, why plague me with this talk, Holy One? Let me rub the other foot. It vexes me, I am not a Sahib. I am thy chela, and my head is heavy on my shoulders.” This is an unusual admission for Kim and Kipling. Many of Kipling’s earlier themes are elaborated and incorporated into Kim. There is the vivid picture of the Indian army; the tale of “Lispeth,” from Plain Tales from the Hills, repeated in the story of the Lady of Shamlegh; and the Anglo-Indian, the native, and the official worlds providing backgrounds as they did in the short stories. Administering medicine in the guise of a charm to soothe and satisfy the Indian native, Jat is an echo from the earlier story, “The Tomb of His Ancestors.” Buddhism, whose scriptural tales—The Jataka Tales—supplied Kipling with a wealth of source material for his two Jungle Books and Just So Stories (1902), supplies the religious atmosphere in Kim. Even Kim’s yearning for the open road had been expressed previously in the character of Strickland, who, incidentally, makes a brief appearance in Kim. Both Kim and the Venerable Teshoo Lama, the two main characters in Kim, emerge as distinctive individual characters and not mere types of the Asian holy man and the Anglo-Indian boy. They grow and develop an awareness of themselves and their surroundings. Kim realizes that his progress depends upon the cooperation of several people: the Lama, Mukherjee, Colonel Creighton, and Mahbub Ali. The Lama too undergoes a change of character. He realizes that his physical quest for the River of

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Arrow has clouded his spiritual vision. The River of Arrow is at his feet if he has the faith to see it. In selecting the Buddhist Lama as the main character, Kipling has emphasized the Middle Way. To the Lama, there is no color, no caste, no sect. He is also the tone of moderation without the extremes of Hinduism and Islam, the two main religious forces on the subcontinent. In the relationship between Kim and the Lama, Kipling portrays an integral part of Indian spiritual life, the disciple and teacher relationship, the guru and chela interaction. It is not an ordinary relationship between a boy and a holy man; it is a special relationship, as the Lama notes, forged out of a previous association in an earlier life, the result of good karma. Kim is indeed a virtuoso performance; it is Kipling at his best. K. Bhaskara Rao Other major works SHORT FICTION: In Black and White, 1888; Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888; Soldiers Three, 1888; The Story of the Gadsbys, 1888; The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Tales, 1888; Under the Deodars, 1888; Wee Willie Winkie, 1888; Life’s Handicap, 1891; Many Inventions, 1893; The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895; Soldier Tales, 1896; The Day’s Work, 1898; Stalky and Co., 1899; Just So Stories, 1902; Traffics and Discoveries, 1904; Puck of Pook’s Hill, 1906; Actions and Reactions, 1909; Rewards and Fairies, 1910; A Diversity of Creatures, 1917; Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, 1923; Debits and Credits, 1926; Thy Servant a Dog, 1930; Limits and Renewals, 1932. POETRY: Departmental Ditties, 1886; Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, 1892; The Seven Seas, 1896; Recessional and Other Poems, 1899; The Five Nations, 1903; The Years Between, 1919; Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1940 (definitive edition). NONFICTION: American Notes, 1891; Beast and Man in India, 1891; Letters of Marque, 1891; The Smith Administration, 1891; From Sea to Sea, 1899; The New Army in Training, 1914; France at War, 1915; The Fringes of the Fleet, 1915; Sea Warfare, 1916; Letters of Travel, 1892-1913, 1920; The Irish Guards in the Great War, 1923; A Book of Words, 1928; Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown, 1937; Uncollected Prose, 1938 (2 volumes); Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, 1965 (Morton N. Cohen, editor). MISCELLANEOUS: The Sussex Edition of the Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, 1937-1939 (35 volumes). Bibliography Bauer, Helen Pike. Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1994. Part 1 explores the major themes of Kipling’s stories; part 2 examines his view of himself as a writer; part 3 provides examples from two particularly insightful critics. Includes chronology and bibliography. Bloom, Harold, ed. Rudyard Kipling. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Essays on Kipling’s major work, his views on art and life, and his vision of empire. Includes introduction, chronology, and bibliography. ____________. Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim.” New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Nine essays ranging from general appreciation to detailed critical analysis, with an introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London: Macmillan, 1978.

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A standard biography with access to unique inside information. The appendices to the 1978 edition contain information previously suppressed by Kipling’s heirs. Includes a chronology of his life and work as well as a family tree. Much stronger on his adult life than his childhood and concentrates on his life and the influences upon it rather than on literary critique. Coates, John. The Day’s Work: Kipling and the Idea of Sacrifice. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Examines the themes of sacrifice and didacticism in Kipling’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Knowles, Frederic Lawrence. A Kipling Primer. Reprint. New York: Haskell House, 1974. Chapter 1 concerns biographical data and includes personality traits. Chapter 2 elaborates on Kipling’s literary techniques and critically examines the stages of his artistic development. Chapter 3 is an index to his major writings, with brief descriptions and criticisms of Kipling’s works by other authors. Laski, Marghanita. From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and at Home. New York: Facts on File, 1987. A lively, well-illustrated biography with a brief chronology, appendices on Kipling’s major travels and his important works, a brief bibliography, and notes. Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Sections on Kipling’s poetry, his writing on India, his work as a mature artist, his unfinished memoir, and his controversial reputation. Introduced by a distinguished critic. No bibliography.

Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler

Born: Budapest, Hungary; September 5, 1905 Died: London, England; March 3, 1983 Principal long fiction · The Gladiators, 1939; Darkness at Noon, 1940; Arrival and Departure, 1943; Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment, 1946; The Age of Longing, 1951; The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy with Prologue and Epilogue, 1972. Other literary forms · Arthur Koestler’s first five novels, along with most of his other books, have been reissued in the Danube edition, published in England by Hutchinson and Company and in America by Macmillan Publishing Company. His nonfiction works include four autobiographical volumes—Spanish Testament (1937), abridged in the Danube edition as Dialogue with Death (1942); Scum of the Earth (1941); Arrow in the Blue: The First Volume of an Autobiography, 1905-1931 (1952); and The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography, 1932-1940 (1954)—as well as an autobiographical essay on his disillusionment with Communism found in The God That Failed (1950), edited by Richard Crossman with additional essays by Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Louis Fischer, and André Gide. Koestler’s nonfiction works exceed twenty-five volumes, divided roughly between social-historical commentary and the history of science. He also wrote one play, Twilight Bar: An Escapade in Four Acts (1945). Achievements · Koestler will be remembered as an apostate to the Left who dramatized in Darkness at Noon and in his autobiographical works the integrity of many Communist intellectuals in the 1930’s and the anguish they suffered under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. As a novelist, he is generally a skilled storyteller, putting conventional techniques to the service of philosophical themes. Although none of his novels have been best-sellers in the usual sense, Darkness at Noon—translated into thirty-three languages—has been reprinted many times, and its appeal shows no sign of slackening. It continues to be read widely in college courses and is probably one of the most influential political novels of the twentieth century, despite the fact that comparatively little academic literary criticism has been devoted to it. Indeed, Koestler’s novels, even Darkness at Noon, are perhaps kept alive more by political scientists and historians than by professional students of literature. Besides being an accomplished novelist of ideas, Koestler was one of the finest journalists of his age, often producing works as controversial as his political fiction. Typical of his best essays is the piece in The Lotus and the Robot (1960) on “Yoga Unexpurgated” (noted as being “far too horrible for me to read” by William Empson in his review); like many other of his best essays, “Yoga Unexpurgated” will maintain its readability. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), a survey of early scientific thought with emphasis on Renaissance astronomy, is part of a trilogy (with The Act of Creation, 1964, and The Ghost in the Machine, 1967) on the understanding of the human mind, and it ranks as Koestler’s most suggestive effort at research and speculation. Even more controversial than his psychological studies, although a wholly different kind of work, is The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), which revived the thesis that the Jews of Eastern Europe are descended from the ancient Khazar 525

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Empire. Scholarly reviews of Koestler’s research tended to be severe. The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971) reveals sympathies for neo-Lamarckian philosophy, and The Roots of Coincidence (1972) surveys the claims of parapsychology, ending with a plea “to get out of the straitjacket which nineteenth-century materialism imposed on any philosophical outlook.” Although he flirted with crank notions, to the detriment of his credibility, Koestler was neither a crank nor a dilettante. His renegade vision has enlivened contemporary arts and letters for several decades, and it is likely that this force will continue to be felt for several more. Biography · Arthur Koestler was born on September 5, 1905, in Budapest, Hungary, the only child of middle-class Jewish parents. He was precocious in math and science and closer to his mother than to his father, an eccentric, self-taught businessman. When Koestler was in his teens, the family moved to Vienna, and he attended the university there as a science student. After four years, he left school without a degree and went to Palestine, where he joined a Zionist movement for a while before obtaining a correspondent’s job with the Ullstein newspapers of Germany. He advanced rapidly in journalism, becoming, in 1930, the foreign editor of B.Z. am Mittag and the science editor of Vossische Zeitung in Berlin, partly as a result of his success as a reporter on the Graf Zeppelin flight to the North Pole in 1931. In December, 1931, Koestler became a member of the German Communist Party, and less than one year later he gave up his position with Ullstein and spent several weeks traveling in the Soviet Union. He then spent three years in Paris working for the Comintern, leaving for Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. His marriage to Dorothy Asher in 1935 lasted only two years before they were separated, eventually to be divorced in 1950. While in Spain for the Comintern in 1937, Koestler was captured by the Nationalists and sentenced to execution. Thanks to the British press, he was freed after three months, and he published an account of his experiences, Spanish Testament (1937). By the next year, he was in France again, where he resigned from the Communist Party in disillusionment with Stalinism and the show trials. During that time, he wrote Darkness at Noon. After escaping from Nazi internment in France, he fled to Britain and spent 1941 to 1942 in the British Pioneer Corps. After Darkness at Noon was published, Koestler was in Paris at the center of the uproar it caused among members of the French National Archives Left. (Simone de Beauvoir’s roman

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à clef, The Mandarins, in 1954, makes vivid this period in French intellectual life.) In the late 1940’s, Koestler became a leader among anti-Communist voices in the West, twice visiting America to lecture, as well as enjoying an appointment between 1950 and 1951 as a Chubb Fellow at Yale University. After his divorce in 1950, he married Mamaine Paget. In 1952, he took up residence in America for two years, during which time he published his autobiographical volumes Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. He was divorced in 1953. One phase in his career ended in 1955, when he indicated in Trial of the Dinosaur and Other Essays that he was through writing about politics. At that time, his interest turned to mysticism and science, and he tried in his writings on extrasensory perception (ESP) to narrow the gap between natural and extrasensory phenomena. He married Cynthia Jefferies in 1965. After World War II, Koestler became a naturalized citizen of England, and his adopted country honored him by making him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.) in 1972 and a Companion of Literature (C.Lit.) in 1974. Koestler died in London, England, on March 3, 1983. His wife was found beside him, both victims of apparent suicide. Analysis · All of Arthur Koestler’s works, both fiction and nonfiction, reveal a struggle to escape from the oppressiveness of nineteenth century positivism and its later offshoots. The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays (1945) sums up the moral paradox of political action. The Yogi, at one extreme, represents a life lived by values that are grounded in idealism. The Yogi scorns utilitarian goals and yields to quietism; his refusal to intervene leads to passive toleration of social evil. The Commissar, committed to dialectical materialism, ignores the shallow ethical concerns of the historically benighted middle class and seeks to function as an instrument of historical progress. History replaces God, and human suffering is seen as an inevitable step toward the ultimate historical synthesis rather than as an element of God’s mysterious purpose. For the Commissar, the end justifies the means, and it is this ethical position that is debated most effectively in The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon, and Arrival and Departure. In his postscript to the Danube edition of The Gladiators, Koestler points out that these novels form a trilogy “whose leitmotif is the central question of revolutionary ethics and of political ethics in general: the question whether, or to what extent, the end justifies the means.” The question “obsessed” him, he says, during the seven years in which he belonged to the Communist Party and for several years afterward. It was his answer to this question that caused him to break with the Party, as he explains eloquently in his essay in The God That Failed. The city built by the rebellious slaves in The Gladiators fails because Spartacus does not carry out the stern measures necessary to ensure the city’s successful continuation. In Darkness at Noon, the old revolutionary Rubashov is depicted as trying to avoid the error Spartacus made, but ends up lost in a maze of moral and ethical complications that destroy him. Behaviorist psychology is congenial to the materialism of Communist revolutionary ethics, and Koestler attacks its claims heatedly. Indeed, Koestler’s interest in mysticism, the occult, and parapsychology was an attempt to find an escape route from the deadly rationalism that makes humans a mere clockwork orange. As far back as 1931, Koestler was investigating psychometry with as much curiosity as he brought to his journalistic accounts of the exploding universe. His answer to the behaviorists is laid out in The Ghost in the Machine, and it is clearly a theological answer. Koestler implies here that evolution is purposive, hence the theological nature of his understanding of life. A problem remains, however; Koestler argues that the limbic system

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of the brain is at odds with its neocortex, resulting in irrational decisions much of the time. Humans are thus as likely to speed to their own destruction as they are to their fulfillment. Koestler’s unorthodox answer to humans’ Manichaean internal struggle is deliberate mutation by chemical agents. The same topic is fictionalized quite successfully in The Call Girls. The Gladiators · Koestler’s first novel, The Gladiators, was written in German and translated into English by Edith Simon (his later novels were published in his own English). The source of the novel is the sketchy account—fewer than four thousand words all together—of the Slave War of 73-71 b.c.e. found in Livy, Plutarch, Appian, and Florus. Koestler divides his narrative into four books. The first, entitled “Rise,” imagines the revolt led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus and a fat, cruel Gaul named Crixus. They march through Campania looting and adding more defectors to their band. In book 2, “The Law of Detours,” after the destruction of the towns Nola, Suessula, and Calatia, the rebels are twenty thousand strong, or more, and approaching the peak of their power. The unruly faction, however, has spoiled the movement’s idealism by its ransacking of these towns, and Spartacus is faced with a decision: Should he let this group go blindly into a foolhardy battle with the forces of the Roman general Varinius, or should he counsel them and enforce a policy of prudence? In his deliberations he is aided by a wise Essene, a type of the imminent Christ, who tells him that of all God’s curses on man, “the worst curse of all is that he must tread the evil road for the sake of the good and right, that he must make detours and walk crookedly so that he may reach the straight goal.” He further tells Spartacus that for what the leader wants to do now, he needs other counselors. Despite the Essene’s warning, Spartacus follows the “law of detours.” Later that night, he confers with Crixus, and although no details of their talk are given, it is clear that Crixus is going to lead the lawless to their unwitting deaths in a confrontation with Varinius. This sacrifice of the unruly faction, however justified, is a cynical detour from honor. Later, however, when the Thracian Spartacus, already pressed by food shortages in the Sun State after a double cross by the neighboring city, is faced with a rebellion against his policies by the Celts, he proves to be insufficiently ruthless: He still retains the idealism with which he began the revolution. Koestler sums it up in his 1965 postscript: “Yet he shrinks from taking the last step—the purge by crucifixion of the dissident Celts and the establishment of a ruthless tyranny; and through this refusal he dooms his revolution to defeat.” Book 3, “The Sun State,” recounts the conflicts that lead up to Spartacus’s defeat, and the gladiators’ humiliation and crucifixion are narrated in book 4, “Decline.” Although Koestler’s characters are wooden, The Gladiators is a satisfying historical novel; the milieu is well sketched, and Spartacus’s dilemmas are rendered convincingly. Darkness at Noon · Darkness at Noon, Koestler’s masterpiece, is the story of an old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who is called before his Communist inquisitors on charges of heresy against the Party. He is interrogated first by Ivanov, who is himself executed, and then by Gletkin, and at the end he is killed by the inevitable bullet in the back of the neck. The novel is divided into three sections, one for each hearing Rubashov is given, and a short epilogue entitled “The Grammatical Fiction.” Besides the confrontations between Rubashov and his questioners, there are flashbacks from Rubashov’s past and extracts from his diary; the latter provide occasions for Koestler’s meditations on history. The narrative is tight and fast moving, and its lucid exposition has

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surely made it one of the most satisfyingly pedagogic novels of all time. Many readers shared the experience of Leslie Fiedler, who referred to Darkness at Noon in his review of The Ghost in the Machine, admitting that “Koestler helped to deliver me from the platitudes of the Thirties, from those organized self-deceptions which, being my first, were especially dear and difficult to escape.” Speaking of the “historical circumstances” of Darkness at Noon, Koestler explains that Rubashov is “a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials.” Rubashov’s thinking is closest to that of Nikolai Bukharin, a real purge victim, and Rubashov’s tormentor, Gletkin, had a counterpart of sorts in the actual trial prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky. (Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, 1968, provides useful details of the real trials.) Two main theses are argued in Darkness at Noon: that the end does not justify the means; and that the individual ego, the I, is not a mere “grammatical fiction” whose outline is blurred by the sweep of the historical dialectic. The events that cause Rubashov great pain and guilt involve two party workers whose devotion is sacrificed to the law of detours. Little Loewy is the local leader of the dockworkers’ section of the Party in Belgium, a likable man whom Rubashov takes to immediately. Little Loewy is a good Communist, but he is ill used by the Party and eventually destroyed in an act of expediency. When the Party calls for the workers to resist the spreading Nazi menace, Little Loewy’s dockworkers refuse to handle cargoes going out from and coming into Germany. The crisis comes when five cargo ships from Russia arrive in the port. The workers start to unload these boats until they discover the contents: badly needed materials for the German war effort. The workers strike, the Party orders them back to the docks, and most of the workers defect. Two years later, Mussolini ventures into Africa, and again a boycott is called, but this time Rubashov is sent in advance to explain to the dockworkers that more Russian cargo is on its way and the Party wants it unloaded. Little Loewy rejects the duplicity, and six days later he hangs himself. In another tragedy of betrayal, Rubashov abandons his secretary, Arlova, a woman who loves him and with whom he has had an affair. When Arlova’s brother in Russia marries a foreigner, they all come under suspicion, Arlova included. Soon after, she is called back to oblivion in Russia, and all of this happens without a word from Rubashov. As these perfidies run through his mind, Rubashov’s toothache rages intensely. Ivanov senses Rubashov’s human sympathies and lectures him on the revolutionary ethic: “But you must allow that we are as convinced that you and they would mean the end of the Revolution as you are of the reverse. That is the essential point. The methods follow by logical deduction. We can’t afford to lose ourselves in political subtleties.” Thus, Rubashov’s allegiance to the law of detours leads him into a moral labyrinth. He fails to heed that small voice that gives dignity to the self in its resistance to the degrading impersonality of all-devouring history and the behaviorist conception of human beings. Arrival and Departure · In Arrival and Departure, Koestler’s third novel, Peter Slavek, twenty-two, stows away on a freighter coming from Eastern Europe and washes up in Neutralia (Portugal) in 1940. He is a former Communist who has been tortured by Fascists in his home country, and he is faced in Neutralia with four possibilities: reunion with the Party, with whom he is disillusioned; joining the Fascists, who present themselves as the shapers of the true brave new world; flight to America; or, finally, enlistment with the British, whose culture is maimed but still represents a

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“brake” on the madness overtaking Europe. Homeless and confused, he meets two women. Dr. Sonia Bolgar, a native of his country and friend of his family, gives him a room and looks after him while she is waiting for the visa that will take her to America. Her lover, Odette, is a young French war widow with whom Peter has a brief affair until Odette leaves for America. Her departure precipitates a psychosomatic paralysis of one of Peter’s legs, symbolic of the paralysis of will brought on by his conflicting urges to follow her and to commit himself again to political action. Sonia, who is an analyst and reduces all behavior to the terms of her profession, leads Peter through a deconstruction of his motives that exposes their origins in childhood guilt feelings. His self-insight cures his paralysis, just as his visa for America is granted. He prepares to leave, but at the last moment he dashes off the ship and joins the British, who parachute him back into his own country in their service. Much of Arrival and Departure is artistically inert, but it does have a solid point to make. Although Fyodor Dostoevski’s name is never mentioned in Arrival and Departure, the novel is Koestler’s response to Dostoevski’s The Possessed (1871-1872), which depicts revolutionaries as warped personalities, dramatizing their neuroses and grudges in political action. For Koestler, human motives are more complex: “You can explain the messages of the Prophets as epileptical foam and the Sistine Madonna as the projection of an incestuous dream. The method is correct and the picture in itself complete. But beware of the arrogant error of believing that it is the only one.” Arrival and Departure is, then, a subtle commentary on the motivation of revolutionaries, rejecting any claims to exclusivity by psychoanalysis and psychobiography. Thieves in the Night · A far more absorbing novel than Arrival and Departure, Thieves in the Night is an account of the establishment of the commune of Ezra’s Tower in Palestine. Many of the events are seen from the perspective of one of the commune’s settlers, a young man named Joseph who was born and educated in England. His father was Jewish, his mother English, and this mixed heritage justifies Koestler’s use of him as a voice to meditate on the Jewish character and the desirability of assimilation. As a novelistic study of a single character, Thieves in the Night is incomplete, but as a depiction of the personal tensions within a commune and as an essay on the international politics wracking Palestine in the period from 1937 to 1939, it is excellent. The British policy formulated in the 1939 White Paper is exposed in all its cruelty. This policy—perhaps influenced by romantic conceptions of the Arab world—shut down the flow of immigrants into Palestine, leaving the Jews exposed and helpless in Europe. At the novel’s end, Joseph has joined the terrorist movement and is engaged in smuggling Polish Jews off the Romanian cattle boats that are forbidden to unload their homeless cargo. In its musings on terrorism, Thieves in the Night seems to back off from the repudiation of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. Koestler always faced these issues honestly, and Thieves in the Night is as engrossing—and as cogent—in the twenty-first century as it was in 1946. The Age of Longing · Published in 1951 and set in Paris in the mid-1950’s, The Age of Longing describes a time of spiritual disillusionment and longing for an age of faith. The narrative opens on Bastille Day and focuses on three characters: Hydie, a young American apostate from Catholicism, who kneels on her prie-dieu and laments, “LET ME BELIEVE IN SOMETHING”; Fedya Nikitin, a security officer with a rigid

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commissar mentality; and Julien Delattre, poet and former Party member. The relationship between Hydie and Fedya occupies much of the novel, with Hydie’s ache for religious solace played off against Fedya’s unquestioning faith in Communism. Hydie is American, naïve, and innocent; she is seeking experience on which to base faith. Fedya is the son of proletarian revolutionaries from Baku, Azerbaijan, a son of the Revolution with the instincts of a true commissar. He seems to have been programmed with Party clichés. When the two become lovers, Fedya humiliates Hydie by treating her as a mere collocation of conditioned responses. She then turns against Fedya and, finally understanding his true assignment as a spy, tries to shoot him but botches the job. Regardless of whether their relationship has allegorical significance, the unfeeling commissar is one of Koestler’s most effective characterizations. At one point, Fedya asks a young school friend why she likes him, and the answer is, “Because you are clean and simple and hard like an effigy of ‘Our Proletarian Youth’ from a propaganda poster.” The third main character, Julien Delattre, is in many ways Koestler’s self-portrait. Delattre has given up his allegiance to the “God that failed,” and he tells Hydie that “My generation turned to Marx as one swallows acid drops to fight off nausea.” He finds his mission in warning others about the ideological traps that he has successfully escaped, and one of the best scenes in the novel comes when he takes Hydie to an evening meeting of the Rally for Peace and Progress. The centerpiece of the session is Koestler’s satirical depiction of Jean-Paul Sartre, who appears as the pompous theoretician Professor Pontieux. Author of a fashionable work of postwar despair, “Negation and Position,” Professor Pontieux “can prove everything he believes, and he believes everything he can prove.” The Age of Longing ends with an image appropriate to its theme. A funeral party is proceeding past the graves of Jean de La Fontaine, Victor Hugo, and others when air-raid sirens start screaming. “The siren wailed, but nobody was sure: it could have meant the Last Judgment, or just another air-raid exercise.” The Call Girls · More than twenty years passed between the publication of The Age of Longing and that of The Call Girls, Koestler’s last novel. During those two decades, Koestler’s interests had shifted from ideology to science and human behavior. The “call girls” of the title are prominent intellectuals—mostly scientists but including a poet and a priest—nomads of the international conference circuit. Koestler puts them all together in a Swiss mountain setting and sets them to talking about ideas. They have been summoned by one of their members, Nikolai Solovief, a physicist, to consider “approaches to survival” and to send a message to the president of the United States. Unfortunately, the meeting degenerates into a series of uncompromising exchanges between behaviorists and nonbehaviorists. Only Nikolai and Tony, the priest, are able to accommodate themselves to the claims of both reason and faith, and rancor replaces the objective search for truth. The Call Girls is an entertaining exposition of the various options available to those seeking enlightenment today. Readers of The Ghost in the Machine and Koestler’s work on ESP will recognize in the arguments of Nikolai and Tony those of Koestler himself. Koestler always staged his intellectual dramas in the dress of irreconcilable opposites—the Yogi and the Commissar, ends versus means—and here the protagonist is clearly spirit and the antagonist matter. His call girls demonstrate that there is still life in this old conflict. Frank Day

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Other major works PLAY: Twilight Bar: An Escapade in Four Acts, pb. 1945. NONFICTION: Spanish Testament, 1937; Scum of the Earth, 1941; Dialogue with Death, 1942; The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays, 1945; Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine, 1917-1949, 1949; Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art, and Social Ethics, 1949; Arrow in the Blue: The First Volume of an Autobiography, 1905-1931, 1952; The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography, 1932-1940, 1954; Trial of the Dinosaur and Other Essays, 1955; Reflections on Hanging, 1956; The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe, 1959; The Lotus and the Robot, 1960; Hanged by the Neck: An Exposure of Capital Punishment in England, 1961 (with C. H. Rolph); The Act of Creation, 1964; The Ghost in the Machine, 1967; The Case of the Midwife Toad, 1971; The Roots of Coincidence, 1972; The Challenge of Chance: Experiments and Speculations, 1973 (with Sir Alister Hardy and Robert Harvie); The Heel of Achilles: Essays, 1968-1973, 1974; The Thirteenth Tribe, 1976; Life After Death, 1976 (with Arthur Toynbee, et al.); Janus: A Summing Up, 1978; Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings with Comments, 1981. EDITED TEXTS: Suicide of a Nation? An Enquiry into the State of Britain Today, 1963; Drinkers of Infinity: Essays, 1955-1967, 1968 (with J. R. Smythies); Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, 1969 (with Smythies). Bibliography Cesarani, David. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. London: William Heinemann, 1998. A good examination of the writer and his works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Day, Frank. Arthur Koestler: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland, 1987. In addition to a listing of Koestler’s publications, there are 518 entries for writings about him, many of them from newspapers and journals. Includes some foreign-language items, and the latest materials are from 1985. Hamilton, Iain. Koestler: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1982. This lengthy biography, favorable to Koestler, is arranged year by year in the fashion of a chronicle and breaks off around 1970. Many events have been retold partly on the basis of interviews, Koestler’s papers, and firsthand accounts. Harris, Harold, ed. Astride the Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler at Seventy. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1975. This collection of essays by authors sympathetic to Koestler provides approximately equal coverage of the writer’s involvement in literary and in scientific concerns. Levene, Mark. Arthur Koestler. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Koestler’s own life is discussed in the first chapter, and his major literary works are considered in detail, but relatively little attention is given to his scientific writings. The chronology and bibliography are useful. Pearson, Sidney A., Jr. Arthur Koestler. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Although a bit sketchy on matters of biography, this work deals with basic issues in Koestler’s writings and has some trenchant and interesting discussion of political themes. Also helpful are the chronology and a selected annotated bibliography. Perez, Jane, and Wendell Aycock, eds. The Spanish Civil War in Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990. Contains Peter I. Barta’s essay “The Writing of History: Authors Meet on the Soviet-Spanish Border,” which provides an excellent grounding in the political history from which Koestler’s fiction evolved. Sperber, Murray A., ed. Arthur Koestler: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,

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N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Both positive and negative reactions appear in this fine sampling of critical work about Koestler’s literary and scientific writings. Among those commentators represented by excerpts here are George Orwell, Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, Stephen Spender, and A. J. Ayer, as well as others. A chronology and bibliography have also been included. Sterne, Richard Clark. Dark Mirror: The Sense of Injustice in Modern European and American Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Contains a substantial discussion of Darkness at Noon.

D. H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence

Born: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England; September 11, 1885 Died: Vence, France; March 2, 1930 Principal long fiction · The White Peacock, 1911; The Trespasser, 1912; Sons and Lovers, 1913; The Rainbow, 1915; Women in Love, 1920; The Lost Girl, 1920; Aaron’s Rod, 1922; The Ladybird, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, 1923; Kangaroo, 1923; The Boy in the Bush, 1924 (with M. L. Skinner); The Plumed Serpent, 1926; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928; The Escaped Cock, 1929 (best known as The Man Who Died); The Virgin and the Gipsy, 1930; Mr. Noon, 1984 (wr. 1920-1922). Other literary forms · D. H. Lawrence was among the most prolific and wide-ranging of modern writers, a fact all the more remarkable considering that he spent so much time on the move, battling chronic tuberculosis, which cut short his life in his forty-fifth year. In addition to his novels, he published more than a dozen books of poetry, collected in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1964); eight volumes of short fiction, including half a dozen novellas, collected in The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence (1961); and seven plays, collected in The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence (1965). He also wrote a wide range of nonfiction, including four fine travel books (Twilight in Italy, 1916; Sea and Sardinia, 1921; Mornings in Mexico, 1927; and Etruscan Places, 1932). Movements in European History (1921), published under the pseudonym Lawrence H. Davison, is a subjective meditation on historical cycles and Europe’s decline, while Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) is a highly original and influential volume of literary criticism. Lawrence’s religious vision, in the guise of a commentary on the Book of Revelation, is offered in Apocalypse (1931). Many other essays on diverse subjects appeared in periodicals during the last two decades of his life and were collected posthumously by Edward McDonald in Phoenix (1936), and by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore in Phoenix II (1968). Lawrence was also a formidable correspondent, and his letters are invaluable aids to understanding the man and the writer. Some 1,257 of the more than 5,500 known letters are available in a collection edited by Harry T. Moore. Several of Lawrence’s fictional works—Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” Women in Love, and The Virgin and the Gipsy—have been adapted to the motion picture medium, while his life is the subject of the 1981 film The Priest of Love. Achievements · The running battle against censorship in which Lawrence engaged throughout most of his career undoubtedly performed a valuable service to subsequent writers and the reading public, though it cost him dearly both emotionally and financially. The essentially symbolic role of sexuality in his writing resembles somewhat that found in Walt Whitman’s, but Lawrence’s more overt treatment of it— liberating as it was to a generation whose Victorian upbringing had been castigated by the Freudians—led to a general misunderstanding of his work that persisted for almost three decades after his death. The thirty-year suppression of Lady Chatterley’s Lover backfired, as censorship so often does, attracting the public’s attention to the object of the prohibition. Unfortunately this notoriety made the novel, far from 534

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Lawrence’s greatest, the one most commonly associated with his name in the popular mind. His reputation among more serious readers was not helped by the series of sensationalistic memoirs published by some of his more ardent followers in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. Championed as a prophet of free love and utopianism, repudiated as a crazed homosexual and protofascist, Lawrence the artist all but disappeared from view.

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The appearance of several serious and sympathetic studies of Lawrence in the middle and late 1950’s, by presenting a more accurate record of his life and a more discriminating assessment of his work, largely succeeded in salvaging Lawrence’s stature as a major writer. Among those most responsible for the Lawrence revival were F. R. Leavis, Harry T. Moore, Edward Nehls, and Grahm Hough. Subsequent readers have been able to recognize more readily in the best of Lawrence’s work what Leavis described as its “marked moral intensity,” its “reverent openness before life.” In addition to his prophetic themes, Lawrence’s technical innovations are now acknowledged as among the most important in modern fiction. He could convey a “ripping yarn” and portray lifelike characters when he chose, and parts of Sons and Lovers and The Lost Girl, among many other works, demonstrate his mastery of traditional realism in the representation of his native Midlands. More fundamentally, however, Lawrence’s novels are triumphs of mood and sensibility; they seek (as Frank Kermode has said) less to represent life than to enact it. He has no peer in the evocative rendering of place, introducing poetic symbols that carry the meaning without losing sight of their basis in intensely observed, concrete details. His approach to characterization following The Rainbow was unconventional in that he avoided “the old stable ego” and pattern-imposed character types in an effort to go beneath the rational and articulate levels of consciousness to the nonhuman being in his characters. As Walter Allen has observed, for Lawrence “the value of people . . . consisted in how far mystery resided in them, how far they were conscious of mystery.” The linear, cause-and-effect development of characters controlled by the rational intellect was for him a hindrance. He focused instead on the surging, dynamic forces—sexual impulses, the potency of nature and animals, the terrible allure of death—which in their purest form defy rationality and are communicated by a kind of unmediated intuition. His prose style was similarly subjective in emphasis. The frequent repetitiveness and inflated rhetoric can be tiresome, but at its best the prose is supple and sensuous, its dynamic rhythms incantatory, a powerful vehicle of Lawrence’s vision. Further, he avoided the neat resolution of closure of traditional narratives, typically preferring the “open end” in which the vital forces operating in his characters are felt to be continuously and dynamically in process rather than subdued by the authorial imposition of finality. His comment on the bustling activities of Indian peasants on market day, in Mornings in Mexico, epitomizes his fictional method as well as his vitalist doctrine: “In everything, the shimmer of creation and never the finality of the created.” Lawrence’s approach to fiction involved considerable risks, and many of his novels are seriously flawed. There are those who cannot read him at all. Nevertheless, the integrity of his vision and the sheer power with which he communicated it have made E. M. Forster’s estimate (written shortly after Lawrence’s death) stand up: “He was the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation.” Biography · David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in the Midlands coal-mining village of Ad, Nottinghamshire. The noise and grime of the pits dominated Eastwood, but the proximity of fabled Sherwood Forest was a living reminder of what Lawrence would later call “the old England of the forest and agricultural past” upon which industrialization had been so rudely imposed. The contrast was to remain an essential element in his makeup. Allied to it was the equally sharp contrast between his parents. Arthur John Lawrence, the father, had worked in the coal pits from the age of seven. Coarse, semiliterate, intensely physical, a hailfellow popular with his collier mates, he was prone to drink and to near poverty. Lydia

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(née Beardsall) Lawrence, his wife, was a former schoolteacher from a pious middleclass Methodist family, which counted among its forebears a noted composer of Wesleyan hymns. Along with his four siblings, young Lawrence was inevitably caught up in the frequent and sometimes violent strife between his mother and father. Delicate and sickly as a child, he could scarcely have emulated his father—not that he was inclined to do so. Instead, he sided with his mother. She in turn doted on him and encouraged him in his studies as a means of escape from the working-class life, thus further alienating him from his father. Only in later life would Lawrence come to see the dangerous liabilities of this overweening maternal bond and the counterbalancing attractiveness of his father’s unassuming strength and vitality. Lawrence was an outstanding student in school and at the age of twelve won a scholarship to Nottingham High School. After graduation in 1901, he worked for three unhappy months as a clerk in a surgical-appliance factory in Nottingham, until he fell seriously ill with pneumonia. About this time, he met Jessie Chambers, whose family lived on a small farm outside Eastwood. Over the next ten years his close relationship with the “spiritual” Jessie (the “Miriam” of Sons and Lovers) and her sympathetic family offered further stimulus to his fondness for the beauties of nature, for reading, and for ideas; eventually, with Jessie’s encouragement and partial collaboration, he began to write stories and verse. The Chamberses’ way of life and the bucolic scenery of Haggs farm, so tellingly unlike the ambience of Lawrence’s own home, would later provide him with materials for his first novel, The White Peacock. After his prolonged convalescence from pneumonia, in 1903 he found a position as a “pupil-teacher” at an elementary school in nearby Ilkeston, Derbyshire. Two years there were followed by a third as an uncertified teacher in the Eastwood British School. In 1906, having won a King’s Scholarship competition, he began a two-year course of study for his teachers’ certificate at Nottingham University College. By 1908, he qualified to teach at Davidson Road School, a boys’ elementary school in the London suburb of Croydon, where he remained until 1911. Meanwhile Lawrence had published several poems in 1909 in the English Review, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), who introduced him to such established writers as H. G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats. Soon Lawrence was busily working at two novels, The White Peacock and the autobiographical Paul Morel (the working title of Sons and Lovers). While the former was still in press in December, 1910, his mother died of cancer, an event whose profound impact on him is duly commemorated in his poems and in Paul Morel, which he had already begun to rewrite. By this time his relationship with Jessie Chambers had diminished considerably, and he had had several brief affairs with other women. His ill health and his increasing commitment to writing (The Trespasser, his second novel, was to appear the following year) induced him to forgo teaching in the winter of 1911-1912. Back in Eastwood, in April, he met and fell in love with Frieda von Richthoven Weekley, the high-spirited daughter of a German baron, wife of a professor of philology at Nottingham University, and at thirty-two the mother of three small children. In May, Lawrence and Frieda eloped to the Continent. There, for the next six months, Lawrence wrote poems, stories, travel sketches (most of which were later collected in Twilight in Italy), and his final revision of the autobiographical novel. This writing, particularly the metamorphosis of Paul Morel into Sons and Lovers (with which Frieda assisted him by discussing her own maternal feelings and the theories of Freud), marked the true beginning of Lawrence’s artistic maturity. The advent of World War I coincided with what in many ways was the most crucial

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period of his development as a writer. By the end of 1914, Lawrence and Frieda had married, the critical success of Sons and Lovers had established his reputation, he had formed important associations with Edward Garnett, John Middleton Murry, and Katherine Mansfield, and he had begun to work on what many now consider his greatest novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love (originally conceived as a single work, The Sisters). Yet the triumph that might have been his soon turned to ashes. The official suppression of The Rainbow in November, 1916—the charge of “immorality” was leveled on both political and sexual grounds—was followed by a series of nightmarish episodes in which, largely because of Frieda’s German origins, the Lawrences were hounded and persecuted as supposed enemy spies. Lawrence was reviled in the “patriotic” English press, and, after The Rainbow fiasco, in which many of his literary associates had failed to come to his defense, he found it increasingly difficult to publish his work and hence to make a living. Though he completed Women in Love in 1917, it did not appear until 1920 in the United States. Events seemed to conspire against him so that, by the end of the war, he could never again feel at home in his native land. This bitter severance motivated the “savage pilgrimage” that dominated the last decade of his life, driving him feverishly around the globe in search of some “ideal centre” in which to live and work in hope for the future. Lawrence’s travels were as much spiritual as geographical in character, and his quest became the primary focus of his writing after the war. The more than two years he spent in Italy and Sicily (1919-1921) provided him with the materials for the concluding chapters of The Lost Girl (which he had begun before the war and set aside to work on The Sisters) and for Aaron’s Rod. Heading for America by way of Asia, the Lawrences briefly visited Ceylon and then Australia, where he wrote Kangaroo in just six weeks. In September, 1922, they arrived in the United States and soon settled near Taos, New Mexico, on a mountain ranch that was to be “home” for them during most of the next three years. Here Lawrence rewrote Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; begun in 1917) and produced such important works as “Eagle in New Mexico” and “Spirits Summoned West” (poems), “The Woman Who Rode Away,” “The Princess,” “St. Mawr,” and half of the travel sketches that form Mornings in Mexico. During this period Lawrence also made three trips to Mexico, staying there a total of about ten months; his travel experiences, embellished by his rather extensive readings in Aztec history and archaeology, provided the sources for his novel of Mexico, The Plumed Serpent, his most ambitious creative undertaking of the postwar years. On the day he finished the novel in Oaxaca, he fell gravely ill with acute tuberculosis and nearly died. After convalescing in Mexico City and on the ranch in New Mexico, he returned with Frieda to Europe in the late fall of 1925, settling first in Spotorno on the Italian Riviera and later in a villa outside Florence. Lawrence’s last years were clouded by the inevitable encroachment of his disease, but he remained remarkably active. He toured the ancient Etruscan ruins; took up painting, producing some strikingly original works; and wrote three complete versions of what would become, in its final form, his most famous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The book’s banning and confiscation in 1928, reviving the old outcry of “obscenity,” prompted several of his most eloquent essays on the subject of pornography and censorship. It was his final battle, save that which could not be won. Lawrence died in Vence, France, on March 2, 1930, at the age of forty-four. Analysis · D. H. Lawrence occupies an ambiguous position with respect to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and the other major figures of the modernist

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movement. While, on the one hand, he shared their feelings of gloom about the degeneration of modern European life and looked to ancient mythologies for prototypes of the rebirth all saw as necessary, on the other he keenly distrusted the modernists’ veneration of traditional culture and their classicist aesthetics. The modernist ideal of art as “an escape from personality,” as a finished and perfected creation sufficient unto itself, was anathema to Lawrence, who once claimed that his motto was not art for art’s sake but “art for my sake.” For him, life and art were intertwined, both expressions of the same quest: “To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point.” The novel realized its essential function best when it embodied and vitally enacted the novelist’s mercurial sensibility. His spontaneity, his limitations and imperfections, and his fleeting moments of intuition were directly transmitted to the reader, whose own “instinct for life” would be thereby quickened. Lawrence believed that at its best “the novel, and the novel supremely,” could and should perform this important task. That is why he insisted that the novel is “the one bright book of life.” One way of approaching his own novels—and the most significant, by general consensus, are Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover—is to consider the extent to which the form and content of each in turn rises to this vitalist standard. To be “whole man alive,” for Lawrence, involved first of all the realization of wholeness. The great enemy of human (and of aesthetic) wholeness, he believed, was modern life itself. Industrialization had cut man off from the past, had mechanized his daily life and transformed human relations into a power struggle to acquire material commodities, thereby alienating man from contact with the divine potency residing in both nature and other men and women. Modern Europe was therefore an accumulation of dead or dying husks, fragmented and spiritually void, whose inevitable expression was mass destruction. For Lawrence, World War I was the apotheosis of modernization. Yet contemporary history provided only the end result of a long process of atomization and dispersion whose seeds lay in ancient prehistory. In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence formulated a myth of origins that sheds light on his quest for wholeness in his travels among “primitive” peoples as well as in his novels. He describes a kind of golden age before the flood, when the pagan world, both geographically and culturally, was a single, unified entity. This Ur-culture, unlike the modern fragmented age, had developed a holistic knowledge or “science in terms of life.” The primal wisdom did not differentiate among body, mind, and spirit; the objective and the subjective were one, as the reason and the passions were one; man and nature and the cosmos lived in harmonious relation with one another. Men and women all over the earth shared this knowledge. They “wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent. . . . The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science, was universal over the earth.” Then the glaciers melted, whole continents were drowned, and the monolithic world fragmented into isolated races, each developing its own culture, its own “science.” A few refugees from the lost continents fled to the high ground of Europe, Asia, and America. There they “refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.” In modern Europe, even these vestiges of the old universal knowledge had largely become extinct, and with them died what was left of the unitary being of man. First Christianity, with its overemphasis on bodiless spirituality, and then modern science, with its excessive dependence upon finite reason as the instrument of control over a

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merely mechanistic world, had killed it. After the war Lawrence hoped, in traveling to lands where Christianity, modern science, and industrialization had not yet fully taken hold, to uncover the traces of the primal knowledge, if only “in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms.” By somehow establishing a vital contact with “primitive” men and women and fusing his “white consciousness” with their “dark-blood consciousness,” he hoped to usher in the next phase in the development of the human race. His novels would sound the clarion call—awakening the primordial memory by means of “ritual, gesture, and myth-story”—summoning “whole man alive” to cross over the threshold into the New World of regenerated being. Although this myth of apocalypse and rebirth was fully articulated during Lawrence’s “wander years” after the war, it was clearly anticipated in his earlier works. There the horror of the modern world’s “drift toward death” and the yearning for some “holy ground” on which to begin anew were keenly felt. The initial experience of fragmentation in Lawrence’s life was obviously the primal conflict between his mother and father, which among other things resulted in a confusion in his own sexual identity. In the fiction of this period, the stunting of life by fragmentation and imbalance is evident in the portrayal of such characters as Miriam Leivers in Sons and Lovers, Anton Skrebensky in The Rainbow, and Gerald Crich in Women in Love, just as the quest for vital wholeness is exemplified in the same novels by Paul Morel, Ursula Brangwen, and Rupert Birkin, respectively. If the secondary characters in Lawrence’s novels tend in general to be static types seen from without, his protagonists, beginning with Ursula in The Rainbow and continuing through Constance Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, are anything but static. Rather, they are volatile, inconsistent, and sometimes enigmatic. In The Plumed Serpent, Kate Leslie vacillates between intellectual abstraction and immediate sensuous experience; between egotistic willfulness and utter self-abandonment to another; between withdrawal behind the boundaries of the safe and the known, and the passionate yearning for metamorphosis; and so on. There is a constant ebb and flow in Kate’s behavior, even a rough circularity, that creates a spontaneous, improvisatory feeling in her narrative. Lawrence’s protagonists are always in flux, realizing by turns the various aspects of their natures, and this dynamism is largely what makes them so alive. They are open to life: in themselves, in their natural environment, and in other vital human beings. Lawrence believed that the novel was the one form of human expression malleable enough to articulate and dramatize the dynamic process of living. In his essay “Why the Novel Matters,” he celebrates the novelist’s advantage over the saint, the scientist, and the philosopher, all of whom deal only with parts of the composite being of humankind. The novelist alone, says Lawrence, is capable of rendering the whole of “man alive.” He alone, by so doing, “can make the whole man alive [that is, the reader] tremble.” The priestly or prophetic function of the novelist is clearly central to this aesthetic doctrine. Lawrence is one of the very few modern writers to assume this role and to do so explicitly. At times, this very explicitness becomes problematic. His novels are quite uneven; most are marred in varying degrees by a hectoring didacticism that is less evident in his short fiction. Nevertheless, he needed the amplitude of an extended narrative to give voice to the several sides of his complex sensibility, as if to discover himself in the process. Perhaps that, as much as anything else, was the object of his quest. Collectively his novels represent a restless search for a form capable of rendering that sensibility fully and honestly.

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Sons and Lovers · In a letter written a few months after the publication of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence made an admission which suggests that “art for my sake” could have been a cathartic as well as a heuristic function. “One sheds one’s sickness in books,” he wrote, “repeats and presents one’s emotions, to be master of them.” Sons and Lovers, his third novel, was the work that enabled Lawrence to come to terms, at least provisionally, with the traumas of his formative years. The more than two years he spent working and reworking the book amounted to an artistic and psychological rite of passage essential to his development as a man and as a writer. The novel spans the first twenty-six years in the life of Paul Morel. Because of the obvious similarities between Paul’s experiences and Lawrence’s, and because the story in part concerns Paul’s apprenticeship as an artist—or, more accurately, the obstacles he must overcome to be an artist—the novel has been seen as an example of a subspecies of the Bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman. Comparison with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) suggests, however, how loosely the term applies to Lawrence’s novel. Where Joyce scrupulously selects only those scenes and episodes of Stephen Dedalus’s life that directly contribute to the young artist’s development (his first use of language, his schooling, his imaginative transcendence of sex, religion, and politics, his aesthetic theories), Lawrence’s focus is far more diffuse. The novel opens with a conventional set-piece description of the town of Bestwood (modeled on Eastwood) as it has been affected by the arrival and growth of the mining industry during the last half century. This is followed by an account of the courtship and early married life of Walter and Gertrude Morel, Paul’s parents. Even after Paul’s birth, the main emphasis remains for many chapters on the mother and father, and considerable space is devoted to their first child, William, whose sudden death and funeral conclude part 1 of the novel. Paul’s interest in drawing is mentioned halfway through part 1, but it is not a major concern until he becomes friends with Miriam Leivers in part 2, and there the companionship itself actually receives more attention. Though the comparison does an injustice to the nature of Lawrence’s real achievement in the novel, perhaps Sons and Lovers more nearly resembles Stephen Hero (1944), the earlier and more generally autobiographical version of Joyce’s novel, than it does the tightly constructed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Yet, when in the late stages of revision Lawrence changed his title from Paul Morel to Sons and Lovers, his motive was akin to Joyce’s when the Irishman discarded Stephen Hero and began to rewrite. The motive was form—form determined by a controlling idea. The subject of Sons and Lovers is not simply Paul’s development but his development as an instance of the pattern suggested by the title; that pattern involves the Morels’ unhappy marriage, the fateful experiences of Paul’s brother William, Paul’s frustrated relationship with Miriam, and his later encounters with Clara and Baxter Dawes, as well as Paul’s own maturation. For Lawrence, the pattern clearly had wide application. Indeed, in a letter to Edward Garnett, his editor, written a few days after completing the revised novel, Lawrence claimed that his book sounded “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England.” This claim, along with the change in title and the late revisions designed to underscore a theme already present in the narrative, was probably influenced by the discussions that Lawrence and Frieda had in 1912 regarding Freud’s theories, of which Frieda was then an enthusiastic proponent. (There is no evidence of Lawrence’s awareness of Freud before this.) In a more general sense, the “tragedy” was rooted historically, as the novel shows, in the disruption of natural human relationships that was one of the by-products of modernization. Directly or indirectly, the characters in

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the novel are entrapped by the materialistic values of their society, unable even when they consciously reject those values to establish true contact with one another. Instead they tend to treat one another as objects to be possessed or manipulated for the purpose of self-gratification. Thus Mrs. Morel, frustrated by her marriage to her coal-miner husband, transfers her affections to her sons, first to William, the eldest, and then to Paul after William’s death. Walter Morel, the father, becomes a scapegoat and an outcast in his own home. Whether consciously or not, Mrs. Morel uses her sons as instruments to work out her own destiny vicariously, encouraging them in pursuits that will enable them to escape the socially confining life that she herself cannot escape, yet resenting it when the sons do begin to make a life away from her. Paul’s fixation upon his mother—and his hatred of his father—contributes to a confusion of his sexual identity and to his inability to love girls his own age in a normal, healthy way. In the same letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence characterized this inability to love as a “split,” referring to the rupture in the son’s natural passions caused by the mother’s possessive love. The split causes Paul to seek out girls who perform the psychological role of mother-surrogates: Miriam, an exaggerated version of the spiritual, Madonna-like aspect of the mother image; and the buxom Clara Dawes, who from a Freudian viewpoint represents the “degraded sex-object,” the fallen woman, equally a projection of the son’s prohibited erotic desires for his mother. Because Paul’s feeling for Miriam and Clara are thus compartmentalized and unbalanced, both relationships are unfulfilling, a fact which only reinforces his Oedipal bondage. At the same time, part of the responsibility for the unsatisfactory relationships belongs to Miriam and Clara themselves, both of whom exploit Paul to help them fulfill their own private fantasy lives. The world of Sons and Lovers is populated by isolated, fragmentary souls not unlike the inhabitants of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land (“We think of the key, each in his prison/ Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”). A decade after the appearance of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence declared that of all his books, it was the one he would like to rewrite, because in it he had treated his father unfairly. By then, of course, he was overtly committed to finding embodiments of “whole man alive” and, in retrospect, his father seemed to offer such an embodiment. When he wrote Sons and Lovers, however, he had not yet fully come to appreciate the importance of his father’s unaffected male vitality. Although occasionally Walter Morel appears in a favorable light, the novel generally emphasizes his ineffectuality as a husband and father. The Oedipal conflict on which the story hinges perhaps made this unavoidable. In any event, the struggle to attain wholeness is centered in Paul Morel. Because Paul’s mother is “the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not escape,” her death amounts to the great crisis of the novel. The terrible spectacle of her agony as she lies dying slowly of cancer torments Paul until, by giving her an overdose of morphine, he commits a mercy killing. Unconsciously, the act seems to be motivated by his desire to release her from her debilitating “bondage” as wife and mother, the roles that have made her erotically unattainable to Paul. Her death is followed by an eerie, Poe-like scene in which the shaken Paul, momentarily imagining his mother as a beautiful young sleeping maiden, stoops and kisses her “passionately,” as if to waken her like the handsome prince in a fairy tale, only to be horrified by her cold and unresponsive lips. It is a key moment, adumbrating as it does the writer’s subsequent shift in allegiances to the “sensuous flame of life” associated with his father. For Paul, however, the loss of his mother induces a period of deep depression

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(interestingly enough, guilt is not mentioned) in which his uppermost desire is to reunite with his mother in death. This “drift towards death” was what Lawrence believed made Paul’s story symptomatic of the times, “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England.” Nevertheless, the novel does not end tragically. Paul, on the verge of suicide, decides instead to turn his back on the “immense dark silence” where his lover/ mother awaits him and to head toward the “faintly humming, glowing town”—and beyond it, to the Continent, where he plans to continue his artistic endeavors (just as Lawrence did). Some readers have found this last-minute turnabout implausible, a breakdown in the novel’s form. Yet Lawrence anticipates Paul’s “rebirth” by having him realize, after his mother’s death, that he must finally sever his ties to both Miriam and Clara. For him to have returned to them then for consolation and affection would have meant that, inwardly, he was still cherishing some hope of preserving the maternal bond, even if only through his mother’s unsatisfactory substitutes. When Paul effects a reconciliation between Clara and her estranged husband Baxter Dawes, who has been presented throughout in terms strongly reminiscent of Walter Morel, he is (as Daniel A. Weiss and others have observed) tacitly acting out a reversal of the original Oedipal conflict. If the primary emphasis of Sons and Lovers is on the tragic split in the emotional lives of the Morels, its conclusion finds Paul taking the steps necessary to begin to heal the split in himself. Only by so doing would Paul, like Lawrence, be able to undertake a quest for vital wholeness. That quest would become the chief subject of the novels following Sons and Lovers. As sometimes happens to a writer after he has successfully struggled to transform autobiography into art, Lawrence reacted against Sons and Lovers almost as soon as he had finished it. The process of revaluating the influence of his parents, begun in his revisions of the novel and particularly evident in its concluding chapters, continued apace. His nonfiction of the period exhibits a growing hostility to women as spawners of intellectual and spiritual abstraction and the early traces of his interest in the reassertion of the vital male. Lawrence reacted also against certain aspects of the narrative technique used in Sons and Lovers. As he worked on his next novel, initially called The Sisters, he found that he was no longer interested in “visualizing” or “creating vivid scenes” in which characters revealed themselves through dramatic encounters and dialogue. The conventions of plot and the “furniture” of realistic exposition bored him. Moreover, the traditional methods of characterization were positively a hindrance to the kind of novel he felt he must write. Lawrence had in fact embarked on a long and difficult struggle to create a new kind of novel, unprecedented in English fiction. When his publisher balked, Lawrence defended his experiment in an important letter that clarifies his intentions not only in what would eventually become The Rainbow and Women in Love but in most of his subsequent fiction: You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon.) What all this suggests, and what is implicit in the novels themselves, is that the conventions of realism, which were developed preeminently in the English novel of the nineteenth century, are inadequate tools for use by a writer whose aim is the

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transformation of the very society whose values were embodied in realism. The “old-fashioned human element,” “the old stable ego,” the “certain moral scheme” prescribing “consistency” and linear development—these were relics of positivism, bourgeois humanism, and other ideologies of a dying culture. Lawrence gropes a bit in the attempt to describe their successors, but it is clear enough that the “other ego,” the “physic” or nonhuman in humanity, and the “radically unchanged element” whose “allotropic” transformations determine a “rhythmic form” along lines unknown, are references to the mysterious source of vital energies capable (he believed) of regenerating both art and society. The Rainbow · The Rainbow applies these ideas in a most interesting way. It is an elegiac study of the dying culture, written in Lawrence’s revolutionary “new” manner. The story spans three generations of the Brangwen family, beginning with the advent of industrialism around 1840 in the rural Erewash valley—signaled by the construction of canals, the collieries, and the railroad—and continuing up to the first decade of the twentieth century. The theme is the destruction of the traditional way of life and the attempt, by the Brangwens, either to accommodate themselves to that loss or to transcend it by discovering a new basis for being. The novel opens with a rhapsodic prose poem telescoping two hundred years of Brangwens into archetypal male and female figures living in “blood intimacy” with one another and with the land: “The pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. [The men] mounted their horses and held life between the grip of their knees.” Despite their “vital connection,” however, there are opposing impulses in the male and the female principles that become increasingly important as the story proceeds. The Brangwen men, laboring in the fields of the Marsh Farm, are compared with the rim of a wheel revolving around the still center that is hearth and home; the women, like the axle of the wheel, live in the still center but always direct their gaze outward, beyond the wheel’s rim toward the road, the village, the church steeple, “the spoken world” that is encroaching on the horizon. This tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, the rim and the axle, is fruitful so long as the Brangwens live in harmony with the land, for it is a reflection of the cyclical processes of nature in which the clash of opposites generates change and growth. With the second generation, however, the principal Brangwen couple, Will and Anna, leaves the land and moves to the industrial town of Beldover, where Will works in a shop that produces machine-made lace. The seasonal cycle is replaced by the Christian liturgical calendar, in Lawrence’s view a step toward abstraction. The old male-female opposition, having lost its former function as the means by which men and women participate in the dynamic rhythms of nature, becomes a destructive force. The marriage of contraries loses impetus because it now reflects not nature but the mechanisms that are dividing society. Husband and wife settle into a fixed domestic routine, typically Victorian, of piety (on Will’s side) and child-rearing (on Anna’s). Anna’s “outward” impulse is thus sublimated, and, like Gertrude Morel in Sons and Lovers, she counts on her children to act out her frustrated quest beyond the pale. Most important of these children is the oldest daughter, Ursula, who, with her sister Gudrun, will also figure prominently in Women in Love. Ursula has been called “the first complete modern woman” (Marvin Mudrick) and, even more sweepingly, “the first ‘free soul’” (Keith Sagar) in the English novel. It is Ursula, a member of Lawrence’s own generation, who finally breaks out of the old circle of life. As she

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grows into womanhood she challenges and ultimately rejects traditional views of religion, democracy, education, free enterprise, love, and marriage. She is the first Brangwen female to enter a profession and support herself (as a schoolteacher); she attends the university; she travels to London and the Continent. On several levels, then, her “centrifugal” movement takes her far afield. Yet despite her explorations she has no sense of who she really is. The traditional order, which formerly provided a living relationship with nature and with other men and women, has all but collapsed. Motivated only by her isolate will and unreciprocated by any meaningful male contrary—as is amply demonstrated by her unsatisfying love affairs with Winifred Inger, her schoolmistress, and the shallow Anton Skrebensky—Ursula’s quest becomes a desperate exercise in redundancy and futility, her vital energies randomly dispersed. The novel ends as it began, symbolically. In the last of a series of “ritual scenes,” in which characters are suddenly confronted with the “physic” or nonhuman “ego” that is the mysterious life force, Ursula encounters a herd of stampeding horses. Whether hallucinatory or actual, the horses seem to represent the “dark” potencies which she has tried so long to discover on her quest and which have so far eluded her. Now, terrified, she escapes. Soon after, she falls ill with pneumonia, miscarries a child by Skrebensky, and lies delirious with fever for nearly a fortnight. All this is fitting as the culmination of Ursula’s abortive, well-driven quest. Her “drift toward death,” more like a plunge finally, is even more representative of her generation’s crisis than Paul Morel’s was in Sons and Lovers. As in the earlier novel, furthermore, Lawrence attempts to end The Rainbow on a hopeful note. After her convalescence, Ursula awakes one morning on the shores of what appears to be a new world, “as if a new day had come on the earth.” Having survived the deluge, she is granted a vision of the rainbow—a symbol related to but superseding the old closed circle—which seems to offer hope for the regeneration not only of Ursula but also of her world. On both levels, however, the symbolic promise is less than convincing. Unlike Paul Morel, Ursula has not performed any action or had any insight which suggests that her final “rebirth” is more than wishful thinking. As for the modern world’s regeneration, when the novel appeared, in September, 1915, nothing could have been less likely. Lawrence hated the war, but like many other modern writers he saw it as the harbinger of the apocalypse, accelerating the advent of a new age. Before long he realized that he had “set my rainbow in the sky too soon, before, instead of after, the deluge.” The furor provoked by the novel must have made the irony of his premature hopefulness all the more painful. In the teeth of that furor and the public persecution waged against Frieda and himself as supposed German spies, Lawrence set about writing Women in Love, considered by many today his greatest novel and one of the half-dozen or so masterpieces of modern fiction. Women in Love · Whatever their differences with respect to the emphasis placed upon the operations of the “physic,” or nonhuman, forces in humanity, Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow share several important traits that set them apart from most of Lawrence’s subsequent novels, beginning with Women in Love. For one, they have in common a narrative structure that, by locating the action firmly within a social context spanning generations, subscribes to the novelistic convention of rendering the story of individuals continuous with the larger movements of history. Women in Love takes up the story of the “modern” Brangwens about three and one-half years after the end of The Rainbow but, in contrast to the earlier novel’s sixty-six-year span, concentrates attention onto a series of loosely connected episodes occurring within a ten-month period,

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from spring to winter of 1909 or 1910. One result of this altered focus, at once narrower and relatively looser than that of the earlier novels, is that the social background seems far more static than before. The great transformation of society known as modernization has already occurred, and the characters move within a world whose ostensible change is the slow, inward process of decay. The shift of emphasis is evident also in the protagonists’ attitudes toward society. The conclusions of the earlier novels—Paul’s turning away from death toward the “humming, glowing town,” and Ursula’s vision of the rainbow offering hope that a corrupt world would “issue to a new germination”—imply that Western civilization could still respond to the most urgent needs of the individual. In Women in Love that assumption has completely vanished. Thus, although Lawrence originally conceived of The Rainbow and Women in Love as a single work and would later describe them as forming together “an organic artistic whole,” the latter novel embodies a far darker view of the world. As Lawrence once said, Women in Love “actually does contain the results in one’s soul of the war: it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating.” The phrase “purely destructive” only slightly exaggerates the despairing nature of the novel’s apocalyptic vision. Certainly its depiction of modern society as a dying tree “infested with little worms and dry-rot” suggests that the impetus toward death and destruction is so pervasive as to make the war all but inevitable. In the novel, the working class, far from resisting the dehumanizing mechanism of the industrial system, is “satisfied to belong to the great wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them.” The leisure class is seen as similarly deluded and doomed. Hermione Roddice’s chic gatherings at Breadalby, her country estate (modeled on Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington), offer no genuine alternative to the dying world but only a static image of the “precious past,” where all is formed and final and accomplished—a “horrible, dead prison” of illusory peace. Meanwhile contemporary art has abdicated its time-honored role as naysayer to a corrupt social order. Indeed, in the homosexual artist Halliday, the promiscuous Minette, and the other decadent bohemians who congregate at the Pompadour Café in London, Lawrence clearly implicates intellectual and artistic coteries such as Bloomsbury in the general dissolution of modern society. That the pandering of the modern artist to the death-drive of mechanistic society was a general phenomenon and not limited to England is emphasized near the end of the novel with the appearance of Loerke, a German sculptor whose work adorns “a great granite factory in Cologne.” Loerke, who asserts on the one hand that art should interpret industry as it had formerly interpreted religion and on the other that a work of art has no relation to anything but itself, embodies the amorality of modernist aesthetics from Lawrence’s viewpoint. Dominated by “pure unconnected will,” Loerke is, like Hermione, sexually perverse, and, like the habitués of the Pompadour, he “lives like a rat in the river of corruption.” All of these secondary characters in Women in Love exemplify the results of the displacement of the traditional order by industrialization, or what Lawrence terms “the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic.” Except for Hermione, they are consistently presented from without, in static roles prescribed for them by a static society. Against this backdrop move the four principal characters: Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, who are sisters, and Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, who are friends. The interweaving relationships of these four, highlighted in scenes of great emotional intensity and suggestiveness, provide the “rhythmic form” of the novel. Notwithstanding their interactions with external society and their long philosophical arguments, they are chiefly presented in terms of

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a continuous struggle among the elemental energies vying for expression within them. Mark Schorer aptly describes the book as “a drama of primal compulsions.” The “drama” concerns the conflict between the mechanical will and the organic oneness of being, between the “flux of corruption” or death and the regenerative forces of life, as these are variously embodied in the four main characters and their constantly shifting relationships. Birkin, full of talk about spontaneity and “pure being” and the “blood-knowledge” available in sensuality, is clearly a spokesman for certain of Lawrence’s favorite ideas. Considering this, it is interesting that from the outset the novel emphasizes his involvement in the death-fixation of modern society at large. He has been one of the “mud-flowers” at the Café Pompadour. In addition, he has been for several years involved in an affair with the perverse socialite Hermione, an affair that has degenerated into a hysterical battle of wills, sapping Birkin of his male vitality. As he tells Gerald, he wants above all to center his life on “the finality of love” for one woman and close relationships with a few other friends, but his goal is frustrated by the lingering parody of it represented in Hermione and the London bohemians. It is therefore significant that he is frequently ill and once goes to the south of France for several weeks to recuperate. His sickness is as much spiritual as physical. Dissatisfied with his prosaic career as a school inspector and frustrated in his relationships, he often finds himself “in pure opposition to everything.” In this depressed state he becomes preoccupied with death and dissolution, “that dark river” (as he calls it) which seethes through all modern reality, even love. Not until after his violent break with Hermione, during which she nearly kills him, does Birkin begin to find his way back to life. Unlike Birkin, Gerald does not believe that love can form the center of life. Instead he maintains that there is no center to life but simply the “social mechanism” which artificially holds it together; as for loving, Gerald is incapable of it. Indeed the novel everywhere implies that his inability to love derives from his abdication of vital, integrated being in favor of mere social fulfillment. As an industrial magnate (he is the director of the local coal mines and has successfully modernized them), Gerald advocates what Birkin calls the “ethics of productivity,” the “pure instrumentality of mankind” being for him the basis of social cohesion and progress. If society is essentially mechanistic, Gerald’s ambition is to be “the God of the machine” whose will is “to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The subjugation itself,” Lawrence adds significantly, “was the point.” This egotistic obsession is illustrated in a powerful scene in which Gerald rides a young Arab mare up to a railroad track and, while Gudrun and Ursula look on aghast, he violently forces the terrified mare to stay put as the train races noisily by them. The impact of this cruel assertion of will to power registers forcefully on Ursula, who is duly horrified and outraged, and on Gudrun, who is mesmerized by the “unutterable subordination” of the mare to the “indomitable” male. After abortive affairs with other women, Birkin and Gerald are inevitably attracted to the Brangwen sisters. The protracted ebb and flow of the two relationships is tellingly juxtaposed in a series of scenes richly symbolic of the central dialectic of life and death. Meanwhile, not content with the romantic promise of finding love with a woman only, Birkin proposes to Gerald that they form a vital male bond as of blood brothers pledged to mutual love and fidelity. Whatever its unconscious origins, the intent of the offer is clearly not sexual. As the rest of the novel demonstrates (anticipating a theme that becomes more central and explicit in subsequent novels

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such as Aaron’s Rod and The Plumed Serpent), Birkin is searching for a kind of pure intimacy in human relationships. He seeks with both men and women a bond of blood and mind and spirit—the integrated wholeness of being that for Lawrence was sacred—that when realized might form the nucleus of a new, vital human community. Because of Gerald’s identification with the mechanism of industrial society, Birkin’s repeated offer of a Blutbrüderschaft amounts to an invitation to a shared rebirth emblematic of epochal transfiguration, an apocalypse in microcosm. Because of that same identification, of course, Gerald, confused and threatened, must refuse the offer. Instead he chooses to die. The choice of death is brilliantly dramatized in Gerald’s impassioned encounters with Gudrun. Despite her earlier identification with the mare he brutally “subordinated,” Gudrun might still have offered him the sort of vital relationship that both so desperately need. At any rate, had they been able to pursue their potential for love, the sort of shared commitment to mutual “being” that Birkin offers Gerald and that he eventually discovers with Ursula, regeneration, however painful and difficult, could have been realized. Rather than accept this challenge, however, Gerald falls back on his usual tactics and tries to subjugate Gudrun to his will. After his father’s death, he becomes acutely aware of the void in his life and turns at once to Gudrun— walking straight from the cemetery in the rain to her house, up to her bedroom, his shoes still heavy with mud from the grave—not out of love but desperate need: the need to assert himself, heedless of the “otherness” of another, as if in so doing he could verify by sheer force of will that he exists. Yet, because this egotistic passion is a perversion of love as Lawrence saw it and because Gerald’s yearning for ontological security is a perversion of the quest for true being, Gerald’s anxieties are only made worse by his contact with Gudrun. For her part, Gudrun, unlike the helplessly dominated mare, never yields herself fully to Gerald. In fact, she does all she can to thwart and humiliate him, and their relationship soon becomes a naked battle of wills. It is redundant to say that this is a battle to the death, for, on the grounds that it is fought, the battle itself is death in Lawrencian terms. In the end, Gerald, whose aim all along as “God of the machine” had been to subjugate Matter to his will, becomes literally a frozen corpse whose expression terrifies Birkin with its “last terrible look of cold, mute Matter.” Gudrun, headed at the end for a rendezvous with the despicable Loerke, arrives at a like consummation. Whatever Lawrence might say about the “purely destructive” forces at work in Women in Love, in the relationship of Birkin and Ursula he finds a seed of new life germinating, albeit precariously, within the “dark river of dissolution.” After the severance of his nearly fatal tie with Hermione, Birkin finds himself for a time in a quandary. Believing as he still does that the only means of withstanding dissolution is to center his life on close human ties, he casts about him to discover precisely the kind of relationship that will best serve or enact his quest for being. The “purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge” represented by a primitive statue of an African woman impresses Birkin but finally proves too remote a mystery for him to emulate; in any event, the modern female embodiments of this “mystic knowledge” of the senses are, like Hermione and Gudrun, will-dominated and murderous. A second way is that represented by the proposed bond with Gerald, the “Nordic” machine-god who for Birkin represents “the vast abstraction of ice and snow, . . . snow-abstract annihilation.” When these alternatives both reveal themselves as mere “allotropic” variations of the flux of corruption from which he seeks release, Birkin finally hits upon a third way, “the way of freedom.” He conceives of it in idealistic terms, as

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the paradisal entry into pure, single being, the individual soul taking precedence over love and desire for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion, a lovely state of free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields. It is a difficult and elusive ideal, and when Birkin tries, laboriously, to describe it to Ursula—inviting her to join him in a new, strange relationship, “not meeting and mingling . . . but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings” dynamically counterpoised as two stars are—she mocks him for dissimulating. Why does he not simply declare his love for her without “dragging in the stars”? She has a point, and Lawrence’s art only benefits from such moments of self-criticism. Still, these paradoxical images of separateness in union, of a bond that finds its strength in the reciprocal affirmation of “otherness,” do express, like the wheel’s axle and rim in The Rainbow, Lawrence’s essential vision of integrated, dynamic relationships. Furthermore, only by actively pursuing such a marriage of opposites, in which the separateness of each partner is necessary to the indissolubility of the bond, can both parties be caught up in something altogether new: “the third,” which transcends individual selves in the oneness of pure being. For Lawrence this is the true consummation, springing up from “the source of the deepest life-force.” So polluted had the river of life become in modern Europe, however, that Lawrence could no longer bring himself to believe that this transcendence, ephemeral as it was to begin with, could survive the general cataract of dissolution. Moreover, even when Birkin and Ursula do find fulfillment together, it is not enough; for Birkin, at any rate, the new dispensation must involve other people as well as themselves. For both reasons, the quest for integrated wholeness of being, a mystery into which Birkin and Ursula are only new initiates, becomes translated into a pilgrimage through space. They must depart from the old, dying world and, like Lawrence and Frieda after the war, proceed in search of holy ground. The primary focus of subsequent novels, this quest is defined in Women in Love simply as “wandering to nowhere, . . . away from the world’s somewheres.” As nowhere is the translation of the word utopia, the social impetus of the search is implicit. “It isn’t really a locality, though,” Birkin insists. “It’s a perfected relation between you and me, and others . . . so that we are free together.” With this ideal before him, Lawrence was poised at the crossroads of his career. In the postwar novels, which present fictionalized versions of his and Frieda’s experiences in Italy (Aaron’s Rod ), Australia (Kangaroo), and Mexico (The Plumed Serpent), the quest translates increasingly into a sociopolitical doctrine projected onto whole societies. The bond between men and the fascination of powerful male leaders became more and more of an obsession in these novels. Lawrence tried mightily to remain faithful to the notion that the regeneration of societies should correspond to the “perfected relations” between individuals. The analogy presented difficulties, however, and the struggle to express his essentially religious vision in political terms proved fatal to his art. There are brilliant moments in all of these novels, especially in The Plumed Serpent, yet the alien aspects of the foreign lands he visited finally obscured the central issues in what was, at bottom, a quest for self-discovery. Women in Love, still in touch with the real motives of that quest and yielding immediate access to its first (and, as it turned out, finest) fruits, offers the richest rendering of both the modern drift toward death and its Lawrencian antidote, “whole man alive.” However ill-defined the object of his protagonists’ plans for flight from Europe,

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ever since the cataclysm of 1914-1918, Lawrence himself had determined to relocate in the United States. Florida, California, upstate New York, New Mexico—all at one time or another figured as proposed sites of his American dream. In one of these areas, apart from the great urban centers, he would establish a utopian colony to be called Rananim. There he would start over again, free from the runaway entropy of modern Europe. In America, and more particularly aboriginal America, he believed that the Tree of Life remained intact, its potency still issuing “up from the roots, crude but vital.” Nevertheless, when the war ended he did not go to America straightaway but headed east, not to arrive in the Western Hemisphere until late in 1922. During this prolonged period of yearning, his vision of America as the New World of the soul, the locus of the regeneration of humankind, took on an increasingly definite form. He was imaginatively committed to it even before settling near Taos, New Mexico, where he and Frieda lived on a mountain ranch for most of the next three years. After studying the classic works of early American literature, he decided that he would write an “American novel,” that is, a novel which would invoke and adequately respond to the American “spirit of place.” For Lawrence the continent’s daemon was the old “blood-and-vertebrate consciousness” embodied in the Mesoamerican Indian and his aboriginal religion. Because of four centuries of white European domination, that spirit had never been fully realized, yet despite the domination it still lay waiting beneath the surface for an annunciation. The terms of this vision, even apart from other factors having to do with his frustrating contacts with Mable Dodge Luhan and her coterie of artists in Taos, all but made it inevitable that Lawrence would sooner or later situate his American novel in a land where the Indian presence was more substantial than it was in the southwestern United States. The Pueblo Indian religion impressed him deeply with its “revelation of life,” but he realized that for a genuine, large-scale rebirth to occur in America, “a vast death-happening must come first” to break the hold of the degenerate white civilization. It was natural enough that he turned his eyes south to Mexico, a land which actually had been caught up in revolution for more than a decade—a revolution moreover in which the place of the Indian (who constituted more than 30 percent of the population) in the national life was a central issue. Reading pre-Columbian history and archaeology, Lawrence found in Aztec mythology a ready-made source of symbols and in the story of the Spanish conquest an important precedent for his narrative of contemporary counterrevolution and religious revival. The Plumed Serpent · Yet the writing of his Quetzalcoatl, the working title of what would become The Plumed Serpent, proved unusually difficult. Kangaroo had taken him only six weeks to write; Aaron’s Rod and The Lost Girl were also composed in sudden, if fitful, bursts. In contrast, he worked on his “American novel” off and on for nearly two years, even taking the precaution of writing such tales as “The Woman Who Rode Away,” “The Princess,” and “St. Mawr” (all of which have much in common with the novel), and the Mexican travel sketches in Mornings in Mexico, as a kind of repeated trial run for his more ambitious project. One reason the novel proved recalcitrant was that Lawrence became increasingly aware during his three journeys into the Mexican interior that his visionary Mexico and the real thing were far from compatible. The violence of the country appalled him; its revolution, which he soon dismissed as “self-serving Bolshevism,” left him cold; and most important, its Roman Catholic Indians were demonstrably uninterested and seemingly incapable of responding to the sort of pagan revival called for

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by Lawrence’s apocalyptic scheme. Yet so committed was he to his American “Rananim” that he was unwilling or unable to entertain the possibility of its failure. Rather than qualify his program for world regeneration in the light of the widening breach between his long-cherished dream and the disappointing reality, he elaborated the dream more fully and explicitly than ever, inflating his claims for it in a grandiose rhetoric that only called its sincerity into question. Had he been content with a purely visionary, symbolic tale, a prose romance comparable in motive with W. B. Yeats’s imaginary excursions to “Holy Byzantium,” such questions would probably not have arisen. Lawrence, however, could not let go of his expectation that in Mexico the primordial spirit of place would answer to his clarion call. At the same time, the realist in Lawrence allowed evidence to the contrary to appear in the form of his extraordinarily vivid perceptions of the malevolence of the Mexican landscape and its darkskinned inhabitants. Yet even these were forced into the pattern of New World Apocalypse. In his desperation to have it both ways, doggedly asserting the identity of his own spiritual quest and the course of events in the literal, external world, he contrived a kind of symbolic or mythic formula in which sexual, religious, and political rebirth are not only equated but also presented as mutually dependent. The result, according to most critics, is a complicated muddle in which the parts, some of which are as fine as anything he ever wrote, do not make a whole. Yet for Lawrence the muddle itself would ultimately prove instructive. In a sense The Plumed Serpent begins where Women in Love ends. The flow of Birkin and Ursula’s relationship in the earlier novel is directed centrifugally away from England toward a nameless “nowhere” of shared freedom in pure being. In The Plumed Serpent, the protagonist, Kate Leslie, having heard the death-knell of her spirit in Europe, has arrived at the threshold of the New World of mystery, where a rebirth awaits her “like a doom.” That the socialist revolution has addressed only the material needs of Mexicans and left their dormant spirit untouched suggests that Mexico is also in need of rebirth. Disgusted by the tawdry imitation of a modern European capital that is Mexico City, the seat of the failed revolution, Kate journeys westward to the remote lakeside village of Sayula. Sayula also happens to be the center of a new-Aztec religious revival led by Don Ramón Carrasco, who calls himself “the living Quetzalcoatl.” The boat trip down the “sperm-like” lake to Sayula begins Kate’s centripetal movement toward her destiny, and also Mexico’s movement toward an indigenous spiritual reawakening; both movements are directed, gradually but inexorably, toward an “immersion in a sea of living blood.” Unlike Birkin and Ursula of Women in Love, Kate, a middle-aged Irish widow, wants at first only to be “alone with the unfolding flower of her own soul.” Her occasional contacts with the provincial Indians inspire in her a sense of wonder at their “dark” mystery, but at the same time she finds their very alienness oppressive and threatening. She feels that the country wants to pull her down, “with a slow, reptilian insistence,” to prevent her “free” spirit from soaring. Since Kate values her freedom and her solitude, she retreats periodically from the “ponderous, down-pressing weight” which she associates with the coils of the old Aztec feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl. Don Ramón explains to her that she must submit to this weight upon the spirit, for by pulling her down into the earth it may bring her into contact with the deep-rooted Tree of Life, which still thrives in the volcanic soil of primordial Mexico beneath the “paleface overlay” on the surface. This injunction is aimed not only at Kate but also at contemporary Mexico itself, which, beckoned by the pulsating drumbeats and hymns of the Men of Quetzalcoatl, is urged to turn its back on the imported white

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creeds (Catholicism and Bolshevism) and rediscover its indigenous roots. Only by yielding their hold on the conscious will can the “bound” egos of the Mexicans as well as of Kate achieve a transfiguration, symbolized in the novel by the Morning Star. Indeed, as a representative of white “mental consciousness,” Kate is destined to perform an important role in the new dispensation in Mexico. Ramón’s aim is to forge a new mode of consciousness emerging from the dynamic tension between the white and dark sensibilities. The new mode is embodied by Ramón himself, in his capacity to “see both ways” without being absorbed by either, just as the ancient man-god Quetzalcoatl united the sky and the earth, and as the Morning Star (associated with Quetzalcoatl) partakes of both night and day, moon and sun, yet remains itself. Thus described, this doctrine may seem a welcome elaboration of the star-equilibrium theory of human relationships advanced by Birkin in the earlier novel. The transcendent emergence of “the third,” at best an elusive idea of divine immanence in Women in Love, seems to be clarified by the Aztec cosmogonic symbolism of The Plumed Serpent. Undoubtedly the latter novel is the fullest statement of Lawrence’s vitalist religion. Yet there is something in the very explicitness of the religion in the novel that renders it suspect. As if in tacit acknowledgment of this, Lawrence, impatient with the slow progress of Don Ramón’s appeal to the spirit, introduces a more overt form of conquest. When both Kate and Mexico fail to respond unequivocally to the invitation to submit voluntarily, Ramón reluctantly resorts to calling on the assistance of Don Cipriano Viedma, a full-blooded Indian general who commands a considerable army. Though Lawrence attempts to legitimize this move by having Ramón induct Cipriano into the neo-Aztec pantheon as “the living Huitzilopochtli” (the Aztec god of war) and by having Kate envision Cipriano as the Mexican Indian embodiment of “the ancient phallic mystery, . . . the god-devil of the male Pan” before whom she must “swoon,” the novel descends into a pathological nightmare from which it never quite recovers. It is not simply that Cipriano politicizes the religious movement, reducing it to yet another Latin American literary adventure which ends by imposing Quetzalcoatlism as the institutional religion of Mexico; nor is it simply that Cipriano, with Ramón’s blessing, dupes Kate into a kind of sexual subservience that puts Gerald Crich’s machine-god efforts with Gudrun (in Women in Love) to shame. The nadir of the novel is reached when Cipriano performs a public execution, stabbing to death three blindfolded prisoners who have betrayed Ramón. This brutal act is given priestly sanction by Ramón and even accepted by Kate, in her new role as Malintzi, fertility goddess in the nascent religion. “Why should I judge him?” asks Kate. “He is of the gods. . . . What do I care if he kills people. His flame is young and clean. He is Huitzilopochtli, and I am Malintzi.” Their “godly” union is consummated at the foot of the altar in the new temple of Quetzalcoatl. At this point, if not before, the threefold quest for “immersion in a sea of living blood” ceases to serve a metaphorical function and becomes all too chillingly literal. With its rigidified “mystical” doctrine, its hysterical rhetoric, and its cruelly inhuman advocacy of “necessary” bloodshed and supermasculine dominance, The Plumed Serpent offers what amounts to a perfect Lawrencian hell but persists in celebrating it as if it were the veritable threshold of paradise. The novel has found a few defenders among critics enamored of “mythic design,” but Harry T. Moore is surely correct in calling it “a tremendous volcano of a failure.” Though for a short time he thought it his best novel, by March, 1928, Lawrence himself repudiated The Plumed Serpent and the militaristic “leader of men” idea that it embodies.

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Nevertheless, The Plumed Serpent marks a crucial phase in Lawrence’s development, for it carries to their ultimate conclusion the most disturbing implications of the ideas that had vexed his mind ever since the war. Submersion in the “dark blood,” as the novel demonstrates, could lead as readily to wholesale murder in the name of religion as to vital and spontaneous relations between men and women. By courageously following his chimerical “Rananim” dream through to its end in a horrific, palpable nightmare, Lawrence accepted enormous risks, psychological as well as artistic. The effort nearly cost him his life, bringing on a severe attack of tuberculosis complicated by malaria. Yet, in the few years that remained to him, he was in a real sense a man reborn, able to return in imagination (in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, among other works) to his native Midlands, where he could once again take up the quest for “whole man alive,” happily unencumbered by the grandiose political imperatives of world regeneration. Purging him of this ideological sickness, the writing of The Plumed Serpent proved as salutary to his later career as Sons and Lovers had been to his period of greatest accomplishment. When Lawrence settled in southern Europe after leaving America in late 1925, he began to reshape his spiritual map in ways suggestive of his shifting outlook during his last years. The problem with the United States, he decided, was that everyone was too tense. Americans took themselves and their role in the world far too seriously and were unable to slacken their grip on themselves for fear that the world would collapse as a result. In contrast, the Europeans (he was thinking chiefly of southern Europeans rather than his own countrymen) were freer and more spontaneous because they were not controlled by will and could therefore let themselves go. At bottom, the European attitude toward life was characterized by what Lawrence called “insouciance.” Relaxed, essentially free from undue care or fret, Europeans were open to “a sort of bubbling-in of life,” whereas the Americans’ more forthright pursuit of life only killed it. Whether this distinction between America and Europe has any validity for others, for the post-America Lawrence it meant a great deal. In The Plumed Serpent, his “American novel,” instead of realizing the free and spontaneous life flow made accessible by insouciance, he engaged in an almost hysterical striving after life writ large, resorting to political demagoguery and a formalized religion fully armed with rifles as well as rites. Apparently aware in retrospect of his error, he eschewed the strong-leader/submissive-follower relationship as the keynote to regeneration. In its place he would focus on a new relationship: a “sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and men and men and women, and not the one up one down, lead on I follow, ich dien sort of business.” Having discovered the virtues of insouciance and tenderness, Lawrence began to write Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of his most poignant, lyrical treatments of individual human relations. Lady Chatterley’s Lover · As always in Lawrence, the physical setting offers a crucial barometer of sensibility. In this case the treatment of setting is indicative of the novelist’s loss of faith in the “spirit of place” as a valid embodiment of his quest. In comparison with his other novels, Lady Chatterley’s Lover presents a scene much reduced in richness and complexity. Wragby Hall, the baronial seat of the Chatterleys, is described as “a warren of a place without much distinction.” Standing on a hill and surrounded by oak trees, Wragby offers a view dominated by the smokestacks of the mines in and around the Midlands village of Tevershall. Like Shortlands, the Criches’ estate in Women in Love, Wragby and its residents attempt through formal artifice to deny the existence of the pits from which the family income derives. The attempt is

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futile, however, for “when the wind was that way, which was often, the house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the earth’s excrement,” and smuts settle on the gardens “like black manna from skies of doom.” As for Tevershall (“’tis now and ’tever shall be”), the mining village offers only the appalling prospect of “the utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, . . . the utter death of the human intuitive faculty.” Clearly Wragby and Tevershall are two sides of the same coin minted by the godless machine age. Between the two is a tiny, ever-diminishing remnant of old Sherwood Forest. The wood is owned by the Chatterleys, and many of its trees were “patriotically” chopped down during the Great War for timber for the allies’ trenches. It is here that Constance (Connie) Chatterley and her lover, Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper, find—or rather create—life together. As Julian Moynihan has observed, the little wood symbolizes “the beleaguered and vulnerable status to which the vital career has been reduced” at the hands of modern civilization. The old centrifugal impulse for a faraway “nowhere” has yielded to a desperate centripetal flight toward refuge from the industrial wasteland. Yet try as they might to find sanctuary within the wood, the lovers must recognize that there is no longer any room in the world for true sanctuary, much less for a “Rananim.” “The industrial noises broke the solitude,” Lawrence writes; “the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.” The geographical focus of the Lawrencian quest is no longer able to provide a modicum of hope and so yields to a new, scaled-down, more intimate image: the human body. The sterility and spiritual paralysis of the modern world are embodied by Clifford Chatterley, Connie’s husband. A paraplegic victim of the war, Clifford is both literally and symbolically deadened to the life of the passions. All his energy is directed to verbal, abstract, or social undertakings in which actual contact is minimal. Clifford believes in the form and apparatus of the social life and is indifferent to private feelings. A director of mines, he sees the miners as objects rather than men, mere extensions of the pit machinery. For him, “the function determines the individual,” who hardly matters otherwise. Clifford also writes fashionably shallow stories and entertains other writers and critics to curry favor. He modernizes the coal mines with considerable success. Thus in broad outline he resembles Gerald Crich of Women in Love. Yet, in the far simpler world of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence chooses not to cloud matters by giving his antagonist any redeeming qualities. The reader is never invited to sympathize with Clifford’s plight. Motoring around Wragby Hall in his mechanical wheelchair, Clifford coolly urges Connie to have a child by another man—the “sex thing” having been of no particular importance to him even before the war—so that he can have an heir to Wragby. By the end of the novel, he turns to his attendant Mrs. Bolton for the only intimacy left to him: a regressive, perverse form of contact. Such heaping of abuse onto Clifford, far in excess of what is needed to establish his symbolic role, undoubtedly detracts from the novel. So long as she remains with Clifford, Connie finds herself in a condition of static bondage in which her individuality is circumscribed by the function identified in her title. A “lady” by virtue of her marriage, she is not yet truly a woman. Sex for her is merely a “thing” as it is for Clifford, an instrument of tacit control over men. She is progressively gripped by malaise. Physically she is “old at twenty-seven, with no gleam and sparkle in the flesh”; spiritually she is unborn. Her affair with Mellors is of course the means of her metamorphosis, which has been compared (somewhat ironically) with the awakening of Sleeping Beauty at the handsome prince’s magical

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kiss. Less obvious is the overlapping of this fairy-tale pattern with a counterpattern of male transformation such as that found in the tale of the Frog Prince. For Mellors, too, is trapped in a kind of bondage, alone in his precarious refuge in the wood. The “curse” on him is his antipathy to intimate contacts, especially with women, after his disastrous marriage to the promiscuous Bertha Coutts. The initial encounters between Connie and Mellors in the wood result only in conflict and hostility, as both, particularly Mellors, cling to their socially prescribed roles and resist the challenge of being “broken open” by true contact with another. Yet, when they finally do begin to respond to that challenge, it is Mellors who takes the lead in conducting Connie through her initiation into the mysteries of “phallic” being. With his “tender” guidance she learns the necessity of letting go her hold on herself, yielding to the “palpable unknown” beyond her conscious will. She discovers the importance of their “coming off together” rather than the merely “frictional” pleasures of clitoral orgasm (a notion acceptable within Lawrence’s symbolic context if not widely endorsed by the “how-to” manuals of the Masters and Johnson generation, of which Lawrence would no doubt have disapproved). When she tries to get Mellors to tell her that he loves her, he rejects the abstract, overused word in favor of the earthier Anglo-Saxon language of the body and its functions. On one occasion he even introduces her to sodomy so as to “burn out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places.” The result of all this, paradoxically, is that the couple arrives at the state of “chastity.” Having broken their ties to the sterile world, they are able to accept an imposed separation until it is possible, after a period of waiting for Mellors’s divorce to occur, for them to live together in hope for their future. In an aside in chapter 9, Lawrence, asserting that it is “the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives,” affirms that the great function of a novel is precisely to “inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness” and to “lead our sympathies away in recoil from things gone dead.” As a statement of intention, this will do for all of Lawrence’s novels. Of course, even the best of intentions do not necessarily lead to artistic achievement. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, though in many respects a remarkable recovery after the dead end that was the “leadership novels,” is nevertheless flawed by the very directness with which it follows the “flow and recoil” idea. For one thing, the deck is too obviously stacked against Clifford. Lawrence never takes him seriously as a man; by making him the stationary target of so much scorn simply for what he represents, Lawrence in effect replicates Clifford’s own treatment of people as mere objects or functions. Because the “recoil” against Clifford as a “thing gone dead” seems facile and almost glib, Connie’s counterflow toward Mellors seems also too easy, despite Lawrence’s efforts to render her conflicting, vacillating feelings. Another part of the problem lies in the characterization of Mellors, who, after his initial reluctance, proves to be a tiresomely self-satisfied, humorless, “knowing” spokesman for the gospel according to Lawrence. Connie, however, is a marvelous creation, far more complex than even Mellors seems to realize. She is a worthy successor to Lawrence’s other intriguing female characters: Gertrude Morel, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, Alvina Houghton (of The Lost Girl), and Kate Leslie. At his best, in Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and especially Women in Love, Lawrence manages to enact the flow and counterflow of consciousness, the centrifugal dilation and the centripetal contraction of sympathies, in a far more complex and convincing way than he does in his last novel. Notwithstanding his battles with Mrs. Grundy, the

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underlying impulse of all his work is unquestionably moral: the passionate yearning to discover, celebrate, and become “whole man alive.” The desperateness with which he pursued that elusive ideal in both his life and his art sometimes led him to resort to a bullying, declamatory didacticism, which took the chance of alienating his readers’ sympathies. Lawrence’s moral vision was most compelling when embodied and rendered in dramatic or symbolic terms rather than externally imposed by “oracular” utterance and rhetorical bombast. Yet “art for my sake” necessarily involved him in these risks, of which he was fully aware. At a time when aesthetic objectivity and the depersonalization of the artist were the dominant aims of the modernists, Lawrence courageously pursued his vision wherever it might lead. Through his capacity for outrage against what he considered a dying civilization, his daring to risk failure and humiliation in the ongoing struggle to find and make known the “vital quick” which alone could redeem humanity and relocate humankind’s lost spiritual roots, Lawrence performed the essential role of seer or prophetic conscience for his age. Moreover, because subsequent events in the twentieth century more than confirmed his direst forebodings, his is a voice which readers today cannot afford to ignore. While many are decrying the death of the novel amidst the proliferation of the much-ballyhooed “literature of exhaustion,” one could do worse than turn to Lawrence to find again the “one bright book of life.” Ronald G. Walker Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, 1914; England, My England, 1922; St. Mawr: Together with the Princess, 1925; The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, 1928; Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, 1930; The Lovely Lady and Other Stories, 1933; A Modern Lover, 1934; The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence, 1961. PLAYS: The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, pb. 1914; Touch and Go, pb. 1920; David, pb. 1926; A Collier’s Friday Night, pb. 1934; The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence, pb. 1965. POETRY: Love Poems and Others, 1913; Amores, 1916; Look! We Have Come Through, 1917; New Poems, 1918; Bay, 1919; Tortoises, 1921; Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, 1923; The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1928; Pansies, 1929; Nettles, 1930; The Triumph of the Machine, 1931; Last Poems, 1932; Fire and Other Poems, 1940; Phoenix Edition of Complete Poems, 1957; The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1964 (Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, editors). NONFICTION: Twilight in Italy, 1916; Movements in European History, 1921; Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 1921; Sea and Sardinia, 1921; Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1922; Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923; Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 1925; Mornings in Mexico, 1927; Pornography and Obscenity, 1929; Á Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1930; Assorted Articles, 1930; Apocalypse, 1931; Etruscan Places, 1932; The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1932 (Aldous Huxley, editor); Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, 1936 (Edward McDonald, editor); The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1962 (2 volumes; Harry T. Moore, editor); Phoenix II, 1968 (Moore and Roberts, editors). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. D. H. Lawrence. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. A major compilation of critical commentary on Lawrence’s writings, this collection of

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essays deals largely with his major novels and short stories and makes available varying assessments of philosophical and psychological concerns implicit in Lawrence’s works. A chronology and short bibliography are also provided. Ellis, David. D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Volume 3 of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence (each volume is written by a different author). Ellis, like his Cambridge colleagues, has been criticized for use of excessive detail, but this biography is indispensable for students of specific periods of his life and work who wish a meticulous, accurate account. As Ellis remarks in his preface, more than most writers, Lawrence drew directly from his daily life, and only a minutely detailed biography can trace his creative process. Heywood, Christopher, ed. D. H. Lawrence: New Studies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. This work includes chapters on Lawrence’s social origins, his poetry, his major novels, political thought, and “blood consciousness,” but no bibliography. Jackson, Dennis, and Fleda Brown Jackson, eds. Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Various critical insights may be found in this collection of twenty essays, which includes articles by scholars and by well-known writers such as Anaïs Nin and Sean O’Casey. All literary genres in which Lawrence was involved are represented by one or more contributions here. Also of note is the editors’ introduction, which deals with trends in critical and biographical literature about Lawrence. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Volume 2 of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence. This is a massively detailed work, including chronology, maps, and notes. Maddox, Brenda. D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. As the subtitle indicates, Maddox focuses on Lawrence and his wife Frieda. A lively, deft writer, Maddox is not as meticulous as Lawrence’s more scholarly biographers. Meyers, Jeffrey. D. H. Lawrence: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. The emphasis in this substantial and well-informed biography is on Lawrence’s literary milieu and his development of themes and ideas in the broader intellectual context of his own time. Also provides some new interpretations of events in Lawrence’s personal life. Preston, Peter, and Peter Hoare, eds. D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989. The worldwide dimensions of Lawrence’s reputation are illustrated by this collection of papers from an international symposium which included scholars from France, Italy, Israel, and Korea, as well as from English-speaking countries. Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. This important literary biography by a specialist who has written several books about Lawrence sets forth the events of Lawrence’s life alongside an exposition of themes and techniques which characterized the writer’s work in several genres. Schneider, Daniel J. The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986. Major themes in Lawrence’s works reflected values and subjective responses developed over the course of the writer’s life. Traces psychological concerns and modes of belief as they arose during Lawrence’s career, without indulging in undue speculation or reductionism. Squires, Michael, and Keith Cushman, eds. The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Madison:

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University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. This group of essays, which deal both with individual works and with broader literary contexts, supplies some interesting and provocative insights. Of particular note is the first article, by Wayne C. Booth, a self-confessed “lukewarm Lawrentian” who maintains that Lawrence’s works are better appreciated upon rereading and reconsideration. Thornton, Weldon. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Part 1 provides interpretations of Lawrence’s most important stories; part 2 introduces Lawrence’s own criticism; part 3 gives a sampling of important Lawrence critics. Includes a chronology and bibliography. Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885-1912. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. This first volume in the Cambridge biography of Lawrence includes a family tree, chronology, and notes.

John le Carré John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell Born: Poole, England; October 19, 1931 Principal long fiction · Call for the Dead, 1960; A Murder of Quality, 1962; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1963; The Looking-Glass War, 1965; A Small Town in Germany, 1968; The Naive and Sentimental Lover, 1971; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1974; The Honourable Schoolboy, 1977; Smiley’s People, 1980; The Quest for Karla, 1982 (trilogy, includes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People); The Little Drummer Girl, 1983; A Perfect Spy, 1986; The Russia House, 1989; The Secret Pilgrim, 1991; The Night Manager, 1993; Our Game, 1995; The Tailor of Panama, 1996; Single and Single, 1999. Other literary forms · John le Carré’s reputation rests exclusively on his novels. He has published a handful of articles and reviews and two short stories but no booklength works in other forms. Achievements · Espionage fiction, the spy thriller, has a large, worldwide audience; at the end of the twentieth century one out of every four contemporary works of fiction published in the United States belonged to this genre. Le Carré is preeminent among writers of espionage fiction. John Gardner, himself an espionage novelist and the author of the continuing James Bond saga, has called le Carré “the British guru of literary espionage fiction.” Le Carré not only constructs the intricate plots which have made his works international best-sellers but also raises complex and fundamental questions about human nature. Most espionage fiction has a rather simplistic frame of reference: right and wrong, good and evil, us and them. The hero battles it out, his victory assured as he prepares to take on another assignment to save the free world from total collapse. He is a superman, and his adventures are narrated with all the razzle-dazzle and pyrotechnics of escapist fiction. Le Carré’s novels undermine all the stereotypes of spy fiction. Instead of a clear-cut conflict between right and wrong, le Carré’s novels offer subtle shades of grey. Instead of a dashing James Bond figure, le Carré’s most representative hero is George Smiley, fat, short, and balding, who “entered middle age without ever being young.” In novel after novel, le Carré is concerned with ends and means, with love and betrayal. He is concerned with character and motive, probing the agony and tragedy of the person who betrays his or her country not for personal profit but for a cause in which he or she believes. He dramatizes the dilemma faced by men and women involved in the monotonous and often inhuman work of espionage, which leads him to raise the uncomfortable yet fundamental question: How is it possible to defend humanity in inhuman ways? Like Graham Greene, le Carré compels one to go on a journey of self-exploration, to come to grips with one’s own self-delusions, fears, and anxieties. In the words of George Grella (The New Republic, July 31, 1976), the novels of le Carré “are not so much spy thrillers as thoughtful, compassionate meditations on deception, 559

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illusion and defeat.” Le Carré’s major achievement is his remarkable ability to transform espionage fiction from cliché-ridden, escapist fare to the level of great literature. Le Carré’s novels take his readers to the nerve center of the secret world of espionage. His is an authentic voice, drawing upon his own experiences. Whether it is the minutiae about an agent’s training in combat and radio transmitting technique in The Looking-Glass War, the subtleties of the “memory man” shredding classified documents in A Small Town in Germany, or the meticulous psychological and physical details involved in delivering a clandestine message in Smiley’s People, le Carré’s novels have, in the words of Melvyn Bragg, “the smell of insider lore . . . like a good wax polish.” He gives a complete portrait of the intelligence community with all its warts and wrinkles, conveying the sheer monotony and the “measureless tedium of diplomatic life” which form the background of the deadly game of espionage. There is nothing glamorous in this limbo world of spies and double agents, a world chillingly described by Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: “What do you think spies are? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” The British Foreign Service is involved not only in plots and counterplots to outwit the Soviets, but also in its own interdepartmental plots and counterplots within the Circus, the London headquarters of the intelligence establishment. In presenting such an uncompromisingly realistic portrait of the spy profession, le Carré has scored a significant achievement. Finally, in his portrait of George Smiley, le Carré has created a major character in contemporary world literature. Smiley is “one of life’s losers.” A notorious cuckold who continues to love his beautiful, unfaithful wife, he “looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie,” but has a brilliant mind. His vision of retirement is to be left alone to complete his monograph on the German baroque poet Martin Optiz. When he travels on a highly sensitive life-and-death mission, his fellow passengers think of him as “the tired executive out for a bit of fun.” Smiley, however, is not one face but “a whole range of faces. More your patchwork of different ages, people and endeavours. Even . . . of different faiths.” He is “an abbey, made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions.” In spite of all the “information” the reader possesses about Smiley, he remains an elusive personality, thus reflecting a mark of great literary creations: a sense of mystery, of a life beyond the boundaries of the text. Biography · John le Carré was born David John Moore Cornwell, the son of Ronald and Olive (Glassy) Cornwell, on October 19, 1931, in Poole, Dorset, England, “in a mouldering, artless house with a ‘for sale’ notice in the garden.” He went to Sherborne School—where James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips, was filmed—but did not like Sherborne and attempted to run away. “I was not educated at all,” le Carré writes in his essay “In England Now” (The New York Times Magazine, October 23, 1977), and speaks of his school as a prison. He spent much of his time “planning escapes across moonlit playing fields,” thereby finding release from “those huge and lonely dormitories.” He remembers the severity of the school crystallized in his being “sprawled inelegantly over the arm of the headmaster’s small chair,” to smart under blows from a small riding whip. Since young le Carré’s father seldom paid the school fees, he was singled out even more for punishment. He was struck by the hand as well as whipped, and le Carré attributes his “partial deafness in one ear to a Mr. Farnsworth,” a teacher in school at that time. The school atmosphere was violent: rugger wars were fought

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“almost literally to death,” boxing was a religious obligation, and instructors drummed into their pupils the notion that “to die in battle” was the highest achievement to which they could aspire. Le Carré’s father was determined to make his two sons grow up independent, so he sent them to schools thirty miles apart. Young David and his brother Tony, two years his senior, made arduous journeys to meet each other on Sundays to find the emotional nourishment each so desperately needed. Le Carré quit Sherborne two years later. Le Carré’s father had dropped out of school at the age of fourteen and ever after, as le Carré said in an interview with Time magazine (October 3, 1977), “lived in a contradictory world,” full of credit but The Douglas Brothers no cash with a “Micawberlike talent for messing up his business adventures.” He finally ended up in prison for fraud. Le Carré’s mother abandoned the children to live with a business associate of her husband. Le Carré did not see his mother until he was twenty-one. His father died in 1975 without reconciling with his sons. Without the support of his parents, le Carré had to depend on his elder brother. As children, they were ignorant of the whereabouts of their parents, and the young le Carré often wondered if his father were a spy on a crucial mission for England. False promises by his father made him distrustful of people, and he confesses that “duplicity was inescapably bred” into him. His childhood was therefore traumatic, and he draws upon this painful experience in The Naive and Sentimental Lover when he makes Aldo Cassidy, one of the heroes of the novel, tell Shamus how his mother abandoned him when he was a child. The loss “robbed him of his childhood,” denying him “normal growth.” Le Carré’s father was angry that his son had left Sherborne and, to punish him, sent him to Berne University in Switzerland; le Carré was sixteen at the time. At Berne, he studied German, French, and skiing. After completing his military service in Vienna with the army intelligence corps, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford, and studied modern languages, taking an honors degree in 1956. From 1956 to 1958, he taught languages at England’s most prestigious public school, Eton. Le Carré is fond of quoting Graham Greene’s observation that “a writer’s capital is his childhood.” In his own case, the circumstances of his childhood led him to accept the “condition of subterfuge” as a way of life. In an interview with Melvyn Bragg (The New York Times Book Review, March 13, 1983), le Carré speaks again of the manner in which his childhood contributed to his secretive nature; he “began to think that [he] was, so to speak, born into occupied territory.” Like the boy Bill Roach in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carré is the perennial clandestine watcher, observing, noting, analyzing, and piecing together the parts of the puzzle.

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In 1954, le Carré married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp, daughter of a R.A.F. marshal. He has three sons from this marriage, which ended in divorce in 1971. He is now married to Jane Eustace, formerly an editor at his British publisher, Hodder and Stoughton; they have a son, Nicholas. In 1960, le Carré entered the British Foreign Service and served as second secretary in Bonn from 1960 to 1963, and as consul in Hamburg from 1963 to 1964. Le Carré has been reticent about his actual work in the Foreign Office, and has been noncommittal about whether his Bonn and Hamburg posts were covers for duties as a secret agent. As Melvyn Bragg writes, “He used to deny having been a spy, but now it’s out. He gives in gracefully—caught but too late for it to matter. His new line is a line in charming resignation, an admission of nothing very much.” The tension, the drama, and the intense human conflict that pervade all his novels undoubtedly derive from le Carré’s “insider lore.” Le Carré experimented with writing while he was a student at Sherborne, but abandoned it because he was discouraged in his creative attempts. After getting married and living in Great Missenden, he once again started writing. Frequently, he used the two-hour train journey he had to make every day to London to plot his stories and overcome his “restlessness as a diplomat.” He chose the pseudonym “John le Carré” in order to satisfy the regulation of the British Foreign Service which forbids its employees to publish under their own names. Appropriately, the origin of le Carré’s pseudonym is itself obscured in mystery and possible deception. Long ago, le Carré told interviewers that he had seen the name “Le Carré” (“The Square”) on the window of a London shop, but diligent researchers have been unable to find any record of such a shop in the registry of London’s businesses. Le Carré’s first two novels, Call for the Dead, which makes use of his German experience, and A Murder of Quality, which draws upon his Eton experience, had moderate success. It was with his third novel, however, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, that le Carré won both fame and financial security. He gave up his job in the Foreign Office and became a full-time writer. Le Carré leads a very private life in an elegantly furnished cliff house in Cornwall, near Land’s End. He is a slow but eclectic reader and avoids novels in his own genre. He follows no writer as a model, but admires and enjoys good prose, clear, lucid, and full of subtle nuances. Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and V. S. Naipaul are among his favorite authors. Le Carré emerged from the shadows somewhat in the 1990’s, making himself available for interviews and addressing public issues. Of his time as a member of the secret world, he said in 1996: “I did nothing of significance. . . . I didn’t alter the world order.” He continued to travel extensively while researching his novels. When at home, he writes in the early morning and often walks along the beaches of Cornwall in the afternoons. He has grappled with the problem of writing novels about espionage in a post-Cold War world and has wondered how much he was affected by the great ideological clash of the superpowers—a clash that he helped to mythologize in his novels. Concurrent with the release of his 1996 novel, The Tailor of Panama, le Carré treated the British reading public to a vituperative literary feud with the novelist Salman Rushdie. Speaking about his book to the Anglo-Israel Association in 1995, le Carré defended himself against charges of anti-Semitism, claiming that he “had become the victim of a witch-hunt by zealots of ‘political correctness.’” Rushdie said that he wished le Carré had voiced a similar concern when his book The Satanic Verses (1988)

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prompted the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa, or death sentence, against him. Both writers quickly directed very personal attacks against each other in the letters section of the venerable British newspaper The Guardian. Le Carré wrote that “there is no law in life or nature that says that great religions may be insulted with impunity.” Le Carré added in a later riposte that Rushdie’s comments were “cultural intolerance masquerading as free speech.” Analysis · In his first novel, Call for the Dead (which took second place in the Crime Writers Association awards for 1961), John le Carré introduced George Smiley, not only his most important character, but also one of the most fascinating and complex characters in the world of fictional espionage. In the very first chapter of the novel, aptly entitled “A Brief History of George Smiley,” the reader is offered more information about Smiley than is provided in any other novel in which he appears. Call for the Dead · Cast in the form of a detective story, even though the theme—the control of Samuel Fennan, a British Foreign Service official, by East Germany—is one of international intrigue and espionage, Call for the Dead is a tight, short, wellconstructed novel written against the background of Britain’s postwar security crisis. There is a need for men of Smiley’s experience because “a young Russian cypherclerk in Ottawa” had defected. (The cypher-clerk to whom le Carré referred was Igor Gouzenko, author of The Fall of a Titan, 1954; his defection set in motion a number of arrests and other defections, including the notorious cases of Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, who were revealed to have been Soviet agents.) Smiley, who “could reduce any color to grey,” and who “spent a lot of money on bad clothes,” has interviewed Samuel Fennan on the basis of an anonymous letter charging Fennan with Communist party affiliations. Soon after the interview, Fennan commits suicide in suspicious circumstances. In investigating Fennan’s death, Smiley investigates himself. Smiley’s self-exploration and the moral responsibility he accepts for having indirectly contributed to Fennan’s death add strength to the novel. Years earlier, during a year in Germany in the Nazi era, Smiley had recruited a young man named Dieter Frey because the handsome young German had “a natural genius for the nuts and bolts of espionage.” Smiley now has to confront Dieter, who turns out to be an East German agent involved in the Fennan case. When the confrontation takes place, Dieter, out of respect for their past friendship, does not fire his gun to kill Smiley, as he could. After that momentary hesitation, Dieter and Smiley struggle, and Smiley kills his former pupil. Ever the scholar-spy, Smiley recalls a line from Hermann Hesse, “Strange to wander in the mist, each is alone,” and realizes that however closely one lives with another, “we know nothing.” Call for the Dead introduces and makes reference to a number of characters who become permanent citizens of le Carré’s espionage world. There is Steed-Asprey, Smiley’s boss, whose secretary, the Lady Ann Sercombe, Smiley married and lost. Le Carré makes a practice of alluding to Steed-Asprey in each subsequent novel, rewarding his faithful readers with sly bits of information; in A Small Town in Germany, for example, a character remarks with seeming irrelevance that Steed-Asprey has become ambassador to Peru. When Smiley is on his final hunt for Karla in Smiley’s People, it is Steed-Asprey’s training he recalls. The reader is also introduced to Peter Guillam, who plays a prominent part in assisting Smiley with tracking down the Soviet mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Mundt, who is a key character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, also makes a diabolical appearance in Call for the Dead. Le Carré’s first novel

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makes it very clear that he was working to create a design, an oeuvre, and his later novels demonstrate that he succeeded in that attempt. A Murder of Quality · Set in an English public school, le Carré’s second novel, A Murder of Quality (which was a finalist for the Crime Writers Association Award for 1962), is a straight mystery novel with no element of espionage or international intrigue, except that the unofficial “detective” is George Smiley, brought into the case by a friend. Stella, the wife of Stanley Rode, a teacher at Carne, a posh public school, feels threatened by her husband. Before Smiley can meet her and inquire as to the basis for her fear, Stella is murdered. In investigating Stella’s death, Smiley meets a variety of characters both within and outside the school, reflecting the rigid class structure of British society. Le Carré draws upon his own teaching experience at Eton to present a convincing picture of a public school, with its inner tensions and nuances of snobbery and cruelty. “We are not democratic. We close the door on intelligence without parentage,” says one of the characters. Stanley Rode is not considered a gentleman because he did not go to the right school. Life at the school is an intensely closed society, and hence, there has not been “an original thought . . . . for the last fifty years.” The least likely suspect turns out to be the murderer. Smiley faces a dilemma because the murderer is the brother of one of his best friends, a fellow agent who disappeared on a mission and is presumed dead. The irony of the situation makes Smiley say, “We just don’t know what people are like, we can never tell. . . . We’re the chameleons.” The Spy Who Came in from the Cold · Le Carré’s third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international best-seller and brought him fame and financial independence. Graham Greene called it “the best spy story I have ever read.” Malcolm Muggeridge praised it for “the cold war setting, so acutely conveyed.” It was made into a successful film, with Richard Burton as Alec Leamas. The novel was translated into more than a dozen languages and was called a masterpiece. Le Carré has said that the novel was inspired by the sight of the Berlin Wall, which drew him “like a magnet.” The plot was “devised in the shadow of the Wall.” Written in a spare, athletic style (the first draft of 120,000 words was reduced to 70,000, while more than a dozen characters present in the first draft were eliminated in the final version), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the story of fifty-year-old Alec Leamas, “built like a swimmer,” a veteran British agent who has lost his most important agent in East Germany. He is asked to take on one more assignment before coming “in from the cold.” Tired and weary, almost burned out, Leamas accepts his terminal assignment: to get a British agent, “a mole,” out of East Germany. It is, however, not until the very end that Leamas, a master spy himself, realizes that he is not involved in a mere double cross, but in a triple cross, and that he is to be sacrificed. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is also a touching love story of two of society’s outcasts, Leamas and Liz. Both are betrayed by the men and institutions in whom they have faith and hope, and to whom they have given their loyalty. The moves and countermoves in the novel are plotted with the intricacy of a masterly chess game. “I wanted to make an equation and reverse it,” le Carré has said, “make another equation and reverse that. Finally, let him think he’s got nearly to the solution of the main equation, and then reverse the whole thing.”

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In Alec Leamas, le Carré creates a stunning portrait of an antihero. “Not accustomed to living on dreams,” Leamas is a citizen of the amoral world of espionage, who practices the art of self-deception so completely that he is unable to distinguish where his life begins and his deception ends. “Even when he was alone he compelled himself to live with the person he had assumed.” Leamas is needed by the British Foreign Service because he is the expendable man. His boss asks him if he is tired of spying because “in our world we pass so quickly out of the register of hate or love. . . . All that is left in the end is a kind of nausea.” Leamas has a sharp-edged cynicism, but when he meets Liz, a devoted but naïve Communist, in the London Library, he feels for her, believing that she can give him “faith in ordinary life.” She is his tender spot; she also becomes his Achilles heel. The Service has no qualms about using her to discredit and destroy Leamas, because “In the acquisition of intelligence, the weak and even the innocent must suffer.” Le Carré makes the telling point that in condoning the sacrifice of the individual, without his consent, for the good of the masses, both East and West use the same weapons of deceit and even the same spies. Le Carré’s judgment on this murky world is not reassuring: “There is no victory and no virtue in the cold war, only a condition of human illness and misery.” Mundt, whom the reader met in Call for the Dead, has a prominent role in the novel as the second man in the Abteilung, the East German Secret Service. A loathsome figure, an ex-Nazi, he turns out to be a double agent serving the British. To rescue him is Leamas’s task, and in the process, two decent human beings, both Jews, are destroyed. “I used Jewish people,” le Carré writes in his article “To Russia, with Greetings” (Encounter, May, 1966), “because I felt that after Stalin and Hitler they should particularly engage our protective instincts.” Smiley makes a brief appearance in the novel in a somewhat menacing role, the only such appearance in all of le Carré’s novels, Smiley without his humane personality. There are other references to SteedAsprey, Peter Guillam, and to the Samuel Fennan case, echoes from Call for the Dead. The Looking-Glass War · The time frame of le Carré’s next novel, The Looking-Glass War, is twenty years after that of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The British Military Intelligence unit, which during World War II has been vibrant, proud, and respectable, now exists as a mere remnant. Its officers and agents, nostalgic for the old days, wait for an incident to happen that could summon them to relive the past glory and regain their identity and honor. The head of this outfit is Le Clerc, a bland “precise cat of a man.” When one of his agents stumbles across evidence pointing to the possible Soviet smuggling of nuclear rockets to the East Germans, Le Clerc is overjoyed. It is a British version of the Bay of Pigs. Le Clerc wants to stage an overflight to photograph the incriminating evidence. He goes about his mission with messianic zeal, because to him, the enemy is not only the Soviet Union, but the Circus—the rival British intelligence agency—as well. The Circus could take the mission away from him and destroy his unit’s moment of glory. In The Looking-Glass War, le Carré reveals the Cold War professionals’ lack of “ideological involvement.” In his own words, “Half the time they are fighting the enemy, a good deal of the time they are fighting rival departments.” Taylor, the man sent to pick up the secret film, is killed, and Le Clerc recruits Avery, untrained for such work, to go undercover to bring back Taylor’s body. Avery is a true believer; he attributes legendary qualities to his unit. He is faced with reality when he bungles the recovery mission and is saved only by a seasoned and contemp-

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tuous British diplomat, but he falls under Le Clerc’s spell again in an ambitious project to train an agent—one of their own, not a Circus man—to send into East Germany to gather evidence of the rockets. His true moment of disillusionment comes when Fred Leiser, the agent in whose training he has participated, is caught inside East Germany. The Department refuses to help Leiser, who is left to fend for himself because of “some squalid diplomatic reason.” Leiser, an immigrant from Poland with wartime espionage experience, is another one of le Carré’s rootless spies who is given a prepackaged identity and then discarded. Leiser’s training provides the Department with its “carefree exciting days,” yet in spite of his loyalty and his gentlemanly dress, Leiser is not considered by the Oxonians who run the show as “one of us.” “He is a man to be handled, not known,” says Haldane, a friend of Smiley. Leiser is not from the proper class nor from the proper school and hence cannot be a member of the privileged caste to which Haldane and Smiley belong. Through the character of Leiser, le Carré again analyzes the subtle nuances of the British class system. A Small Town in Germany · The “town” of A Small Town in Germany is Bonn, “a very metaphysical spot” where “dreams have quite replaced reality.” Britain is eager to get into the Common Market, so eager that she is prepared to shake hands with the devil. The devil in this case is Karfeld, a demogogue with Hitlerian overtones, fanatically anti-British and involved in forging a Russo-German alliance. Of more immediate concern to the British, however, is Leo Harting, second secretary in the political section of the British embassy. Because of his refugee background—like that of Leiser in The Looking-Glass War—Harting is in an “unpromotable, unpostable, unpensionable position.” At the beginning of the book, Harting is missing along with some top-secret files. Information in these files could destroy British chances to join the Common Market and compromise British-German relations. Harting must be found, but the files are more important than the man. To lead this urgent manhunt, Alan Turner is sent from London. Most of the events in the novel are seen through Turner’s eyes. “A big lumbering man,” Turner walks “with the thrusting slowness of a barge; a broad aggressive policeman’s walk.” Like Leamas, Turner is a professional. Tough, acerbic, with a passionate obsession to get the job done, Turner shakes up the inefficient officials of the British embassy. In his pursuit of Harting, Turner begins to see a mirror image of himself. Both are underground men. “I’ll chase you, you chase me and each of us will chase ourselves,” Turner soliloquizes. In Turner’s view, Harting must not only be found but also protected, because he is “our responsibility.” To the Oxonians, Harting, although he dresses in British style and “uses our language,” is “only half tamed.” He is, like Leamas and Leiser, expendable. In his minute analysis of the British embassy officials in Bonn, le Carré portrays what Raymond Sokolov aptly calls “an encyclopedia of the English class system.” Both as an exciting tale of suspense and as a novel exploring the moral dilemma confronting men and women involved in defending Western freedom, A Small Town in Germany further advanced le Carré’s reputation as an able chronicler of a murky world. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy · Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the first volume in the trilogy concerning Smiley’s pursuit of his Soviet counterpart, Karla, is the story of the exposure of a Soviet “mole” burrowed deep within the Circus. Smiley, who has been

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fired (officially, he has “retired”) because of his close association with Control, the former head of the Circus, now dead, who was discredited by the mole because he was coming too close to the truth, is summoned “to come out of his retirement and root out as unobtrusively as possible” the Soviet mole. Smiley begins his meticulous search through the “long dark tunnel.” Proust-like, he indulges in remembrance of things past to trace the identity of the mole. He even questions his own motives, part of the subtle pressure exerted on him by his adversary Karla. The search in memory takes him to Delhi, India, where the reader meets Karla for the first time. Karla, “a little wiry chap, with silvery hair and bright brown eyes and plenty of wrinkles,” is imprisoned under the name of Gerstman. With characteristic frankness, Smiley tells Karla, “I can see through Eastern values just as you can through our Western ones.” Trying vainly to persuade Karla to defect, Smiley offers him cigarettes and hands him his lighter, a gift inscribed with love from his wife, Ann. Karla keeps the lighter when he returns, unpersuaded, to his cell. Echoes of this prison meeting between Karla and Smiley reverberate effectively in The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. Smiley finally captures the mole: He is suave, handsome Bill Haydon, who comes from the right background and the right school. Haydon has turned mole because he could no longer be an empire builder. Haydon not only has betrayed his country, but also has betrayed his friend Jim Prideaux by setting him up for Soviet cruelty. Further, at the command of Karla, Haydon has slept with Smiley’s wife, Ann, thereby creating a doubt in Smiley’s mind concerning his own motives for ferreting out Haydon. The bureaucratic world of official secrets is linked with the private world of emotional betrayal, giving le Carré’s work a universality which transcends its genre. Kim Philby, the British defector, was the prototype of Bill Haydon. In his introduction to The Philby Conspiracy (1968), le Carré writes that the British secret services are “microcosms of the British condition, of our social attitudes and vanities.” Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy portrays such a microcosm. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a successful television miniseries with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Le Carré admired the production, but he has remarked that Guinness “took the character away from me. Writing Smiley after Smiley-throughGuinness had entered the public domain was very difficult. In a sense his screen success blew it for me.” The Honourable Schoolboy · Set in Southeast Asia at the time of America’s disastrous retreat from Vietnam, The Honourable Schoolboy, the second volume in the trilogy The Quest for Karla, is a stunning novel of contemporary history. In The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley steps out of Europe: The action of the novel ranges across Southeast Asia and is centered in Hong Kong. There are two spheres of action: the Circus, where one encounters the familiar faces of Peter Guillam, Sam Collins, and Toby Esterhase; and Southeast Asia, where Smiley has sent Jerry Westerby to track down a high-ranking Chinese who is a top Soviet agent. As the novel progresses Smiley must also contend with the machinations of the “cousins” (the American Central Intelligence Agency). Jerry Westerby is the honorable schoolboy, so called because he was called “schoolboy” in the Tuscan village where he was trying to write a novel, and given the honorific “the Honorable” because he is the son of a Press Lord. Le Carré had introduced Westerby in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and in making him the major figure in The Honourable Schoolboy, he demonstrated one of his techniques for developing characters. In an interview with Michael Barber (The New York Times Book Review,

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September 25, 1977), le Carré explained that he gives some of his minor characters “a variety of qualifications” so that he can later “turn them from two dimensional characters into three dimensional characters.” He had provided Westerby with a Far Eastern background in the earlier novel, making him a natural for a leading role in a novel with that setting. In The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley feels compelled to restore the dignity of the Circus, lost in the aftermath of the exposure of Bill Haydon. When he spots large amounts of money from Russia pouring into Southeast Asia, his curiosity is aroused. He recruits Westerby, a newspaper writer and an “occasional” for the Circus, to go to Hong Kong. Westerby’s targets are two Chinese brothers, Drake Ko and Nelson Ko. In dealing with them, Westerby is fatally attracted to Drake Ko’s mistress Lizzi Worthington. Westerby, by allowing his passion—and compassion—to intrude on his sense of duty, pays a heavy price for his weakness. The Honourable Schoolboy is a very complex novel, and there are plots within plots like ingenious Chinese boxes. Any attempt at a synopsis would be futile, and it is difficult to capture the rich texture of the novel. Le Carré peoples it with a multitude of characters, each bursting with possibilities for a separate novel. There is Craw, the Australian journalist, an old China hand, based on the London Sunday Times correspondent Richard Hughes (who also appears as Dikko Henderson in Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, 1964); Connie Sachs, the Circus Sovietologist; Fawn, the professional killer; and the mercenary pilot Ricardo, to mention but a few. They interact with one another in a variety of ways to dramatize a labyrinthine maze of involved relationships, both personal and political. Within this framework, le Carré again poses the questions with which he continues to be concerned: What is honor? What is loyalty? These questions, as Eliot Fremont-Smith noted, “provide the tension in the book, and are its engines of suspense.” Smiley’s People · Smiley’s People, the final volume in the trilogy The Quest for Karla, opens with the knowledge that one of Smiley’s most valued and loyal “people,” Vladimir, alias Colonel Miller, has been murdered. He had a message for Smiley concerning the Sandman (a code name for Karla). Once again, Smiley is called back from retirement. Smiley’s quest is to find a weak spot in Karla, his Soviet counterpart. In Karla, Smiley sees his own dark and mysterious side. As Connie Sachs says to him, “You and Karla, two halves of the same apple.” In this novel, Smiley is the detective par excellence. He stalks Vladimir’s killer with the skill and acumen of Sherlock Holmes. No James Bond, Smiley is the philosopherspy who wants to find Karla’s Achilles heel. He is convinced that Karla is not “fireproof.” The tender spot turns out to be Karla’s mentally defective daughter, Alexandra. Smiley plays upon this weakness, this aspect of a Karla “flawed by humanity.” Karla yields, and the final tense scene of Smiley’s People is acted out on the same site as le Carré’s masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—the Berlin Wall. Smiley sees the face of the man whose photograph had hung on the wall in the Circus, constantly reminding him of his unfinished business. They face each other, “perhaps a yard apart,” Smiley hears the sound of Ann’s gold cigarette lighter fall to the ground, and Karla crosses over to give Smiley the victory he has sought for so long. In Smiley’s People, the reader meets Ann for the first time, “beautiful and Celtic.” When Smiley sees her, “Haydon’s shadow” falls “between them like a sword.” In the end, Smiley is alone, as he had been in his first appearance in A Call for the Dead,

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“without school, parents, regiment or trade,” a man who has invested his life in institutions and realizes philosophically that all he is “left with is myself.” The women in Smiley’s People are more fully delineated than in le Carré’s previous novels. He attributes this to his second marriage. After completing Smiley’s People, le Carré expressed the hope that the “emergence of female strength” in that novel could be carried into later writing. In The Little Drummer Girl, he fulfilled that ambition. The Little Drummer Girl · Charmian (“Charlie”), an English actress—incidentally inspired by le Carré’s own sister Charlotte, a Shakespearean actress—is the heroine of The Little Drummer Girl. Charlie is a promoter of many causes, a grab-bag of the serious and the fashionable, “a passionate opponent of apartheid . . . a militant pacifist, a Sufist, a nuclear marcher, an anti-vivisectionist, and until she went back to smoking again, a champion of campaigns to eliminate tobacco from theatres and on the public underground.” The resemblances to Vanessa Redgrave are unmistakable. Kurtz, an Israeli intelligence agent, offers Charlie the most spectacular role of her career—an opportunity to perform in “the theatre of the real.” She is transformed into a successful double agent with the task of cracking “the terror target.” The target is Khalil, a Palestinian guerrilla who is bombing Jews and Israelis in Bonn and various other European cities. In her attempt to get Khalil out into the open, Charlie undergoes an astonishing change in her own character. It is hard to think of another novel that has so masterfully portrayed the destruction and reconstruction of the psyche of a person in the process of being turned into a double agent. The Little Drummer Girl is a departure for le Carré. There are no moles here, but rather terrorists, and Britain and the Soviet Union are replaced by Israelis and Palestinians. Le Carré made several trips to the Middle East, talking with members of Israeli intelligence and with Yasser Arafat to soak up the atmosphere and allow his characters to develop and determine the action of the novel. The characters are not only authentic but also credible. In Charlie’s switching of roles and loyalties, le Carré has the opportunity to present both viewpoints, the Israeli and the Palestinian. While le Carré admires all that Israel stands for, in this book he is a partisan for the needs of the Palestinians. In The Little Drummer Girl, le Carré skillfully weaves a suspense tale taken from newspaper headlines, seeking out the universal themes of loneliness, alienation, exile, love, and betrayal of human beings behind those headlines. The result is a great novel. A Perfect Spy · In his next two novels, le Carré returned to the world of British espionage. A Perfect Spy centers on Magnus Pym, a British double agent. Here, as in previous works, le Carré considers the meaning of loyalty and betrayal, not only among spies but also in everyday life; in much of the book, espionage is peripheral. The character of Rick Pym, Magnus’s charming but untrustworthy father, is clearly based on le Carré’s own father, and the novel is his most autobiographical to date. The Russia House · With The Russia House, le Carré became one of the first masters of espionage fiction to reckon with the changes wrought by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. Published in the spring of 1989, shortly before the momentous events in Germany and Eastern Europe, The Russia House suggests that powerful factions in the United States intelligence community and military establishment might well contrive to keep the Cold War going. A Perfect Spy and The Russia House demonstrate le Carré’s continuing determination

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to extend the boundaries of the espionage novel. Indeed, le Carré’s career offers proof—if further proof is needed—that great fiction can be written in any genre, that genius is no respecter of critical categories. The Secret Pilgrim · The occasion of le Carré’s next novel, The Secret Pilgrim, is the end-of-term dinner at the Circus’s training center, Sarratt. The guest of honor, the legendary George Smiley, makes his last appearance in le Carré’s work, imparting his wisdom to the spies in training and to Ned, previously Barley Blair’s case officer in The Russia House. Ned listens to Smiley’s recollections, feeling “that he was speaking straight into my heretical heart.” Smiley’s comments propel Ned into a deep retrospection of the thirty years of secrecy and betrayal that have constituted his life in the Service. The Secret Pilgrim progresses not so much as an integrated whole but as a series of short stories. At the end of the evening’s celebration, Smiley flatly states that “It’s over, and so am I. . . . Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday’s cold warrior. . . . The worst thing you can do is imitate us.” Jauntily, as a parting note, Smiley says to “tell them to spy on the ozone layer, will you, Ned?” The Night Manager · A problem that le Carré faced in the 1990’s was what to write about after the end of the Cold War, which had been so central to his work. He solved this problem in his next novel, The Night Manager, his mostly richly textured and intricately plotted book since The Honorable Schoolboy. Jonathan Pine, one-time British soldier and itinerant hotelier, is haunted by the death of Sophie, an Egyptian woman he had tried to save from her brutal arms-dealing lover. Pine volunteers his services to British intelligence after he encounters Dicky Roper, the man who is ultimately responsible for Sophie’s death. Pine becomes a pawn in a struggle between the “enforcement” operatives who control him, and who wish to prosecute Roper, and the “Pure Intelligence” services of the “River House” who have a secret understanding with Roper. A further complication is Pine’s love for Roper’s mistress, Jemima. Infiltrating Roper’s household, Pine eventually becomes involved in Roper’s arms deals until his cover is blown. The conclusion of the novel is a clear homage to Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer”; Pine and Jemima are helped off Roper’s yacht, while Roper sadly watches from the rail. Our Game · Our Game, a play on the British expression “the Great Game,” pits two Cold War colleagues against each other. Timothy Cranmer, a retired case officer, now a winemaker, pursues his agent, Larry, who has disappeared with Cranmer’s girlfriend, Emma. Tracing Emma to Paris, Cranmer continues to follow Larry, first to Moscow, then to Chechnya during its civil war. While he arrives too late to confront his former colleague, Cranmer is not too late to redeem his own and Larry’s legacy. He joins the Chechen guerrillas. The Tailor of Panama · Le Carré’s only comic novel, The Tailor of Panama, recalls Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. Harry Pendel, a former convict and “bespoken tailor,” is suborned as a source by British intelligence. Unfortunately he has no intelligence to impart, so he invents it. Fueled by this source, the intelligence community in Panama contrives an American coup, while the British ambassador elopes with his secretary. Le Carré’s darkly humorous vision of intelligence gathering is juxtaposed against the real problems of contemporary Panamanians. K. Bhaskara Rao, updated by James Barbour

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Bibliography Barley, Tony. Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carré. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986. This work applies a somewhat esoteric critical examination to the problems of morality and reality in le Carré’s work up to The Little Drummer Girl. It is a thorough text, but it suffers from being too academic. Beene, Lynn Diane. John le Carré. New York: Twayne, 1992. This is a very useful biography of David Cornwell’s life before he adopted the pseudonym John le Carré, and his career since becoming a writer. Following the biography, the author provides a detailed and well-referenced analysis of le Carré’s novels through Smiley’s People. Cobbs, John, L. Understanding John le Carré. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. This is a thorough and comprehensive critical work about John le Carré’s novels, all of which, through The Tailor of Panama, are analyzed. Lewis, Peter E. John le Carré. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. An extensive critique of John le Carré’s work, with special mention of its political context. The material is well organized and includes a useful bibliography. Monaghan, David. The Novels of John le Carré: The Art of Survival. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Provides book-by-book coverage of all of le Carré’s novels through The Little Drummer Girl. Also includes an insightful chapter on George Smiley. ____________. Smiley’s Circus. London: Orbis Press, 1986. A wonderful illustrated index of characters from all the novels through A Perfect Spy, particularly focusing on the Karla trilogy of novels. Includes chronologies of the plots of the novels, maps, and photographs of some of the more famous British landmarks featured in le Carré’s work. This is an invaluable tool for untangling the byzantine complexity of George Smiley’s world. Its careful compilation of characters is testament not only to Monaghan’s skill as a researcher but also to le Carré’s deeply textured work. Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Secret Agents in Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. A criticism and comparison of John le Carré, Ian Fleming, and Len Deighton. Although there are references to le Carré throughout the text, one chapter, “The Enemy Within,” is devoted solely to his work. Wolfe, Peter. Corridors of Deceit: The World of John le Carré. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987. An in-depth probing of le Carré’s writing, this work contains many interesting insights into the author’s characters but lacks a bibliography.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Born: Dublin, Ireland; August 28, 1814 Died: Dublin, Ireland; February 7, 1873 Principal long fiction · The Cock and Anchor, 1845; Torlogh O’Brien, 1847; The House by the Churchyard, 1863; Wylder’s Hand, 1864; Uncle Silas, 1864; Guy Deverell, 1865; All in the Dark, 1866; The Tenants of Malory: A Novel, 1867 (3 volumes); A Lost Name, 1868; The Wyvern Mystery, 1869; Checkmate, 1871; The Rose and the Key, 1871; Morley Court, 1873; Willing to Die, 1873 (3 volumes). Other literary forms · Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is better known today as a short-story writer than as a novelist. His many tales first appeared in periodicals, later to be combined into collections. In addition to having genuine intrinsic merit, the stories are important to an understanding of Le Fanu the novelist, for in them he perfected the techniques of mood, characterization, and plot construction that make his later novels so obviously superior to his early efforts. Indeed, Le Fanu seems to have recognized little distinctive difference between the novel and the tale; his novels are often expansions of earlier stories, and stories reissued in collections might be loosely linked by a frame created to give them some of the unity of a novel. The major collections, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), Chronicles of Golden Friars (1871), In a Glass Darkly (1872), and The Purcell Papers (1880), reveal an artist who ranks with Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, M. R. James, and Algernon Blackwood as one of the masters of supernatural fiction in the English language. One story from In A Glass Darkly, “Carmilla,” is reprinted in almost every anthology of horror stories and has inspired numerous film versions, the most famous being Carl-Theodore Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931). Le Fanu wrote verse throughout his literary career. While unknown as a poet to modern audiences, in his own day at least one of his compositions achieved great popularity in both Ireland and the United States. “Shamus O’Brien” (1850) is a fine ballad that relates the adventures of the title character in the uprising of 1798. Achievements · In the preface to his most famous novel, Uncle Silas, Le Fanu rejects the claim of critics that he is a mere writer of “sensational novels.” Pointing out that the great novels of Sir Walter Scott have sensational elements of violence and horror, he denies that his own work, any more than Scott’s, should be characterized by the presence of such elements; like Scott, Le Fanu too has “moral aims.” To see the truth in this self-appraisal requires familiarity with more than one of Le Fanu’s novels. Singly, each of the major works overwhelms the reader with the cleverness of its plot, the depravity of its villain, the suspense evoked by its carefully controlled tone. Several novels together, however, recollected in tranquility, reveal a unity of theme. Moreover, each novel can then be seen as not merely a variation on the theme but also as a deliberate next logical step toward a more comprehensive and definitive statement. The intricacies of plot, the kinds of evil represented by the villains, the pervasive gothic gloom are to Le Fanu more than story elements; they are themselves his quite serious comment on the nature of human existence, driven 572

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by natural and social forces that leave little room for the effective assertion of free will toward any beneficial end. In Le Fanu’s short stories, more often than in his novels, those forces are embodied in tangible supernatural agents. “Carmilla,” for example, is the tale of a real female vampire’s attack on a young woman, but seen in the context of the larger theme, it is more than a bit of occult fiction calculated to give its readers a scare. With her intense sexuality and lesbian tendencies, the vampire is nothing less than the embodiment of a basic human drive out of control, and that drive—like the others that move society: self-preservation, physical comfort—can quite unpredictably move toward destruction. Le Fanu’s most significant achievement as a novelst was to show how the horror genre could be used for serious purposes—to show that monsters are not as horrible as minds that beget monsters, and that ghosts are not as interesting as people who are haunted. Biography · Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was descended from a Huguenot family that had left France for Ireland in the seventeenth century. Both his grandfather, Joseph, and great uncle, Henry, had married sisters of the famous playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His father, Philip Le Fanu, was a noted scholar and clergyman who served as rector at the Royal Hibernian School, where Le Fanu was born, and later as Dean of Emly. His mother was from all accounts a most charming and gentle person, an essayist on philanthropic subjects and a leader in the movement for humane treatment of animals. With loving and indulgent parents and the excitement of life at the school, where military reviews were frequent, Le Fanu’s childhood was a happy one. In 1826, the family moved to Abington in county Limerick. Le Fanu and his brother, William, were not sent to a formal school but were tutored by their father with the help of an elderly clergyman, who gladly excused the boys from their lessons so he could pursue the passion of his life: fishing. Walking tours through the wild Irish countryside, conversations with friendly peasants, who told of fairies and pookhas and banshees, shaped very early the imagination of the boy who would become the creator of so many tales of the mysterious and supernatural. The Tithe Wars of 1831 and the resulting animosity of the peasants to the Le Fanus, who were seen as representative of the Anglo-Irish establishment, forced the young Le Fanu to examine his own Irishness. On the one hand, he was intellectually supportive of the union and convinced that the British rule was in the best interests of the Irish people; on the other, the courage and sacrifices of the bold Irish nationalists filled him with admiration and respect. In 1837, Le Fanu was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. He took honors in classics and was well-known for his fine orations before the College Historical Society. Called to the Irish Bar in 1839, he never practiced law but entered a productive career in journalism. His first published work, “The Ghost and the Bonesetter,” appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in January, 1838. That magazine was to publish serially eight of Le Fanu’s fourteen novels after he became its owner and editor in 1861. During the early 1840’s, Le Fanu became proprietor or part-owner of a number of journals, including The Warder, The Statesman, The Protestant Guardian, and the Evening Mail. In 1844, Le Fanu married Susan Bennett. The union was a happy one; the Le Fanus had two sons and two daughters. One son, George, became an artist and illustrated some of his father’s works. Le Fanu’s novels published in the 1840’s, The Cock and Anchor and Torlogh O’Brien, received poor reviews, and Le Fanu turned from writing

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fiction to concentrate on his journalistic work. With the death of his beloved wife in 1858, he withdrew from society and became a recluse. Only a few close friends were allowed to visit “the invisible prince” at his elegant home at Merrion Square, Dublin. Emerging only occasionally to visit booksellers for volumes on ghosts and the occult, Le Fanu established a daily routine he was to follow for the remaining years of his life: writing in bed by candlelight from midnight till dawn, rising at noon, and writing all afternoon at a prized, small desk once owned by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In this manner was produced the greatest share of a literary canon that rivals in quantity the output of the most prolific authors of the Victorian age. At the end, under treatment for heart disease, troubled by nightmares—especially one recurring scene of a gloomy, old mansion on the verge of collapsing on the terrified dreamer—Le Fanu refused the company of even his closest friends. On the night of February 7, 1873, his doctor found him in bed, his arms flung wide, his unseeing eyes fixed in terror at something that could no longer do him harm. “I feared this,” the doctor said; “that house fell at last.” Analysis · After writing two novels that failed to impress the critics, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu left that genre for approximately fifteen years. In his reclusive later life, he returned to long fiction to produce the fine work for which he is remembered. Le Fanu’s career as a novelist reveals a marked change in his perception of humanity and the very nature of the universe itself. The development of the author’s major theme can be illustrated by a survey of the major novels in his quite extensive canon. The Cock and Anchor · The early works, The Cock and Anchor and Torlogh O’Brien, are both historical novels dealing with the Ireland of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the turbulent time of the Williamite wars (1689-1691). The Cock and Anchor presents a slice of Irish life that cuts across events and persons of real historical significance and the personal misfortunes of one fictional couple, Mary Ashewoode and Edmund O’Connor. The story of these ill-fated lovers has nothing special to recommend it. Mary is kept from Edmund first by her father, Sir Richard, who would marry her for a fortune to Lord Aspenly, a conventional fop, and then by her brother, Henry, who would see her wed to one Nicholas Blarden, a conventional villain. Mary escapes these nefarious designs and flees to the protection of Oliver French, the conventional benevolent uncle. There is, however, no happy ending: Mary dies before Edmund can reach her. The designing Sir Richard suffers a fatal stroke; brother Henry finally finds the destiny for which he was born, the hangman’s noose; and even Edmund’s unlucky life ends on the battlefield of Denain in 1712. More interesting to the modern reader are the historical characters. The haughty Lord Warton, Viceroy of Dublin, personifies power and Machiavellian self-interest. Joseph Addison and young Jonathan Swift are also here in well-drawn portraits that demonstrate considerable historical research. Still, the novel is at best uneven, the work of an author with promise who has more to learn about his craft. The technical obstructions, however, cannot hide Le Fanu’s message: The problems of Ireland are profound and rooted deep in a history of conflict. The Anglo-Irish establishment, represented by the Ashewoode family, has lost sight of the values needed to end the strife and move the society toward peace and prosperity, values such as personal responsibility, compassion, and even love within the family. Le Fanu was unwilling to risk clouding his theme by allowing the happy marriage of Mary and Edmund, the conventional ending to which the conventional plot could be expected

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to lead. They die to prove the point. The Ashewoodes’s decay is really Ireland’s decay, and the wage is death. Torlogh O’Brien · Torlogh O’Brien, Le Fanu’s second novel and the last he was to write for sixteen years, is set a few years before The Cock and Anchor, during the Williamite wars. Again, most critics have found little to admire in the work. The historical scenes and characters show that once more Le Fanu thoroughly researched his subject, but the fictional characters reveal little improvement in their creator’s art. The plot, except for some unusually violent scenes, would hold no surprises for a reader of romances. The villainous Miles Garret, a traitor to the Protestant cause, wishes to take Glindarragh Castle from Sir Hugh Willoughby, a supporter of William of Orange. Arrested on false charges created by Garret, Sir Hugh and his daughter, Grace, are taken to Dublin for trial. Their escort is Torlogh O’Brien, a soldier in the army of King James II, whose family originally held the estate. O’Brien and Sir Hugh, both honorable men, rise above their political differences to gain mutual respect. Finally, it is O’Brien who intervenes to save the Willoughbys from the designs of Garret, and of course his bravery is rewarded by the love of Grace. From the first novel to the second, villainy—Nicholas Blarden or Miles Garret—remains a constant, and the agony of a torn Ireland is the common background against which Edmund O’Connor and Torlogh O’Brien act out their parts. The social cancer that blighted the love of Mary and Edmund is, however, allowed a possible cure in Torlogh O’Brien. As the deaths of the lovers in the first novel showed Ireland as a sterile wasteland, so the union of the Willoughbys and O’Briens in the second promises restoring rain, but when after the long hiatus Le Fanu returned to novel writing, he chose to let the promise go unfulfilled. The House by the Churchyard · Held by many critics to be Le Fanu’s finest work, The House by the Churchyard, the first novel of his later period, appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in 1861; two years later, it was published in London as a book. The story is set in late eighteenth century Chapelizod, a suburb of Dublin. As in the earlier historical romances, there are villains, lovers, and dispossessed heirs. A major plot concerns the righting of an old wrong. Eighteen years after the death of Lord Dunoran, executed for a murder he did not commit, his son, using the name Mr. Mervyn, returns to the confiscated family lands hoping to establish his father’s innocence. The real murderer, Charles Archer, has also returned to Chapelizod under the alias of Paul Dangerfield. He is soon recognized by a former accomplice, Zekiel Irons, and a witness, Dr. Barnaby Sturk. Sturk attempts blackmail, only to have Archer beat him severely. His victim in a coma, Archer plays benefactor and arranges for a surgeon he knows to be incompetent to perform a brain operation, supposedly to restore Sturk to health. To Archer’s surprise, the operation gives Sturk a period of consciousness before the expected death. Irons joins Sturk in revealing Archer as the murderer, Lord Dunoran’s lands and title are restored to Mervyn, and the family name is cleared at last. This, however, is only one of several interrelated plots that make The House by the Churchyard a marvel of Victorian complexity. To label the Archer mystery as the major story line would be to mislead the reader who has yet to discover the book. More accurately, the novel is about Chapelizod itself. The discovery of a murderer stands out in the plot as, to be sure, it would in any small community, but Le Fanu is reminding his readers that what immediately affects any individual—for example,

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Mervyn’s need to clear his father’s name—no matter how urgently, is of limited interest to other individuals, who are in turn preoccupied with their own concerns. Mrs. Nutter has her own problem with protecting her inheritance from wicked Mary Matchwell. Captain Devereux and Lilias Walsingham have their doomed romance to concern them, as, on a more humorous note, Captain Cuffe is preoccupied with his love for Rebecca Chattesworth, who is finally joined with Lieutenant Puddock, the former suitor of Gertrude Chattesworth, who in turn has a secret romance with Mervyn. Indeed, the unsolved murder cannot totally dominate even the life of Lord Dunoran’s son. Some of the characters serve a comic purpose, and with so many complex entanglements, the comic could easily slide into complete farce. Le Fanu avoids caricature, however, by providing each comic figure with some other distinguishing quality—wit, compassion, bravery. In The House by the Churchyard, Le Fanu, already a master of description and mood, added the one needed skill so obviously absent in his early novels, the art of characterization. The characterization of Archer, alias Dangerfield, is by itself sufficient to demonstrate Le Fanu’s growth as a novelist. Dangerfield’s evil is almost supernatural; he describes himself as a corpse and a vampire, a werewolf and a ghoul. He is incapable not only of love but also of hate, and he calmly announces before his suicide that he “never yet bore any man the least ill-will.” He has had to “remove two or three” merely to ensure his own safety. The occult imagery used to define Dangerfield also links him to the microcosm of Chapelizod, for Mervyn’s Tiled House is reputedly haunted; the specter of a ghostly hand has frightened more than one former resident. Le Fanu allows Mervyn, like Torlogh O’Brien, his happy ending, but so powerful is the hold of Dangerfield on the novel that the possibility of colossal evil that he personifies is not totally exorcised even by his death. The fact that he was not really supernatural but was the embodiment of human depravity in no way diminishes the horror. Wylder’s Hand · With his fourth novel, Wylder’s Hand, Le Fanu left historical romances and social panoramas to study evil with a closer eye. The story, certainly Le Fanu’s finest mystery, concerns the strange disappearance of young Mark Wylder, a lieutenant in the navy and rival of Captain Stanley Lake for the hand of Dorcas Brandon, a rich heiress. From several locations in Europe, Wylder has sent letters containing instructions for the conduct of his business and releasing Dorcas to marry Lake. The suspicions of Larkin, a family attorney, are aroused by a problem with the dating of certain letters, but then Wylder returns to Brandon Hall, where he is actually seen in conversation with Lake. The very next day, however, Lake is thrown from his horse as the animal is startled by the pointing hand of Mark Wylder’s corpse protruding from the ground, exposed by a heavy rain. Dying, Lake confesses to having murdered his rival and arranging for the posting of forged letters. In fact, it was not Wylder who appeared the preceding night at Brandon but one James Dutton, the unwitting accomplice who had posted the letters and who happens to resemble Wylder. Only one person knew of Wylder’s fate, having witnessed his midnight burial: Rachel Lake, the murderer’s sister. Devotion to her brother and to Dorcas Brandon, who really loves Lake, compelled her silence. The plot is a masterpiece of suspense, but still more impressive are the characterizations. Each figure is finely drawn and fits into a mosaic of human types which together pictures a species ill equipped to deal with evil. Wylder is a swaggering braggart, crude, unfeeling, with a general air of disreputability that seems to promise

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some future act of monstrous brutality had not a violent death cut short his career. Like two vicious dogs claiming the same territory, Wylder and Lake cannot exist in the same world without one destroying the other. Lake’s evil, however, is of a quite different nature. In many respects, he is Le Fanu’s most interesting study. Wylder’s is a rather directionless evil; it could as easily manifest itself in one abhorrent action as another. Dangerfield was simply amoral. Born without any sense of restraint, his natural selfishness led to murder for convenience. Lake’s evil is weakness. Greed for property and position seems almost an outside force, a part of human society that can compel even murder in those who lack the strength to resist. He experiences guilt and fear and never is able to derive satisfaction from his villainy. Considering that the murdered man was certainly no credit to the human race, the reader may actually feel sympathy for Lake. In him, Le Fanu presents the criminal as victim, but the consequences of Lake’s weakness affect others as well. Rachel’s knowledge of the secret and Dorcas’s ignorance isolate them from the man they love, much as Lake is himself isolated. Gloom, a sense of a scheme of things not quite right, permeates the texture of the entire novel. There is no happy ending. Years later, Rachel and Dorcas are seen in Venice, sad and alone. Uncle Silas · In Uncle Silas, Le Fanu continued his investigation of the terrible yet tragic evil represented by Lake. Two earlier tales, “An Episode in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1838) and “The Murdered Cousin” (1851) provided a basic plot structure for the study, and in 1864, the same year that Wylder’s Hand was published, a bound edition in three volumes with the title Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh appeared. Considered by most critics Le Fanu’s finest novel, it brings all the skill acquired over a productive career to a definitive study of the themes that interested its author most: the nature of evil, and the hereditary aristocracy as a paradigm for the effects of that destructive force. As usual, the study is conducted through carefully drawn characters and a plot filled with mystery and suspense. In compliance with the will of the deceased Austin Ruthyn, his daughter, Maud, is made the ward of Austin’s brother, Silas, a sinister man suspected but never convicted of a past murder. The suspicions are well founded, for Uncle Silas will stop at nothing to gain full ownership of Maud’s estate. When an arranged marriage between Maud and Silas’s son, Dudley, proves impossible—the scoundrel is discovered to be already married—murder seems the only solution. Dudley botches the job, however, and kills Madame de la Rougierra, another of Silas’s agents, by mistake. Maud flees to a kindly relative; Dudley flees to Australia; and Uncle Silas dies that same night from an overdose of opium. Le Fanu called Uncle Silas a “tragic English romance,” and indeed the novel does depict a truly tragic situation. The Ruthyns stumble blindly through situations and realities they can hardly perceive, much less understand. Austin Ruthyn, heedless of the suspicions surrounding his brother, sends his daughter into the wolf’s lair. Dudley, purposeless and crude, sees only the moment, and this he addresses with instinct rather than intelligent consideration of consequences. Even Maud Ruthyn, the heroine and narrator, is unaware of her perilous situation until it is almost too late. Gothic heroines are expected to be naïve, and Le Fanu uses that trait in his narrator to good advantage. Maud often tells more than she realizes, and the reader sensitive to the unspoken messages that careful diction can convey sees the closing circle of predators before she does. The rhetorical effect is a sense of foreboding, a tension that charges the entire novel.

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Despite his avoidance of prosecution for an earlier crime and his careful designs for his niece’s downfall, Silas is as blind as any of the lesser characters. His lust for wealth and property is virtually inherited: Similar drives have directed his family for generations. His body a slave to narcotics, his mind to religious fanaticism, he is the aristocracy in decay. Le Fanu surrounds him with appropriate death imagery, and his loutish son, Dudley, married without Silas’s knowledge to a barmaid, is final evidence of the collapse of the Ruthyn line. Silas’s first murder victim had been a Mr. Charke, to whom he owed gambling debts, but with the planned murder of Maud, the violence turns in upon the Ruthyns themselves. Austin’s blind trust puts Maud in harm’s way, and Silas’s blind greed would destroy her; Uncle Silas is ultimately nothing less than a portrait of the aristocratic class cannibalizing itself. Maud survives and eventually marries a young lord, but her concluding words speak more of hope for happiness than happiness realized, and the death of her first child, sorrowfully remembered, strikes at the last the same note sounded throughout the novel. Willing to Die · That note of futility is heard most clearly in Le Fanu at the end of his career as a novelist. Willing to Die, first published serially in All the Year Round (1872-1873), is by no means his finest effort. The story, while complex, lacks the gothic excitement of the works for which he is remembered. Still, the novel is important in a thematic study. Ethel Ware, the heroine, is allowed to sample a full range of life’s possibilities. Poverty, loneliness, love, all contribute to the growth of her character; she surmounts all obstacles to achieve great material wealth and an understanding of the meaning of life. This is a new picture; in Ethel, the reader does not meet yet another aristocrat beaten by an ignorance of the forces at work in human society. Ethel wins, in the sense that Silas Ruthyn and Stanley Lake would have liked to win, but the mature vision that comes with the material victory only shows that the quest is pointless and the victory hollow. Isolated in her accomplishment as the protagonists of earlier novels were most often isolated in their failures, Ethel sees that the human struggle is manipulated by forces of society and chance, and whether the struggle culminates in a moment that might be called success or failure is finally irrelevant, for the last force to affect the struggle, death, affects the Wares and the Ruthyns alike. The novels of Le Fanu are the record of an artist exploring social structures and individual minds in quest of horrors natural and supernatural. With his final entry in that often brilliant record, Willing to Die, he penetrated at last to the very heart of darkness to discover the ultimate horror: the utter futility of it all. William J. Heim Other major works SHORT FICTION: Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851; Chronicles of Golden Friars, 1871; In a Glass Darkly, 1872; The Purcell Papers, 1880; The Watcher and Other Weird Stories, 1894; A Chronicle of Golden Friars, 1896; Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, 1923 (M. R. James, editor); Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories, 1945; Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu, 1964. POETRY: The Poems of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1896. Bibliography Begnal, Michael. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1971. Sketches Le Fanu’s life up to the death of his wife in 1858 and the beginning

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of his seclusion in Dublin. Analyzes his work as part of the gothic tradition to which Le Fanu makes a serious contribution, though he breaks from it to relate his ideas to his contemporary society. Focuses on his last four novels, presented as his best, which he published after emerging from his seclusion, beginning with The House by the Churchyard, in 1863. A brief study with a chronology and a selected bibliography. Crawford, Gary William. J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Part 1 discusses Le Fanu’s biography; part 2 is a primary, annotated bibliography of magazines, books, anthologies, and manuscripts; part 3 is an annotated secondary bibliography. The beginning student of Le Fanu will find this book an indispensable tool, which includes an appendix on films and plays based on Le Fanu’s work. Also contains two useful indexes. McCormack, W. J. Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats, and Bowen. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1993. The section on Le Fanu discusses his relationship to the English novel, the development of his fiction, his treatment of characters, and his drawing on history. Includes notes but no bibliography. ____________. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1980. After a short introductory note, analyzes Le Fanu’s life and career, examining the special conditions in Victorian Ireland behind his writing. These include the clerical world of Dublin during the struggles for Catholic emancipation, his Irish political background, and his own changing opinions with regard to the repeal of the Act of Union. Includes a close analysis of the symbolism of Uncle Silas as his most complex novel. McCormack acknowledges that his late writing is not good, but argues that study of his entire career is fundamental to study of AngloIrish literature. Contains illustrations, two appendices, a substantial bibliography with manuscript sources, and an index. Melada, Ivan. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne, 1987. After summarizing Le Fanu’s life, concentrates on his writing and concludes with an assessment of his literary achievements. Discusses Le Fanu’s early short fiction, then his historical novels, followed by a sustained analysis of Uncle Silas, and then the late short fiction; Le Fanu’s poetry and periodical fiction are saved for a final word on the variety of his work. Estimates his achievement by arguing that Uncle Silas shows him to be a master of terror literature, that his cinematic style should be attractive to a modern audience, and that his canon makes Le Fanu a major author in the gothic tradition. Provides a prefatory chronology, supplementary notes, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index.

Doris Lessing Doris Lessing

Born: Kermanshah, Persia; October 22, 1919 Principal long fiction · The Grass Is Singing, 1950; Martha Quest, 1952; A Proper Marriage, 1954; Retreat to Innocence, 1956; A Ripple from the Storm, 1958; The Golden Notebook, 1962; Landlocked, 1965, 1991; The Four-Gated City, 1969; Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971; The Summer Before the Dark, 1973; The Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974; Shikasta, 1979; The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, 1980; The Sirian Experiments, 1981; The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 1982; Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, 1983; The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 (as Jane Somers); If the Old Could . . . , 1984 (as Somers); The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1984 (includes The Diary of a Good Neighbour, and If the Old Could . . .); The Good Terrorist, 1985; The Fifth Child, 1988; Playing the Game, 1995; Love, Again, 1996; Mara and Dann, 1999; Ben, in the World, 2000. Other literary forms · Doris Lessing has published numerous volumes of short stories. She has also written memoirs, documentaries, essays, plays, reviews, and a book of poems. Achievements · Lessing has been one of the most widely read and influential British novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Her works have been translated into many languages and have inspired critical attention around the globe. Generally serious and didactic, Lessing’s fiction repeatedly urges the human race to develop a wider consciousness that would allow for greater harmony and less violence. Although known particularly as a master of realism, Lessing is often experimental or deliberately fantastic, as shown in her science-fiction novels. Her interests are far-ranging, from Marxism and global politics to the mystical teachings of Sufism to the small personal voice of the individual. Her awards include the Somerset Maugham Award, the German Shakespeare Prize, the Austrian Prize for European Literature, and the French Prix Médicis for Foreigners. In 1995 she won the James Tait Black Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her 1994 autobiography, Under My Skin. Biography · Doris May Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia (later Iran), in 1919, the first child of Alfred Cook Tayler and Emily Maude McVeagh Tayler, who had emigrated from England to Persia shortly after World War I. A brother, Harry, was born two years later, and in 1925 the family moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). Her parents were never financially successful. Her father was a dreamer who became a cynic after he failed at maize farming; her mother was domineering but ineffective. Despite Lessing’s love of the African landscape and the isolated veld, she was eager to leave her family behind. She attended a Catholic convent school in Salisbury (now Harare) but left when she was fourteen, saying that she had eye problems, though she continued her voracious reading. Lessing left home when she was fifteen to become a nursemaid and moved to Salisbury to work in various jobs, mostly clerical, and began writing fiction. She was married to Frank Charles Wisdom, a minor civil servant, in 1939, and had a son, John, 580

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and a daughter, Jean. Divorced in 1943, she was remarried two years later to a German-Jewish refugee, Gottfried Lessing. They had a son, Peter, in 1947. She divorced Gottfried Lessing in 1949 and that same year moved to England, settling in London; in 1950 she published her first novel. After that she continued to live in London and to make her living as a professional writer, publishing reviews, media scripts, and nonfiction in addition to novels, short stories, drama, and poetry. Lessing’s interest in politics began with a Marxist group in Rhodesia, and in England she was briefly a member of the Communist Party, leaving it officially in 1956. In the late 1950’s she participated in mass demonstrations for nuclear disarmament and was a speaker at the first Aldermaston Ingrid Von Kruse March in 1958. During the early 1960’s she worked in the theater, helping to establish Centre 42, a populist art program, and writing her own plays. In the late 1960’s Lessing’s thinking began to be heavily influenced by the mystical teachings of Indries Shah and Sufism, which emphasizes conscious evolution of the mind in harmony with self and others. Although for many years Lessing resisted the role of public persona, in the mid-1980’s she began to make numerous public appearances in many countries. Lessing’s work was recognized several times in 1995. She received an honorary degree from Harvard University that year and was also welcomed back into South Africa, which she had been forced to leave in 1956. She went to visit her daughter and grandchildren and was received with open arms by the country. In 1995, her autobiography won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best biography and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lessing has remained one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, and many of her books have won critical acclaim. In the 1990’s she made fewer public appearances, devoting herself to more writing. Although she made a fourteen-week tour to promote her autobiography, Lessing has stated that she is more useful to her publisher when she stays at home and writes. When her novel Love, Again was published in 1996, she made no public appearances to promote the book. Analysis · Doris Lessing is a powerful writer committed to the lofty goal of changing human consciousness itself. The narrative voice that weaves throughout her prolific fiction is that of an intense thinker who observes, explores, and describes the contemporary world but whose ultimate sense of human life is that the individual, and indeed the human race, is meant to go beyond mere recognition of perceived reality and to

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struggle with visions of the possible. Her novels repeatedly suggest that changes in the way humans view themselves, their world, and their relationships with others are imperative if life on this planet is to survive. Lessing’s scope is wide. Her creative imagination is able to provide a close analysis of a character with all that individual’s fears, longings, and contradictions and to relate that individual not only to his or her circle of acquaintances but to patterns of global economics and politics as well, and then to sweep beyond even this planet to the cosmos and a perspective that encompasses the metaphysical questions of existence. Her fictional explorations are multiple, multidimensional, and overlapping, suggesting that no one viewpoint is adequate or complete. This range is also reflected in her varied narrative forms, which include realism, naturalism, science fiction, utopianism and dystopianism, fantasy, fable, transcultural postmodernism, and experimental combinations of these. This heterogeneity of themes, techniques, and perspectives illustrates Lessing’s overriding premise that truth and substance cannot easily be compartmentalized or assigned fixed labels: Existence is always process, always in flux. Lessing’s position as an exile is a prominent aspect of her work, both in content and in theme. Born in the Middle East of English parents, she spent her adolescence in Southern Rhodesia, first with her family on an isolated and impoverished farm whose workers were all native black Africans, and then on her own in Salisbury. In the city she became involved with a group interested in international politics whose most specific focus was increased rights for black Rhodesians. Her experiences there in the 1940’s, including two marriages and three children, became material for nearly all of her novels for the first twenty years of her writing career. The Grass Is Singing · In 1949 Lessing arrived in London with her youngest son and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing. In many ways this first book established a pattern for subsequent novels. Her manuscript was accepted for publication within three days of her submitting it to a publisher. The novel was well received and went through seven reprintings within five months. The title comes from part 5 of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922); Lessing’s wide reading included the twentieth century writers as well as the great British, French, and Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. She most admired those writers with a sense of moral purpose, a sense of commitment to all humanity. The Grass Is Singing clearly shows the horrific effects of apartheid and racial prejudice on both the white colonial rulers and the black people who make up the overwhelming majority of the populations of southern Africa. In a stylistic technique directly opposite to that of a stereotypical detective story, the third-person narrator reveals at the outset of The Grass Is Singing that Mary Turner, the wife of a poor farmer, has been killed by a houseboy, Moses, who confessed to the crime. The opening chapter shows the confusion and emotional collapse of Mary’s husband, Dick Turner, and the reactions of Charlie Slatter, a neighbor, and Tony Marston, a young recent immigrant from England. The plot then becomes straightforward as it gives the background and chronology of events that led to the murder. Mary grew up in the city and had established a pleasant though rather meaningless life after the death of her parents. At age thirty she begins to overhear acquaintances’ disparaging remarks about the fact that she has never married. Suddenly seeing herself as a failure, she agrees to marry virtually the first man available, an impractical farmer who comes to town for supplies. Dick Turner immediately takes her to his isolated shack, where they are surrounded by black workers; the nearest white

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neighbor is many miles away. Mary is unprepared for marriage and totally inept at dealing with the series of houseboys Dick brings from the field to do cooking and housework. In exile from her city life, Mary is further hampered by the typical white Southern Rhodesian belief that natives are basically nonhuman, or at least subhuman and destined to inferiority. She cannot handle the intimate day-by-day contact with the native houseboys who seem so alien to her, and with the advent of the arrogant Moses, the many psychological strains lead inexorably to her almost invited death. Mary and all of white culture are guilty, but it is the black Moses who will be hanged. Mary’s failures are also a result of her inability to understand herself. She is not a reader. She has dreams and nightmares but makes no exploration of their possible significance. She has never examined social and political realities and has no one with whom to discuss her problems. She is unable to adjust to her current reality and unable to create any alternative reality. The Children of Violence series · Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, and The Four-Gated City trace in detail the growth and development of Martha Quest, an autobiographical character who, unlike Mary Turner, is intensely interested in knowing herself and making sense of the world. Together these novels make up the Children of Violence series. The first four are set in Africa, while The Four-Gated City, which nearly equals in length the preceding four, is set in London and traces Martha Quest’s life from her arrival there around 1949 to the late 1990’s. The novels set in Africa are categorized as social realism, while The Four-Gated City moves beyond that to discuss what are often considered paranormal capacities, and the work concludes after some unspecified disaster has destroyed much of life on earth. The futurist world Lessing depicts here is neither entirely utopian nor dystopian, and despite forces beyond the control of the individual, Martha Quest and some of the other inhabitants of the postcatastrophic world epitomize the continuing need for individual responsibility and commitment to a more harmonious world. Martha Quest, as her surname suggests, is a quintessential Lessing heroine, always examining the human condition and searching for a higher consciousness to change herself and her world. The characterization is detailed and frank, including descriptions of Martha’s sexual relationships and, in A Proper Marriage, a lengthy and explicit description of childbirth. Yet Martha’s perceptions and innermost thoughts also provide a historical overview of an entire era and a challenge to the status quo. Central to all Martha’s struggles is her determination to grow and to envision a freer and more responsible world. The Golden Notebook · It is good to note that Lessing interrupted the writing of the Children of Violence series to work on The Golden Notebook, published in 1962 and generally acknowledged as her most impressive and influential novel. “The two women were alone in the London flat,” begins the long novel, and from this simple statement Lessing creates a fascinating portrait of the modern world. The protagonist is Anna Wulf, a writer who says that she is suffering from writer’s block after a successful first novel about racial problems in Africa. Anna’s friend Molly is a divorced mother trying to make a life for herself. Through them Lessing perceptively examines the problems of the intelligent and disillusioned modern woman. Anna tries to create order out of chaos by keeping a diary, which she divides into four notebooks: a black notebook recounting her experiences as a young woman in Africa; a red notebook for her Communist and political activities; a yellow notebook, which

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includes her fictional attempts to understand herself, including the creation of an autobiographical character named Ella, who is also writing a novel; and a blue notebook to record the factual details of her daily life and her relationships with men. Sections of these notebooks are repeated sequentially four times and are finally superseded by another notebook, the golden one of the novel’s title, in which Anna attempts to integrate these compartmentalized and often-conflicting aspects of her life. In the golden notebook section, influenced by the mental breakdown of one of her lovers, Saul Green, Anna goes through layers of madness in herself and questions the idea of reality itself. The shape of this pivotal metafictional novel is further complicated by sections called “Free Women,” which open and close the book as well as separate the repeated sections of the black, red, yellow, and blue notebooks. The five “Free Women” sections together form a conventional novel about sixty thousand words long. Although it deals with the same characters and events recounted in the various notebook sections, it does so in a reductive and more structured way. It is as though the “Free Women” novel were what Anna is able to produce to end her writer’s block, but a novel that shows that fiction is unable to capture the intricacies and complexities of actual existence. Since the sections of this conventional novel frame and appear throughout the larger work, the contrasts and variations with the notebook sections make The Golden Notebook as a whole a complex structural and stylistic achievement. While The Golden Notebook elaborates Lessing’s attitudes toward racism, sexism, and the interconnections between the personal and the political, it also shows the development of Lessing’s thinking to include the benefits of the irrational and the necessity of exploring areas beyond the layers of social pretense and conventionality. These areas are further addressed in The Four-Gated City and in three subsequent novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark, and The Memoirs of a Survivor. Each of these novels breaks from traditional versions of realism and insists upon a wider definition of the possible. Briefing for a Descent into Hell · Briefing for a Descent into Hell, one of the very few Lessing novels with a male as the central character, presents Charles Watkins, a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, who is found wandering incoherently in the streets and is hospitalized for treatment of a mental breakdown. While in the hospital, Watkins, who has forgotten even his name, imagines himself taken away in a spaceship, and most of the book relates his various encounters with unfamiliar creatures and situations that seem almost mythological. Many of these experiences are painful or frightening. Often he is alone, yet he feels a sense of urgency and intense anxiety: He must accomplish certain tasks or risk total failure for himself and others. He also has times of exceptional joy, as he sees the beauty of creation and has revelations of a harmony that could prevail if each creature accepted its part in the scheme of things and made its responsible contribution. In the final pages of the book, Watkins is given electroshock treatment and yanked back into his old life, but both he and the reader are left with the sense that compared with his previous insights he has been forced back to a shallow and hollow “normalcy.” The Summer Before the Dark · In The Summer Before the Dark, Kate Brown, a woman in her early forties, also goes through a period of “madness,” which reveals the extent to which she has previously succumbed to the pressures to become only roles: wife, mother, sex object, efficient organizer, selfless caregiver. During the summer that is

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the time frame of the novel, Kate’s husband and grown children are away from home; at loose ends, Kate accepts a position as translator for an international food organization. She soon finds herself traveling and organizing global conferences. She spends some time in Spain with Jeffrey Merton, a young man whose psychosomatic and psychological illnesses spill over into her own life, and she returns to London to deal with her doubts and confusions. She stays for a while in a flat with Maureen, a twenty-two-year-old who is establishing her own identity. Through her reactions to Maureen, Kate comes to understand much about herself and her own family, and she finally grasps the relevance of a recurring dream about a seal. The seal dream appears fifteen times in the novel, and the basic image is of Kate struggling to return an abandoned seal to the ocean. When Kate is finally able to finish the dream and return the seal to water, she realizes that what she has been burdened with is her own ego and that she must fight against the power of repressive institutions and roles. The Memoirs of a Survivor · Lessing again shows the conjunction between the individual and the larger society, including the importance of responsibility and direction, in The Memoirs of a Survivor. In this dystopian rendering of the “near future,” the unnamed first-person narrator records her observations of a world in a state of cultural and social decline following an unexplained catastrophe. A stranger consigns into the narrator’s care a girl of about twelve, Emily, who has with her Hugo, an ugly cat/dog creature. Much of the novel describes Emily’s accelerated development through puberty and her association with Gerald, a young gang leader who, with Emily’s help, tries to rebuild some semblance of order or at least some system of survival in a degenerated and nonfunctional society. From the window of her flat the narrator watches groups abandon the city, never to be heard of again, and she witnesses the collapse of civilization, demonstrated particularly in the very young children who fend for themselves and who have only fleeting connections to others for immediate gain. In these children, not only respect for others but also language itself has broken down, and they attack their victims or one another with barbaric yaps. In the midst of all this collapse, the narrator has become aware of another layer of reality in and through the walls of her flat. When she enters this space, she is confronted with a variety of scenes from the past, not necessarily her own past, and usually she sees something that she must do. On one journey through the walls she glimpses a figure of a woman, perhaps a goddess or some aspect of herself, who fills her with a sense of hope. Surrounded by despair in the present world, the narrator constructs an alternative visionary world, and at the end of the novel, when even the air is unbreathable, the collapsed world is left behind as the narrator steps through the wall through both a willed and a magical transformation. She takes with her Emily and Gerald and their group of youngsters as well as Hugo, transformed from an ugly beast into something shining with hope and promise. The Canopus in Argos series · After a rare gap of five years without a novel, Doris Lessing burst forth with Shikasta, which she announced was the first in a series called Canopus in Argos: Archives, and in the next four years she published the other four books in the series. A number of loyal readers were disappointed with what Lessing called her “space fiction,” with its undeveloped, stylized characters and strangely unexciting interplanetary rivalries. Yet the series attracted a new audience of sciencefiction readers, and, taken as a whole, the series continues Lessing’s themes: the

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individual versus the collective, political systems and their interference with racial and sexual equality, the interconnectedness of all life, and the need for a more enlightened consciousness. Some of the terms used to describe the varied genres in the Canopus in Argos novels include outer space fiction, science fiction, fantasy, psychomyth, allegory, utopian and indicate the variety within and among these books. They do not even comfortably fit the classification of series, or roman-fleuve, since traditionally a series centers on a single character, as Lessing’s Children of Violence had centered on Martha Quest. Shikasta is filled with reports, journals, and interviews by aliens who discuss the fate of Earth, or Shikasta. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five does not seem to be set on another planet so much as in the realm of myth and legend as Al·Ith moves between the zones in search of her destiny. The Sirian Experiments is told by a woman named Ambien II, who is a leading administrator in the Sirian Colonial Service. She discovers that the rival Canopean Empire is actually in advance of Sirius in every way and more deserving of conducting experiments on Shikasta than is her own empire, though the Sirians certainly do not want to hear this. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 is the story of a small planet whose inhabitants live comfortably until the time of The Ice begins, with ice and snow covering most of the globe. The inhabitants are unable to emigrate, but a few of them survive in some nonphysical but essential existence. Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire uses testimonies and histories to show that the Volyen Empire has failed to keep its promises to its inhabitants and to the cosmos. The empire suffers a rhetoric-induced downfall, as its leaders had become enamored with the sound of their grand ideas rather than performing the actions that should have accompanied them. None of the narrators and voices in the Canopus in Argos series is entirely reliable, and many questions are left unanswered. Perhaps this confusion is itself Lessing’s goal: to make her readers question and reconsider ideas and actions. As Johor, an emissary to Shikasta, comments on the very first page of the series: “Things change. That is all we may be sure of. . . . This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.” The Diaries of Jane Somers · The same year the final volume of Canopus in Argos was published, another novel appeared, titled The Diary of a Good Neighbour, purportedly by a new British writer, Jane Somers. It was not until the following year, and after the publication of another Jane Somers novel, If the Old Could . . ., that Lessing publicly revealed her authorship with the publication of the two novels together as The Diaries of Jane Somers. In her introduction to the book Lessing discusses some of her reasons for having used a pseudonym. One was to create a new persona as the narrator: How would a real Jane Somers write? Another was to show the difficulties unestablished writers have in getting published, and indeed the first manuscript was rejected by several publishers before it was printed by Michael Joseph in London, the same firm that had accepted the unknown Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing nearly four decades earlier. Lessing also says that she wanted the novels to be judged on their own merit, apart from the Lessing canon. When the Jane Somers novels first appeared, they sold in only modest numbers and received favorable but very limited attention from reviewers. Lessing notes that the modern publishing business markets high-volume, high-profile authors with the planned expectation that the novels will

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have a short shelf life as big sellers for a few weeks but soon are replaced and out of print; such policies do not favor new and experimental novelists. The Diaries of Jane Somers focuses on old age, especially the relationship that develops between the middle-aged Jane Somers, head of a high-fashion magazine, and Maudie Fowler, a poor but proud woman in her nineties. Set in a realistic London, the novels, particularly The Diary of a Good Neighbour, give an insightful analysis of contemporary health-care services and again show the impact of social attitudes and governmental policies on the individual. The social realism of the novel, with its discussions of aging and dying, is given contrast by the summaries of novels Jane writes about Maudie’s life. Maudie tells stories of her long, hard life, and Jane transforms them into successful romanticized fictions, which Maudie then enjoys hearing. Jane, whose friends call her Janna, is repeatedly mistaken for a “Good Neighbour,” a social worker, as though there could be no other explanation for her friendship with Maudie. The layers of illusion and reality, fictions and lives, add to the emotional power of the novel and make it an important addition to Lessing’s later works. The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child · The Good Terrorist shows rather stupid and totally unsympathetic would-be revolutionaries who move from city to city in England planning random bombings. Contrary to the title, there is no good terrorist in the novel, and it is just as well that these characters have a tendency to blow up themselves accidentally rather than killing others. A much more interesting novel is The Fifth Child, which can be read as an accurate and realistic account of an unfortunate English family, but which to other readers is a science-fiction fantasy, a tale of an alien being born into a human family. The novel hovers on some point that embraces both readings. The setting is England in the 1960’s. Harriet and David Lovatt want a big family and a settled home life. Everything seems to be working according to their plan until the birth of their fifth child. Ben has nothing childlike about him: He is gruesome in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong, demanding, and violent. In no way does he fit into the happy home. Yet Harriet, steeped in the idea of motherhood, cannot bear to abandon him in some mental institution and insists on keeping him with her. As the years pass, the older children escape though already harmed by Ben’s weirdness and violence, and even David finally recognizes that he cannot continue to live with such a creature. The novel ends in despair, the problems unresolved. Ben is well on his way to becoming a fully grown criminal, a rapist and murderer, with no one able to subdue him. The story of the Lovatts becomes a parable of the modern world, the vision of a simple and happy existence shattered within the family itself and a society unwilling to confront and unable to control its own most brutal aspects. Love, Again · Lessing’s novel Love, Again confronts the uncertainty of love and the decisions made because of love. Sarah, an aging theater manager, writes a play based on the true story of a young, beautiful French mulatto named Julie Varion. Julie has many eligible suitors in her life, but none commits himself to her because of family pressures of status and community responsibility. Julie finally becomes engaged to an older gentleman, but she mysteriously dies before the wedding. Writing about this alluring character and her life is emotionally trying for Sarah, who feels she, unlike Julie, is unable to act upon her love interests because of her age. Unable to act on her feelings, Sarah suffers silently through her painful longings for a twenty-eight-year-old

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actor and a thirty-five-year-old director. Sarah eventually comes to terms with her age through painful moments of realization and acceptance. All the characters are seen through the eyes of a narrator who focuses primarily on Sarah and reveals the characters as Sarah sees them. Like Julie and her suitors, Sarah and her friends are bound by obligations and social rules which affect the decisions they make for their own lives. Sarah is faced with decisions of loving but letting go. Sarah’s brother, Hal, realizes that his future only holds loneliness because of his inability to see others and their needs. Stephen, a dear friend of Sarah’s, ultimately commits suicide over his preoccupation and obsession with the deceased Julie Varion, which only become more intense as the production of the play about her continues. Mara and Dann · Mara and Dann is an exciting adventure story set thousands of years in the future. The two main characters, Mara and her brother Dann, were kidnapped from their home with the Mahondi tribe when Mara was seven and Dann was four. In order to stay alive, the two are forced to change their names when they are taken to a village of the Rock People, a tribe considered less advanced than the Mahondi. Mara stays in the village until she becomes a strong young woman who desires to learn as much as possible even as she faces starvation and drought; she is sold into slavery and taken prisoner to be a breeder for other tribes. Dann suffers through abductions and addictions and becomes divided in his desires and duties toward his sister. Through his dream world, Dann faces his fears and eventually accepts his past experiences. Although the two are separated many times, they never stop searching for each other even at the risk of slavery and death. The novel is an interesting tale of survival of the human mind and spirit even through the most severe times a new world can encounter after an ice age. Mara and Dann’s characters are well developed, and they change and learn from their experiences. Mara learns to love and to trust but also learns the price she must pay to survive in the world outside her home. Lessing portays issues of racism, greed, and power as they have affected every generation throughout time. Lessing has had a wide readership. For many years she has been on best-seller lists, and her novels have been translated into many languages. Her work is widely anthologized and has been closely read by many contemporary authors, particularly women writers. The number of critical articles, books, and sections of books about her work is enormous and international in scope, reflecting the wide diversity of readers and the serious attention her work has commanded throughout her writing career. Lessing’s novels, far-ranging in scope and treatment, resist any easy labels. Still, her major themes, though presented in a variety of ways, have been remarkably consistent. The individual has responsibilities, Lessing always shows, not only to achieve self-knowledge and inner harmony but to contribute to the greater harmony of society as well. Human consciousness must expand, and people’s attitudes and actions must change if human life is to survive. Lois A. Marchino, updated by Mary A. Blackmon Other major works SHORT FICTION: This Was the Old Chief’s Country, 1951; Five: Short Novels, 1953; The Habit of Loving, 1957; A Man and Two Women, 1963; African Stories, 1964; The Temptation

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of Jack Orkney and Other Stories, 1972 (also known as The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories); This Was the Old Chief’s Country: Volume 1 of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, 1973; The Sun Between Their Feet: Volume 2 of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, 1973; Sunrise on the Veld, 1975; A Mild Attack of Locusts, 1977; To Room Nineteen/Her Collected Stories, 1978; The Temptation of Jack Orkney/Her Collected Stories, 1978; Stories, 1978; London Observed: Stories and Sketches, 1991 (pb. in U.S. as The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches, 1992); Spies I Have Known and Other Stories, 1995. PLAYS: Each His Own Wilderness, pr. 1958; Play with a Tiger, pr., pb. 1962; Making of the Representative for Planet 8, pr. 1988 (libretto); Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays, pb. 1996. POETRY: Fourteen Poems, 1959. NONFICTION: Going Home, 1957; In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary, 1960; Particularly Cats, 1967; A Small Personal Voice, 1974; Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 1987; The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 1987; African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe, 1992; Under My Skin, 1994; A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, 1994; Doris Lessing: Conversations, 1994 (pb. in England as Putting the Questions Differently); Shadows on the Wall of the Cave, 1994; Walking in the Shade, 1997. MISCELLANEOUS: The Doris Lessing Reader, 1988 (selections). Bibliography Fishburn, Katherine. The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in Narrative Technique. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. This study considers Lessing’s science fiction from Briefing for a Descent into Hell through the Canopus in Argos series. It argues that the science fiction has the purpose of transforming reality and involving the reader in ideas and the intricacies of the texts rather than in characterization. Fishburn also published Doris Lessing: Life, Work, and Criticism (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: York Press, 1987), which provides a brief overview of Lessing’s life and works, including literary biography, critical response, and an annotated bibliography. Galen, Muge. Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. This text applies the ideas of Sufism and its influence on Lessing and her novels. An introduction to Sufism and to Doris Lessing is included to help the reader understand the basic ideas of Sufism. Emphasis is placed on her space-fiction utopias as an alternative to the current Western lifestyles. Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Lessing’s works are repeatedly referred to throughout the text. The Golden Notebook is covered extensively in a chapter titled “Naming a Different Way,” which concentrates on how the novel was very differently received and understood by male and female readers. The essay focuses on the form and structure of the story as well as character development. ____________. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Greene centers this study on how Lessing’s novels are concerned with change. Several different critical approaches to Lessing’s works, including Marxist, feminist, and Jungian, are included in the study. Kaplan, Carey, and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds. Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988. Eleven essays that display a variety of approaches to Lessing’s works. The approaches and various perspectives are as diverse as her readership. The essays were gathered from Modern Language

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Association conventions from 1971 to 1985. The introduction includes a brief history of the development of the Doris Lessing Society and notes how Lessing criticism has grown within the MLA convention each year. Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. A chapter of this book is devoted to Lessing and her works. Primary focus is placed on the Children of Violence series: Martha Quest, The Four-Gated City, Landlocked, A Proper Marriage, and A Ripple in the Storm. Robinson focuses on Lessing’s desire to present a humanist view in her characters and themes and how the female main characters tend to create contradictions when trying to reach their goals. Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. This volume shows the cyclic design in Lessing’s repeated themes, particularly the mind discovering, interpreting, and ultimately shaping its own reality. In a comprehensive chronological approach through 1978, it examines the relationship between fictional structure and meaning, the purpose of doubling, and the relationship between fiction and reality. Seligman, Dee. Doris Lessing: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Seligman incorporates earlier checklists and bibliographies and provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography through 1978. She includes a bibliography of research and teaching suggestions, interviews with Lessing, and book reviews. Marshall Tymn draws on Seligman’s bibliography and updates it to 1988 in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts special issue on Doris Lessing, edited by Nicholas Ruddick (volume 2, no. 3, 1990). Sprague, Claire, and Virginia Tiger, eds. Critical Essays on Doris Lessing. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. This collection includes review essays and various other articles plus a general introduction to Lessing and a chronology of her works. It is divided into sections entitled “Politics and Patterns,” “Female (Other) Space,” “Inner and Outer Space,” and “Reception and Reputation.” Whittaker, Ruth. Modern Novelists: Doris Lessing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. This resource provides a brief biography and insightful background information into Lessing and how her works have been influenced by her past. Major focus is given to her novels and a discussion of how Lessing excels as a modern novelist.

C. S. Lewis C. S. Lew is

Born: Belfast, Northern Ireland; November 29, 1898 Died: Oxford, England; November 22, 1963 Principal long fiction · Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grownups, 1945; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 1950; Prince Caspian, 1951; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952; The Silver Chair, 1953; The Horse and His Boy, 1954; The Magician’s Nephew, 1955; The Last Battle, 1956; The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950-1956 (includes the 7 previous titles); Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, 1956. Other literary forms · Though his novels for adults and children continue to be widely read and admired, C. S. Lewis is also well known as a religious essayist and literary scholar-critic. His religious writings of three decades include autobiography (The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, 1955; A Grief Observed, 1961) and essays in varying lengths and forms. Some of his essays include The Personal Heresy (1939, with E. M. W. Tillyard), Rehabilitations (1939), The Problem of Pain (1940), The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Abolition of Man (1943), Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947), Mere Christianity (1952), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), and The Four Loves (1960). Posthumous works of a religious nature include Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964), Letters to an American Lady (1967), God in the Dock (1970), and The Joyful Christian: 127 Readings from C. S. Lewis (1977). Lewis’s criticism, focused primarily on medieval and Renaissance studies, includes The Allegory of Love (1936), A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), Studies in Words (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image (1964). Several posthumous volumes of criticism appeared, including Spenser’s Images of Life (1967), Selected Literary Essays (1969), and Present Concerns (1986). Less widely known are Lewis’s early volumes of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919), a collection of lyrics; and Dymer (1926), a narrative. The posthumous The Dark Tower and Other Stories (1977) includes an unpublished fragment of a novel. This collection and one other, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966), contain the only extant fictional pieces not printed during Lewis’s lifetime. The Wade Collection at Wheaton College (Illinois) and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, hold many volumes of Lewis papers, including eleven volumes of Lewis family letters written from 1850 to 1930. Achievements · Lewis’s achievements as a novelist are hard to separate from his role as a Christian apologist and from his impeccable literary scholarship. Many of Lewis’s readers believe that his greatness lies in the unusually wide scope of his work: He wrote so much so well in so many forms. His Mere Christianity, for example, is a superb primer on Christian ideas, while The Four Loves and A Grief Observed are powerful explorations of the endurance of love despite doubt and deep pain. The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s most popular book in America, still enthralls new readers with its witty yet serious study of the war between good and evil in the contemporary world. Among his critical writings, The Allegory of Love remains a classic study of medieval literature 591

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and society, while The Discarded Image is one of the very best discussions of the contrast between the medieval worldview and the modern mind. The popularity of Lewis’s novels for adults (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength—known as the space trilogy—and Till We Have Faces) owes more perhaps to their treatment of themes also developed in his nonfiction than to their literary excellence, although the space trilogy is widely read among devotees of fantasy and science fiction who have little acquaintance with Lewis’s other works. The extraordinary appeal of Lewis’s fiction for children, the Narnia books, is undisputed. Each year, these seven novels gain thousands of new readers of all ages and are, for many, the introduction to Lewis which inspires them to delve into his other works. Indeed, had Lewis never published another word, the Narnia books would have ensured his reputation with both critics and the public. Biography · Born in Belfast in 1898, the son of Albert Lewis, a successful lawyer, and Flora Hamilton Lewis, a writer and mathematician, Clive Staples Lewis spent his early childhood in an atmosphere of learning and imagination. His mother tutored him in French and Latin before he was seven; his nurse, Lizzie Endicott, taught him the folktales of Ireland. Clive and his brother, Warren, devoted long, often rainy afternoons to exploring the book-lined corridors of Little Lea, their home. As small children, the brothers invented their own country, Boxen, for which they wrote a four-hundred-year chronicle and which they peopled with animal characters who became subjects of individual stories. These early childhood adventures were of incalculable influence on Lewis’s long fiction, written almost half a century later. With his mother’s death from cancer in 1908, Lewis’s life changed drastically and irrevocably. A disconsolate, bewildered Albert Lewis sent his sons to boarding school in England, the first of several cruel experiences before age sixteen that nurtured in Lewis a hatred for public-school education. At last persuading his father to place him with the demanding but kind tutor W. T. Kirkpatrick in 1914, Lewis developed his great scholarly talents and won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, two years later. Before taking his entrance exams, however, Lewis was recruited into the army and served as a second lieutenant on the front lines in France during World War I. Surviving a wound and the mental shocks of war, Lewis happily entered Oxford life in 1919, his education financed by his father—whose support in other ways would always be lacking. Perhaps to compensate for this lack of parental affection, Lewis developed a steadfast friendship with a Mrs. Moore, the mother of a friend who had died fighting in France. With Mrs. Moore and her young daughter, Maureen, Lewis set up housekeeping, this arrangement continuing thirty years, until Mrs. Moore’s death in 1951. Lewis’s tenure at Oxford, as student, tutor, and fellow of Magdalen College, lasted even longer, ending in 1954 with his acceptance of the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. During the Oxford years, he wrote and published most of his fifty-eight books of adult and children’s fiction, literary criticism, essays, Christian apologetics, and poetry. It was there also that Lewis, influenced by such close friends as J. R. R. Tolkien, underwent his conversion to Christianity. Lewis’s Christian fervor led to widely read publications and to a long series of radio talks before and during World War II. His faith also inspired fictional works, including his space trilogy, written during the war, and his Narnia books for children. Many of his Oxford colleagues, however, were offended by his overt religiousness—and his

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popularity. Through these years, they thus denied Lewis the Magdalen professorship that his eminence as a literary scholar warranted. With his rise to a more esteemed position in the more congenial atmosphere of Cambridge, Lewis completed, among other projects, the books of Narnia, the first of which had been published in 1950, and wrote perhaps his finest novel, Till We Have Faces. This last work of fiction was dedicated to Joy Davidman Gresham, an American admirer with whom he had corresponded for several years and who came to England to join him in 1955. They were married in 1956, and, according to Lewis, “feasted on love” for the four years they shared before Joy’s death from bone cancer in 1960. Despite his own worsening health, Lewis continued to produce autobiographical and critical works until suffering a heart attack in 1963. He died on November 22, the date of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and of the death of writer Aldous Huxley. Analysis · The happy fact of C. S. Lewis’s creation of long fictional works is that the more of them he wrote, the better he became as a novelist. This is not to say that with each book from Out of the Silent Planet to Till We Have Faces he measurably improved, but from the early space trilogy (1938-1945) through the Narnia tales (1950-1956) to his last novel, there is a clear change in Lewis’s conception of fiction. In the early books, characters exemplify definite sides in an ethical debate, and plot is the working out of victory for Lewis’s side. In the later books, however, character becomes the battleground of ambiguous values, and plot takes place more and more within the minds of the characters. The space trilogy · The hero of the space trilogy, Cambridge don Elwin Ransom, is often less the protagonist of novels than an embodiment of the Christian and intellectual virtues that Lewis recommended in his essays. Throughout the trilogy, Ransom represents Lewis’s ideal of the relentless intellectual, his learning solidly founded on respect for great ideas from earlier ages, who valiantly maintains his integrity despite the powerful temptations posed by modern materialism. In both Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, Ransom’s journeys to Mars (Malacandra) and Venus (Perelandra), respectively, Ransom’s adversary is as clearly villainous as Ransom himself is heroic. The antagonist is Edward Weston, a brilliant physicist, who represents for Lewis that most insidious modern outgrowth of Renaissance humanism: the belief that the highest goal of humankind is to establish its dominance over all forms of life in as many worlds as it can conquer. This view, which Lewis saw as the root of the boundless ambition of political leaders Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini, is exemplified in Weston’s misuse of technology to build a spacecraft that enables him to reach other planets, so that he might make them colonies of Earth. By moving the scene of this attempt away from Earth, Lewis can manipulate material reality so that the limitations of Weston’s philosophy become obvious and his actions ludicrous. Assuming the innate superiority of man over all other forms, and thus a perpetual state of war between man and nature, Weston fails to see the simplest, most significant facts of the new worlds he intends to conquer. As Ransom, the Christian student of myths and languages, easily perceives, the forces that rule Mars and Venus are both fully hospitable to humankind and infinitely more powerful. Thus, Weston shoots gentle creatures because they appear strange and, in a parody of the European explorers, tries to bribe with shiny trinkets the Oyarsa of Malacandra, who, as Ransom learns, is second only in power and wisdom to Maleldil, ruler of the universe.

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In contrast to Weston, Ransom—a far truer scientist than his opponent—learns the language of and befriends these extraterrestrials; hence, mysteries are opened to him. In Out of the Silent Planet, he learns that only Earth (Thulcandra), long under the dominance of the “bent eldil,” is deprived of clear knowledge of the Oyarsa and Maleldil; Thulcandrans believe themselves enlightened above all others, when in reality they are the most benighted. He learns also that the universe is in a state of becoming: that the creatures of old worlds, such as Malacandra, can no longer be endangered by such forces as those which guide Weston, but that newer worlds, such as Thulcandra, are still theaters of contending principles, while the youngest worlds, such as Perelandra, have yet to achieve spiritual identity. This is vital knowledge for Ransom, who realizes, in the second book, that he has been given wisdom because he has also been given the responsibility of helping to bring about Maleldil’s reign on Perelandra, which places him in open confrontation with Weston, now clearly the mere instrument of the bent eldil. In a probing recapitulation of the temptation of Eve, Lewis has Ransom and Weston contend, somewhat in the mode of the medieval psychomachia, for the mind of Tinidril, the first woman of Perelandra. As the confoundingly subtle arguments of the Unman (the spirit that controls Weston) begin to conquer Tinidril, Ransom at last understands that he must physically fight, to the death, his adversary. Despite his slim chance of survival, Ransom attacks the Unman; he ultimately defeats him, though suffering wounds, incredible fatigue, and near despair. It is an epic battle, reminiscent of the Pearl-Poet’s fourteenth century manuscript Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596); Ransom’s faith and courage in the fight prepare the reader for his apotheosis in the final chapters, wherein Lewis’s paradisiacally lush description of Perelandra takes on an almost beatific vividness and illumination. In novelistic terms, Perelandra surpasses Out of the Silent Planet in its attention to the development of Ransom’s awareness of his role and his struggle to maintain his integrity in the face of fears and misleading appearances. Nevertheless, its extraterrestrial setting and its clearly demarcated hero and villain make Perelandra more an epic romance than a novel. This is not to prefer one book to the other, but it is to distinguish them both from the third part of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, which may be Lewis’s most interesting fiction, although not his most consistent. That Hideous Strength tries to harmonize heterogeneous elements of romance, epic, and novel. Following the novelist’s impulse, Lewis brings his setting back to earth and localizes it in the sort of place he knew best, a venerable English college town, which he calls Edgestow. He also centers the reader’s interest on two authentic protagonists, Jane and Mark Studdock, whose story is their painful, humiliating, sometimes dangerous progress toward faith and self-awareness. They act bravely in the ultimate crisis, both risking torture and death, but they engage in nothing like the epic struggle of Ransom and the Unman. Still, the events in which they engage are of epic magnitude, and in this thrust of the book Lewis returns to familiar fictional territory. The plot concerns a powerful conspiracy to turn Britain into a totalitarian state. This conspiracy is opposed most strenuously by a small underground directed by Elwin Ransom, now a heroic, almost godlike leader, whose powers are spiritual rather than physical. His main adversaries are men who, like Weston, call themselves scientists, but whose distinguishing traits are lust for power, deviousness, and cruelty. Having established a research institute called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), these men use

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the press, political infiltrators, and their own “police” to avoid, placate, or squash opposition to their Nazi-like program of “social planning.” Mark Studdock is one of the bright but indecisive minds easily co-opted by the N.I.C.E. Lewis shows convincingly how the leaders play on his ego and his fears of rejection in order to exploit his talent as a journalist. Conversely, Jane Studdock falls in with the resistance group; she weighs its values against those of her husband and gradually comes to see that whichever road she chooses will mean great danger for both of them. She chooses the resistance. Had Lewis limited the book to the clash between political philosophies and its impact on two ordinary people, he would have had a conventional novel, but he wanted to portray this clash as occurring on a cosmic level, as a war between pure good and pure evil. Since the combatants in this novel are the human representatives of these supernatural forces, the reader necessarily finds himself once more in the realm of romance. Aware of his mixing of genres in That Hideous Strength, Lewis called the amalgam a fairy tale, arguing that his work fell into that long tradition in which supernatural events subsume the ordinary activities of realistic characters. What fairy tale means here is that when the N.I.C.E. performs such blatant works as the turning of rivers from their courses, the trapping of huge numbers of animals for vivisection, and the deforestation of ancient preserves, they call down on themselves the wrath of nature, personified in a resurrected Merlin, who pledges allegiance to Ransom as the spiritual successor of Arthur. His obedience allows Ransom to reinvest him with eldilic power, which enables him single-handedly to destroy the N.I.C.E. Add to the appearance of Merlin such important romantic elements as Jane Studdock’s clairvoyance and the veneration of a talking head by the N.I.C.E., and That Hideous Strength seems almost more romance than novel. The book should be judged as a fairy tale. Lewis warns the reader in his preface not to be deceived by the “hum-drum scenes and persons” into thinking this a realistic fiction. He merely intends the familiar names and places to heighten the reader’s appreciation of the importance of the spiritual battles occurring around and within each individual. Indeed, one explicit purpose of the book is to warn England—here Lewis was prophetic—that radical social evil would not be eradicated with Hitler’s defeat. The formal problem, however, is that a bit of realism begets the expectation of total realism, and so readers accustomed to novels will naturally look askance at Merlin’s return and the survival of the severed head, while they will accept the generic consistency of the floating islands in Perelandra. Even if Lewis had deleted these effects from the third book, however, he would have had to substitute other supernatural manifestations in order to be consistent not only with the pattern of the first two books but also, more important, with his religious conviction of the immanence of the supernatural in everyday life. Viewing the book as a fairy tale, Lewis felt, would allow the reader sufficient suspension of disbelief to become involved with the characters. Nevertheless, the reader would still face, as in all of Lewis’s other works, the challenge of accepting or rejecting Lewis’s position on God, nature, and humanity. The Chronicles of Narnia · Lewis actually began the first book of the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in 1939, when four children, inspiration for the Pevensie children in the stories, were evacuated to his home at the start of the war. Returning ten years and many books later to the idea of writing for children, Lewis found the fictional form perhaps best suited to his genius. These tales of ordinary boys and girls transported to another world allowed Lewis to relive in some sense the

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childhood idyll at Little Lea that had been cut short by his mother’s death; moreover, they let him put directly into prose the fantastic images—fauns, castles, golden lions—that came to him, without his having to adapt them, as he had in the space trilogy, to the narrower tastes of adult readers. The fairy-tale form restricted him to simpler vocabulary and syntax, as well as to a more exclusively narrative and descriptive mode, but these restrictions freed him to do what he did best in fiction: dialogue, action narrative, and vivid description of select detail. More than anything else, however, the form let him depict given characters as essentially good or evil, though careful readers will observe that these qualities are consistently dramatized in action, not merely posited by authorial fiat. One of the many virtues of these stories is that appearance never defines character; the reader likes or dislikes persons or animals in these books only when he has come to know them. The seven books traverse some sixty years of English time, roughly between 1895 and 1955, and more than one thousand years of time in Narnia, a land which is the home of Aslan, the Golden Lion, as well as talking animals, dwarves, fauns, satyrs, witches, men and women, boys and girls. The chronicle begins with The Magician’s Nephew (the sequence of publication differs from the internal chronology of the series), in which young Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer magically enter Narnia at the time of its creation by Aslan. Unfortunately, the curious Digory inadvertently breaks the spell that has bound Jadis, the White Witch, who becomes the main enemy of the Narnians. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, almost fifty English years have passed, but an untold number in Narnia. The visitors are now the four Pevensie children, who enter Narnia through a magical wardrobe in the spacious country home of an old friend of their parents—Professor Digory Kirke. They find a cold world in terror of the Witch. The children eventually join those who are still rebelling against her, and their faith is rewarded when Aslan returns. His conquest is not complete, however, until he has been ritually murdered by the Witch, only to be reborn in far greater splendor. The four children are crowned kings and queens of Narnia. The Horse and His Boy occurs during the reign of Peter Pevensie as High King of Narnia. It concerns Shasta, a boy of neighboring Calormen, who through various adventures is revealed to be the true prince of Archenland, another Narnian neighbor. The fourth part of the chronicle, Prince Caspian, takes place a thousand years forward in Narnian time, but only two or three years after the adventure through the wardrobe. The four children are transported to Narnia from a railway bench, only to find all record of their reign obliterated by time and by the purposeful lies told by invaders. The children’s arrival, however, coincides with another coming of Aslan, who, aided by an alliance of all the creatures of Narnia, restores to the throne the true heir, Caspian. He is still king of Narnia when the fifth adventure, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, occurs. This time, the two younger Pevensies, Edmund and Lucy, accompanied by a recalcitrant friend, Eustace Scrubb, reenter Narnia to help Caspian sail the farthest seas to find seven Narnian lords banished by the invaders. On their voyage, they discover lands beyond imagining, including Aslan’s country itself. The sixth chronicle, The Silver Chair, is another story of a search, this time by Eustace and a friend, Jill Pole, who are called to Narnia to find the dying Caspian’s long-lost son, Rilian. Despite many deceptions and dangers, the children eventually discover the prince, by then the rightful king of Narnia. The chronicles end with The Last Battle, the apocalypse of Narnia. King Tirian, Rilian’s descendant, is joined by Eustace and Jill in a final battle to save Narnia from

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invading hordes of hostile neighbors. As they go to certain death, they are suddenly greeted by Aslan, who ushers them into the real Narnia, of which the mere parody is now disappearing as quickly as it had been born centuries before. There they are joined by all the friends of Narnia, including three of the four Pevensies, who, with their parents, have come to the real Narnia thanks to a railway accident in “their” world. Aslan tells them that this Narnia is forever, and that they need never leave: “The term is over; the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning.” Till We Have Faces · Almost nothing of the style of the space trilogy is recognizable in Till We Have Faces, Lewis’s first novel for adults after 1945, and the last of his career. Though Lewis here was reworking an ancient myth, that of Cupid and Psyche, this book can be unambiguously called a novel, in the full modern sense of that word. It begins and ends in the spiritual turmoil of the mind of the narrator, Orual, Queen of Glome, a tiny state somewhere north of Greece, sometime in the centuries just preceding the birth of Christ. The novel is the story of her life, told in two parts. The first, much the longer, is Orual’s complaint against the gods for their hatred of humankind, hatred shown most obviously in their failure ever to make themselves clearly known. The second part, a few brief chapters hastily penned by the dying queen and ended in midsentence by her death, repents for the slanders of part 1 and tells of a few pivotal encounters and an extraordinary dream that have resolved her anger. Part 1 recalls a lifelong source of her rage, her ugliness, which has made Orual hated by her father, the king, and shunned by most others. A far greater injury, however, is the sacrifice of her wonderfully beautiful sister, Psyche, whom the head priest of Glome offers to the god of the Grey Mountain in hopes of ending a drought. Orual cannot forgive the gods for taking the only joy of her life. What irritates her most, however, is her discovery that Psyche has not been devoured by the god of the mountain, as most people believe, but that he has wedded her. Moreover, Psyche is happy. Convincing herself that her sister’s happiness can only be a fatal delusion, Orual persuades Psyche, with a threat of suicide, to disobey her lord’s one command: that she never look at him. The result is that Psyche is banished and forced to undergo ordeals. Orual is also punished: The god tells her, cryptically, “You also will be Psyche.” Never fully comprehending this sentence, and enraged by the ambiguity of the portent, Orual passes the years, eventually succeeding her father and distracting her thoughts by careful attention to government of her people. Orual becomes a wise and masterful ruler, but her mind remains troubled. When, by chance, she discovers that the story of Psyche has given rise to a cult of worshipers, she decides finally to spill her anger and doubt onto paper. The story the sect tells is false, she feels: In it, Psyche’s sister is accused of deliberately plotting her fall. She feels that she must write to clear the record, to exonerate herself. In part 2, she repents. She admits that the very writing of part 1 has brought back disquieting memories: Perhaps she had been jealous of Psyche. Her self-awareness grows when two meetings with longtime observers of her life convince her that her perspective on people and events has always been narrow and selfish. Finally, two terrible dreams—visions, she realizes—bring her crime before her eyes; she understands the sentence of the god. She has indeed been Psyche, in that while her sister has performed the ordeals assigned her, Orual, in her years of suffering, has borne all the anguish of them. Thus, she has both committed the crime and expiated the guilt. Her confession in part 2 gives way to thanksgiving, as she discovers that, washed clear

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of her guilt, she is as beautiful as the sister whom she is at last free to love. The richness of Orual’s character has been likened by critics to the increasing depth of compassion in Lewis’s essays of these later years. The striking resonance of these works has been attributed, at least in part, to the influence on Lewis’s life at this time of Joy Davidman, to whom he dedicated Till We Have Faces. That Lewis’s renunciation of bachelorhood late in his life signaled an opening of himself, and his prose, to emotions and ways of seeing that he had not before allowed himself seems plausible; nevertheless, the simple design and straightforward nature of this last novel can as easily be explained as further developments of Lewis’s style in the direction taken by the Narnia books. Perhaps the exploration of his own childhood necessitated by writing these books taught him lessons about his writing as profound as those Orual learned in trying to recapture her past. Perhaps he learned that he was truly happy as a writer when he could explore the curious corridors of his personality, just as he had loved to explore the rooms and passages of his boyhood home. It is surely no coincidence that the first part of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, was published in 1955, while he was at work not only on Till We Have Faces but also on The Last Battle. All three books reveal an exquisite sensitivity which can be attributed to his deep introspection at this time. This sensitivity, this honesty, makes these books far more memorable in themselves than his more clever experiments in less traditional forms. Christopher J. Thaiss Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Dark Tower and Other Stories, 1977. POETRY: Spirits in Bondage, 1919; Dymer, 1926; Poems, 1964; Narrative Poems, 1969. NONFICTION: The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; The Allegory of Love, 1936; The Personal Heresy, 1939 (with E. M. W. Tillyard); Rehabilitations, 1939; The Problem of Pain, 1940; The Screwtape Letters, 1942; Broadcast Talks, 1942; A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” 1942; Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem, 1942; Christian Behaviour, 1943; The Abolition of Man, 1943; Beyond Personality, 1944; The Great Divorce, 1945; Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1947; Arthurian Torso, 1948; The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses, 1949; Mere Christianity, 1952; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, 1954; Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, 1955; Reflections on the Psalms, 1958; The Four Loves, 1960; The World’s Last Night, and Other Essays, 1960; Studies in Words, 1960; An Experiment in Criticism, 1961; A Grief Observed, 1961; The Discarded Image, 1964; Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1964; Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1966; Letters of C. S. Lewis, 1966; Christian Reflections, 1967; Letters to an American Lady, 1967; Spenser’s Images of Life, 1967; Selected Literary Essays, 1969; God in the Dock, 1970; The Joyful Christian: 127 Readings from C. S. Lewis, 1977; They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1914-1963, 1979; On Stories, and Other Essays on Literature, 1982; C. S. Lewis: Letters to Children, 1985; Present Concerns, 1986; Letters: C. S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calabria, a Study in Friendship, 1988. MISCELLANEOUS: Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, 1966; The Business of Heaven, 1984; Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis, 1985. Bibliography Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. A major study of the lives and works of the “Inklings,” a name first applied by Lewis, perhaps as early as 1933, to a group

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of literary friends who met regularly together at Oxford University. Capsule biographies of the Inklings, bibliographies of their major works, a section of photographs, extensive notes, and an index enhance an illuminating exploration of Lewis’s literary milieu. Downing, David C. Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. The introduction contains a concise, insightful view of Lewis’s varied career as literary critic, novelist, philosopher, and theologian. The first chapter shows how his early life influenced the writing of his trilogy. Subsequent chapters explore his Christian vision, his use of classicism and medievalism, his portraits of evil, his treatment of the spiritual pilgrimage, and the overall achievement of his trilogy. Includes notes and bibliography. Gilbert, Douglas, and Clyde S. Kilby. C. S. Lewis: Images of His World. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1973. Photographer Gilbert’s several hundred color and black-and-white portraits of friends of Lewis, as well as the British countryside that was his continual inspiration, are coupled with excerpts of Lewis’s published and unpublished writings. Kilby, curator of the Lewis collection at Wheaton College in Illinois, has added a chronology of Lewis’s life. Lewis family pictures and photographs of his juvenilia complement this visually impressive volume. Holbrook, David. The Skeleton in the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis’s Fantasies: A Phenomenological Study. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1991. Of use mainly to advanced students, Holbrook provides a probing reading of Lewis’s fiction for children and for adults. He explores the thesis that the Narnia stories make disturbing reading for children. Bibliography included. Manlove, C. N. C. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. An explication of Lewis’s major works of fiction, from The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) to Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), including an analysis of each of the Narnia books (published between 1950 and 1956). Representative of a subgenre of Lewis studies, and easily accessible is its consideration of narrative, structure, and theme in Lewis’s stories. Finds Lewis’s use of imagery and analogy a potent means of giving literary vitality to traditional Christian doctrines, though his complexly patterned works raise him above facile religious apologist. Sayer, George. Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. An intimate biography by a former pupil and lifelong friend of Lewis. Assesses Lewis’s experience of grade-school life as less abnormal than that portrayed in his own autobiography, suggests that Lewis and Mrs. Moore were not lovers, and provides a personal account of the last years of Lewis’s life. Lewis emerges a gifted and sincere nonsectarian Christian. A section of black-and-white photographs, a classified bibliography, and an extensive index are included. Smith, Robert Houston. Patches of Godlight: The Pattern of Thought of C. S. Lewis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. A scholarly but accessible analysis of Lewis’s philosophy of religion, linking what is dubbed his Christian “Objectivism” to the profound influence of Platonism on his views of the nature of humanity and of God. A sympathetic treatment which nevertheless finds Lewis to have been flawed as a philosopher, a rational mystic torn between a romantic vision of the absolute and the boundaries of a reasoned faith. Extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index add to the worth of the study. Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. An important interpretation of Lewis and his work from a Freudian perspective. Paints Lewis as

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neither a saint nor a full-time Christian apologist but as a man of real passions and a contradictory nature unbefitting the cult following that developed after his death. The chronological biography traces many of his adult preoccupations to the sometimes traumatic experiences of his early childhood and comes to some controversial conclusions regarding several of Lewis’s relationships (especially regarding Mrs. Moore). Black-and-white photographs, a select bibliography, and an index complete what turns out to be an iconoclastic portrait of the creator of Narnia.

Matthew Gregory Lewis Matthew Gregory Lewis

Born: London, England; July 9, 1775 Died: At sea, near Jamaica; May 14, 1818 Principal long fiction · The Monk: A Romance, 1796 (also published as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk). Other literary forms · Matthew Gregory Lewis’s work in genres other than fiction deserves more critical attention than it has generally received. In his own day, his reputation as a dramatist almost equaled his fame as the author of Ambrosio: Or, The Monk, commonly referred to simply as The Monk. The Castle Spectre (1797), a gothic drama, was a major success. Clearly the work of the author of The Monk, the drama is populated by stock characters who move through an intricate plot decorated with ghosts and spectacle. The Castle Spectre allowed Lewis to show what The Monk would only let him describe. Alfonso, King of Castile (1801), a tragedy, was much hailed by critics, and helped establish Lewis’s reputation as a major figure in the literary world of the early nineteenth century. Lewis also wrote poetry. Some of his finer pieces appear in the text of The Monk. One, “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine,” is still read as an excellent example of the then-popular gothic ballad and is included in The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1926). Lewis is also highly respected as a writer of nonfiction. Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834) is a detailed and vivid account of Jamaica in the days of slavery and of the reactions of a genuinely humane person to this environment. Achievements · Lewis’s outstanding achievement is his famous novel, The Monk. Often mentioned but seldom read today, this work helped to define a particular type of gothic novel that is still popular today. Rather than merely suggesting a dangerous supernatural presence by the careful use of tone, The Monk relies upon graphic description and bold action. Lewis’s imagination worked with clear visual images rather than with hints and elusive impressions. Indeed, he has contributed more to the gothic conventions of stage and cinema than he has to later horror fiction. The great gothic writers of the nineteenth century—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë—relied more on psychological effects and less on graphic horror than did Lewis. Lewis’s true successors are contemporary novelists such as Stephen King and Peter Straub, who have taken the graphic depiction of horror to new extremes. Among the countless readers of The Monk, perhaps none has enjoyed the book so thoroughly as Lewis himself did. In September, 1794, he announced in a letter to his mother that he had produced “a romance of between three and four hundred pages octavo” in a mere ten weeks. With the outrageous immodesty of youth, he proclaimed, “I am myself so pleased with it, that, if the Booksellers will not buy it, I shall publish it myself.” Two years later, the novel was published with a preface in imitation of Horace: “Now, then, your venturous course pursue,/ Go, my delight! dear book, adieu!” The Monk’s course has been “venturous” indeed. An immediate success, it went into a second edition the same year it was published, and by 1800, readers were 601

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buying the fifth edition. The first edition had been published anonymously; the second, however, not only bore the proud author’s name but also his title of MP (Member of Parliament). While the earliest reviews of The Monk had been generally favorable—the book was deemed artful, skillful, interesting—the second wave of criticism brought judgments less kind. The Monk was “a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee,” said poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Critical Review for February, 1797. Moreover, the poison had been brewed by a Member of Parliament, the critics were fond of noting. Such criticism did no harm to the sale of the book, but an embarrassed Lewis expurgated later editions of The Monk. Biography · Matthew Gregory Lewis was the oldest of four children born to Matthew Lewis and Frances Maria Sewell. Both families were quite prominent: Frances was the daughter of Sir Thomas Sewell, master of the rolls, and Matthew, born in Jamaica to a landed family, was deputy-secretary at war. They were an ill-matched pair, the elder Matthew being distant and austere, his wife delighting in gay times and the company of musical and literary people. The marriage failed, and the Lewises separated. While loyal to both parents, young Lewis was his mother’s favorite, and he returned her affection in full. From an early age, Lewis showed a great love for music and drama. At fifteen, he submitted a farce to the Drury Lane Theatre; it was rejected, but this did nothing to curb his industry. He sent his mother numerous songs and poems and outlined his plan to write a two-volume novel, burlesquing popular novels of sensibility. His father intended for him to have a diplomatic career, and in preparation, Lewis spent school vacations in Europe, where he soon mastered German. Through his father, he received a position as an attaché to the British embassy in Holland. While at The Hague, he completed The Monk. Lewis returned to England, and his novel was published in March, 1796. Still in his early twenties, “Monk” Lewis became one of the most popular writers in England. In the following few years, this popularity was reinforced by some noteworthy successes on the stage. The Castle Spectre enjoyed a long run at Drury Lane; Alfonso played to enthusiastic audiences at Covent Garden. In the later years of his short life, Lewis turned away from literary effort. Having achieved great prominence at an early age, he seems to have found little reason to continue in an activity which could bring him no greater fame and which he did not need to purLibrary of Congress sue for a livelihood. “The act of

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composing has ceased to amuse me,” he wrote in the preface to the play Venoni (1808). Lewis’s father provided more than adequate support, and after his death in 1812, the son inherited substantial fortune and property. Modest in his own needs and habits, he was known to his friends (who included poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott) as a man of generosity and deep concern for the oppressed. In 1815, he sailed for Jamaica to do all he could to improve the conditions of the slaves on his estates. He was responsible for important reforms and improvements, including a hospital and a humane code regulating punishments for crimes. After a brief return to England and then to Italy to visit Shelley and Byron, Lewis sailed again for Jamaica. During a five-month stay, he continued to work for better conditions for slaves. He left the island on May 4, 1818. Already sick with yellow fever, his health declined over the next several days. He died on shipboard, on May 14, and was buried at sea. According to witnesses, the coffin was wrapped in a sheet with sufficient ballast to make it sink. The plunge caused the weights to fall out, however, and the loose sheet caught the wind. The body of “Monk” Lewis, the author of one of the most fantastic books in the English language, was last seen in a sailing coffin headed for Jamaica. Analysis · While The Monk is seldom read today, few students of English literature have not heard of this scandalous example of the gothic novel. While the modern devotee of popular gothic literature and film whose sensitivity has long since been dulled by graphic, technicolor horrors may find The Monk mild stuff indeed, the novel is not without excitement, and its relation to modern gothic cinema is closer than that of most other classic gothic novels, especially those of Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe would not allow her imagination to break free from eighteenth century rationalism; the supernatural, in the end, had to be given a natural explanation. Matthew Gregory Lewis’s gothic vision looked toward nineteenth century Romanticism. He endowed certain characters with total confidence in tangible reality only to deflate their skepticism with head-on encounters with the supernatural that defy reason’s best efforts at explanation. Magic works in The Monk; the ghosts are real and interfere with human destiny; demons interact with men, and Satan himself, as a deus ex machina, finally resolves the plot. The Monk · The plot of The Monk, like the plot of most classic gothic novels, is not easily summarized. Father Ambrosio, a renowned priest and orator of Madrid who symbolizes all that is chaste and holy, falls in love with an innocent girl in his congregation, Antonia. He is, at the same time, pursued by the bolder Matilda, who enters the order disguised as a novice in order to be near Ambrosio. She and Ambrosio become passionate lovers, and Matilda, seeing that Ambrosio still pines for the young Antonia, promises to grant her to him by the aid of magic. Ambrosio bungles the staged seduction, kills Antonia’s mother, Elvira, by mistake, and is forced to abduct Antonia to the dungeon of the monastery, where he drugs and rapes her. Seized with remorse and fear of exposure, he drives a knife in her heart when she returns to consciousness and begins to cry out. Imprisoned and faced with an Inquisitional investigation, he yields to Matilda’s entreaties to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for release from prison. He soon bitterly realizes that he faces far worse punishment at the Devil’s hands than he would have, had he faced the Inquisitors, who were preparing to pardon him. A subplot of the novel involves Agnes, a youthful nun who has given birth to the

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child of her lover, Raymond. She and the child are condemned to languish without food or water in the deepest part of the dungeon. In the final chapters of the book, she is discovered, half dead, and restored to Raymond. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Lewis the novelist is that he was also a successful playwright for the popular stage. Readers of The Monk do not have to concern themselves with questions of interpretation; they need not be bothered with understanding complex characters and subtle motivations. Lewis has made all the important decisions, principally that the supernatural is not only real but also a controlling force in human affairs, and with that decision, complex characterization becomes impossible and unnecessary. While Lewis denied his creation some of the elements that make a novel great, he added enough action to produce a good story. Critics in Lewis’s time generally agreed that the disreputable member of Parliament who authored The Monk had indiscriminately heaped immoral action upon blasphemous action to create a plot utterly devoid of moral purpose. Such a charge is not entirely fair, for The Monk obviously teaches a number of moral lessons. Antonia demonstrates that innocence alone is no defense against evil. The adventures of Agnes could hardly be said to promote promiscuity, and the decline and fall of Ambrosio, the monk, provides the major theme: Pride is a vice that can pervert all virtues, even religious piety. Nevertheless, those early critics were not altogether unfair in their severe judgment, for Lewis’s morality is only shallowly rooted in his plot. Antonia, a model of virtue, is forcibly raped and then stabbed to death by the panic-stricken monk. Agnes, in the heat of passion, gives herself to Raymond; her reward, after suffering the loss of her child and imprisonment in a subterranean crypt, is finally to be united in matrimony with her dashing and well-to-do lover. Ambrosio is proud of the spirituality and dedication to priestly celibacy that sets him above men bound to the flesh. A truly tragic Ambrosio would finally come to understand that his pride was misplaced, for, indeed, he is a man like his fellows. In fact, the events of the book viewed in the light of the revelations at the conclusion may even support Ambrosio’s original pride. The monk is enticed to damnation by the personal attention of the Devil himself, who is apparently unwilling to trust this prize to the temptations that are sufficient to damn normal men. Until the final two or three pages of the novel, Ambrosio seems quite capable of damning himself with no outside help, and more than one sentence would be helpful in understanding why this particular monk is deserving of such special demoniac effort. Lust, perfidy, rape, and murder so much direct his actions that the reader is at a loss to understand how Ambrosio has ever been considered virtuous. Those last pages, however, cast the preceding four-hundred in a quite different light. After revealing that Elvira and Antonia (the murdered mother and daughter) were, in fact, Ambrosio’s own mother and sister, the Devil goes on to brag, “It was I who threw Matilda in your way; it was I who gave you entrance to Antonia’s chamber; it was I who caused the dagger to be given you which pierced your sister’s bosom; and it was I who warned Elvira in dreams of your designs upon her daughter, and thus, by preventing your profiting by her sleep, compelled you to add rape as well as incest to the catalogue of your crimes.” The prior existence of that virtue is suddenly given credibility by this surprise revelation of the total manipulation that was necessary for its destruction.

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These concluding revelations come as such a surprise that some critics regard them as merely tacked on to the action of the novel. In particular, the revelation of Matilda’s true nature suggests that the conclusion was a kind of afterthought. Early in the novel, disguised as a young monk, she wins the friendship of Ambrosio. When she reveals her true sex, friendship turns to lustful love, and when Ambrosio’s lust cools, her love becomes utter dedication to satisfying his every desire, even his desire for Antonia. Matilda is, in some ways, the most interesting and complex character in the novel. In the conclusion, however, Lewis does his readers the dubious favor of unraveling her complexity by having the Devil finally announce that she is not a woman at all but a lesser demon in human form, whose every action has followed the Devil’s own blueprint for Ambrosio’s destruction. This is especially puzzling for the careful reader, who remembers that in earlier pages, Matilda professed love for Ambrosio while thinking him asleep, and that on more than one occasion, even the narrator presented her affection as sincere. The Monk’s conclusion, then, both damages the credibility of the narrator and clouds whatever moral might be found in the fall of Ambrosio. More accurately, he does not fall; he is pushed. Those late eighteenth and early nineteenth century critics for whom morality was a measure of artistic accomplishment had some cause for their attack on The Monk. A more generous interpretation will allow that Lewis did not construct his plot or characters to illustrate morals; he only tried to salvage what morality he could from a plot that was allowed to go its own way in search of excitement and adventure. While there was much in The Monk to surprise and shock readers of the day, the novel was, in many ways, highly conventional. For example, the death of Antonia was demanded by convention. Once deflowered, an unmarried female character was useless as a symbol of virtue. Although the woman was raped against her will, her very participation in an extramarital sex act destroyed her aura of purity for eighteenth century audiences. If the association of purity with that particular character was still needed to move the plot or motivate other characters, as Antonia’s purity is clearly still needed as a contrast to Ambrosio’s final sin, the selling of his soul, then something must be done to remove the taint of sex and reestablish the woman in her former symbolic role. She must pay for her unintentional sin through sacrifice, and Lewis’s audience expected the ultimate sacrifice: death. After her rape, Antonia, alive, is of no use to the novel; her marriage to her sweetheart, Lorenzo, a man of wealth and breeding, would be unthinkable. Dead, however, her purity is restored and can effectively serve as a foil to Ambrosio’s depravity. Antonia’s fate could not have been otherwise. Romantic conventions also demanded a happy ending for the characters left alive. Lorenzo’s all too rapid recovery from the loss of his beloved Antonia and his speedy attachment to Virginia, a minor character introduced late in the plot as an obvious replacement, is perhaps Lewis’s most awkward attempt to satisfy convention. His handling of Agnes, the other major female character, is considerably more skillful. In a cast of one-dimensional characters, Agnes stands out, if only as a slightly more believable human being. She displays moral frailty without becoming a caricature of lust; she is possessed of a sense of humor and at least enough intelligence to remind the reader that the quality is generally lacking among the other characters. Agnes, like Antonia, loses her virginity. That she does so with her own true love, Raymond, whom she hopes to marry, helps only a little. Lewis recognized that it would be awkward indeed to kill off Agnes in addition to Antonia. He would then be

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forced to end his story with a miserable Raymond or to find some way to kill him as well. Either solution would detract from the utter misery of the monk, whose fate is seen as all the more wretched in contrast with the final happiness of the other characters. Another Virginia created in the last pages to help Raymond forget his lost love would be more than even a reader of romances could accept. Forced by his plot to allow Agnes to live, Lewis at least attempted to satisfy his audience’s predictable indignation at her indiscretion by bringing her as close to death as possible. Before her happy reunion with Raymond, Agnes passes through a purgatory as horrible as any in literature. Thought dead by all but a very few, the pregnant Agnes is imprisoned by the evil prioress in a hidden dungeon under the convent’s crypt. There, alone, with barely enough bread and water to sustain her, she gives birth. The child soon dies, and the nearly insane Agnes is left to lavish a mother’s love on its putrefying corpse until her rescue by Lorenzo. Lewis was certainly aware that here he was walking a fine line between pity and disgust. If the audience reacts with repugnance, Agnes would acquire a new taint that would make her happy union with Raymond unacceptable. To avoid this, Lewis carefully chooses his words when Lorenzo comes upon the despairing Agnes. The dead baby is only a “bundle” with which Agnes refuses to part, and while the bundle’s contents is obvious, Lewis wisely—and uncharacteristically—renders the scene vague and withholds description. Several pages later, a fully recovered and quite sane Agnes is allowed to tell her own story, and she tells it with such sensitivity and self-understanding as to convince the audience that she has passed through the fire, learned from the experience, and is now a proper wife for Raymond. The destinies of the individual characters—Antonia, Lorenzo, Agnes, the monk himself—show that Lewis was not naïve. He knew what his readers demanded to satisfy their moral expectations and sense of justice, and as far as was convenient, he was willing to comply, but if popular expectation conflicted with his own sense of what made a good story—adventure, graphic detail, action rather than characterization, and no rationalization of the fantastic—then he was committed to disappointing expectation. William J. Heim Other major works PLAYS: Village Virtues, pb. 1796; The Castle Spectre, pr. 1797; The Twins: Or, Is It He or His Brother?, pr. 1799, pb. 1962 (adaptation of Jean François Regnard’s Les Ménechmes: Ou, Les Jumeaux); The East Indian, pr. 1799; Adelmorn the Outlaw, pr., pb. 1801; Alfonso, King of Castile, pb. 1801; The Captive, pr. 1803 (dramatic monologue); The Harper’s Daughter: Or, Love and Ambition, pr. 1803 (adaptation of his play The Minister); Rugantino: Or, The Bravo of Venice, pr., pb. 1805 (two acts; adaptation of his play The Bravo of Venice); Adelgitha: Or, The Fruits of a Single Error, pb. 1806; The Wood Daemon: Or, “The Clock Has Struck,” pr. 1807; Venoni: Or, the Novice of St. Mark’s, pr. 1808, pb. 1809 (adaptation of Jacques Marie de Monvel’s play Les Victimes cloîtrées); Temper: Or, The Domestic Tyrant, pr. 1809 (adaptation of Sir Charles Sedley’s translation, The Grumbler, of David Augustin Brueys and Jean Palaprat’s play Le Grondeur); Timour the Tartar, pr., pb. 1811; One O’Clock: Or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon, pr., pb. 1811 (music by Michael Kelly and Matthew Peter King; adaptation of his play The Wood Daemon); Rich and Poor, pr., pb. 1812 (music by Charles Edward Horn; adaptation of his play The East Indian).

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DRAMA TRANSLATIONS: The Minister, pb. 1797 (Friedrich Schiller’s play Kabale und Liebe); Rolla: Or, The Peruvian Hero, pb. 1799 (August von Kotzebue’s play Die Spanier in Peru: Oder, Rollas Tod). POETRY: The Love of Gain: A Poem Initiated from Juvenal, 1799; Tales of Wonder, 1801 (with Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey, and John Leyden); Monody on the Death of Sir John Moore, 1809; Poems, 1812; The Isle of Devils: A Metrical Tale, 1827. NONFICTION: Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, 1834 (also as Journal of a Residence Among the Negroes in the West Indies, 1861). TRANSLATIONS: The Bravo of Venice: A Romance, 1805 (of J. H. D. Zschokke’s novel Abällino der Grosse Bandit); Feudal Tyrants: Or, The Counts of Carlsheim and Sargans: A Romance, Taken from the German, 1806 (four volumes; Christiane Benedicte Eugénie Naubert’s novel Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg: Oder, Geschichte der Frauen in der Schweiz). EDITED TEXTS: Tales of Terror, 1799 (also as An Apology for Tales of Terror; includes work by Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey); Tales of Wonder, 1801 (2 volumes; includes work by Scott, Southey, Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, John Dryden, and others). MISCELLANEOUS: Romantic Tales, 1808 (4 volumes; includes poems, short stories, and ballads); Twelve Ballads, the Words and Music by M. G. Lewis, 1808; The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, with Many Pieces Never Before Published, 1839 (2 volumes; Margaret Baron-Wilson, editor).

Bibliography Cox, Jeffrey N. Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. See part 6 of Cox’s introduction for a discussion of “Lewis and the Gothic Drama: Melodrama, Monodrama, and Tragedy.” Howard, Jacqueline. Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1994. See chapter 5, “Anticlerical Gothic: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.” Recommended for advanced students with some grounding in literary theory. Irwin, Joseph James. M. G. “Monk” Lewis. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Presents the life and writings of Lewis, with a concluding overview of his achievements. Discusses his family background, the beginning of his literary career in Paris, and the consequences of his second journey to Jamaica. Concentrates on The Monk, which brought Lewis fame and notoriety and set the standard for tales of terror. Also surveys his success and failure in the theater, with attention to his nongothic plays, such as The East Indian, and his poetry, praised by Sir Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One chapter argues that Journal of a West India Proprietor is about self-discovery and has humanitarian and social importance, anticipating critical study of slavery. Includes notes, an annotated bibliography, and an index. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. An important book on Romantic prose fiction, including Lewis’s gothic romances, which analyzes in depth twelve Romantic novels to define the intellectual context of the era. Notes that concepts of reality were tested and changed by Romantic novels, and Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime modified aesthetic forms. Lewis is given a prominent place in this general thesis, and The Monk is analyzed in detail as the focus of his chapter. Proposes that Ambrosio is a symbol of the artist and concludes that the novel is a nightmare vision of the chaos beneath the appearance of order. Finds a common drift toward death in most novels of this genre. Includes notes and an index.

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Peck, Louis F. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961. This first modern full-length biography of Lewis uses materials not available to earlier biographers, such as diaries, memoirs, and the correspondence of Lewis’s contemporaries. Chapter 1 details his background and early life up to 1796 and devotes attention to The Monk, arguing that it was published in 1796 rather than 1795. Follows Lewis from his membership in Parliament in 1796 to the beginning of the Kelly affair in 1810, and also examines his dramas and his other prose and verse. Narrates Lewis’s affairs in Jamaica and his death on board the ship returning him to England. Contains a collection of selected letters, a list of his principal works, a bibliography of works cited, notes, and an index. Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. 1938. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. A pioneer study, placing gothic in the Romantic movement and examining its popularity from the success of publishers and circulating libraries. After cataloging the influences of Continental literature on English gothic writers, examines novels in the mode of the historical gothic. Gives sustained attention to Lewis’s career, sketching his life, summarizing his plots, describing the public’s response to each novel, and suggesting various works directly influenced by his novels and dramas. Lewis is also cited throughout the book as a major contributor to the gothic tradition. Contains sixteen illustrations, including, as a frontispiece, a portrait of Lewis, end notes for each chapter, and two indexes, one general and one for novels. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. London: Arthur Barker, 1957. A classic historical study of the gothic novel in England, which examines the origins of the gothic and analyzes Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto as the first novel in the genre. The study of Lewis is focused on, though not limited to, The Monk, showing how it derives from the taste for horror and how his writings influenced authors after him, including twentieth century American writers. Lewis was one of the earliest authors in the school of horror, emphasizing psychology, which combined with Sir Walter Scott’s historical school and Ann Radcliffe’s school of terror to produce Charles Robert Maturin and others. Includes three appendices, a bibliography, and an index.

Penelope Lively Penelope Lively

Born: Cairo, Egypt; March 17, 1933 Principal long fiction · The Road to Lichfield, 1977; Treasures of Time, 1979; Judgement Day, 1980; Next to Nature, Art, 1982; Perfect Happiness, 1983; According to Mark, 1984; Moon Tiger, 1987; Passing On, 1989; City of the Mind, 1991; Cleopatra’s Sister, 1993; Heat Wave, 1996; Spiderweb, 1998. Other literary forms · While Penelope Lively is known primarily as a novelist, she first earned an international reputation in the early 1970’s as a writer of literature for children. Readers see in these early stories strong traces of the concerns subsequently explored in her adult fiction. The most widely known of her children’s books, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), describes the experiences of young James Harrison as he encounters the ghost of a seventeenth century former inhabitant of the cottage in which James now lives. Blamed for the poltergeist’s mischievous actions, James discovers the significance of historical perspective in explaining the world at large. Here, as in many of Lively’s works for children, most notably A Stitch in Time (1976), the supernatural is the medium by which the past comes into contact with the present. Along with many stories for older children, Lively has written one picture book for infants, The Cat, the Crow, and the Banyan Tree (1994; illustrated by Terry Milne). She has produced three short-story collections for adults and two full-length works of nonfiction: The Presence of the Past (1976), a study of landscape history, and Oleander, Jacaranda (1994), a personal memoir in which Lively looks back to her early childhood in Egypt. She has also written radio and television scripts, book reviews, and other articles for academic and nonacademic publications, including travel articles for The New York Times. Achievements · Lively’s work has earned her a number of literary accolades. With Moon Tiger, she won Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker-McConnell Prize, an award for which two previous novels, The Road to Lichfield and According to Mark, were shortlisted. Moon Tiger also received the 1988 Los Angeles Times Book Award. Treasures of Time, Lively’s second work of long fiction for adults, received the British Arts Council’s inaugural National Book Award in 1979. She won the Carnegie Medal, the top children’s literature award in Britain, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and the Whitbread Prize for A Stitch in Time. In 1985, Lively was named a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, and four years later, she became an officer of the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) by Queen Elizabeth II. In general, her body of work qualifies her as one of Britain’s most popular, prolific, and influential late twentieth century novelists. Biography · Born of British parents Vera and Roger Low, Lively spent her childhood in the suburbs of Cairo, where her father worked for the National Bank of Egypt. An only child, she received no formal education but was taught at home by a personal tutor in an apparently rather haphazard fashion. The young Lively was encouraged, however, to read voraciously the great classics of children’s literature, as well as the 609

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Bible and ancient mythology. The ardent interest in the past that Lively exhibits in all her works may well have been engendered by the family’s weekly visits to the Egyptian pyramids. After her parents divorced in 1945, she was sent at the age of twelve to live with her grandmother in rural Somerset, England, and soon after, to an austere English boarding school. Although the school empha(Photo not available) sized physical over intellectual activity–she once was admonished by the headmistress for reading poetry outside of the classroom–Lively continued to read widely and obtained a place at St. Anne’s College of Oxford University. Here, Lively felt a sense of liberation among Britain’s best scholars and students. Her field was history, but she also read a good deal of contemporary fiction. She graduated in 1954 with a B.A. in modern history. After working for a short time as a secretary for an Oxford University professor, in 1957 Lively married research fellow Jack Lively, who later became a professor of politics at the University of Warwick. They had two children, Josephine and Adam, whom Lively stayed home to raise. She read to them often and soon became interested in writing children’s stories of her own. Her first, Astercote, appeared in 1970, and others followed in quick succession. While continuing to publish works for children, in the late 1970’s Lively turned to adult fiction—short stories and novels—and subsequently earned both critical acclaim and popular success. From 1985, Lively became active in the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN), and for a long period of time she chaired the Society of Authors. She also lectured in various countries for the British Arts Council. In the 1990’s, Lively’s time was divided between London and her farmhouse in Oxfordshire, and she continued to publish fiction for children and adults. Analysis · Lively is one of a number of British novelists who emerged in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s to reaffirm the English novel’s capacity to express postmodernist themes without sacrificing its roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth century realist tradition. Her fictional worlds are predicated on the conventions of realist fiction, but these conventions are transformed both by perceptual shifts in the consciousness of her characters—a technique strongly reminiscent of modernists such as Virginia Woolf—and by her self-conscious examination of the nature of language. In a manner characteristic of postmodernist British fiction, Lively’s choice of characters demonstrates her fascination not only with the past but also with the ways

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in which it is reconstituted in and refracted by the present. Her novels introduce us to archaeologists, paleontologists, architects, biographers, historians, and teachers of history; all these occupations have in a common a concern for the meaning and the weight of the past. Lively is less experimental in terms of technique than some of her fellow writers in Britain and elsewhere; however, her theoretical interest in the workings of history and memory, and the intersections between the two, aligns her with such notable contemporaries as Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, and Salman Rushdie. Collectively, then, her novels stress the palimpsest quality of a narrative present ineluctably underwritten by the presence of the past. The Road to Lichfield · The Road to Lichfield marked Lively’s shift from children’s stories to adult fiction. The novel records the experiences of a middle-aged history teacher, Anne Linton, whose dying father, she learns, has been having an affair for many years. On train trips to visit her father, Anne meets schoolteacher David Fielding, and they begin an affair of their own. Her father’s clandestine past, and her own clandestine activities in the present, force her to recognize the subjective quality of memory and perception. Marked by Lively’s characteristically polished style, The Road to Lichfield employs a shifting third-person perspective to portray events from a number of different points of view. This technique recurs consistently in Lively’s subsequent novels. According to Mark · Lively’s second novel earned her a second appearance on the Booker Prize shortlist. According to Mark, like much of Lively’s subsequent work, is concerned with whether the attempt to re-create the past is closer to the order of fiction than to that of objective truth. Here, she tells the story of a literary biographer embarked on a project to write the life of a 1920’s man of letters. The novel’s title alludes to one of four biblical versions of the gospel, and her protagonist shares with Lively herself a concern for the nature and validity of historical evidence in re-creating the past. During the course of his research, the protagonist determines that uncovering the truth is impossible. The novel itself, though, qualifies this rather nihilistic conclusion in the sense that what the protagonist fails to re-create in the dead subject of his biographical research—“life”—he discovers for himself through his growing love for his subject’s daughter. Moon Tiger · “I am writing a history of the world,” the elderly Claudia Hampton announces on her deathbed at the beginning of Lively’s Booker Prize-winning novel, “and in the process my own.” With these words, Lively’s narrator, a former war correspondent and popular historian, establishes Moon Tiger’s preeminent concern: What is the relationship between world history and the span of an individual’s life? As Claudia looks back on her past, she is periodically interrupted by the narrative present, in the form of the overheard voices of medical staff discussing her case. The rich and full life she fleshes out, though, during the course of the novel, stands in sharp contrast to their dismissive clinical remarks. In typically postmodernist fashion, history is inescapable in this novel, but it takes on many diverse forms. Claudia’s childhood interest in fossils and rock formations, for example, draws our attention to the scale of geological time, while in witnessing some of the crucial moments of World War II she points to the historical significance of global events and to those, such as German general field marshal Erwin Rommel, who apparently are history’s central players. However, as the novel’s opening lines

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suggest, these conventional conceptions of what constitutes history are overshadowed by the story of Claudia’s own life. Combining personal recollections with ruminations on the nature and purpose of history, Claudia’s story stresses the significance of imagination and memory over hard historical evidence. This is typified by Claudia’s strategy of imagining “real” events from the different points of view of those involved; in such cases, the details remain broadly the same, but their meaning and context differ markedly according to the perspective from which they are perceived. In employing such techniques, Claudia’s narration criticizes implicitly the conventional historian’s faith in empirical evidence, objectivity, and linear cause-and-effect patterns. The structure of Moon Tiger is, like memory itself, fragmentary and achronological, but the kaleidoscopic representation of Claudia’s life is brought into focus when she recalls her brief affair in Egypt during World War II with Tom, a doomed British tank commander. This pivotal moment in the novel at once underscores and explains Claudia’s perception of history: Tom’s untimely death in a German air attack is in one respect utterly peripheral, hardly a footnote in the record of the twentieth century’s central historical event, and yet Tom has, in effect, played the central role in Claudia’s autobiography. In this way, the novel affirms the significance of the individual life in relation to history’s larger forces. Such a conclusion is characteristic of Lively’s work as a whole, but in Moon Tiger it receives perhaps its fullest and most evocative expression. Moon Tiger remains, for many readers, Lively’s best novel, and it is certainly her most widely read and most widely taught. City of the Mind · Following the enormous success of its predecessor, City of the Mind explores the history and geography of the city of London through the mind of the protagonist, Matthew Halland, an architect who contemplates the impact of his buildings on the centuries-old cityscape of England’s capital city. Set against the backdrop of history on a grander scale—an array of the city’s inhabitants going back to Elizabethan times—are the smaller experiences of an individual life: Halland’s divorce, losing custody of his daughter, the commercial pressures imposed on him by a greedy developer, and his encounter with an expert glass engraver and Holocaust survivor. Ultimately, Halland’s faith in human relations is restored when he meets and falls in love with the editor of an art magazine, Sarah Bridges. All these events influence in significant and unexpected ways Halland’s minor contribution to the redevelopment of London’s docklands that took place in the 1980’s. City of the Mind examines the nature of historical continuity and historical change and asks, what is our debt to the past? Cleopatra’s Sister · This novel is in some ways Lively’s most ambitious, in the sense that she creates an imaginary history not simply for her characters but for an entire country. Cleopatra’s Sister tells the story of Lucy Faulkner, a relatively unsuccessful freelance journalist. On her way to Kenya, Lucy meets Howard Beamish, a paleontologist fascinated by different conceptions of time. Their airplane is grounded in the fictitious African nation of Callimbia and subsequently hijacked by Callimbian freedom fighters. The novel is concerned with the growing love between the two characters as they become enmeshed in unpredictable political circumstances. Interestingly, though, the narrative that traces this developing relationship periodically is interrupted by chapters such as “A Brief History of Callimbia,” in which Lively creates a fictional history of the country from ancient times to the present day. Reviewers of

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Cleopatra’s Sister found this element of the novel rather contrived or improbable, which is a fairly valid response. However, the novel does affirm the primacy of individual over national histories and individual relationships over political relationships, and in that sense it remains true to Lively’s abiding concerns. John L. Marsden Other major works SHORT FICTION: Nothing Missing but the Samovar and Other Stories, 1978; Corruption and Other Stories, 1984; Pack of Cards: Stories 1978-86, 1986; The Five Thousand and One Nights, 1997. NONFICTION: The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape History, 1976; Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, a Memoir, 1994. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Astercote, 1970; The Whispering Knights, 1971; The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy, 1971 (published in the U.S. as The Wild Hunt of the Ghost Hounds); The Driftway, 1972; The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973; The House in Norham Gardens, 1974; Boy Without a Name, 1975; Going Back, 1975; A Stitch in Time, 1976; The Stained Glass Window, 1976; Fanny’s Sister, 1976; The Voyage of QV66, 1978; Fanny and the Monsters, 1979; Fanny and the Battle of Potter’s Piece, 1980; The Revenge of Samuel Stokes, 1981; Fanny and the Monsters and Other Stories (containing the three Fanny stories), 1982; Uninvited Ghosts, 1984; Dragon Trouble, 1984; Debbie and the Little Devil, 1987; A House Inside Out, 1988; The Cat, the Crow, and the Banyan Tree, 1994 (illustrated by Terry Milne). Bibliography Jackson, Tony E. “The Consequences of Chaos: Cleopatra’s Sister and Postmodern Historiography.” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 2 (Summer, 1996). The theme of historiography in another of Lively’s novels is taken up by Jackson. LeMesurier, Nicholas. “A Lesson in History: The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Penelope Lively.” New Welsh Review 2 (Spring, 1990). In a less theoretical vein than Jackson, LeMesurier discusses more generally the influence of the past on Lively’s characters and settings. Lively, Penelope. “An Interview with Penelope Lively.” Interview by Amanda Smith. Publishers Weekly 232, no. 12 (March, 1988). Those interested in hearing what Lively has to say about her own life and work should begin by consulting this informative article. Moran, Mary Hurley. Penelope Lively. New York: Twayne, 1993. Offers brief but useful critical readings of each of Lively’s first nine novels for adults. ____________. “Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger: A Feminist ‘History of the World.’” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 11, no. 2/3 (1990). This essay takes a radical feminist approach to Lively’s most well-known novel. Raschke, Debrah. “Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger: Reexamining a ‘History of the World.’” ARIEL 26, no. 4 (October, 1995). Examines Lively’s treatment of history and personal identity as unstable. Raschke argues that the novel represents a liberation from the traditional limits of women’s participation in historiography.

Malcolm Lowry Malcolm Lowr y

Born: Liscard, England; July 28, 1909 Died: Ripe, England; June 27, 1957 Principal long fiction · Ultramarine, 1933, revised 1962; Under the Volcano, 1947; Lunar Caustic, 1968; Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, 1968; October Ferry to Gabriola, 1970. Other literary forms · All but two of the volumes now attributed to Malcolm Lowry were published after his death at the age of forty-seven. During the last decade of his life, after the publication of Under the Volcano, Lowry worked more or less concurrently on numerous projects but was unable to finish any of them before his death. The one closest to completion when he died was Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961), a collection of seven interrelated tales. Additional short fiction has been collected in Malcolm Lowry: Psalms and Songs (1975), edited by Margerie Bonner Lowry. A selection of poems, edited by Earle Birney, appeared in 1962. Lunar Caustic, a novella edited from two earlier versions by Birney and Margerie Bonner Lowry, was published in 1968. Throughout his career, Lowry elaborated and reelaborated a massive scheme of interlocking narratives called, collectively, “The Voyage That Never Ends,” which, had he lived to complete it, would have included all of his longer works, with Under the Volcano at the center of the “bolus,” as he called it. The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry, appeared in 1965 and played a large part in the revival of interest in Lowry during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Lowry was also much interested in the cinema and, in collaboration with his second wife Margerie Bonner (herself a published novelist), prepared a screenplay for an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934); the film was never produced, but the Lowrys’ notes for the film script were published in 1976. Malcolm Lowry’s life is the subject of the film Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1977), directed by Donald Brittain. Since so many of Lowry’s works were left unfinished at his death, and since even the works published posthumously are selections from numerous versions Lowry left behind, selections made and pieced together by editors, the authenticity of the texts published after 1957 is at least questionable. The special collection of Lowry manuscripts housed at the University of British Columbia Library in Vancouver is, therefore, very important. Achievements · The only Lowry novel to attract any notable attention during his lifetime was Under the Volcano, which was in general very warmly received (in France and the United States at any rate, though curiously it was all but ignored in England) upon its appearance in 1947. During the ten years following, however, no extended works of fiction by Lowry appeared in English, and by the time of his death, even Under the Volcano was out of print. Nevertheless, an underground following quietly persisted in its admiration for what must then have seemed, to most, a cometlike blaze of genius revealed in that one novel, appearing out of nowhere and as suddenly disappearing from sight. 614

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The situation altered with the posthumous publication of other Lowry works in the 1960’s, beginning with Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. By 1965, a selection of poems had appeared, Ultramarine and Under the Volcano had been reissued, the Paris Review offered a new edition (the first to appear in English) of Lunar Caustic, and Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry was published to largely favorable reviews. Lowry was belatedly “discovered” in England, and Under the Volcano was hailed as “one of the great English novels of this century” (Philip Toynbee). With the appearance at the end of the decade of the heavily edited, fragmentary novels Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid and October Ferry to Gabriola, however, a reaction set in. Both books were widely regarded as failures, and Lowry’s tendency toward solipsism was judged to have gotten the better of him in his abortive later works. This view probably does an injustice to Lowry. First, works never brought to completion by Lowry cannot be justly measured against a fully realized work on which the author lavished almost ten years of concerted labor. Even so, Douglas Day’s long awaited authorized biography, published to nearly universal acclaim in 1973, seemed to legitimize the view of Lowry as an artist manqué whose single triumph amounted to a kind of fluke accomplished despite its author’s compulsive tendencies to self-destruction and willed failure. In the late twentieth century, there were salutary signs of a reassessment of the Lowry canon as a whole, with such critics as Muriel C. Bradbrook, Ronald Binns, and Sherrill Grace arguing persuasively against the distortions of the “one-book author” label. Biography · The youngest of four brothers, Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born at Warren Crest, North Drive, Liscard, Cheshire, England, on July 28, 1909. His father, Arthur O. Lowry, was a wealthy cotton broker of sturdy Victorian probity; his mother, Evelyn Boden, was the daughter of Captain Lyon Boden of Liverpool. A prominent shipowner and mariner, Captain Boden had died of cholera while homeward bound from Calcutta in 1880. This part of the family legacy, so unlike that of the paternal side, would provide Malcolm Lowry with the doom-tinged romantic yearning for the sea much in evidence in his fiction. At fourteen, Lowry was sent to a public school, The Leys, from which he was expected to proceed to Cambridge University, as his brothers had done. It was during his four years at The Leys, however, that he began to engage in what amounted to a subtle subterfuge of the respectable middle-class life that his father had prescribed for him. He became infatuated with jazz and took up playing the “taropatch,” or tenor ukulele. Enthusiastic readings of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, and the early Eugene O’Neill fed his dreams of adventure at sea. Meanwhile, encouraged by one of his schoolmasters (the model for James Hilton’s “Mr. Chips”), he began to write his own stories for the school’s literary magazine. At this time, too, he began, surreptitiously at first, what would become his lifelong addiction: alcohol. By 1927, the conflict with his father had become overt, but Lowry finally agreed to go to Cambridge—after going to sea. In May, he shipped as deckboy aboard the SS Pyrrhus, bound for the Far East. This experience, which lasted about six months and was to provide the raw material for Ultramarine, punctured at least some of his youthful illusions about the sea. It was followed, in the summer of 1928, by another pilgrimage, this time to New England, where he went to pay homage to Conrad Aiken. The American writer’s experimental novel of the sea, Blue Voyage (1927), was the catalyst of a kind of private tutorial (Lowry being already engaged in the writing of Ultramarine). The two got on famously, beginning a literary kinship—and, later a competition—as father and son, which would last in one form or another for thirty years.

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At Cambridge, Lowry scarcely applied himself to his formal studies. Instead, he played the role of the loutish yet brilliant sailor, took up jazz again, became a connoisseur of avant-garde German silent films, drank, ran with an “advanced” circle of friends, and continued to work on Ultramarine. In November, 1929, one of his friends, Paul Fitte, committed suicide. The circumstances remain uncertain, but it is clear from the obsessive references to this event in his later fiction that Lowry felt partly responsible for it. The other significant occurrence of this time came in the summer of 1930, when Lowry again shipped out, this time as fireman on a Norwegian tramp steamer bound for Archangel in the White Sea. His purpose was to pay a visit to Norwegian author Nordahl Grieg, whose novel The Ship Sails On (translated in 1927) seemed to Lowry as important a precursor as Aiken’s Blue Voyage. This journey and the eventual meeting between the two men gave Lowry the idea for another novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, on which he worked intermittently for the next fourteen years until the manuscript (running to some one thousand pages) was destroyed in a fire at his home in Canada in 1944. After graduating with third-class honors in English, Lowry traveled on the Continent, meeting Aiken in Spain in the spring of 1933. There he also met and soon married Jan Gabrial, formerly a stunt woman in Hollywood films. It was an unhappy match, and Jan left him only a few weeks after their marriage in January, 1934. She returned to the United States, Lowry following her by ship the next autumn. In June, 1935, after a particularly severe bout of drinking, he was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Upon his release ten days later, he began, between further drinking marathons, to write the first draft of Lunar Caustic. When an attempt to find a job in Hollywood proved fruitless, Jan and Lowry sailed to Mexico in November, 1936, settling soon after in Cuernavaca, where he began to write Under the Volcano. In December of the following year, Jan, who had never been faithful to the unstable Lowry, left him permanently. He drifted south to Oaxaca, where he spent some days in jail and formed an important friendship with a Mexican named Juan Fernando Márquez. Almost continually drunk, Lowry, with the assistance of “agents” sent by his father, was at length put on a train out of the country in July, 1938. Back in California, Lowry met and fell in love with another American, Margerie Bonner. By the end of 1940, divorced from Jan and remarried to Margerie, Lowry had moved with Margerie into a squatter’s shack in Dollarton, on Burrard Inlet, British Columbia. Here they would remain, with occasional trips to Mexico, Haiti, and Europe, for the next fourteen years. It was by far the happiest, most sober (comparatively speaking), and most productive period of Lowry’s life. By December, 1944, he had completed the fourth and final version of Under the Volcano. A five-month return visit to Mexico between 1944 and 1945 had nearly disastrous consequences—a suicide attempt, more drinking, the discovery that his Mexican friend, Juan Fernando Márquez, had been killed, trouble with the Mexican authorities, and finally deportation—but from these experiences Lowry gained most of the materials for Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid and the unpublished fragment La Mordida. By 1950, he was working, as it were, simultaneously on these novels, the stories to be collected in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, the film script for Tender Is the Night, his poems, and October Ferry to Gabriola. This period of intense creative effort came to an end in 1954, when Lowry’s American publisher, out of patience with his proliferating but seemingly unproductive schemes for his “bolus,” severed their contract. Another severance occurred when the Lowrys left their “northern paradise” in Dollarton. After a final, brief reunion with

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Aiken in New York, they sailed for Italy. In late 1955, Lowry was admitted to a hospital in London for psychiatric treatment. Released in February, 1956, he settled with Margerie in the village of Ripe, Sussex, where he resumed his work. His sudden death, on June 27, 1957, caused by a fatal combination of alcohol and barbiturates, was officially termed “death by misadventure.” Not surprisingly, Lowry had long since arrived at his own verdict: Malcolm Lowry Late of the Bowery His prose was flowery And often glowery He lived, nightly, and drank, daily, And died playing the ukulele. Analysis · Like most artists, Malcolm Lowry was always fascinated by the mystery of the creative process. Unlike many other modern writers, however, he was little inclined to the explicit formulation of aesthetic theories. Still, his attitudes toward art, particularly his own art, are frequently embodied in his fiction. In the opening chapter of Under the Volcano, for example, one of the main characters, a film director named Jacques Laruelle, sees a drunken horseman “sprawling all over his mount, his stirrups lost, . . . barely managing to hold on by the reins, though not once . . . [grasping] the pommel to steady himself.” Hurtling at breakneck speed through the narrow, winding streets of a Mexican village, the rider slips to one side, nearly falls, rights himself, almost slides off backward, and barely regains his balance, “just saving himself each time, but always with the reins, never the pommel.” A closer look reveals a machete in one of the rider’s hands, used to beat the horse’s flanks furiously. It is, as M. Laruelle reflects, a “maniacal vision of senseless frenzy, but controlled, not quite uncontrolled, somehow almost admirable.” This image serves, mutatis mutandis, as an epitome of Lowry’s art: full of high risk, willfully unstable, disdainful of conventional controls, precariously balanced—but balanced all the same. Obviously, such balance is achieved, when it is achieved, with great difficulty. This was particularly true for Lowry, whose inclination was always to follow the minutest divagations of the mind. His is an art of excess, in several senses. The composition of a novel, for him, meant continual amplification and expansion, patiently adding layer after layer of meaningful reference and telling detail, until the structure of the whole fairly exploded with a rich profusion of reverberating meanings. Such “overloading,” to use Lowry’s own word describing his technique, is felt at every level. His prose style, for example, is characterized by wheeling complex sentences, rife with qualifications, suspensions, and parentheses. Brian O’Kill has aptly described this style as “expansive” and “centrifugal,” persistently “avoiding the closed unit of the periodic sentence in favor of an open form with an almost infinite capacity for addition and reduplication.” Lowry’s range of tone is also unusually wide and varied. As Robert B. Heilman observed, In recording a disaster of personality that is on the very edge of the tragic, [Lowry] has an extravagant comic sense that creates an almost unique tension among moods. Desperation, the ludicrous, nightmare, the vulgar, the appalling, the fantastic, the nonsensical, and the painfully pathetic coexist in an incongruous melange that is still a unity.

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In a famous letter defending Under the Volcano against various suggestions for further revision, Lowry argued that the book could be regarded as a symphony, an opera, a jazz break, a poem, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, a Churrigueresque cathedral, a wheel, a cryptogram, a prophecy, a film, and a kind of machine. If this claim sounds extravagant, it should be remembered that Lowry believed, with Charles Baudelaire, that “life is a forest of symbols.” Virtually everything in this novel, from a theater marquee to items on a menu, newspaper advertisements, an armadillo digging a hole, a cat chasing a dragonfly, amusement park rides, a travel brochure, a urinal—everything signifies. Appearing amid profuse allusions to the Bible, Christopher Marlowe, Dante, the Cabbala, John Bunyan, Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and T. S. Eliot, among many others, these “found objects” in the setting gradually develop into a vast network of the protagonist’s plight, elevating it to the level of a modern myth, indeed a tragedy for modern times. In these respects, as in many others, Lowry resembles no one so much as Melville. (Lowry once admitted, characteristically with irony at his own expense, that he identified himself with the American novelist for several reasons but “mostly because of his failure as a writer and his whole outlook generally.” Both novelists were acutely aware of the monstrous potencies of the human imagination, which could envision—and proceed resolutely to enact—apocalyptic destruction as readily as it could create life-serving works of art. Both knew well the dangers involved in unleashing those potencies, particularly in the service of a narcissistic quest for what Melville’s Ishmael calls “the ungraspable phantom of life,” the self. Such a view of the imagination, overtly Romantic and possessed by the seductive demoness of an artistic ego of leviathan, of volcanic, proportions, is clearly fraught with risk. Lowry, like Melville, accepted the risks involved, not the least of which was the gamble that the reader would go along, entertaining the terms of the risk. There are times when, inevitably, the gamble fails. “Overloading”—the Melvillian tendency in Lowry to pile on six portents or allusions or symbols to evoke something that another writer would either summarize in a simple declarative sentence or else not attempt to say at all—sometimes threatens to sink the vessel. Reading the work of both men requires the granting of far more than the usual share of indulgences before the bountiful aesthetic rewards can be reaped. Some readers, however, do not find such tolerance of unevenness to their taste, and Under the Volcano is on the way to becoming one of the least read of great novels, in company with Moby Dick (1851). Lowry’s other works (like Melville’s Pierre, 1852, and The Confidence Man, 1857) are so much the more neglected, despite the efforts of later critics to call attention to their worth. One can only regret this aesthetic stinginess, along with the more commonplace preference for readily accessible, streamlined fictions. In Lowry’s case, the reader who gives himself to the experience proffered, accepting the terms of risk including the excesses involved, and the occasional failings, is likely to find that the gamble more than justifies itself. For, as Matthew Corrigan has aptly observed, when such “writing works for us, it does so . . . because it entails a vision of a higher order of creative existence altogether than we ordinarily get in modern literature.” Under the Volcano · Under the Volcano is a book of wonders, a grand testament to the undiminished plentitude of the English language and the prodigious powers—both creative and destructive—of the human imagination. Not the least of its wonders is that Malcolm Lowry began writing it while he was in Mexico suffering through the

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personal anguish of a failed marriage, chronic alcoholism, and a terror of life so pervasive that it is a minor miracle he survived at all, much less that he was able to write. The novel went through at least four complete drafts in nine years (the third draft having been rejected by no fewer than thirteen publishers) and was finally completed in December, 1944. By that time, Lowry, from the far more stable perspective provided by living simply on the beach in Dollarton with his second wife Margerie, had succeeded in sufficiently harnessing his inner demons so as to transform his earlier sufferings into art. He described the work in an important letter to his British publisher, Jonathan Cape, as a “drama of . . . man’s struggle between the powers of darkness and light,” but it would be more precise to call it a “Bible of Hell” written by one who had been a member of the devil’s party and knew it well. One index of Lowry’s ability to amplify his experience, transmuting it into a pattern with universal implications, is his management of setting. While the fictional village of Quauhnahuac is loosely modeled on Cuernavaca, where Lowry lived between 1936 and 1938, there is no attempt at documentary realism. To be sure, Lowry selects elements from the real town—the surrounding mountains dominated by the great volcano, Popocatepetl, the Cortes palace with its revolutionary frescoes, the Hotel Casino de la Selva, the dilapidated Borda Gardens of Maximilian and Carlota, the winding cobbled streets, the quaintly named cantinas, the fetid barranca or ravine winding through the town—but his rendering of them emphasizes not mere “local color” but the power of the mind to metamorphose external reality into an interlocking set of correspondences to the inner life of man. One of Lowry’s strongest convictions was that life was, as Charles Baudelaire said, a forest of symbols. Thus, Hernando Cortes’s palace and the Diego Rivera frescoes adorning it suggest the Spanish Conquest and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, which in turn suggest both the endless internecine conflicts of history and the perpetual battle of the individual human soul against the powers of darkness. The Borda Gardens embody similar meanings, along with the aura of doomed love. The volcano literally looms large over the entire novel, its snowy summit serving as a symbol of the characters’ spiritual aspiration toward ascent, while at its base winds the ubiquitous barranca, suggestive of an alternative destination awaiting the wayward soul. The proximity of the barranca to the totemic volcano and to the many gardens in the novel (most of them, like the Borda Gardens, overgrown, untended, and ruined) calls attention to one of Lowry’s central themes: the “infernal paradise” that is the essence of Mexico and, by extension, the modern world itself. This oxymoronic image owes something to D. H. Lawrence, whose novel The Plumed Serpent (1926) similarly links the contradictions endemic to revolutionary Mexico with the struggle of his protagonist to undergo a kind of rebirth of spirit. In Lowry, however, the allure of the infernal paradise does not liberate his protagonist from the despoiled garden of life and propel him toward redemption; rather, it arrests him in a state of prolonged inertia, a paralysis of will which renders him finally incapable of actively pursuing the spiritual ascent he so often imagines for himself. In Lowry’s version of the myth, at least in Under the Volcano, man is condemned to inhabit a garden gone to seed, bereft of its creator: Paradise, surviving only as an image of longing, is irretrievably lost. Solipsistic dreams of ascent succeed only in preventing the upward progress of the soul and, indeed, in promoting its gradual descent into the infernal abyss. Lowry’s narrative, like his setting, is designed to encourage the reader to view the events in broadly symbolic terms. Apart from the opening chapter, which is set one

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year to the day after the events recounted in the rest of the novel, the narrative’s present action is confined to the events of a single day, November 2, 1938, the last day in the life of the protagonist Geoffrey Firmin, a British ex-Consul and an alcoholic’s alcoholic. It is also the last day in the life of his wife, Yvonne. The Firmins have been divorced for nearly a year, but on this holiday, known to all in Mexico as the Day of the Dead (All Soul’s Day), Yvonne has returned to try to reconcile with Geoffrey. He realizes, however, that such a reconciliation—which he himself has desperately longed for during her absence—would require that he give up drinking, and this he cannot bring himself to do. They quarrel, fail at making love, and part for a time, the Consul to the company of a bottle, Yvonne to that of Geoffrey’s half brother Hugh, formerly her lover. Later, the threesome make a day trip “downhill” by bus to Tomalín, where, as Hugh makes a spectacle of himself at an event called a “bull-throwing,” Yvonne fervently proposes to Geoffrey that they leave Mexico and try to make a new life together in some “northern paradise” (clearly a reference to Dollarton). At length, after more drinking and more quarreling, the Consul emphatically refuses and runs off alone, claiming that he prefers “hell” to her offer of a “sober” northern paradise. Pursuing Geoffrey in the darkness through the woods, Yvonne encounters a spooked horse and is trampled to death. The Consul, meanwhile, has gone to the lurid Farolito cantina in Parián, where, after a series of misunderstandings and mescal-inspired blunders—culminating in his freeing of a tethered horse (the same animal that tramples Yvonne in the forest), an act of fuddled yet genuine protest—he is accused of being a Communist spy and is shot to death by Fascist “irregular police.” His body is thrown down into the barranca along with that of a dead dog. In the novel’s opening chapter, these tragic events, along with many earlier incidents in the lives of the doomed Firmins, are recollected on the Day of the Dead one year later by Jacques Laruelle, a retired French film director who had once been the Consul’s closest friend as well as another of Yvonne’s lovers. Such a summary is inevitably misleading, for Under the Volcano, like most of Lowry’s fiction, really offers little in the way of conventional plot. For one thing, the story is deliberately deprived of any ordinary sort of suspense by the disclosure of its tragic outcome in the first chapter. What this curiously epiloguelike prologue accomplishes, among other things, is a displacement of emphasis away from the sequence of events themselves to their causes and, in the grief of M. Laruelle, some of their effects. Other disruptions of the superficial story interest stem from the frequent use of flashbacks (although strictly speaking, the entire novel after the first chapter is a flashback), as the characters brood on their past lives leading up to this day of crisis; from ellipses caused by the Consul’s passing out or hallucinating; and from the constantly shifting narrative viewpoint. Five of the novel’s twelve chapters are presented from the Consul’s perspective, three from Yvonne’s, three from Hugh’s, and one from Laruelle’s. The focus is thus chiefly inward, on the embattled consciousness of the characters. Even the characters’ surroundings in the external world—Laruelle’s bizarre mosquelike house with the oracular inscription on one of the towers (no se puede vivir sin amar, “one cannot live without loving”); the municipal garden with its equally oracular warning sign (¿Le gusta este jardín que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!—“Do you like this garden that is yours? See that your children do not destroy it!”); the amusement park rides, including a loop-the-loop contraption called (after a play by Jean Cocteau) La Máquina Infernal and a “luminous wheel” that is as much

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time or fortune as a ferris wheel; the advertisements for a horror film, The Hands of Orlac, about an artist-turned-murderer; a cantina called La Sepultura, and another called Salón Ofelia; the forest around Quauhnahuac and Parián equated repeatedly with Dante’s dark wood—all these external places or objects (and there are many other examples) are essentially coordinates on the map of the mind that the novel traces. Indeed, so densely overgrown is Lowry’s “forest of symbols” that one can sometimes lose sight of the immediate or human level of the story. At such junctures, time seems to be arrested or abolished by the “self-reflexive” play of images and motifs, just as it does in The Waste Land (1922) and other great “spatializing” works in the modernist tradition. Yet in Under the Volcano, the force of time is powerfully affirmed at the bottom of the reeking barranca. Despite the novel’s inward focus, Lowry manages to achieve an ironic detachment from his characters. This is no mean feat, not only because of the autobiographical origins of the story, but also because the Consul himself lays claim to ironic detachment even as he observes his own downfall. Lowry’s detachment is achieved precisely through the form of the novel, an exceedingly complex design which includes but is finally larger than even the Consul and his remarkably resourceful capacity to transform his life into species of “quixotic oral fiction.” Even though the Consul’s tragedy in a moral sense is of his own making, it is made by Lowry to resonate like a central melodic pattern within an enormous surrounding symphonic structure. In part, this resonance derives from the novel’s frequent echoing of its own infernal music—the leitmotifs mentioned previously. Equally important are the allusive echoes to literature, myth, and history. The novel teems with allusions direct and implicit to the Bible, the Cabala, Sophocles, Ovid, Dante, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and T. S. Eliot, among others. Persistently, the Consul’s situation is compared (often by the Consul himself) with that of Oedipus, Prometheus, Adam, Christ, Judas, the Fisher King, Faust, and Hamlet. These allusions, moreover, are not gratuitous. Individually and collectively, they amount to a kind of running commentary on the pattern of heroism to which the Consul, and sometimes the other characters, aspire, and against which his downfall may be measured. What is one to make, for example, of a hero who, at one moment, proclaims in impressive Promethean tones that “the will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it,” and who collapses “with a crash,” unconscious, the next? Even more tellingly ironic are the historical analogues that Lowry draws between the Consul and such figures as Cortés, William Blackstone the explorer, Maximilian, and General Victoriano Huerta. All of the latter were men of action, which the Consul emphatically is not; yet, like him, they all became involved, sooner or later, in nefarious political intrigues whose result—sometimes unwittingly—was the exploitation of a subject people, usually of another nation or race. During World War I, Geoffrey, then lieutenant commander of a Q-boat, the SS Samaritan, was obscurely implicated in the murder of captured German officers; and as Lowry wrote to Cape, “you can even see the German submarine officers taking revenge on the Consul in the form of the sinarquistas and semi-fascist brutos at the end.” However absurd on the face of it, the political pretexts for the murder of the Consul by the pro-Fascists carry a certain underlying truth. In an important episode in chapter 8, a wounded Mexican Indian is found by the roadside. Because of a Mexican law prohibiting any interference in a crime, even after

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the fact, the Consul prevents Hugh from attempting to help the dying man. “Compañero,” the Indian says, appealing to them, but all they can do is ruminate on the horror of it all, even as another traveler on the bus to Tomalín openly steals the dying man’s money. Clearly, there is but a small difference between this sin of commission, the theft, and the Consul’s sin of omission, so that in the last chapter, it is fitting that he should be “the one dying by the wayside and no good Samaritan would halt.” “We evict those who destroy,” warns the terrible sign in the garden (as meaningfully mistranslated by the Consul) and, like Cortés, Huerta, and no doubt every other man, in one diluted way or another, Geoffrey Firmin stands guilty at heart: “No se puede vivir sin amar.” Yet while Lowry more than encourages the reader to see his characters against this elaborate backdrop of interrelated allusions, symbols, and motifs, it would be a mistake to overemphasize the backdrop at the expense of the foreground figures. The Consul, Hugh, Yvonne, and Laruelle are the cynosures through whose eyes the reader is allowed to glimpse the “massive interests” of a world sliding into the abyss beneath the volcano. At the same time, there is admittedly a deficiency in Lowry’s portrayal of character, if by “portrayal” one has in mind the conventions of realistic characterization such as found in Henry James. Lowry was well aware of this deficiency. “The truth is,” he wrote to Jonathan Cape, “that the character drawing [in Under the Volcano] is not only weak but virtually nonexistent, save with certain minor characters, the four main characters being intended, in one of the book’s meanings, to be aspects of the same man, or of the human spirit.” Lowry seems almost to be opting for a kind of allegorist’s stance when he adds that there “are a thousand writers who can draw adequate characters till all is blue for one who can tell you something new about hell fire. And I am telling you something new about hell fire.” This is, as it were, Lowry’s donnée. He is not particularly interested in his characters as fully realized individuals whose development over the course of time is gradually presented. The four main characters are all, as he said to Cape, “aspects of the same man.” Hugh is “Everyman tightened up a screw . . . the youth of Everyman”; Yvonne is “the eternal women,” the anima principle; Laruelle is the Consul’s Doppelgänger, a surrogate for the artist/betrayer with blood on his hands. Although Lowry has provided glimpses into these characters’ past lives, his purpose is less to trace the etiology of, for example, the Consul’s alcoholism, than it is to locate key moments that chime with the present situation or offer ironic contrast to it. As Terence Wright has noted, “Lowry is not concerned with the Consul’s fall as a process, nor with the attempts to save him as a thing which may or may not be accomplished, but with the contemplation of a state of affairs—the state of affairs being that a man is in Hell.” Notwithstanding the Consul’s grandiose gestures toward Promethean rebellion, what is really most remarkable about him is his readiness to embrace his own death and damnation. This is perhaps what Lowry was referring to when he claimed to be teaching the world “something new about hell fire.” The Consul knows, as his very utterance indicates (“A corpse will be transported by express!”), that his “glorious” descent is nearing its conclusion and that death is imminent, just as the reader knows, from the opening chapter, that Geoffrey has already succeeded in finding the disaster he has so ardently courted. This curious sense that everything has already happened conditions the whole feeling of the book and makes possible a range of effects—including moments of wild comedy and soaring lyricism—that one would not ordinarily expect to find in a tragic tale. It is as if the Consul, having resigned himself to the inevitability of his downfall, having indeed long since chosen the “hell” of addiction,

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solipsism, and despair represented for him by the Farolito, can undergo his descent and simultaneously observe himself descending, even deriving a certain amusement from the spectacle. The Consul’s semidetachment from his own suffering derives in part from his very awareness of the paradigms of tragic downfall in literature, above all Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, whose despairing quest for forbidden knowledge he deliberately emulates. At the same time, indulging in this “heroic” despair, he seems to harbor the illusion (derived this time from Blake) that “right through hell there is a path” leading to a “new life” beyond: By sinking as low as it is possible for a man to sink, giving himself over to complete damnation, he will somehow be saved in the end. Salvation, however, will come, if it comes, not in the form of a loving union with Yvonne in some sober northern paradise but in the form of mystical vision, a state of mind for which, he believes, alcohol is ”absolutamente necesario.” The Consul regards his drinking as a religious exercise comparable to the partaking of an eternal sacrament. His determination to resist the meddling “salvage operations” of Hugh and Yvonne takes on the significance of a kind of holy war, an anticrusade, so to speak. As he tells Jacques Laruelle, he is fighting for nothing less than “the survival of the human consciousness.” The fact that these are, on one level, an alcoholic’s rationalizations, does not alter the issue. Drink, as the principal means of access to the visionary state, has become an integral part of his quest for occult knowledge and, as such, is immutably associated with a peculiar kind of fulfillment that the Consul has actually known, “. . . how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes [in the cantina] at seven o’clock in the morning?” This mixture of attitudes accounts for the “tragic joy” that, for a time, mitigates the gathering darkness of Under the Volcano. The Consul’s vision at such moments is of genuinely heroic proportions, for he succeeds not merely in embracing Faustian despair but in transcending it, albeit fleetingly. The Consul is a man of awesome imaginative energies and tremendous resources of humor and intelligence, so that when he dies, the reader experiences that sense of immense waste that accompanies the deaths of great tragic heroes such as Doctor Faustus. Yet the very qualities that set him apart contribute directly to his downfall. The ultimate irony here is that even though he succeeds in finding at the Farolito the “hell” he has sought all along, he succeeds “in a manner somewhat outside his calculations.” He finds that damnation is not so ennobling—much less is it an amusing object for detached contemplation—after all. Knocked flat on his face by the shots of a Chief of Rostrums (of all people), the Consul is disappointed, as he was bound to be: “Christ . . . this is a dingy way to die,” he tells himself. At this point, the Consul in effect sloughs off the trappings of a borrowed literary heroism and achieves his own “autochthonous” stature as a hero. He dies not as a modern-day Faustus but as Geoffrey Firmin, self-evicted from the potential satisfaction of living in even an infernal paradise. Nevertheless, as he lies dying, shorn of all vestiges of grandiosity, he recognizes what, in his solipsism, he has become. He acknowledges the tragic error of attempting to live without loving—faces, that is, his own essential humanity—though, as his final vision of climbing the volcano only to find himself hurtling down into it makes clear, it is too late for him to act on this new awareness. Moreover, even if he could somehow act, Yvonne is no longer attainable, thanks to his last defiant gesture of releasing the horse. The novel closes with the Consul’s final vision (chorically echoed by the oracular warning sign in the ruined garden), at once the culminating comment on his life of solipsistic denial and a vision of apocalyptic destruction:

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The world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling. Although Under the Volcano is Lowry’s best and most highly regarded work, his other pieces have received more sympathetic treatment. Muriel C. Bradbrook was the first to call attention to Lowry’s early experiences on the Wirral Peninsula, in public school, and at Cambridge as in many ways the crucial source of his mature vision, an emphasis that nicely balances Douglas Day’s excessive dwelling on the last, doomhaunted years. Ronald Binns is one of several critics to examine Lowry’s fiction after Under the Volcano both seriously and sympathetically, finding in it evidence of a new direction toward the metafictional mode of such postmodernists as Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, rather than mere failed attempts to repeat the “high modernist” performance that links Under the Volcano with the older tradition of James Joyce and Marcel Proust. For her part, Sherrill Grace maintains that Under the Volcano is “best viewed as the magnificent Popocatepetl among lesser, but by no means uninteresting, peaks.” In short, although Under the Volcano still stands as Lowry’s undisputed masterpiece, an adequate appreciation of his complex achievement finally depends on a firm understanding of his “bolus” as a whole. When this understanding occurs, there is reason to believe that Lowry will be recognized as one of the greatest of modern visionary artists. Ronald G. Walker Other major works SHORT FICTION: Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, 1961; Malcolm Lowry: Psalms and Songs, 1975 (Margerie Bonner Lowry, editor). POETRY: Selected Poems, 1962 (Earle Birney, editor). NONFICTION: Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, 1965 (Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry, editors). MISCELLANEOUS: Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” 1976 (with Margerie Bonner Lowry). Bibliography Asals, Frederick. The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano.” Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Discusses Lowry’s themes in his major work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Binns, Ronald. Contemporary Writers: Malcolm Lowry. London: Methuen, 1984. Discusses the Lowry “myth,” with emphasis given to Under the Volcano and the autobiographical elements in his writing. The chapter on metafictions is a particularly useful survey of Lowry’s late experimental novels and stories. A valuable guide for the beginning reader of Lowry. Bowker, Gordon. Malcolm Lowry Remembered. London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1985. A readable collection of reminiscences that attempt to “penetrate the myth and reach the man.” Some of the essays are published here for the first time. Also includes interviews with Lowry’s two wives and many of his friends and admirers. ____________. Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. A comprehensive, scholarly biography. See especially the preface for pithy

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comments on the relationship between Lowry’s life and fiction. Includes a brief bibliography. Costa, Richard Hauer. Malcolm Lowry. New York: Twayne, 1972. The second half of this study deals with Lowry’s work during his fifteen years in Canada. Costa approaches his study of Lowry from a Jungian perspective and looks at this author’s “mystical-messianic aspects.” Grace, Sherrill, ed. Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. Grace’s introduction is a useful guide to Lowry’s reputation. Part 1 contains essays on the relationship between his life and his fiction. Part 2 concentrates on Under the Volcano; part 3 on Lowry’s subsequent fiction; part 4 on assessments of his body of work. Includes notes but no bibliography. Markson, David. Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning. New York: Times Books, 1978. An in-depth critical study of Lowry’s Under the Volcano, considered his masterpiece and recognized by many critics as a major novel of this century. Indispensable to the serious scholar of Lowry.

Rose Macaulay Rose Macaulay

Born: Rugby, England; August 1, 1881 Died: London, England; October 30, 1958 Principal long fiction · Abbots Verney, 1906; The Furnace, 1907; The Secret River, 1909; The Valley Captives, 1911; The Lee Shore, 1912; Views and Vagabonds, 1912; The Making of a Bigot, 1914; Non-Combatants and Others, 1916; What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, 1918; Potterism: A Tragi-farcical Tract, 1920; Dangerous Ages, 1921; Mystery at Geneva, 1922; Told by an Idiot, 1923; Orphan Island, 1924; Crewe Train, 1926; Keeping up Appearances, 1928 (pb. in U.S. as Daisy and Daphne, 1928); Staying with Relations, 1930; They Were Defeated, 1932 (pb. in U.S. as The Shadow Flies, 1932); Going Abroad, 1934; I Would Be Private, 1937; And No Man’s Wit, 1940; The World My Wilderness, 1950; The Towers of Trebizond, 1956. Other literary forms · Though principally a novelist, Rose Macaulay wrote prolifically in several genres. Early in her career, she published two slim volumes of verse, The Two Blind Countries (1914) and Three Days (1919), both of which earned favorable reviews in the British press. For many years, Macaulay contributed reviews and essays to such publications as The Spectator, The Guardian, and the New Statesman; she produced two generally well-received book-length critical studies, Milton (1934, revised 1957) and The Writings of E. M. Forster (1938). Some of Macaulay’s best prose can be found in two of her widely acclaimed travel books, Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal (1949) and Pleasure of Ruins (1953). Achievements · Throughout much of her lifetime, Macaulay was one of Great Britain’s best-known authors. Many of her lighter sketches and essays appeared in the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, and other newspapers and periodicals aimed at large, general audiences; some of her fiction appeared in serialized form in Eve, a popular English magazine aimed at women and filled mainly with froth. Yet Macaulay’s more serious works consistently earned high praise in Great Britain’s most respected literary publications; her twenty-third and final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, won the prestigious James Black Tait Memorial Prize. In 1951, Macaulay was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Cambridge University; in 1958, she was named a dame commander of the British Empire. Her death from heart seizure in 1958 brought forth warm and respectful tributes from many leading literary figures, including Harold Nicolson, Rosamond Lehmann, and Anthony Powell. Biography · Emilie Rose Macaulay was born in Rugby, England, on August 1, 1881. Her father, George Macaulay, was a schoolmaster and Latin scholar; her mother, the former Grace Conybeare, was a bright, energetic, but rather severe woman who sought to impart to her children a High Church interpretation of Anglican Christianity. Rose Macaulay was related to a long line of ministers, teachers, and authors (the celebrated historian Thomas Babington Macaulay was her paternal grandfather’s first cousin); not surprisingly, she was so well schooled by her parents that, by early adolescence, she was already on very familiar terms with, among other classics, 626

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Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1320) and Shakespeare’s plays. Because doctors prescribed warmth and sunshine as a means of treating her mother’s tuberculosis, Macaulay spent the better part of her childhood in Varazzo, Italy—a place she would later recall with considerable fondness. In 1900, she entered Oxford’s Somerville College, where she studied modern history and became, as her biographer Constance Babington Smith records, “a chatterbox who gabbled away so fast that at times she was hardly intelligible, a ready speaker who made lively contributions to undergraduate debates.” Soon after completing her studies at Oxford, Macaulay—while living with her parents in Wales—began work on her first novel, Abbots Verney, which critics praised for its artistic promise. In 1915, Macaulay acquired a flat of her own in London, where she quickly developed friendships with such influential literary figures as J. C. Squire, Hugh Walpole, and Walter de la Mare, and where, in 1917, she entered into what became a twenty-five-year love affair with Gerald O’Donovan, a married man and a former Catholic priest who was himself well known in London’s literary circles as the author of the highly autobiographical and anticlerical novel Father Ralph (1913). Though she traveled frequently, widely, and often intrepidly to locations that saw little tourist activity, Macaulay continued to make her home in London, where even in old age she was seen, as one friend recalled, “at every party, every private view, protest meeting, cruise, literary luncheon, or ecclesiastical gathering.” Macaulay openly began to identify herself as an agnostic during her university days; much of her fiction pokes generally gentle fun at organized religion. After O’Donovan’s death in 1942, however, she experienced a renewed interest in orthodox Christianity, an interest much in evidence in her later novels. Analysis · Over a writing career that spanned fifty years, Rose Macaulay produced twenty-three novels. She understandably came to regard the earliest of these—including The Furnace, The Secret River, and The Valley Captives—as immature and rather badly made, and she did nothing to encourage their republication. In her novels, Macaulay utilizes a wide variety of carefully rendered settings (some of which are quite exotic); her prose is beautifully cadenced and richly detailed. Occasionally, however, the exuberance and ornateness of Macaulay’s prose can be distracting, and, occasionally, her plots bog down beneath the weight of the descriptive digressions and authorial intrusions that pepper her texts. Many of Macaulay’s characters are both convincing and memorable. Some, however, are both stereotypical and stiff and appear to be exchanging speeches rather than engaging in spontaneous conversation. Macaulay recognized that, as a novelist, she was least skilled at characterization; indeed, she was sometimes urged by friends and critics to concentrate on the essay form. Yet Macaulay also recognized that her fiction had a large and rather devoted readership and that, moreover, fiction could provide her with an entertaining vehicle for disseminating, and dissecting, a wide range of stimulating ideas. As a novelist, Macaulay returned again and again to the same themes. It is plain that, on the whole, she very much liked human beings. Still, she was critical of the intellectual laziness that she found epidemic in the human race. Repeatedly, her novels mock and sometimes savage characters who unthinkingly digest easy answers to the questions of life and who are prone, then, to sentimentality and cant. Though she is not generally ranked among her generation’s more overtly feminist authors, Macaulay frequently reveals in her work a deep disdain for a social system that continued to deny women equal access to education and adventure. She regularly features as central figures young women who are witty, well read, and intellectually ambitious.

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Many of Macaulay’s recurring concerns are overtly stated in Potterism, one of her most enduring novels—and the first to sell impressively in the United States. Potterism is, in fact, dedicated to “the unsentimental precisians in thought, who have, on this confused, inaccurate, and emotional planet, no fit habitation.” It features among its five epigraphs Dr. Johnson’s injunction to “clear your mind of cant. . . . Don’t think foolishly.” At the core of Potterism is the abrupt death of a young newspaper editor recently wed to Jane Potter, whose father is the publisher of a string of superficial, cant-spewing newspapers, and whose mother, under the pseudonym of Leila Yorke, churns out foolish and schmaltzy novels that enjoy huge sales. In order to discuss and analyze this somewhat suspicious demise from varying perspectives, Macaulay presents “extracts” from the “private journals” of several characters who knew the young editor, including his novel-writing mother-in-law. Employing clichéd and rather empurpled prose, Mrs. Potter shows herself to be quite capable of the sort of overemotionalism and muddled thinking that Macaulay, throughout her career, so thoroughly disdained. The three authors of the other journal entries are the friends of the Potter twins, Johnny and Jane, who have sought to distance themselves from what they disparagingly refer to as the “Potterism” of their parents. Macaulay demonstrates that Johnny and Jane and their university-trained friends are not without their own pretensions and illusions, but she makes it clear that their crusade against vulgarity and stupidity, though quite probably quixotic, is well worth the taking. Told by an Idiot · Macaulay’s thirteenth novel, the highly praised Told by an Idiot, is set in England between 1879 and 1927 and takes its title, and its epigraph, from Macbeth’s well-known observation that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing. . . .” In this work, Macaulay focuses on the family of Maurice Garden, whose continuing struggles with faith and doubt have made him at various times a Catholic, a Baptist, a Positivist, an Anglican, “a plain agnostic,” and, when the novel opens, an enthusiastic member of the Ethical Society. Garden’s theological gyrations are well tolerated by his calm wife and his bright children, whose ranks include lively daughters named Imogen, Stanley, and Rome. Through her portrait of Maurice, Macaulay not only conveys something of her sense of the futility of most conflicting “isms” but also provides an acute portrait of the mental landscape of Victorian England. Through her depiction of the Gardens’ daughters, she is able to portray young women who, though by no means perfect, possess energy, perspicacity, and a desire for independence. Orphan Island · In Orphan Island, perhaps Macaulay’s most satisfactorily plotted novel, she harshly satirizes the sort of narrow-minded smugness that was not uncommon among influential people in the Victorian age. In the novel’s early chapters, Macaulay describes how in 1855 a ship carrying dozens of young English orphans is blown off its California-bound course during a violent storm and winds up wrecked along the coast of a small, uncharted island in the South Pacific. In succeeding chapters, she shows how the prim and proper Miss Charlotte Smith, the orphans’ supervisor, gradually turns the island into a model of Victorian England and establishes herself as its stern and platitudinous queen. In the 1920’s, Miss Smith’s island is rediscovered by a team headed by Mr. Thinkwell, a Cambridge lecturer in sociology. Thinkwell is astonished to discover that, in the remotest part of the South Pacific, Victorian England—complete with pronounced social inequities and an obsession with propriety—is, in effect, frozen in time. Still, Thinkwell enjoys the island’s remarkable

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beauty, which Macaulay effectively renders through frequent and detailed descriptions of its sunny skies, lush plant life, and exotic vegetation. He also becomes attached to his growing status as a man of great intelligence and learning. In fact, near the novel’s close and soon after the ancient Miss Smith’s long-expected death, he becomes the island’s prime minister, bent on reforming the corrupt monarchy into a republic where freedom and social justice can thrive. Macaulay does not reveal whether Thinkwell succeeds, though she does point out that, in the end, human folly has a way of winning out, and that the island is “likely” to become “as tyrannous, as unfair, as oligarchic in constitution and economic condition” as it was during Miss Smith’s curious reign. They Were Defeated · Macaulay’s sole historical novel is They Were Defeated, called The Shadow Flies in its American edition, which takes place in England and covers an eight-month period beginning in the fall of 1640. Essentially, the novel centers on the often bloody and self-defeating religious conflicts that were then taking place between Puritans, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics. Among its characters are several wellknown historical and literary figures, including the poets Robert Herrick, John Cleveland, and John Suckling. The scholarly and highly analytical Dr. Conybeare, himself based on one of Macaulay’s distant relations, is one of the many central characters in her fiction who finds himself struggling with religious doubts. Similarly, his daughter Julian is a recognizable Macaulay “type”: She bears what is commonly regarded as a male name and desires for herself the male prerogative to ask questions and obtain knowledge. In a prefatory note to this long, intricately plotted, and largely convincing book, Macaulay explains, I have done my best to make no person in this novel use in conversation any words, phrases, or idioms that were not demonstrably used at the time in which they lived; though I am aware, for all the constant and stalwart aid of the Oxford Dictionary, and the wealth of literature, letters and journals of the period that we possess for our guidance, that any such attempt must be extremely inadequate; or, at least, that mine is so. In fact, after the publication of The Shadow Flies, Macaulay received assurances from several students of the language that her errors in word usage were both minor and few. Going Abroad · Going Abroad, Macaulay’s next novel, represents a decided change of pace. Dedicated to two friends “who desired a book of unredeemed levity,” Going Abroad is set largely in Zarauz, a coastal resort town in the Basque country of Spain. It features a large cast of British eccentrics, including a Dante scholar, a young aesthete, a rigid colonel, and a woman schooled in the classics who seeks to relocate and re-create the Garden of Eden. Also featured in Going Abroad is a pair of vulgarians who run a string of beauty parlors and a group of hearty Oxford students who seek to spread goodness and religion through the Moral Re-armament Movement, and who are successfully portrayed by Macaulay as both foolish and, in their own sort of way, admirable. By focusing on the often strained interaction of these diverse types, Macaulay created a highly successful comic novel set in an appealingly sunny climate—one that deserves to be ranked among the most amusing of its time. The World My Wilderness · During the 1950’s, Rose Macaulay produced two novels that are generally placed among her most accomplished. The first of these, The World

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My Wilderness, draws heavily upon the recent events of World War II. Its central figure, a seventeen-year-old girl named Barbary, spent the war years in France, where she witnessed or was touched by a host of brutalities, including her stepfather’s murder by Resistance fighters who believed, wrongly, that he collaborated regularly with the Nazis. After the war, Barbary moves to London to live with her father, a wealthy barrister. She studies art and tries to start a more ordered life. As Macaulay repeatedly emphasizes, however, the ruins of war still dominate London: Blocks and blocks of buildings have been shattered, and so have innumerable lives. Thus, Barbary and her brother Raoul eventually fall in with a group of young Londoners who have been similarly affected by the recent violence and chaos and who spend their days wandering around in the city’s many ruins, their energies focused on petty crime. During the war, Macaulay’s small flat was itself destroyed by German bombs; she lost all of her letters, manuscripts, and books. Certainly, much of her sense of loss and despair informs The World My Wilderness. The Towers of Trebizond · The Towers of Trebizond, Macaulay’s final novel, begins with the delightful and arresting words, “Take my camel, dear.” This work, which is set principally in Turkey, along the Mediterranean coast, seems at first glance to be an outrageous and funny farce in the manner of Going Abroad. For example, one of its main characters, the camel-riding Aunt Dot, is immediately recognizable as yet another of Macaulay’s eccentric—and harmless—fanatics. Her goal is to spread singlehandedly the doctrine of female emancipation throughout Islamic Turkey, while along the way bringing wayward Muslims into the Anglican fold. She is accompanied on her trip by a priggish, relic-scavenging High Church priest, and by a niece, Laurie, who relates the novel’s action. Like many of Macaulay’s earlier novels, The Towers of Trebizond pokes gentle, rather affectionate fun at zealous churchgoers. Like many of her novels, it displays a subtle, complex, and rhythmical prose style that sometimes dazes and more frequently dazzles. Laurie, its narrator, is certainly very much in keeping with Macaulay’s earlier central figures. She is witty, intelligent, and widely read. In the final analysis, Laurie’s observations on many serious matters give The Towers of Trebizond a far less farcical tone than Going Abroad. Indeed, Laurie—Macaulay’s last heroine—is, perhaps appropriately, her most autobiographical. She not only freely expresses a mixture of guilt and joy at having maintained a long and intimate relationship with a married man, but, like Macaulay after Gerald O’Donovan’s death, she repeatedly reveals a deep desire to return to the Church that she denied for so many years. Even more revealing, however, is her zest for life. Like Macaulay, Laurie has read and traveled and carefully observed because, as she points out, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again. Brian Murray Other major works POETRY: The Two Blind Countries, 1914; Three Days, 1919. NONFICTION: A Casual Commentary, 1925; Catchwords and Claptrap, 1926; Some

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Religious Elements in English Literature, 1931; Milton, 1934, revised 1957; Personal Pleasures, 1935; The Writings of E. M. Forster, 1938; Life Among the English, 1942; They Went to Portugal, 1946; Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal, 1949; Pleasure of Ruins, 1953; Letters to a Friend, 1950-1952, 1961; Last Letters to a Friend, 1952-1958, 1962; Letters to a Sister from Rose Macaulay, 1964. Bibliography Bensen, Alice. Rose Macaulay. New York: Twayne, 1969. This standard account is especially valuable because there are few books devoted to Macaulay. Offers a survey of her widely varied output: novels, short stories, historical works, travel books, essays, and book reviews. Her tolerance for and sympathy with others are brought out. Macaulay belonged to the species of “gifted amateurs,” and her carefully wrought style was sometimes too arch. Crawford, Alice. Paradise Pursued: The Novels of Rose Macaulay. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Explores Macaulay’s beginnings as an Edwardian novelist, her World War I novels, her treatment of women and civilization in the 1920’s, her novels of the 1930’s, and her final novels. Includes appendices on Macaulay’s childhood reading and on other writings. Provides notes and bibliography. Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. London: John Murray, 1991. The standard biography of Macaulay, written with grace and sensitivity to the life and the work. See especially the introduction, “Three Voices of Rose Macaulay.” Includes notes and bibliography. Passty, Jeanette. Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of Rose Macaulay. London: Associated University Presses, 1988. Sees Macaulay as a feminist pioneer who repudiated the traditional pattern of the male-dominated family in favor of an androgynous ideal, arguing that people should pursue their aims in a gender-free way. Gives an account of Macaulay’s work, the most comprehensive available, with the feminist theme always in the forefront. Her correspondence with Father Hamilton Johnston and its importance for her work receive detailed attention. Smith, Constance Babington. Rose Macaulay. London: Collins, 1972. The standard (and only) biography of Macaulay. Presents a detailed account of her family background and sheds light on key episodes in her life, such as her unrequited love for Rupert Brooke. Gives synopses of most of her major works. A useful feature is an appendix that contains tributes to Macaulay from a number of her friends, including Harold Nicolson and Rosamond Lehmann.

Sir Thomas Malory Sir Thomas Malory

Born: Warwickshire (?), England; early fifteenth century Died: London (?), England; March 14, 1471 Principal long fiction · Le Morte d’Arthur, 1485. Other literary forms · Le Morte d’Arthur is the only work attributed to Sir Thomas Malory. It was published in 1485 by William Caxton, England’s first printer. The 1485 edition, for centuries the only source of Malory’s tale, is a continuous narrative of twenty-one “books,” though at the end of some books that clearly complete a larger grouping or “tale,” Caxton included “explicits” (concluding comments) by the author. These explicits indicate that Malory may have intended the work to be organized in a fashion somewhat different from that of the published version. A manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur discovered in 1934 at Winchester Cathedral indicates that Malory did not write it as a single long work, but rather as a series of eight separate tales, each of which deals with some aspect or character of the Arthurian legend. Achievements · Any assessment of Malory’s achievement as a literary artist is inevitably bound up with a judgment of the form of Le Morte d’Arthur: Is it a single story or eight separate tales? As critic Stephen Knight points out, this question of form is central to critical inquiry, for “if we are not clear whether we have before us one book or eight, or something in between, then our attitude towards the work or works must be obscure and tentative.” That Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur should be considered a series of separate “works” is argued forcefully by Eugène Vinaver, editor of the modern standard edition, conspicuously entitled The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947, 3 volumes). Vinaver argues in the introduction to his edition that the unity that scholars have found in Le Morte d’Arthur was imposed by Caxton, not intended by Malory, and his edited text, based on the Winchester manuscript, restores many passages excised by Caxton in the 1485 edition. Vinaver’s opinion has been challenged by several critics, most notably by R. M. Lumiansky, who has argued that even in the Winchester manuscript one can see a unity of design and a progression from early to late tales, suggesting that Malory himself conceived of his eight tales as forming a single “work.” Unfortunately, although this issue has been debated at length, it has not been settled with any real certainty, and any final judgment of Malory’s talents as an original artist may remain in abeyance for some time. Yet, whether one considers the Caxton edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, where a stronger sense of unity is prevalent, or the Winchester manuscript, from which the argument for eight separate tales can be made more forcefully, one can see an unmistakable unity imparted by the ordering of the tales. Malory’s story moves progressively from the birth of Arthur to his assumption of kingship and defeat of all opposition, through the numerous stories depicting the adventures of knights in service to him, to his death at the hands of his traitorous, illegitimate son, Mordred. This kind of chronological progress is noticeably absent in the romances which Malory used as sources for his work. In the romances, especially that amorphous collection known as the French Vulgate Cycle, from which Malory borrowed much of his materials, there is often little sense of 632

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direction or completeness to the knights’ adventures. From the modern reader’s point of view, Malory deserves special credit for unifying these disparate tales and arranging them in an order that lends motivation to certain characters’ actions and—perhaps more important—gives the reader a sense of the cause-and-effect relationship between certain incidents that is lacking in the “French books” from which Malory says he has “drawn out” his tales. Malory’s achievement in condensing and organizing his sources has also been a matter of debate. Nineteenth century scholars, possessed of newly discovered Arthurian manuscripts of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, were divided on the issue. Several noted medievalists branded Malory as a mere “compiler”; others, equally respected, praised him for his originality. Perhaps the most laudatory comment was offered by George Saintsbury, who claimed that in Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory made a significant advance over the romance tradition by developing a firm sense of narrative purpose, akin to that of the modern novelist. Saintsbury sees Malory exhibiting “the sense of grasp, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central pulse and nerve of the story.” Saintsbury and others, notably W. P. Ker, also praised Malory for his strong, original prose style. T. S. Eliot has called Malory “a kind of crude Northern Homer,” a fine prose stylist. Regardless of the criticisms leveled at Malory’s tale as an artistic achievement in its own right, there can be little question about the importance of Le Morte d’Arthur in literary history. Since its publication, it has stood as the preeminent English-language document to which readers of succeeding centuries have turned to learn of the Arthurian legend. Caxton’s edition was followed by two others early in the sixteenth century, attesting to Malory’s immediate popularity. Intellectuals during the Renaissance may have agreed with Roger Ascham, who commented in The Scholemaster (1570) that the chief pleasure of Le Morte d’Arthur lay in two points, “open manslaughter and bold bawdy.” Nevertheless, the appearance of still more editions of the work and the numerous references to the Arthurian legend in the literature of the period offer further proof of the influence of Malory’s work long after its publication. When English society developed a renewed interest in chivalric materials and especially in the Arthurian legend, Le Morte d’Arthur was the work to which writers from Sir Walter Scott to Alfred, Lord Tennyson turned as the locus classicus of the legend. It was by comparison to Malory that Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885) and the Arthurian poems of A. C. Swinburne, William Morris, and Matthew Arnold were judged by their contemporaries, and all openly acknowledged their debt to the author of Le Morte d’Arthur. In part, Le Morte d’Arthur’s influence as a source for Arthurian adventure and chivalric virtue may be attributed to the good fortune of its having been printed, while hundreds or even thousands of Arthurian tales existed only in manuscript until the late nineteenth or even the twentieth century. Nevertheless, even after scholarly and popular bookshelves began to be filled with other versions, Malory’s work continued to be regarded as the premier English rendition of the Arthurian story. In the twentieth century, T. H. White, who had at his disposal both medieval and modern accounts of the legend numbering in the hundreds, turned to Malory for inspiration in writing what is no doubt the most important twentieth century Arthurian tale, The Once and Future King. John Steinbeck, whose accomplishments as a novelist earned him the Nobel Prize, began a modern adaptation of Malory because he wanted to bring to “impatient” modern readers the “wonder and magic” of Le Morte d’Arthur. While the literary purist may question the value of modernizing Malory, one cannot

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quarrel too much with Steinbeck’s motive, for he speaks truly when he observes that these stories “are alive even in those of us who have not read them.” To write a work that becomes a part of the cultural heritage of one’s country, and a classic of one’s language and literature, is an achievement few writers accomplish; Malory is one of the exceptions. Biography · Though it is clear that “Sir Thomas Malory, knight prisoner” wrote Le Morte d’Arthur, there is serious debate about which Thomas Malory actually authored the work. Records of fifteenth century England contain references to more than a dozen Thomas Malorys. Most modern scholars believe that the author of Le Morte d’Arthur was Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell, Warwickshire, in southern England, but there are other candidates, most notably Thomas Malory of Hutton and Studley, Yorkshire, in the north. That Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell was the author of Le Morte d’Arthur was first proposed in 1894 by George L. Kittredge, who examined both the Caxton text and historical records and deduced that the Newbold Revell knight met all the necessary criteria for authorship. From the explicit at the end of book 21 of Le Morte d’Arthur, Kittredge concluded that Thomas Malory was a knight, that he was in prison (he prays for “good delyveraunce”), and that the book was concluded in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV, that is, March, 1469, to March, 1470. Extant records indicated that the Malory from Newbold Revell was the son of a gentleman and therefore probably received the education requisite to produce the work. He had been exposed to knightly virtues while in service to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who was said to have embodied the knightly ideals of the age. He is reported to have died on March 14, 1471, after the terminus ad quem of the book’s composition. Kittredge’s identification of Malory was reinforced when, in the early 1920’s, Edward Cobb found an indictment consisting of eight charges against the Newbold Revell knight. Although it is not clear that Malory was ever found guilty on any of the charges, it is certain that he spent time in jail; in fact, it appears that between 1460 and 1471, the Newbold Revell knight spent most of his time at Newgate prison. His presence there would explain his having access to the books upon which he based Le Morte d’Arthur, because Newgate was situated near a monastery with an excellent library. Malory may well have bribed his keepers to allow him to borrow the books. The Winchester manuscript, discovered in 1934, contains several new explicits that provide additional information about the author. For example, at the end of the “Tale of Sir Gareth,” Malory petitions his readers to pray that God will send him “good delyveraunce sone [soon] and hastely.” Even more clear is the explicit at the end of the “Tale of King Arthur,” in which the author says that “this was drawyn by a knyght presoner sir Thomas Malleorre.” On this evidence, the knight from Newbold Revell has emerged as the leading candidate for the authorship of Le Morte d’Arthur. The primary arguments discrediting the Newbold Revell knight have been made by William Matthews in The Ill-Framed Knight (1965). According to Matthews, no evidence suggests that this Malory had any familiarity with northern poetry, yet the dialect of Le Morte d’Arthur and its English sources (especially the alliterative Morte Arthure) are clearly northern. Further, none of the references to real places (many are mentioned in the text) are to locations near Warwickshire. Matthews contends, too, that it is doubtful that a criminal would have had access under any circumstances to

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the library near Newgate, and that there is no evidence that the monastery’s library had the books upon which Le Morte d’Arthur is based. At the time the work was completed, Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell could have been seventy-five years old, much too old to have completed such an arduous task. Finally, the Newbold Revell knight’s political alliances were Yorkist, and Le Morte d’Arthur is distinctly Lancastrian in outlook. Kittredge had also cited two documents to support his claim, but this documentary evidence is discounted by Matthews. Matthews says that Kittredge’s Malory was too old to have participated in a 1462 winter siege in which a Malory is recorded to have taken part. Similarly, the Newbold Revell knight could not have been the one named in the pardon made by Edward IV in 1468, since the pardon applied to political prisoners, and the Warwickshire man was a common criminal. Matthews has proposed a second candidate, Thomas Malory of Hutton and Studley in Yorkshire. This Malory was a member of an eminent northern family; it is realistic to assume that he could read French, had access to the necessary source documents, was familiar with northern poetry and places, and spoke the northern dialect prominent in Le Morte d’Arthur. In addition, he supported the Lancastrian cause. The objections to his candidacy for authorship are that he is not described in family genealogies as a knight or chevalier, and there is no record of his ever being a prisoner. Matthews argues, however, that these are not serious discrepancies. Many men who could do so did not claim the title of knight. That there is no record of the Yorkshire Malory being a prisoner is also explainable. Although records abound detailing the imprisonment of criminals, it was not a fifteenth century custom to keep records of prisoners of war. These prisoners often had some measure of freedom and several wrote books while in captivity. It seems more likely that a work the scope of Le Morte d’Arthur would be written under these conditions than under those imposed on criminals. Further, the expression “knight-prisoner,” used by Malory to refer to himself in the explicits, is applied in Le Morte d’Arthur to Lionel, Lancelot, and Tristram when they become prisoners of war. Similarly, “good deliverance” is used when Malory speaks of Tristram’s trials in prison. Thus, the term “knight-prisoner” is used in a somewhat complimentary fashion as the epithet of a prisoner of war, not a common criminal. The claim for Thomas Malory of Studley and Hutton rests on these grounds. Other candidates have been proposed as the author of Le Morte d’Arthur, but few can be considered seriously. Thomas Malorys appear in the records of English courts and parishes as laborers, armigers—and one as a member of Parliament (though he is mentioned only once, and nothing else is known about him). What is known for certain about the author of Le Morte d’Arthur can only be gleaned from the text of the work itself, and then verified—with much conjecture—by searching the records of fifteenth century England. Analysis · The modern reader approaching Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur may be perplexed at first reading, for while the story of Arthur and his knights has the appearance of a novel, it is certainly far removed from representatives of the genre with which today’s reader is more familiar. Though there is an overarching structure to the work, provided by the chronology of Arthur’s reign, individual stories often seem mere appendages that add little to the major plot and seldom seem to have concrete beginnings or endings themselves. The “fault” for this apparent lapse into chaos lies not so much with Malory (though too close a reliance on his sources does

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tend to cause the story to branch off in several directions that lead nowhere), but rather with the reader who is not familiar with medieval techniques of storytelling. It is not uncommon to find medieval romances that simply begin in medias res and seem to end there as well. That form of narrative technique has been supplanted in today’s literary world by the “well-made story,” whose beginning, middle, and end are clearly defined, and whose parts are clearly integrated into the whole. The medieval audience demanded neither tight concentration on a single story line nor analysis of cause-andeffect relationships; to appreciate Malory and his achievement in the chain of events leading to the modern novel one must first appreciate that for writers before him, and for Malory himself, emphasis on the event itself, rather than on its consequences or on the role of characters, was of primary importance. Malory, in fact, was one of the first writers to delve into the minds of his characters and achieve a certain degree of verisimilitude in presenting the people who appear in his story. Malory lacks originality in the modern sense, since almost everything he recounts in Le Morte d’Arthur is taken from medieval romances popular for centuries before his. His accomplishments as a storyteller and his claim to literary greatness lie in the artistry with which he wove together the elements of the Arthurian legend and in the insight he presents into the meaning of the story both for his contemporaries and for readers throughout the centuries. Beneath the surface chaos of the tales that make up the work, Malory has presented a unified vision of a society in triumph and in decay; his is a complex work with a complex purpose. As D. S. Brewer explains in his introduction to Malory: The Morte Darthur (1968), the work was “a part of the movement that transformed the medieval knight into the English gentleman.” Through this story of the “ideal society,” Malory presents the enduring dilemma of man’s attempt to reconcile individual demands with those of the society in which he lives and those of the God he worships. Le Morte d’Arthur · Le Morte d’Arthur consists of eight tales, which Caxton divided into twenty-one books in his edition. The story itself divides into three large sections. The first, consisting of books 1 through 5 in the Caxton text, details the coming of Arthur and the establishment of the Round Table. It begins with the adulterous conception of the King, tells the now popular story of the sword in the stone, and continues with an account of the early battles and adventures of Arthur and his knights in their effort to subdue external threats to the realm. Always the careful craftsman where larger issues of plot and motivation are concerned, Malory skillfully interweaves into this larger story details that become important in later episodes: the “dolorous stroke” wielded by Balin that initiates in a curious way the Holy Grail quest, the hatred felt by Morgan le Fay for her brother Arthur, and the power of Excalibur and its symbolic significance. In the final book of this section, Arthur is hailed as the conqueror of Rome and welcomed into the city by the pope himself; the last great external challenge to this new order of society has been met and overcome. The main books of Le Morte d’Arthur (11-17) deal with the adventures of Arthur’s knights. Included are tales of the prowess of Sir Lancelot, the dedicated idealism of Sir Gareth (“Beaumains”), and the accomplishments and deceptions of Sir Tristram and his paramour, La Beal Isould. In these accounts, the court of King Mark is established as a kind of counterculture to that of Arthur, and the reader is made to feel the imminent doom that awaits Arthur’s kingdom should the knights falter in their loyalty to their leader and the virtues he upholds. The final books of this section recount the quest of the Sangreal (Holy Grail), a devastating undertaking that strips

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Arthur of many of his knights and exposes the shortcomings of many of those considered the best in the realm. The quest marks the beginning of the end of the Round Table, for through vain pursuit of this holy artifact, the knights reveal their spiritual imperfection and perhaps their inherent imperfectability. The third and final section of the work tells of the decay of Arthur’s kingdom, a process that begins when the knights return from the unsuccessful Grail quest. Lancelot, by his actions, reveals that his dedication to the Queen is greater than his devotion to God, his personal needs more important than his public duties. Arthur becomes unable to effect a suitable compromise between public and private life, and as incident after incident forces him to choose between his queen and his knights, he reluctantly is forced to opt for the latter. His sad statement after the civil war has begun in his kingdom reflects his inability to maintain a balance between his private and public lives: “Much more I am sorrier for my good knights’ loss than for the loss of my fair queen; for queens I might have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company.” This conflict between public and private virtues, a universal condition of humankind that Malory perceived at the heart of the Arthurian tale that he was transcribing, is the cause of the tragic development in the story. The essence of the conflict Malory portrays in Le Morte d’Arthur has been described by D. S. Brewer as “the divergence of the values of honour and goodness from each other.” The concept of honor is the paramount public virtue, informing the code of chivalry and motivating actions of those who were proponents of knighthood. Goodness, on the other hand, is a private virtue, and in Le Morte d’Arthur it is specifically identified as a Christian attribute. Hence, the conflict between honor and goodness is elevated beyond the level of individuals struggling within themselves to choose the proper path in life; it becomes, under Malory’s skillful handling of individual tales from Arthurian romances, a larger conflict between two modes of living—the way of the good knight and the way of the good Christian. The public virtue of honor had been the hallmark of chivalry for centuries before Malory brought it under scrutiny in Le Morte d’Arthur, and his characters all place great emphasis on winning and maintaining it. The promise of honor brings the knights to court; the chance to increase one’s honor motivates them to accept the most impossible quests and to battle against the most insurmountable odds. The preservation of honor demands strict obedience to one’s lord, unswerving fidelity to one’s lady, and unshakable loyalty to one’s brother knights. By striving for honor, the knights make the Round Table great, and paradoxically, by striving to maintain their honor, they destroy it. In the society that Malory’s Arthur imagines and attempts to build, honor and goodness are inseparable. In a passage not in any of Malory’s sources, the King charges all his knights “never to do outrageousity nor murder, and always to flee treason [that is, to avoid committing it]; also, by no mean to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy, upon pain of forfeiture of their worship . . . and always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succour, upon pain of death.” By their honor, the knights are committed to doing good deeds. As the story progresses, however, the requirements of honor and goodness begin to diverge, and the inability of the knights and ladies to reconcile the two leads to the tragic demise of Arthur’s society. Malory highlights the growing divergence throughout a number of stories in Le Morte d’Arthur, but in none more clearly than “The Poisoned Apple” (book 18,

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chapters 1-7). In this vignette, Guinevere is accused by Sir Mador of poisoning Sir Patrice, his cousin. Mador demands justice: Either the queen is to be executed, or her champion must defeat Mador in battle. Arthur cannot fight, as he is to sit in judgment of the case, and Lancelot is not at court. Clearly this is a matter of honor—the king’s lady is to be shamed, bringing dishonor on the entire court—and yet all of the knights present at court suspect Guinevere and refuse to fight in her behalf. In desperation, Arthur and Guinevere send for Sir Bors. They appeal to him to champion the queen not because she is to be shamed, and through her the court, but rather because he has an obligation to uphold the honor of his kinsman Lancelot, who no doubt would fight for the queen were he at court. Bors tells Arthur he will fight “for my Lord Launcelot’s sake, and for your sake.” Bors then appeals to other knights, claiming that “it were great shame to us all” should the wife of Arthur be “shamed openly”; he is rebuked by many who, while acknowledging their respect for the king, have no love for Guinevere because she is a “destroyer of good knights.” Though Lancelot eventually arrives in time to fight for Guinevere and save her from this charge, of which she is innocent, the implication here—borne out later in Le Morte d’Arthur—is that the prowess that wins honor may also allow one to win when the cause for which one is fighting is on the wrong side of justice; it might may indeed prevail for evil instead of goodness. This sad fact is brought home to the reader in Malory’s account of Lancelot’s battles for the queen when she is accused of adultery. Lancelot is forced to come to Guinevere’s rescue, even at the expense of creating strife within Arthur’s realm, because his honor is at stake. “Whether ye did right or wrong,” Bors advises him, “it is now your part to hold with the queen, that she be not slain . . . for and she so die the shame shall be yours.” In the final chapters of Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory presents Lancelot fighting reluctantly against truth to preserve his honor. Arthur, too, fights reluctantly, even though he is on the side of truth, for he would rather preserve his noble society of knights than save his queen, and he appears willing to be cuckolded rather than have the Round Table destroyed by internal strife. The clear dichotomy between knightly and Christian virtues is made evident at several points in Le Morte d’Arthur, but Malory makes his most forceful statement about the problem in “The Maid of Astolat” (book 18, chapters 9-20). Lancelot, fighting in disguise against his own kinsmen and the other knights of the Round Table, is wounded and taken to a hermitage to heal. The hermit attending him asks who this knight is, and when he learns it is one who fought against Arthur, remarks: “I have seen the day . . . I would have loved him the worse because he was against my lord, King Arthur, for sometime I was one of the fellowship of the Round Table, but I thank God now I am otherwise disposed.” The hermit has renounced his former calling, perhaps because he has seen where the path of honor leads and has adopted a new path and a new Lord. Lancelot, who recovers from his wound while at the hermitage, comes to a momentary realization of his folly and bitterly acknowledges that his “pride” has led to his being thrown into this lowly condition. Only much later, however, does he abandon the pursuit of honor through the chivalric code, and by then Arthur is dead, Guinevere has entered a nunnery, and the kingdom is in ruins. The sense that one gets from reading Malory’s account of the last days of Arthur’s realm is that even the most chivalric society is doomed to failure, and that humanity’s only hope lies in adopting values and goals that transcend worldly ideals. What, then, has Malory accomplished in telling this tale? In the strife that tears Arthur’s kingdom apart, fifteenth century readers saw mirrored their own griefs over

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the demise of feudal England, ravaged by the bloody struggle for the English throne that became known as the Wars of the Roses. Le Morte d’Arthur offered these readers faith, in a curious way, because in his work Malory has shown that, despite the collapse of an ideal society, lives and societies continue. Even in their failures, the characters of Le Morte d’Arthur appear as larger-than-life personages who speak to the reader of the potential greatness of humankind. If honor can somehow be wedded to goodness, if the public virtues that gave the knights their sense of purpose can be married to the private virtues that cause humans to rise above societal bonds when necessary, the ideal society can be created. To his contemporary readers, Malory’s story no doubt offered this note of special hope. Thus, Le Morte d’Arthur speaks not only to its fifteenth century readers, but through the story of Arthur and his knights, Malory also speaks to all peoples of all nations and times of the possibility of greatness, the inevitability of failure, and the glory that humankind achieves by striving for the impossible. Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sarah B. Kovel Bibliography Archibald, Elizabeth, and A. S. G. Edwards, eds. A Companion to Malory. Woodbridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1996. Part of the Arthurian Studies series, this volume examines the Arthurian legend in Malory’s seminal work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Field, P. J. C. The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1993. A very detailed, scholarly retelling of Malory’s life. Recommended for advanced students and scholars. Ihle, Sandra Ness. Malory’s Grail Quest: Invention and Adaptation in Medieval Prose Romance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Examines “The Tale of the Sangreal” from Le Morte d’Arthur, looking both to its thirteenth century French source and to Malory’s own structural and thematic adaptation. Gives insight into medieval literary theory and the underlying intentions of Malory’s distinctive Grail quest. McCarthy, Terence. An Introduction to Malory. Reprint. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1991. McCarthy provides very ample discussions of how to read Malory, exploring, in depth, characters such as Lancelot, Tristram, and Arthur and the world of romance that Malory creates. McCarthy takes many different critical approaches, and he includes a section of background and biography as well as a very useful bibliographical essay. ____________. Reading “The Morte Darthur.” Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1988. A study intended to assist the newcomer to Malory’s work. Follows Eugène Vinaver’s division of this work into eight books. Presents various contexts through which to view Le Morte d’Arthur. A useful and accessible reader. Merrill, Robert. Sir Thomas Malory and the Cultural Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. An original inquiry into the psychology of the knights of Arthurian romance and the impact of the Round Table on their lives. Traces the formation of medieval institutions and explores the personal and social tensions in the Middle Ages that led to the Protestant Reformation. Parins, Marylyn Jackson. Malory: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1988. An important collection of early criticism and commentary on Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in chronological order, beginning with William Caxton’s preface to the

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first edition and ending with remarks by influential literary critic George Saintsbury in 1912. Riddy, Felicity. Sir Thomas Malory. New York: E. J. Brill, 1987. An excellent critical commentary that examines Le Morte d’Arthur from a number of perspectives. This scholarly work contains much useful information.

Charles Robert Maturin Charles Robert Maturin

Born: Dublin, Ireland; September 25, 1780 Died: Dublin, Ireland; October 30, 1824 Principal long fiction · Fatal Revenge: Or, The Family of Montorio, 1807; The Wild Irish Boy, 1808; The Milesian Chief, 1812; Women: Or, Pour et Contre, 1818; Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820; The Albigenses, 1824. Other literary forms · In addition to his novels, Charles Robert Maturin also wrote plays, three of which were performed and published during his lifetime: Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand, a Tragedy (1816), Manuel (1817), and Fredolfo (1819). A fourth, Osmyn, the Renegade: Or, The Siege of Salerno, a Tragedy, written sometime between 1817 and 1821, was produced in Dublin in 1830. It was never published in its entirety; excerpts were printed in The Edinburgh Literary Journal (April 24, 1830). Of these plays, only Bertram was financially successful. When it first appeared, it was one of the most talked about plays of the season, and today it is noted for being one of the first dramatic portrayals of the brooding, sinned against, and sinning figure who has come to be called the Byronic hero. Two short fictional pieces were published posthumously: “Leixlip Castle: An Irish Family Legend” appeared in The Literary Souvenir: Or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance of 1825, and “The Sybil’s Prophecy: A Dramatic Fragment” was printed in the 1826 edition of the same publication. Both these pieces are in the gothic style. Achievements · Maturin is best known for the fifth of his six novels, Melmoth the Wanderer. Although, when it first appeared, many critics viewed it merely as an unfortunate attempt to revive the gothic novel, a form earlier made popular by such authors as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, scholars now consider Melmoth the Wanderer one of the finest examples of its genre. It is judged to be not only a culmination of the gothic novel but also a forerunner of the psychological novels of such writers as Fyodor Dostoevski and Franz Kafka. Although Maturin’s handling of narrative structure is often awkward and confusing, and although he borrowed so closely from the works of others that he can be accused of plagiarism, his novels are original in their depiction of extreme states of mind, especially those engendered by fear. Maturin himself was aware of his major strength. In the prefatory pages of The Milesian Chief, he wrote: “If I possess any talent, it is that of darkening the gloomy, and of deepening the sad; of painting life in extremes, and representing those struggles of passion when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed.” His settings of mazelike madhouses and dungeons lead the reader into the dark places of the human soul. This particular aspect of his novels fascinated and influenced many other authors. Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Honoré de Balzac, and Charles Baudelaire were all impressed by Maturin’s attempt to penetrate the mystery of evil. Critical attention has been given to Maturin’s role in Irish literary history. In such novels as The Milesian Chief and The Wild Irish Boy, descriptions of Irish settings and character 641

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Biography · Charles Robert Maturin was born in 1780, one of several children born to William Maturin and his wife, Fidelia Watson. The Maturin family was of French descent. One of their ancestors was a Huguenot priest who was forced to leave France because of religious persecution during the reign of Louis XIV. This aspect of his family history strongly impressed the young Maturin, and Library of Congress throughout his life he was fond of relating how his ancestors had suffered for their faith. He himself was strongly anti-Catholic and especially opposed to the rule of monastic life, which he considered dangerously repressive. His novels contain many scenes and descriptions of monasteries as sadistic places where virtue turns to vice. When in Ireland, Maturin’s family became closely connected with the Anglican Church. Maturin’s great-grandfather, Peter Maturin, was Dean of Killala from 1724 to 1741, and his grandfather, Gabriel James Maturin, succeeded Jonathan Swift as Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin in 1745. Following this tradition, Maturin entered Trinity College in 1795 to study theology, and in 1803 he took holy orders. In the same year, he married Henrietta Kingsbury, a daughter of the Archdeacon of Killala. From all reports, the couple were well suited and happily married. After ordination, Maturin served as curate in Loughrea, Galway, for two years. He then returned to Dublin to become curate of St. Peter’s, a position he held for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, his small income from this curacy was insufficient to support his family, especially after his father was accused of fraud and dismissed from his position with the Irish post office in 1809. Later, he was cleared and given another position, but for a time the family struggled in severe poverty. In fact, Maturin was continually troubled by financial difficulties. To supplement his income, he ran a school to prepare boys for college, and later he turned to novel writing. The prefaces of his novels and the styles of romance he chose to employ indicate that he wanted very much to become a popular writer. Because he realized that many of his parishioners and superiors might not approve of a minister writing novels, he used the pseudonym of Dennis Jasper Murphy, publishing three novels under that name. When it was discovered that he was the author of the play Bertram, a play involving adultery and an amoral hero, he was for a time in danger of losing his curacy. Apparently, friends intervened to soothe the necessary bishops. After this

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incident, since his identity was known, he published his next novels and plays under his own name. It is quite possible that his literary activities did prevent his advancement in the clerical profession. There were those who interpreted the beliefs of his characters, some of which were atheistic and heretical, as Maturin’s own. His novels did gain him one very influential friend, Sir Walter Scott. In 1810, Scott wrote a generally favorable review of Fatal Revenge for The Quarterly Review. Encouraged, Maturin wrote to him, and a correspondence was begun which lasted until Maturin’s death. Although the two men never actually met, Scott did assist Maturin with encouragement and advice, and he was instrumental in Maturin’s one financial success; he recommended Bertram to George Gordon, Lord Byron, who was then responsible for play selection at Drury Lane Theatre. Byron was favorably impressed, and the famous actor Edmund Kean agreed to play the lead. The play’s success earned Maturin one thousand pounds, most of which paid a relative’s debt. Earlier, Maturin had been able to sell the copyright of his third novel, The Milesian Chief, for eighty pounds (the first two novels he had printed at his own expense), and later he was advanced five hundred pounds for Melmoth the Wanderer, but his literary efforts never brought the long-sought and often desperately needed financial stability. Up until his death, he continually tried to write in a style that would sell. The Albigenses is a historical romance, a type Scott had established and made quite popular. This novel was the first in what was to be a trilogy depicting European manners in ancient, medieval, and modern times. Soon after The Albigenses was completed, Maturin died in his home on October 30, 1824, apparently after a long period of ill health. The exact cause of his death is not known. He left a wife and four children who were still in desperate need of financial assistance. Analysis · In his preface to Fatal Revenge, Charles Robert Maturin stresses the fear of the unknown as essential in man’s emotional and spiritual life: “It is not the weak and trivial impulse of the nursery, to be forgotten and scorned by manhood. It is the aspiration of a spirit; ‘it is the passion of immortals,’ that dread and desire of their final habitation.” In one of his sermons, he focuses on the same theme: The very first sounds of childhood are tales of another life—foolishly are they called tales of superstition; for, however disguised by the vulgarity of narration, and the distortion of fiction, they tell him of those whom he is hastening from the threshold of life to join, the inhabitants of the invisible world, with whom he must soon be, and be for ever. These quotations indicate a major aspect of Maturin’s perception of human existence; the haunted and the sacred are interwoven and share a common ground. Human fascination with the supernatural, the world of demons and ghosts, springs from the same source as the desire to believe in salvation and a return to paradise. In fact, the road to salvation leads through the dark places of the soul where individuals must admit their fallen state, their own guilt. The theme of guilt is common in all of Maturin’s novels. His major characters must struggle with the serpents in their own hearts, their own original sin. In keeping with this theme, the settings of his novels are generally those of a fallen world; dungeons and underground passages are common backgrounds for the action. Even in those novels that contain descriptions of more natural surroundings, storms and earthquakes are common occurrences, always reminding people that they have been exiled from paradise. Harmony with nature, with humanity, and with God has been lost.

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Maturin develops this theme of guilt, which brings exile and separation, through his handling of character. The divided nature of humanity is represented by the pairing of characters, especially brothers: Ippolito and Annibal in Fatal Revenge, Connal and Desmond in The Milesian Chief, Paladour and Amirald in The Albigenses. These brothers are described in such a way as to suggest one identity fragmented into two opposing selves. Ippolito is passionate, Annibal rational; Desmond is the soft flower, Connal the proud oak. Often a character is torn in two opposing directions and does not know how to reconcile them: Connal between his Irish pride and his realization that the Irish peasants are not yet ready to govern themselves; Charles in Women between his love for Eva, a shy quiet girl, and Zaira, a worldly and more accomplished woman. At times, a character seems pursued by a dark, sinister double: Montorio by Schemoli in Fatal Revenge; Alonzo by the parricide in Melmoth the Wanderer. By far the most striking and powerful example of this is the character of the wanderer himself. Melmoth represents the potential for evil which can be found in all humans. In developing Melmoth’s character, Maturin echoes the warning in Genesis against too much curiosity about the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Melmoth has sold his soul for increased knowledge; his sin is one of “pride and intellectual glorying,” the sin of Lucifer and of the first mortals. As Maturin’s characters wander in a fallen world, little guidance is provided. Especially weak and ineffective are the parental figures. In fact, a distinguishing trait of this fallen world is the disintegration of the family. In all of Maturin’s six novels, there are parents who are woefully irresponsible. They are often self-centered, putting their own greedy desires before their children’s welfare, or they seek to expiate their own guilt by placing the burden of their sin upon their children. This selfish turning inward and transference of guilt to another is also found in Maturin’s representations of larger structures of authority, especially the Catholic Church. As the divided soul wanders in a fallen world, parent and church offer little hope. Maturin reserves the role of spiritual guide for the female characters who either love or are loved by the hero (such love is not always fulfilled or requited). Often his women are idealized creatures who can reconcile within themselves all conflicting opposites: in Melmoth the Wanderer, Immalee embodies passion and purity; in The Albigenses, Genevieve is a “mixture of strengh and purity that is never to be found but in woman.” Even if a woman finds herself hurled into a world of experience and corruption, as Zaira is in Women, her heart remains pure. At times, Maturin uses his female characters to symbolize self-sacrificing love that, although never placing the beloved before God, does place the beloved before the self. Despite Maturin’s emphasis on such redeeming love, however, when domestic happiness is found by his characters it seems contrived and imposed upon them by others. Maturin is undoubtedly at his best when depicting people lost and searching for wholeness, not in actually finding it. Fatal Revenge · Maturin titled his first novel The Family of Montorio, but the publisher changed the title to Fatal Revenge, hoping to attract readers who would be interested in a gothic tale. The novel is definitely written in the style of Ann Radcliffe—one of its central figures, a ghostlike monk who calls himself Schemoli, is clearly patterned after Radcliffe’s Schoedoni in 1797’s The Italian—but Maturin uses what he borrows to develop his own characteristic theme with originality. Although he follows Radcliffe’s technique of revealing the supernatural events as merely the result of disguise and charade, his descriptions of aberrant states of mind, to which all are subject, go

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beyond her handling of evil, and beyond the mere cataloging of grotesque horrors used by those writers who chose to imitate the more sensational style of Matthew Gregory Lewis. Annibal concludes after a brief period of solitary confinement that an “inward acquaintance” delights one not with tranquillity but, on the contrary, with “the grave of the mind.” In describing the anguish of his guilt, Montorio cries, “the worm within me never dieth; and every thought and object it converts into its own morbid food.” In Maturin, the evil within is quite real. The plot of this novel is complicated, and Maturin’s narrative is at times twisted and confusing. The tale relates the vengeful machinations of Schemoli, the once noble Count Montorio. He is seeking revenge for the wrongs his younger brother committed against him by manipulating Ippolito and Annibal, two young men he believes are his brother’s sons, into believing that they are fated to murder their father. In part, the novel’s convoluted structure works to Maturin’s advantage, for it helps create a nightmare quality that suits this theme of revenge and guilt. By the end of the novel, after several brutal crimes, it is clear that the words of Ippolito to the Inquisition accurately represent human nature as portrayed in the novel: “There is no human being fully known to another . . . [t]o his own consciousness and recollection, a man will not dare to reveal every thought that visits his mind; there are some which he almost hopes are concealed from the Deity.” The Wild Irish Boy · Maturin’s second novel, The Wild Irish Boy, although often following the style of the sentimental, regional novel, still has some of the same motifs and themes as those of the gothic Fatal Revenge. The novel does have many flaws and is probably Maturin’s poorest work: There are long pointless digressions, a decidedly awkward handling of point of view, and an ineffective mixture of literary techniques. Nevertheless, when Maturin touches upon those subjects that most fascinated him, he does so with some success. The novel’s most interesting character is Lady Montrevor, a strong, compelling woman who through her own foolish vanity allows herself to be trapped into a loveless marriage, thus sacrificing the sincere love of a good man. She must bear the anguish of her loss and the knowledge of her guilt. She does so grandly, wanting no man’s pity. Maturin often alludes to John Milton’s fallen angel when describing her: She is “no less than archangel ruined.” In many ways, she is a female Byronic hero who knows that evil is more than appearance. This type of female character clearly interested Maturin. Zaira in Women and Armida in The Milesian Chief are similarly delineated, and all three are quite unlike the sentimental heroines so typical of the other novelists of the day. The Milesian Chief · In Maturin’s third novel, The Milesian Chief, his interest in the anguish of the proud heart reveals itself in his portrayal of the hero as well as of the heroine. Connal, the Irish rebel, is the once-great angelic chief fallen among lesser spirits, an appropriate male partner for the melancholy Armida, who is shaded by a “proud dejection, like that of an abdicated monarch.” The novel is set in Ireland during an uprising against the British in 1798. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Maturin is more successful in handling narrative structure and point of view than in his previous works, and although the final scene, in which the four major characters (Connal, Armida, Desmond, and Ines) all die more or less at the same time in the same place, seems contrived, it is psychologically appropriate. Throughout the novel, these four personalities have been interwoven. Connal and Desmond function as opposites linked in one identity, and each female character both mirrors and comple-

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ments her male counterpart. Again, even when trying to write a regional novel, Maturin shows that his main interest lies in depicting the individual lost and searching for a way back to some longed-for paradise. Women: Or, Pour et Contre · In his preface to Women: Or, Pour et Contre, Maturin writes that he believes his previous novels failed to win popular approval because they lacked reality. He indicates that in this novel he has fashioned his characters to resemble those of “common life.” This intention does not, however, cause any significant change in his major theme. Again, through his three central characters, Maturin depicts human nature as torn and guilt ridden. Charles vacillates between his love for Eva, a shy innocent girl, and Zaira, the older, more accomplished woman. He is never able to commit himself fully to loving one or the other until it is too late. Only when Eva is dying of consumption brought on by Charles’s abandoning her for Zaira does he desert Zaira to return to Eva. Throughout the novel, Eva has struggled with her love for Charles, for in her heart it conflicts with her love for God. On her deathbed, she rejects Charles completely, refusing even to see him, and she dies at peace with God. Zaira undergoes a similar ordeal after Charles abandons her. She turns to God, hoping for consolation, yet she continues to see Charles’s image before her eyes. After Eva’s death, Charles dies from fever and madness. As the novel closes, Zaira becomes the primary figure of guilt. She lives on, always holding her hand to her heart, accusing herself of having murdered her daughter. She has discovered that Eva was the child taken from her at birth, the child she has been trying to find. This discovery is not made until it is too late to remedy the painful consequences of the mother and daughter loving the same man. Maturin concludes the novel with an image typical of his style: “The serpents that devour us, are generated out of our own vitals.” Melmoth the Wanderer · Although Maturin’s preface to Melmoth the Wanderer suggests that what follows will show the reader the enemy of humankind in the form of Satan, the tales within tales that constitute the novel show instead that this enemy lies within each individual. By combining the qualities of Faust, Mephistopheles, and the Wandering Jew, Maturin fashioned a hero-villain suitable for leading the reader through the maze of tales that takes him into the obscure recesses of the human soul. Melmoth is Maturin’s most compelling and powerful character; he is an embodiment of the dark side of each human being, the shadow that each person casts. Thus, it is particularly appropriate that in the narrative frame of these tales of human malignity, John Melmoth, who bears the same name as the mysterious wanderer, inherits the task of dealing with the molding manuscript that will set him on his own journey into the mystery of evil. His withdrawal at midnight into a closed room, sealed off from society, to read the manuscript, disregarding his uncle’s warning that perhaps he should destroy it unread, suggests a type of original sin. Indeed, as he pursues knowledge of the wanderer’s life, he learns that all people are potential agents of Satan. After all, Melmoth the Wanderer did not spring from the fires of hell, but from his own family. The hope that Maturin offers in his guilty state is to be found in self-sacrificing love; yet to love in this manner one must believe in the potential for goodness in humankind, the possibility of redemption. Melmoth is finally damned not because of his original bargain to sell his soul but because of his own misanthropy. He believes in nothing but the hostility and evil of human nature. Immalee, the island maiden

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who learns of suffering by loving him, was his hope. If he had chosen to trust in her love, seeing in it the essence of the greater self-sacrificing love of Christ, he might have been saved. The Albigenses · Maturin’s last work, The Albigenses, is a historical novel that focuses on the crusade in 1208 against the Albigenses, a Manichaean sect declared heretical by the Catholic Church. Maturin, however, follows the historical facts only roughly, altering events and chronology to suit plot and character. Again, he portrays two brothers, Paladour and Amirald, and their two loves, Isebelle and Genevieve. Although the theme of the fragmented self is not as predominant as in his previous novels, it is present. Paladour and Amirald were separated at birth, and for most of the novel neither knows the other is his brother; they are characterized in such a way as to suggest differing aspects of one personality. Paladour is associated with iron and Amirald with flowers, yet they are bound together through suffering. In choosing their brides, they also reveal complementary personality traits: Paladour marries the noble Lady Isebelle, and Amirald chooses the simple peasant girl Genevieve. When the novel ends, the reader is left with the impression that all four live together in absolute harmony. Such an easy resolution does seemed contrived, for The Albigenses begins with Paladour’s sinister encounter with a seemingly demonic lady of the lake. He believes there is a curse upon him and that he is fated to murder his bride on their wedding night. When the effects of these dark tones are no longer wanted, Maturin quickly resolves all with rational explanations. Paladour is then free to live as a very natural husband. Part of the dissatisfaction the reader feels with this happy ending may be accounted for by the fact that the novel bristles with gothic motifs that are not smoothly integrated into the historical aspects of the novel. Despite Maturin’s own belief that the day of the gothic novel had already passed when he began writing, and his repeated attempts to use whatever narrative form might suit the reading public, he was continually drawn to the techniques of the gothic tale. Whether it be a mysterious monk haunting underground passages or a madwoman raving prophetic truths, all his novels have gothic elements. The gothic novel provided him with a literary world suitable for the images of evil and suffering that populated his own mind, a mind repeatedly drawn to the problems of human guilt and the divided soul. The body of Maturin’s work, although uneven, offers ample proof of his ability to shape these dark themes with power and originality. Diane D’Amico Other major works PLAYS: Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand, pr., pb. 1816; Manuel, pb. 1817; Fredolfo, pb. 1819. Bibliography Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. A sympathetic study of gothicism, the essence of which is its confrontation with evil and feelings of doom. Contains chapters on literary gothicism and Gothic art and its relationship to literature, as well as focused analyses of particular works of literature. As one of the central writers of gothicism, Maturin is given considerable attention, including

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an extensive analysis of Melmoth the Wanderer that examines the novel as a pattern of expulsions and expansions. The conclusion sees a correlation between the gothic urge for expansion and its style of intensification. Includes a bibliography and index. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. An important book on Romantic prose fiction, including Maturin’s gothic romances, which analyzes in depth twelve Romantic novels to define the intellectual context of the era. Notes that concepts of reality were tested and changed by Romantic novels and Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime modified aesthetic forms. Maturin has an important place in this general thesis, and Melmoth the Wanderer is analyzed in detail as the focus of his chapter. Finds this novel more emotionally involved with Roman Catholicism and rebellious against authoritarian political systems than other gothic fiction, believing it to be a journey into the darkness of the mind. Finds a common drift toward death in most novels of this genre. Includes a set of notes and an index. Kramer, Dale. Charles Robert Maturin. New York: Twayne, 1973. Analyzes Maturin’s personality, describes the conditions of his life, and indicates his innovations in the gothic tradition. Examines his early novels from Fatal Revenge to The Wild Irish Boy, then looks at Maturin’s experiments on the stage, where he achieved popular success with Bertram but hardly any with Manuel and Fredolfo. Analyzes Women, Maturin’s novel of “real life,” and devotes a chapter to Melmoth the Wanderer as his most successful writing, favorably comparing it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Godwin’s Adventures of Caleb Williams. Also examines The Albigenses as a descendant of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances and sketches Maturin’s place in the history of literature. A chronology, notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index are included. Lougy, Robert E. Charles Robert Maturin. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1975. An insightful review of Maturin’s life and writings, dividing his career into early, middle, and later years. Fatal Revenge is analyzed for his characteristic themes: fear and guilt. His other writings are placed in the context of his biography but also receive critical attention in comparison with one another, as well as with other works in the gothic and Irish traditions. Focuses on Bertram, which benefited from the popularity of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and concentrates on Melmoth the Wanderer as a unique adaptation of the legends of the Wandering Jew and Faust. Although The Milesian Chief and Women deserve credit and Maturin’s other writings are given some attention, his reputation rests on Melmoth. Includes a chronology and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary works. Tinkler-Villani, Valeria, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, eds. Edited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995. See Anthony Johnson’s essay, “Gaps and Gothic Sensibility: Walpole, Lewis, Mary Shelley, and Maturin,” for a learned and clear discussion of how Maturin handles the gaps in reality that gothic fiction exploits.

W. Somerset Maugham W. Somerset Maugham

Born: Paris, France; January 25, 1874 Died: Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France; December 16, 1965 Principal long fiction · Liza of Lambeth, 1897; The Making of a Saint, 1898; The Hero, 1901; Mrs. Craddock, 1902; The Merry-Go-Round, 1904; The Bishop’s Apron, 1906; The Explorer, 1907; The Magician, 1908; Of Human Bondage, 1915; The Moon and Sixpence, 1919; The Painted Veil, 1925; Cakes and Ale, 1930; The Narrow Corner, 1932; Theatre, 1937; Christmas Holiday, 1939; Up at the Villa, 1941; The Hour Before Dawn, 1942; The Razor’s Edge, 1944; Then and Now, 1946; Catalina, 1948; Selected Novels, 1953. Other literary forms · A professional man of letters whose work spanned more than six decades, W. Somerset Maugham published in a wide range of literary forms, the significant exception being poetry. He first won success, fame, and wealth in the theater; his most acclaimed dramas were performed on the London stage during the first three decades of the twentieth century. He produced more than a hundred short stories, largely written during the period from 1921 to 1950; his collected short stories include four of the best-known stories of the twentieth century: “Rain,” “The Outstation,” “The Letter,” and “The Colonel’s Lady.” Fifteen or more additional volumes are devoted to autobiography, literary and aesthetic criticism, and travel. Among these, the most useful for students are The Summing Up (1938), Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948), and A Writer’s Notebook (1949). Achievements · Maugham’s twenty novels are exceptionally uneven; the first eight, though interesting, suggest the efforts of a young novelist to discover where his talent lies. From the publication of Of Human Bondage (1915) through The Razor’s Edge (1944), he produced his most significant prose works. During this period, he was a worldfamous man of letters with a following of many thousands who would buy and read anything he wrote; however, a few novels that he produced, such as Then and Now and Up at the Villa, were not in his best vein. The novels brought Maugham acclaim and recognition both from a general audience and from the intelligentsia. Among common readers, he was perhaps the most successful English novelist of the twentieth century, and, as Samuel Johnson pointed out, the common reader is not often wrong. Yet, it must be admitted that Maugham’s detractors, such as Edmund Wilson, present valid criticism: One expects a serious artist to exert an important influence, either thematic or formal, upon his medium. The symphony was forever altered by Ludwig van Beethoven; no similar statement can be made about Maugham and the novel. He sought to tell a story with clarity and grace, to embody a set of attitudes and values, and to entertain his readers with insights into character and life. Biography · William Somerset Maugham, son of an English solicitor, was born in the British Embassy in Paris and spent his early childhood in France, learning French as his first language. Following the early death of both parents, Maugham went at age ten to England to live with his uncle, the Reverend Henry Maugham, Vicar of 649

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Whitstable, and his German-born wife. The rigid routine and disciplined family life of the Whitstable rectory contrasted with the casual, c a r ef r e e ex i s t en c e a n d c l os e warmth that Maugham had known in France. He was enrolled in the King’s School, Canterbury, where he spent several unhappy years. A permanent stammer that developed during this period of his life destroyed any possibility of following the profession of his father and two of his brothers. Instead of enrolling in a university, Maugham chose to travel abroad to Germany, where at Heidelberg he saw Henrik Ibsen’s dramas and attended lectures by Kuno Fischer on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Returning to London, he enrolled i n t h e m e d i c a l s c h o ol a t S t . Library of Congress Thomas’s Hospital, where he received his M.D. in 1897. Maugham’s stronger interests, however, were literary and aesthetic, and when his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, achieved a modest success, he resolved to enter upon a career as a writer. None of the novels that Maugham wrote during the following decade repeated the success of Liza of Lambeth, yet he achieved sudden and unexpected acclaim through a series of plays, modern comedies of manners, beginning with Lady Frederick (1907). In 1908, four of his plays were running in London simultaneously. During World War I, Maugham served with British Intelligence in Switzerland and Russia. In 1915, he married Syrie Bernardo Wellcome, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1927. Following World War I, Maugham traveled to more remote areas of the world: the South Seas, Southeast Asia, and America, accompanied by his secretary, a gregarious American named Gerald Haxton, who aided the author in finding material for his fiction. Maugham acquired the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera in 1928, an estate that became his home for the remainder of his life, though he continued his frequent travels and spent several years during World War II living in the United States. Creative work during his later years centered principally upon short stories, novels, and autobiography. Analysis · W. Somerset Maugham’s novels are written in a style highly idiomatic and fluent, revealing the qualities of simplicity, lucidity, and euphony which the author sought to attain. Content to narrate an interesting story from his own unique angle of vision, he brought to the genre a gift for creating interesting characters who reflect life’s ironies. In his later works, Maugham’s narrative persona is a character interested in people, yet detached and somewhat clinical in his analysis of their actions and motives. The narrator demonstrates an unusual degree of tolerance for human peccadillos and incongruities and is reluctant to judge the actions of human beings. He

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writes primarily of adults in conflict with one another and with social mores. Frequently, his characters grow in tolerance and acceptance of human life, which is portrayed somewhat pessimistically. Maugham based his characters upon people whom he had known or whose lives he had somehow come to know; their actions are presented with consummate realism. They are motivated by their passions or emotions and by their attempts to control their destinies, not by an ideology or set of ideals. Though they may experience inner turmoil and conflict, they are seldom tormented by such emotions. Like their creator-narrator, the characters often have the ability to view themselves with clinical detachment and objectivity, to cast a cold eye on life. Liza of Lambeth · Among the early novels of Maugham, Liza of Lambeth, published when the author was only twenty-three, is probably the best known. Set in the Lambeth slum along Vere Street, London, it depicts naturalistically the lives of people in a state of poverty, characters such as those whom the author had come to know at first hand as an obstetric clerk at St. Thomas’s Hospital. In its depiction of character, Liza of Lambeth fits the tradition of the naturalistic novel, somewhat in the manner of George Gissing, whose work Maugham knew well. The Cockney dialogue that pervades the novel is accurately represented, both in its pronunciation and in its slang or colloquial expressions. As is typical of naturalistic fiction, the characters are generally without hope, yet even in a naturalistic tradition Maugham reveals an original perspective. Unlike much naturalism, Liza of Lambeth does not urge social reform; the characters exhibit more hostility toward one another than toward any system. They generally accept their lot, which would be bearable but for their own mistakes. Liza Kemp’s friend Sally enters marriage with hope, only to find her chances for happiness shattered owing to her husband’s bad temper following drinking bouts, a weakness he had previously concealed. Liza, brimming with life and energy, spurns the devotion of a staid suitor, Tom, and finds excitement in an affair with an older, married neighbor, Jim Blakeston. By allowing passion to dominate their lives, the characters create undue hardships for themselves. This theme is commonly found in Maugham’s work. Just as Liza of Lambeth represented an effort at producing a naturalistic novel, Maugham’s other early novels give the impression of deliberate attempts at imitating well-established forms. In The Making of a Saint, he wrote a brief historical novel with a late fifteenth century Florentine setting. A story of intrigue, assassination, and revenge, it is derived from a brief passage in a work by Niccolò Machiavelli. Mrs. Craddock is set in rural England of the late nineteenth century, a novel of manners depicting provincial life, much in the manner of Arnold Bennett; The Merry-Go-Round belongs to a similar tradition. In The Magician, Maugham incorporates the conventions of the gothic genre, though there is perhaps too much realism for this work to be designated a true gothic novel. Of Human Bondage · In Of Human Bondage, Maugham’s longest novel and his masterpiece, he turned to the well-known form of the Bildungsroman, the novel of a young person growing to maturity. Of Human Bondage is highly autobiographical, although it departs significantly from autobiographical accuracy in places. With the aid of an omniscient narrator, the reader follows the life of Philip Carey from his mother’s death when he was only nine until he becomes a doctor and resolves to marry. Numerous characters in the novel are based upon people the author knew. The Reverend William Carey and his wife Louisa are based upon Maugham’s uncle and

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aunt with whom he lived; Lawson is his friend Sir Gerald Kelly; Cronshaw derives from the eccentric poet Aleister Crowley, who had also been the model for Oliver Haddo in The Magician; and Hayward is based upon Maugham’s friend Ellington Brooks. In a similar manner, Maugham incorporates descriptions of places that he knew well, with names only slightly altered (Whitstable to Blackstable, Canterbury to Tercanbury) or not altered at all, as the countryside of Kent or the cities of London and Paris. In Of Human Bondage, Maugham sees three forces impinging upon Philip, shaping and influencing his life, forces that the novel emphasizes strongly: passion, disillusionment, and the quest for purpose in life. Philip is ill-equipped to cope with passion. Having been born with a clubfoot, which becomes a source of ridicule among school boys, and having lost both parents in childhood, he becomes overly sensitive. He takes pleasure in the solitary pursuit of reading and is less in the company of others than most boys; as a result, he has little understanding of the world at large. He finds that women who adore him arouse in him no passion in return, whereas he falls irrationally and inexplicably in love with the common and venal Mildred Rogers. Only after a long period of bondage, humiliation, and pain can he free himself from this attachment, which he comes to regard as degrading. At the end of the novel, he proposes marriage to Sally Athelney, not because he feels passion for her but because he believes she will be a good wife. Maugham’s view of romance in this work is consistent with the view presented in his other works and with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic outlook—that romantic passion is a kind of trick played upon people by nature to foster procreation, that it does not last, that it is irrational, and that it represents a poor basis for marriage. To express the necessity for disillusionment, Maugham depicts Philip as growing up in an atmosphere of illusion involving religious beliefs and assumptions about the code of an English gentleman. When Philip arrives in Germany, it becomes awkward to continue to maintain that a gentleman necessarily belongs to the Church of England. He encounters a diversity of religious beliefs, all sincerely held and advocated through conflicting arguments. The result is that he loses his religious faith, though he assumes that the actual cause of the loss is that he lacks the religious temperament. Losing a framework so basic, he experiences a sense of liberation, yet he finds his new freedom uncomfortable as well, lacking in certainties. Philip clings to one certainty: He assumes without question that he must earn his living through some profession, and he begins to explore various unsuitable paths. He rejects the idea of becoming a clergyman, quits a career in accounting, abandons the struggle to become an artist after studying in Paris, and finally decides to pursue medicine. He does not escape hardship, for at one point he loses the money provided for his education and must work at a department store until his uncle’s death brings a small inheritance. Reflecting upon happiness, Philip is puzzled as to how this quality fits as a purpose in life, since his own is unhappy. He observes that happiness eludes people such as the dancers at the Bal Bullier in Paris who pursue it frenetically. Those who seek happiness through the enjoyment of art waste their lives, and those who struggle to create art seldom find happiness, even when they succeed. Yet, the paintings of El Greco suggest to Philip that the will of humankind is powerful, that life can be made meaningful through struggle. After this realization, Philip comes to understand the secret of a piece of Persian rug given him by an eccentric poet. The poet told him that the rug held the key to the meaning of life, but he refused to explain the puzzle to

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Philip. The solution becomes apparent to Philip years later, after much searching for it: Life has no meaning. There is no set of obligations by which a person must live, no certain path to follow. With this bleak conclusion, Philip comes to another realization: Like the weaver of the carpet, a person may choose the strands that please his aesthetic sense and make a pattern of his life satisfying to his own taste. Happiness and pain are important only as strands in the design. Though people are under no obligation to create a design, they are free to do so if they choose; or, if they reject freedom of the will, it may seem that they are free. Life for Philip, then, has purpose because he wills to endow it with purpose—a conclusion primarily existential but also in accord with Schopenhauer’s view of people’s will. The Moon and Sixpence · In The Moon and Sixpence, a novel that relies somewhat upon autobiographical materials used in Of Human Bondage, Maugham narrates a portion of the life of his hero Charles Strickland, a stockbroker turned artist whose character is based upon that of the artist Paul Gauguin. The narrator, or the Maugham persona, is a successful author who enjoys access to high society and, like Maugham, travels extensively around the world. He is detached and analytical in his attitudes, revealing a fondness for the maxims of Blaise Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. He prefers to permit the story to unfold in an episodic way by letting others whom he meets tell him what they know or think about Strickland. Maugham sees in Strickland the frustrated genius, a moderately successful businessman who, at age forty, decides to become an artist, ruthlessly throwing over everything to pursue his ambition, and succeeding. The action occurs over a period of more than twenty years, with the setting shifting from London to Paris to Tahiti and back to London. As in the earlier Of Human Bondage and later in Christmas Holiday, art is an important theme, and allusions to paintings and painters are numerous. At the beginning of the novel, Maugham invents a “scholarly” tradition on Strickland, complete with footnotes, to enhance the realism. In the concluding segment set in Tahiti, he introduces characters who had known Strickland during his final years and who report on his decline and death. They are modeled after characters whom Maugham met in Tahiti and who told him about Gauguin. With references to actual people whose identities the author does not very much bother to conceal, The Moon and Sixpence, then, is a roman à clef, as are its two most important successors, Cakes and Ale and The Razor’s Edge. Cakes and Ale · In Cakes and Ale, the most “literary” of Maugham’s novels, the narrator assumes the name Willie Ashenden, one that Maugham had used in his collection of short stories based upon his work as an intelligence agent (Ashenden, 1928). Ashenden is a novelist in his fifties who during the course of the narrative has several meetings with another novelist and critic, Alroy Kear. Kear, about the same age as Willie Ashenden, represents the Edwardian novelist Hugh Walpole. The unflattering portrait of Walpole, recognizable to many contemporaries and to Walpole himself, contributed to an attack on Maugham by Evelyn Wiehe in Gin and Bitters (1931), where he is given the name Leverson Hurle. Besides the narrator and Kear, another author plays a major role in the novel. Edward Driffield, the grand old man of Victorian literature, is based upon the character of Thomas Hardy. Rosie Gann, Driffield’s first wife, is modeled after the actress Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones, to whom Maugham once proposed. Alroy Kear, who is writing a biography of Driffield, discovers that Ashenden has

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been a longtime acquaintance of the Driffields. The Driffields once lived in Ashenden’s village of Blackstable, where they were regarded with suspicion by the villagers, especially by Ashenden’s uncle, the vicar, who represents the epitome of Victorian propriety and prudery. The villagers’ suspicions are confirmed when the Driffields move to London, leaving behind debts to most of the merchants. Later, Ashenden renews his acquaintance with the Driffields in London, gradually losing touch with them after Rosie leaves Driffield for a Blackstable coal merchant, Lord George Kemp. Ashenden’s knowledge of all these details merges in flashbacks that go back as far as his childhood. Ashenden knows that a tactful biographer such as Kear, who has secured the approval of Driffield’s second wife, cannot include such revealing recollections, and thus he tells them to the reader. He concludes his narrative with an account of meeting Rosie, then more than seventy years old, in New York. She confesses to Ashenden that she ran off with Lord George because “He was always such a perfect gentleman,” a judgment with which every other character in the novel would have disagreed. Except for one brief episode that occurs in New York, the novel is set either in London or in the nearby villages and countryside. Maugham relies heavily on flashbacks ranging over a period of some forty years; Cakes and Ale is a novel cast in the form of reminiscences of a character, which assuredly would conflict with the “official” biography of Driffield as recorded by Alroy Kear. Its appeal lies primarily in its allusions to actual persons, its behind-the-scenes literary gossip, and the creation of Rosie Gann, probably the most appealing of Maugham’s female characters—a wholesome, agreeable, and vivacious woman utterly lacking in pretense. The Razor’s Edge · In The Razor’s Edge, the narrator becomes “Mr. Maugham,” a celebrated author and world traveler. With characters such as the urbane and aristocratic art agent, Elliott Templeton, he exchanges views and pleasantries in an attitude of amusement and tolerance. To younger characters such as Sophie Macdonald he offers sage advice. To readers he offers a variety of wry comments on the art and craft of the novel. He speculates as to why people whom he barely knows divulge their life stories so readily to him. He admits the reader behind the scenes of the writer’s study with such unguarded comments as the famous opening, “I have never begun a novel with more misgiving,” and such wry asides as “I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of [the] . . . story. . . . I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book.” Usually “Mr. Maugham” limits his involvement to conversation; his own actions, where they are noted (as when he withdraws to write a novel or takes his boat to Toulon), do not advance the plot. Occasionally, he does involve himself in the plot in some minor way. He contrives for the dying Elliott Templeton to receive an invitation to a party given by the Princess Novemali after she had deliberately snubbed Elliott, and he is on hand to identify the body of Sophie Macdonald. “Mr. Maugham” reports the story as the major characters reveal it in their conversations. Isabel Bradley is in love with Larry Darrel but sensibly marries the successful Gray Maturin, only to find that after Gray loses his assets during the Depression, she and her husband and their two daughters must live on the generosity of her uncle Elliott. Larry, whose main interest in life is the study of philosophy and religion, attempts to marry Sophie Macdonald to save her from a dissolute life, an effort that Isabel shrewdly thwarts. Larry goes to a Benedictine monastery in France, later

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leaving it to study the Hindu religion in India. Returning from India at the end of the novel, he gives up his independent income and resolves to find work in New York driving a taxi. The Maturins move from Paris to Dallas, where Gray has secured an executive position in an oil company. The plot covers more than a decade, with the settings in France, England, and America. “Mr. Maugham,” like the young Philip Carey, seeks a pattern in the lives of those he has met, and he finds that each life in The Razor’s Edge has been a success. Even Sophie Macdonald, whose trauma caused her to seek death, found what she was seeking. Maugham’s three most significant novels following Of Human Bondage explore ideals that he considered in the final chapters of his autobiography, The Summing Up—truth, beauty, goodness. In The Moon and Sixpence, Charles Strickland represents the true genius whose work survives and speaks to posterity, even though his talent surfaced late in life and he violated accepted standards to advance it. In him, truth is neither obvious nor pleasant, but its existence can be confirmed by those who have felt the power of his work. Even the wife he abandoned displays reproductions of his paintings in her home and takes pride in his attainments. In Cakes and Ale, the ideal is beauty, which readers and critics find in the style, characters, and descriptions of Edward Driffield’s novels. The narrator Willie Ashenden rejects this aesthetic beauty in favor of a more realistic beauty. He discovers the ideal in the warmth and charm of Rosie Gann, Driffield’s first wife, who possessed neither fidelity nor business ethics but whose character brought others a wholesome sense of well-being. In The Razor’s Edge, Larry Darrel reveals a basic goodness, a difficult quality to depict, partly because it may be attributed to the absence of either appetites or temptations. Though not an ascetic, Larry keeps passion and ambition in check and pursues his own spiritual development. He readily sacrifices himself for others, making a futile effort to save Sophie Macdonald from self-destruction through an offer of marriage, yet his sacrifices do not appear quixotic. A generous amount of modesty enables him to make the best of a life that reveals only goodness as an extraordinary element. In each character, the ideal is neither obvious nor probable in the conventional sense. Its existence is ironic, and it might be overlooked were not the Maugham persona on hand to define it. Not even the narrator, however, can explain or account for it; the reader savors its presence without fully understanding its origin. Among the remaining novels of Maugham, one finds works of literary merit and appeal, though they represent lesser achievements. A reader of Maugham would not want to miss novels such as The Painted Veil and The Narrow Corner, which narrate suspenseful and intense conflicts. Works such as these differ from the better-known novels in several important respects. First, the Maugham persona is either absent or less intrusive. In The Narrow Corner, for example, the author’s viewpoint is usually expressed through Dr. Saunders, who lives on a Pacific island and has no literary interests or ambitions. Further, the settings are usually foreign or exotic—European or Asian rather than American or English. Instead of spanning decades, the plots narrate events that occur during a few months; novels such as Up at the Villa, for example, differ little from some of Maugham’s short stories. Significantly, in Maugham’s major novels, the important characters—Philip Carey, Larry Darrel, Rosie Gann, and Charles Strickland—either embody an ideal or achieve some measure of success in pursuit of an ideal, whereas idealism in the minor works is usually crushed and defeated. Fred Blake and Erik Christensen in The Narrow Corner find only disappointment, disillusionment, and early death, as does the unfortunate Karl Richter in Up at the Villa. Those who survive are worldly-wise and detached characters who can regard life as Maugham’s spokesman Dr. Saunders does:

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Life is short, nature is hostile, and man is ridiculous but oddly enough most misfortunes have their compensations and with a certain humour and a good deal of horse-sense one can make a fairly good job of what is after all a matter of very small consequence. The minor works reward the reader with their depiction of the ironies of human life, the eccentricities of human beings, and the unusual settings and universal conflicts, yet, however rewarding, they lack the thematic richness and emotional concentration of Maugham’s best novels. Stanley Archer Other major works SHORT FICTION: Orientations, 1899; The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, 1921; The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories, 1926; Ashenden: Or, The British Agent, 1928; Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, 1931; Ah King: Six Stories, 1933; East and West: The Collected Short Stories, 1934; Cosmopolitans, 1936; The Favorite Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, 1937; The Round Dozen, 1939; The Mixture as Before: Short Stories, 1940; Creatures of Circumstances: Short Stories, 1947; East of Suez: Great Stories of the Tropics, 1948; Here and There: Selected Short Stories, 1948; The Complete Short Stories, 1951; The World Over, 1952; Seventeen Lost Stories, 1969. PLAYS: A Man of Honor, wr. 1898-1899, pr., pb. 1903; Loaves and Fishes, wr. 1903, pr. 1911; Lady Frederick, pr. 1907; Jack Straw, pr. 1908; Mrs. Dot, pr. 1908; The Explorer, pr. 1908; The Noble Spaniard, pr. 1909; Penelope, pr. 1909; Smith, pr. 1909; Landed Gentry, pr. 1910 (as Grace); The Tenth Man, pr. 1910; The Land of Promise, pr. 1913; Caroline, pr. 1916, pb. 1923 (as The Unattainable); Our Betters, pr. 1917; Caesar’s Wife, pr. 1919; Home and Beauty, pr. 1919 (also known as Too Many Husbands); The Unknown, pr., pb. 1920; The Circle, pr., pb. 1921; East of Suez, pr., pb. 1922; The Constant Wife, pr., pb. 1926; The Letter, pr., pb. 1927; The Sacred Flame, pr., pb. 1928; The Breadwinner, pr., pb. 1930; The Collected Plays of W. Somerset Maugham, pb. 1931, 1952 (3 volumes; including 18 plays); For Services Rendered, pr., pb. 1932; Sheppey, pr., pb. 1933. SCREENPLAY: Trio, 1950 (with R. C. Sherriff and Noel Langley). NONFICTION: The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia, 1905 (also known as Andalusia, 1920); On a Chinese Screen, 1922; The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong, 1930; Don Fernando, 1935; The Summing Up, 1938; Books and You, 1940; France at War, 1940; Strictly Personal, 1941; Great Novelists and Their Novels, 1948; A Writer’s Notebook, 1949; The Writer’s Point of View, 1951; The Vagrant Mood: Six Essays, 1952; The Partial View, 1954 (includes The Summing Up and A Writer’s Notebook); Ten Novels and Their Authors, 1954 (revision of Great Novelists and Their Novels); The Travel Books, 1955; Points of View, 1958; Looking Back, 1962; Purely for My Pleasure, 1962; Selected Prefaces and Introductions, 1963. Bibliography Cordell, Richard A. Somerset Maugham, a Writer for All Seasons: A Biographical and Critical Study. 2d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. A valuable discussion of Maugham’s philosophy, which Cordell finds in the “writings of wise men of all ages.” Considers both sides, sympathetic and unsympathetic, to Maugham while focusing on his novels, short stories, plays, and nonfiction (briefly). The best of his work is Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and Cakes and Ale. Indexed.

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Holden, Philip. Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham’s Exotic Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Examines the themes of homosexuality, gender identity, and race relations in Maugham’s works. Loss, Archie K. ”Of Human Bondage”: Coming of Age in the Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1990. One of Twayne’s masterwork studies, this is an excellent analysis. Maugham, Robin. Somerset and All the Maughams. New York: New American Library, 1966. Maugham’s complex personality is illuminated in this intriguing study of his ancestors and immediate family members. An index is included. Morgan, Ted. Maugham. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. The first full-scale biography of Maugham and therefore an essential text in all studies of the man and his work. Unlike previous biographers, Morgan enjoyed the cooperation of Maugham’s literary executor and, therefore, is able to correct many distortions in previous studies. Offers the most comprehensive account yet of the private man, including photographs, a complete primary bibliography, and an index. Naik, M. K. William Somerset Maugham. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. Argues that a conflict between “cynicism” and “humanitarianism” kept Maugham from literary success. Only in Cakes and Ale, his short stories, and his travel books does he balance the two points of view. Rogal, Samuel J. A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Contains information on Maugham’s life as well as his works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

George Meredith George Meredith

Born: Portsmouth, England; February 12, 1828 Died: Box Hill, England; May 18, 1909 Principal long fiction · The Shaving of Shagpat, 1855; Farina, 1857; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 1859; Evan Harrington, 1861; Emilia in England, 1864 (as Sandra Belloni: Or, Emilia in England, 1886); Rhoda Fleming, 1865; Vittoria, 1867; The Adventures of Harry Richmond, 1871; Beauchamp’s Career, 1874-1875 (serial), 1876 (book); The Egoist, 1879; The Tragic Comedians, 1880; Diana of the Crossways, 1885; One of Our Conquerors, 1891; Lord Ormont and His Aminta, 1894; The Amazing Marriage, 1895; Celt and Saxon, 1910 (unfinished). Other literary forms · Ironically, George Meredith, one of nineteenth century England’s greatest novelists, actually considered himself a poet. Regrettably, the several volumes of poetry he published during his lifetime went largely unnoticed. Even though Alfred, Lord Tennyson, praised “Love in the Valley,” published in his first volume, Poems (1851), dedicated to his then father-in-law, Thomas Love Peacock, it was as a novelist that Meredith achieved recognition in his own time. Undaunted, nevertheless, Meredith continued to write poems and, in keeping with his stated vocation and with his aspiration, both his first and his last published books were collections of poems. Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside (1862) represents Meredith’s lyric and dramatic power at its height, especially in the sequence of fifty sixteen-line lyrics, Modern Love. In these poems, Meredith traces the dissolution of a marriage with an unrestrained candor that is more like the attitudes toward marital relationships of the late twentieth century than the straight-faced, closed-lipped Victorian notions. At the lowest point in the sequence, the persona exclaims, “In tragic life, God wot,/ No villain need be! Passions spin the plot;/ We are betrayed by what is false within.” Herein Meredith seems to capture with great precision the essence of tragedy. Meredith’s poetic vision is not always dark; light imagery, in fact, plays a significant role in his poetry. The thinking man appears often in Meredith’s works, but he is perhaps most prominent in the 1877 essay “The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit.” This essay is significant enough to be included in many contemporary collections of criticism, especially in those that pertain to drama. Acknowledging that the muse of comedy has never been “one of the most honored of the Muses,” Meredith submits that it is the “Comic Spirit” that civilizes man. By means of thoughtful laughter, the Comic Spirit corrects and checks the foibles of all the men who exceed the bounds of temperance and indulge in excessive behavior. Although Meredith opened himself to censure in his own day, his ideas about women and their roles in comedy are particularly interesting to today’s reader. Indeed, comedy, “the fountain of common sense,” teaches that men and women are social equals and that women are often men’s superiors. Achievements · In the late nineteenth century, Meredith achieved the status of a literary dictator or arbiter of taste. The path toward this recognition was, however, a 658

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long and arduous one. For years, Meredith received little to no recognition, and he had to wait for the publication of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel before he enjoyed the limited appreciation of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others among the pre-Raphaelites. Not until the appearance of The Egoist in 1879 did Meredith’s literary reputation reach its zenith. During his last years, Meredith received many awards and honors, including the succession of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as the president of the Society of British Authors and election as one of the original members of the Order of Merit. Within twenty years after Meredith’s death in 1909, nevertheless, his literary reputation began to suffer a partial eclipse, from which it began to recover in the 1970’s. One explanation for Meredith’s decline in reputation is simple: His turgid style and complex plots demand more from the average reader than he or she is often willing to give. C. L. Cline’s three-volume edition of The Letters of George Meredith, which appeared in 1970, and Phyllis B. Bartlett’s two-volume collection of The Poems of George Meredith (1978) have done much to reawaken interest in Meredith’s work, particularly in his poetry, which seems to appeal to modern readers much more markedly than it had to those of his own time. Even so, the influence of Meredith the novelist on such younger writers as Thomas Hardy was decisive, and Meredith’s theory of the Comic Spirit as the civilizing force of all thoughtful men speaks to all cultures of all times. Biography · Born the son and grandson of tailors, George Meredith appears to have rejected his humble origins. Indeed, he once threatened that he would “most horribly

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haunt” any who attempted to reconstruct his biography. Despite his modest heritage, legacies from his mother and an aunt permitted him to attend private schools, St. Paul’s Church School, Southsea, and the Moravian School of Neuwied, Germany. His objective in formal training was to become a lawyer, and he was apprenticed to a London solicitor in 1845. Young Meredith soon became dissatisfied with the legal profession, however, and began to seek a career as a journalist, a vocation which he pursued throughout most of his life, since he was never quite able to survive financially as an author of novels and poems. From at least 1845 until his marriage in 1849 to Mary Ellen Nicolls, a widow and the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, Meredith appears to have read widely and deeply in the literature of Greece, Rome, Germany, France, and England. The first few years of his marriage appear to have been ones of continued intellectual growth. The Merediths lived either with or near the aspiring young author’s famous father-inlaw. Meredith made good use of Peacock’s extensive and often arcane library, whose shelves included volumes on such Near Eastern religions as Zoroastrianism, a faith that was later to have a profound influence on Meredith’s novels and poems. The first few years of apparent bliss were soon terminated, however, when Mary eloped in 1858 with the painter Henry Wallis to the isle of Capri. Meredith was consequently left alone to rear his son Arthur; the author later wrote about these unhappy times both in the novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and in the lyric sequence Modern Love. After Mary’s death in 1861, Meredith married, within three years, Marie Vulliamy; this match proved to be both enduring and much happier. After serving as war correspondent, he and his new wife moved to Flint Cottage, Box Hill, Surrey, where he lived the remainder of his life. Box Hill is where admiring and enthusiastic young authors went to seek Meredith’s sage counsel. Analysis · Although George Meredith’s works all emphasize the corrective, civilizing influences of the Comic Spirit, his novels, as well as his poems, forcefully work out a sort of theodicy which is consistently informed by the Near Eastern religion Zoroastrianism. This philosophy that treats the being and government of God and the immortality of the soul displays the theme of the struggle between good and evil in the early work Farina. Farina and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel · In the novel, surrounded by the trappings of medieval Germany, Farina, the hero of the tale, is left to contend with the evil effects of a bout between a monk and Satan. The monk represents the Zoroastrian god of light or good, Ormuzd, and Satan, the god of darkness or evil, Ahriman. In the later, much more successful novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, this dialectic is seen in the sixth chapter, “The Magian Conflict” (the magi were ancient priests of Zoroaster). In this case, Meredith assigns the roles of the two opposing parties of the struggle to a Tinker and a Yeoman; the witness to this debate is the adolescent Richard Feverel, whose father, Sir Austin, has attempted unsuccessfully to shield him from any introduction to the world’s forces of good and evil. The Tinker, who appears to be a faithful follower of Zoroaster, the ancient prophet of the faith, asserts that the Good Spirit reigns supreme. The Yeoman, whom Meredith playfully calls Speed-the-Plough, protests, because of his recent misfortune of having lost several jobs, that the Evil Spirit dominates. The Yeoman is particularly hostile to Farmer Blaize, with whom Richard and a companion have also had an unpleasant encounter. Farmer Blaize is responsible for the beginning of the Yeoman’s misfor-

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tunes. Tinker and Yeoman discuss the universal strife between good and evil in Zoroastrian terms, wherein the Good Spirit is supposed to hold dominion for a two-thousand-year period and the Evil Spirit is believed to assume dominion for a like period of two thousand years. Clearly, then, this debate challenges the young Richard to side with Ahriman (darkness) or to join the legions of Ormuzd (light). Richard later relates the details of this encounter to Adrian Harley, a sort of tutor and confidant of the young Mr. Feverel, who is actually a disciple of the Comic Spirit and whom the narrator addresses as the Wise Youth. Adrian explains to Richard that “I’m perfectly aware that Zoroaster is not dead. You have been listening to a common creed. Drink the Fire-worshippers, if you will.” Adrian recognizes the nature of the timeless controversy and applies to it the synecdoche, “Zoroaster,” to point out the age of the struggle. Adrian also emphasizes that this struggle is a universal one, the result of a “common creed,” regardless of Sir Austin’s refusal to acknowledge it. Adrian’s comic toast to the Fire-worshippers is also ironic in that Richard and Tom Bakewell, the ploughman, have plotted to burn Farmer Blaize’s hayracks. That night, Richard and his friend Ripton Thompson watch the fiery destruction resulting from the match of Tom Bakewell, whose last name is comically appropriate to his role. This “Bakewell Comedy,” however, has serious overtones when seen in the light of the Zoroastrian metaphor. The fire of the boys’ vision is not a pure one, for there are “dense masses of smoke” amid the flames which leap into the darkness like “snakes of fire.” In Zoroastrianism, Ahriman (Evil) is responsible for this corruption of the pure flame. The chapter’s title, “Arson,” which initiates the Bakewell Comedy, effectively points out the boys’ error. The boys are, like Tom Bakewell, not good Zoroastrians because the fire they are worshiping reflects the evil nature of their revenge. Adrian sees through their conspiracy; however, he does not expose the boys. Rather, in the true manner of the Zoroastrians, he believes that the most effective punishment would be a spiritual, inner conflict. “The farmer’s whip had reduced them to bodily contortions; these were decorous compared with the spiritual writhings they had to perform under Adrian’s skillful manipulation.” Adrian knows the true value of fire to the Zoroastrians: it is a symbol of the inner light of the soul, which glows brightest when fired by Ormuzd. If the soul is possessed by the evil Ahriman, the spiritual light is contaminated and burns, if at all, with a dim, impure glimmer. Richard’s next crucial encounter intensifies the glow of the purer fire burning within him. He meets Lucy Desborough, destined to be his wife. The imagery used to describe this encounter is filled with references to light. Nature herself has provided “a Temple for the flame” of love. From a boat, Richard first sees Lucy pictured in an idyllic scene of radiant sunshine reflecting from the “green-flashing plunges of a weir.” Lucy’s face is shaded from the sun’s illumination mysteriously but compellingly “by a broad straw hat with a flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes.” Her hair was “golden where the ray touched” it. Even her name is derived from the Latin word for light: lux. Richard’s soul is filled with the light of passionate love, but he has another journey to the vision of the celestial light of the Zoroastrians. Other references to Zoroastrianism abound in the novel. For example, at a later point, Sir Austin yields to the dark force of Ahriman when he chooses to “do nothing” at a time when his son needs his counsel most. Consequently, he turns his son away from him, perhaps forever, thus proving that a father with a “system” for child rearing cannot meet that system on its own terms.

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Viewed within the bounds of the magian conflict, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is seen as a novel about the inevitability of the human strife between good and evil, both of which are inextricably mixed within the soul of every human being. Some measure of hope is given the novel, however, when the reader learns that, finally, Richard does view, if but for a moment, the celestial light of Ormuzd through the aid of a truly devoted wife. It is this hope that raises The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to the level of true tragedy, which must in some measure be positive. Although Sir Austin falls victim to Ahriman, his son, Richard, has seen the vision of Ormuzd. By the use of Zoroastrian imagery, Meredith has greatly intensified his conviction that the ultimate destiny of humankind is unity with the light of the spirit or, more realistically for Meredith, unity with the great “Over Reason” of the universe. This unity directs man along the path of spiritual evolution and is the apex of Meredith’s developing doctrine about man: blood (perfection of the body), brain (perfection of the mind), and spirit (perfection of the needs of man’s spiritual consciousness by means of realizing his intrinsic independence and freedom). The tone of the first half of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is predominantly one of comic irony; the latter half of the novel, however, assumes tragic dimensions. Meredith’s later novels display a much greater reliance upon the comic mood. Even so, the essence of “The Magian Conflict” is never lost; rather, Meredith wields the forces of darkness against those of light to accentuate the balancing, equalizing role of his emerging Comic Spirit, whose seeds have been planted in the wise youth, Adrian Harley. The struggle to reach the evolutionary apex, the light of the spirit, assumes a background role in the novels following The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and is treated later most directly in the poetry. In his novels, Meredith becomes increasingly more concerned with the question of how one should meet the vicissitudes of everyday life. Meredith published his essay “The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” in 1877. Beauchamp’s Career appeared the year before; quite naturally the novel portrays many of the theories Meredith proposed in his essay. In 1879, Meredith completed The Egoist, which the author named “a comedy in narrative.” Meredith’s last great achievement in the novel genre appeared in 1885 and was entitled Diana of the Crossways. The novels provide interesting examples of the working out of Meredith’s theories centered in the Comic Spirit, and they demonstrate some degree of the use of Zoroastrian imagery. Beauchamp’s Career employs the Zoroastrian contrast of light and dark to a much greater extent than the other two novels. Meredith draws from Zoroastrianism to a noticeable degree, however, in each of these three novels in order to make the instructive character of his Comic Spirit more emphatic. Beauchamp’s Career · Meredith makes repeated references to fire, sun, and light throughout Beauchamp’s Career, which undoubtedly reflects his prior use of Zoroastrianism in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Meredith’s dependence upon Zoroastrianism is most pronounced, however, in his characterization of Dr. Shrapnel. Nevil Beauchamp is ambitious and wants to be a politician; he plans to exercise his philanthropic desire to “save the world.” He joins a radical political party in order to battle the more conservative Tory Party and to oppose the vehement objections of his Uncle Everard Romfrey, a hater of radicals. After Nevil loses an election for a seat in Parliament, he comes under the tutelage of Dr. Shrapnel, a professed Fire-worshipper. Since “Fire-worshippers” is a name that Zoroastrians were often mistakenly called,

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when Dr. Shrapnel testifies “I am a Fire-worshipper,” the reader perceives already an element of Meredith’s comedy. Dr. Shrapnel, whose name calls to mind a number of images, all of which indicate either potential destruction or active destruction, has obviously become enamored of the mystic, esoteric nature of the religion and hence has adopted certain of its tenets to his own philosophy. Basically Shrapnel’s personal doctrine is, in his own words: “That is our republic: each one to his work; all in union! There’s the motto for us! Then you have music, harmony, the highest, fullest, finest!” Admittedly, Shrapnel’s philosophy is good, or superior in its idealism, and it represents a direct restatement of Meredith’s own philosophy (expressed in many of his poems). At this point in the novel, however, the philosophy is stated by an extremist; hence, there is a touch of the comic which becomes more apparent as the novel progresses. Meredith’s infrequent use of the exclamation point and his almost negative use of italics make this particular passage stand out as the radical view of an extremist. Rosamund Culling, the future wife of Nevil’s uncle, thinks of Shrapnel as “a black malignant . . . with his . . . talk of flying to the sun.” As may be expected from Rosamund’s tone, Dr. Shrapnel has at some time in her company been overzealous in the expression of his republican sentiments. News of Dr. Shrapnel’s inflammatory radicalism soon reaches Nevil’s Uncle Romfrey, who proceeds to horsewhip Shrapnel to the point of severe injury. Lack of understanding by his fellowman appears to be Shrapnel’s failing and provides the occasion for comment from the Comic Spirit, who judges that Shrapnel must suffer for his intemperance, for his imbalance. Compromise should be man’s objective. Both in The Egoist and in Diana of the Crossways, the part played by Zoroastrian imagery is greatly reduced from that which it played in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Beauchamp’s Career. Meredith’s Comic Spirit, however, comes to the front in full array; the increased subordination of Zoroastrian imagery to Meredith’s portrayal of his Comic Spirit indicates that Meredith’s theories and understanding of the purpose of his literary art were expanding and maturing. In the later novels, Meredith’s Zoroastrian and classical images become frequently and inseparably fused, a combination which further exemplifies Meredith’s artistry and more significantly indicates that Meredith’s philosophy was progressively becoming more distinct. His thinking was beginning to become a cultivated doctrine. The Egoist · The Egoist characterizes the egocentric element in Meredith’s theory of high comedy. Sir Willoughby Patterne, who thinks himself the epitome of goodness and excellence in the world, surrounds himself with admirers and sycophants who satisfy his compulsion to be adored. In creating Patterne, Meredith has taken the next logical step from his production of Beauchamp. Patterne does not merely aspire to goodness and excellence; he actually believes himself to be the embodiment of these qualities. Patterne attempts to satisfy his ego chiefly by involving himself with three women whom he manipulates with promises of marriage. His first “pretender,” Constance Durham, sees through Patterne’s facade of greatness with some degree of alacrity and leaves him. The lovely Clara Middleton, however, is not so insightful. She experiences a great deal of emotional turmoil, first in ascertaining the truth of Patterne’s pose and then in distinguishing the light of “her sun” from that of Patterne’s less self-assured cousin, Vernon Whitford, “a Phoebus Apollo turned Fasting Friar.” Here, Meredith gives more attention to extravagances so that he may better reveal

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the necessity for the corrective influence of his Comic Spirit. Sir Willoughby Patterne burns; he does not merely reflect. His fire is the product of his own egotism, which burns with an outer brilliance but promises no inner flame. Meredith may well be recalling satirically the Western world’s traditional misconception of the importance of fire to the Zoroastrians, who do not worship fire for itself but only as a symbol of the light of the inner spirit. The character of Vernon presents a striking contrast to that of Patterne. His light is the light of Apollo, who is not only the Greek god of poetry but also the classical god of the sun. Meredith has fused classical allusion with the Zoroastrian importance placed upon fire. Vernon’s flame is one of inner strength, for he burns with the light of poetic truth as well as with physical fire. He is also a Fasting Friar, however, a characteristic that raises doubt about the nature of his fire, since Meredith was not an ascetic. In effect, he has achieved in the characterization of Vernon the moderation that Dr. Shrapnel’s explosive goals denied him, since Vernon’s flame is tempered with some degree of asceticism. Vernon has measured life for what it is, but he has not given up the light of hope for what life can become. Meredith has achieved in his image of the contrast of the two fires the blending of Zoroastrian, classical, and Christian elements. Laetitia Dale, the third of Patterne’s “adorers,” presents an interesting foil to Patterne’s character. At the beginning of the novel, she is described as a delicate, misled woman, a “soft cherishable Parsee.” The Zoroastrian connection is obvious: The Parsees are a modern sect of the Zoroastrians. Indeed, within Meredith’s comic framework, Laetitia worships “her sun” much as the Parsees were reputed to worship a “god of fire.” Laetitia gradually becomes a strong, practical Parsee, however, as she, like the other two women in Patterne’s egotistic design, begins to see that the source of Patterne’s fire is not from within. Patterne is left in the end with Laetitia and is forced to accept her on her own terms. No reader of The Egoist can claim its conclusion as romantic or condemn it as pessimistic; rather, Meredith has achieved a noble expression of the corrective power of his Comic Spirit. Diana of the Crossways · Meredith creates in Diana of the Crossways a character who faces decisions similar to those of the women in The Egoist. Even Diana’s superior wit and intellect do not prevent her from battling the forces of darkness. Meredith prepares the reader for Diana’s struggle in the introductory chapter of the novel. He develops a light image, “rose pink,” which “is rebuked by hideous revelations of filthy foul,” a likeness of darkness. Meredith opens this novel with a discussion of the same subject he had treated in his other novels. For man to think himself already a part of the celestial light at his present step on the evolutionary ladder is surreptitious folly. The future holds for him only “hideous revelations of filthy foul.” The narrator further asserts that it is not within the capacity of man to suppress completely the evil forces of darkness. The duality of good and evil inevitably creeps into life. Having established an atmosphere of foreboding, the narrator sets out to explore Diana’s mental processes. Diana quickly becomes disillusioned by a mismatched marriage. Her husband, Warwick, is a man of limited intelligence. As a consequence, Diana becomes drawn to ideas outside the rigid, Victorian system of mores. Her desires strongly urge her to take leave of her witless, insensitive husband, who has accused her of infidelity. She experiences a night of conflict in which she fights like “the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with evil.”

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Meredith’s presentation of the strife between good and evil by his mixing of classical mythology with overtones of the Zoroastrian duality creates a sense of the universal nature of Diana’s struggle. Diana must decide whether to remain loyal to her marriage vows or to strike out on her own and obey her inner compulsions. She finds the impetus for her escape in Dacier, a character who is associated with devil imagery. Indeed, Dacier is the embodiment of Meredith’s assertion that there is “an active Devil about the world.” Dacier is a lure to Diana in her desire to escape. His devilish character, however, is ironically exposed by his sanctimonious friend, Sir Lukin. Lukin declares that no man should be fooled by masks of goodness that seem to cover the bad in the world. Dacier, who presents every indication of virtuous conduct, is compared to the old Jewish Prince of Devils, Asmodeus, who spurs on appetite and uproarious activities of all sorts. Although the name Asmodeus appears in the Apocrypha, it also bears connotations to Eshina-Dewa, a wicked spirit of ancient Persian mythology. This is one of Meredith’s clearest fusions of Zoroastrianism with Christianity. Dacier is thwarted in his evil intentions to seduce Diana. An acceptable guide appears for Diana in Thomas Redworth, a character capable of controlling Diana’s energetic impulses. Dacier does obtain a prize, however, in the lovely but naïve Constance Asper. Constance is “all for symbols, harps, effigies, what not” and believes that brains in women are “devilish.” Constance is perhaps the ideal mate for The Egoist’s Sir Willoughby Patterne, and she presents no problems for Dacier’s devious motivations. Constance, along with Dr. Shrapnel and Patterne, has failed to see the smoke for the fire. All three are so enamored of the physical brilliance of the flames that they cannot see the subtle glow of spiritual truth within the heart of the blaze. In Diana of the Crossways, Meredith suggests that the endurance of life is perhaps more replete with task than with play. The individual is forced to make a distinction between good and bad, which life seldom presents in a clear-cut fashion. Constance and Dacier somewhat ironically indulge each other in their ostensibly opposing forces. The subtle comment of the Comic Spirit is that both approach life with attitudes of excess; hence, both have lost contact with the steady movement toward self-improvement. Diana and Redworth offer hope to the reader, however, because they have accepted the moderation that the Comic Spirit has taught them and that is necessary for the future success of the human spirit. These novels present Meredith’s concern with the inevitability of “The Magian Conflict” in the life of each man. They also present Meredith’s keen observation that this conflict is never one from which one emerges successfully with ease. The struggle makes man’s attempt to choose an acceptable path—a way which is acceptable both to him and to his society—extremely difficult. The conflict is presented in terms of Zoroastrian, Christian, and classical myth; Meredith borrows from each in order to make his presentation of this undeniable, unavoidable battle assume universal dimensions. Meredith’s Comic Spirit attempts to aid man in his struggle, but it is not always successful in exposing man’s shortcomings, excesses, and refusal to see himself in a true light. In the fullest meaning of Meredith’s doctrine, however, the individual is also instrumental in the greater, universal struggle of humankind to move up the evolutionary ladder. Meredith demonstrates in his attitude toward humankind and nature the belief that humans can achieve their evolutionary destiny by conforming to the lessons and demands of nature. His philosophy is universal in scope and implies a comprehensive fusion of nearly all the ethical ideals that people have gathered from the beginning of

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time. Although Meredith does not discard all the dogma or the moral ideals of the many religious philosophies he studied, he does select with careful scrutiny those elements that he feels contribute to his own doctrines. Indeed, he demonstrates that he is vitally affected by all the religious thought known to him. John C. Shields Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, 1890; The Tale of Chloe, 1890. POETRY: Poems, 1851; Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, 1862; Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, 1883; Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, 1887; A Reading of Earth, 1888; Selected Poems, 1897; A Reading of Life, with Other Poems, 1901; Last Poems, 1909; The Poems of George Meredith, 1978 (2 volumes; Phyllis B. Bartlett, editor). NONFICTION: On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, 1877; The Letters of George Meredith, 1970 (3 volumes; C. L. Cline, editor). Bibliography Beer, Gillian. Meredith: A Change of Masks. London: Athlone Press, 1970. Attempts one of the first modern appraisals of Meredith’s art, seeing him as a novelist anticipating twentieth century concerns and techniques, as well as questioning Victorian certitudes. Includes an index. Muendel, Renate. George Meredith. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Chapters on Meredith’s poetry, his early fiction, his novels of the 1870’s and 1880’s, and his last novels. A beginning chapter sums up his biography. Includes chronology, notes, and an annotated bibliography. Pritchett, V. S. George Meredith and English Comedy. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1970. A very readable introductory account of Meredith, constituting the five Clark lectures for 1969. Roberts, Neil. Meredith and the Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. A good study of Meredith’s long fiction. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Shaheen, Mohammad. George Meredith: A Re-appraisal of the Novels. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981. Suggests that traditional Meredith criticism has viewed his fiction too much in the light of The Egoist. Concentrates on Meredith’s other major works as more representative of his true independent mind and specifically explores how character expresses theme for Meredith. Contains selected bibliography. Stevenson, Lionel. The Ordeal of George Meredith. London: Peter Owen, 1954. A straightforward, readable biography of Meredith. Includes a bibliography. Williams, Ioan, ed. Meredith: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. A collection of reviews and essays showing the critical reception of Meredith’s work from 1851 through 1911. Contains indexes of his work, periodicals, and newspapers.

Iris Murdoch Iris Murdoch

Born: Dublin, Ireland; July 15, 1919 Died: Oxford, England; February 8, 1999 Principal long fiction · Under the Net, 1954; The Flight from the Enchanter, 1956; The Sandcastle, 1957; The Bell, 1958; A Severed Head, 1961; An Unofficial Rose, 1962; The Unicorn, 1963; The Italian Girl, 1964; The Red and the Green, 1965; The Time of the Angels, 1966; The Nice and the Good, 1968; Bruno’s Dream, 1969; A Fairly Honourable Defeat, 1970; An Accidental Man, 1971; The Black Prince, 1973; The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, 1974; A Word Child, 1975; Henry and Cato, 1976; The Sea, the Sea, 1978; Nuns and Soldiers, 1980; The Philosopher’s Pupil, 1983; The Good Apprentice, 1985; The Book and the Brotherhood, 1987; The Message to the Planet, 1989; The Green Knight, 1993; Jackson’s Dilemma, 1995. Other literary forms · Iris Murdoch produced a considerable amount of work in areas other than fiction, particularly in the areas of literary criticism, drama, and, most important, philosophy. Her first book, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), was a critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy as it appears in his novels. She wrote three plays for the theater and adapted several of her novels for the stage. The Servants and the Snow was first performed at the Greenwich Theatre in 1970, and The Three Arrows at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, in 1972; the two plays were published together in 1973 as The Three Arrows, and The Servants and the Snow: Two Plays. Another play, Art and Eros, was performed at the National Theatre in 1980. Murdoch collaborated with J. B. Priestley to adapt her novel A Severed Head for the stage in 1963 (published in 1964), and with James Saunders to adapt The Italian Girl in 1967 (published in 1969). The Black Prince has also been adapted for the stage and was performed at the Aldwych Theatre in 1989. Murdoch also produced books on the subject of philosophy: The Sovereignty of Good (1970), which consists of three essays on moral philosophy, “The Idea of Perfection,” “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” and “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”; and The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977), a study of Plato’s objections to art and artists. Murdoch added to her work on Plato in the form of two “platonic dialogues” entitled “Art and Eros: A Dialogue About Art” and “Above the Gods: A Dialogue About Religion,” which she combined in a 1986 book entitled Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals appeared in 1992, and a collection of essays entitled Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature was published in 1997. She also published several philosophical papers in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and other important articles on philosophy and aesthetics, including “The Sublime and the Good” (Chicago Review) and “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” (Yale Review). Her best-known essay, “Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch,” which appeared in the January, 1961, issue of Encounter, is a work of literary criticism that urges a return to the capacious realism of the great nineteenth century novelists. Achievements · Murdoch, who is universally acknowledged as one of the most important novelists of postwar Britain, combined a prolific output with a consistently 667

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high level of fictional achievement. From the beginning of her career as a novelist, she was a critical and popular success in both Great Britain and the United States. In general, Murdoch is thought of as a “philosophical novelist,” and despite her objections to this description, she attempted a fusion of aesthetic and philosophical ideas in her fiction. Including her first novel, Under the Net, published in 1954, she published twenty-six novels and received a variety of literary awards and honors. In 1973, she was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Black Prince and in 1974 received the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1978. Murdoch became a member of the Irish Academy in 1970 and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975; she was awarded the honorary title of Commander of the British Empire in 1976. She was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1987, and in 1990 she received the Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club in New York. Biography · Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 15, 1919, to Anglo-Irish parents, Wills John Hughes Murdoch and Irene Alice Richardson. The family later moved to London, where Murdoch attended the Froebel Education Institute; she finished her secondary education at the Badminton School, Bristol, in 1937. From 1938 to 1942, she attended Somerville College at Oxford University, studying classical literature, ancient history, and philosophy. After obtaining a firstclass honors degree, she worked from 1942 to 1944 as the assistant principal in the British Treasury, and from 1944 to 1946 served as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in England, Austria, and Belgium. After the war, an interest in existentialism led Murdoch to turn her attention to philosophy. She was unable to accept a scholarship to study in the United States because she had become a member of the Communist Party while an undergraduate at Oxford, and instead attended Newnham College at Cambridge University from 1947 to 1948 after receiving the Sarah Smithson Studentship in philosophy. In 1948, she was made a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she lectured in philosophy until 1963, when she was named an honorary fellow of the college. In 1956, she married John Bayley, the author of many books of literary criticism and many book reviews. For many years Bayley was the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. He has also written several novels, including The Queer Captain (1995). From 1963 to 1967, Murdoch lectured at the Royal College of Art in London, after which she stopped teaching to devote all her time to writing fiction and philosophy. Her novels have won many awards, including the Book of the Year Award from the Yorkshire Post (1969), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1974), and the Booker Prize (1978). Murdoch became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1976 and a Dame of the same order (DBE) in 1987. Oxford University awarded her an honorary D.Litt. in 1987; Cambridge University followed in 1993. In 1992, she published her major philosophical work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, a brilliant and sometimes garrulous survey of her ideas about many more topics than its title indicates. In 1997, many of her writings on philosophy and literature were collected in Existentialists and Mystics. At one time Murdoch maintained a London flat in the Earls Court area, but she and her husband always had their primary residence in or near Oxford. In the mid-1990’s, Murdoch was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Her

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husband described their life together, including how they coped with her mental condition, in Iris: A Memoir (1998), published in the United States as An Elegy for Iris in 1999, the year Murdoch died.

Thomas Victor

Analysis · A knowledge of Iris Murdoch’s philosophical and critical essays is invaluable for the reader wishing to understand her fiction. Her moral philosophy, which entails a rejection of existentialism, behaviorism, and linguistic empiricism, informs her fiction throughout and provides a basis for an interpretation of both the content and the form of her work. Although early influenced by Sartrean existentialism, she developed a radically different view of the human condition. The major disagreement she had with the existentialist position is its emphasis on choice, a belief Murdoch characterizes as “unrealistic, over-optimistic, romantic” because it fails to consider the true nature of human consciousness and what she called “a sort of continuous background with a life of its own.” Existentialism, which she called “the last fling of liberal Romanticism in philosophy,” presents humanity with “too grand” a conception of itself as isolated from its surroundings and capable of rational, free choice. She describes this picture of humankind as “Kantian man-gods” who are “free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, and brave.” Although Murdoch denied being a Freudian, Sigmund Freud’s “realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man” is much closer to her own conception of human nature, and she agreed with what she called Freud’s “thoroughly pessimistic view” in which the psyche is described as an “egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy” determined by its individual

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history; the natural attachments of this psyche are “sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to control.” The most important dimension of this description of the individual is his lack of rational free will, and Murdoch’s statement in “Against Dryness” that “we are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy” is perhaps her tersest summary of the human condition. Murdoch’s philosophical position is the basis for her choice of prose fiction as the most realistic literary genre. The novelist’s advantage is his “blessed freedom from rationalism,” and she saw the novel as the literary form which, because of its lack of formal restrictions, could best portray the “open world, a world of absurdity and loose ends and ignorance.” Although she had reservations about modern literature and believed that the twentieth century novel tends either to be “crystalline” (self-contained, mythic, sometimes allegorical, and frequently neurotic) or “journalistic” (semidocumentary, descriptive, and factual), the nineteenth century novel as written by Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and George Eliot remains the best example of how fiction can create free, independent characters who are not “merely puppets in the exteriorization of some closely-locked psychological conflict” of the author. The nineteenth century novel, because it “throve upon a dynamic merging of the idea of person with the idea of class,” was not simply a representation of the human condition but rather contained “real various individuals struggling in society”; in other words, it presented characters and the “continuous background with a life of its own.” Murdoch believed that the most important obligation for the novelist is the creation of particularized, unique, and ultimately indefinable human beings, characters who move outside the novelist’s consciousness into an independent ontological status. This aesthetic theory has its corollary in Murdoch’s moral philosophy, in which she stresses the need for the individual to recognize the “otherness” of other individuals. The great novelist, like the “good” person, has an “apprehension of the absurd irreducible uniqueness of people and of their relations with each other,” an apprehension she castigates Sartre for lacking. Recognition of otherness is, to a degree, dependent upon the individual’s ability to “attend” to other individuals, a concept Murdoch derives from the philosophy of Simone Weil. Murdoch describes attention as a “patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation” and believes that we “grow by looking”; morality, both for the individual and the novelist who is attempting a realistic portrayal of human beings in the world, is an endless process of attending to a reality outside the individual consciousness. Attention is seeing, “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality,” and as such is an effort to counteract “states of illusion” brought about by selfish fantasy. For Murdoch, attention is also another name for love, and “the ability to direct attention is love.” Imaginative prose literature, Murdoch believed, is the best medium in which to focus attention on the individual because it is “par excellence the form of art most concerned with the existence of other persons.” In “The Sublime and the Good,” Murdoch defines love as “the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” She has also said that the main subject of her fiction is love, and her novels usually depict the difficulties involved in recognizing the uniqueness and independence of other human beings. In The Bell, the Abbess tells Michael Meade that “all of our failures are ultimately failures in love,” a statement that neatly describes Murdoch’s fictional

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world. The enemy of love in her novels is the propensity of the individual to fantasize and to create false pictures of reality, particularly distorted conceptions of other people. As a result, her novels frequently present situations in which characters are forced to confront the “otherness” of those around them, situations which often involve a realization of the past or present sexual involvements of other persons. The comfort and safety of the “old world,” as it is called by many Murdoch characters, is destroyed by a discovery about the past or by characters suddenly falling passionately in love with each other. A Severed Head, in which Martin Lynch-Gibbon is shocked by a series of revelations about his wife and friends and falls precipitately and unpredictably in love with Honor Klein, is one of the best examples of this recurring pattern in Murdoch’s work. Murdoch believed that the experience of art can serve to shock the individual into an awareness of a reality outside the personal psyche, and her novels contain several scenes in which characters who gaze upon paintings are able to escape temporarily from solipsistic fantasy. Dora Greenfield in The Bell, Harriet Gavender in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and Tim Reede in Nuns and Soldiers each experience what Murdoch calls “unselfing” and Harriet Gavender describes as “not being myself any more”; in fact, Dora Greenfield notes that paintings give her “something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour. . . . The pictures were something real outside herself.” Murdoch, in “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” calls art “spiritual experience” because it can bring out this radical change in perception, and in The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, she claims that in an unreligious age good art provides people with “their clearest experience of something grasped as separate and precious and beneficial and held quietly and unpossessively in the attention.” Murdoch’s ambivalent attitudes about the role of art and artists are present in both her fiction and her philosophy. In an interview with Michael Bellamy, in Contemporary Literature (1977), she described art as a “temptation to impose from where perhaps it isn’t always appropriate,” and in the same discussion noted that “morality has to do with not imposing form, except appropriately and cautiously and carefully and with attention to appropriate detail.” Murdoch suggested to several interviewers that the basis of her novels is what she calls the conflict between “the saint and the artist,” or the dichotomy between the “truthful, formless figure” and the “form-maker.” She mentioned Tallis Browne and Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Ann and Randall Peronett in An Unofficial Rose, and Hugo Belfounder and Jake Donaghue in Under the Net as examples. She believes that Plato’s life exemplifies this conflict: “We can see played out in that great spirit the peculiarly distressing struggle between the artist and the saint.” The true or “good” artist must avoid the “ruthless subjection of characters” to his will and should use symbolism judiciously in a “natural, subordinate way” that attempts to be “perfectly realistic.” In her fiction, Murdoch’s artist-figures are often demonic individuals who manipulate people in real life without regard for their well-being or independence as persons. Her “saint” figures have a corresponding lack of form, or sense of self, and are frequently unable or unwilling to act in any way. Douglas Swann’s comment in An Unofficial Rose that “nothing is more fatal to love than to want everything to have form” is also true of Murdoch’s attitude toward art. Many of Murdoch’s characters attempt to find form in their own lives in order to explain the apparent chaos that surrounds them. In her essay “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Murdoch talks about the need at times to stress “not the comprehensibility of the world but its incomprehensibility” and says that “there are even moments when

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understanding ought to be withheld.” In The Flight from the Enchanter, John Rainborough experiences a moment of joy when he feels “how little I know, and how little it is possible to know,” but this happiness in a lack of knowledge is rare in Murdoch’s fiction. In the same novel, Rosa Keepe, a much more representative Murdoch character, listens to the sound of the machines in the factory, hoping to hear a “harmonious and repetitive pattern,” just as Michael Meade in The Bell expects to find “the emergence in his life of patterns and signs.” At the end of the novel, he regretfully concludes that the apparent pattern he had observed in his life was merely his own “romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pattern.” The search for rational, discernible causal relationships is the major structuring principle in An Accidental Man, a novel concerned with the discovery of, in Gracie Tisbourne’s words, “a world . . . quite without order.” In “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” Murdoch says that “there are properly many patterns and purposes within life, but there is no general and as it were externally guaranteed pattern or purpose of the kind for which philosophers and theologians used to search,” and she has also stated her desire to write novels that, because they contain more of the contingent, accidental dimensions of life, are more realistic than “patterned” fiction. Murdoch’s reservations about form in life and art are paralleled by her suspicions about language. A fervent defender of literature and language who said in “Salvation by Words” that “words constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being. . . . The fundamental distinctions can only be made in words” and in The Fire and the Sun that “the careful responsible skillful use of words is our highest instrument of thought and one of our highest modes of being,” Murdoch also voiced suspicions about the ironic nature of language, its potential to distort the truth and to create false pictures of reality. This distrust of language is evident in her first novel, Under the Net, and continued to inform her fiction. In this respect, Murdoch was greatly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein; direct references and sly, sometimes ironic allusions to Wittgenstein appear repeatedly in her novels. In spite of these reservations, however, Murdoch mounts one of the most eloquent defenses of art and literature in modern times in The Sovereignty of Good and The Fire and the Sun. She claims in “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” that art “can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer. It is a kind of goodness by proxy,” and in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” she asserts that art, rather than being any kind of playful diversion for the human race, is “the place of its most fundamental insight.” According to Murdoch, literature is the most important art because of its unique ability to shed light on the human condition: “The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.” This statement in “The Idea of Perfection” obviously places an enormous burden on the novelist, a burden which Murdoch’s prolific output, technical virtuosity, and moral vision appear to be capable of bearing. Under the Net · Jake Donaghue, the narrator-protagonist of Under the Net, informs the reader early in the novel that the story’s central theme is his acquaintance with Hugo Belfounder. The relationship between the two men illustrates Murdoch’s philosophical and aesthetic concerns, for the Hugo-Jake friendship represents the saint-artist dichotomy; this “philosophical novel” allows her to explore the problem of theoretical approaches to reality, the issue of contingency, the realization of the otherness of individuals, and the ambiguities of language and art.

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The character of Hugo Belfounder is based in part on that of the enigmatic Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981; the Bulgarian-born Canetti, who has lived in England since 1939, appears in various guises in several of Murdoch’s early novels. Hugo, some of whose precepts also suggest the influence of Wittgenstein, is Murdoch’s first “saint” figure, and he embodies many of the qualities of the “good” characters who appear later in her fiction. Hugo’s saintliness is a result of his truthfulness and his lack of desire for form or structure in life and art. Opposed to him is Jake, who, fearing that he may actually tell the truth to Mrs. Tinckham about being evicted by Madge, delays telling his story until he can present it in a “more dramatic way . . . as yet it lacked form.” Form, as Jake tacitly admits, is a kind of lying, an imposition of structure that distorts reality. Hugo, on the other hand, is attracted by the ephermerality and formlessness of the firework displays he has created, and he abandons them when they receive the attention of art critics who begin to classify his work into styles. Hugo is also characterized by a selflessness that Jake finds astonishing: It does not occur to him that he is responsible for the concepts discussed in Jake’s book The Silencer, or that Anna Quentin’s mime theater is based upon her interpretation of his beliefs. The difference between the two men is also evident in their attitude toward theory. After his conversations with Hugo, Jake concedes that his own approach to life is “blurred by generalities,” and he is entranced by Hugo’s refusal to classify the world around him or to adopt any kind of theory about it. Annandine, Hugo’s persona in The Silencer, says that “the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular.” Theories, like form, distort what they attempt to explain and understand. Hugo’s lack of a general theoretical framework for his ideas, the “net” of the novel’s title, makes everything he encounters “astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious.” Part of Jake’s education and development as a potential artist is dependent upon relinquishing the need for theories and generalizations. In his first meeting with Anna, he notices that she is in “the grip of a theory,” and one of the most important episodes in the novel is Jake’s realization that Jean-Pierre Breteuil, whose work he has previously translated into English, has finally written a good novel, a feat Jake had believed impossible. He understands that he has incorrectly “classed” Jean-Pierre and says that “It wrenched me, like the changing of a fundamental category.” Similarly, when Jake becomes aware that Hugo is in love with Sadie Quentin rather than Anna, he says that “a pattern in my mind was suddenly scattered and the pieces of it went flying about me like birds.” At the end of the novel, Jake has abandoned attempts to impose his own ideas onto his environment; rather, he decides to sit quietly and “let things take shape deeply within me,” noting that he can “sense,” beneath the level of his attention and without his conscious aid, “great forms moving in the darkness.” Jake’s initial need to perceive form and to create theories is paralleled by his fear of contingency. One of Murdoch’s major quarrels with Sartre is his inability to deal with the contingent, or, in her words, the “messiness” and “muddle” of human existence. Rather than rejecting Sartre’s concept of viscosity, Murdoch frequently forces her characters to come to terms with the physical world and the accidental and apparently chaotic nature of reality. Early in the novel, Jake announces that “I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason,” and later, in a reference to Sartre’s La Nausée (1938; Nausea, 1949), observes that Hugo’s Bounty Belfounder film studio is situated in a part of London “where contingency reaches the

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point of nausea.” The novel ends with Jake laughingly admitting that he does not know the reason why Mrs. Tinckham’s kittens look as they do. “I don’t know why it is,” he says, “It’s just one of the wonders of the world.” In this scene, Jake focuses on the particular—the kittens—and is able to accept that their appearance cannot be explained by him, two actions which show that he has moved much closer to Hugo’s position. Hugo had earlier advised Jake that “some situations can’t be unravelled” and, as a result, should be “dropped.” This acceptance of contingency implies a realization that life cannot be completely controlled by human will. Jake also learns that other individuals exist independently of him and resist his efforts to explain and categorize their behavior. When he introduces his close friend Peter O’Finney to the reader, he claims that “Finn has very little inner life,” and that, while Finn is an inhabitant of his universe, “I . . . cannot conceive that he has one containing me.” Events in the novel force Jake to move out of his solipsistic consciousness, and at the conclusion he acknowledges that for the first time Anna exists “as a separate being and not as a part of myself,” an experience he finds “extremely painful.” She becomes “something which had to be learnt afresh,” and he then asks if it is possible ever to know another human being. He answers himself in a statement that clearly belongs to his author: “Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it.” In the same way, Jake also grants Hugo a final mysteriousness and impenetrability, comparing him to a monolith whose purpose remains obscure. Murdoch’s suspicions about the nature of language are also evident in Under the Net. In a conversation between Hugo and Jake, Hugo maintains that, by definition, language lies: “The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.” Language is also vulnerable because of humanity’s tendency to distort and to exaggerate experiences when attempting to articulate them; Hugo notes that when he speaks he does not state precisely what he thinks but rather what will impress Jake and force him to respond. Only actions, says Hugo, do not lie. This is not, however, Murdoch’s final word on language and literature, for Jake’s development as a human being during the course of the novel culminates in his realization that he will be able to write creatively. The “shiver of possibility” that he feels at the novel’s conclusion is his knowledge that his earlier writing has been merely a preparation for his emergence as a novelist. Murdoch’s first novel is clearly a Künstlerroman and her most overtly “philosophical” novel. In an interview in 1978 with Jack Biles, in Studies in the Literary Imagination, she said that she does not want to “promote” her philosophical views in her novels or to allow them to “intrude into the novel world.” This attitude certainly seems more descriptive of the novels written after Under the Net. Although she paints an ironically amusing portrait of the novel’s only professional philosopher, Dave Gellman, her major concerns in her first novel are clearly philosophical; Under the Net contains in more obvious form the philosophical issues which are transmuted into the fictional material of her subsequent work. A Fairly Honourable Defeat · Speaking of A Fairly Honourable Defeat in her interview with Michael Bellamy, Murdoch said that the “defeat” of the novel’s title is the defeat of good by evil. She calls the novel a “theological myth” in which Julius King is Satan, Tallis Browne is a Christ-figure, and Leonard Browne is God the Father. Another trichotomy, however, is suggested in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, for Julius and Tallis, like Ann and Randall Peronett in An Unofficial Rose, embody the saint-artist opposition

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that is so common in Murdoch’s fiction; and Rupert Foster represents the rationalist philosopher’s approach to experience, an approach which ultimately fails because it does not take into consideration the reality of evil and the formlessness of good. The relationship among these three men is one of the most important thematic concerns of the novel. A Fairly Honourable Defeat begins with Hilda and Rupert Foster enacting a scene common in Murdoch’s fiction, that of the happily married couple whose contentment has insulated them from their less fortunate friends. Like Kate and Octavian Gray in The Nice and the Good, Rupert and Hilda feel as if their happiness has granted them a privileged and protected status. Rupert’s statement that “Anything is permitted to us,” ominously similar to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “all is permitted,” signals that for the moment they live in the “old world” of pleasure and stability that is so frequently shattered in the course of a Murdoch novel. The agent of destruction in A Fairly Honourable Defeat is Julius King, a scientist who considers himself an “artist” whose art works consist of manipulating the lives of people around him, forcing them to “act parts” and in the process become “educated” about their moral failures. Julius King’s reaction to Rupert’s philosophy of life is the catalyst for the events of the novel. Although Rupert, like Murdoch, calls human existence “jumble” and castigates his sister-in-law Morgan Browne for her “love and do as you please” attitude toward people, Rupert believes that “complete information and straight answers and unambiguous positions . . . clarifications and rational policies” are possible and desirable; for Rupert, goodness is a fairly simplistic concept that can be experienced directly and articulated eloquently. His statement to Morgan after Julius has orchestrated their ostensible “love affair” that “nothing awful can happen” summarizes his inability to grasp the kind of evil that Julius represents, and the destruction of the manuscript of his book on moral philosophy symbolizes the fragility of his worldview, a fragility underscored by his death. Rupert’s major error is believing that his own rationality can prevail; he hypocritically thinks that “the top of the moral structure was no dream, and he had proved this by exercises in loving attention: loving people, loving art, loving work, loving paving stones and leaves on trees.” In reality, as Julius later observes, Rupert is in love with his own image of himself as a good, loving, and rational man who can control any urge that threatens the “moral structure” of his world; while he espouses many theories about the nature of love, he lacks the “direct language of love” that makes real action possible. Unlike Rupert, who believes that his duty is to love others, Julius’s attitude toward human beings is one of contempt, an emotion the narrator describes as “the opposite extreme from love: the cynicism of a deliberate contemptuous diminution of another person.” One of the major reasons for his low valuation of people is the very quality that makes them vulnerable to his manipulation—their malleability, or, as he phrases it, the easiness with which they are “beguiled.” In a conversation with Tallis, Julius says that most individuals, motivated by fear and egotism, will cooperate in almost any deception. The most obvious examples of his theory in A Fairly Honourable Defeat are Morgan Browne and Simon Foster. Morgan, titillated by Julius’s boast that he can “divide anybody from anybody,” first encourages him in his plan to separate Simon and Axel and later unknowingly becomes one of his victims; Simon, afraid that Julius will destroy his relationship with Axel, unwillingly allows Julius to “arrange” a relationship between Rupert and Morgan. In fact, Julius’s claim that he is an “artist” and a “magician” depends upon the moral weaknesses of the characters whose lives he carefully “plots.”

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Both Leonard Browne and Julius King mount verbal assaults on the world; in some respects, their diatribes sound remarkably similar. Like Leonard, Julius believes that the human race is a “loathesome crew” who inhabit a “paltry planet”; he goes further than Leonard, however, in his statement that human beings “don’t deserve to survive,” and, more important, in his desire to see the reification of his ideas. Julius’s theory that people are merely puppets who need to be educated becomes, in practice, a tragedy. Although, like Hugo Belfounder, he claims that philosophy is the subtlest “method of flight” from consciousness and that its attempted truths are “tissues of illusions,” in Theories, he is entranced with his own theorizing, as is Rupert. Good, he says, is dull, and what passes for human goodness is a “tiny phenomenon” that is “messy, limited, truncated.” Evil, by comparison, “reaches far far away into the depths of the human spirit and is connected with the deepest springs of human vitality.” Good, according to Julius, is not even a “coherent concept; it is unimaginable for human beings, like certain things in physics.” One of Murdoch’s saintlike characters, James Tayper Pace in The Bell, also discusses the difficulty of comprehending goodness while he emphasizes the need for the individual to seek the good beyond the confines of his own consciousness: “And where do we look for perfection? Not in some imaginary concoction out of our own idea of our own character—but in something so external and so remote that we can get only now and then a distant hint of it.” In “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” Murdoch talks about contemplating goodness, and, like James Tayper Pace, defines it as “an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue.” Unlike Pace and Murdoch, Julius is unwilling to waste his energies in the contemplation of a concept so “remote” and “transcendent” and is instead beguiled by the immediacy and vitality of evil. Tallis Browne, the “saint” of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, is one of the strangest characters in Murdoch’s fiction. Early in the novel, his wife Morgan, talking about the human psyche, complains that “it stretches away and away to the ends of the world and it’s soft and sticky and warm. There’s nothing real, no hard parts, no centre.” This description of human consciousness also explains Morgan’s dissatisfaction with her husband, who is completely lacking in the qualities she so admires in Julius King: form and myth. With Tallis, says Morgan, “there were no forms and limits, things had no boundaries”; he lacks any kind of personal “myth,” while she characterizes Julius as “almost all myth.” Like Julius, Tallis does not believe in theories, and at one point he correctly accuses Morgan of being “theory-ridden” and chasing “empty abstractions”; unlike Julius, however, he has no theories about human nature or behavior, a fact that Julius acknowledges when he tells Tallis that Rupert probably feels that “theorizing would be quite out of place with you.” While Julius manipulates the relationships of those around him according to his ideas about human weakness and Rupert writes a text on morality and goodness, Tallis nurses his dying father and helps to feed and shelter the poverty-stricken immigrants in his neighborhood. The formlessness of Tallis’s goodness causes him to have no desire to analyze the tragedy of Rupert’s death or to assign reasons or blame. He grieves “blankly” over what appears to have been a “disastrous compound” of human failure, muddle, and sheer chance, and mourns Rupert by attempting to remember him simply with a kind of mindless pain. His reaction to the loss of his wife is similar. Rather than indulging in anger, grief, or speculations about their future relationship, he simply lets her “continue to occupy his heart.” His unwillingness to impose any kind of form or to

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structure his surroundings in any way extends to his feelings for his father Leonard, who is dying of cancer. Tallis cannot find the appropriate moment to tell his father of his impending death because, as he tells Julius, “It seems so arbitrary, at any particular instant of time, to change the world to that degree.” Rather than seeing human beings as puppets, as does Julius, Tallis has reached a crisis state in which he fears that any action may have a deleterious effect on those around him. Significantly, however, in spite of Tallis’s passivity he is the only character in the novel who is capable of positive action. As Axel phrases it, he is “the only person about the place with really sound instincts.” In the Chinese restaurant, he strikes the young man who is abusing the Jamaican, and later he forces Julius to telephone Hilda Foster to explain that it is Julius who has created the “affair” between Morgan and Rupert. At the end of the novel, Tallis has abandoned the idea of prayer, which the narrator notes could only be a “superstition” for him at that point, and has instead become a completely passive and receptive consciousness. He catches hold of objects “not so as to perform any act himself, but so as to immobilize himself for a moment to be, if that were possible, perhaps acted upon, perhaps touched.” The similarity of this statement to Simone Weil’s definition of “attention” in Waiting for God (1951), where she describes the act of attention as “suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object . . . our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything,” is clear. Much earlier in the novel, Morgan has grabbed an object, a green paperweight belonging to Rupert, in an attempt to escape from the formlessness of the psyche. Tallis, on the other hand, uses objects as a way to attend to reality, as a means of opening himself up to the world outside himself. A Fairly Honourable Defeat ends with Tallis weeping over his father’s approaching death and Julius, after contemplating his choices of Parisian restaurants, concluding that “life was good.” The conversation between the two men which precedes this, however, is much more ambiguous. Julius, in an apparent attempt to win Tallis’s approbation for his actions, reveals a great deal about himself personally and asks Tallis to agree that he is “an instrument of justice.” Tallis’s attitude toward Julius is one of detached tolerance, and his response to Julius’s statement is merely to smile. A parallel to his calm acceptance of Julius’s evil is his response to the “weird crawling things,” apparently rats, mice, and insects, which inhabit his house; he feels for them “pity rather than disgust” and has advanced far beyond Rupert’s claim to love “paving stones and leaves on trees.” Tallis’s acceptance of the world, which has grown to embrace even its most despicable and horrible elements, makes him the most saintlike character in Murdoch’s fiction. He is her answer to Sartre’s Roquentin in Nausea: Instead of becoming nauseated by the world’s plethora of objects and the muddle of existence, as does Roquentin, Tallis, at the end of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, is capable of feeling only pity and acceptance for everything that surrounds him. An Accidental Man · In An Accidental Man, Murdoch presents a chaotic world of accident and unpredictability in which several of her characters search for—and fail to find—any kind of pattern or causal relationships in their lives. Perhaps Murdoch’s fear that form in fiction can hinder the characters’ development as complex and fully realized individuals and that intricately patterned fiction sometimes prevents the author from exploring “the contradictions or paradoxes or more painful aspects of the subject matter” led her to write a novel in which the narrative voice is almost completely absent: In An Accidental Man, the characters appear to have taken over the novel. In an interview with W. K. Rose, in Shenandoah (Winter, 1968), Murdoch

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expressed the desire to write a novel “made up entirely of peripheral characters, sort of accidental people like Dickens’s people,” and mentioned that the author “might go so far as starting to invent the novel and then abolishing the central characters.” An Accidental Man is the result of these speculations about fiction, for it contains a Dickensian sweep of characters and lacks any kind of “protagonist.” The inclusion of more “accident” in Murdoch’s work is one aspect of her wish to write realistic fiction, for she believes that the novelist should portray the world as “aimless, chancy, and huge.” An Accidental Man, a brittle comedy of manners which contains four deaths, two attempted suicides, and more than twenty characters, some of whom are suffering from mental retardation, schizophrenia, and brain damage, is Murdoch’s vision of a contingent, random, and godless world. Many characters in the novel share this vision. At the conclusion, Matthew Gibson Grey notes that Austin’s appropriation of Mavis Argyll “has been, like so many other things in the story, accidental.” Charlotte Ledgard, contemplating suicide, sees herself as “the slave of chance” and the world as being made up of “chaos upon which everything rested and out of which it was made.” Ludwig Leferrier senses that “human life perches always on the brink of dissolution,” and Gracie Tisbourne, who is usually not given to philosophical speculations, has “a sense of the world being quite without order and of other things looking through.” The characters in An Accidental Man wander through mazes in which they lack important information about their own and others’ lives, or they become the victims of “accidents” which radically transform their existence. London’s labyrinthine streets become symbolic of their ignorance and blindness as they pass and miss one another, and, in the instance of Rosalind Monkley, symbolic of accidental death itself. Garth Gibson Grey, Matthew Gibson Grey, Ludwig Leferrier, and Mavis Argyll all hope to find some kind of logical order and rationality in the world, but are finally defeated by the “absolute contradiction . . . at the heart of things,” and instead encounter what Garth calls “the rhetoric of the casually absent god.” Although Murdoch is generally not interested in experimentation in form, An Accidental Man shows her moving beyond the traditional narrative form of her earlier work in search of new structures to embody the philosophical assumptions that underlie the novel. Conspicuously missing in this novel is an authoritative narrative voice; instead, one tenth of the book is in epistolary form and a significant portion consists of chapters of untagged dialogue. In An Accidental Man, Murdoch, who has stated her wish to expel herself from her fiction in order to avoid imposing “the form of one’s own mind” on the characters, creates a work in which the narrator is frequently not privy to the inner thoughts or reactions of the characters and can only report their spoken and written words without comment or elucidation. The disappearance of the narrator in certain sections of the novel parallels the absence of god; Murdoch creates a novelistic world in which the reader must search for his own patterns and conclusions without the guiding presence of the authorial voice which was present in her earlier fiction. In addition, the narrator’s refusal to pass judgments or give information about the thoughts of the characters, despite the fact that he has shown himself to be omniscient in certain situations, results in a coldly detached tone which refuses to grant a fundamental importance to any act. Like the chapters of dialogue, the epistolary sections of the novel create a voyeuristic situation for the reader that parallels the voyeurism that takes place several times during the narrative. The reader is privileged to read correspondence and to overhear important conversations while being denied access to the characters’ thoughts, just as

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the characters in An Accidental Man have a noticeable penchant for eavesdropping on one another’s conversations and reading other people’s letters. The epistolary sections also create comically ironic effects because the reader knows more about the entire situation than any of the individual letter-writers, and the ignorance, lies, and exaggerations of the writers are juxtaposed in ways that underscore the limited and fallacious viewpoint of each individual. These chapters also give Murdoch an opportunity to open up the novel, expanding its boundaries to encompass more and more territory—a narrative technique that corresponds to her desire to write fiction that depicts reality as “a rich receding background” with “a life of its own.” The widening framework of the novel creates a constantly changing perspective, for when the narrator withdraws from a direct presentation of events in order to present the reactions of peripheral or uninvolved characters, the importance of these events is reduced through distancing and in the process rendered comic. The same technique is used in the chapters of pure dialogue, where events which have been treated seriously in earlier episodes become the subject of comically trivial cocktailparty conversations. The dialogic and epistolary sections are central elements in the novel, for Murdoch uses them to advance the narrative through fragmentary bits of information which are often necessary for a complete understanding of what is happening; her belief that “reality is not given whole” is expressed in her narrative technique. The self-acknowledged “accidental man” of the novel’s title is Austin Gibson Grey. Neurotically obsessed with his older brother, Matthew, and unable to keep either his wife or his job, Austin is nevertheless a survivor who depends upon his own egotism for his continued well-being. One aspect of Austin’s ability to survive is his refusal to allow the catastrophes of others to affect him. He observes that “a man can see himself becoming more callous to events because he has to survive,” and his reaction to the death of Rosalind Monkley, whom he has killed in an automobile accident, is typical. He writes to his wife, Dorina, that “I will survive and recover, I have had worse blows than this”; he does not mention any guilt he may feel about the incident or the pain Rosalind’s death may have caused her family. Similarly, after Dorina’s accidental death, Austin tells Matthew that “Poor old Dorina was just a sort of half person really, a maimed creature, she had to die, like certain kinds of cripples have to. They can’t last.” In spite of Austin’s selfishness, however, he is merely the most exaggerated example of egotism in An Accidental Man. The statement by an unnamed character at the novel’s conclusion that “Austin is like all of us only more so” is, unfortunately, correct. Austin Gibson Grey resembles several other characters in Murdoch’s fiction, all of whom show a talent for survival and an ability to turn unfortunate incidents to their account. In the same way, Austin’s wife Dorina is representative of another charactertype which recurs throughout Murdoch’s novels: the individual who functions as a scapegoat or assumes the consequences of the sins of others. Frequently, through no fault of their own, such characters cannot cope with the events happening around them and either choose suicide or become the victims of an “accidental” death that appears to be inevitable. Traditionally, the scapegoat or pharmakos figure is an individual who must be expelled from society in order to maintain its continued existence and vitality. Dorina Gibson Grey is a pharmakos who manifests all these characteristics. Early in the novel, she feels as if “something were closing in for the kill,” and after her death, her sister Mavis voices the opinion that “she has died for me,” telling Matthew that “she has somehow died for us, for you and me, taking

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herself away, clearing herself away, so that our world should be easier and simpler.” Dorina’s death enables Garth Gibson Grey to feel love once again for his father. Her death also rejuvenates her husband, as Matthew ironically observes: “Something or other had . . . done Austin good. Perhaps it was simply Dorina’s death.” Her death has an almost ritualistic dimension in An Accidental Man, and it ensures the rejuvenation of several of the characters. The ending of An Accidental Man is one of the darkest in Murdoch’s fiction, and very few of the defeats suffered in this novel can be termed “honourable.” In fact, several characters, including Matthew Gibson Grey, Garth Gibson Grey, and Charlotte Ledgard, appear to have settled for what Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat calls a “sensible acceptance of the second rate.” Matthew, en route with Ludwig Leferrier to the United States, where Ludwig will receive a prison sentence for refusing to fight in Vietnam, realizes that “he would never be a hero. . . . He would be until the end of his life a man looking forward to his next drink”; Garth is metamorphosed into a self-satisfied, successful novelist whose former social conscience and pursuit of goodness have been abandoned in favor of marriage to Gracie Tisbourne and all that she represents; and Charlotte chooses to remain with Mitzi Ricardo in spite of her knowledge that what she feels for Mitzi is merely “a fake dream love.” These failures contrast with the fates of Austin and Clara Tisbourne, both of whom are described as looking “radiantly juvenile.” Austin, in particular, has been completely rejuvenated by the misfortunes of others and is finally able to move his fingers, which have been rigid since his childhood “accident”; his inability to do this heretofore has symbolized his problems with dealing with the world, just as his new physical flexibility reflects the rebirth of his psyche. The darkly comic final chapter of An Accidental Man, which consists solely of untagged dialogue, furnishes important information while it trivializes the events of the entire novel. The fact that Ludwig Leferrier is now in prison in the United States after his decision to leave his idyllic and protected situation in England, the real moral dilemma of the novel, is mentioned in passing and then dropped by an unnamed character who incorrectly says that he has been imprisoned for “Drugs or something.” In this final section of the novel, unlike the earlier chapters of letters and dialogue, the reader becomes less and less certain about who is actually speaking. In fact, the dialogue appears to be spoken by a group of eerie, disembodied voices which create an ominous atmosphere from which the narrator and the main characters have departed, leaving the reader to overhear the mindless gossiping of strangers. At the conclusion of An Accidental Man, contingency and “the rhetoric of the casually absent god” have triumphed. The Sea, the Sea · In The Sea, the Sea, Murdoch focuses on a type of character who has appeared throughout her fiction, the artist or would-be artist who confuses life and art with unfortunate (and sometimes tragic) consequences. In Murdoch’s earlier novel, The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson’s quiet life is suddenly shattered by a series of revelations and catastrophes which include an affair with the teenage daughter of his best friend. These real-life events cause Bradley to create the novel he had been unable to write previously; at the same time, Bradley is consciously aware of his movement from experience to the expression of experience in aesthetic form and realizes the difference between the two, even though he takes great pride in his “artistic” consciousness throughout the story. In The Sea, the Sea, however, Charles Arrowby, the famous and ostensibly “retired” theatrical director who is unable to

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leave behind the artifice and dramatic structure of the stage, begins to “direct” life offstage, ignoring the boundaries between fact and fiction. His theater becomes the small seaside village to which he has moved, and his actors are the people around him. Published one year before The Sea, the Sea, The Fire and the Sun, Murdoch’s study of Plato’s objections to art and artists, is instructive to read in the light of her portrayal of Charles Arrowby. Although Murdoch disagrees with several of Plato’s fundamental assumptions about the nature of art, her narrator in The Sea, the Sea, embodies many of Plato’s—and Murdoch’s—suspicions about the artistic sensibility. In The Fire and the Sun, Murdoch discusses the Platonic doctrine that art and the artist “exhibit the lowest and most irrational kind of awareness, eikasia, a state of vague image-ridden illusion”; in Plato’s myth of the cave, this state corresponds to the prisoners who, facing the wall, can see only the shadows cast by the fire. Charles Arrowby, called the “king of shadows” several times in the novel, exemplifies the “bad” artist, the “naive fantasist” who “sees only moving shadows and construes the world in accordance with the easy unresisted mechanical ‘causality’ of his personal dream life.” Throughout the novel, James Arrowby, Charles’s cousin and the “saint” figure in The Sea, the Sea, tries to convince Charles that the woman he is pursuing is only a “dream figure,” just as Hartley Fitch, the sixty-year-old woman who was Charles’s adolescent girlfriend and is now married to another man, tells Charles that their love is a “dream” that does not belong in the real world. Near the end of the novel, Charles acknowledges the truth of their interpretations, calling his novel “my own dream text.” Charles Arrowby’s psychological state, one that combines tremendous egotism with an obsessional need to control other people while remaining almost completely deluded about what is happening around him, closely resembles Murdoch’s description of Plato’s idea of the “bad” man. The “bad” or mediocre man is “in a state of illusion, of which egoism is the most general name. . . . Obsession, prejudice, envy, anxiety, ignorance, greed, neurosis, and so on veil reality.” Similarly, Plato says that the human soul desires “omnipotence” and erects barriers between itself and reality so that it can remain comfortably within a “self-directed dream world.” Although on the novel’s first page Charles claims that he has come to his retirement home “to repent of egoism,” his realization that Hartley is living in the same village results in his jealously obsessional need to “capture” her from her husband. Although he views himself as a Prospero-like magician-artist who can effect any kind of magical transformation, he gradually reveals his incorrect evaluations of himself and others. Charles’s novel, the chronicle of his delusions and errors, is a portrait of the “bad” man who refuses to acknowledge the unpredictability and intransigence of reality. Charles tells the reader that his last great role as an actor was as Prospero in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and he believes he has much in common with Shakespeare’s magician. Despite his statement early in the novel that “Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit,” he soon begins the direction of his final “drama.” His theatrical vision of the world often obscures reality; not surprisingly, he is overjoyed to discover that what he first called a “diary,” “memoir,” and “autobiography” has become a novel. The change from a journalistic mode of writing to a fictional one parallels his growing tendency to dramatize and fictionalize events, and soon after his announcement that he is indeed writing a novel, he begins to construct an elaborate “story” about Hartley and her marriage. James fails in his attempt to convince his cousin that he is fighting for a “phantom Helen” and that his wish to rescue her is “pure imagination, pure fiction.” Although Charles later admits to the

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reader that he has created an “image” of Hartley which does not correspond to reality, he denies that his “image” is untrue. His kidnapping of Hartley reveals his need to hold her prisoner in his imagination, to create an aesthetic image he can manipulate for his own purposes. Unlike Bradley Pearson, who finally admits that any kind of final possession of human beings is impossible, Charles continues to believe that he can force Hartley to concede to the planned denouement of his “drama.” Charles’s attitude toward his novel is related to his dramatic theories, and both have implications for the way his story is interpreted by the reader. He defines the theater as “an attack on mankind carried on by magic,” and its function as being “to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied.” Although he claims to take painstaking care to relate events in his novel as truthfully as possible, at one point even reassuring the reader that he is rendering the dialogue almost verbatim, he is delighted by his sudden discovery that language, like dramatic art, can create illusion and veil truth. He says that anything written down is “true in a way” and gloats over the fact that he could write down “all sorts of fantastic nonsense” in his memoir and be believed because of “human credulity” and the power of the written word. He takes an increasing pleasure in fictionalizing his life and in transforming the people around him into “stylish sketches,” acts which reveal his desire to cast his friends and enemies into a drama he can both write and direct. Like Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, he finds that verbalizing experience can be a way to control what is happening; he also believes that he can dramatically intensify his feelings by writing them out “as a story.” When he writes out his account of the visit of another former girlfriend, Lizzie Scherer, he observes that it would be “rewarding” to “write the whole of one’s life thus bit by bit as a novel. . . . The pleasant parts would be doubly pleasant, the funny parts funnier, and sin and grief would be softened by a light of philosophic consolation.” Murdoch, who has said that the function of art is to reveal reality rather than to console its creator or consumer, portrays Charles as the “bad” artist who attempts to use art and the creative process for solace instead of revelation. Just as Murdoch’s characters often misuse art and their own creative impulses, they frequently fall in love suddenly and violently, an experience that produces a state of delusion and neurotic obsession. Although she says in The Fire and the Sun that the “lover” can be shocked into an awareness of “an entirely separate reality” during the experience of love, the lover’s ego usually causes him to wish to “dominate and possess” the beloved. The lover, rather than wishing to “serve and adore,” instead wants “to de-realize the other, devour and absorb him, subject him to the mechanism of . . . fantasy.” Charles Arrowby’s “Quest of the Bearded Lady,” as one character terms his pursuit of Hartley, exemplifies this dimension of falling in love; his feelings for her are typical of the obsessive, self-centered, fantasy-ridden love that Murdoch believes is antithetical to an objective, free apprehension of others. He admits that he is “like a madman” and compares himself to a “frenzied animal.” Later, he says that “I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I . . . could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent.” Unlike his cousin James, who has cultivated the intellectual and spiritual detachment of Eastern philosophy combined with a concern for the well-being and “otherness” of individuals, Charles’s passion for Hartley Fitch is, at bottom, an obsession with his own past and loss of innocence. In two earlier novels, An Accidental Man and The Black Prince, Murdoch uses

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narrative devices such as epistolary and dialogic chapters and the addition of “postscripts” by other characters to alter the reader’s perspective and interpretation of events. In The Sea, the Sea, she allows Charles Arrowby to add a “revision” to his novel that qualifies and contradicts much of his earlier narrative. At the end of the “History” section of The Sea, the Sea, he closes his story on a note of repentance and revelation, goes to sleep hearing “singing,” and awakens to see the seals he had previously been unable to sight. Murdoch believes that fiction should reflect the “muddle” of reality, and thus she adds a postscript by the narrator appropriately entitled “Life Goes On.” Charles begins by mocking his “conclusion” and observing that life, unlike art, “has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions”; he then decides to continue his story a while longer, this time in the form of a “diary” in which he alters his own version of events and reveals that he has learned very little from them. In this way, Murdoch further reduces the stature of her “failed Prospero,” and the picture of Charles that emerges in the postscript is that of a rapidly aging man with an incipient heart condition. Another addition to the group of “power figures” in Murdoch’s fiction who believe that they can “invent” reality and manipulate other people for aesthetic purposes, Charles Arrowby represents Murdoch’s belief in the final impossibility of one human being’s controlling another. In The Sea, the Sea, the would-be director who thought himself a “god” or “king” is revealed as a relatively powerless individual over whom the formlessness and unpredictability of “transcendent reality” triumphs. The Good Apprentice · Murdoch’s most critically acclaimed novel of the 1980’s is The Good Apprentice, a novel that reflects her continuing desire to write fiction whose length and complexity embody her belief in a contingent, infinitely particularized universe in which goodness is easily discussed but achieved, if at all, with great difficulty and pain. The “good apprentice” can refer to either of two characters in the novel. Edward Baltram has recently been responsible for the death of his best friend and is attempting to deal with his resulting guilt and self-hatred; Stuart Cuno, his stepbrother, is, like many other Murdochian characters, seeking goodness and finding it a problematical goal. Murdoch makes Stuart Cuno the mouthpiece of some of her most cherished ideas about the nature of goodness. Like Murdoch, Stuart acknowledges that goodness is often an unimaginable concept that involves inaction rather than action, and several times in the story he is referred to as a “negative presence.” Stuart has rejected the entire concept of God and instead attempts to meditate blankly, to empty his mind out in order to perceive clearly, what Murdoch calls “an instinctive craving for nothingness which was also a desire to be able to love and enjoy and ‘touch’ everything, to help everything.” Psychoanalyst Thomas McCaskerville, who stands in direct opposition to Stuart’s nontheoretical approach to goodness, catechizes the younger man at length in an important conversation that reveals Thomas’s dependence on the cozy theories of psychoanalysis that Murdoch has mocked in her earlier novels. Thomas has a conceptual framework for almost any idea or event, and his discovery that his wife Midge has been having an affair with Stuart’s father Harry Cuno only temporarily shocks him out of his comfortable mental and emotional world. His further realization that his supposedly psychotic patient Mr. Blinnet is actually quite sane and has been faking mental illness for years is another blow at Thomas’s carefully constructed theoretical world.

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It is the artist Jesse Baltram, Edward’s father, who best represents one of the most enduring and interesting figures in Murdoch’s fiction, the magician-artist power figure who mysteriously spellbinds those around him and functions as a catalyst for many important events. Edward goes to Seegard, Jesse’s home, to be “healed” and “purified” of his friend’s death. In the process he meets May Baltram, Jesse’s wife, his two half sisters, and, finally, his father, who has been reduced by an unspecified illness to childlike behavior and incoherence. Jesse’s difficulty in making rational conversation is another alternative in the novel to Stuart’s “blankness” and “whiteness” and Thomas’s frenziedly articulate philosophizing: It signifies that the logical ordering principle of language ultimately cannot describe or explain a reality that is always “boiling over” with energy and creativity. Jesse’s description of the world and the relationship between good and evil, in which syntax and logic break down, is directly opposed to the other characters’ slick facility with language. He tells Edward, “What I knew once—about good and evil and those—all those things—people don’t really have them, meet them—in their lives at all, most people don’t—only a few—want that—that fight, you know—think they want—good—have to have evil—not real, either—of course—all inside something else—it’s a dance—you see—world needs power— always round and round—it’s all power and—energy—which sometimes—rears up its beautiful head—like a dragon—that’s the meaning of it all—I think—in the shadows now—can’t remember—doesn’t matter—what I need—is a long sleep—so as to dream it all—over again.” Jesse’s connection with the supernatural and paranormal dimension of Edward’s stay at Seegard reveals Murdoch again experimenting with the limits of realistic fiction. As in The Sea, the Sea, she is willing to force the reader to accept the unexplained and acknowledge the thin line between the natural and the supernatural, between distortion of perception and a glimpse into another world where the usual rational rules no longer apply. The Good Apprentice shows Murdoch at the height of her powers as a novelist, combining her “moral psychology” with her long-held aesthetic theories in a work that proves the undiminished fecundity of her imagination and intelligence. The Book and the Brotherhood · In another important novel of the 1980’s, The Book and the Brotherhood, Murdoch’s power-figure is as charismatic as Jesse but is neither impotent nor incoherent. David Crimond is an intellectual of the far Left (the communists kicked him out for being too radical). Years ago at Oxford, a group of Crimond’s friends pledged to support him while he wrote the volume of revolutionary economic and social philosophy they thought the world needed. Years later, although Crimond’s book remains unpublished, his intellectual, personal, and even sexual power over the group remains undiminished. The novel shows how the friends try to define their moderating political views in relation to Crimond’s. The novel also shows how the friends and their friends try to make peace with the world. Each yearns for fulfillment, though in widely different ways—some of them touching, some admirable, some reprehensible. Gerard, perhaps the novel’s central character, yearns for a vague something (his yearning began with his affection for his pet parrot, as described in one of Murdoch’s most brilliant passages). Rose, a passive woman, yearns for Gerard. Duncan yearns for his wife, who yearns for Crimond. Jenkins, a saintly schoolmaster, yearns for a perfect act. Other characters are less important but stranger. At the end of an Oxford party, Gulliver is awakened by a

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deer’s kiss; later he has a paranormal experience in a London railway station. Other inexplicable forces are exerted by buried Roman roads and by Church rituals performed by an unbelieving priest. The Book and the Brotherhood offers no certainties, for neither Crimond’s ideas nor Gerard’s refutations are convincing. It shows a wide spectrum of memorable characters yearning earnestly and sometimes comically toward some things they cannot fully define. The Green Knight · Murdoch’s last great novel, The Green Knight, is one of her most perplexing. The story is bizarre. It often resembles (but does not strictly parallel) that of the medieval narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In its central act, Murdoch once again pushes the bounds of realism. One dark night in a public park, Lucas Graffe, while attempting to kill his brother Clement with a baseball bat, hits a third man instead and kills him. Later, like the medieval Green Knight, the supposedly dead man reappears. His name is Peter Mir, and he is this novel’s powerful magician; he is alive and demands justice. His demand is worked out in a way that also recalls Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Mir also is said to resemble Mr. Pickwick, Prospero, the Minotaur, and Mephistopheles.) The stories of other characters encircle the central one. Clement hopelessly loves Louise Anderson, whose magical house contains three wonderful daughters who are about to begin life’s journey. The most mysterious is Moy, who can move small stones at a distance. The Andersons keep a dog named Anax, one of Murdoch’s finest animal creations. His master, Bellamy, gave him away to embark on a spiritual quest for which he is ill suited. At one point Anax, who may embody the goodness of the flesh, escapes and tries to find his master in an anxious lope through the streets of London. Murdoch’s conclusion of this novel may not satisfy everyone, but the journey through the novel is exciting and rewarding. Her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, has many high spots, but it is often confusing. By the time the reviews appeared, her Alzheimer’s disease had progressed so far that she could not understand them. Angela Hague, updated by George Soule Other major works PLAYS: A Severed Head, pr. 1963 (with J. B. Priestley); The Italian Girl, pr. 1967 (with James Saunders); The Servants and the Snow, pr. 1970; The Three Arrows, pr. 1972; The Three Arrows, and The Servants and the Snow: Plays, pb. 1973; Art and Eros, pr. 1980; The Black Prince, pr. 1989; Joanna Joanna, pb. 1994; The One Alone, pb. 1995. NONFICTION: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 1953; The Sovereignty of Good, 1970; The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, 1977; Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues, 1986; Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1992; Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, 1997 (edited by Peter Conradi). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Iris Murdoch. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Bloom’s collection of essays, a representative selection of some of the best articles and book chapters on Murdoch, includes his introductory analysis of The Good Apprentice and Murdoch’s essay “Against Dryness.” Bove, Cheryl K. Understanding Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina

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Press, 1993. A lucid and valuable handbook for college students. Early chapters summarize Murdoch’s philosophical ideas. Byatt, Antonia S. Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1965; expanded edition, London: Vintage, 1994. This important study focuses on the degrees of freedom that characters have in Murdoch’s early novels and notes Murdoch’s failings. The expanded edition reprints the original edition and adds a foreword, the entire text of Byatt’s pamphlet Iris Murdoch (1976), a review of Byatt’s first book, and Byatt’s own reviews of many of Murdoch’s later novels. Dipple, Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. A valuable and essential study of the aesthetic, moral, and philosophical dimensions of Murdoch’s works through Nuns and Soldiers. Dipple discusses Murdoch’s use of Plato’s concept of the Good and perhaps overemphasizes the bleak Buddhist elements in the novels. Gordon, David J. Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Gordon discusses many of Murdoch’s ideas, especially those concerning power and human motives. Heusel, Barbara. Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Heusel analyzes Murdoch’s relation to many philosophers, Wittgenstein in particular. She uses Bakhtin’s dialogic method to illuminate how Murdoch’s characters interact. Johnson, Deborah. Iris Murdoch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Johnson uses Anglo-American and French feminist theories to analyze Murdoch from a feminist perspective, focusing on Murdoch’s male narrators, the issue of confinement, the symbol of the cave, and the problem of endings in the fiction. Soule, George. Four British Women Novelists: Anita Brookner, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, an Annotated and Critical Secondary Bibliography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998. An analysis of most critical books and articles on this author through 1996, with evaluations. Todd, Richard. Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearian Interest. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979. Murdoch’s frequently noted debt to Shakespeare is explored in this study, which pays particular attention to The Black Prince, Bruno’s Dream, A Word Child, The Nice and the Good, and A Fairly Honourable Defeat.

George Orwell George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair Born: Motihari, India; June 25, 1903 Died: London, England; January 21, 1950 Principal long fiction · Burmese Days, 1934; A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935; Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936; Coming Up for Air, 1939; Animal Farm, 1945; Nineteen EightyFour, 1949. Other literary forms Since the mid-1940’s, George Orwell has been considered one of the world’s premier essayists. Combining reportage, the polemical essay, fictional techniques, and refracted autobiographical detail, his works defy precise generic definition. Orwell’s numerous nonfiction works have been compiled in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell (1968), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Achievements · Although Orwell is widely recognized as one of the best essayists of the twentieth century, his reputation as a novelist rests almost entirely on two works: the political allegory Animal Farm and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both have been translated into so many other languages and have been so widely read that the adjective “Orwellian” has international currency, synonymous with the “ghastly political future,” as Bernard Crick has pointed out (George Orwell: A Life, 1980). Indeed, Jeffrey Meyers is convinced that Orwell, the writer of essays, political tracts, and fiction, “is more widely read than perhaps any other serious writer of the twentiethcentury” (A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, 1975). Biography · George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair, the son of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida (Limouzin) Blair. Orwell was born in India and lived there for four years, until his father moved the family back to England, to a small house named “Nutshell” in Henley-on-Thames. After a short leave, Orwell’s father returned alone to India, leaving his wife and children in England and rejoining them later, upon his retirement. With his father’s return, Orwell, like most male members of the upper middle class, was sent away to boarding school, St. Cyprian’s, located at Eastbourne on the Sussex Coast. After several miserable years, as Orwell described them in his autobiographical Such, Such Were the Joys (1953), he won a scholarship to Eton, the public school that would forever set him apart from the working classes about which he was so concerned during most of his adult life. Considered rather unacademic at Eton, Orwell was graduated in December, 1921, and, after a decision not to attend the university, he applied to the India Office for the position of Imperial Police Officer. Five years in Burma, from 1922 to 1927, shaped the impressionable young man so as to make him forever sympathetic to individuals victimized by governmental bureaucracy and imperialistic power. Orwell left Burma in the summer of 1927, ostensibly on sick leave (he suffered from a lung condition most of his life). At some point early in his leave, Orwell wrote a letter of 687

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resignation to the India Office and explained to his skeptical parents that all he really wanted was to write. In 1928, Orwell commenced a long, five-year apprenticeship as a writer, time spent as a tramp in both Paris and London, and in the writing and rewriting of countless manuscripts. By 1933, he had assumed the name by which he is known and had produced, in addition to at least two destroyed novels, the nonfictional Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and his first novel, Burmese Days, published one year later. From 1933 to 1937, Orwell continued to develop his literary talents, producing two more novels, a book about his experiences with poverty-stricken coal miners in Wigan (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937), and several essays, occasional pieces, and book reviews. By the end of this period, he had also married, for the first time, and, within a year or so of that, gone to Spain. Perhaps the most singular experience of his life to date, the Spanish Civil War found Orwell on the front lines, a member of a Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (a Marxist worker’s party) brigade; henceforth, Orwell passionately declared himself a fighter for “democratic Socialism” and, in that context, wrote his most famous nonfictional work, Homage to Catalonia (1938). After being wounded (and nearly imprisoned), Orwell escaped Spain with the help of his wife, returned to England, and continued his literary career. Within another year, his lungs still causing problems, Orwell moved to the dry climate of Morocco, where he wrote much of Coming Up for Air. His fourth novel was buried under mounting war concerns and preparations. Orwell, unable to join the military because of health, became a spokesman for the British Broadcasting Corporation. During the last years of the war, Orwell finished writing Animal Farm, only to see it rejected by almost every major publisher in England and America. Finally brought out in August, 1945, during the last days of the Pacific War, Animal Farm was a work of near-perfection, making Orwell’s name internationally known, so that when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published four years later, the world came to realize that both works would henceforth be considered literary classics, satires ranking with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704). Orwell’s death in 1950 at the age of forty-six was a tragic loss to the world of letters and to the larger world with which he always kept in touch. Analysis · Excepting Animal Farm, most critics view George Orwell’s fictions as aesthetically flawed creations, the work of a political thinker whose artistry was subordinate to his intensely didactic, partisan passions. This reaction to Orwell’s novels was generally promoted posthumously, since his fiction in the 1930’s was often ignored by the larger reading public and panned by those reviewers who did pick up one of his books. The early academic critics—up to the late 1960’s—were often Orwell’s personal friends or acquaintances, who tended to see his early novels as conventionally realistic and strongly autobiographical. Even his masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were viewed as formally undistinguished, however powerful their message. It was not until the second generation of critics began looking at Orwell’s fiction that a more balanced assessment was possible. Burmese Days · Orwell’s first published novel, Burmese Days, concerns the life of John Flory, an English policeman in Burma during the early 1920’s. The plot is fairly straightforward. After a lengthy introduction to Flory’s personality and daily life, Orwell dramatizes him as a man blemished with a physical stigma, a birthmark, and

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puzzled by a moral dilemma, how to deal with the increasingly rebellious natives, to whom he is secretly sympathetic but against whom he must wield the club of imperialistic authority. In the middle of this dilemma, Elizabeth arrives, a young English woman who is fresh faced but decidedly a traditional “burra memsahib.” Flory attempts to win both her heart and mind—much to the dismay of his Burmese mistress, Ma Hla May—and succeeds in doing neither, even though he manages to half-succeed in proposing marriage during an earthquake. With a mind too closed to anything not properly British, and a heart only to be won by someone very English, Elizabeth forgets Flory’s attentions with the arrival of Verrall, an English military policeman, who will in turn reject her after his billet is completed. A humble Flory waits for Elizabeth, and after Library of Congress Verrall has left takes her to church services, confident that he has outlasted his rival. Unfortunately, Flory is humiliated by Ma Hla May, is repulsed yet again by Elizabeth, and, in a mood of despair, commits suicide, killing both his dog and himself. Burmese Days is interesting for its accurate psychological portrayal of a man trapped between two worlds: loving England, yet hating English imperialistic politics; loving and hating the subject people, the Burmese, yet fascinated by their culture and the beauty of their environment. Flory is strangely sympathetic to their struggle for independence while doing everything possible to keep it in check. In such a world, Flory is emphatically not meant to be a sympathetic character, but rather a victim of the very political order he has sworn to uphold. In effect, Orwell has laid a trap for the unwary reader. Too close an identification with Flory, too intense a desire to have him succeed in marrying Elizabeth—an unholy alliance of imperialistic Englishwoman and revolutionary, thinking pariah—will prevent the reader from recognizing the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in the British presence in Burma. Coming Up for Air · Orwell’s fourth published novel, Coming Up for Air, was written in Marrakesh, Morocco, shortly after he had recovered from yet another bout with tubercular lesions of the lungs. Although the novel sold moderately well for the time (a first printing, according to Bernard Crick, of two thousand copies and a second printing of one thousand), many critics were vaguely condescending toward the hero, George Bowling, a middle-class insurance salesman who longs for the golden country

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of the past while simultaneously dreading the horrors of a second world war, then only months away. Many of the themes more fully developed in Nineteen Eighty-Four find their initial expression in Orwell’s last conventional novel, set before the outbreak of the devastation that the next six years would bring. Coming Up for Air is set in London during the late 1930’s; Orwell employs a first-person narrative to describe the life of George Bowling, a middle-aged, middleclass salesman, whose first set of false teeth marks a major milestone in his life. Musing in front of a mirror while he prepares for work one morning, George’s mind wanders back to the past, the golden England of thirty years earlier when he was growing up. As he goes about his day, disgusted with all the evidence of modern life in front of him—the casual brutalities, the tasteless food, the bombers overhead—George forms a plan to return to Lower Binfield, his childhood home, and, by extension, the simple life he had once led. Unfortunately, his return only confirms the all-pervasive slovenliness of the modern world: Lower Binfield has been swallowed by a sprawling suburb, his adolescent sweetheart has become a frowsy old married woman (she is all of two years older than he), and the fishing hole (once filled with huge finny dreams) has been emptied of water and filled with trash. Shocked and completely disenchanted, Bowling makes plans to get at least a relaxing few days from the trip when a bomber accidentally drops a bomb close by, killing and wounding several people. In thorough disgust, Bowling packs, leaves, and returns home to face his wife, who has somehow found out where he has gone, although his motives for going will be forever incomprehensible to her. A plot summary of the novel fails to do justice to the subtle tonal shifts and complicated psychological changes Orwell employs in presenting his portrait of the average man waiting for the apocalypse. Orwell has used the ancient theme of the double (or Doppelgänger) to illustrate the self-fragmentation of European man prior to the outbreak of the war. George Bowling is divided into two “selves.” Tubby is the outwardly fat, insensitive insurance tout who is able to function successfully in a fast-paced, competitive world that would eat up less hardened personalities, but his character can only survive at the cost of any sort of satisfying inner life. Georgie, on the other hand, would be lost in the modern rat race and so is protected by Tubby; nevertheless, Georgie can give expression to the memories, the sensitivities, the love for natural pleasures that Tubby (and George Bowling) would have to forgo to remain functional. Thus, George Bowling devised a strategy for living both materially successfully and psychologically well in the modern world, doing so by splitting his identity into Tubby and Georgie. Coming Up for Air details the ongoing dialogue between these two “selves”—a conversation that reflects the strains of modern living as well as any other novelist has done in the twentieth century. Furthermore, Orwell has modified the literary conventions of the Doppelgänger to suit his own needs. Whereas the death of one-half of the double usually means the destruction, ultimately, of both, Orwell has Tubby live on after Georgie is symbolically destroyed by the bombing plane. The tonal change at this point, rather like the tonal change in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) with the death of Kid Sampson, shows the reader the world that Orwell envisioned between 1938 and 1939, one horrible enough to prevent total escape even by death. It is, however, typically Orwellian that however horrible human bondage can make the cultural world, nature, of which humankind is a part, has enough ebullient energy to wait out any social mess—a wait without immediate hope, without idols, but also without hopeless despair. George Bowling leaves Lower Binfield, returning to his scold of a wife, Hilda; to the everlast-

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ing round of bills, worries, war clouds on the horizon, and a death-in-life without Georgie; but, as the novel’s epigraph states, “He’s dead, but he won’t lie down.” Animal Farm · Animal Farm is one of those rare books before which the critic lays down his pen. As a self-contained “fairy story,” the book can be read and understood by children not old enough to pronounce most of the words in an average junior high school history text. As a political satire, Animal Farm can be highly appreciated by those who actually lived through the terrible days of World War II. As an allegory concerned with the limitations and abuses of political power, the novel has been pored over eagerly by several generations of readers. The novel is built around historical events in the Soviet Union, from before the October Revolution to the end of World War II; it does this by using the frame of reference of animals in a farmyard, the Manor Farm, owned by a Mr. Jones. Drunk most of the time and, like Czar Nicholas of Russia in the second decade of the twentieth century, out of touch with the governed, Jones neglects his farm (allegorically representing the Soviet Union, or by extension, almost any oppressed country), causing much discontent and resentment among his animals. One day, after Jones does his nightly rounds, Major, an imposing pig (V. I. Lenin), tells the other animals of a dream he has had concerning theories about the way they have been living. Animals have been exploited by Mr. Jones and humankind generally, but Major has dreamed of a time when they will throw over their yokes and live free, sharing equally both the profits and the hazards of their work. Major teaches the animals the words to a song, “Beasts of England” (The Internationale), and tells them to look to the future and the betterment of all animals; three days later he dies. The smartest of the animals, the pigs, are aroused by his speech and by the song; they secretly learn to read and write, developing a philosophical system called animalism (Communism, Bolshevism) whose principles are taught to all the animals. When Jones forgets one day to feed them (as Russians starved near the end of their involvement in World War I), the animals revolt spontaneously, driving out Jones, his wife (Russian nobility), and Moses, the raven (the Russian Orthodox Church). The animals rejoice, feeling a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps, and set about to build a new life. The pigs, however, by taking on the responsibility of organization, also take over certain decision-making processes—as well as all the milk and apples; in fact, Orwell has himself stated that the first sign of corruption, the taking of the cow’s milk, led to the inevitable destruction of everything else. Two pigs in particular, Snowball (Leon Trotsky) and Napoleon ( Joseph Stalin), argue constantly, while a third, Squealer (Pravda, Tass) appears more than happy to endorse any course of action with his adroit use of language and his physical habit of skipping from side to side as he speaks. After changing the name from Manor Farm to Animal Farm, the pigs paint on the the side of the barn the seven commandments of animalism, the most important being “All animals are equal.” Meanwhile, Napoleon has been privately raising puppies born on the farm after the overthrow of Jones, puppies that develop into savage attack dogs (secret police, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs [NKVD]); with these, he will one day drive off the farm all of his personal enemies, especially the brilliant theoretician, Snowball. Also soon to be lost to Animal Farm is Mollie (the bourgeoisie), who shows up at Pilkingtons (the West, England). At this point, the work becomes more difficult, the pigs assume practical control, and the arguments become more intense. Even though Benjamin, the donkey (Tol-

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stoyan intellectuals), remains cynical about the supposed heaven on earth, Boxer, the horse (the peasantry), vows to work harder; nevertheless, the animals continue to lose their spirit and cohesiveness until attacked by Farmer Jones, who tries to regain the Farm. Because of Snowball’s brilliant strategy, Jones is driven off in what is thereafter called the Battle of the Cowshed (the Civil War). Following the victory celebration, Snowball and Napoleon move toward a decisive parting: The former wants to move full speed ahead with the building of the windmill (permanent revolution), while the latter thinks the most important task immediately ahead is the increase in food production (develop socialism in Russia first). After much debate and just before what could be an affirmative vote for Snowball’s policies, Napoleon unleashes his secretly kept dogs on his rival, chasing him out of Animal Farm forever. Henceforth, the unchallenged leader abolishes Sunday meetings, increasingly changes rules at will, and even announces that the building of the windmill was his idea. The animals continue to work hard, still believing that they are working for themselves. The changes Napoleon institutes, however, are so at variance with the initial rules of Animal Farm, and life gets to be so much drudgery, that no one has the memory to recall the ideals of the past, nor the energy to change the present—even if memories were sound. Very soon, life at Animal Farm seems indistinguishable from the life the animals led at Manor Farm. Orwell is not so much ultimately pessimistic as he is realistically moral: Institutionalized hierarchy begets privilege, which begets corruption of power. The first mistake of the animals was to give over their right to decide who got the the milk and apples. Lord Acton’s famous statement could not be more appropriate: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Nineteen Eighty-Four · Nineteen Eighty-Four is Orwell’s most famous work. As a fantasy set in the future, the novel has terrified readers for more than fifty years—frightened them into facing the prospect of the ultimate tyranny: mind control. As a parody of conditions in postwar England, it is, as Anthony Burgess has argued in 1985 (1978), a droll, rather Swiftean exaggeration of then current trends straining the social and political fabric of British culture. As a critique of the way in which human beings construct their social reality, the novel has so affected the modern world that much of its language (like that of its predecessor, Animal Farm) has entered into the everyday language of English-speaking peoples everywhere: doublethink, newspeak, thoughtcrime, and Big Brother. Bernard Crick argues that the novel is intimately related to Animal Farm—more so than most critics have hitherto acknowledged—and that both works convey Orwell’s most important message: Liberty means telling people what they do not want to hear. If the vehicle for the telling gets corrupted, then the message itself will always be corrupted, garbled; finally, the very thoughts which led to the utterances in the first place will be shackled, constrained not only from the outside but also from the inside. To think clearly, to speak openly and precisely, was a heritage Englishmen received from their glorious past; it was a legacy so easily lost that it needed to be guarded fiercely, lest those who promulgated ideologies of right or left take away what had been won with such difficulty. That was where the danger lay, with those who practiced the “smelly little orthodoxies” that are still “contending for our souls.” The story begins with a man named Winston Smith who is hurrying home on a cold, windy April day as the clocks are striking thirteen. With this ominous beginning,

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the reader is quickly plunged into a gritty, decaying world where the political order so dominates everyday life that independent thought is a crime, love is forbidden, and language seems to say the opposite of what one has normally come to expect. As Winston’s daily life unfolds, the reader quickly learns that the whole world has been divided into three geographical areas: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. All are engaged in perpetual warfare with one or both of the others, not for territorial or religious reasons but primarily for social control. At some point, atomic warfare had made total war unthinkable, yet it suits the political leaders of Oceania (the same is also true of the other two political areas) to keep the population in a general state of anxiety about foreign attack. Under the guise of national concern, Oceania’s leaders keep the population under their collective thumb by the use of propaganda (from the Ministry of Truth), by outright, brutally applied force (from the Ministry of Love), by eternally short rations (Ministry of Plenty), and by the waging of perpetual war (Ministry of Peace). The ruling elite, called the Inner Party, makes up only two percent of the population; the Outer Party, the next thirteen percent. The remainder, some eightyfive percent of the population, are called Proles, the oppressed masses. Winston, a member of the Outer Party, has been disturbed by strange thoughts of late, and one day he purchases a small, bound volume of blank paper, a diary where he can record his most private thoughts without being observed by the omnipresent telescreen, manned by members of the Thought Police. In his diary, he records his first thought: “Down with Big Brother!” To compound such a heinous thoughtcrime, he begins a liaison with a pretty young woman, a member of the Anti-Sex League, named Julia. After their affair has progressed for some time, they are contacted by a man named O’Brien, who enlists their aid in combating Big Brother by joining a group called the Brotherhood. O’Brien gives Winston a book, written by a man named Emannuel Goldstein, called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Having made love to Julia in a room rented from an old Prole (secretly a member of the Thought Police), Winston begins reading to her from Goldstein’s book, actually an exposition of the theory that Orwell has used to construct Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although Winston is fascinated, Julia, a rebel from the waist down only, falls asleep, and, after a while, so does Winston. They awake many hours later, are captured by the Thought Police, who apparently knew of their hideaway from the first, and are taken to rooms in the Ministry of Love. There, they find that O’Brien is in reality a member of the Thought Police; he alternately tortures and debates with Winston, trying to convince him that he must love Big Brother. When torture fails, Winston is taken to Room 101, where he will be subjected to that which he fears most—in his case, rats. He gives in, begs them to “do it to Julia,” and is ultimately convinced that he loves Big Brother. The novel ends as Winston, having exchanged mutual conversations of betrayal with Julia, sits at the Chestnut Café, drinking Victory Gin, completely brainwashed and committed to Big Brother. Much has been said about the ultimate pessimism of Nineteen Eighty-Four being related to Orwell’s fatal illness, which he fought unsuccessfully during the composition of the novel. If, however, one thinks of Orwell’s fiction less in biographical terms and more in relation to artistic intention, then such a conclusion could be subject to argument. Although the novel ends with Winston in what Northrop Frye calls the sixth level of irony, unrelieved bondage, one should draw a distinction, as Orwell does in his other writings (most notably in the essay “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray”), between humans’ actions as cultural beings and their activities as creatures of planet Earth, natural beings.

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As political creatures, people and their purely cultural institutions could, Orwell believes, develop a world such as the one portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As biological residents of the planet Earth, however, this would be impossible. Humankind never displays hubris more graphically than does O’Brien in his speech about the party’s supposed control of nature. In Orwell’s view, humans will never fully control nature, because they are only a part of that which they wish to control. The great chestnut tree blossoming over Winston and his degeneration as a free being is Orwell’s symbol indicating that the natural world can outlast society’s cultural and political aberrations. “The planting of a tree,” says Orwell, “if [it] takes root . . . will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.” If there is hope for Oceania in the Proles, perhaps it is because they are instinctively closer to the natural world symbolized by the chestnut tree. Nevertheless, whether one thinks there is any hope for the people of that world or not, their existence has served as a warning to the larger world: The price of the right to tell people what they do not want to hear is never too high to pay. John V. Knapp Other major works NONFICTION: Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933; The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937; Homage to Catalonia, 1938; Inside the Whale and Other Essays, 1940; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941; Critical Essays, 1946 (published in the U.S. as Dickens, Dali, and Others); Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 1950; Such, Such Were the Joys, 1953; The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 1968 (4 volumes; Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, editors); Orwell: The War Commentaries, 1986. MISCELLANEOUS: Orwell: The Lost Writings, 1985. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. George Orwell. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This compilation includes thirteen articles from leading critics and scholars which deal for the most part with major themes and well-known novels. A short bibliography and chronology are also included. Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. The most important full-scale effort so far, considering all phases of Orwell’s career and pointing out some odd contrasts and anomalies that lay beneath what was outwardly very much a private life. The first biography to benefit from unlimited rights of quotation from Orwell’s works held under copyright. Based upon extensive use of the writer’s archives and other manuscript sources, as well as numerous publications. Davison, Peter. George Orwell: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. This book follows the course of Orwell’s career as a writer. Although it does contain background chapters explaining his origins, it is chiefly concerned with his literary influences and relationships, including those with his publishers and editors. Davison served as the editor of The Complete Works of George Orwell, an experience that makes him particularly suited to the task of writing a literary biography that is something other than the usual “life and works.” Gardner, Averil. George Orwell. Boston: Twayne, 1987. This interesting and sensible summary treatment of Orwell’s career and literary contributions takes note of areas where interpretive controversies have arisen. The chronology and the annotated selected bibliography are also useful.

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Holderness, Graham, Bryan Loughrey, and Nahem Yousaf, eds. George Orwell. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Essays on Orwell’s novels; his use of allegory; his politics; his handling of form, character, and theme; and his view of England. Includes a bibliography. Reilly, Patrick. “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: Past, Present, and Future. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This spirited defense of Orwell’s last novel upholds his conceptions against the claims of modern detractors. Contains a detailed chronology and an annotated bibliography. Reilly also wrote an earlier critical study of Orwell’s fiction, George Orwell: The Age’s Adversary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). Rodden, John. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Essentially a study of publications about Orwell rather than of the writer himself. Points to the seemingly ubiquitous impact of phrases and concepts associated with his ideas, many of which have been used in recent contexts that Orwell himself scarcely could have foreseen. The breadth of Rodden’s research, in more obscure newspapers and journals, is impressive. Sandison, Alan. George Orwell After “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” London: Macmillan, 1986. This interpretive effort, based on an earlier work, regards Orwell’s writings as a reflection of a long intellectual tradition of religious and philosophical individualism. A lengthy postscript presents Sandison’s views on other works about Orwell. Sheldon, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. A major biography, with extensive notes and bibliography. Slater, Ian. Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. This attempt to trace the events of Orwell’s life by way of his major works becomes slightly awkward in places but also reaches some interesting conclusions on matters of politics and literature. Stansky, Peter, and William Abrahams. Orwell: The Transformation. London: Constable, 1979. Deals with Orwell’s work through his period of combat service in the Spanish Civil War, discussing the origins of five early works. Concludes that Orwell’s political point of view had begun to take a definite shape by 1937 as a result of his own experiences. ____________. The Unknown Orwell. London: Constable, 1972. Orwell’s early years in India, at Eton, in Burma, in Paris, and in London are considered in the light of his decision to become a writer in the period leading up to the publication of his first book in 1933. Information provided by those who had known him personally has supplied details about Orwell’s education and the beginning of his literary career.

Walter Pater Walter Pater

Born: London, England; August 4, 1839 Died: Oxford, England; July 30, 1894 Principal long fiction · Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, 1885 (two volumes); Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance, 1896. Other literary forms · Walter Pater is principally remembered as a critic. His most influential work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1877, 1888, 1893), decisively changed the Victorian conception of art as a vehicle for the expression of uplifting sentiments or edifying ideals. Pater, whose unnamed antagonist was John Ruskin, argued that art is preeminently concerned with the dextrous elaboration of its own sensuous ingredients. Form, color, balance, and tone: These are the elements of which art is constituted. Hence, the imposition of a moral upon a painting, a poem, or a musical composition subverts the integrity of the work and distorts the function of criticism. The genuine critic begins with an analysis of the impression which a painting or a poem communicates and then endeavors to trace that impression to the structural elements of which the work is composed. Ultimately, as the notorious conclusion to The Renaissance makes clear, art is chiefly to be cherished as a means of enhancing, expanding, and enlarging the faculties of sensuous apprehension and as a catalyst in the pursuit of more varied, exquisite, and complex sensations. In the last analysis, Pater was inclined to evaluate and judge life itself as an aesthetic phenomenon. Pater qualified this position in his later works, however, and since Marius the Epicurean—his one completed novel—was expressly written to revise and reevaluate the conclusion of The Renaissance, it is necessary to acquire some preliminary understanding of Pater’s earlier and less complex point of view. By way of preparation for Marius the Epicurean, Pater composed a series of stories that foreshadow the mature techniques of his novel. The best of these stories, “The Child in the House,” traces the influence of a child’s environment upon the formation of his sensibility and character. Here, in a statement which may be regarded as a keynote to the author’s subsequent utterances, Pater expresses through the character of Florian Deleal the distinguishing quality that informs not only his own sensibility but also the sensibility of Marius and, indeed, of all his protagonists: “For with the desire of physical beauty,” observes Pater of Florian, “mingled itself early the fear of death—the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.” Before examining the implications of this sentiment in the context of Marius the Epicurean, it is interesting to note that virtually all of Pater’s other works—in both criticism and fiction—are meditations on the propinquity of beauty and death and on the desire that this meditation engenders in Pater to conceive of an absolute which defines itself in and gives broader significance to the sensuous flux of existence. As Pater observes in his study of Plato, “to realize unity in variety, to discover cosmos, an order that shall satisfy one’s reasonable soul—below and within apparent chaos: is from first to last the continuous purpose of what we call philosophy.” In addition to The Renaissance, then, Pater’s other works are briefly these: Imaginary 696

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Portraits (1887), a collection of stories that prefigure Marius the Epicurean in their emphasis on the aesthetic quality and philosophical repercussions of experience upon a sensitive and circumspect temperament rather than with the dramatization of experience itself; Appreciations (1889), a heterogeneous collection of literary criticisms that apply the principles adduced in The Renaissance to the examination of English and French literary figures; Plato and Platonism (1893), the philosophical and theoretical counterpart to Marius the Epicurean, which examines the respective relations between the temporal and the eternal, the relative and the absolute, the ideal and the real in the works of Plato; Greek Studies (1895), an examination of the myths of Dionysus and Persephone and their symbolic relation to the spirit of art; and Miscellaneous Studies (1895), a grouping of Pater’s most important writings on figures of literary, religious, and artistic significance. Of special interest in the latter is the short essay “Diaphaneite,” wherein Pater delineates those attributes that go into the making of an ideal and yet realizable humanity. Finally, Essays from the “Guardian” (1896) is a collection of Pater’s reviews on the writers of his day. Achievements · Pater’s achievement as a novelist and a critic is central to the modern vision of art. Though he was not always edified by the scandalous manner in which his disciples interpreted his message, nor gratified by the distortion of his ideas by an entire generation of aesthetes and decadents, Pater, when he is fully understood, emerges as a figure of incalculable importance in the evolution of twentieth century literature. In the first place, he did away with much of the fustian that obscured the appreciation of art in his own day, and he left a critical legacy, which extended into the present century in the works of Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry. Moreover, as Harold Bloom observes of Pater’s most memorable character, “Marius, more than any fictional character of our age, is the representative modern poet as well as the representative man of literary culture who remains the only audience for that poet.” As a stylist, too, Pater was wonderfully suggestive and original. Adapting the rich and ornate cadences of Ruskin to his more subtle purpose, Pater evolved a style that is the last word in delicacy, refinement, and understated eloquence. His sentences are characterized by elaborate parentheses, delicately wrought rhythms, and mannered circumlocutions— annoying to some readers—and his prose matches with minute accuracy the uncertainties, doubts, and deliberations of a mind in debate with itself, a mind fastidiously alive Library of Congress to the full complexity of human

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experience and scrupulously intent upon a verbal music that, in its hesitant rhythms, remains faithful to that experience. In this regard, he clearly anticipates Marcel Proust. It is not, however, on the level of style alone that Pater’s influence has been indelible. Marius the Epicurean, in the role which it assigns to memory, its tone of melancholy retrospect, its analysis of a highly developed sensibility enamored of perfection yet resigned to uncertainty, anticipates, to a remarkable degree, the structural, tonal, and thematic underpinnings of Proust’s novels. When one adds to this Pater’s lasting influence on Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, André Gide, and William Butler Yeats—the last of whom claimed that Marius the Epicurean is “the only great prose in modern English”—one is compelled to admit that Pater was one of the first major sensibilities of the modern age. Biography · For a writer who was to become the subject of numerous debates and controversies regarding the tendency of his works, the quality of his influence, and the dubiety of his doctrines, Walter Horatio Pater’s life seems, at first glance, a singularly colorless affair. The youngest son of a dedicated physician who died prematurely, Pater was reared in a household dominated by his sisters, his mother, and his godmother. He remained, throughout childhood, indifferent to the activities or sports of his peers, preferring to imagine a world of ceremonious gallantry and hieratic ritual. He manifested a deep attachment to the solemn devotions and sumptuous worship of the Anglican Church. A need to remain true to the irrepressible skepticism and intellectual scrupulousness of his own nature prevented him, at the last, from acting upon his early impulses and taking orders. With a temperament more than commonly inclined to self-analysis and introspection, Pater, following his matriculation at Queens College, Oxford, chose to pursue an academic career. He was elected a junior fellow at Brasenose College in 1864. From the first, the young don was regarded with certain suspicions, “having acquired,” as Humphry Ward observed, “a new and daring philosophy of his own, and a wonderful gift of style.” Benjamin Jowett, the famous translator of Plato, was acutely displeased with the seemingly subversive conclusion to The Renaissance and successfully hindered Pater’s advancement at Oxford. In defiance, however, of Jowett’s reprobations, Pater continued to enjoy a steady advance in influence and reputation. Ultimately, his increased fame warranted the taking of additional rooms in London, and there, in the company of sisters and friends, Pater enjoyed the sympathy and civility which were sometimes denied him at Oxford. Modest, retiring, elusive, and enigmatic: These are the epithets that most frequently occur in contemporary portraits of Pater. It was doubtless these qualities that won him the admiration of his most famous pupil: Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is interesting to note (and much to Pater’s credit) that, in the surcharged evangelical atmosphere of Oxford, where professors more often strove to win converts than to foster independence of mind, Pater was the single instructor who continued to be loyal to Hopkins after his embrace of Catholicism. Indeed, Pater’s elasticity and insouciance, his careful cultivation of what John Keats called “negative capability,” were as characteristic of the man as they were of the artist. Pater died as a result of a heart attack in 1894. Analysis · Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean is the culminating expression of a fictional genre that began in the 1830’s and continued until the turn of the century. This genre, a peculiar mixture of religious speculation and personal confession, developed almost synchronously with the assault of science against traditional Chris-

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tianity, beginning with the publication, in 1832, of Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Lyell’s book, which exploded the biblical account of creation, was the first of several—the most famous being Charles Darwin’s—that shook Western culture to its foundations. The passage of the Reform Bill, the theories of Darwin and Karl Marx, the development of the so-called “higher” criticism in the exegesis of biblical texts, the rise in population, and the spread of revolution were but a few events that challenged the inherited certainties of Victorian England. Men were forced to reevaluate old beliefs, to doubt discredited traditions, to revise social policies, to change moral valuations. It is not surprising that the confessional novel, the novel of doubt and faith, should acquire an unprecedented significance during such a period. The absence of reliable guideposts threw men back upon themselves and obliged them to search for unity, purpose, and direction in the kaleidoscopic sequence of their own lives. Marius the Epicurean · Marius the Epicurean is one of the finest offshoots of a literary tradition inaugurated by Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1835) and sustained in such works as John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848), William Hale White’s The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1885), and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). Pater chose to set his search for meaning and purpose amid the disintegrating spectacle of Antonine Rome, but its bearing on the condition of late Victorian England is emphatically underlined: “Let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives—from Rome, to Paris or London,” Pater interpolates at one point. Marius is clearly meant to be prototypical: He dramatizes a quest for religious values that satisfies the demands of modern consciousness and reflects the ambiguity of a shattered world. This is not to say that his growth is haphazard or random; on the contrary, Pater implies an underlying teleology in Marius’s development: However dim and faint the sense of a superintending providence, his life is oriented toward the climactic moment of self-sacrifice with which the novel ends. Marius does not, however, fully resolve the conflicting calls of conscience and sensation, beauty and duty, engagement and withdrawal, in the fulfillment of that end. Though Pater evidently sees Marius’s entire existence as an elaborate preparation for the revelatory moment in which his moral and spiritual being are ultimately defined, critics have generally judged that this is accomplished, if at all, without dramatic conviction. Marius’s youth is characterized, as was Pater’s, by a more than common susceptibility to sensuous impressions. His home, “White Nights,” a villa with adjacent farm, contributes to these susceptibilities. The note of grave beauty, of life lived under the conditions of animal sacrifice and seasonal change, develops in the boy a wistful reverence and wonder, which deepen with the passage of years. The Wordsworthian element in all this is not fortuitous, for Marius is destined to enact precisely that pattern of spiritual growth enunciated in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”—a pattern that involves a gradual conversion from the sensory to the spiritual planes of existence, a slow but steady ascension from the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” of his first impulsive response to beauty to the sober steadfastness of a mind that recognizes “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” This conversion, if such it may be called, does not, for Marius, issue in the renunciation of his former pleasures, but rather a deepening awareness of their ultimate origin and tendency. In brief, Marius comes to dwell consciously in the presence of a spirit which is implied in his first naïve responses to nature and beauty. Hence, the pagan ceremonies, which solicit Marius’s

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devotion and awe, already foreshadow “certain heavy demands” that will not become apparent to the lad until he acquires the mature self-consciousness of adulthood. It is then, on the level of discursive thought, that he will begin to recognize “some ampler vision, which should take up into itself and explain this world’s delightful shows.” “White Nights” is, therefore, as Pater suggests, not only a domestic dwelling place but also a state of mind peculiar to youth and prior to the self-dedication that maturity exacts. In any event, it is not long before Marius is obliged to abandon the “world’s delightful shows” in the pursuit of a more bracing conception of beauty. To cure a childhood illness, Marius is sent to the Temple of Aesculapius. The process of healing is complemented by meditations on Platonic texts. While these constitute a cherishable legacy for Marius, the boy reacts against a world of abstract essences. The impalpable ideas of Plato attract him only insofar as they fuse with the world of spatiotemporal objects, “green fields, for instance, or children’s faces.” Here, Pater is clearly attempting to revise the “impressionism” of his youth, itself a recrudescence of the Heraclitean theory of perpetual flux, with a Symbolist theory of correspondences. Beauty will no longer be an end in itself but “an outward imagery identifying itself with unseen moralities.” While Marius does not achieve such an identification at once or without great difficulty, Pater clearly intends that the boy’s unthinking empiricism should be shaken and unsettled. In a word, the exhortation “to burn with a hard gem-like flame,” which Pater formerly enunciated in The Renaissance, is now being duly qualified by an obligation “to discriminate, ever more and more fastidiously, select form and colour in things from what was less select.” Pater is avid to demonstrate, through his hero Marius, the correct application of the aesthetic theory to life, an application that requires a transvaluation of the concept “Beauty” to include “not pleasure, but fulness of life, and insight as conducting to that fulness . . . whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal.” Marius’s stay at the temple initiates an intellectual or moral awakening, a search for a hieratic order of conduct and beauty that is truly serviceable to that ideal. Dissatisfied with the abstractness of the Platonic method, Marius rejects the world of ideal forms in the pursuit of its equivalent in a living community, a veritable body of fellow aspirants. His search for this community determines the subsequent shape of the novel. Immediately prior to his departure from the temple, Marius is vouchsafed a distant view of a city which appears to be an earthly incarnation of the Platonic archetype he is seeking. This first glimpse of Rome kindles in Marius the illusion that it, perhaps, is that “new city coming down ‘like a bride out of heaven,’” of which Plato discoursed so eloquently. Accordingly, Marius takes practical steps to bring him closer to “the most religious city in the world.” He moves next to Pisa, preparing for his future obligations as secretary to the Emperor Aurelius. He is soon befriended by an aspiring youth of literary ambitions by the name of Flavian—a character who clearly represents one aspect of Marius’s own divided consciousness. Flavian’s function in the novel is to bear involuntary witness to the limitations of aesthetic hedonism. Pater clearly intends through this subordinate character to disabuse his devotees of the notion that burning with a hard, gemlike flame is equivalent to self-indulgent dissipation. Beneath “the perfection of form” that Flavian achieves in his bearing and his poetry, Marius recognizes “a depth of corruption,” which compels him to follow his friend only so far. Pater anticipates, here, to a remarkable degree the theme of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912): the awareness that an exclusive preoccupation with artistic form may have the effect of neutralizing both

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good and evil by reducing them to complementary colors, lights, and shades in a composition. Nevertheless, Flavian performs a vital role in the drama of Marius’s development: It is he who introduces Marius to the “golden book” of Apuleius. At this point, Pater reproduces in full Apuleius’s tale of Cupid and Psyche. Through subtle and strategic modifications of the original, Pater conceives of the tale as a presentiment of Marius’s spiritual development. Evoking the solemn harmonies of the King James version of the Bible and softening the racy idiom of Apuleius, Pater endows the story of Cupid and Psyche with a “gentle idealism” and facilitates its interpretation as an allegory. Just as Psyche, symbol of the human soul, is redeemed from death by the intervention of Cupid, so Marius—bewildered, distracted, and divided by the contradictory sects and philosophical schools of decadent Rome—is presumably redeemed from despair by the appearance of a community that claims to satisfy the deepest needs of the human spirit. The road to that community is, however, difficult, uncertain, and devious. Flavian’s life is prematurely ended by an outbreak of plague. Marius, who remains, as ever, faithful to the evidence of his senses, is convinced of “nothing less than the soul’s extinction.” It may be parenthetically observed that despite his later sympathy with the Christian response to suffering, Marius never fully abandons those scruples “which can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil of immediate experience.” With his departure for Rome, he remains in a state of suspended judgment with regard to the ultimate destiny appointed for the human soul. The actual journey to the capital of the ancient world includes a number of incidents that undermine the philosophic detachment of the young Marius. Notwithstanding the glory of the Roman campagna, the many idyllic details of which Marius, with his habitual eye for the concrete, discerns with “a fresh, primeval poetry,” he is plunged, following a scarcely averted accident, into further uncomfortable wrestling with the eternal questions. This accident—a loosened boulder falls from a wall beside the path Marius is following—has the effect of shaking him into a recognition that “his elaborate philosophy had not put beneath his feet the terror of mere bodily evil.” The force, however, that is destined to correct the deficiencies in Marius’s scheme of existence is not far away. Stopping at an inn to revive his spirits, Marius orders a glass of wine and muses vacantly over the “ring of delicate foam” that sparkles in his cup. Presently, his attention is arrested by a voice—“a youthful voice, with a reassuring clearness of note, which completes his cure.” As he will soon learn, it is the voice of Cornelius, a young Roman soldier whose influence is destined to supersede that of Flavian. It is not, however, until much later in his pilgrimage that Marius discovers that the origin of Cornelius’s gracious alacrity of spirit is traceable to “some new knighthood or chivalry, just then coming into the world.” Marius, however, is not yet in a position to be irresistibly won over to that knighthood. He must first extend his philosophical hypotheses beyond the immediate circle of his own sensations; the role of Marcus Aurelius in the novel is to facilitate this extension. Unlike Flavian and Cornelius, the philosophical emperor of Rome is more than merely a shadowy personification of Marius’s fractured ego: Aurelius is a figure of vital warmth and sympathy who encourages Marius to enlarge his spiritual perspective and to discover that an exclusive preoccupation with the passing moment may actually narrow the range of experience, curtail the development of character, and inhibit the acquisition of wisdom. The upshot of Aurelius’s teachings is to reinforce Marius’s search for a “comely order . . . to which, as to all other beautiful phenomena in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust himself.”

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While his influence is certainly salutary, Aurelius remains, in the final analysis, incapable of reconciling his devotion to that “comely order” with the debased reality of Antonine Rome. It is not long before Marius discovers a number of serious shortcomings in Aurelius’s view of existence. To be sure, Marius accepts the merits of a philosophical scheme that posits a universal reason, or logos, a point of rest and a center of calm from which to withstand the vertiginous whirl of feelings and events, the traumatic blows of fate and destiny. Unfortunately, such a scheme, as Marius equally recognizes, may easily devolve into a pretext for neglecting one’s peers in the present, for averting one’s eyes from the plenitude and plurality of the living world. While freely granting the efficacy of believing in a “universal commonwealth of mind”—the sense of expanded horizons, the freedom from petty vexations, the glimpse of imperishable ideals that it allows—Marius rejects the concomitant calm and serenity that Aurelius, for example, maintains in the midst of human misery. Two episodes in particular underline the deficiencies of the Stoical system. The first of these occurs during a performance at the Colosseum over which Aurelius, notwithstanding his own aversion to the gladiatorial games, presides with an air of tolerance. This indifference to the unspeakable butchery of men and animals, a consequence of the Stoic divorce of reason from reality, provokes Marius “to mark Aurelius as his inferior, now and for ever, on the question of righteousness.” When it comes, however, to the suffering and death of his son, Lucius Verus, Aurelius is presented in a more sympathetic light. This episode, too, leaves an indelible mark in Marius’s consciousness. The disparity between the imperturbable calm of the professed Stoic and the irrepressible grief of the stricken parent is poignantly dramatized when the boy, after an operation of surpassing agony, lapses into a coma from which he never recovers. The chapter that immediately follows this episode signals the direction that Marius henceforth will take. An epigraph from the Psalms—“My heart is ready, O God, a ready heart is mine”—clearly enunciates the imminence of that spiritual crisis toward which his whole life has been moving. It would be a mistake, however, to construe this crisis as a sudden shattering encounter with the divine. On the contrary, nothing in the sense of a clear dramatic conversion may be said to happen. The epiphany that Marius is vouchsafed has all the character of a Wordsworthian “spot of time.” In one of his vagrant wanderings on the outskirts of Rome, Marius pauses at an outdoor inn to gaze at the extensive Roman compagna. His attention is divided among a number of apparently trivial and unrelated details—“a bird came and sang among the wattled hedge-roses: an animal feeding crept nearer: the child who kept it was gazing quietly”—when, suddenly, the entire scene presents itself as the outward and tangible emblem of “that . . . Ideal, to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator, which for the philosophers of Greece is the Eternal Reason, and in the New Testament the Father of Men.” The mundane world is transfigured and transvalued in a moment of privileged perception: no less and no more. The departure of this mood is as quiet and unobtrusive as its inception, but it leaves Marius with the firm conviction that the remainder of his life must be “a search for the equivalent of that Ideal . . . a gathering together of every trace and token of it, which his actual experience might present.” The event is clearly something of a watershed. At this juncture, Marius is given the opportunity to visit a pair of houses that represent two opposing visions of reality. The first house represents the finest flowering of classical antiquity. It is here that Marius meets his former idol, the poet Apuleius; enjoys the refined pleasures and urbane conversation of the Roman intelli-

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gentsia; and delights in the delectations of a banquet replete with music, dance, and fine condiments. The whole proceedings, however, are tainted by a certain foppish connoisseurism, a pampered elegance, a “facility” and “self-complacency” in the exchange of ideas. Marius departs with a nagging sense of weariness and disillusion. The second house, to which he is introduced by Cornelius, is that of the Christian saint, Cecilia. It is characteristic that Pater should choose the canonized patroness of music as the agent of Marius’s contact with Christianity. Presumably, if art can obscure the moral being of man, as in the case of Flavian, it can also reveal that moral being. The grave, refined, and simple dignity of the Christian community—its air of domestic and filial piety, its comely rectitude of spirit, its solicitude for the departed, care for the living, and faith in things to come—stands in favorable contrast to the enervating amusements and facile wit of the Roman upper crust. Yet it is important to note that the early Church, as Pater presents it, has nothing of that apocalyptic fervor that looks forward to the end of the world and the last things. On the contrary, “the contrast between the church and the world,” Pater tells us, “was becoming less pronounced.” By far the largest part of Marius’s attraction to this community derives from his contemplation of “the beautiful house of Cecilia, its lights and flowers, of Cecilia herself, moving among the lilies, with an enchanted grace.” The fact is that Marius remains ultimately indifferent to the dogmatic foundations of Christianity. To be sure, he returns to his childhood home and supervises the reburial of his ancestors according to the usages of the early Church. Furthermore, he willingly intercedes on Cornelius’s behalf following an officially sanctioned purge of the growing Christian community. There is, however, a considerable degree of ambiguity involved in Marius’s position vis-à-vis the Christian faith. Marius is arrested along with Cornelius for being present at a community act of worship. An outbreak of plague shatters the fragile tolerance extended to the Church and initiates widespread persecution of the Christians. On the strength of his relations with Aurelius, Marius contrives to have Cornelius released. He is compelled, however, to give a deposition on his friend’s behalf and to join the other prisoners in the long and arduous journey to Rome. This generosity of spirit on the part of Marius is prompted by a mistaken notion that Cornelius is Cecilia’s intended: The latter’s vows of chastity entirely elude Marius’s understanding. Traveling to Rome in company with the other captives, Marius is stricken with plague and abandoned at a neighboring farm which, as it turns out, is the dwelling of some recent converts. Lying in a state of semidelirium for several days, he finds consolation, during the lucid intervals allowed him, in “the scent of newmown hay . . . and the sounds of cattle . . . from the green places around.” The occupants, erroneously assuming that he is a Christian, administer to the dying Marius the last rites of their faith. Is Marius, then, a Christian? This question has been the subject of critical debate since the novel’s appearance. For Paul Elmer More, Marius the Epicurean is “only another manifestation of that aestheticism which Pater sucked from the Romantic school of his century and disguised in the phraseology of ancient faith.” He further adds, “to write thus was to betray Christianity with a kiss.” T. S. Eliot has no hesitation in asserting that “of the essence of the Christian Faith . . . Pater knew almost nothing.” Arthur Benson is equally forthright in claiming that “the very peace which Marius discerns in Christianity is the old philosophical peace over again.” The point is that Marius fails to grasp and remains largely indifferent to the theoretical foundations of Christianity. “Our creeds,” as Pater observes, “are but the brief abstract of our prayer and song.” Inasmuch as Christianity invests that song with a deeper pathos, frees the

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mind from its empirical trammels, and endows existence with a warmer hope, it is clearly a serviceable hypothesis for the questing human spirit. Its dogmatic underpinnings, however, are of secondary importance. Some might claim that Pater’s enterprise in Marius the Epicurean is fundamentally affiliated with the Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard. There is, however, one signal and important difference. Unlike Kierkegaard, who posits a leap of faith in which reason is virtually annihilated, Pater viewed all such leaps as a source of potential fanaticism. Christianity, for Pater, is clearly a stage in the development of human potential, but he would jealously protect that potential from any claim that might threaten its autonomy. The Church of Cecilia is, at bottom, a fictive structure in which there is “no forced opposition between soul and body, the world and the spirit.” It is even identified, at one point, with that “half-humorous placidity of soul, of a kind illustrated later very effectively by Montaigne.” Just as modern-day theologians who attempt to gerrymander Christianity into the camps of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Ludwig Feuerbach, Pater has created a church of his own making—distinctly unrecognizable to the average believer. From the perspective of Christ’s statement, “He who is not with me is against me,” Marius is most certainly not a Christian; on the other hand, if one considers the earlier phrasing of this statement in the gospel of Mark, “He who is not against us is for us,” then the question of Marius’s death as “a kind of sacrament with plenary grace” remains open. Gaston de Latour · Moreover, as Pater was to recognize in Gaston de Latour, institutional Christianity, insofar as it defines itself in what a man professes rather than in what he is, is as prodigal of sectarian bigotry and bloodshed as the worst excesses of pagan Rome. Like Marius the Epicurean, Gaston de Latour examines the situation of faith in an “age of transition . . . when the problem of man’s destiny and his relations to the unseen was undergoing a new solution.” Though Pater never lived to complete the novel—it remains, at best, a series of discontinuous meditations on the religious and political ferment of the Reformation—its essential outlines are as follows. Born in the midst of growing strife between Huguenots and Catholics, Gaston comes of age in “the cornlands of France,” in close proximity to the cathedral of Chartres and amid the luxuries of his rustic manor house. He becomes acquainted with King Charles the Ninth, joins the “episcopal household of Chartres as a page,” and falls under the influence of the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard. Like Marius, in a different context, he becomes the votary of a great philosopher: in this instance, Michel de Montaigne. He eventually travels to Paris and takes up with a spirited Huguenot girl; under the pressure of her brothers, he marries her in a Protestant ceremony which exerts no real claim upon him: “The transaction seemed to have but that transitoriness as also the guilt of a vagrant love.” Miscalculating the forces of destruction gathered on the eve of St. Bartholomew, Gaston returns to his homestead at Deux-manoirs, “his wife left behind there in Paris.” He later learns of the death of his wife “while the stairways of the Louvre, the streets, the trap-doors of Paris, run blood.” Following the banishment of King Charles, Gaston returns to Paris and falls under the influence of the heterodox monk Giordano Bruno. Here the novel abruptly ends. What is clearly significant about this work is its relation to Marius the Epicurean. Just as Marius qualifies the hedonism of The Renaissance, so Gaston de Latour qualifies the Christianity of Marius the Epicurean. Indeed, of Gaston himself the reader is told that ”the very genius of qualification followed him through his keen, constant, changeful consideration of men and things.”

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Pater’s attitude is obvious. He clearly distrusts the external machinery of a church that absorbs the individual conscience and resolves all doubts in cozy conformity, irresponsible anonymity, and superstitious fear. Pater rejects dogmatic formulations and ideologies of any kind, especially insofar as these inhibit the cultivation of human sympathy or the development of individual character. “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind,” wrote William Blake, and Pater would have most certainly agreed. Indeed, the true saint of the Reformation, for Pater, is Montaigne, and the legitimate attitude in all matters speculative and religious is not the intransigence of the doctrinaire but the suspended judgment of a humanist. “It was something to have been,” writes Pater of Montaigne, “in the matter of religious tolerance, as in so many other matters of justice and gentleness, the solitary conscience of the age.” In the final analysis, the question of whether Pater’s protagonists are ultimately Christian pales before the question of whether they are comprehensively human. Thoughtful, but without energy; sensitive, but without resolve; scrupulous, but without conviction; both Marius and Gaston remain imprisoned, each in his own consciousness and incapable of genuine community with others. The essentially selfish conviction that informs these novels and that may be taken as a motto for Pater’s life and work is perhaps stated most succinctly in one of the Pythian Odes of the Latin poet Pindar: “O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.” Pater once remarked of Marius that his was a philosophy that at least guaranteed its possessor of living a life without harm to others. The question remains, however, whether such a philosophy is adequate to the full range of human experience. In the absence of more solid and substantial convictions than those which Pater demonstrates in his writings, this question remains a point of legitimate concern in any final estimate of his achievement. Stephen I. Gurney Other major works SHORT FICTION: Imaginary Portraits, 1887. NONFICTION: Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873 (rev. as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1877, 1888, 1893); Appreciations: With an Essay on Style, 1889; Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures, 1893; Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, 1895; Miscellaneous Studies, 1895; Essays from the “Guardian,” 1896. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Walter Pater. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Bloom has compiled what he considers some of the best criticism available on Pater. The introduction by Bloom provides a useful overview of Pater’s work and contains much insight. Also includes a reprint of an unabridged pamphlet on Pater by Ian Fletcher, a highly respected critic of Pater. A valuable and wellrounded study. Brake, Laurel, and Ian Small, eds. Pater in the 1990’s. Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 1991. This collection of fifteen critical essays was culled from papers offered at a 1988 Pater conference at Oxford University. The editors note that while half of the essays they include reflect the older New Criticism approach to literature, the other half demonstrate the shift in Pater criticism toward consideration of his works in historical and biographical contexts. Topics range from editing Pater to his friends

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and literary influences to his own lasting influence on writers such as James Joyce. Buckler, William E. Walter Pater: The Critic as Artist of Ideas. New York: New York University Press, 1987. This scholarly study examines the breadth and depth of Pater’s prose and poetry, as well as his role as a critic, acknowledging him as a major but underrated writer. The work focuses on Pater’s aestheticism in his work, and chapter 8 examines Pater’s Plato and Platonism, which has been generally ignored by critics. Court, Franklin E. Walter Pater: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1980. This volume includes a checklist of a representative body of criticism on Pater from 1871 through 1973. Contains abstracts of critical articles, reminiscences, biographies, and letters to editors. A rich source of bibliographical information for the Pater scholar. Levey, Michael. The Case of Walter Pater. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. An appreciative study of Pater, largely biographical and executed with thoroughness. Levey promotes Pater’s case but alludes to the difficulty in placing Pater’s writing because he moved so fluidly from fiction to fact. Moliterno, Frank. The Dialectics of Sense and Spirit in Pater and Joyce. Greensboro: ELT Press, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1998. Compares themes and aesthetics in Pater and James Joyce. With bibliographical references and an index. Monsman, Gerald. Walter Pater. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A chronological look at Pater’s work and life. Examines the heroes in his works, in particular the hero in Marius the Epicurean. A useful study for the beginning reader of Pater. A selected bibliography is provided. Shuter, William. Rereading Walter Pater. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature series, this volume examines Pater’s works with a critical eye.

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MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Notable British Novelists

Volume 3 Thomas Love Peacock — Virginia Woolf 707 – 1050 Index

edited by

Carl Rollyson

SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

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Copyright © 2001, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. Essays originally appeared in Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Second Revised Edition, 2000; new material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Notable British novelists / editor, Carl Rollyson p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89356-204-1 (set : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-208-4 (v. 1 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-209-2 (v. 2 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-89356-237-8 (v. 3 : alk. paper) 1. English fiction-—Bio-bibliography-—Dictionaries. 2. Novelists, English—Biography—Dictionaries. 3. English fiction— Dictionaries I. Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund) II. Series. PR821.N57 2001 820.9′0003—dc21 [B] 00-046380

First Printing

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Contents — Volume 3 Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxiii Thomas Love Peacock Anthony Powell . . . . J. B. Priestley . . . . . Barbara Pym . . . . . .

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Terms and Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1037 Time Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1047 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1051

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Complete List of Contents Contents—Volume 1 G. K. Chesterton, 164 Agatha Christie, 171 Arthur C. Clarke, 180 Wilkie Collins, 186 Ivy Compton-Burnett, 195 Joseph Conrad, 204 A. J. Cronin, 219 Daniel Defoe, 231 Walter de la Mare, 245 Charles Dickens, 251 Arthur Conan Doyle, 264 Margaret Drabble, 277 Daphne Du Maurier, 291 Lawrence Durrell, 296 Maria Edgeworth, 305 George Eliot, 317 Henry Fielding, 330 Ford Madox Ford, 343

Richard Adams, 1 Kingsley Amis, 6 Martin Amis, 21 Jane Austen, 29 J. G. Ballard, 41 Julian Barnes, 51 Aphra Behn, 58 Arnold Bennett, 65 Elizabeth Bowen, 76 Charlotte Brontë, 83 Emily Brontë, 92 Anita Brookner, 98 John Bunyan, 107 Anthony Burgess, 114 Fanny Burney, 123 Samuel Butler, 132 Lewis Carroll, 139 Angela Carter, 145 Joyce Cary, 152

Contents—Volume 2 E. M. Forster, 351 John Fowles, 366 John Galsworthy, 380 Elizabeth Gaskell, 389 George Gissing, 399 William Golding, 407 Oliver Goldsmith, 418 Robert Graves, 423 Graham Greene, 435 Thomas Hardy, 445 L. P. Hartley, 461 Aldous Huxley, 468 P. D. James, 481 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 490 Samuel Johnson, 499 Elizabeth Jolley, 509 Rudyard Kipling, 516

Arthur Koestler, 525 D. H. Lawrence, 534 John le Carré, 559 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 572 Doris Lessing, 580 C. S. Lewis, 591 Matthew Gregory Lewis, 601 Penelope Lively, 609 Malcolm Lowry, 614 Rose Macaulay, 626 Sir Thomas Malory, 632 Charles Robert Maturin, 641 W. Somerset Maugham, 649 George Meredith, 658 Iris Murdoch, 667 George Orwell, 687 Walter Pater, 696 xxxiii

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Contents—Volume 3 Thomas Love Peacock, 707 Anthony Powell, 716 J. B. Priestley, 729 Barbara Pym, 737 Ann Radcliffe, 745 Mary Renault, 754 Jean Rhys, 762 Dorothy Richardson, 769 Samuel Richardson, 777 Susanna Rowson, 787 Dorothy L. Sayers, 796 Sir Walter Scott, 807 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 824 Tobias Smollett, 835 C. P. Snow, 843 Muriel Spark, 855 Laurence Sterne, 870

Robert Louis Stevenson, 883 Jonathan Swift, 891 William Makepeace Thackeray, 899 J. R. R. Tolkien, 912 Anthony Trollope, 925 John Wain, 936 Evelyn Waugh, 948 Fay Weldon, 959 H. G. Wells, 966 Paul West, 973 T. H. White, 983 Oscar Wilde, 988 A. N. Wilson, 994 Angus Wilson, 1001 P. G. Wodehouse, 1010 Virginia Woolf, 1019

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Thomas Love Peacock Thomas Love Peacock

Born: Weymouth, England; October 18, 1785 Died: Halliford, England; January 23, 1866 Principal long fiction · Headlong Hall, 1816; Melincourt, 1817; Nightmare Abbey, 1818; Maid Marian, 1822; The Misfortunes of Elphin, 1829; Crotchet Castle, 1831; Gryll Grange, 1860. Other literary forms · Before turning his talents to the satirical novel, Thomas Love Peacock wrote poetry. His early works include Palmyra and Other Poems (1806), The Genius of the Thames (1810), The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812), and Sir Proteus: A Satirical Ballad (1814). When his principal efforts turned to prose, Peacock continued to produce the occasional elegant lyric or rousing song, many of them incorporated into his novels. His long narrative poem Rhododaphne (1818), “a nympholeptic tale,” attracted considerable contemporary attention and has retained a measure of continued critical esteem; his satirical Paper Money Lyrics (1837), topical and crochety, is largely ignored. Early in his literary career Peacock also wrote two farces, The Dilettanti and The Three Doctors, both of which were unpublished. Throughout his life, and particularly during the periods when his responsibilities at the East India Company precluded sustained literary projects, Peacock wrote essays and reviews, the most famous being his unfinished but incisive “Essay on Fashionable Literature,” in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), the satirical critique of contemporary poetry’s debasement that provoked Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry (1840) and Peacock’s four-part Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858-1862), which the reserved and fastidious Peacock, who deplored the publication of private matters, wrote grudgingly, as a corrective to the muddled enthusiasms and posthumous scandal-retailing that admirers and acquaintances of Shelley were offering as literary biography. Achievements · From the beginning of his career as a satirical novelist, Peacock always had an attentive audience, but never a wide one. His career in several ways has invited comparison with that of his contemporary, Jane Austen. Each writer set out to please himself or herself, uninfluenced by desire for fame or gold. Each swam against the Romantic mainstream. Each produced a slim shelf of novels distinguished by elegance, irony, and—detractors might add—limited scope. Whereas Austen limited herself to matters suitable to the notice of a lady, Peacock restricted himself yet more narrowly. Except for Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, respectively set in the picturesque past of “Merrie England” and Arthurian Wales, Peacock’s novels take place in an idyllic country-house world where conversation, varied by singing, dining, drinking, flirtation, and sightseeing, is the chief activity. Even so, in this Pavonian realm, the reader who is able to read the signs aright can find, as critic Marilyn Butler reveals, serious and well-grounded discussion of moral, political, aesthetic, economic, and scientific concerns. The dense if oblique topicality of these conversations is something of an obstacle for the twentieth century reader. Another hurdle for the general public in any age is Peacock’s learning: Only those who share Peacock’s passion for the past, especially 707

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classical antiquity, can enjoy the novels’ esoterica and allusions, and only readers nurtured in Greek and Latin (or possessing editions whose annotations compensate for such deficiency) can smile at the puns and scholarly jokes Peacock presents in the names and adventures of his characters. Writing for a few congenial spirits, Peacock attained in his own time the respect of Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and John Cam Hobhouse. He has retained the appreciative but limited audience Shelley’s lines from Letter to Maria Gisbourne (1820) seem to prophesy: “his fine wit/ Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;/ A strain too learned for a shallow age,/ Too wise for selfish bigots.” Biography · Thomas Love Peacock was born at Weymouth in Dorset, England, in 1785. His father, Samuel, was a London merchant, his mother, Sarah, a woman of Devonshire. He attended a private school at Englefield Green until he was thirteen. After leaving school, he served for some time as a clerk at a mercantile house and as a private secretary. In his youth, Peacock found employment uncongenial, however, and his private resources, although insufficient to send him to a university, did preclude his having to work. Peacock used his leisure well. An apt and diligent student, he became a sound classicist through his independent reading. In 1812, Peacock met Percy Bysshe Shelley through the agency of a mutual friend, Thomas Hookham. For the next few years he was often a part of the Shelley circle. Closely involved in Shelley’s tangled domestic affairs, Peacock attempted to be true to his friend, fair to the poet’s wife, Harriet, and civil to Shelley’s new love, Mary Godwin. When Shelley went abroad, Peacock corresponded with him and transacted business for him. When Shelley died, Peacock, along with Byron, was named executor of the estate. In 1819, Peacock was appointed assistant to the examiner in the East India Office. The salary he derived from his position enabled him to marry Jane Gryffydh, a rector’s daughter whom he had last seen in 1811, when he had been on a walking tour of Wales. The Peacock marriage was not a particularly happy one; the professional appointment proved rather more auspicious. In 1837, on the retirement of James Mill, Peacock became examiner at East India House. He capably held this important administrative post until his retirement in 1856. The pleasures of Peacock’s maturity were those he ascribes to various characters (most of them urbane clergymen) in his novels: good wine, good dinners, hours in the garden or in his study with the classics, rural walks from his house at Halliford in the Thames valley. One of the few new friends Peacock made during the latter half of his life was John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton. Peacock’s peaceful old age was saddened by the unhappiness of his favorite daughter, the talented Mary Ellen, who had imprudently married the novelist George Meredith, and by her death in 1861. Peacock died at Halliford in 1866. Analysis · A writer with strong intelligence but weak invention is not likely to become a novelist. His talents would seem to be most serviceable elsewhere in the literary realm. Even so, the example of Peacock suggests that such a deficiency need not be fatal to a writer of fiction. True, his plots are often insignificant or implausible, and his characters tend to be sketches rather than rounded likenesses or, if three-dimensional, to have more opinions than emotions. His novels are nevertheless readable and re-readable, for he excels in anatomizing the follies, philosophies, and fashions that the age presents to his satirical eye. It is not enough for Peacock to make clear the inconsistencies and absurdities of pre-Reform Toryism, Byronic misanthropy, or

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the modern educational system: His talent for phrase-making ensures that even the bores and halfwits he creates spout golden epigrams. Clear thinking and stylish writing are not the rarest of Peacock’s gifts, though. Perhaps his distinctive excellence is his ability to embrace limitation without accepting diminution. He revels in ideas and delights in the good things of the world. A thoroughgoing classicist in his own views, he accurately understands most of the contemporary opinions and ideas he attacks (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s transcendentalism is a notable exception). He is opinionated without being ill humored. His erudition does not preclude strong practicality. The narrow range of emotions he articulates is the result of a positive rather than a negative quality, of brave stoicism rather than heartlessness. Although Peacock’s novels are for the most part slender, they never seem the productions of a small mind. Headlong Hall · Headlong Hall, Peacock’s first novel, is far from being his finest piece, but it is a mature work in which the characteristic devices of Peacock’s career are effectively, if not perfectly, deployed. One finds charming description of picturesque countryside, in this case Wales, where Peacock had happily traveled in 1809. One finds a rich rural lover of good conversation, Squire Headlong of the Hall, who, to gratify his taste, assembles a diverse set of wise and foolish talkers. Most important, one finds the talkers themselves. In this novel, as in several of the later ones, Peacock’s satire is general; his own perspective is not to be precisely identified with that of any one character. The principal way of grouping the speakers at Squire Headlong’s symposium is to distinguish the philosophers, who genuinely seek to discover truth via Socratic dialogue, from the cranks, who find in conversation a chance to ride forth on their particular intellectual hobbyhorses, and who would rather lecture than learn. When Peacock wrote Headlong Hall in 1815, he was in daily contact with the Percy Bysshe Shelley circle, and the novel’s three philosophers reason from stances Shelley, Peacock, and their friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg adopted in their intellectual discussions. Peacock’s naming of the three characters indicates their respective positions. Foster the perfectabilian (φωστηρ, “one who guards a flame”) articulates a position that Shelley sometimes took, that the human race is improving largely through technological advances. At the other pole is Escot the deteriorationist (εσ σκοτορ, “one looking on the dark side”), who takes the Rousseau-derived view that man has fallen from his pristine excellence largely because, as Shelley’s friend J. F. Newton argued, he eats meat. Balancing these opposites is Jenkinson, the embracer of the status quo (αιερ εσ ιοωρ, “one who from equal measures can produce arguments on both sides”), who gives voice to Hogg’s skepticism. To fan the flames of intellectual discourse, Peacock provides an assortment of windy enthusiasts and eccentrics, none so finely drawn as later incarnations were to be, but none failing to amuse. The Reverend Mr. Gaster begins Peacock’s series of gourmandizing clergymen; Panscope is his first and thinnest burlesque of Coleridge’s transcendentalism. Marmaduke Milestone speaks for the Reptonian school of picturesque gardening, a taste Peacock deplored. The phrenologist Mr. Cranium leads off the series of freakish scientists that continues down through Gryll Grange. Representing literary enterprises, if not strictly speaking literature, are the poets Nightshade and Maclaurel, the reviewers Gall and Treacle, and Miss Philomela Poppyseed, a writer of feminine novels and one of the few stupid women in Peacock’s gallery. Lest the fine arts be neglected, Peacock supplies Sir Patrick O’Prism, a painting dilettante, and Cornelius Chromatic, an amateur violinist.

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The characters feast, drink, talk, sing. Having served their host’s (and their author’s) purposes, they are paired in the ordering dance of marriage, an inevitable conclusion according to the systems of both Foster and Escot, and an empirical state in which one suspects the two philosophers’ theories will prove of precisely equal value. Melincourt · Peacock’s second and longest novel, Melincourt, is generally considered his weakest. At the time of its composition, Peacock’s principal association was with Shelley, and in this novel Peacock drops the objectivity of the “laughing philosopher” and presents political views he shared with the poet, who was even then giving them poetic form in what was to be Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1818). Melincourt sincerely satirizes the Tory government and, as Lord Byron’s The Vision of Judgment (1822) would later do, former liberals such as the Lake Poets—Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Coleridge (Feathernest, Paperstamp, and Mystic in the novel)—who had grown less critical of the establishment as their places in that order grew more comfortable. Certain episodes in Melincourt are memorable. The election at Onevote presents a marvelous empirical case for parliamentary reform, and the Anti-Saccharine Fête celebrates Peacock’s belief that sugar, because its production permitted the West Indian slave trade to prosper, was a morally and politically abominable commodity to be abjured by all true philanthropists “till it were sent them by freemen.” For the most part, though, this sort of candor makes Melincourt shrill rather than forceful. The romantic thread on which the beads of satiric incident are strung is likewise not among Peacock’s strongest. The heroine of the piece and owner of its principal location is Anthelia Melincourt, “at the age of 21, mistress of herself and of ten thousand a year, and of a very ancient and venerable castle in one of the wildest valleys of Westmoreland.” More than one critic has noticed that the assets mentioned and the rhetoric employed in this, Melincourt’s opening passage, call to mind the famous first sentence of Jane Austen’s Emma, published two years earlier in 1815. Unlike Austen’s charming and self-deluded Miss Woodhouse, Miss Melincourt is an earnest and judicious lady, a fit match for Mr. Sylvan Forester, the second Peacock hero to embody Shelley’s intellectual idealism. These two young people, so obviously suited for each other, lose no time in discovering their mutual regard. The novel’s complications and the lovers’ tribulations must come from without: Anthelia is abducted to Alga Castle by the enamoured Lord Anophel Achthar. Having lost his bride-to-be, Forester, ostensibly seeking her, wanders about England’s Lake District and calls on poets and reviewers at Mainchance Villa and Cimmerian Lodge. His dilatory pursuit gives Lord Anophel time to tire of waiting for Anthelia to yield to his repeated proposals. He threatens to compromise her, and, even though the lady is too strong-minded to think that his wickedness will be her disgrace, she is nevertheless grateful enough to be rescued from a test of her theory by Forester and his companion Sir Oran Hautton, who is barely prevented from administering “natural justice” by throwing Lord Anophel out the window. The fierce, faithful, mute Sir Oran is, most readers agree, the book’s chief delight, curious though it might seem for a speechless character to be the chief excellence in a book by a writer noted largely for his characters’ conversations. In Sir Oran, who plays the flute, goes out in society, and gains a parliamentary seat, Peacock presents with only slight exaggerations a theory of the Scottish jurist Lord Monboddo that the orangutan is a “noble savage” distinguished from the rest of the human race only by

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its inability to speak. In the world of literature at least, Monboddo’s argument may have more validity than readers might expect: A literary Darwin examining popular fiction might well be tempted to see in the still thriving breed of strong, silent, active heroes Sir Oran’s not-too-distant descendants. Nightmare Abbey · Peacock began writing his third novel, Nightmare Abbey, after Shelley and Mary Godwin departed England for Italy in March of 1818. The book is arguably his finest, certainly his best-focused and plotted, and easily his most controversial. In this novel, Peacock, one of the great English admirers of Aristophanes, lays himself open to the same sort of unfair criticisms that have been heaped on the Greek dramatist for his comedy The Clouds (423 b.c.e.). Just as Aristophanes was censured by various critics, from Plato on, for inaccurately and irresponsibly portraying Socrates, so Peacock has been condemned for faithlessness and poor taste by readers who consider Nightmare Abbey an unseemly depiction of one of the less commendable interludes in Shelley’s life—his period of wanting to have Mary Godwin without giving up his wife Harriet. There are indeed resemblances between Shelley and the novelist’s protagonist Scythrop, part romantic idealist—part misanthrope, part would-be reformer. Marionetta O’Carroll, the sprightly coquettish cousin Scythrop professes to love, is like Harriet Shelley in spirit and appearance. Scythrop’s other love, the heiress Celinda Toobad (known to him as Stella), is tall and raven-haired, the physical opposite of Mary Godwin, but very like Peacock’s impression of that grave lady in her passion for philosophical speculation, political discussion, and transcendental romantic literature. Invention of detail was at no time Peacock’s strong suit; he was obliged to borrow from real life. Yet, despite having drawn certain details of his novel from Shelley’s situation in 1814, Peacock was neither so tasteless nor so unkind as to write a book centering on his friend’s romantic and domestic difficulties. The surest sign of Peacock’s goodwill is Shelley’s own admiration of the novel: “I am delighted with Nightmare Abbey,” he wrote from Italy. “I think Scythrop a character admirably conceived and executed; and I know not how to praise sufficiently the lightness, chastity, and strength of the language of the whole.” Rather than personalities, Peacock’s targets were the dark gloom of modern literature, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), and such other determinedly dismal works, and the black bile and blue devils introduced by this literature into the lives of its readers. Nightmare Abbey is the only Peacock novel to take place at one scene only, namely the dreary and semidilapidated seat of Christopher Glowry, a gentleman “naturally of an atrabilarious temperament, and much troubled with those phantoms of indigestion which are commonly called blue devils.” Disappointed in love and marriage, the gloomy squire of the Abbey surrounds himself with owls, ivy, water weeds, and servants with the most dismal names: Raven, Crow, Graves, Deathshead. His son Scythrop, a reader of gothic novels and transcendental philosophies, stalks the Abbey like a grand inquisitor. The young man is ruled by two passions: reforming the world by repairing the “crazy fabric of human nature” and drinking Madeira. These preoccupations alter materially when Mr. Glowry’s sister and brother-in-law, their niece and ward Marionetta, and a host of other guests arrive for an extended taste of what hospitality the Abbey can afford. Among the houseguests are a particularly fine array of representative embodiments of morbid romanticism. The Honorable Mr. Listless, who spends whole days on a sofa, has perfected ennui. Mr. Flosky, who “plunged into

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the central opacity of Kantian metaphysics, and lay perdu several years in transcendental darkness, till the common daylight of common sense became intolerable to his eyes,” is one of Peacock’s more successful sketches of Coleridge. Mr. Toobad is a Manichaean Millenarian, the Byronic Mr. Cypress, a poet who, having quarreled with his wife, feels absolved from all duty and is about to set off on his travels. Finely drawn though the gentlemen may be, as Marilyn Butler has noted in her treatment of Nightmare Abbey, Scythrop’s two ladies divide the book between themselves. Scythrop’s attraction to the volatile Marionetta, who playfully spurns him when he seems devoted and charms him when he seems distant, dominates the first half of the book, while his fascination for the mysterious and brilliant Stella, a creature of veils and conspiracies, overshadows lesser matters in the second half of the story. Scythrop can bring himself to dispense with neither lady: “I am doomed to be the victim of eternal disappointment,” he laments in the tone of German high tragedy, “and I have no resource but a pistol.” The two unrenounceable ladies, however, find it possible to renounce their suitor. Wishing Scythrop joy of Miss O’Carroll, Celinda/ Stella turns to the metaphysical Mr. Flosky. Wishing him all happiness with Miss Toobad, Marionetta engages herself to Mr. Listless. His disappointment validated, his misanthropy doubly confirmed, Scythrop thinks himself unlikely to make a figure in the world. His story ends not with a gunshot but with a sound more familiar in the Peacock world: “Bring some Madeira.” Peacock’s next two novels, Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, depart from the prevailing “country-house conversation” pattern. Both works are generally labeled “satirical romances,” being set in the picturesque past but laying out oblique observations on present-day situations. Maid Marian · The first of these romances is perhaps Peacock’s most widely known story, primarily because it forms the basis for a popular operetta by J. R. Planché, Maid Marian: Or, The Huntress of Arlingford (1822). Peacock was sometimes considered to have borrowed portions of his novel from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), but actually Scott and Peacock, who wrote most of his novel in 1818, shared their primary source: Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood, a collection of ancient poems, songs, and ballads about that hero. Like Scott’s work, Peacock’s novel is no plausible portrait of medieval life. Robin Hood is not a responsible steward of the wealth he commandeers; his superiority lies in being less hypocritical than his adversaries, the sheriff and Prince John. Friar Tuck is one in Peacock’s long gallery of wine-loving clergymen; Maid Marian, whose swordsmanship and archery are commendable, and who decides in liberated fashion at the novel’s end to retain her virginal title “though the appellation was then as much a misnomer as that of Little John,” is one of Peacock’s admirably independent heroines. The satiric object of the forest idyll? To mock the repressive and reactionary Holy Alliance, on which Byron, too, was then turning his sights in his Don Juan (1819-1824). The Misfortunes of Elphin · As a perennial wandering woodsman, particularly in Windsor Forest, which had recently been enclosed, Peacock might have grown up with an interest in the Robin Hood material. His interest in the legendary past presented in The Misfortunes of Elphin dates to a more specific series of events. In 1820, Peacock married Jane Gryffydh, a young woman he had met on his travels in Wales ten years before, and her fluency in Welsh reawakened his interest in the Celtic legends of Elphin, Taliesin, and Arthur on which his story is based. Peacock’s pastiche

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of Welsh myths is notable for its rousing songs and its depiction of the splendidly amoral inebriate Seithenyn. Its political satire is particularly effective. The crumbling of the ruinous seawall and castle administered by the drunken Seithenyn could be an apt allegory for any self-indulgent, backward-looking ruling class blind to imminent revolution and indifferent to public responsibility. The situation and the speeches of Seithenyn, however, superbly transmuted from those of the nineteenth century politican George Canning, are particularly relevant to an England on the brink of parliamentary reform. Crotchet Castle · Crotchet Castle, written two years after The Misfortunes of Elphin, returns to the Pavonian mainstream. Here the mansion is a glorified villa; the owner, a rich and recently retired Scottish stockbroker; the target, progressive hypocrisy, represented in real life by Henry Brougham and in the novel by the “March of Mind.” The novel divides into three parts. A house party at Crotchet Castle, carefully designed by its host to pit “the sentimental against the rational, the intuitive against the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical,” is followed by a floating caravan proceeding up the Thames to the rural depths of Wales; the novel concludes with a Christmas gathering, more than a little Pickwickian, at the quasimedieval residence of Mr. Chainmail, a sturdy but sensitive anachronist patterned, as critic David Garnett has observed, after Sir Edward Strachey. This tale of past and present—that is, the past as it should have been and the future that the present shows all too much promise of becoming—sets Mr. Chainmail and the Reverend Dr. Folliot, one of Peacock’s fiercer Tory clergymen, against the liberal utilitarians of the “March of Mind” school, preeminent among them one Mr. MacQuedy (“Mac Q.E.D., son of a demonstration,” as Peacock annotates his own pun). Two pairs of lovers require proper pairing as well. Mr. Chainmail, by story’s end, overcomes his excessive regard for old names and blood and marries Susannah Touchandgo, a financier’s daughter once engaged to the prospering speculator Crotchet, Jr. Having lost her fiancé when her father lost his fortune and decamped for America, Miss Touchandgo has withdrawn to a salubrious Welsh seclusion of music, country cream, fresh air, and exercise, in which charming situation Mr. Chainmail comes upon her. If old names must be foresworn, so must new money; in the romance dovetailed with the Chainmail-Touchandgo one, Lady Clarinda Bossnowl, generally acclaimed as the most delectable of Peacock’s exceptionally pleasing heroines, breaks her engagement to young Crotchet and commits herself to the poor, pedigreed, and talented Captain Fitzchrome. Perhaps the best philosopher in the Crotchet Castle party, Lady Clarinda begins by playing at utilitarianism, intent on not giving her heart away when she can sell it. The journey from the stockbroker’s villa to romantic Wales, however, gives her judgment time to concur with what her feelings long have suggested: that love in a cottage—and not even a cottage ornée—with the Captain is better than comfort at the Castle. Lady Clarinda’s raillery, Folliot’s prejudices, and Chainmail’s enthusiasms make the novel’s conversation particularly fine, and the climax, a spirited defense of Chainmail Hall against “Captain Swing” and that “coming race,” the mob, is perhaps Peacock’s most active. Gryll Grange · Peacock, preoccupied with official duties and family concerns, did not write another novel for thirty years, but Gryll Grange, his last one, is of a vintage worth

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waiting for. Few readers would suspect that the author of this suave and mellow production was well acquainted with sorrow and disappointment. The satire here is less incisive and the development of character richer than in the earlier books—in part because the people portrayed have feelings as well as opinions, in part because Peacock’s wit plays not on the characters but on the world outside Gryll Grange, the modern England of scientific advance, technological development, competitive examinations, and spiritualism—a society mocked by the Gryll Grange houseparty in their own satirical comedy “Aristophanes in London.” For the plot of Gryll Grange, Peacock harks back to the situation of Melincourt. Morgana, the niece and heiress of Gregory Gryll (the family, we learn, is descended from that Gryllus who alone among Ulysses’ crewmen declined being released from the spell by which Circe has turned him into a pig), needs a fit husband who will take her name. Squire Gryll’s friend the Reverend Dr. Opimian, a hearty man much like Peacock in his relish for “a good library, a good dinner, a pleasant garden, and rural walks,” finds just such a suitor in Mr. Falconer, the new resident of a nearby tower significantly called the “Duke’s Folly” by the neighborhood. Falconer, the last of Peacock’s fictional projections of the young Shelley, is an idealistic recluse who lives a comfortable, scholarly life with seven beautiful sisters who manage his household and make his music. Once juxtaposed by the well-tried divine machine of a thunderstorm, Miss Gryll and Falconer are mutually attracted: The subsequent story in large measure centers on the hero’s vacillations. Should he renounce his monastic retreat and the seven maidens who have been his companions since childhood, or should he forswear the social world so fetchingly represented by Gryll Grange and the one lady he loves? Also staying at the Grange are Lord Curryfin, a lively, inventive, and engagingly ridiculous fellow, and the serenely beautiful Miss Niphet. Their presence further complicates the romantic dilemma. Lord Curryfin, at first drawn to Miss Gryll, finds himself increasingly enamoured of the other charmer and knows not where to offer his heart and title. Miss Niphet, a good friend to Morgana, loves the young lord but hesitates to bag a bird on whom she believes her friend’s sights to be trained. Miss Gryll, who knows she loves Falconer but doubts whether she can get him, believes she can get Lord Curryfin but wonders whether she could truly love him. This tangled web of love, honor, and jealousy, so mild that it never becomes a vise, is straightened out by an event yet more providential than the convenient thunderstorm: the appearance and acceptance of seven stalwart rustics who want to marry the maidens of the tower and who thereby free Falconer from his reservations. The novel ends with all the lovers properly betrothed, a multiple wedding, and, as is fitting in the Peacock world, a vinuous salute. Addressing the wedding party, Dr. Opimian concludes, “Let all the corks, when I give the signal, be discharged simultaneously; and we will receive it as a peal of Bacchic ordnance, in honor of the Power of the Joyful Event, whom we may assume to be presiding on this auspicious occasion.” Peter W. Graham Other major works POETRY: The Monks of St. Mark, 1804; Palmyra and Other Poems, 1806; The Genius of the Thames, 1810; The Philosophy of Melancholy, 1812; Sir Proteus: A Satirical Ballad, 1814; Rhododaphne, 1818; Paper Money Lyrics, 1837. NONFICTION: The Four Ages of Poetry, 1820; Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1858-1862.

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Bibliography Burns, Bryan. The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock. London: Croom Helm, 1985. Focuses on Peacock’s novels, providing a close reading and analysis for each. The introduction traces his intellectual debts, especially to classical authors. The novels are read with a primarily textual approach, discussing language, characterization, syntax, and irony and suggesting that they are “dialectical” in nature. Burns does not offer much interpretation of Peacock’s novels but does a good job of looking at their style, emphasizing their similarities but also insisting on their diversity. The bibliography is selective but includes important works, and the index is thorough. Butler, Marilyn. Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. A first-rate study of Peacock which focuses not only on him as an individual but also on the society in which he lived and worked. Discusses the relationship between Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley, contending that they derived mutual intellectual benefit from their friendship which is revealed in their work. Butler emphasizes Peacock’s satiric abilities, attempting to explain that he does not debunk everything—a common charge against him—but instead is highly skeptical of systems. Includes a detailed reading of each of his major novels, plus an examination of Peacock as a critic. The introduction sets him in his literary, social, and biographical context. Dawson, Carl. His Fine Wit: A Study of Thomas Love Peacock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Discusses most of Peacock’s work in detail, including his poetry, essays, and music criticism. Does a very good job with his works and provides an alternative view, but is somewhat outdated. The chapter on Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry provides illuminating background on the book and also on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s response to it, which culminated in his famous A Defense of Poetry. Even so, Dawson does not treat Peacock as a minor writer or as a disciple of Shelley, as many critics do; in fact, he paints Shelley as something of a hypocrite. The index and chronology are not strong, and there is no bibliography; the book does include notes which could serve as a substitute. McKay, Margaret. Peacock’s Progress: Aspects of Artistic Development in the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1992. Chapters on Peacock’s poems and plays as well as on his novels. Peacock’s major characters also receive considerable discussion. McKay provides good background information on the literary figures and movements Peacock satirized. Includes extensive bibliography. Mulvihill, James. Thomas Love Peacock. Boston: Twayne, 1987. An excellent short sourcebook on Peacock, providing biographical background and sound context for each of his major works from his poetry to his novels (Headlong Hall, Melincourt, Nightmare Abbey, Crotchet Castle, Gryll Grange, Maid Marian, The Misfortunes of Elphin), as well as his essays and reviews. Attempts to place each work into its appropriate literary and historical background and provide a detailed, interesting, although fairly standard reading. A good starting place for work on Peacock because of its brevity. The bibliography and good chronology are helpful, as Peacock is such a little noticed author. Prance, Claude A. The Characters in the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866): With Bibliographical Lists. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1992. An excellent dictionary of characters in Peacock’s works. Indispensable for the student of Peacock. Tomkinson, Neil. The Christian Faith and Practice of Samuel Johnson, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1992. Examines the religious literature of Peacock, Johnson, and De Quincey. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Anthony Powell Anthony Pow ell

Born: London, England; December 21, 1905 Died: Frome, Somerset, England; March 28, 2000 Principal long fiction · Afternoon Men, 1931; Venusberg, 1932; From a View to a Death, 1933; Agents and Patients, 1936; What’s Become of Waring, 1939; A Question of Upbringing, 1951; A Buyer’s Market, 1952; The Acceptance World, 1955; At Lady Molly’s, 1957; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, 1960; The Kindly Ones, 1962; The Valley of Bones, 1964; The Soldier’s Art, 1966; The Military Philosophers, 1968; Books Do Furnish a Room, 1971; Temporary Kings, 1973; Hearing Secret Harmonies, 1975 (previous 12 titles known as A Dance to the Music of Time); O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, 1983; The Fisher King, 1986. Other literary forms · Although Anthony Powell produced much writing other than his long fiction, he was primarily a novelist. Powell was an editor, an author of prefaces, a prolific book reviewer, and a screenwriter. While his miscellaneous writing includes light verse and fictional sketches, the stories, such as the ironic sequels to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), are facile parodies, amusing but of limited interest. His skill in characterization and the fine art of gossip, basic to his major work, A Dance to the Music of Time, helps explain Powell’s empathy with a seventeenth century expert in these matters, John Aubrey, author of Brief Lives (1813). Powell edited Aubrey’s works and wrote a biographical study, John Aubrey and His Friends (1948, 1963). Powell also wrote two plays, The Garden God and The Rest I’ll Whistle (published together in 1971). These comedies of manners, while containing crisp dialogue and entertaining dramatic scenes, do not suggest that Powell is a dramatist manqué. Finally, he wrote his memoirs, in four volumes under the general title To Keep the Ball Rolling (1976, 1978, 1980, 1982). These books provide a valuable account of experiences that Powell transmuted into fiction; they also present vivid characterizations of many of Powell’s contemporaries, including Constant Lambert, the Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, and George Orwell. In 1990, Powell published a substantial selection of his essays and reviews, Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946-1989, followed in 1991 by a second collection, Under Review: Further Writings on Writers 1946-1989. Three volumes of Powell’s journals were also published between 1995 and 1997. Achievements · Anthony Powell’s career as a novelist started with five novels published in the 1930’s. These books had generally favorable reviews and reasonable sales; they established Powell’s reputation as a skilled and successful, if perhaps minor, novelist. His reputation grew steadily with his twelve-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, begun after World War II and completed in 1975, and by the 1980’s he was generally recognized as one of the major English writers of the century. He is frequently compared to Marcel Proust, although, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out, Powell’s roman-fleuve is more realistic and much funnier. A Dance to the Music of Time is indeed funny. Becoming more somber in tone as it proceeds, incorporating numerous tragic events, never lacking a certain fundamental 716

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seriousness, the series nevertheless remains comic, a comedy in more aspects than Honoré de Balzac’s meaning of a broad social portrait. The series does present a picture of various segments of English society—essentially the privileged segments— during the empire’s decline since World War I. It has, thus, a certain limited value as sociological documentation—as what W. D. Quesenbery termed an “anatomy of decay”—but this is at best a secondary aspect. Primarily as excellent entertainment, the novels are appreciated by a wide range of readers. One may enjoy, in each of the individual novels, the wit, especially in dialogue, the characterization, and incident. In the series as a whole, there is the additional pleasure of observing the complex interactions of the characters as they appear, disappear, and reappear, forming unexpected patterns in the “dance,” the whole bound together, if somewhat loosely, by theme. From the first volume of the sequence, A Question of Upbringing, the work was well-received, although it was, of course, only as subsequent volumes appeared that readers, in increasing numbers, came to appreciate the complex interconnections of the separate books. Powell’s wit and style were commended, as was his characterization, expecially the creation, in Kenneth Widmerpool, of one of the great comic villains in all of English literature. It was the narrative structure, however, that eventually produced the most critical interest. Although the series moves chronologically forward, through the half century from 1921 to 1971, it is presented through the memory of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, who employs flashback and foreshadowing in a complex manner, recalling, for example, in the sixth book, his childhood in 1914. Such a structure suggests Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931). The comparison is relevant, and both Powell and his protagonist, Nick Jenkins, admire the French writer. Powell’s narrator is not similar to Proust’s, however; Nick’s mind operates differently. In addition, Henri Bergson’s theory of time, so important to Proust, has limited relevance to Powell’s work. If Powell is not an English Proust, comparisons with other novel sequences make even clearer the unique quality of A Dance to the Music of Time. In its focus upon the individuality of character, it is diametrically opposed, for example, to “unanimism,” the ideology of collective experience which informs Jules Romains’s roman-fleuve Les Hommes de bonne volonté (19321947). One of the few English novel sequences of comparable length, C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers (1940-1970), employs a Courtesy D.C. Public Library structure quite different from Pow-

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ell’s. The eleven volumes of Snow’s work shift between those that focus on the life of the central figure, Lewis Eliot, and those that do not, whereas Nick Jenkins remains in each book simultaneously a participant in, and an observer of, the “dance” that the series chronicles. Powell’s achievement, springing from an interest in character, expressed through matchless style, and distinctly structured, has then, as does any great work of art, a sui generis excellence. It won Powell a devoted and varied audience; the British Broadcasting Corporation produced the series; A Dance to the Music of Time’s translations include a Bulgarian version. A share of worldly honors, such as an honorary fellowship in the Modern Language Association of America and an honorary degree from Oxford, have come to Powell. Perhaps more significantly, he has earned the respect of fellow writers, those his own age and those younger, those who share his conservative beliefs and those who do not. In sincere flattery, at least one other writer, the major Canadian novelist Hugh Hood, is writing his own series of novels in admiring emulation of Powell’s work. Biography · Anthony Dymoke Powell (pronounced “Antony Diemoke Pole”) was born December 21, 1905, in London, England. His mother was the daughter of a barrister; his father, himself the son of a colonel, was a lieutenant in the army who was to win decoration in World War I and retire as a lieutenant colonel. Powell, his parents’ only child, spent his early years in a military environment. He was to have a continuing respect for the service; General Conyers, in A Dance to the Music of Time, is only one of a number of sympathetically portrayed army officers in Powell’s fiction. As a member of a well-to-do family, Powell had an upper-class education and acquired the values of his class. He entered Eton in 1918, where he made friends, such as Hubert Duggan, a source for Stringham, who were to contribute to his subsequent characterizations. When, in 1923, Powell matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, he continued to collect the friends and the personal impressions that were to serve him well when he later described Nick Jenkins’s experiences. Powell’s memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling, written after A Dance to the Music of Time, are invaluable in dealing with the complex issue of the relation between fiction and “real life,” but it may be said that Powell is not always entirely forthcoming, and that many of his fictional characters are based, often rather closely, upon particular prototypes. While at Oxford, Powell made various vacation trips to the Continent; in 1924, he traveled to Finland, where his father was stationed. Later, he drew upon this travel in his early novel Venusberg. Powell graduated from Oxford in 1926 and went to work for the publishing firm of Duckworth, in London. There, Powell lived the quasi-bohemian life that is described in A Buyer’s Market and subsequent volumes in A Dance to the Music of Time, and which is also reflected in his five prewar novels. He spent much time in the company of painters and musicians, meeting, among them, the composer Constant Lambert, who was to become a lifelong friend and the prototype for Hugh Moreland in Powell’s series. On December 3, 1934, Powell married Lady Violet Pakenham; they were to have two sons, Tristam and John. With his marriage, Powell acquired a large set of interesting in-laws; collectively, they were to contribute something to his fictional portrait of the Tollands; his brother-in-law Frank Pakenham, the seventh Earl of Longford, was to serve as a major source for the character Kenneth Widmerpool. After his wedding, Powell left Duckworth’s, and, in 1936, worked as a scriptwriter for Warner Bros. in London. There he met Thomas Phipps, the original of Chips

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Lovell. In 1937, he went via the Panama Canal to Hollywood, California, in search of a scriptwriting job. Although the job did not work out, before returning, the Powells enjoyed an interesting interlude that included a meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Upon his return to London, Powell engaged in journalism and wrote his fifth novel, What’s Become of Waring. As World War II began, Powell, in 1939, was commissioned a lieutenant in the Welsh Regiment. His war experiences are fairly accurately portrayed in the military trilogy, the third “movement” of the four in A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell, like Nick Jenkins, served first in a line regiment in Northern Ireland; he was transferred, in 1941, to Army Intelligence, worked as a liaison officer with Allied forces, served in France and Belgium, and gained the rank of major. Just as Nick, after leaving the army at the end of the war, worked on a study of Robert Burton, so did Powell engage in historical research on John Aubrey, publishing his study in 1948, and an edited collection of Aubrey’s work the next year. With Aubrey “finally out of the way,” as Powell writes, he turned again to novel-writing, and began with A Question of Upbringing, his roman-fleuve. The novels in the series appeared at fairly regular intervals, averaging one every two years from 1951 until 1975. During these years, Powell continued his career in journalism, contributing sketches, articles, and reviews to Punch, the London Daily Telegraph, and other periodicals. In 1956, he was made a C.B.E; in 1961 he lectured in America at Dartmouth College, Amherst College, and Cornell University. He was appointed a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in 1962. His plays, The Garden God and The Rest I’ll Whistle, were published together in 1971, the same year in which the University of Sussex awarded him the honorary degree. During his outwardly quiet postwar years, Powell continued to enjoy and expand his circle of friends, thereby finding some additional prototypes for the characters introduced in the later volumes of his series. The writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, the prototype of X. Trapnel, is a notable example. Upon completing A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell began his memoirs, publishing Infants of the Spring in 1976, followed, at two-year intervals, by Messengers of Day, Faces in My Time, and The Strangers All Are Gone. In 1983, a year after the appearance of the final volume of his memoirs, Powell published a short novel or novella, O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, a satirical jeu d’ esprit, his first work of fiction since the completion of A Dance to the Music of Time. This was followed in 1986 by The Fisher King, a full-length novel published to excellent reviews. During most of the period of his major work, Powell and his wife lived at Somerset. In the 1980’s Powell continued to receive honors for writing, including a D.Litt. from Oxford in 1980. Anthony Powell was one of the major figures of British letters after the 1920’s and 1930’s, and by the late 1990’s he was the last surviving member of the so-called Brideshead generation, as described by Waugh. While he was a student at Eton, perhaps England’s most prestigious public school, Powell’s contemporaries included Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, and George Orwell. At Oxford University he was a colleague of Waugh, Peter Quennell, and Maurice Bowra. He died in Somerset on March 28, 2000. Analysis · Of the many pleasures and rewards offered by Anthony Powell’s novels, none surpasses that to be found in coming to know, and continually being surprised by what happens to, a variety of fascinating characters. For Powell, an interest in character is primary. This can be seen in his absorption in the biographies sketched

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by John Aubrey, in the series of verbal portraits which dominate To Keep the Ball Rolling, and in his statement that a concern for character was central in his beginning A Dance to the Music of Time. A Dance to the Music of Time · Successful fiction, though, involves more than the presentation of a series of characters, however intriguing. When characterization is conveyed with wit, in both dialogue and description, when the style becomes a pleasure in itself, as it does in Powell’s work, one has enough ingredients to produce writing worth reading, but not enough for a novel, certainly not for a novel of the scope and stature of A Dance to the Music of Time. Such a novel, like any successful work of art, must satisfy the aesthetic requirement of unity—a sense of structure and order must be conveyed. Although not the sole ingredient upon which a unified structure depends, character does help provide this sense of balance. For example, a degree of unity is achieved by having a single narrator, Nicholas Jenkins. Yet, A Dance to the Music of Time is not really the story of Nick Jenkins, just as it is not essentially the story of Kenneth Widmerpool, important as both these characters are. Although himself a participant in the “dance,” Nick basically observes and reports; he does not give structure to the events that he relates. No persona, only Powell himself, can do this. Many writers, certainly, achieve structure through plot, which may be the soul of fiction as Aristotle thought it was of drama. For Powell, however, the demands normally implied by “plot” run counter to his fundamental sense of time’s complex mutability; to give his work a definite beginning, middle, and end, with action rising to and falling from a specific climax, would be justified neither by his sense of reality nor by his artistic intentions. This is not to say that conscious arrangement of incident is not present in A Dance to the Music of Time. On the contrary, because the author has exercised intelligent concern for such arrangement, continual surprises are enjoyed in a first reading, and anticipation of the irony of coming events gives a special pleasure to rereading the series. It would be yielding too readily to the seductive appeal of paradox, however, to claim that it is a crafted sense of the random which gives basic structure to A Dance to the Music of Time—that its order lies in its apparent lack of order. If not to be found primarily in character or plot, what is the key to the structure of the dance? Unwilling, with reason, to accept the idea that it has no clear structure, that it is, even if cut from a loaf made of remarkably milled flour, essentially “a slice of life,” critics have proposed a variety of answers. The title of the series, as Powell has explained, derives from an allegorical painting in the Wallace Collection in London, Nicholas Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Comparisons between the painting and the novel may be ingeniously extended, but it seems improbable that they were extensively worked out by Powell as he began a series which, he writes in Faces in My Time, would consist of a number of volumes, “just how many could not be decided at the outset.” It would appear more probable that the Poussin painting, expressing the French artist’s sense of the permutations time produces in human life, while an important analogue to Powell’s intention in the series, was only one of a number of sources of the work’s pattern. Another source might have been Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), a masque organized around the four seasons, contrasting the arts and the utilitarian spirit, and involving a sophisticated, semidetached “presenter”; it was the basis of a musical composition by Powell’s close friend Constant Lambert.

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Other structural keys have been proposed, including the importance of mysticism (the Dr. Trelawney, Mrs. Erdleigh aspect) and the signs of the zodiac. There would seem to be some validity in most of these interpretations, but the attempt to see any one as a single key to the series appears reductionist, in the sense that a strict Freudian or Marxist reading of William Shakespeare is too limiting. Insofar as the pattern of the dance can be extrapolated from the work itself, most critics have agreed that it must be seen as a reflection of theme. Of the many thematic strands, that which is central appears to be the conflict between power and art, or imagination and will. Jenkins himself suggests this at more than one point in the series. From the perspective of this conflict, in which Widmerpool, the extreme example of the self-centered power seeker, is thematically contrasted to Hugh Moreland the musician, and later to X. Trapnel the writer, the characters and their actions fall into a meaningful, if somewhat shadowy, pattern. The pattern is hardly simple, though; few characters are purely villainous or heroic; some artists seek power; some professional soldiers and businessmen are artistic and imaginative; both victories and defeats tend to be temporary. Furthermore, the sexual designs woven in the “dance” complicate a bipolar view of theme. Sexual attraction, or love, in the novel usually involves both an imaginative appreciation of a perceived beauty in the desired partner, and some attempt to impose one’s will upon another. Thus, with vagaries of desire, thematic antitheses and syntheses may fluctuate within individual characters. It is clear, however, that when Matilda Wilson goes from the artist Moreland to the industrialist Sir Magnus Donners, or Pamela Flitton leaves Widmerpool for the novelist X. Trapnel, a thematic point is made. (Indeed, the women in the series, generally less convincingly presented than the men, often seem to serve as scoring markers in the thematic game.) That this thematic conflict, while it should not be simplistically defined, was essential to Powell’s concept of the work’s structure is shown additionally by the way prototypes were transmuted into fictional characters. Frank Pakenham, for example, unlike his fictional “counterpart” Widmerpool, not only would seem to have a number of virtues, but also has enjoyed a long and happy marriage, blessed by eight children. Clearly, the structure of the series requires that such satisfaction be denied its thematic villain. A suggestion, then, may be made as to the probable way Powell proceeded in constructing his series. He apparently started with a novelist’s interest in certain people that he knew, those he felt would be worth portraying. Then, to create order in his work, he fitted these people’s fictional representatives into thematic patterns, changing reality as needed to accomplish this patterning. Using the thematically identified characters, he then, at a lower order of priority, considered and manipulated the plot, using plot itself to demonstrate another major theme, that of “mutability.” The result was a uniquely constructed work of art. Afternoon Men · Before beginning his major work, Powell wrote five novels; a case can be made for their being excellent works in their own right. Had Powell not gone on to write his roman-fleuve, they may have gained him a certain lasting recognition. As it is, inevitably they are regarded primarily as preparation for his masterpiece. The use of the “detached” narrator, coincidence in plot, ironic style, clipped dialogue, the theme of power, art, and love—all these attributes of A Dance to the Music of Time are anticipated in the early novels. Afternoon Men, picturing a London social scene the young Powell knew well, is the first of the five early novels. Powell has described it

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as “something of an urban pastoral . . . depicting the theme of unavailing love,” with not much plot in the conventional sense. He sees the design of this first novel to be “not without resemblance to the initial framework” of the sequence. Although the protagonist, William Atwater, is not the narrator—the story is told mainly from his point of view, with the author occasionally intruding in his own voice—he may be compared, in his wit and detached forbearance, to Nicholas Jenkins. It is essentially in its ironic style, however, especially in the dialogue, that Afternoon Men anticipates the later series. Venusberg and From a View to a Death · Venusberg, Powell’s second novel, also has a protagonist, Lushington, who is comparable to Nick Jenkins. Flashback, a technique later significant to the series, is employed in this novel’s construction, and the theme of love is extended to include adultery, while power and clairvoyance, topics prominent in A Dance to the Music of Time, are introduced. Powell’s next novel, From a View to a Death, dealing with the interrelated themes of art, love, and power, emphasizes the latter. Arthur Zouch, a painter and womanizer, uses art and love in his search for the power he believes is his by right of his being an Übermensch. Fittingly, for one who not only debases the gift of imagination but is also a would-be social climber, he is defeated by a member of the country gentry. Technically, the book is interesting in that Powell experiments with a shifting point of view. Agents and Patients · Art, sex, and power—specifically power derived from money— are the subjects that provide structure in Agents and Patients. In this novel, each of two confidence men, Maltravers and Chipchase, attempts to fleece a naïve young man, Blore Smith, Maltravers by playing upon Smith’s sexual innocence, Chipchase by playing upon his artistic innocence. As the title, drawn from John Wesley, suggests, the issue of free will and determinism, significant in a less direct way in A Dance to the Music of Time, is an underlying theme. Excellent as it is as satiric comedy, Agents and Patients puts such an emphasis upon plot and theme that the characterization, usually Powell’s strongest suit, tends somewhat toward caricature. What’s Become of Waring · What’s Become of Waring, Powell’s last novel before the war, is perhaps a less impressive achievement than the four that preceded it. It is, however, close to A Dance to the Music of Time in more than chronology. Although it has a carefully worked out, conventional plot, Powell still manages, as James Tucker observes, to “slip out of it and pursue his concern for people.” In this work, a first-person narrator is employed. He is a publisher’s reader; the work draws upon Powell’s experience at Duckworth’s. Never named, the narrator, in his overall attitude and as a partial alter ego for Powell, resembles Nicholas Jenkins. Again, the mystical element, later present in the series, is introduced through seances. Significantly, given the thematic center of A Dance to the Music of Time, What’s Become of Waring ends with the narrator, as he drifts off to sleep, free-associating on the idea of power. A Question of Upbringing · That Powell, after his lengthy hiatus from novel writing, returned to the idea of the quest for power is clear even from the first of the three volumes that constitute “Spring,” the initial movement of his sequence. A Question of Upbringing introduces, at the very start, the series’ most important character, Widmerpool, and it is clear that even as a schoolboy he is determined to dominate. The early introduction of the major themes is an important aid to unity, for the

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start of a long series poses particular problems for its author. As Powell suggests in Faces in My Time, early volumes, in preparation for future ones, must introduce undeveloped characters and potential situations; additionally, some characters and situations, in view of their subsequent importance, must be overemphasized. These requirements may tend to confuse the reader, unless patterns are perceived. A Question of Upbringing, which covers Nick’s youth at public school and university, introduces an important pattern of repetition of related incidents by having Nick meet his Uncle Giles at both the beginning and the end of the volume. Another recurring structural device, the alternation of scenes described in dramatic detail with linking sections provided by Nick’s subjective impressions, is present, as are the patterning devices of allusion and symbolism. The series begins with a scene of workmen gathered around a fire, repeated at the conclusion of the sequence, twelve volumes later, and mentions the Poussin painting which provides the title for the whole sequence. References to paintings are important throughout the series, including the Tiepolo ceiling in Temporary Kings and the oft-mentioned Modigliani drawing which is rescued in the final volume. A Buyer’s Market · Although the themes of love and art (which, along with the interrelated theme of power, dominate the series) are present in the first volume, they are more prominent in the second, A Buyer’s Market. In this book, dominated by the social life of parties and dances which Nick, down from the university, enjoys, not only do sexual activities become important to Nick (a late bloomer as compared to his friends Templer and Stringham), but also the theme of the quest for power is extended to include politics. The radical young woman, Gypsy Jones (with whom Nick apparently loses his virginity), is utilized in one of Powell’s recurring attacks upon the political Left, as well as to serve as an object of frustrated lust for Widmerpool, whose sex life is to be, throughout the series, eccentric and unsatisfactory. The Acceptance World · The Acceptance World, the third volume in this movement, begins with another meeting between Nick and his Uncle Giles, who is now associated with Mrs. Erdleigh, a clairvoyant. She plays a major role in the dramatization of the subtheme of mysticism. Mysticism in the series, as seen later in Dr. Trelawney, and finally in Scorpio Murtlock, is related to an attempt to escape from what Mrs. Erdleigh calls the “puny fingers of Time” and gain power. Power in The Acceptance World, though, is considered more in political terms; there is an extension of the political satire against the Left, especially through Quiggin (whose character owes something to Cyril Connolly’s), a university friend of Jenkins who moves in left-wing intellectual circles. The volume’s love interest involves Nick in a serious affair with Jean Templer, a school friend’s sister. Much later in the series, in The Military Philosophers, Nick realizes that Jean, who breaks off the affair, really is attracted to money and power; she ultimately marries a Colonel Flores, who becomes a Latin American dictator. As Nick reflects in the first volume, “being in love is a complicated matter”; staying in love is even more so. The balance of thematic opposites, necessary to love, is seldom maintained. Nick is to be virtually unique in the series by virtue of his lasting, successful marriage, but the reader is given little direct insight into the secret of his success. At Lady Molly’s · Nick’s courtship and engagement are described in the first volume of the second movement, “Summer.” This volume is entitled At Lady Molly’s; Lady

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Molly Jeavons is a fictional amalgam of actual people including Rosa Lewis, the famous proprietor of the Cavendish Hotel, and Lady Astor, celebrated mistress of the magnificent country mansion, Cliveden, the prototype of the novel’s Dogdene. Lady Molly, whose easygoing hospitality attracts a variety of guests, is the aunt of Chips Lovell (a character based on Thomas Phipps), who works with Nick as a scriptwriter for films. Powell here, as throughout the series, introduces new characters, thereby continually revivifying his novel, personifying its themes with variety, and causing the reader to wonder who, as well as what, is coming next. The actions of the two most permanent characters, Nick and Widmerpool, form the core of the volume; Nick’s developing and successful love for Isobel Tolland is contrasted with the debacle that occurs when Widmerpool attempts a premarital seduction of his fiancé, Mildred Haycock. Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant · Love and marriage are even more central to the next book, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, which introduces and focuses upon one of the series’ most important and attractively realized characters, the composer Hugh Moreland, who becomes one of Nick’s closest friends, just as Moreland’s real-life prototype, Constant Lambert, became very important to Powell. Moreland is, thematically, the artist. As such, he is Widmerpool’s antithesis, even though the two have too little in common to be antagonists other than thematically, the few occasions when they encounter each other are singularly, but not surprisingly, undramatic. One critic has suggested that even their names, Widmerpool’s suggesting wetness, and Moreland’s the opposite, indicate their antithesis. (Powell’s names, as most readers will have noticed, are frequently suggestive and apt, as well as sometimes amusing—consider, for example, the name of the sexually experienced woman whom Widmerpool so decidedly fails to satisfy, Mrs. Haycock.) A more significant difference between Moreland and Widmerpool is in their way of talking. Moreland produces very witty and pleasurable conversation; Widmerpool is given to pompous pronouncements that often entertain the reader by their unconscious self-satire. Like Widmerpool, however, although quite differently and for different reasons, Moreland has trouble with his love life; interconnections of art and love form much of the subject matter of the volumes in this movement. The Kindly Ones · Other perspectives on love are introduced in The Kindly Ones, the last volume of “Summer,” in which Widmerpool temporarily fades into the background, until the last chapter. The work begins with a flashback to Nick’s childhood in 1914, thereby relating World War I to the approach of World War II in 1938, the time to which the book returns. The chronology is particularly complicated in this volume, and coincidence, always a feature of the series’ plotting, is pushed to its limits when Nick, having gone to the seaside hotel where his Uncle Giles has died, meets, along with others from his past, Bob Duport, the former husband of Nick’s past lover, Jean. The fact that for many readers, the complex structure of The Kindly Ones is unobtrusively successful, provides some measure of Powell’s legerdemain. At the end of The Kindly Ones, Nick has arranged for his commission in the army; the third movement, “Autumn,” carries him though World War II. The reader learns from the autobiographical Faces in My Time that Nick’s army experiences closely parallel Powell’s own. Nick’s service is distinguished, but the focus is more upon the tedium of war than its heroism. In treating this often tedious, but different world of the service, Powell faced

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technical problems. He had to maintain the structure of his series within an entirely new environment. New characters, some from a social background that the novel had previously ignored, had to be used in a manner in accordance with the controlling themes. Furthermore, the style had to make some adaptation to the grim subject matter. Powell was not going to emphasize the comic elements of war, even though they are not ignored. The basic solution to these problems was to alternate the army scenes with those occurring when Nick is on leave. Thereby, the reader is able to experience the new, while still maintaining an interest in the old characters and themes. The Valley of Bones · The first volume of the movement, The Valley of Bones, introduces, among many new characters, a particularly significant one, Captain Gwatkin. Gwatkin, while no artist—he had worked in a local Welsh bank—is a man of imagination, a sort of Miniver Cheevy actually in armor. He has romantic ambitions to be a perfect soldier, ambitions doomed to failure in his encounters with the men of power who are his superiors. Although he is eventually relieved of his command, Gwatkin finds some consolation in love, only to lose it when he learns of the infidelity of his beloved barmaid Maureen. Between these army scenes, Nick, while on leave, observes the continued amatory maneuvers of his friends and relations. The book ends with the dramatic appearance of Widmerpool as an influential major. The Soldier’s Art · In the next volume, The Soldier’s Art, Nick is working as Widmerpool’s junior assistant, in a position to observe his superior’s continuing struggle for power, transferred from civilian to military life. Widmerpool hovers upon the verge of disaster, but at the end of the book his career is saved. Previously, he had failed to assist an old school fellow of his and Nick’s, Stringham, now reduced to being an enlisted man working in the officers’ mess, subsequently to die in a Japanese prisonerof-war camp. Meanwhile, personal entanglements continue to form new patterns, while some of the characters, including Chips Lovell and Lady Molly, are killed in a bombing raid. The Military Philosophers · The final volume of the movement, The Military Philosophers, finds Nick in the war office, working on liaison with Allied troops. This book, stylistically notable for its increased use of allusion, presents a number of the real personnel with whom Powell worked, little changed in their fictional guises. It is, however, an imagined character, or at least one for whom no prototype has been established, who reappears at this point, having been briefly introduced earlier as a young girl, subsequently to be a major figure. Pamela Flitton is, like Widmerpool, Stringham, Moreland, and Trapnel, one of the series’ most memorable creations. She is a kind of ubiquitous nemesis, capable of bringing down the men of both art and power. Outstanding even in a cast of remarkably unusual and individual characters, she is made by Powell larger than life and yet believable, beautiful and yet repulsive, contemptible and yet capable of arousing the reader’s sympathies. Although not all readers find her entirely convincing, she is certainly one of Powell’s most fascinating characters. As the war ends, she is engaged to Widmerpool. No one could deserve her less, or more. With Pamela’s entrance into the series, the tone, previously not essentially grim, even with the many deaths occurring during the war, changes. Books Do Furnish a Room · In the final movement of the series, “Winter,” the style also changes as Powell moves toward a concluding “wintery silence.” While a sense

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of the comic is never abandoned, the mood becomes more somber, the action more direct. The first novel in this movement, Books Do Furnish a Room, is primarily the story of X. Trapnel, a novelist heavily based on Powell’s friend, Julian Maclaren Ross. Trapnel, the artist, is juxtaposed with Widmerpool, the man of power, through the agency of Pamela Flitton, who leaves Widmerpool to live with Trapnel. The triumph of the artist is temporary, however, for not only is Pamela discovered to be both sexually insatiable and frigid, but she also destroys a manuscript of Trapnel’s most recent novel by dumping it in the Maida Vale Canal and returns to Widmerpool. Temporary Kings · In the next volume, Temporary Kings, which begins at an international literary conference in Venice, where the first half of the novel is set, Pamela is a dominant character. Her sexual debauchery continues, unsettling Widmerpool, but she encounters a man upon whom her charms fail, Professor Russell Gwinnett. Continuing his ability to rejuvenate the series by introducing new characters, Powell brings in this American scholar with necrophilic tastes, who is writing a book on Trapnel. Nick finds him “an altogether unfamiliar type,” with “nothing simple” about his personality. Thematically, Gwinnett, a curious variant of the deus ex machina, may embody a kind of resolution of the conflict between art and power. Having both an involvement with art and an exceptionally strong will, Gwinnett, whose superior psychic strength provokes Pamela’s suicide, perhaps in a necrophilic ritual, may be thought to have avenged Trapnel, if not Widmerpool. Any resolution with Gwinnett is, however, a dark one, incorporating the cult rites with which he becomes involved before returning to America, and necessarily suggesting that to which he is most strongly related, death. Hearing Secret Harmonies · The final volume of the sequence, Hearing Secret Harmonies, is focused on Widmerpool, who, with the exception of Nick himself, is the series’ most enduring character. After becoming a kind of hero to rebellious youth, he joins a pagan religious cult and struggles with its leader, Scorpio Murtlock, for dominance. Finally, running at the end, just as he was in his first appearance in the sequence, he falls dead, exhausted by his effort to take the lead in a ritual run. The ending of such a long work poses a particular problem. After twelve books, certainly some feeling of conclusion must be produced, yet the whole structure, the whole sense of the continually evolving dance of time, renders any strong sense of climax inappropriate. Powell, by having Nick learn at second hand of Widmerpool’s death, and then returning to the initial image of the workmen’s fire, quoting Robert Burton, and providing a carefully worded final image, skillfully solves this problem. The ending is a final reminder of the quality of literary skill and talent that is sustained through all the volumes of singularly satisfactory achievement. The Fisher King · The Fisher King was Powell’s second novel to be published after the completion of A Dance to the Music of Time. Most of the action involves a group of characters taking a summer cruise around the British Isles. Aboard the cruise ship Alecto is Saul Henchman, a famous photographer who received disabling and disfiguring injuries in World War II. He is traveling with his assistant and companion, a beautiful woman named Barberina Rookwood. Much of the story is narrated by another passenger, Valentine Beals, a writer of historical novels. As the cruise progresses, Henchman reveals himself as a thoroughly unpleasant individual, Beals is

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seen to be gossipy and pretentious, and Rookwood inspires the admiration of men and women alike. Three men on the cruise—Henchman, Gary Lamont, and Robin Jilson—vie for her attention. The Fisher King provides numerous connections between its characters and mythological figures, generally commented on by Beals. Beals’s interpretations and speculations are flawed in a number of ways, however, and Powell is perhaps suggesting that myth can still illuminate intriguing aspects of human behavior but cannot truly predict how humans will act. Throughout, Powell is less concerned with drawing precise mythological parallels than with providing an amusing and intellectually entertaining story of people and their foibles. William B. Stone, updated by Eugene Larson and McCrea Adams Other major works PLAYS: ”The Garden God” and “The Rest I’ll Whistle”: The Text of Two Plays, pb. 1971. POETRY: Caledonia: A Fragment, 1934. NONFICTION: John Aubrey and His Friends, 1948, 1963; To Keep the Ball Rolling, 1976-1982 (includes Infants of the Spring, 1976; Messengers of Day, 1978; Faces in My Time, 1980; The Strangers All Are Gone, 1982); Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946-1989, 1990; Under Review: Further Writings on Writers 1946-1989, 1991; Journals 1982-1986, 1995; Journals 1987-1989, 1996; Journals 1990-1992, 1997; A Writer’s Notebook, 2000. Bibliography Brennan, Neil. Anthony Powell. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Covers Powell’s work up to 1973, when the eleventh volume of A Dance to the Music of Time was published. One-third of this study is devoted to A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell’s tour de force; the rest is an analysis of his other works, including early novels such as Afternoon Men and From a View to a Death. Contains a chronology of Powell which includes his family ancestry. Joyau, Isabelle. Investigating Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. An academic, Joyau writes an insightful and appreciative analysis of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, discussing structure, literary techniques, and characters. Morris, Robert K. The Novels of Anthony Powell. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968. The first book-length study of Powell’s writing. Morris discusses all Powell’s novels up to 1968 and focuses on what he discerns as Powell’s central theme: the struggle between the power hungry and the sensualists. The second part of this study analyzes the first eight volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. Selig, Robert L. Time and Anthony Powell. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1991. An analysis of Powell’s use of time in A Dance to the Music of Time, both within the series and as the reader’s sense of time is affected. Spurling, Hilary. Invitation to the Dance: A Guide to Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the Music of Time.” Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. Spurling intends this as a reference cum “bedside companion for readers who want to refresh their memories.” Whether or not it makes for bedside reading, this volume certainly is a useful guide to the complexities of Powell’s opus. Contains a synopsis of each volume, by chapter and time sequence, and includes an extensive character index. Taylor, D. J. “A Question of Upbringing.” The [London] Sunday Times Books, January

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29, 1995, p. 8. Taylor, a journalist and novelist, interviewed Powell about his career and recent life at the Powell country house in western England. Tucker, James. The Novels of Anthony Powell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. An extensive appraisal of the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. Includes a “who’s who” of characters, themes, style, narrative, and method. A scholarly work, but quite readable. Also contains a bibliography.

J. B. Priestley J. B. Priestley

Born: Bradford, England; September 13, 1894 Died: Stratford-upon-Avon, England; August 14, 1984 Principal long fiction · Adam in Moonshine, 1927; Benighted, 1927; Farthing Hall, 1929 (with Hugh Walpole); The Good Companions, 1929; Angel Pavement, 1930; Faraway, 1932; I’ll Tell You Everything, 1933 (with George Bullett); Wonder Hero, 1933; They Walk in the City: The Lovers in the Stone Forest, 1936; The Doomsday Men: An Adventure, 1938; Let the People Sing, 1939; Blackout in Gretley: A Story of—and for—Wartime, 1942; Daylight on Saturday: A Novel About an Aircraft Factory, 1943; Three Men in New Suits, 1945; Bright Day, 1946; Jenny Villiers: A Story of the Theatre, 1947; Festival at Farbridge, 1951 (pb. in U.S. as Festival ); Low Notes on a High Level: A Frolic, 1954; The Magicians, 1954; Saturn over the Water: An Account of His Adventures in London, South America, and Australia by Tim Bedford, Painter, Edited with Some Preliminary and Concluding Remarks by Henry Sulgrave and Here Presented to the Reading Public, 1961; The Thirty-first of June: A Tale of True Love, Enterprise, and Progress in the Arthurian and ad-Atomic Ages, 1961; The Shape of Sleep: A Topical Tale, 1962; Sir Michael and Sir George: A Tale of COMSA and DISCUS and the New Elizabethans, 1964 (also known as Sir Michael and Sir George: A Comedy of New Elizabethans); Lost Empires: Being Richard Herncastle’s Account of His Life on the Variety Stage from November, 1913, to August, 1914, Together with a Prologue and Epilogue, 1965; Salt Is Leaving, 1966; It’s an Old Country, 1967; The Image Men: Out of Town and London End, 1968; The Carfitt Crisis, 1975; Found, Lost, Found: Or, The English Way of Life, 1976; My Three Favorite Novels, 1978. Other literary forms · In addition to the nearly thirty novels that he published after Adam in Moonshine in 1927, J. B. Priestley wrote approximately fifty plays, upon which his future reputation will largely depend. These include such memorable works as Dangerous Corner (1932), Eden End (1934), Time and the Conways (1937), An Inspector Calls (1946), The Linden Tree (1947), and The Scandalous Affair of Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon (1955). He also collaborated with Iris Murdoch on the successful stage adaptation of her novel A Severed Head (1963). There is, besides, a long list of impressive works which characterize Priestley as the twentieth century equivalent of an eighteenth century man of letters, a term he professed to despise. This list includes accounts of his travels both in England and abroad, the best of these being English Journey (1934), an account of English life during the Depression; Russian Journey (1946); and Journey down a Rainbow (1955), written in collaboration with Jacquetta Hawkes. Priestley produced several books of reminiscence and recollection, which include Rain upon Godshill (1939), Margin Released (1962), and Instead of the Trees (1977). His literary criticism includes studies of George Meredith, Charles Dickens, and Anton Chekhov; and his familiar essays, thought by many to be among his finest works, are represented in the volume entitled Essays of Five Decades (1968), and by Postscripts (1940), his broadcasts in support of England at war. Priestley created several picture books of social criticism such as The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, 1811-1820 (1969), The Edwardians (1970), and Victoria’s Heyday (1972), and his far-reaching historical surveys detail an idiosyncratic view of people 729

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in time: Literature and Western Man (1960) and Man and Time (1964). Priestley’s short-story collections include Going Up (1950) and The Other Place and Other Stories of the Same Sort (1953). As this list indicates, no aspect of modern life escaped Priestley’s scrutiny, and no genre was left untried. In a long and prestigious career, he earned for himself a secure place in the annals of literature. Achievements · Although Priestley’s accomplishments in the theater may prove more significant than his work in the novel, perhaps because of his experimentation within the dramatic genre, his fiction has nevertheless secured for him a high place in contemporary literature; it has been read and cherished by a large and very appreciative audience. The Good Companions, a runaway best-seller in 1929, allowed Priestley to turn his attention from journalism and the novel to the theater in the 1930’s, but he kept returning to the novel form throughout his career. Priestley produced no novel that equals James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in scope or intellectual subtlety, no novel as prophetic as D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), no novel illustrative of the intuitive faculty equal to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), or of ethical concern equal to Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) or William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932). His place on the scale of literary achievement may be lower than theirs, but his audience has been, by and large, greater. Priestley aimed for and caught a popular audience that remained loyal to him through five decades of writing. His novels and plays have been widely translated and acted, most notably in the Soviet Union. His craft in the novel genre shows the influence of Charles Dickens, of the English Romantics, especially of William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt, and of the English music hall and its traditions. Priestley himself made no great claims for his fiction, beyond good-naturedly protesting once or twice that there is more to it than meets the top-speed reviewer’s eye. His finest novel, Bright Day, however, earned general critical approval when it was published in 1946, and merited the praise of Carl Jung, who found its theme consonant with his notion of the oneness of all people. Biography · John Boynton Priestley was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, on September 13, 1894. His mother died soon after his birth, and he was reared by a kind and loving stepmother. His father Jonathan was a schoolmaster whom Priestley has characterized in the autobiographical Margin Released as the man Socialists have in mind when they write about Socialists. Bradford, in Priestley’s early years, offered much to feed a romantic boy’s imagination: theater, the music halls, a playgoer’s society, an arts club, the concert stage, a busy market street, and a grand-scale arcade called the Swan. A tram ride away were the Yorkshire Dales and moors. As a young man, Priestley worked in a wool office, writing poetry and short stories into handmade notebooks in his spare time. An important early influence was Richard Pendlebury, his English master. Priestley later observed that Bradford and its environs did more for his education than did Cambridge University, which he attended years later. In 1915, Priestley enlisted in the army. He was sent to France, invalided back to England after being wounded, and then sent back to France. Significantly, his experience of war does not figure explicitly in any fictional piece, with the single exception of a haunting short story entitled “The Town Major of Miraucourt” (1930). Priestley’s entire creative output may, however, have been an attempt to put war and its ravages

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into a long-range context, a notion that pervades his Postscripts broadcasts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during World War II. At the end of his army service, Priestley went to Cambridge, where he studied, between 1919 and 1922, literature, history, and political theory. His first book, Brief Diversions (1922), received good reviews but did not sell. Leaving Cambridge for London and the precarious life of a journalist, Priestley worked for J. C. Squire and the London Mercury, for the Daily News, and for the Bodley Head Press. Meanwhile, he published critical books on George Meredith, Thomas Love Peacock, and modern literature. His first novel, Adam in Moonshine, appeared in 1927. Shortly thereafter, Hugh Walpole offered to collaborate with Priestley on a novel called Farthing Hall in order to give the younger writer a much-needed publisher’s advance so that he could continue his work. In 1929, The Good Companions appeared, and Priestley was fully embarked on a long and distinguished career. Priestley was married three times; his first marriage, to Pat Tempest, came in 1919. A year after her death, in 1925, he married Mary Holland Wyndham Lewis, from whom he was divorced in 1952. The two marriages produced four daughters and a son. In 1953, he married the distinguished anthropologist Jacquetta Hawkes. During his adult life, Priestley resided in London, on the Isle of Wight, and in Alveston, just outside Stratford-upon-Avon. He traveled widely, frequently using his journeys as background for his novels and plays. During World War II, he and his wife ran a hostel for evacuated children; after the war he campaigned vigorously for nuclear disarmament. He served as a UNESCO delegate and on the board of the National Theatre. He refused a knighthood and a life-peerage but did, in 1977, accept membership in the Order of Merit. In 1973, he happily accepted conferment of the Freedom of the City from his native Bradford. Priestley did not retire from his writing work until well after he turned eighty. He died in 1984, one month shy of his ninetieth birthday. Analysis · In his novels J. B. Priestley largely portrays a Romantic view of life. His focus is primarily England and the English national character, and on those aspects of people that ennoble and spiritualize them. Yet, there is a no-nonsense view of life portrayed in his fiction; hard work, dedication to ideals, and willingness to risk all in a good cause are themes which figure prominently. At times, the darker aspects of humanity becloud this gruff but kindly Yorkshireman’s generally sunny attitudes. Ultimately, life in Priestley’s fictional universe is good, provided the individual is permitted to discover his potential. In politics, this attitude reduces to what Priestley has called “Liberal Socialism.” For Priestley, too much government is not good for the individual. Romanticism largely dictated characterization in Priestley’s novels, and his most valid psychological portraits are of individuals who are aware of themselves as enchanted and enchanting. These characters are usually portrayed as questers. It is Priestley’s symbolic characters, however, who are the most forcefully portrayed, occasionally as god-figures, occasionally as devil-figures, but mostly as organizers—as stage-managers, impresarios, factory owners, butlers. Priestley’s female characters fall generally into roles as ingenues or anima-figures. There are, however, noteworthy exceptions, specifically Freda Pinnel in Daylight on Saturday. It is primarily through the presentation of his organizers that Priestley’s chief plot device emerges: the common cause. A group of disparate characters is assembled and organized into a common endeavor; democratic action follows as a consequence.

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“Liberal democracy. Expensive and elaborate, but best in the end,” says a choric figure in Festival at Farbridge, echoing one of his author’s deepest convictions. A Romantic view of people in space and time also dictated the kind of novels that Priestley wrote. His fiction falls easily into three main categories. The first is the seriously conceived and carefully structured novel, in which symbolism and consistent imagery figure as aspects of craft. The best of this group are Angel Pavement, Bright Day, and It’s an Old Country. The second category can be termed the frolic or escapade. This group includes The Good Companions, Festival at Farbridge, and the delightful Sir Michael and Sir George. The third category is the thriller or entertainment, which includes such science-fiction works as The Doomsday Men and Saturn over the Water as well as the detective story Salt Is Leaving. Priestley’s favorite novel, and his longest, The Image Men, published in two volumes in 1968 and as one in 1969, incorporates these three categories within a controlled and incisive satirical mode. In many of his works, but more so in his plays than in his fiction, Priestley dramatized a theory concerning the nature of time and experience which derived from his understanding of John William Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934) and P. D. Ouspensky’s A New Model of the Universe (1931). Briefly stated, this time theory, most explicit in The Magicians, a gothic tale which presents Priestley’s characterizations of the Wandering Jew, and Jenny Villiers, originally written as a play for the Bristol Old Vic, proposes a means of transcendence. Priestley believed that Dunne’s Serialism—“we observe something, and we are conscious of our observation . . . and we are conscious of the observation of the observation, and so forth”—permitted him to deal with character “creatively.” For the ordinary individual, to “Observer One,” the fourth dimension appears as time. The self within dreams becomes “Observer Two,” to whom the fifth dimension appears as time. Unlike the three-dimensional outlook of Observer One, Observer Two’s four-dimensional outlook enables him to receive images from coexisting past and future times. From Ouspensky, Priestley refined the notion that time, like space, has three dimensions; these three dimensions, however, can be regarded as a continuation of the dimensions of space. Wavelike and spiral, time provides for eternal recurrence, but a recurrence not to be confused with Friedrich Nietzsche’s “eternal retour,” with reincarnation, or with the Bergsonian durée. Ouspensky provided Priestley with the possibility of re-creation—that is, of intervention in space and time through an inner development of self. In other words, self-conscious awareness of self in past time can re-create the past in the present; sympathetic re-creation of self and others in what Priestley terms “time alive” can give new meaning to the present and shape the future. For Priestley, the seer—whether he be a painter or a musician, or the organizer of a festival or of a traveling group of entertainers, or even a butler in a country house—by looking creatively into the past, ameliorates the present and shapes a brighter future. Consequently, the organizer is Priestley’s most forceful and symbolic character, and the thematic purpose of his novels depends upon an understanding of this character’s motives. The Good Companions · Priestley’s first successful novel, The Good Companions, presents a cozy fairy tale against an essentially realistic background, the English music halls of the 1920’s. A determined spinster, Elizabeth Trant, organizes a down-and-out group of entertainers who have called themselves the Dinky Doos into a successful group renamed the Good Companions. The adventures of these troupers on the road and on the boards provide the novel with its zest and comedy.

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Angel Pavement · Angel Pavement is in some ways a departure from this earlier work inasmuch as its tone appears dark and ominous. In Angel Pavement, the organizer is not a cheerful woman of thirty-seven giving herself a holiday on the roads as an impresario, but a balding, middle-aged adventurer named Golspie. “A thick figure of a man but now slow and heavy,” Golspie enters the London firm of Twigg and Dersingham, dealers in wood veneers, and breathes new life into the business in a period of economic depression. With his only commitment being his daughter Lena, Golspie seems at first the firm’s savior, for he provides a supply of veneer from the Baltic at half the domestic price. Perhaps because he and his daughter are rejected by the more polite segments of London society, Golspie feels it unnecessary to play fair with his employers. Eventually, he ruins Twigg and Dersingham, putting the employees out of work. At the novel’s end, he and Lena leave London for South America and new adventure. What most distinguishes Angel Pavement is its portrayal of the city, London, in the midst of the Depression, and of those who people it. Lilian Matfield, the head secretary, is fascinated by Golspie but refuses to accept the life of adventure he offers her, and Henry Smeeth, the bookkeeper, accepts a raise in salary, only to discover that once Golspie has abandoned Twigg and Dersingham, the company is bankrupt and he is out of work. The streets, the offices, the pubs, the tobacco stands, the amusements, all combine to present a view of human enervation and despair. A confidence man but not exactly a charlatan, Golspie locks the novel to a seemingly pessimistic view. Despite the enervation and apathy portrayed, Golspie offers freedom. Through his sinister organizer, Priestley portrays the life of romance that lies beneath the ordinary. What Angel Pavement finally achieves is a startling view of the modern metropolis as a prison from which only the romantic can escape. Bright Day · One of his own favorite works, Priestley’s Bright Day has been justly admired by critics and readers alike. Its uniqueness lies not so much in its dexterous use of such novelistic techniques as the time-shift and memory digression as in the way it looks behind and beyond its immediate focus into that sense of race and identity all people share. Although the novel deals with time, Priestley here shows a greater indebtedness to Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust than he does to Ouspensky and Dunne. Music, specifically a Franz Schubert trio, returns a middle-aged screenwriter, Gregory Dawson, the narrator, who has taken refuge from his unhappy life in a genteel hotel in Cornwall, to a memory of youth and joy. An old couple reminds him of the boy of eighteen he was when he fell in love with a family called Alington in Bruddersford, a wool-producing northern town. The Alingtons, charming and gracious, had sentimentally attached the young Gregory to themselves and had introduced the would-be writer to their world, which he had seen as one of grace and beauty. Ironically, the old couple who trigger the middle-aged Dawson’s memories are in fact the Eleanor and Malcolm Nixey who had opportunistically intruded on his youthful idyll and brought an end to the prosperous wool business on which the Alingtons and their gracious world depended, and to Gregory’s idealism as well. In Bright Day, Priestley, concerned with a rite of passage, presents Gregory’s initiation into a world of greed and suspicion, of appearance and falsehood; his is in fact an initiation into the modern world, and the novel symbolically spans the period of the two world wars. In the course of reconstructing the past, Gregory comes to terms with himself in the present, and it is his recognition of self in time that makes a

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commitment to the future possible for him. This liberation is confirmed by the stunning revelation made to him by Laura Bradshaw, who had also known the Alingtons, that Joan Alington in a jealous rage had pushed her sister Eva to her death from a cliff. The cancer of destruction had been in the Alingtons themselves; the Nixeys had merely served as catalysts. Although Gregory Dawson is a quester for truth through self-knowledge, he is much more than a symbolic character. His psychological validity makes his growth in the course of the novel persuasive and compelling. The rediscovery of his romantic self in the present time of the novel is the rediscovery of a moment of beauty that had laid dormant in the rich soil of his memory. Many of Priestley’s novels largely describe romance; Bright Day re-creates its essence, as does Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945, 1959), with which it has much in common. Lost Empires · Published in 1965 and representative of the novels Priestley produced in the later stages of his career, Lost Empires is in some ways a return to the world of The Good Companions, employing as it does the music hall as background. Unlike The Good Companions, however, whose chief interest was the high jinks of the troupers on the road, the theater serves here as a metaphor for the theme of appearance and reality and allows Priestley to allegorize loosely the politics of a world destined for war. The protagonist, Dick Herncastle, one of Priestley’s romantic questers here presented as an artist, is contrasted to his uncle, Nick Ollanton, the organizer, who is portrayed as a magician or mesmerizer. Ollanton and his “turn” allegorize the political activist and his propaganda techniques as he bends people to his will, much as does Thomas Mann’s Cipolla in “Mario and the Magician.” A time-perspective on Ollanton’s influence on young Dick, who works as his assistant, is presented by means of a deftly presented prologue and epilogue, which encompass the action proper of the novel, set in the period of World War I. The main action ends with Dick succumbing to the illusion of a better world after the end of the war, and with Ollanton himself leaving the Old World for the United States, revealing his bag of tricks as a private escape from the “bloody mincing machine” of global war. There, he will manufacture machine-gun sights for warplanes. The novel proper, however, ends with the account in the prologue of Dick’s return from the war and his successful career as a watercolorist, an illusionist of another sort. The charm of Lost Empires goes well beyond its symbolic dimension; it lies chiefly in the presentations of the performers and the turns they perform on the boards. The juggler Ricardo, the comedian Beamish, the ballad singer Lily Farrish, and many others add to the plot and charm of the novel. That they are logically placed within the melodramatic and symbolic structure of the novel is simply another testimony to the skill of their author. A. A. DeVitis Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Town Major of Miraucourt, 1930; Going Up: Stories and Sketches, 1950; The Other Place and Other Stories of the Same Sort, 1953; The Carfitt Crisis and Two Other Stories, 1975. PLAYS: The Good Companions, pr. 1931 (adaptation of his novel; with Edward Knoblock); Dangerous Corner, pr., pb. 1932; The Roundabout, pr. 1932; Laburnum Grove, pr. 1933; Eden End, pr., pb. 1934; Cornelius, pr., pb. 1935; Duet in Floodlight, pr., pb.

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1935; Bees on the Boat Deck, pr., pb. 1936; Spring Tide, pr., pb. 1936 (with George Billam); People at Sea, pr., pb. 1937; Time and the Conways, pr., pb. 1937; I Have Been Here Before, pr., pb. 1937; Music at Night, pr. 1938; Mystery at Greenfingers, pr., pb. 1938; When We Are Married, pr., pb. 1938; Johnson over Jordan, pr., pb. 1939; The Long Mirror, pr., pb. 1940; Goodnight, Children, pr., pb. 1942; They Came to a City, pr. 1943, pb. 1944; Desert Highway, pr., pb. 1944; The Golden Fleece, pr. 1944; How Are They at Home?, pr., pb. 1944; An Inspector Calls, pr. 1946; Ever Since Paradise, pr. 1946; The Linden Tree, pr. 1947; The Rose and Crown, pb. 1947 (one act); The High Toby, pb. 1948 (for puppet theater); Home Is Tomorrow, pr. 1948; The Plays of J. B. Priestley, pb. 1948-1950 (3 volumes); Summer Day’s Dream, pr. 1949; Bright Shadow, pr., pb. 1950; Seven Plays of J. B. Priestley, pb. 1950; Dragon’s Mouth, pr., pb. 1952 (with Jacquetta Hawkes); Treasure on Pelican, pr. 1952; Mother’s Day, pb. 1953 (one act); Private Rooms, pb. 1953 (one act); Try It Again, pb. 1953 (one act); A Glass of Bitter, pb. 1954 (one act); The White Countess, pr. 1954 (with Hawkes); The Scandalous Affair of Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon, pr., pb. 1955; These Our Actors, pr. 1956; The Glass Cage, pr. 1957; The Pavilion of Masks, pr. 1963; A Severed Head, pr. 1963 (with Iris Murdoch; adaptation of Murdoch’s novel). SCREENPLAY: Last Holiday, 1950. POETRY: The Chapman of Rhymes, 1918. NONFICTION: Brief Diversions: Being Tales, Travesties, and Epigrams, 1922; Papers from Lilliput, 1922; I for One, 1923; Figures in Modern Literature, 1924; Fools and Philosophers: A Gallery of Comic Figures from English Literature, 1925 (pb. in U.S. as The English Comic Characters); George Meredith, 1926; Talking: An Essay, 1926; The English Novel, 1927, 1935, 1974; Open House: A Book of Essays, 1927; Thomas Love Peacock, 1927; Too Many People and Other Reflections, 1928; Apes and Angels: A Book of Essays, 1928; The Balconinny and Other Essays, 1929 (pb. in U.S. as The Balconinny, 1931); English Humour, 1929, 1976; The Lost Generation: An Armistice Day Article, 1932; Self-Selected Essays, 1932; Albert Goes Through, 1933; English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933, 1934; Four-in-Hand, 1934; Midnight on the Desert: A Chapter of Autobiography, 1937 (pb. in U.S. as Midnight on the Desert: Being an Excursion into Autobiography During a Winter in America, 1935-1936, 1937); Rain upon Godshill: A Further Chapter of Autobiography, 1939; Britain Speaks, 1940; Postscripts, 1940 (radio talks); Out of the People, 1941; Britain at War, 1942; British Women Go to War, 1943; The Man-Power Story, 1943; Here Are Your Answers, 1944; The New Citizen, 1944; Letter to a Returning Serviceman, 1945; Russian Journey, 1946; The Secret Dream: An Essay on Britain, America, and Russia, 1946; The Arts Under Socialism: Being a Lecture Given to the Fabian Society, with a Postscript on What Government Should Do for the Arts Here and Now, 1947; Theatre Outlook, 1947; Delight, 1949; Journey down a Rainbow, 1955 (with Jacquetta Hawkes); All About Ourselves and Other Essays, 1956; The Writer in a Changing Society, 1956; The Art of the Dramatist: A Lecture Together with Appendices and Discursive Notes, 1957; The Bodley Head Leacock, 1957; Thoughts in the Wilderness, 1957; Topside: Or, The Future of England, a Dialogue, 1958; The Story of Theatre, 1959; Literature and Western Man, 1960; William Hazlitt, 1960; Charles Dickens: A Pictorial Biography, 1962; Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections, 1962; The English Comic Characters, 1963; Man and Time, 1964; The Moments and Other Pieces, 1966; All England Listened: J. B. Priestley’s Wartime Broadcasts, 1968; Essays of Five Decades, 1968 (Susan Cooper, editor); Trumpets over the Sea: Being a Rambling and Egotistical Account of the London Symphony Orchestra’s Engagement at Daytona Beach, Florida, in July-August, 1967, 1968; The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, 1811-1820, 1969; Anton Chekhov, 1970; The Edwardians, 1970; Over the

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Long High Wall: Some Reflections and Speculations on Life, Death, and Time, 1972; Victoria’s Heyday, 1972; The English, 1973; Outcries and Asides, 1974; A Visit to New Zealand, Particular Pleasures: Being a Personal Record of Some Varied Arts and Many Different Artists, 1974; The Happy Dream: An Essay, 1976; Instead of the Trees, 1977 (autobiography). CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Snoggle, 1972. EDITED TEXTS: Essayist Past and Present: A Selection of English Essays, 1925; Tom Moore’s Diary: A Selection, 1925; The Book of Bodley Head Verse, 1926; The Female Spectator: Selections from Mrs. Eliza Heywood’s Periodical, 1744-1746, 1929; Our Nation’s Heritage, 1939; Scenes of London Life, from “Sketches by Boz” by Charles Dickens, 1947; The Best of Leacock, 1957; Four English Novels, 1960; Four English Biographies, 1961; Adventures in English Literature, 1963; An Everyman Anthology, 1966. Bibliography Atkins, John. J. B. Priestley: The Last of the Sages. London: John Calder, 1981. Cites Priestley as a major but neglected writer. A comprehensive look at his novels and plays as well as his career as a critic. Contains much valuable information. Braine, John. J. B. Priestley. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. Not a critical analysis of Priestley’s work, by Braine’s admission, but a look at a selection of his writings. Braine, a fellow Bradfordian, offers a knowledgeable view of Priestley. Brome, Vincent. J. B. Priestley. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988. The first biography of Priestley. Brome, a seasoned biographer and prolific author, renders a lively portrait, doing justice to Priestley’s many different careers as novelist, playwright, essayist, and public intellectual. Cook, Judith. Priestley. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. An excellent biography of Priestley. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Cooper, Susan. J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author. London: Redwood Press, 1970. A sympathetic account of Priestley written in an informal style. Cooper gives both criticism of his work and a look at the man himself: “warm hearted, generous.” DeVitis, A. A., and Albert E. Kalson. J. B. Priestley. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A good introduction to Priestley, which focuses on some eighty novels and plays, from the late 1920’s to the 1960’s. The authors note that Priestley’s work has an “unerring ability to deal incisively with the idiosyncrasies of the English national character.” Evans, Gareth Lloyd. J. B. Priestley: The Dramatist. London: Heinemann, 1964. Analyzes the three collected volumes of Priestley’s plays, which Evans has divided into “Time-plays,” “Comedies,” and “Sociological plays.” An authoritative study that is primarily concerned with the dominant themes in Priestley’s plays.

Barbara Pym Barbara Pym

Mary Crampton Born: Oswestry, England; June 2, 1913 Died: Oxford, England; January 11, 1980 Principal long fiction · Some Tame Gazelle, 1950; Excellent Women, 1952; Jane and Prudence, 1953; Less than Angels, 1955; A Glass of Blessings, 1958; No Fond Return of Love, 1961; Quartet in Autumn, 1977; The Sweet Dove Died, 1978; A Few Green Leaves, 1980; An Unsuitable Attachment, 1982; Crampton Hodnet, 1985; An Academic Question, 1986. Other literary forms · In 1984, Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym published a one-volume edition of Barbara Pym’s diaries and letters, entitled A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters. In 1987, Holt edited a miscellany, Civil to Strangers and Other Writings, which contained mostly fiction but some nonfiction. Achievements · Pym was a writer of distinctive qualities who, having suffered discouragement and neglect for fifteen years, was rediscovered toward the end of her life, to take her rightful place as a novelist of considerable originality and force. Often compared favorably with Jane Austen’s novels, Pym’s are essentially those of a private, solitary individual, employing precise social observation, understatement, and gentle irony in an oblique approach to such universal themes as the underlying loneliness and frustrations of life, culture as a force for corruption, love thwarted or satisfied, and the power of the ordinary to sustain and protect the men and women who shelter themselves under it. Also like Austen, Pym has no illusions about herself and very few about other people: “I like to think that what I write gives pleasure and makes my readers smile, even laugh. But my novels are by no means only comedies as I try to reflect life as I see it.” The story of Pym’s early achievements, her long enforced silence, and her remarkable rediscovery perhaps says more about the publishing world than about either her books or her readers. Between 1949 and 1961, while working as an editorial assistant at the International African Institute, Pym wrote a novel every two years. As each manuscript was finished, she sent it off to Jonathan Cape. Her first six novels established her style, were well received by reviewers, and enjoyed a following among library borrowers. Excellent Women, her most popular novel, sold a little more than six thousand copies. Then, in 1963, Pym put her seventh novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, in the mail. A short time later, it was returned: Times, she was told, had changed. The “swinging sixties” had no place for her gently ironic comedies about unconventional middleclass people leading outwardly uneventful lives. “Novels like An Unsuitable Attachment, despite their qualities, are getting increasingly difficult to sell,” wrote another publisher, while a third regretted that the novel was unsuitable for its list. Being a woman of determination with a certain modest confidence in herself, Pym went to work on an eighth novel, The Sweet Dove Died, and she sent it off to Cape; it too came back. She adopted a pseudonym—“Tom Crampton”—because “it had a 737

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swinging air to it,” but twenty publishers turned down the novel. Humiliated and frustrated, she began to feel not only that her new books were no good, but also that nothing she had ever written had been good. No Fond Return of Love was serialized by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Portway Reprints reissued five others; her books retained their popularity among library borrowers; and Robert Smith published an appreciation of her work in the October, 1971, issue of Ariel—but despite these signs of the continuing appeal of her work, Pym could not find a publisher, and by the mid-1970’s, her name appeared to have been forgotten. A renaissance in Pym’s fortunes came with startling suddenness in 1977, when, to celebrate three-quarters of a century of existence, The Times Literary Supplement invited a number of well-known writers to name the most over- and underrated novelists of the century. Both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil—for years staunch admirers of hers—selected Pym as having been too long neglected, the only living writer to be so distinguished in the poll. Larkin praised her “unique eye and ear for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life.” Cecil called her early books “the finest example of high comedy to have appeared in England” in the twentieth century. The publicity surrounding the article, not surprisingly, had positive effects on Pym’s reputation. Macmillan published her new novel, Quartet in Autumn, near the end of 1977; later it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Cape began to reissue her earlier books; Penguin and Granada planned a series of paperbacks; she was widely interviewed; finally, she appeared on “Desert Island Discs” as well as in a television film called “Tea with Miss Pym.” The Sweet Dove Died was published in 1978, followed by her last novel, the posthumously published A Few Green Leaves (1980). The manuscript of An Unsuitable Attachment was found among her papers after her death and published in 1982 with an introduction written by Philip Larkin. A book was prepared from her diaries and short stories. Pym’s novels are distinguished by an unobtrusive but perfectly controlled style, a concern with ordinary people and ordinary events, and a constant aim to be readable, to entertain in a world that is uniquely her own. They are also distinguished by a low-key but nevertheless cutting treatment of assumptions of masculine superiority and other sexist notions—all this well in advance of the women’s movement, and without the rhetoric which mars so much feminist fiction. Although hers is a closed world, what Robert Smith called “an enchanted world of small felicities and small mishaps,” it is also real and varied in theme and setting, with its own laws of human conduct and values, its peculiar humor and pathos. Middle-aged or elderly ladies, middle-aged or elderly gentlemen, civil servants, clergymen, anthropologists and other academics—these are the people about whom Pym develops her stories. The world in which Pym’s characters live, whether urban or provincial, is also a quiet world, evoked in such detail as to make the reader feel that the action could not possibly take place anywhere else. Taken together, her novels constitute that rare achievement: an independent fictional world, rooted in quotidian reality yet very much the creation of Barbara Pym. Central characters from one novel appear in passing or are briefly mentioned in another; delightful minor characters turn up in unexpected places. This pleasure of cross-references is characteristic of Pym’s art, in which formal dexterity and a marvelous sense of humor harmonize with a modest but unembarrassed moral vision. “I prefer to write about the kind of things I have experienced,” Pym said, “and to put into my novels the kind of details that amuse me in the hope that others will share in this.”

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Biography · Mary Crampton (Barbara Pym) was born on June 2, 1913, in Oswestry, Shropshire, a small English town on the border of Wales. Like many of her characters, she led a quiet but enjoyable life among middle-class people with an Anglican background. Her father, Frederick Crampton Pym, was a solicitor and sang in the choir; her mother, Irena (Thomas), was of half Welsh descent and played the organ. Pym was given a good education (Huyton College, a boarding school near Liverpool; and St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, from which she received a B.A., 1934, in English language and literature); saw some wartime service (Postal and Telegraph Censorship in Bristol, 1939, and the Women’s Royal Naval Service in England and Italy, 1943-1946); and lived in various sections of London: Pimlico, Barnes, and Kilburn. She wrote down everything she saw in a series of little notebooks, and later “bottled it all up and reduced it, like making chutney.” In 1948, Pym began working at the International African Institute, first as a research assistant and later as an assistant editor of the journal Africa. She was given the job of preparing the research for publication, and regretted that more of the anthropologists did not turn their talents to the writing of fiction. In their work, she found many of the qualities that make a novelist: “accurate observation, detachment, even sympathy.” Needed was a little more imagination, as well as “the leavening of irony and humour.” Several of her novels draw on her years at the Institute to study the behavior patterns and rituals of a group of anthropologists. In Less than Angels, for example, she portrays an anthropologist and his female co-workers, gently mocking the high seriousness with which they pursue their research among primitive African tribes and the shameless jargon in which they converse. No doubt the narrator is speaking for Pym herself when she concludes: “And how much more comfortable it sometimes was to observe [life] from a distance, to look down from an upper window, as it were, as the anthropologists did.” Although her first novel did not appear until 1950, Pym began writing when she was a schoolgirl, and even completed a novel when she was sixteen. After leaving Oxford, she started to write seriously and finished two more novels, but did not succeed in getting them published. By then, however, her literary tastes were well set. Above all, she was addicted to novels. Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen were her favorite novelists, and she knew their works intimately; but she read all the fiction she could, and listed among her favorites Ivy Compton-Burnett, Anthony Powell, and Iris Murdoch. She was less tolerant of contemporary novels, and viewed popular and sentimental fiction with the critical eye of the satirist. Nowhere in her own fiction does the reader find the sentimental excesses and sensational unrealities of current popular fiction. In 1971, Pym had a serious operation, and in 1974, she retired to live with her sister near Oxford. She died on January 11, 1980, at the age of sixty-six. Analysis · Like most novelists, Barbara Pym was interested above all in human nature, and for most of her life she trained both eye and ear upon the exploration of that subject in its many fascinating dimensions. Her first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle, sets the tone and subject for what is to come as she casts her specialist’s eye on British lower-class and lower-middle-class life and focuses on the quiet domestic lives of a few people. At the center are two unmarried women who have decided that they will be happier living alone together. An all-pervasive influence of the Anglican church, numerous references to anthropology and English literature, the weakness of men, realism, and a sometimes devastatingly comic tone are among the many

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distinctive features of not only this early novel but the later ones as well. Much the same judgment may be made for two posthumously published novels: Crampton Hodnet, which she had written in the 1930’s but never intended to publish, and An Academic Question, for which she had written two drafts (one in first person, another in third person) but abandoned to write Quartet in Autumn. In 1986, Hazel Holt published an amalgamation of the two drafts. In spite of their thin plots and shallow characterization, both novels contain Pym’s characteristically sharp observations and lively dialogue among the minor characters, as well as her concern with the elderly. Considered together, in all twelve of her novels Pym communicates her vision in an engaging, entertaining, and readable way. Her wit, her sense of style, her devotion to language and its revelation of character, and the richness of her invention all compel respect and critical attention. “In all of her writing,” Philip Larkin has written of Pym, “I find a continual perceptive attention to detail which is a joy, and a steady background of rueful yet courageous acceptance of things.” In this statement, Larkin points to perhaps the single most important technique—and theme—in Pym’s work. Excellent Women, A Glass of Blessings, and Quartet in Autumn develop their effects, as indeed do all of Pym’s twelve novels, by exploiting the comedy of contemporary manners. Like her anthropologists, whom she quietly mocks for their esoteric detachment, Pym scrupulously notes and records the frustrations, unfulfilled desires, boredom, and loneliness of “ordinary people, people who have no claim to fame whatsoever.” The usual pattern for the heroine is either retrenchment into her own world or, as a result of interaction with others, self-realization. By representing intensively the small world most individuals inhabit, it is Pym’s method to suggest the world as a whole as well. Usually Pym appoints a heroine to comment on the intimate details of social behavior. In Excellent Women, the assignment falls to Mildred Lathbury, who, as an observer of life, expects “very little—nothing, almost.” Typical of Pym’s “excellent women,” Mildred is preoccupied with order, stability, and routine, but her special interest centers on the lives and crises of those around her, including her new neighbors, Rockingham and Helena Napier; the vicar, Julian Malory; and the anthropologist, Everard Bone. Faced with Mildred’s honesty, diffidence, and unpretentiousness, the crises are resolved happily. In Pym’s fifth novel, A Glass of Blessings, the heroine is Wilmet Forsyth, a young and leisured woman bored with her excessively sober civil-servant husband. Her near romances with a priest, her best friend’s husband, and Piers Longridge (in whose friend Keith she discovers a rival) are only some of the pairings in this intricate drama of romantic errors. When the possibility of a love affair fails to materialize, Wilmet finds a different kind of consolation in religion. Finally, Pym’s antiheroic view of life is particularly obvious in her most somber work, Quartet in Autumn, the first of her novels to be published after fifteen years of silence. Whereas her earlier work was a small protest against everyday life, Quartet in Autumn offered a formal protest against the conditions both of life itself and of certain sad civilities. The comedy is cold and the outlook is austere in this story of four people in late middle age who suffer from the same problem: loneliness. In its manipulation of the narrative among Edwin, Norman, Letty, and Marcia, the novel also represents Pym’s greatest technical achievement. Excellent Women · Excellent Women, described by one critic as the most “felicitous” of all of Pym’s novels, explores the complications of being a spinster (and a religious

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one, at that) in the England of the 1950’s. The setting is a run-down part of London near Victoria Station, but the very high Anglican Church of St. Mary’s also provides the background for some of the events described. In the quiet comfort of this world, where everything is within walking distance and a new face is an occasion for speculation, the pleasantness and security of everyday life dominate. Only small crises—such as an argument between Winifred and Alegra over how to decorate the church altar—form the counterpoint to comfort. As the narrator says, “life was like that for most of us—the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.” Mildred Lathbury, the narrator, is representative of one of Pym’s favorite character types: the “excellent woman.” She lives very much as she did growing up in a country rectory, working part-time for the aid of impoverished gentlewomen and devoting herself to the work of the parish. As one who tends to get involved in other people’s lives, she knows herself, she says, “capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life—birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fête spoilt by bad weather.” In all of Pym’s novels, says Philip Larkin, “a small incident serves to set off a chain of modest happenings among interrelated groups of characters.” In this instance, it is the entry into Mildred’s life of Rockingham Napier. A flag lieutenant to an admiral, Rockingham has just returned from Italy, where he served his country by being charming to dull Wren officers. His wife Helena, an anthropologist, does not welcome his return. Scornful of his easy charm and lack of serious purpose, she has become infatuated with another anthropologist, Everard Bone, her co-worker in Africa. As Helena pursues, however, Everard flees. The reader depends upon Mildred for ironic commentary. Helena leaves her husband, who then departs for a cottage in the country. Excellent woman that she is, Mildred is invited by Rockingham to send him the Napier furniture, by Helena to get it back, by both to effect their reconciliation, and by Everard to read proof and make the index for his forthcoming book. Because the vicar, Julian Malory, needs to be protected from designing women and Everard needs her help with the book, it seems to Mildred that she may look forward to a “full life.” Then she remembers Rockingham’s smile and reads from Christina Rossetti: “Better by far you should forget and smile,/ Than that you should remember and be sad.” “It was easy enough to read those lines and be glad at his smiling,” she acknowledges, “but harder to tell myself there would never be any question of anything else.” Still, Everard’s affection is genuine, if undemonstrative—and not unmixed with a pragmatic desire to find a suitable typist, indexer, and all-around “helpmate”—and the reader is happy to learn, in a subsequent novel, that Mildred and Everard do indeed go on to wed. A Glass of Blessings · Again set in the 1950’s, town and country are contrasted in A Glass of Blessings, which Larkin regards as the “subtlest” of Pym’s books. The novel opens in St. Luke’s Church on the feast of its patron, the “beloved physician,” as St. Paul called him. Celebrating the feast and her thirty-third birthday, Wilmet Forsyth, the narrator and heroine, is the well-to-do but aimless wife (subject to “useless little longings”) of a typical Pym husband—hopelessly imperceptive, though well intentioned and reliable. Like Jane Austen’s Emma, whom Pym has in mind throughout the novel, Wilmet is unused and spoiled. A beautiful woman, always exquisitely dressed, Wilmet is childless, idle, and snobbish. She is also utterly unknown to herself,

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unable to imagine another life, and afraid to risk herself, even on the London buses, certain that any disturbance will be disillusioning. Bored, without training for a career, despising routine, she plans “to take more part in the life of St. Luke’s, to try to befriend Piers Longridge and perhaps even go to his classes.” Piers Longridge is a sour, moody homosexual, a fact Wilmet never quite seems to grasp until well into the novel. He has taken a seemingly useless degree and now teaches Portuguese in adult education classes. Believing that she might relieve his unhappiness, she forces herself on him, hoping for the grand passion of her life, another fact that she never really admits. Finally, in a scene of high comedy and bitter pain, exasperated by Wilmet’s attentions and her naïveté, Piers confronts her with his secret lover, Keith, a male model, and accuses Wilmet of being incapable of affection. It is the first time anyone has told her anything near the truth, and in response, she says to Mary Beamish, “sometimes you discover that you aren’t as nice as you thought you were—that you’re in fact rather a horrid person, and that’s humiliating somehow.” When she witnesses the courtship and marriage of Mary Beamish, an orphan and ex-Anglican nun, and Father Marius Lovejoy Ransome, Wilmet begins to perceive the possibilities of being useful in the parish and even of passion. After she finds out that Rodney has had an innocent flirtation with his secretary, Wilmet sees him differently, thinking, “I had always regarded Rodney as the kind of man who would never look at another woman. The fact that he could—and indeed had done so—ought to teach me something about myself, even if I was not quite sure what it was.” The truth of it is that Wilmet has failed to recognize her society, including the parish of St. Luke’s, for what it is, an erotic conclave of beauty and variety, both dangerous and enlivening. It is like George Herbert’s “glass of blessings,” full of the “world’s riches”—“beautie . . . wisdome, honour, pleasure.” Quartet in Autumn · In her first six novels, Pym treats her characters with warm compassion and gentle irony. With Quartet in Autumn, however, her tone becomes harsher, more bitter, as she examines with bleak detachment the lonely rejection of the retired. Letty Crowe, another of Pym’s excellent women, is sixty-five and faces retirement from the unspecified office job she has shared for many years with her colleagues, Marcia, Norman, and Edwin. For Letty, life in a rooming house is “a little sterile, perhaps even deprived.” Retirement gives her a feeling of nothingness, as if she had never existed. During sleepless nights, her life unrolls before her, like that of a person drowning: forty years wasted looking for love. Images of dead leaves drifting to the pavement in autumn and being swept away recur throughout the novel. Indeed, Letty tries not to dwell on the image of herself lying among the autumnal leaves “to prepare for death when life became too much to be endured.” Her former colleagues are of no help to Letty. Norman is a scrawny, sardonic bachelor. Edwin is a widower preoccupied with “the soothing rhythms of the church’s year.” Marcia is gravely ill and at least slightly mad—collecting tins of food she never opens and milk bottles which she hoards in a shed. The only pleasures she knows are visits to the clinic for check-ups and bus trips to look at the mansion of her adored surgeon. Incapable of thought, she is far more pathetic than Letty. Unlike her colleagues, Letty does try to act bravely, reading books on sociology, participating in church activities, still caring for her hair and her dress. “She told herself, dutifully assuming the suggested attitude toward retirement, that life was still full of possibilities.” At the close of the novel, she is, like Mildred and Wilmet, where she was at the beginning. Yet, at the slightest change in the routine of her eventless

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days, she courageously assures herself, “at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.” In Excellent Women, A Glass of Blessings, and Quartet in Autumn, Pym relies neither on violence nor on the bizarre. Nothing outwardly momentous happens, but the frustrations of a half dozen or more characters emerge clearly and poignantly. Some critics have felt that the narrowness of her life inevitably imposed limitations on her work. Beneath the calm surface of her novels, however, the events of the day do make an imprint—to a degree appropriate to the lives of ordinary middle-class people. Each novel is a miniature work of art, distinguished by an air of assurance, an easy but firm control of the material, and the economy of means to achieve it. Dale Salwak Other major works NONFICTION: A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, 1984. MISCELLANEOUS: Civil to Strangers and Other Writings, 1987. Bibliography Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. Part 1 discusses Pym’s life and work; part 2 analyzes her novels; part 3 examines different critical approaches to her work and provides a bibliographical essay; part 4 provides a comprehensive primary and secondary bibliography. An extremely useful volume for both beginning students and advanced scholars. Benet, Diana. Something to Love: Barbara Pym’s Novels. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Benet’s fresh and insightful study examines Pym as “a chronicler of universal problems” whose focus—the many guises of love—moves, shapes, or disfigures all of her major characters. Includes an index. Burkhart, Charles. The Pleasure of Miss Pym. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. A very readable discussion of Pym’s life and autobiographical writings, as well as her fiction through An Academic Question. Focuses on her worldview, the unique nature of her comedy, her religion, her place within the history of the novel, and her insights into male-female relationships. Includes photographs and an index. Cotsell, Michael. Barbara Pym. New York: Macmillan, 1989. A cogent examination of all Pym’s novels, paying particular attention to her characters’ thoughts and feelings. Cotsell judges the novels to be “unabashedly romantic” and also considers Pym’s sense of language, her unpublished writings, and her creative process. Includes an index. Liddell, Robert. A Mind at Ease: Barbara Pym and Her Novels. London: Peter Owen, 1989. In this invaluable study, Liddell draws upon his fifty years of friendship with Pym to write a critical survey through Crampton Hodnet. Considers the attention she gave to her characters’ domestic and emotional lives, examines the reasons for her revival in popularity, and guides the reader through her novels, explaining which ones are or are not successful and why. Also corrects errors by critics and dilutes the common misconception that Pym is a modern-day Jane Austen. Long, Robert Emmet. Barbara Pym. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1986. A helpful treatment of Pym’s first eleven novels, paying particular attention to her recurring themes and character types, her modes of social comedy and satire, and her pervasive concern with “unrealized” love and solitude. Finds that Jane Austen’s dynamic English provincial world has reached a point of breakdown in Pym. Includes a chronology, notes, and an index.

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Nardin, Jane. Barbara Pym. Boston: Twayne, 1985. An excellent introductory study of Pym’s life and career, noting the origins and development of her themes, character types, and style. Contains a chronology, notes, a bibliography (listing primary and secondary sources), and an index. Rossen, Janice, ed. Independent Women: The Function of Gender in the Novels of Barbara Pym. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. This collection of ten original essays seeks to test Pym’s reputation by considering her craftsmanship, the literary influences on her work, and her special use of language. Includes biographical, historical, and feminist approaches to explore her unique creative process as it relates to events in her life. Notes and an index are provided. ____________. The World of Barbara Pym. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Focuses on twentieth century England as Pym saw, lived, satirized, and enjoyed it. Defines her significance within the framework of the modern British novel, traces her artistic development, explores interrelationships between her life and her fiction, and addresses broader themes regarding British culture in her work, such as spinsterhood, anthropology, English literature, the Anglican Church, and Oxford University. Notes and an index are provided. Salwak, Dale, ed. The Life and Work of Barbara Pym. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Nineteen essays consider Pym’s life and her novels, as well as her human and artistic achievements, from a variety of fresh perspectives. Includes notes and an index. Snow, Lotus. One Little Room an Everywhere: Barbara Pym’s Novels. Edited by Constance Hunting. Orono, Maine: Puckerbrush Press, 1987. In seven well-researched, clearly written chapters, Snow discusses Pym’s interest in ordinary people and their mundane lives, her selection of character names, and her presentation of men and married women. Includes notes. Weld, Annette. Barbara Pym and the Novel of Manners. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Chapters on manners and comedy, poems, stories and radio scripts, the early novels, and her major fiction. Includes notes and bibliography. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. A fine narrative and analytical biography. See also the introduction: “Creativity and the Life Cycle.” Includes notes and bibliography.

Ann Radcliffe Ann Radcliffe

Born: London, England; July 9, 1764 Died: London, England; February 7, 1823 Principal long fiction · The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 1789; A Sicilian Romance, 1790; The Romance of the Forest, 1791; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794; The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents, 1797; Gaston de Blondeville, 1826. Other literary forms · In addition to her novels, Ann Radcliffe published A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795). It recounts a continental journey made with her husband and includes copious observations of other tours to the English Lake District. The work became immediately popular, prompting a second edition that same year retitled The Journeys of Mrs. Radcliffe. Following a common practice of romance writers, Radcliffe interspersed the lengthy prose passages of her novels with her own verses or with those from famous poets. An anonymous compiler took the liberty of collecting and publishing her verses in an unauthorized edition entitled The Poems of Ann Radcliffe (1816). This slim volume was reissued in 1834 and 1845. Radcliffe’s interest in versifying was increasingly evident when her husband, in arranging for the posthumous publication of Gaston de Blondeville, included with it a long metrical romance, St. Alban’s Abbey (1826). Radcliffe also wrote an essay, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” which was published in The New Monthly Magazine (1826). The record of her literary achievement still remains available, as all of her novels and the poems are in print. Achievements · Mrs. Radcliffe’s fame as a novelist today in no way compares to the popularity she enjoyed in the 1790’s. With the publication of her third novel, The Romance of the Forest, this relatively unknown woman established herself as the best-selling writer of the period, receiving rave reviews from the critics and increasing demand for her works from circulating libraries. Radcliffe’s five gothic romances, published between 1789 and 1797, owed a portion of their motivation to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) and two earlier gothic writers, Sophia Lee and Clara Reeve. The gothic tale reached its full development with Radcliffe’s ability to manipulate the emotions of love and fear in such a manner as to provoke terror in her characters and readers alike. Though managing an effective use of the little understood complexities of the imagination, she offered her readers stereotyped plots, characters, and settings. Her disguises of foreign characters and lands were as thin as the supernatural illusions which often seemed anticlimactic in their emotional appeal. These weaknesses did not deter Radcliffe’s public, who remained fascinated by her distinctive brand of romanticism, which combined the gloomy darkening vale of the more somber poets of the graveyard school, the extremes of imaginative sensibility (as in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, 1771), and the medieval extravagance of the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson, as well as the pseudoarchaic fabrications of Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems (1777). Radcliffe nurtured this cult of melancholy, primitivism, sentimentalism, exoticism, 745

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and medievalism in her novels, becoming the epitome of the gothic genre to her contemporaries. The Mysteries of Udolpho, her best-known work, was satirized by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818) as representative of the entire mode. Her later importance was seen in a number of major Romantic writers who read her romances in their childhood. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi (1810), an extravagant romance, was a youthful answer to the genre. Lord Byron’s Manfred (1817) appears as a gothic villain committing spiritual murder in a landscape of “sublime solitudes.” Matthew G. Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley clearly benefited from Radcliffe’s strengths as a novelist of suspense, mystery, and the picturesque. In America, Washington Irving’s, Edgar Allan Poe’s, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales of terror, along with Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntley (1799), were suggested by Radcliffe’s work. As the most popular and perhaps most important novelist between the eighteenth century masters and Austen and Sir Walter Scott, Radcliffe continues to claim the attention of academicians. Psychological, feminist, folklorist, and the more traditional thematic studies have proved the strengths of her art. In 1980, Devendra P. Varma (The Gothic Flame, 1957) began serving as advisory editor for the Arno Press collection, Gothic Studies and Dissertations, which has published at least thirty-four texts dealing with Radcliffe’s literary output; of those, fifteen discuss Radcliffe’s novels at length. It is clear that there is at present a remarkable revival of interest in the gothic and in Radcliffe’s work. Biography · Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, née Ward, was born on July 9, 1764, in Holborn, a borough of central London, the only child of William Ward and Ann Oates Ward. Her father was a successful haberdasher who provided the family with a comfortable life, allowing Radcliffe access to a well-stocked library and the time to read the works of every important English author, as well as numerous popular romances. This quiet, sheltered existence was enlivened by the visits of her wealthy and learned uncle, Thomas Bentley, who was the partner of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter. Bentley’s London home was a center for the literati; there, among others, the pretty but shy girl met Mrs. Hester L. Thrale Piozzi, the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson; Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, “Queen of the Blue-Stocking Club”; and “Athenian” Stuart. In 1772, Radcliffe joined her parents at Bath, where her father had opened a shop for the firm of Wedgwood and Bentley. She remained sequestered in this resort until her marriage to the young Oxford graduate, William Radcliffe, in 1788. William Radcliffe had first decided to become a law student at one of the Inns of Court but abandoned this for a career in journalism. The couple moved to London soon thereafter, where William subsequently became proprietor and editor of the English Chronicle. The marriage was happy but childless, and the couple’s circle of friends were primarily literary, which added encouragement to William Radcliffe’s argument that his wife should begin to write. With her husband away on editorial business, Radcliffe spent the evenings writing without interruption. Her first book, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, was unremarkable, but her next two novels established her reputation as a master of suspense and the supernatural. A Sicilian Romance and The Romance of the Forest attracted the public’s voracious appetite for romances. Both works were translated into French and Italian, and numerous editions were published, as well as a dramatization of The Romance of the Forest, performed in 1794. Radcliffe’s success culminated in the appearance of The Mysteries of Udolpho; her decision to rely less on external action and more on psycho-

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logical conflict produced ecstatic reviews. The excitement created by the book threatened the relative solitude of the Radcliffes, but the publisher’s unusually high offer of five hundred pounds freed them to travel extensively on the Continent. In the summer of 1794, the Radcliffes journeyed through Holland and along the Rhine to the Swiss frontier. On returning to England, they proceeded north to the Lake District. While traveling, Radcliffe took complete notes concerning the picturesque landscape and included detailed political and economic accounts of the Low Countries and the Rhineland. These latter observations were probably contributed by her husband, though both Radcliffes found the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars appalling. In 1795, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany appeared. Radcliffe’s interest in the human misery of these regions and the legends and superstitions of the great fortresses and Catholic churches of the Rhineland suggested her next work, The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents. As a romance of the Inquisition, it explored character motivation in great detail, while action became a method of dramatizing personalities and not a simple vehicle for movement from one adventure to another. The Italian, though not as popular as The Mysteries of Udolpho, was translated immediately into French and even badly dramatized at the Haymarket on August 15, 1797. At the age of thirty-three, Radcliffe was at the height of her popularity; though she had never decided on writing as a potential source of income, her means by this time had become quite ample. With the deaths of her parents between 1798 and 1799, she found herself independently wealthy. Whether it was because of her secure financial condition or her displeasure with the cheap imitations of her novels, Radcliffe withdrew from the public domain and refrained from publishing any more works in her lifetime. Innumerable reports surfaced that she was suffering from a terminal illness, that the terrors of which she had written in her novels had driven her mad, or that she had mysteriously died. These reports were without substance; in fact, she wrote another novel, a metrical romance, and an extensive diary. After her death, Radcliffe’s husband found among her papers a novel, Gaston de Blondeville, which he arranged to have published. Written after Radcliffe’s visit to the ruins of Kenilworth Castle in 1802, it came near to comparing with the historical romances of Scott but lost itself in a preoccupation with historical precision, leaving action and character to suffer from a lack of emphasis. The narrative poem, St. Alban’s Abbey, appeared posthumously with this last novel; though Radcliffe had been offered an early opportunity for publication, she broke off negotiations with the publisher. Content with retirement and relative obscurity, she wrote in her last years only diary entries concerning the places she and her husband had visited on their long journeys through the English countryside. From 1813 to 1816, she lived near Windsor and probably at this time began suffering from bouts of asthma. From all reports, she enjoyed the company of friends, maintained a ready wit and a sly humor, but insisted on delicacy and decorum in all things. Shortly before her final illness, she returned to London; she died there on February 7, 1823, in her sixtieth year. The “Udolpho woman” or “the Shakespeare of Romance Writers,” as one contemporary reviewer called her, has achieved a secure place in the history of English literature. Analysis · The novels of Ann Radcliffe serve as a transition between the major English novelists of the eighteenth century and the first accomplished novelists of the nineteenth century. In the years between 1789 and 1797, her five novels established a style

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which profoundly affected English fiction for the next twenty-five years and had a considerable impact in translation as well. From the negligible first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, to the sophisticated romances, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, Mrs. Radcliffe demonstrated an ability to enrich the motives, methods, and machineries of each succeeding work. Manipulating the conventions of the gothic while introducing new thematic concerns and experiments with narrative techniques, Radcliffe became a master of her craft. Improved control over the complex atmosphere of the gothic romance proved an early factor in her success. Radcliffe went beyond the traditional gothic devices of lurking ghosts and malevolent noblemen torturing innocent girls to an interest in natural description. This delight with nature’s sublime scenery gave tone and color to her settings while emphasizing the heightened emotions and imagination that were produced in reaction to the landscape. A skillful use of numerous atmospheric factors such as sunsets, storms, winds, thunderclaps, and moonlight intensified the romantic tendencies of her time. A scene typifying the Radcliffe concept of landscape portraiture has a ruined castle in silhouette, arranged on a stern but majestic plain at nightfall. This view does not depend on precision of outline for effect but instead on an ominous vagueness, creating in the reader a queer mixture of pleasure and fear. Her delight in the architecture of massive proportions and in the picturesque derived in part from her reading of the nature poets and her study of the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa. She reflected a mid-eighteenth century English passion in cultivating an acute sensibility for discovering beauty where before it had not been perceived. While she made landscape in fiction a convention, it was her combining of beauty in horror and the horrible in the beautiful that reflected the Romantic shift away from order and reason toward emotion and imagination. Radcliffe’s novels rely not only on strategies of terror but also on the psychology of feelings. The novels of sensibility of the past generation offered her alternatives to the gothic trappings made familiar in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto; those gothic aspects now became linked to various emotional elements in a total effect. By drawing on the poetry of Thomas Gray and Edward Young or the fiction of Oliver Goldsmith and Henry Mackenzie, Radcliffe created a minority of characters with complex natures who not only exhibited melancholy and doubt, love and joy, but also hate and evil intentions. She was one of the first English novelists to subject her characters to psychological analysis. Of particular psychological interest are Radcliffe’s villains. Cruel, calculating, domineering, relentless, and selfish, they are more compelling than her virtuous characters. Since their passions are alien to the ordinary person, she dramatically explores the mysteries of their sinister attitudes. Radcliffe’s villains resemble those created by the Elizabethan dramatists, and their descendants can be found in the works of the great Romantics, Byron and Shelley. At her best, Radcliffe manifested strengths not seen in her first two novels nor in her last. Her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, exhibits the most obvious borrowings, from sources as well known as The Castle of Otranto to numerous other gothic-historical and sentimental novels. Though immature, the work offers her characteristic sense of atmosphere with the marvelous dangers and mysteries of feudal Scotland depicted to full advantage. Its weaknesses become evident all too soon, however, as stock characters populate strained, often confused incidents while mouthing rather obvious parables about morality. Didacticism seems the motivating princi-

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ple of the work; as David Durant observes in Ann Radcliffe’s Novels (1980), “The characters are so controlled by didactic interests as to be faceless and without personality.” The rigid obligations of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne to the morality of sentimental novels, the uniformity of a neoclassical prose style, and the repetitious, predictable action of the romance plot trap Radcliffe into a mechanical performance. A Sicilian Romance · Mrs. Radcliffe’s second novel, A Sicilian Romance, has a new strategy, an emphasis on action and adventure while subordinating moral concerns. This approach, however, was not effective because of the obvious imbalance between the two methods, and characterization suffered before a mass of incident. The interest in fear was expanded throughout the tale as a long-suffering wife, imprisoned in the remote sections of a huge castle by a villainous nobleman (who has an attachment to a beautiful paramour), struggles helplessly until rescued, after much suspense, by her gentle daughter and the young girl’s lover. The characters’ shallowness is hidden by a chase sequence of overwhelming speed which prevents one from noticing their deficiencies. To dramatize the movement of plot, Radcliffe introduced numerous settings, offering the reader a complete vision of the Romantic landscape. Though A Sicilian Romance lacks the sureness of technique of the later novels and remains a lesser product, it did establish Radcliffe’s ingenuity and perseverance. It was followed by the three novels on which her reputation rests: The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian. Radcliffe’s last novel, the posthumous Gaston de Blondeville, which was probably never meant for publication, exhibits the worst faults of the two earliest romances. Lifeless characters abound in a narrative overloaded with tedious historical facts and devoid of any action. In reconstructing history, Radcliffe was influenced by Sir Walter Scott but clearly was out of her element in attempting to make history conform to her own preconceptions. The primary innovation was the introduction of a real ghost to the love story. This specter, the apparition of a murdered knight demanding justice, stalks the grounds of Kenilworth Castle at the time of the reign of Henry III. Radcliffe detracts from this imposing supernatural figure when she resorts to explanations of incidents better left mysterious. The Romance of the Forest · With the publication of her third novel, The Romance of the Forest, Mrs. Radcliffe moved from apprenticeship to mastery. Her technique had advanced in at least two important elements: The chase with its multitude of settings is scaled down to an exacting series of dramas set among a few extended scenes, and characterization of the heroine is improved with the reduction of external action. Though suspense is extended rather illegitimately in order to produce a glorious final surprise, the novel is a genuine exploration of the realm of the unconscious. This remarkable advance into modern psychology gave life to the standard situations of Radcliffe’s stories, allowing the reader to create his or her own private horrors. Radcliffe’s new emphasis on internal action makes her protagonist, Adeline, more credible than the stock romantic heroines whom she in many ways resembles. Adeline suffers from a nervous illness after mysteriously being thrust upon the LaMotte family, who themselves have only recently escaped, under curious circumstances, from Paris. Soon the group discovers a Gothic ruin, which contains the requisite underground room, rotten tapestries, blood stains, and a general aura of mystery. Instead of the familiar chase scenes, a series of unified set-pieces portray the exploration of the ruin, the seduction of the heroine, and the execution of the hero.

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The entire plot depends upon the actions of a vicious but dominating sadist, the Marquis Phillipe de Montalt, and his conspiratorial agent, Pierre de LaMotte, against the unprotected Adeline. Because of the uncertainty of her birth, the sexual implications of this situation involve the risk of incest. Among contemporary readers, The Romance of the Forest became an immediate success, owing to its well-constructed narrative, the charm of its description of Romantic landscape, and a consummate handling of the principle of suspense. The Mysteries of Udolpho · Mrs. Radcliffe’s next novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, remains her best-known work. The sublimity of her landscapes and the control which she demonstrates in this novel mark an important change from her earlier novels; Radcliffe’s handling of action and character also reached new levels of subtlety and success, moving the novel a step beyond the rather strict conventions of the sentimental mode to one of psychological inquiry. The period of the novel is the end of the sixteenth century. The principal scenes are laid in the gloomy enclave of the Castle of Udolpho, in the Italian Apennines, but many glances are directed toward the south of France—Gascony, Provence, and Languedoc—and the brightness of Venice is contrasted with the dark horrors of the Apennines. Emily St. Aubert, the beautiful daughter of a Gascon family, is the heroine; she is intelligent and extraordinarily accomplished in the fine arts. Though revealing all the tender sensibilities of the characters associated with a hundred sentimental tales, Emily emerges as a credible figure who seems aware of the connections between the scenery around her and the characters who inhabit it. As a painter, she sees and thinks of life as a series of pictures. As David Durant explains in Ann Radcliffe’s Novels (1980), “She does not merely feel fright, but conjures up imaginary scenes which elicit it . . . scenery inhabits the inner life of the heroine, as well as locating her actions.” A further element of Emily’s characterization that adds to her credibility is her internalizing of the suspense produced by the action in the narrative. Her heightened sensibility reacts to fear and terror in an all-inclusive way; this acuteness of sensibility makes her easy prey for the villain, Signor Montoni. This sinister figure marries Emily’s aunt for her money, and then conveys Emily and her unhappy aunt to the “vast and dreary” confines of the castle. This impossible castle becomes a superbly appointed stage for the playing of the melodrama. As the melodrama has hopes of communicating a real sense of mystery, its action and characters remain subordinate to the environment, which pervades the entire texture of the work. Description of landscape is a major part of the book’s concept, and Radcliffe pays homage to Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain in emphasizing pictorial detail. The somber exterior of the castle prepares the reader for the ineffable horrors that lie within the walls and adumbrates the importance of landscape and massive architecture in the novel. There are certain shortcomings in Radcliffe’s method: Landscape description strangles action; the visual aspects of the novel have been internalized; and the device of the chase over great stretches of land has been subordinated by mental recapitulation of past scenes—action becomes tableaux. This internal action is slow-moving, tortuously so in a novel of 300,000 words. Critics have also objected to Radcliffe’s penchant for a rational explanation of every apparent supernatural phenomenon she has introduced; others, however, point out that Radcliffe’s readers enjoyed terror only if they were never forced into surrendering themselves. The Mysteries of Udolpho brought new energy to the picturesque, the sentimental,

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and the gothic novel. Radcliffe alternated effectively between the picturesque vagueness of the landscape and the castle’s hall of terrors. Her deft handling of sexual feeling, shown as antagonism between Montoni and Emily, is characteristic of her refusal to acknowledge sex overtly except as a frightening nameless power. The artificial terror, heightened sensibility, and the pervading air of mystery produced a powerful effect on her readers, yet many felt cheated by her failure to satisfy fully the intense imaginative visions awakened by the book. These readers would have to wait for The Italian, probably Radcliffe’s finest work and the high-water mark of gothic fiction. The Italian · The unity, control, and concentration of The Italian display a superb talent. Mrs. Radcliffe’s narrative technique is more sophisticated than at any previous time, particularly in the subtle revelation of the unreliability of feelings based on first impressions rather than on rational judgment. The dramatic pacing remains rigorous throughout and relatively free from digressions. The story’s impulse depends upon the Marchesa di Vivaldi’s refusal to allow her young son, Vincentio, to marry the heroine, Ellena di Rosalba, whose origins are in doubt. The Marchesa relies on the sinister machinations of her monk-confessor, Schedoni, who decides to murder Ellena. Radcliffe’s antipathy to Roman Catholicism is evident in her account of the horrors of the Carmelite abbey and its order, including the labyrinthine vaults and gloomy corridors. A strange blend of fascination and disgust is evoked here and in the scenes of the trial in the halls of the Inquisition, the ruins of the Paluzzi, and the prison of the Inquisition. Clearly, the gothic aspects of The Italian function as representations of a disordered and morally evil past. The vividness continues through to the climax of the story, when Schedoni, dagger in hand, prepares to murder Ellena but hesitates when he recognizes the portrait miniature she wears. Believing the girl is his lost daughter, he tries to make amends for his crimes. Though the solution involves more complex developments, the excitement of the confrontation between these two figures remains exceptional. Ellena has been a paragon of virtue, displaying piety, sensibility, benevolence, constancy, and a love of nature. To this catalog, Radcliffe adds intelligence, courage, and ingenuity. As an idealized character, Ellena represents the strengths necessary to prevail in the Romantic conflict against external malign forces. Schedoni, the devil/priest, is a figure of strong and dangerous sexual desire, associated, as is often the case in Radcliffe’s work, with incest. Radcliffe counters the passivity and weakness of Ellena’s virtues with this masculine version of desire, the lust of unregulated ambition. She describes him thus: “There was something terrible in his air, something almost superhuman. . . . His physiognomy . . . bore traces of many passions . . . his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate at a single glance into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts.” His pride, greed, and loneliness combine to form a demonic figure vaguely suggesting John Milton’s Satan. Eino Railo, in The Haunted Castle (1964), believes The Italian and the central character, Father Schedoni, were created under the revivified Romantic impulse supplied by the tragic monastic figure in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796). According to Railo, the difference between Ambrosio and Schedoni is that the latter “is no longer a young and inexperienced saint preserved from temptations, but a person long hardened in the ways of crime and vice, alarmingly gifted and strenuous, hypocritical, unfeeling and merciless.” Radcliffe was inspired by “Monk” Lewis to

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write a more impressive book than earlier conceived; her bias against sexual and sadistic impulses and toward heightened romantic effect win out in The Italian. While Ambrosio’s passions remain tangled and confused by his need for immediate satisfaction and his lack of any lasting goal, Schedoni has well-defined goals for power, wealth, and status. His Machiavellian inclinations blend with pride, melancholy, mystery, and dignity, making him Radcliffe’s most fully realized character. Her protest against The Monk created a story of tragic quality that goes beyond the conventional gothic paraphernalia and toward the psychological novel. Mrs. Radcliffe remains the undisputed mistress of the gothic novel and a central figure in the gothic revival, beginning in the late 1950’s, which has seen the resurrection of hordes of forgotten gothic novelists and their tales. The generous volume of Radcliffe criticism in recent decades has redefined her place in literary history, acknowledging the prodigious sweep of her influence. On first reading her works, one must remember to search behind the genteel exterior of the artistry to discover the special recesses of terror, subconscious conflict, and the psychology of feelings which played a major role in the evolution of dark Romanticism. Paul J. deGategno Other major works POETRY: The Poems of Ann Radcliffe, 1816; St. Alban’s Abbey, 1826. NONFICTION: A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, 1795. Bibliography Durant, David S. Ann Radcliffe’s Novels: Experiments in Setting. Rev. ed. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Discovers a pattern of evolution in Radcliffe’s novels from the sentimental The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne to the historical Gaston de Blondeville that reflects the movement of eighteenth century British fiction and completes the transition between Fanny Burney’s fiction and Sir Walter Scott’s romances. This book still shows the shape of its original dissertation format, including footnotes; nevertheless, it is one of the few easily accessible books on Radcliffe. Devotes six chapters to detailed analyses of her six novels, putting them in the context of their time and genre and illustrating their experimental styles. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. An important book on Romantic fiction, including Radcliffe’s gothic romances, which analyzes in depth twelve Romantic novels to define the intellectual context of the era. Notes that concepts of reality were tested and changed by Romantic novels and that Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime modified aesthetic forms. Radcliffe is given a prominent place in this general thesis and The Mysteries of Udolpho is analyzed in detail as the focus of her chapter. Her novel is shown as a progressive revelation that nature weakens beneath the power of human imagination to project itself upon nature, as her heroine is deprived of consolation from natural order. Finds a common drift toward death in most novels of this genre. Includes a set of notes and an index. McIntyre, Clara Frances. Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1920. Reprint. New York: Archon Books, 1970. A dated, but still useful, 104-page study of Radcliffe which reviews the facts of her life and surveys her work. Presents contemporary estimates of her novels, considers their

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sources, and lists translations and dramatizations of them. Argues that Radcliffe’s main contribution is in her improvement of Horace Walpole’s method of dramatic structure, demonstrated by an analysis of her structures and their influences on the structures of Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, and others. Contains a bibliography which includes a list of references to magazines. Miles, Robert. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Explores the historical and aesthetic context of Radcliffe’s fiction, with separate chapters on her early works and mature novels. Miles also considers Radcliffe’s role as a woman writer and her place in society. Includes notes and bibliography. Murray, E. B. Ann Radcliffe. New York: Twayne, 1972. Surveys Radcliffe’s life, drawing from her A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany to illustrate her novels’ geography. Examines the background of the gothic, with its supernatural elements, sentiment and sensibility, and sense of the sublime and the picturesque. Looks at Radcliffe’s modern romance of medieval experience, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; concentrates on the heroine’s sufferings in A Sicilian Romance; examines the strengths in plot and atmosphere of The Romance of the Forest; views The Mysteries of Udolpho as her first successful synthesis of modern and medieval; and argues that The Italian is Radcliffe’s best novel because it sustains the reader’s interest. Provides an overview of Radcliffe’s literary accomplishments and influence. Includes notes, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index. Rogers, Deborah D., ed. The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A good selection of critical essays on Radcliffe. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Smith, Nelson C. The Art of the Gothic: Ann Radcliffe’s Major Novels. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Contains a valuable introduction which reviews the scholarship on Radcliffe between 1967 and 1980. Analyzes the ways Radcliffe developed the sophistication of her fiction from The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne to The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian in a six-year period. Examines the nature of the gothic in order to focus on Radcliffe’s heroines of sensibility. Notes a decline of didacticism in Radcliffe’s fiction by isolating her heroes and villains for study. Analyzes the narrative techniques used to craft the gothic tale and surveys the gothic writers who followed Radcliffe. Includes end notes for each chapter and a bibliography.

Mary Renault Mary Renault

Mary Challans Born: London, England; September 4, 1905 Died: Cape Town, South Africa; December 13, 1983 Principal long fiction · Purposes of Love, 1939 (pb. in U.S. as Promise of Love, 1940); Kind Are Her Answers, 1940; The Friendly Young Ladies, 1944 (pb. in U.S. as The Middle Mist, 1945); Return to Night, 1947; North Face, 1948; The Charioteer, 1953; The Last of the Wine, 1956; The King Must Die, 1958; The Bull from the Sea, 1962; The Mask of Apollo, 1966; Fire from Heaven, 1969; The Persian Boy, 1972; The Praise Singer, 1978; Funeral Games, 1981; The Alexander Trilogy, 1984 (includes Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games). Other literary forms · All but two of Mary Renault’s published works are novels. The Lion in the Gateway: Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae (1964) is a children’s history of ancient Greek battles. The Nature of Alexander (1975) is a heavily documented biography placing the charismatic leader in the context of his time and customs, a book that also defines the two abiding preoccupations of Alexander’s life and Renault’s art. “Outward striving for honor,” the Greek to philotimo, balances arete, the profound inward thirst for achievement knowingly made beautiful. Together, as Alexander himself wrote, they win immortality: “It is a lovely thing to live with courage,/ and die leaving an everlasting fame.” Achievements · Critics praised Renault’s first five novels, written and set around World War II, for their realism, psychological depth, and literary technique. In 1946, one year prior to its publication, Return to Night won the MGM Award, $150,000, then the world’s largest literary prize. Although this novel was never made into a motion picture, the award brought Renault American acclaim, augmented later by the success of her Greek novels, but her work has never gained the academic attention it deserves. She received the National Association of Independent Schools Award in 1963 and the Silver Pen Award in 1971, and she was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Biography · Mary Renault (the pen name of Mary Challans), a physician’s daughter, was born on September 4, 1905, in London. At eight, she decided to become a writer, and she read English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, from 1924 to 1927, where she preferred to study the Middle Ages, the setting of an attempted historical novel she destroyed after several rejections. She had once thought of teaching, but after graduation she entered nurses’ training at Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, where she received her nursing degree in 1937. She dated her literary career from 1939, though she continued as a neurosurgical nurse at Radcliffe Infirmary throughout the war, writing in her off-duty hours. Her first novels were widely popular, but she claimed that “if her early novels were destroyed irrevocably, she would feel absolutely no loss” (Bernard F. Dick, The Hellenism of Mary Renault, 1972). Renault’s postwar travels in the eastern Mediterranean provided the impetus for a 754

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new literary phase marked by her immigration to South Africa in 1948. After this move, her exhaustive self-taught knowledge of ancient Greek history and philosophy made her a mesmerizing novelist able to re-create a lost world. In the estimation of Bernard Dick, Renault was “the only bona fide Hellenist in twentieth century fiction.” Renault remained a resident of South Africa until her death on December 13, 1983. Analysis · Mary Renault’s novels celebrate and eulogize people’s potential but transitory glory, a combination difficult for a world that has relinquished its acquaintance with the classics. Peter Wolfe regards Renault’s first five novels as her literary apprenticeship, “1930’s novels” marked by then-fashionable themes of political engagement and sexual liberation. Bernard F. Dick, her only other major commentator, believes her early fiction was influenced by the restrictive, pain-filled atmosphere of a World War II surgical hospital. Both are partly correct; Renault’s early work deals with the individual’s freedom from contemporary power structures and stifling social conventions. Such topical concerns, however appealing to modern readers, are nevertheless peripheral to the core of Renault’s art, the Platonism which she followed to the mythic depths in her later novels. When she began to write, Renault was already familiar with the Theory of Ideas developed in Plato’s dialogues, wherein everything perceptible by human senses is imitative of changeless perfect Ideas beyond time and space. Each Idea corresponds to a class of earthly objects, all of which must inevitably change, leaving the Ideas the only objects of true knowledge in the universe. A transitory earthly object, however, may remind people of the Idea it represents. Plato theorized that before entering the body, the soul had encountered the infinite Ideas, and that once embodied, the soul might vaguely remember them. Renault often convincingly incorporates Plato’s anamnesis, the doctrine that “learning is recollection,” in her fiction. Plato also believed that human recognition of such natural truths as the mathematically perfect circle could lead people stepwise to the contemplation of Absolute Truth, which he equated with Absolute Goodness and Absolute Beauty. He taught that the immortal human soul may be reborn through metempsychosis, or transmigration, another concept found throughout Renault’s work. (Photo not available) Renault’s novels are also informed by Plato’s theory of love as defined by Socrates in The Symposium (c. 388-368 b.c.e.): love is the desire for immortality through possession of or union with the Beautiful. Love manifests itself on its lowest levels by human sexuality, proceeds upward through intellectual achievement, and culminates in a mystical union of the soul with

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the Idea of Beauty. That Renault’s heroes aspire to such union is their glory; that being mortal they must fail is the fate she eulogizes. Plato, like most classical Greeks, allowed heterosexual love only the lowest rung on his ladder of love, as the necessary element for reproduction. Only the homosexual relationship was considered capable of inspiring the lifelong friendships which offered each partner the ideal of arete. All of Renault’s novels illustrate some aspect of Platonic love; in the first, Promise of Love, she shows Vivian, a nurse, and Mic, who loves her because she resembles her brother Jan, achieving self-knowledge not through sexual passion but by affection, the ultimate stage of Platonic love, which at the close of the novel “recalls the true lover of [Plato’s dialogue] the Phaedrus who is willing to sleep like a servant at the side of his beloved.” Renault’s other early novels also have strong Platonic elements. Kind Are Her Answers foreshadows her interest in theater as mimetic form, Plato’s first literary love, which she realized more fully in The Mask of Apollo. Her third novel, The Middle Mist, concludes with references to Plato’s Lysis, his dialogue on friendship which claims that erotic satisfaction destroys philia, the more permanent nonphysical union promised by Platonic love, a theme to which Renault returned more successfully in The Last of the Wine. Renault attempted unconvincingly in Return to Night and North Face to state the amor vincit omnia tradition of “women’s fiction” in mythological metaphors, and found that she had to develop a new fictional mode capable of expressing her archetypal themes with Platonic concepts. The Charioteer · Not published in the United States until 1959 because of its forthright treatment of homosexuality, The Charioteer is the only Renault novel to incorporate a systematic development of Platonic philosophy as the vehicle for commentary on contemporary life. In the Phaedrus (c. 388-368 b.c.e.), Plato depicted reason as a charioteer who must balance the thrust of the white horse of honor against the unruly black horse of passion. The image unifies Renault’s tale of Laurie Odell, wounded at Dunkirk, who must come to terms with his homosexuality. After his friendship with the sexually naïve conscientious objector Andrew Raines dissolves, Laurie finds a lifelong partner in Ralph Lanyon, who brought him back wounded after they had fought at Dunkirk. Laurie attains an equilibrium between the two conflicting halves of his nature in a Platonic denial of sexual excess. As Renault comments in the epilogue, a Greek device she favors, “Now their [the horses’] heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle; and when the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.” In the ideal Platonic pattern, the older man assumes a compassionate responsibility for the honor of the younger, altogether transcending physical attraction and cemented by shared courage in battle. Renault’s efforts at an entirely convincing presentation of such friendship are hindered by the intolerance with which homosexual relationships are usually viewed in modern society and the often pathetic insecurity it forces upon them. Despite these handicaps, Renault sympathetically portrays Laurie as “a modern Hephaestus, or maimed artist,” as Wolfe notes, a character who wins admiration through striving to heal his injured life and nature and make of them something lasting and beautiful. From roots far deeper than Plato’s philosophy, Renault developed the vital impulse of her eight Greek novels, her major literary achievement. Central is the duality of Apollo and Dionysus, names the Greeks gave to the forces of the mind and of the heart, gods whose realms the mythologist Walter Otto described in Dionysus, Myth and

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Cult (1965) as “sharply opposed” yet “in reality joined together by an eternal bond.” In Greek myth, Zeus’s archer son Apollo, wielder of the two-sided weapon of Truth, endowed people with the heavenly light called Art, by which he admonished humankind to self-knowledge and moderation through his oracle at Delphi. Paradoxically, Apollo shared his temple and the festival year at Delphi with his mysterious brother Dionysus, god of overwhelming ecstasy, born of mortal woman and all-powerful Zeus, torn apart each year to rise again, offering both wine’s solace and its madness to humankind. Thought and emotion were the two faces of the Greek coin of life—in Otto’s words, “the eternal contrast between a restless, whirling life and a still, far-seeing spirit.” Each of Renault’s Greek novels focuses on a crucial nexus of physical and spiritual existence in Greek history. The age of legendary heroes such as Theseus of Athens, subject of The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, was followed by the Trojan War, 1200 b.c.e., the stuff of classical epic and tragedy and the harbinger of Greece’s Dark Age, when only Athens stood against the Dorian invasion. By the sixth century b.c.e., the setting of The Praise Singer, Athens, under the benevolent tyrant Pisistratus, had become the model polis of the Greek peninsula, building a democracy that repelled imperial Persia and fostered the world’s greatest tragedies in their Dionysian festivals. The Last of the Wine treats the fall of Athens to Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars, 404 b.c.e., torn by internal strife and bled by foreign expansion. The restored Athenian democracy of a half-century later is the milieu of The Mask of Apollo. Shortly after Plato’s death, his pupil Aristotle taught a prince in Macedon who dreams of Homeric deeds in Fire from Heaven, accomplishes them in The Persian Boy, and leaves an empire to be shattered by lesser men in Funeral Games—Alexander the Great. The Last of the Wine · The Last of the Wine, like most of Renault’s Greek fiction, is ostensibly a memoir, a form favored by classical authors. Its fictional narrator, a young and “beautiful” Athenian knight named Alexias, endures the agonizing aftermath of Athens’ ill-fated Sicilian venture under Alkibiades, the magnetic but flawed former student of Sokrates. With Lysis, the historical figure on whom Plato modeled his dialogue on ideal friendship, Alexias begins the idealistic attachment they learned together from Sokrates, but physical passion, handled with sensitivity by Renault, overcomes them, and they ruefully must compromise their ideal. Sacrificing his honor for Lysis during the famine caused by the Spartan siege of Athens, Alexias models for sculptors, at least one lascivious, to feed his wounded friend, and in the battle to restore Athenian democracy, Lysis falls gloriously with Alexias’s name upon his lips. The novel’s title, an allusion to the Greek custom in which the wine remaining in a cup is tossed to form the initial of a lover’s name, metaphorically represents Athens’s abandonment of the ideals of its Golden Age. Renault poignantly shows Lysis, a gentleman athlete in pursuit of philotimo, the hero’s struggle for outward glory to emulate his ideal, beaten sadistically in the Isthmian Games by a monstrous professional wrestler, just as Athenian democracy is becoming warped by politicians such as the vicious Kritias and the cold-blooded Anytos, who will help condemn Sokrates. Alkibiades’ personal disaster, abandoning Athens for its Spartan enemies, is an exemplary case of a leader who cannot resist abusing his charismatic gifts. The Greek ideal of democracy learned at Sokrates’ side and based on individual arete, inward pursuit of honor, still allows Lysis a moral victory often overlooked in this splendidly elegiac novel of the death of an era. “Men are not born equal in themselves,” Lysis tells Alexias over wine one evening in Samos; “a man who thinks

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himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better.” Lysis fights and dies for “a City where I can find my equals and respect my betters . . . and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient.” At the end of the novel, as he listens to the distorted minds of bureaucrats, Alexias remembers the lamps of Samos, the wine-cup on a table of polished wood, and Lysis’s voice: “Must we forsake the love of excellence, then, till every citizen feels it alike?” The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea · Renault analyzes the ideal of kingship in The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. In the earlier novel, she traces Theseus’s early life from Troezen and Eleusis, where with the bard Orpheus he establishes the Sacred Mysteries, to the labyrinthine palace of Crete, where he destroys the brutal son of King Minos, who oppresses Athens. In the second, she pursues Theseus’s progressive rule in Athens through his abandonment of Ariadne to Dionysus’s bloody cult and his capture of the Amazon Hippolyta to the great tragedy of his life, his fatal curse on their son Hippolytus. Stylistically more evocative of Homer’s mighty simplicity than the Attic cadences of The Last of the Wine, Renault’s Theseus novels treat kingship as a manifestation of the divine inner voice that chooses the moment of willing consent when the monarch sacrifices himself for his people. Both novels discuss a past so dim that its events have become the raw material of myth. Theseus’s birth meshes the earthly with the supernatural, since it results from the divinely inspired compassion of the Athenian King Aigios for the stricken land of Troezen; the reader is left, as is customary in Renault’s fiction, to decide where history ends and metaphysics begins. Until his son’s death, Theseus practices the lesson learned from his grandfather’s ritual sacrifice of the King Horse, one of the shocking joys hidden in pain that opens much of Renault’s fiction: “The consenting . . . the readiness is all. It washes heart and mind . . . and leaves them open to the god.” By closing himself to the speaking god, however, obeying not his reason but his emotional reaction to his wife Phaedra’s false accusations of Hippolytus, Theseus is lost. Only two bright moments remain to him, an anamnetic dream of Marathon where he fights beside the Athenians defending their City, his name their stirring war cry; and a glimpse before he dies of the boy Achilles, “as springy and as brisk as noonday, his arm round a dark-haired friend.” Prescient, Theseus watches tragedy in the making: “The god who sent him that blazing pride should not have added love to be burned upon it,” but—consoled that his own reputation has become Achilles’ “touchstone for a man”—Theseus for the last time consents to the god of the sea. The Mask of Apollo · By the mid-fourth century b.c.e., late in Plato’s life, sophisticated Athenians had accepted the gods as metaphysical forces within the human personality. In The Mask of Apollo, Renault poses the primal duality of Apollo and Dionysus in Greek culture, the calm, far-seeing force of reason and art balanced against the irresistible force of ecstasy. An old mask of Apollo, reputedly from the workshop of the Parthenon’s architect Phidias, accompanies Renault’s narrator Nikeratos through his successful acting career, the fascinating backdrop to the political career of Dion of Syracuse, Plato’s noble friend, who might have become the ideal philosopher-king Plato postulated in The Republic. Though Dion is a model soldier and a principled statesman, circumstances force him to abandon his philosophical ideals to save Syracuse from devastation. Renault parallels his fall with Nikeratos’s performance in Euripides’ The Bacchae (405 b.c.e.), the enigmatic masterpiece named for the followers of Dionysus. As he meditates

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before Apollo’s mask, Nikeratos hears his own voice: “With The Bacchae he [Euripides] digs down far below, to some deep rift in the soul where our griefs begin. Take that play anywhere, even to men unborn who worship other gods or none, and it will teach them to know themselves.” Plato’s tragedy, acted out by Dion, was the “deep rift” that made people unable to follow him with united minds and hearts: “No one would fight for Dion, when he gave, as his own soul saw it, his very life for justice.” By serving Apollo and Dionysus equally, however, Nikeratos the artist earns his gifts, one a Platonic dream of acting in a strange revenge drama, speaking lines beside an open grave to a clean skull in his hand. Through his love for his protégé Thettalos, whom he frees for achievements he knows will be greater than his own, Nikeratos plays Achilles in Aeschylus’s The Myrmidons in a performance viewed by Alexander, a boy for whom men will fight and die, “whether he is right or wrong,” a prince who “will wander through the world . . . never knowing . . . that while he was still a child the thing he seeks slipped from the world, worn out and spent.” Had he encountered Plato’s Ideals, which he instinctively sought, Renault proposes as the curtain falls on The Mask of Apollo, the Alexander of history might have made the philosopher-king Plato’s Dion never could have been; but Nikeratos observes that “no one will ever make a tragedy—and that is well, for one could not bear it—whose grief is that the principals never met.” Fire from Heaven · Renault’s Alexander grows from boy to king in Fire from Heaven, in which she abandons the memoir form for more objective narration, as though no single point of view could encompass Alexander’s youthful ideals, fired by the blazing Homeric philotimo in Achilles’ honor he learned at the epic-conscious Macedonian court. Modern archaeology supports Renault’s conviction that Alexander deliberately patterned his actions, even his father Philip’s funerary rites, upon the Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.), which he read as though returning home, recognizing in his mutual love with Hephaistion the tragic bond of Achilles and Patroclus, the basis of the Western world’s first, perhaps greatest, poem. Arete, which cloaks the heavenly Idea of excellence in earthly beauty, came to Alexander less from Aristotle than through his instinctive attraction to Sokrates through Plato’s works, which he read as a boy in Macedon. After defeating Thebes’s Sacred Band at Cheironeia, where Philip’s Macedonians secured the domination of all of Greece, Alexander stands “with surmise and regret” at Plato’s tomb in Athens, listening to his disciple Xenokrates: “What he [Plato] had to teach could only be learned as fire is kindled, by the touch of the flame itself.” The Persian Boy · The novel in which Renault most precariously treats the question of homosexuality, The Persian Boy, is narrated by Bagoas, the handsome eunuch once King Darius’s favorite and now the lover of Alexander. Renault’s choice of Bagoas’s point of view reflects her belief that Alexander was not corrupted by Persian luxury and imperial power, as many historians from classical times to the present have asserted, but that he sought to assimilate Eastern ways as a means of uniting his realm in spirit as well as military fact. Just as Alexander’s “passionate capacity for affection” could allow him to accept affection wherever it was sincerely offered from the heart and yet remain wholly true to Bagoas’s “victor now, forever,” Hephaistion (who Renault feels is the most underrated man in history), Alexander felt “Macedon was my father’s country. This is mine”—meaning the empire he had won for himself. Renault believes that Alexander’s eventual tragedy was that he was humanly

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unable to achieve equilibrium between his followers’ personal devotion to him and their pragmatic selfish desires. Through Alexander’s complex relationship with his dangerous mother Olympias, herself a devotee of Dionysus, Renault exemplifies the peril of neglecting the god of ecstasy basic to The Bacchae, in which Olympias herself had acted during Alexander’s youth as a shocking challenge to Philip’s authority. Toward the end of Alexander’s own life, Dionysus’s cruelty touches even him. Renault shows his purported deterioration as less his own fault than his men’s when he must hold them by force as well as by love, even violating Macedon’s dearest law, killing before their Assembly had condemned a man to death. The powerful god leads Alexander to excess; Bagoas sees that “his hunger grew by feeding.” The Roman historian Arrian, following the memoir of Alexander’s only faithful general Ptolemy, commented, “If there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.” Bagoas better than any also sees that “great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.” Alexander loses Hephaistion and with him nearly abandons his own senses, emerging only after his friend’s funeral, in which he watches Thettalos, without Nikeratos for the first time, perform The Myrmidons one last time; “‘perhaps,’ Bagoas thought, ‘the last of the madness had been seared out of him by so much burning.’” At the close of The Persian Boy, Renault notes in her Afterword, “When his [Alexander’s] faults (those his own times did not account as virtues) have been considered . . . no other human being has attracted in his lifetime, from so many men, so fervent a devotion. Their reasons are worth examining.” In her two novels of Alexander’s life, Renault not only has examined the reasons, but also has brilliantly probed to the heart of one of the greatest human mysteries: how one person can ask, as did Homer’s Achilles, “now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us/ In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,/ Let us go.”—and how other people, with all their hearts, can answer. Such “true songs are still in the minds of men,” according to the aged bard Simonides, narrator of The Praise Singer, recalling the “lyric years” when tragedy was being born of song and Athens was becoming the center of the earth. “We die twice when men forget,” the ghosts of heroes seemed to tell him as a boy, and he has spent his life in “the bright and perilous gift of making others shine.” In this novel, where Renault’s heroic epitaph for philotimo and her noble elegy for people’s hope of arete have given place to a gentler, less exalted nostalgia, she recognizes that “praising excellence, one serves the god within it.” Renault also notes in her Afterword that “the blanket generalization ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is a historical absurdity,” and she demonstrates that the respected rule of Pisistratus, nominally a “tyrant,” formed the solid foundation on which Pericles erected Athenian democracy, even presaging through a discredited seer “a lightning flash from Macedon.” In Alexander’s time, Renault has remarked, “the issue was not whether, but how one made [war].” At his death, brought about at least in part by his self-destructive grief for Hephaistion, Alexander’s generals embarked on a cannibalistic power struggle—only Ptolemy, his half-brother, emerging with any of the dignity Alexander had worn so easily in conquering his empire. Renault’s Funeral Games is “the ancestral pattern of Macedonian tribal and familial struggles for his throne; except that Alexander had given them a world stage on which to do it.” Funeral Games · The most violent of Renault’s Greek novels, Funeral Games contains a darkness that is alleviated only by flashes of Alexander reflected through the

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decency of the few who knew him best—Ptolemy; Bagoas; Queen Sisygambis, who looked upon Alexander, not Darius, as her son. In them, something of Alexander’s flame lingers a little while, a heavenly light extinguished at last in the wreckage of his empire in human depravity which Alexander could not prevent nor Renault fail to record. In her eight novels of ancient Greece, Renault far surpasses conventional historical fiction. She achieves a mythic dimension in her balance of Apollonian and Dionysian psychological forces and philosophical precision in her treatment of Platonic doctrines. Her style is adapted to the Greek literature of each period she delineates, Attic elegance for The Last of the Wine and The Mask of Apollo, Hellenic involution counterpoised against Alexander’s Homeric simplicity of speech. Renault links all eight novels with a chain of works of art, a finely crafted touch the classical Greeks would have applauded: the great tragedies, The Myrmidons and The Bacchae, Polykleitos’s sculpture of Hermes modeled on Alexias, and the bronze of the liberator Harmodios in Pisistratos’s day all serve as shaping factors in the portrait of her ultimate hero, Alexander. Mastering time, space, and modern ignorance of the classical world, Renault captures the “sadness at the back of life” Virginia Woolf so aptly cited as the essence of Greek literature, the inevitable grieving awareness of people at the impassable gulf between their aspirations and their achievement. In the face of the eternal questions of existence, Renault’s novels offer a direction in which to turn when, in Woolf’s words, “we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.” Mitzi M. Brunsdale Other major works NONFICTION: The Nature of Alexander, 1975. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Lion in the Gateway: Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae, 1964. Bibliography Burns, Landon C., Jr. “Men Are Only Men: The Novels of Mary Renault.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 4 (Winter, 1963): 102-121. A good, but limited, look at Renault’s historical fiction. Burns examines character, theme, and use of classical myth in The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, and The Bull from the Sea. Burns’s careful study repeatedly stresses the high order of Renault’s fiction. Dick, Bernard F. The Hellenism of Mary Renault. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. An excellent introduction to Renault’s work, examining her entire literary output through Fire from Heaven. Places Renault in the mainstream of fiction and applauds her as one of the most creative historical novelists of the century. Sweetman, David. Mary Renault: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. The first part explores Renault’s life in England, including her education at Oxford. The second part describes her years in South Africa. A fascinating study of Renault’s sexuality as it relates to her historical novels. Includes a bibliography. Wolfe, Peter. Mary Renault. New York: Twayne, 1969. The first full-length examination of the writer, but limited through The Mask of Apollo. Wolfe’s study is both a plea for Renault’s recognition by the critics as an important twentieth century writer and a critical analysis of her work. He has high praise for most of her novels but dislikes North Face and The Bull from the Sea.

Jean Rhys Jean Rhys

Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams Born: Roseau, Dominica Island, West Indies; August 24, 1894 Died: Exeter, England; May 14, 1979 Principal long fiction · Postures, 1928 (pb. in U.S. as Quartet, 1929); After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 1930; Voyage in the Dark, 1934; Good Morning, Midnight, 1939; Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966. Other literary forms · Though Jean Rhys is now primarily remembered for her novels, her first published book was a collection of short stories, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927). As Ford Madox Ford pointed out in the preface to the collection, Rhys’s heroines are geographically, psychologically, and emotionally of “the Left Bank,” not only of Paris—though Rhys captured the Paris of the 1920’s as well as anyone—but also of all the cities of the world. They are underdogs, alone, betrayed, on the edge of poverty; they are women in a man’s world. Besides The Left Bank, Rhys published two other collections of stories: Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976). In 1987, The Collected Short Stories brought together her work in this genre. At her death, she left an essentially completed first section of an autobiography with Diana Athill, who had edited Wide Sargasso Sea and Sleep It Off, Lady. Athill published this section and a less complete second section as Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography in 1979. A collection of letters was published in 1984. Achievements · When Wide Sargasso Sea, her last novel, was published, Jean Rhys was described in The New York Times as the greatest living novelist. Such praise is overstated, but Rhys’s fiction, long overlooked by academic critics, is undergoing a revival spurred by feminist studies. Rhys played a noteworthy role in the French Left Bank literary scene in the 1920’s, and between 1927 and 1939, she published four substantial novels and a number of jewel-like short stories. Although she owes her current reputation in large measure to the rising interest in female writers and feminist themes, her work belongs more properly with the masters of literary impressionism: Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. She began to publish her writing under the encouragement of her intimate friend Ford Madox Ford, and she continued to write in spite of falling out of favor with his circle. As prizes and honors came to her in her old age after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, it must have given her grim satisfaction to realize that she had attained entirely by her own efforts a position as a writer at least equal to that of her erstwhile friends. Biography · Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in the West Indies on the island of Dominica in 1894, the daughter of a Welsh father and a part-Creole mother. English society classified her as “colored.” Her child associates were often Creole, and she was surrounded by ideas peculiar to their culture, such as voodoo and witchcraft. At the same time, she attended a convent school and seriously 762

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considered the life of a nun. The colonial mentality was strong in Dominica, and the “proper” role for a well-bred young woman was sharply defined: passive, obedient, submissive. In 1910, Rhys left Dominica and went to live in Cambridge, England, with her aunt, Clarice Rhys Williams. After a short term in a local school, she enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her father died soon after she arrived in England, and she found herself short of money. The transition from the West Indies to England must have been extremely painful for the sixteen-year-old girl: the climate harsh, the people cold, the social and economic situation threatening. Those who knew her as a young woman testified that she was strikingly beautiful. After a term at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she toured as a minor actress or chorus girl with provincial theater troupes and did modeling. A young woman alone under these circumstances would have seen at first hand how male dominance and financial control in British society combined to exploit the female. Many of her stories and novels reflect scenes from her career on the stage, and most of them hinge on the theme of male exploitation of women through financial domination. Near the end of World War I, Rhys married Jean Lenglet (alias Edouard de Neve), an adventurer who had served in the French Foreign Legion and who was probably employed by the French secret service during the war. The newlywed couple lived in Paris, constantly moving from one cheap hotel to another, although de Neve secured temporarily a position with the international mission administering Vienna. A son was born to them in 1919, but lived only three weeks. A daughter born in 1922 lived but required special medical care. Rhys tried to earn a living in Paris by modeling and writing. Pearl Adam, the wife of a correspondent for The Times of Paris, took an interest in some of her sketches and introduced her to Ford Madox Ford, then editor of The Transatlantic Review. Through him, she entered into the expatriate community of the early 1920’s, meeting James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and other prominent writers. Shortly after Rhys met Ford in the autumn of 1924, her husband was sent to prison for illegal dealing in antiques. Ford was living at the time with the artist Stella Bowen. Rhys, penniless, moved in with them and soon formed an intimate relationship with Ford. A casual episode in Ford’s generally messy life was something much more serious for the young woman; Rhys treats this affair in her first novel, Quartet. De Neve never forgave her for her involvement with Ford. After her divorce from de Neve, Rhys became closely involved with a literary agent, Leslie Tilden Smith. They were eventually married and lived together until his death in 1945. Subsequently, she married his cousin, Max Hamer, who later served time in prison for mismanagement of his firm’s funds. Throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s, Rhys suffered greatly from poverty, poor health, and family problems. Her books were all out of print. She was not, however, entirely forgotten. The actress Selma Vaz Diaz adapted a dramatic monologue from Good Morning, Midnight for stage use in 1949. Eight years later, the BBC’s third program presented Selma Vaz Diaz’s monologue, which received excellent notices. The publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and the rapid growth of feminist studies led to a Rhys revival, and the reprinting of all her works followed. Analysis · Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet, reflects closely her misadventures with Ford Madox Ford. The heroine, Marya Zelli, whose husband is in prison, moves in with the rich and respectable Hugh and Lois Heidler. Hugh becomes Marya’s lover, while Lois punishes her with petty cruelties. The central figure is a woman alone,

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penniless, exploited, and an outsider. In her next novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the central figure, Julia Martin, breaks off with her rich lover, Mr. Mackenzie, and finds herself financially desperate. Voyage in the Dark tells the story of Anna Morgan, who arrives in England from the West Indies as an innocent young girl, has her first affair as a chorus girl, and descends through a series of shorter and shorter affairs to working for a masseuse. In Good Morning, Midnight, the alcoholic Sasha Jensen, penniless in Paris, remembers episodes from her past which have brought her to this sorry pass. All four of these novels show a female character subject to financial, sexual, and social domination by men and “respectable” society. In all cases, the heroine is passive, but “sentimental.” The reader is interested in her feelings, rather than in her ideas and accomplishments. She is alienated economically from any opportunity to do meaningful and justly rewarding work. She is an alien socially, either from a foreign and despised colonial culture or from a marginally respectable social background. She is literally an alien or foreigner in Paris and London, which are cities of dreadful night for her. What the characters fear most is the final crushing alienation from their true identities, the reduction to some model or type imagined by a foreign man. They all face the choice of becoming someone’s gamine, garçonne, or femme fatale, or of starving to death, and they all struggle against this loss of personal identity. After a silence of more than twenty years, Rhys returned to these same concerns in her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. While the four early novels are to a large degree autobiographical, Wide Sargasso Sea has a more literary origin, although it, too, reflects details from the author’s personal life. Wide Sargasso Sea · Wide Sargasso Sea requires a familiarity with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In Brontë’s novel, Jane is prevented from marrying Rochester by the presence of a madwoman in the attic, his insane West Indian wife who finally perishes in the fire which she sets, burning Rochester’s house and blinding him, but clearing the way for Jane to wed him. The madwoman in Jane Eyre is depicted entirely from the exterior. It is natural that the mad West Indian wife, when seen only through the eyes of her English rival and of Rochester, appears completely hideous and depraved. Indeed, when Jane first sees the madwoman in chapter 16 of the novel, she cannot tell whether it is a beast or a human being groveling on all fours. Like a hyena with bloated features, the madwoman attacks Rochester in this episode. Wide Sargasso Sea is a sympathetic account of the life of Rochester’s mad wife, ranging from her childhood in the West Indies, her Creole and Catholic background, and her courtship and married years with the deceitful Rochester, to her final descent into madness and captivity in England. Clearly, the predicament of the West Indian wife resembles that of Rhys herself in many ways. In order to present the alien wife’s case, she has written a “counter-text,” an extension of Brontë’s novel filling in the “missing” testimony, the issues over which Brontë glosses. Wide Sargasso Sea consists of two parts. Part 1 is narrated by the girl growing up in Jamaica who is destined to become Rochester’s wife. The Emancipation Act has just been passed (the year of that imperial edict was 1833) and the blacks on the island are passing through a period of so-called apprenticeship which should lead to their complete freedom in 1837. This is a period of racial tension and anxiety for the privileged colonial community. Fear of black violence runs high, and no one knows exactly what will happen to the landholders once the blacks are emancipated. The girlish narrator lives in the interface between the privileged white colonists and the blacks. Although a child of landowners, she is impoverished, clinging to European

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notions of respectability, and in constant fear. She lives on the crumbling estate of her widowed mother. Her closest associate is Christophine, a Martinique obeah woman, or Voodoo witch. When her mother marries Mr. Mason, the family’s lot improves temporarily, until the blacks revolt, burning their country home, Coulibri, and killing her half-witted brother. She then attends a repressive Catholic school in town, where her kindly colored “cousin” Sandi protects her from more hostile blacks. Part 2 is narrated by the young Rochester on his honeymoon with his bride to her country home. Wherever appropriate, Rhys follows the details of Brontë’s story. Rochester reveals that his marriage was merely a financial arrangement. After an uneasy period of passion, Rochester’s feelings for his bride begin to cool. He receives a letter of denunciation accusing her of misbehavior with Sandi and revealing that madness runs in the family. To counter Rochester’s growing hostility, the young bride goes to her former companion, the obeah woman Christophine, for a love potion. The nature of the potion is that it can work for one night only. Nevertheless, she administers it to her husband. His love now dead, she is torn from her native land, transported to a cruel and loveless England, and maddeningly confined. Finally, she takes candle in hand to fire Rochester’s house in suicidal destruction. In Brontë’s novel, the character of the mad wife is strangely blank, a vacant slot in the story. Her presence is essential, and she must be fearfully hateful, so that Jane Eyre has no qualms about taking her place in Rochester’s arms, but the novel tells the reader almost nothing else about her. Rhys fills in this blank, fleshing out the character, making her live on a par with Jane herself. After all, Brontë tells the reader a great deal about Jane’s painful childhood and education; why should Rhys not supply the equivalent information about her dark rival? It is not unprecedented for a writer to develop a fiction from another writer’s work. For example, T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) imagines that some of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians were transported to England, escaped captivity, and established a thriving colony in an abandoned English garden, where they are discovered by an English schoolgirl. Her intrusion into their world is a paradigm of British colonial paternalism, finally overcome by the intelligence and good feeling of the girl. This charming story depends on Swift’s fiction, but the relationship of White’s work to Swift’s is completely different from the relationship of Rhys’s work to Brontë’s. Rhys’s fiction permanently alters one’s understanding of Jane Eyre. Approaching Brontë’s work after Rhys’s, one is compelled to ask such questions as, “Why is Jane so uncritical of Rochester?” and, “How is Jane herself like the madwoman in the attic?” Rhys’s fiction reaches into the past and alters Brontë’s novel. Rhys’s approach in Wide Sargasso Sea was also influenced by Ford Madox Ford and, through Ford, Joseph Conrad. In the autumn of 1924, when Rhys first met Ford, he was writing Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. Some thirty years earlier, when Joseph Conrad was just beginning his career as a writer, his agent had introduced him to Ford in hopes that they could work in collaboration, since Conrad wrote English (a language he had adopted only as an adult) with great labor. Ford and Conrad produced The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903) as coauthors. During their years of association, Ford had some hand in the production of several works usually considered Conrad’s sole effort, although it has never been clear to what degree Ford participated in the creation of the fiction of Conrad’s middle period. About 1909, after Ford’s disreputable ways had become increasingly offensive to Conrad’s wife, the two men parted ways. Immediately after Conrad’s death in 1924, however, Ford rushed into print his memoir of the famous author. His memoir of Conrad is fictionalized and

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hardly to be trusted as an account of their association in the 1890’s, but it sheds a great deal of light on what Ford thought about writing fiction in 1924, when he was beginning his powerful Tietjens tetralogy and working for the first time with Rhys. Ford claimed that he and Conrad invented literary impressionism in English. Impressionist fiction characteristically employs limited and unreliable narration, follows a flow of associated ideas leaping freely in time and space, aims to render the impression of a scene vividly so as to make the reader see it as if it were before his eyes, and artfully selects and juxtaposes seemingly unrelated scenes and episodes so that the reader must construct the connections and relationships that make the story intelligible. These are the stylistic features of Rhys’s fiction, as well as of Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). An “affair”—the mainspring of the plot in an impressionist novel—is some shocking or puzzling event which has already occurred when the story begins. The reader knows what has happened, but he does not understand fully why and how it happened. The story proceeds in concentric rings of growing complication as the reader finds something he thought clear-cut becoming more and more intricate. In Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), the affair is the scandalous abandonment of the pilgrim ship by the English sailor. In The Good Soldier, it is the breakup of the central foursome, whose full infidelity and betrayal are revealed only gradually. Brontë’s Jane Eyre provided Rhys with an impressionist “affair” in the scene in which the mad West Indian wife burns Rochester’s house, blinding him and killing herself. Like Conrad’s Marlow, the storyteller who sits on the veranda mulling over Jim’s curious behavior, or The Good Soldier’s narrator Dowell musing about the strange behavior of Edward Ashburnham, Rhys takes up the affair of Rochester and reworks it into ever richer complications, making the initial judgments in Jane Eyre seem childishly oversimplified. “How can Jane simply register relief that the madwoman is burned out of her way? There must be more to the affair than that,” the secondary fiction suggests. One of the most important features of literary impressionism is the highly constructive activity which it demands of the reader. In a pointillist painting, small dots of primary colors are set side by side. At a certain distance from the canvas, these merge on the retina of the eye of the viewer into colors and shapes which are not, in fact, drawn on the canvas at all. The painting is constructed in the eyes of each viewer with greater luminosity than it would have were it drawn explicitly. In order to create such a shimmering haze in fiction, Ford advises the use of a limited point of view which gives the reader dislocated fragments of remembered experience. The reader must struggle constantly to fit these fragments into a coherent pattern. The tools for creating such a verbal collage are limited, “unreliable” narration, psychological time-shifts, and juxtaposition. Ford observes that two apparently unrelated events can be set side by side so that the reader will perceive their connection with far greater impact than if the author had stated such a connection openly. Ford advises the impressionist author to create a verbal collage by unexpected selection and juxtaposition, and Wide Sargasso Sea makes such juxtapositions on several levels. On the largest scale, Wide Sargasso Sea is juxtaposed with Jane Eyre, so that the two novels read together mean much more than when they are read independently. This increase of significance is what Ford called the “unearned increment” in impressionist art. Within Wide Sargasso Sea, part 1 (narrated by the West Indian bride) and part 2 (narrated by Rochester) likewise mean more in juxtaposition than when considered separately. Throughout the text, the flow of consciousness of the storytellers cunningly shifts in time to

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juxtapose details which mean more together than they would in isolation. Because Wide Sargasso Sea demands a highly constructive reader, it is, like The Good Soldier or Heart of Darkness, an open fiction. When the reader completes Jane Eyre, the mystery of Rochester’s house has been revealed and purged, the madwoman in the attic has been burned out, and Jane will live, the reader imagines, happily ever after. Jane Eyre taken in isolation is a closed fiction. Reading Wide Sargasso Sea in juxtaposition to Jane Eyre, however, opens the latter and poses questions which are more difficult to resolve: Is Jane likely to be the next woman in the attic? Why is a cripple a gratifying mate for Jane? At what price is her felicity purchased? The Doppelgänger, twin, or shadow-character runs throughout Rhys’s fiction. All of her characters seem to be split personalities. There is a public role, that of the approved “good girl,” which each is expected to play, and there is the repressed, rebellious “bad girl” lurking inside. If the bad girl can be hidden, the character is rewarded with money, love, and social position. Yet the bad girl will sometimes put in an appearance, when the character drinks too much or gets excited or angry. When the dark girl appears, punishment follows, swift and sure. This is the case with Marya Zelli in Quartet, Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark, and Sasha Jensen in Good Morning, Midnight. It is also the case in Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The education of Jane Eyre consists of repressing those dark, selfish impulses that Victorian society maintained “good little girls” should never feel. Jane succeeds in stamping out her “bad” self through a stiff British education, discipline, and self-control. She kills her repressed identity, conforms to society’s expectations, and gets her reward—a crippled husband and a burned-out house. Rhys revives the dark twin, shut up in the attic, the naughty, wild, dark, selfish, bestial female. She suggests that the struggle between repressed politeness and unrepressed self-interest is an ongoing process in which total repression means the death of a woman’s identity. Todd K. Bender Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927; Tigers Are Better-Looking, 1968; Sleep It Off, Lady, 1976; The Collected Short Stories, 1987. NONFICTION: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 1979; The Letters of Jean Rhys, 1984 (also known as Jean Rhys: Letters, 1931-1966). Bibliography Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. This biography grew out of Angier’s brief 1985 critical study of Rhys’s work. As it expanded into an account of her life, Angier felt obliged to jettison her chapters devoted to Rhys’s short stories. What survived is a book that is broken into four parts: “Life, 1890-1927,” “Work, 1928-1939,” “The Lost Years, 1939-1966,” and “The Lost Years, 1966-1979.” Angier’s lengthy book is a good introduction to the life, but it is—of necessity—a less than complete account of the work. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Discusses Rhys’s work in the context of the Left Bank literary community. Rhys knew the members of the community but stood outside it, and Benstock demonstrates that Rhys’s position as an outsider in life influenced her fiction. Harrison, Nancy R. Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Harrison is a feminist critic who argues that women

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tend to write, and respond to writing, in a different fashion from men. Women write in a way that invites the reader to join in the creation of the work; the author’s activity of writing is stressed, and the work is not offered as a finished product. Analyzes Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea along these lines. Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander, and David Malcolm. Jean Rhys: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. This book makes up for what Angier’s biography—and most critical assessments of Rhys—lacks. After a section devoted to their assessment of Rhys’s short fiction, the Malcolms provide a chapter on Rhys’s own views of herself, conveyed in excerpts from her letters and an interview, and conclude with a section that reprints a wide range of critical opinion about Rhys’s fiction. Staley, Thomas. Jean Rhys: A Critical Study. London: Macmillan, 1979. Probably most important for its first chapter, which gives an account of Rhys’s life. Rhys has not been the subject of a full-length biography, and Staley’s presentation of her life is the best available. Should be supplemented with Rhys’s Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, on which she was working at the time of her death in 1979.

Dorothy Richardson Dorothy Richardson

Born: Berkshire, England; May 17, 1873 Died: Beckenham, England; June 17, 1957 Principal long fiction · Pilgrimage, 1938, 1967 (includes Pointed Roofs, 1915); Backwater, 1916; Honeycomb, 1917; The Tunnel, 1919; Interim, 1919; Deadlock, 1921; Revolving Lights, 1923; The Trap, 1925; Oberland, 1927; Dawn’s Left Hand, 1931; Clear Horizon, 1935; Dimple Hill, 1938; March Moonlight, 1967. Other literary forms · Dorothy Richardson’s literary reputation rests on the single long novel Pilgrimage. She referred to the parts published under separate titles as “chapters,” and they were the primary focus of her energy throughout her creative life. The first appeared in 1915; the last, unfinished and unrevised, was printed ten years after her death. Before 1915, she wrote some essays and reviews for obscure periodicals edited by friends and also two books growing out of her interest in the Quakers. She contributed descriptive sketches on Sussex life to the Saturday Review between 1908 and 1914. During the years writing Pilgrimage, Richardson did an enormous amount of miscellaneous writing to earn money—columns and essays in the Dental Record (1912-1922), film criticism, translations, and articles on various subjects for periodicals including Vanity Fair, Adelphi, Little Review, and Fortnightly Review. She also wrote a few short stories, chiefly during the 1940’s. None of this material has been collected. A detailed bibliography is included in Dorothy Richardson: A Biography by Gloria G. Fromm (1977). Achievements · The term “stream of consciousness,” adapted from psychology, was first applied to literature in a 1918 review of Richardson’s Pointed Roofs, Backwater, and Honeycomb. In the twentieth century, novels moved from outward experience to inner reality. The experiments that marked the change were made almost simultaneously by three writers unaware of one another’s work: The first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past appeared in 1913; James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began serial publication in 1914; and the manuscript of Pointed Roofs was finished in 1913. Richardson was the first novelist in England to restrict the point of view entirely to the protagonist’s consciousness, to take for content the experience of life at the moment of perception, and to record the development of a single character’s mind and emotions without imposing any plot or structural pattern. Her place in literature (as opposed to literary history) has been less certain; some critics feel that her work is interesting only because it dates the emergence of a new technique. The absence of story and explanation make heavy demands on the reader. Since the protagonist’s own limited understanding controls every word of the narrative, readers must also do the work of evaluating the experience in order to create meaning. Richardson wrote what Virginia Woolf called “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender,” a sentence that expanded its limits and tampered with punctuation to convey the multiple nuances of a single moment. She deliberately rejected the description of events, which she thought was typical of male literature, in order to 769

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convey the subjective understanding that she believed was the reality of experience. The autobiographical basis of Pilgrimage was not known until 1963. Richardson, like her protagonist and like other women of her period, broke with the conventions of the past, sought to create her own being through self-awareness, and struggled to invent a form that would communicate a woman’s expanding conscious life. Biography · Dorothy Miller Richardson, born on May 17, 1873, was the third of four daughters. Her father, Charles Richardson, worked in the prosperous grocery business that his father had established, but he wanted to be a gentleman. He abandoned Nonconformity for the Church of England and, in 1874, sold the family business to live on investments. During Dorothy’s childhood, periods of upper-middle-class luxury (a large house, servants, gardens, membership in a tennis club) alternated with moves arising from temporarily reduced circumstances. Charles Richardson had hoped for a son, and he took Dorothy with him to lectures in Oxford and meetings of scientific associations. She was sent at age eleven to a private day school for the daughters of gentlemen. It was late enough in the century for the curriculum to emphasize academic subjects; her studies included logic and psychology. In 1890, realizing that her family’s financial condition had become seriously straitened, Dorothy looked to the example of Charlotte Brontë and Villette (1853) and applied for a post as pupil-teacher in a German school. Six months in Hanover were followed by two years teaching in a North London private school and a brief spell as governess for a wealthy suburban family. By the end of 1893, Charles Richardson was declared bankrupt; in 1895, two of Dorothy’s sisters married. Her mother, Mary Richardson, was troubled by an unusually severe bout of the depression that had gripped her for several years. Dorothy took her mother to stay in lodgings near the sea and found that she required almost constant companionship and supervision. On November 30, 1895, while her daughter was out for a short walk in the fresh air, Mary Richardson committed suicide. At the age of twenty-two, responsible for her own support and severely shaken by the past two years’ events, Richardson moved to an attic room in a London lodging house and took a job as secretary and assistant to three Harley Street dentists. For young women at that time, such a step was unusual; by taking it Richardson evaded the restraint, protection, and religious supervision that made teaching an acceptable profession for young women of good family. The nineteenth century was drawing to a close and London was alive with new ideas. Richardson explored the city, made friends with women who worked in business offices, and lived on eggs and toast so that she could afford concert tickets. Soon after moving to London, she was invited for a Saturday in the country by an old school friend, Amy Catherine Robbins, who had married her science instructor at London University—a man named H. G. Wells. He had just published The Time Machine (1895). Richardson was fascinated by Wells and by the people and ideas she encountered at his house but angered by his way of telling her what to do. She was aware that she stood outside the class system and between the Victorian and modern worlds. She was drawn both to picnics with cousins at Cambridge and to Anarchist and Fabian meetings. She sampled various churches, including Unitarian and Quaker, but refrained from committing herself to any group or cause. In 1902, Richardson began contributing occasional articles and reviews to Crank and other magazines edited by a vegetarian friend. She refused a proposal from a respectable physician and broke her engagement to a Russian Jew, Benjamin Grad.

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Her friendship with Wells passed at some point into physical intimacy, but she continued to struggle against being overwhelmed by his ideas and personality. In 1906, finding herself pregnant, she brought the affair to an end; she looked forward to rearing the child on her own and was distressed when she suffered a miscarriage. Exhausted physically and mentally, Richardson left her dental job and went to Sussex to recover and think. In 1908, she began writing sketches for the Saturday Review. Then, as her fortieth year approached, she began deliberately searching for the form that would allow her to create what she called “a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.” Pointed Roofs was at first rejected by publishers. When it was published in 1915 it puzzled readers, distressed some reviewers, and failed to make money. Richardson persisted, however, on the course she had set, even while living an unsettled life in YWCA hostels and borrowed rooms and earning a minimal income by proofreading and by writing a monthly column for the Dental Record. In 1917, she married the artist Alan Odle, who was fifteen years younger than she and had been rejected for military service by a doctor who told him he had six months to live. Richardson’s books attracted some critical recognition in the years after World War I, but they never earned money; she was usually in debt to her publishers. She supported herself and Odle (who lived until 1948) and also coped with all the practical details of their life—housekeeping, paying taxes, writing checks, doing his business with publishers and exhibitors. The couple moved frequently, spending the off-season (when lodgings were less expensive) in Cornwall and going to rooms in London for the summer. During the early 1930’s, Richardson took on the burden of five fulllength translations from French and German. Returning to Pilgrimage and the state of mind in which it was begun became increasingly difficult for Richardson; the later volumes were weakened by extraliterary distractions and also by the psychological difficulty for the author in concluding the work that was based on her own life. The final segment, March Moonlight, was found unfinished among her papers after she died on June 17, 1957, at the age of eighty-four. Analysis · Pilgrimage is a quest; the protagonist, Miriam Henderson, seeks her self and, rejecting the old guideposts, makes her own path through life. The book remains a problem for many readers, although since 1915 most of Dorothy Richardson’s technical devices have become familiar: unannounced transitions from third-person narration to the first person for interior monologue, shifts between present and past as experience evokes memory, disconnected phrases and images and fragmentary impressions representing the continuous nonverbal operations of the mind. Looking back on the period when she was trying to find a way to embody Miriam Henderson’s experience, Richardson described her breakthrough as the realization that no one was “there to describe her.” Impressed by Henry James’s control of viewpoint, she went one step further. The narrator and the protagonist merge; the narrator knows, perceives, and expresses only what comes to Miriam’s consciousness. Furthermore, the narrator does not speak to any imagined reader and therefore does not provide helpful explanations. The scenes and people are presented as they impinge on Miriam’s awareness—thus the most familiar circumstances are likely to be undescribed and the most important people identified only by name, without the phrases that would place them or reveal their relationship to Miriam. Many readers are discouraged by the attempt to follow the book and make meaning of it; some are tempted to use Richardson’s biography to find out what “really” happened and others prefer to read

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isolated sections without regard to sequence, responding to the feeling and imagery as if it were poetry. Because there is no narrative guidance, meaning is continually modified by the reader’s own consciousness and by the extent of identification. The Miriam Henderson novels · The first three titles show Miriam Henderson in the last stages of her girlhood and form the prelude to her London life. Pointed Roofs covers her experience in Hanover; in Backwater, she is resident teacher in a North London school and still drawn to the possibility of romance with a young man from her suburban circle; in Honeycomb, she briefly holds a post as governess before her sisters’ weddings and her mother’s death complete the disintegration of her girlhood family. The Tunnel begins Miriam’s years in London and introduces situations and characters that reappear in the next several volumes: the dental job, the room at Mrs. Bailey’s lodging house, the new women Mag and Jan and the dependent woman Eleanor Dear, a visit to her school friend Alma who has married the writer Hypo Wilson. In Interim, Miriam perceives the difficulty of communicating her current thoughts and experiences to her sister and other old friends. Deadlock treats her acquaintance—growing into an engagement—with Michael Shatov. In Revolving Lights, she has decided not to marry Shatov and becomes increasingly involved with Hypo Wilson. The Trap shows her sharing a cramped flat with a spinster social worker and growing despondent about the isolation which, she realizes, she imposes on herself to avoid emotional entanglements. Oberland is a lyrical interlude about a holiday in Switzerland. In Dawn’s Left Hand, Miriam has an affair with Hypo Wilson and an intense friendship with a young woman (Amabel) who becomes a radical suffragist. Clear Horizon concludes much of the practical and emotional business that has occupied Miriam for several years; she disentangles herself from Wilson, Shatov, and Amabel and prepares to leave London. In Dimple Hill, she lives on a farm owned by a Quaker family, absorbs their calm, and works at writing. March Moonlight rather hastily takes Miriam up to the point of meeting the artist who would become her husband and to the beginning of her work on a novel. This summary of events is the barest framework. Life, for Miriam Henderson, exists not in events but in the responses that create her sense of awareness. The books are made up of relatively independent sections, each treating a single segment of experience or reflection. Because of the depth with which single moments are recorded, the overall narrative line is fragmentary. Despite Pilgrimage’s length, it embodies isolated spots of time. Frequently, neither narration nor the memories evoked by subsequent experience indicate what events may have taken place in the gaps between. Furthermore, the book concentrates on those moments important to Miriam’s interior experience, and it leaves out the times when she acts without self-awareness— which may include significant actions that take place when Miriam is so engrossed by events that she does not engage in thought or reflection. Richardson disliked the phrase “stream of consciousness” because it implies constant movement and change. She preferred the image of a pool—new impressions are added, and sometimes create ripples that spread over the previously accumulated consciousness. Thus, Miriam’s interior monologue becomes steadily more complex as she grows older. Her consciousness widens and deepens; fragmentary phrases show her making connections with her earlier experiences and perceptions; her understanding of past events alters with later awareness. The earlier volumes have more sensory impression and direct emotion; later, as Miriam grows more self-aware, she has greater verbal skill and is more likely to analyze her responses. Because of her

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more sophisticated self-awareness, however, she also grows adept, in the later volumes, at suppressing impressions or fragments of self-knowledge that she does not want to admit to consciousness. In many ways, Miriam is not likable—readers are sometimes put off by the need to share her mind for two thousand pages. In the early books, she is a self-preoccupied, narrow-minded adolescent, oppressively conscious of people’s appearance and social class, annoyingly absorbed in wondering what they think about her, defensively judgmental. The wild swings in mood and the ebb and flow of her energies during the day appear to have little cause and to be unworthy of the attention she gives them. Most people, however, would appear unpleasantly selfish if their minds were open for inspection. Miriam creates her self by deliberate consciousness. The danger is that she tends to withdraw from experience in order to contemplate feeling. Pilgrimage · The events of Pilgrimage span the decades at the turn of the century but, because of the interior focus, there is relatively little physical detail or explicit social history to create an objective picture of the era. Women’s developing self-awareness, however, must be seen as one of the period’s significant events. Miriam reflects the mental life of her times in her range of responses to religion, the books she reads, and the people, ideas, and movements she encounters. A good deal of life’s texture and even its choices take place at levels that are not verbalized. Richardson’s first publisher described her work as “female imagism.” Miriam responds particularly and constantly to the quality of light. Readers are also aware of her reaction to places, objects, and physical surroundings; ultimately, it is through mastering the emotional content of this response that she is able to discover what she needs to have in her life. Another continuing thread is created by Miriam’s thoughts about men, about men and women together, and about the roles of women in society. Her basic animosity toward men gives shape to a series of statements on their personal, emotional, social, and intellectual peculiarities that falls just short of a formal feminist analysis. Each possible romance, each rejected or forestalled proposal amounts to a choice of a way of life. The matter is, however, complicated by Miriam’s sexual reticence. Even though she can talk about free love, she is not conscious—or perhaps will not permit herself to become conscious—of overt sexual urges or of physical attraction to men or to women. She struggles not to let her feeling for certain women lead her to be absorbed by their lives or roles. In Backwater, Miss Perne’s religion is dangerously comfortable; Eleanor Dear’s passive feminine helplessness forces Miriam to become her protector; Amabel’s possessiveness is as stifling as Hypo Wilson’s. At the end—in March Moonlight—there is a hint of emotional involvement with the unidentified “Jane.” Struggling to know herself, Miriam is constantly faced with the problem of knowing other women. Pointed Roofs · Pointed Roofs comes close to being a structural whole—it begins with Miriam Henderson’s journey to Hanover and ends with her return home six months later. She is on her first trip away from home, looking at new scenes, anxious about her ability to do her job and earn her wages, having her first taste of independence. Since Miriam is seventeen—and, as a Victorian daughter, a relatively innocent and sheltered seventeen—the reader often understands more than Miriam does and can interpret the incidents that develop her sense of who she is and where she fits in the world. Some of Miriam’s reactions are cast in the form of mental letters home or

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imaginary conversations with her sisters, which provide a structured way to verbalize mental processes. Miriam pays attention to the sights and sounds and smells of Hanover because they are new, giving readers a sense of the physical setting absent in many of the later books. Miriam’s moods are typically adolescent. An incident or object can set off a homesick reverie or a bout of self-recrimination; the sound of music or the sight of rain on paving stones can create an inexpressible transport of joy. She is alternately rebellious and anxious for approval; she is glad to learn that her French roommate is Protestant (because she could not bear living with a Catholic), proud of the skill in logic that allows her to criticize the premises of a sermon, moved by the sound of hymns in German. She worries about her plainness, her intellectual deficiencies, her inability to get close to people. Observing class and cultural differences lets her begin to understand that she has unthinkingly absorbed many of her tastes and ideas; she starts to grow more deliberate. This portrait of Miriam at seventeen—which forms the essential background for the rest of Pilgrimage—is also interesting for its own sake. Because the narrative is limited to Miriam’s consciousness, the reader is able to supply interpretation. In one key scene, the middle-aged Pastor Lahmann, chaplain to the school, quotes a verse describing his ambition for “A little land, well-tilled,/ A little wife, well-willed” and then asks Miriam to take off her glasses so that he can see how nearsighted her eyes really are. Miriam, who is both furious at being “regarded as one of a world of little tame things to be summoned by little men to be well-willed wives” and warmed by the personal attention that makes her forget, for a moment, that she is a governess, is oblivious to the sexual implications of Pastor Lahmann’s behavior, and cannot understand why the headmistress is angry when she walks in upon the scene. Although Miriam’s consciousness will develop in subsequent volumes, her combination of receptivity to male attention, anger at male assumptions, and blindness to sexual nuance will remain. Deadlock · Deadlock contains a greater proportion of direct internal monologue than the earlier books. Miriam has grown more articulate; she interprets her emotional states and examines the premises underlying her conflicts. During her first years in London, she had cherished the city for the independence it gave her. By such acts as smoking, eating alone in restaurants, and dressing without regard to fashion, she deliberately rejected Victorian womanhood. In Honeycomb, she refused a marriage that would have satisfied her craving for luxuries because she could not accept a subordinate role. In Deadlock, Miriam is faced by the loneliness that seems inextricably linked to independence. Her work has become drudgery because she no longer has the sense of a social relationship with her employer. A Christmas visit to her married sister reveals the distance that has grown between them; Miriam had not even realized that Harriet’s marriage was unhappy. Deadlock is shaped by the course of Miriam’s relationship with Michael Shatov. The romance forces her conflicts to the surface. Shatov is a young Jew recently arrived from Russia; a lodger at Mrs. Bailey’s arranges for Miriam to tutor him in English. As she shows Shatov London, tired scenes recapture their original freshness. Miriam is excited by her ability to formulate ideas when she argues about philosophy or works on a translation. Yet, although Miriam is buoyed by the joy of sharing her thoughts with another person, Shatov’s continual presence comes between her and the life that was her own. Her love has a maternal quality: Though Shatov is only three years younger than Miriam, he is a foreigner and also, Miriam finds, rather impractical; she

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feels protective. She is also sexually reticent: Because she has despised traditional femininity, she does not know how to behave as the object of a courtship. The romance ends when Miriam deliberately engages Shatov in an argument that reveals his views of woman’s limited nature. (The final scene restates the problem more concretely when Miriam visits an Englishwoman married to a Jewish man.) Beneath these specific difficulties lies the friction between Miriam’s individualism and Shatov’s tendency to see problems in the abstract—she talks about herself, he dwells on the future of the race. For Richardson, the conflict reflects the irreconcilable difference between masculine objectivity (or materialism) and feminine subjectivity. The images of darkness accumulate as Miriam realizes the extent of her deadlock; unable to be a woman in the sense that men see women, she seems to have no path out of loneliness and alienation. Dawn’s Left Hand · Dawn’s Left Hand is a prelude to the deliberate detachment and observation that would turn Miriam into a writer. Oberland (the preceding book) vibrates with the sensory detail of a two-week holiday in Switzerland that makes London complications seem far away; returning, Miriam sees people objectively even when she is with them. The transitions between third-person narrative and internal monologue are less noticeable; Miriam and the narrator have virtually merged. The visual content of scenes reveals their meaning. Miriam looks at pictorial relationships and examines gesture and tone for the nonverbal communications that, to women, are often more meaningful than words. (During the years that she worked on Dawn’s Left Hand, Richardson wrote regularly about films—which were still silent—for the magazine Close Up.) Images of light carry emotional and symbolic content throughout Pilgrimage. When Miriam visits Densley’s medical office early in Dawn’s Left Hand, the drawn shades are keeping out the light; she refuses his proposal—one last offer of conventional marriage—with a momentary wistfulness that is immediately replaced by a great sense of relief. She is increasingly aware of herself as an actor in the scenes of her life. Self-observation allows physical compositions to reveal power relationships: When Hypo Wilson comes into Miriam’s room, she notices that he stands over her like a doctor, and when he embarks on a program of seduction to the music of Richard Wagner, she disputes his control by rearranging the chairs. On another occasion, in a hotel room, Miriam looks in the mirror to observe herself and Wilson. Her own position blocks the light and thus the scene is chilled even before she begins to see him as a pathetic naked male. During the final stages of the Wilson affair, Miriam is increasingly preoccupied by a beautiful young woman—soon to be a radical suffragist—who pursues her ardently and pays homage to her as a woman in ways that bring home to Miriam the impossibility of real communion with men. Yet the deep commitment demanded by Amabel is frightening; her intense adoration forces Miriam into a role that threatens her independence more crucially than Hypo Wilson’s overt attempts at domination. The advantage of being with people who interact only on superficial levels, Miriam realizes, is that she can retain her freedom. March Moonlight · Although Richardson struggled to bring the events in March Moonlight up to 1912, the year that she began writing Pilgrimage, her form and subject virtually required the book to remain unconcluded. The narrative techniques of March Moonlight grow more deliberate; when Miriam begins to write, she thinks and sees

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differently and is aware of selecting and arranging details. Thus, the book’s ending is only a middle: Miriam’s sense of self would inevitably change as she reexamined and re-created her experiences in order to write novels. Once traditional formulas are rejected and being itself becomes the subject, there can be no ending; there is no epiphany, no coming of age, no final truth but rather a continuous process of self-making through self-awareness. Sally Mitchell Other major works NONFICTION: The Quakers Past and Present, 1914; Gleanings from the Works of George Fox, 1914; John Austen and the Inseparables, 1930. Bibliography Bluemel, Kristin. Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s “Pilgrimage.” Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. The first chapter assesses Richardson and previous studies of her. Subsequent chapters explore Richardson’s handling of gender, problems of the body, and science, and the author’s quest for an ending to her long work. Includes notes and bibliography. Fromm, Gloria G. Dorothy Richardson: A Biography. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1977. An objective biography, including previously inaccessible details, which could provide invaluable data to the literary analyst. Carefully draws distinctions between the events of Richardson’s life and those of her fictional characters, but also identifies clear correlations between the two. Extensively researched and well written and supplemented by illustrations, chapter endnotes, a comprehensive bibliography, and an index. Gevirtz, Susan. Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. A probing discussion of Richardson’s aesthetic. This is a challenging study for advanced students. Pilgrimage receives detailed discussion throughout the book. Includes extensive bibliography not only on Richardson but also on feminist theory, literary and cultural theory, poetics and phenomenology, theology and spirituality, travel and travel theories, and narrative. Radford, Jean. Dorothy Richardson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. An excellent introductory study, with chapters on reading in Pilgrimage, the author’s quest for form, London as a space for women, and Richardson as a feminist writer. Includes notes and bibliography. Rosenberg, John. Dorothy Richardson, the Genius They Forgot: A Critical Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. The strength of Rosenberg’s biography lies in his scholarly credibility, as he aptly parallels events in Pilgrimage to Richardson’s life. His concluding analysis of Richardson’s pioneering impact upon the development of the novel, however, lacks the impact of his earlier writing. Contains both an index and an ample bibliography.

Samuel Richardson Samuel Richardson

Born: Derbyshire, England; July 31 (?), 1689 Died: London, England; July 4, 1761 Principal long fiction · Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, 1740-1741; Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady, 1747-1748; Sir Charles Grandison, 1753-1754. Other literary forms · In addition to the three novels on which his fame and reputation rest, Samuel Richardson’s best-known work is a collection of fictitious letters which constitutes a kind of eighteenth century book of etiquette, social behavior, manners, and mores: Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions (1741), customarily referred to as Familiar Letters. It had been preceded, in 1733, by a handbook of instruction concerning the relationship between apprentices and master printers, which grew out of a letter Richardson had written to a nephew in 1731, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum: Or, Young Man’s Pocket Companion (1733). Throughout his life, Richardson, like so many of his contemporaries, was a prolific letter-writer; notable selections of his correspondence include six volumes edited by his contemporary and early biographer, Anna L. Barbauld, the first of which was published in 1804, and his correspondence with Johannes Stinstra, the Dutch translator of his novels to whom Richardson had sent a considerably important amount of autobiographical material. Of only minor interest is Richardson’s A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, published anonymously in 1755, a series of excerpts emphasizing his conviction that “instruction was a more important obligation to the novelist than entertainment.” Achievements · Perhaps Richardson’s most important contribution to the development of the novel was his concern for the nonexceptional problems of daily conduct, the relationships between men and women, and the specific class-and-caste distinctions of mid-eighteenth century England. He sought and found his material from life as he had observed and reflected upon it from childhood and youth as a member of the working class in a highly socially conscious society to his position as an increasingly successful and prosperous printer and publisher. He contemplated this material with passionate interest and recorded it with a kind of genius for verisimilitude that sets him apart from most of his predecessors. What one critic has called Richardson’s “almost rabid concern for the details” of daily life and his continuing “enrichment and complication” of customary human relationship account in large measure for his enormous contemporary popularity: In Pamela, for example, the relationships between Pamela and Squire B. are so persistently grounded in the minutiae of ordinary life as to create a sense of reality seldom achieved in prose fiction prior to Richardson; at the same time, the outcome of the emotional and physical tugs-of-war between the two main characters and the happy outcome of all the intrigue, sensationalism, and hugger-mugger have about them the quality of conventional romantic love. Richardson learned to know his characters, so intimately, so thoroughly, as to triumph over his prolixity, repetitiveness, moralizing, and sentimentality. Equally 777

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important was his development of the epistolary novel. Other writers had used letters as a storytelling device, but few if any of Richardson’s predecessors had approximated his skill in recording the external events and incidents of a narrative along with the intimate and instant revelation of a character’s thought and emotions in the process of their taking place, a method so flowing, so fluid, so flexible, as almost to anticipate the modern technique of stream of consciousness. Richardson’s works, along with those of his three great contemporaries—Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne—prepared the way for the great achievements of the nineteenth century English novel. Biography · The exact date of Samuel Richardson’s birth is uncertain, but he was born in Derbyshire, probably on July 31, 1689. His father was a joiner and, according to Richardson, a “good draughtsman” who “understood architecture” and whose ancestors had included several generations of small farmers in Surrey; of his mother, the second wife of Richardson père, little is known. The family returned to London, where Richardson may have attended the Merchant Taylor’s School in 1701 and 1702, at which time his formal education ended. In 1706, he was apprenticed to the Stationers’ Company, and in 1715, he became a “freeman” of the Company. He married his former employer’s daughter, Martha Wilde, in November 23, 1721, set up his own business as a printer, was admitted to the Stationers’ Company in 1722, and soon became what his major biographers—T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel—term a “prosperous and respected” tradesman. Six children, none of whom survived infancy or early childhood, preceded their mother’s death in January, 1731. Two years later, on February 3, 1733, Richardson remarried, this time to Elizabeth Leake, also the daughter of a printer; four of their six children survived. Richardson’s career as an editor continued to prosper—among other distinctions, he was eventually awarded the lucrative contract to print the journals of the House of Commons—and by the mid-1730’s, he had moved into a large house in Salisbury Court, where the family would live for the next two decades and where he would write the three novels on which his reputation rests. For some time, two of Richardson’s “particular friends,” both of them London booksellers, had been urging him to compile a “little book . . . of familiar letters on the useful concerns of common life.” An almost compulsive letter-writer since early childhood—before he was eleven he had written to an elderly widow, reprimanding her for her “uncharitable conduct”—Richardson began the undertaking, one letter of which was an actual account he had heard some years before, the story of a virtuous servant who eventually married her master. The recollection of the incident stimulated his imagination, and so, at the age of fifty, he temporarily abandoned the letters project. In two months, writing as much as three thousand words a day, he completed the novel that, on November 6, 1739, without the author’s name on the title page, was to explode upon the English scene: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a beautiful Young Damsel, to her Parents. Now first published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes. A Narrative which has its Foundation in Truth and Nature; and at the same time that it agreeably entertains, by a Variety of Curious and affecting Incidents, is entirely divested of all those Images, which, in too many Pieces calculated for Amusement only, tend to inflame the Minds they should instruct. Pamela was an instant success, going through five editions in less than a year and inspiring numerous burlesques, imitations, and parodies, including An Apology for the

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Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741, probably the work of Henry Fielding and the only parody of interest today) and serving as the impetus for Fielding’s The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742). Pamela was also dramatized in several forms and translated into German, French, and Dutch; its success, for the worse rather than the better, led Richardson to write a sequel, centering on his heroine’s life after her marriage. Meanwhile, Richardson continued to combine the roles of successful and prosperous businessman and author. Exactly when he began the novel which was to be his

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masterpiece is uncertain—one of his biographers thinks he was considering it as early as 1741—but he had the concept of Clarissa “well in mind” before 1744, began the actual writing in the spring or summer of that year, and by November was ready to send parts of the manuscript to his old friend Aaron Hill. Unlike Pamela, Clarissa did not have its origins in “real life”; Clarissa and Miss Howe, Richardson insisted, were “entirely creatures of his fantasy.” The novel, almost a million words in length, was three years in the writing, including two “thorough” revisions, and published in seven volumes between December 1, 1747, and December 7, 1748; a subsequent eight-volume edition, “with Letters & passages restored from the original manuscript,” was published between 1749 and 1751. Though Clarissa was somewhat less controversial than Pamela, its reception was tumultuous; among other things, the author was accused of indecency because of the dramatic fire scene, and Richardson took the charges seriously enough to write an eleven-page pamphlet defending it. Sarah Fielding wrote what has been called an “ambitious defense” of the novel, and her brother Henry, whose masterpiece The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was published soon after the last volumes of Clarissa in 1749, lavishly praised Richardson’s work, although Richardson’s dislike of what he considered Fielding’s improprieties, along with the opening sections of Joseph Andrews and Fielding’s possible authorship of Shamela, made any friendship between the two impossible (indeed, their relationship—or, more accurately, the lack of it—reflects little credit on Richardson). One of Richardson’s closest friends, Lady Bradshaigh, had written him soon after publication of the fourth volume of Clarissa, entreating him not to let his heroine die, and subsequently urged him to write a “novel about a Good Man.” How much this influenced Richardson, if at all, is purely conjectural, but early in 1750, he had begun what was to be his last novel. Despite his stated intention not to publish this “new work,” the first six volumes of Sir Charles Grandison were published late in 1753 (November 13 and December 11), and the concluding volume on March 14, 1754. As had been the case with Pamela and Clarissa, Dutch, German, and French translations soon followed. In his preface to Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson, in his guise as the “editor” of the manuscript, announced that after this third novel he would write no more. He had, however, been in the process of compiling a series of selections from his novels which was published in March, 1755, as A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. He continued to be active as a printer and to make minor revisions in his novels, particularly Pamela, but his “dislike to the pen” continued. During his last years, he devoted more and more time to his correspondence—since the early 1740’s, he had kept copies of all or most of his letters—apparently with the idea of eventual publication. On June 28, 1761, he suffered a stroke that resulted in his death a few days later on July 4, 1761. Analysis · “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.” Samuel Johnson’s comment is only partly relevant. As James E. Evans states in his introduction to Samuel Richardson’s series of excerpts, the revival of Richardson’s reputation in recent decades grows out of the assertion that he “remains a great writer in spite of his morality” and must be read “‘for the story’ (psychological realism and conscious artistry), because we no longer read ‘for the sentiment.’”

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Richardson himself stated quite clearly, in his prefaces to Pamela and Clarissa, and in his letters, that his purpose as an author was to depict “real life” and “in a manner probable, natural, and lively.” At the same time, however, he wanted his books to be thought of as instruments of manners and morals intended to “teach great virtues.” Fiction, he insisted, should be useful and instructive; it should edify readers of all ages, but particularly should be relevant and appealing to youth. Richardson observed with passionate interest and recorded with a genius for infinite detail the relationships between men and women, the concerns of daily life, and the particular class and caste distinctions of mid-eighteenth century England. This intense interest in the usual sets him apart from such predecessors as Daniel Defoe or the seventeenth century writers of prose romances. In all of his novels, and particularly, perhaps, in Pamela, the relationship between his main characters has about it the quality of traditional romantic love; at the same time, the novels are so realistically grounded in the accumulation of a mass of day-to-day realistic details as to create a remarkable sense of authenticity. Characteristic of this creation of the illusion of real life is the account, possibly apocryphal, of Pamela’s being read aloud by the local blacksmith to a small group of the village’s inhabitants on the village green; finally, when Pamela’s triumph by her marriage to Squire B. was assured, the villagers indulged in a spree of thanksgiving and merrymaking; it was their Pamela who had conquered. Richardson, then, was both a conscious, self-avowed realist, and also an equally conscious, self-avowed teacher and moralist. This dualism permeates all three of his novels and is perhaps most apparent—and transparent—in Pamela. It is, indeed, Richardson’s hallmark, and is the source both of his strength and weakness as a novelist. Pamela · Reduced to its simplest terms, the “story” or “plot” of the first volume of Pamela is too well known to warrant more than the briefest summary. The heroine, a young servant girl, is pursued by her master, Squire B., but maintains her virginity in spite of his repeated and ingenious efforts, until the would-be seducer, driven to desperation, marries her. Thus is Pamela’s virtue rewarded. The continuation of the novel in volume 2, a decided letdown, is virtually plotless, highly repetitive, and highlighted only by Squire B.’s excursion into infidelity. Volumes 3 and 4, written partly because of Richardson’s indignation with the various parodies of the first volume of Pamela, have even less to recommend them. Labeled as “virtually unreadable” by one modern commentator, even Richardson’s most understanding criticbiographers, T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, have dismissed them as “Richardson at his worst, pompous, proper, proud of himself, and above all dull.” Despite his frequent excursions into bathos and sentimentality, when he is not indulging in sermonizings on ethics and morality, the Richardson of the first volume of Pamela writes vigorously, effectively, and with keen insight and intimate understanding of his characters. Pamela contains many powerful scenes that linger long in the reader’s memory: the intended rape scene, the sequence in which Pamela considers suicide, even parts of the marriage scene (preceded by some prodigious feats of letter-writing to her parents on the day prior to the wedding, from six o’clock in the morning, half an hour past eight o’clock, near three o’clock [ten pages], eight o’clock at night, until eleven o’clock the same night and following the marriage) are the work of a powerful writer with a keen sense for the dramatic. In the final analysis, however, the novel succeeds or fails because of its characters, particularly and inevitably that of Pamela herself. From the opening letter in which she informs her parents that her mistress has died and Squire B., her mistress’s son,

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has appeared on the scene, to the long sequence of her journal entries, until her final victory when her would-be seducer, worn out and defeated in all his attempts to have her without marriage, capitulates and makes the “thrice-happy” Pamela his wife, she dominates the novel. In effect, and seemingly quite beyond Richardson’s conscious intent, Pamela is two quite different characters. On one hand, she is the attractive and convincing young girl who informs her parents that her recently deceased mistress had left her three pairs of shoes that fit her perfectly, adding that “my lady had a very little foot”; or having been transferred to Squire B.’s Lincolnshire estate, laments that she lacks “the courage to stay, neither can I think to go.” On the other hand, she is at times a rather unconvincing puppet who thinks and talks in pious platitudes and values her “honesty” as a very valuable commodity, a character—in Joseph Wood Krutch’s words—“so devoid of any delicacy of feeling as to be inevitably indecent.” Squire B. is less interesting than Pamela, and his efforts to seduce Pamela tend to become either boring or amusing. Her father, the Old Gaffer, who would disown his daughter “were she not honest,” similarly frequently verges upon caricature, although one distinguished historian of the English novel finds him extremely convincing; and Lady Davers, Squire B.’s arrogant sister, tends to be more unbelievable than convincing, as do Pamela’s captors, the odious Mrs. Jewkes and the equally repulsive Colbrand. In spite of its shortcomings, Pamela cannot be dismissed, as one critic has commented, as “only a record of a peculiarly loathsome aspect of bourgeois morality.” Pamela has great moments, scenes, and characters that pass the ultimate test of a work of fiction, that of memorableness: scenes that remain in the reader’s consciousness long after many of the events have become blurred or dimmed. It is equally important historically: Among other things, its popularity helped prepare the way for better novelists and better novels, including what Arnold Bennett was to call the “greatest realistic novel in the world,” Richardson’s Clarissa. Clarissa · Unlike Pamela, Clarissa did not have its origins in “real life”; his characters, Richardson insisted, were “entirely creatures of his fantasy.” He commenced the novel in the spring or summer of 1744; it was three years in the making, two of which were primarily devoted to revision (it has been said that when his old friend Aaron Hill misread Clarissa, Richardson devoted a year to revising the text for publication). Almost a million words in length, the plot of Clarissa is relatively simple. Clarissa Harlowe, daughter of well-to-do, middle-class parents with social aspirations, is urged by her family to marry a man, Solmes, whom she finds repulsive. At the same time, her sister Arabella is being courted by an aristocrat, Robert Lovelace. Lovelace, attracted and fascinated by Clarissa, abandons his lukewarm courtship of Arabella and, after wounding the girl’s brother in a duel, turns his attention to Clarissa, in spite of her family’s objections. Clarissa lets herself be persuaded; she goes off with Lovelace, who imprisons her in a brothel, where he eventually drugs and rapes her; she finally escapes, refuses the contrite Lovelace’s offers of marriage, and eventually dies. Lovelace, repentant and haunted by his evil act, is killed in a duel by Clarissa’s cousin, Colonel Morden. Counterpointing and contrasting with these two major characters are Anna Howe, Clarissa’s closest friend and confidante, and John Belford, Lovelace’s closest friend. Around these four are a number of contrasting minor characters, each of whom contributes to the minutely recorded series of events and climaxes, events which in

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their barest forms verge upon melodrama, and at times even farce. Even so, the novel in its totality is greater than the sum of its parts: It has about it the ultimate power of Greek tragedy, and Clarissa herself, like the major characters of Greek drama, rises above the occasionally melodramatic or improbable sequences to attain a stature not seen in English prose fiction before, and seldom surpassed since. Much of the power and the drama of Clarissa grows out of the author’s effective use of contrast—between Clarissa and Anna Howe; between Lovelace and Belford; and between the country life of the upper middle class and the dark, rank side of urban England. This and the richness and variety of incident redeem the sometimes improbable events and lapses into didacticism and give the novel a sense of reality larger than life itself. In the final analysis, the great strength of the novel is the creation of its two main characters. Clarissa, with her pride and self-reliance, “so secure in her virtue,” whose feelings of shame and self-hatred are such that she begs Lovelace “to send her to Bedlam or a private madhouse” (no less a master than Henry Fielding praised Clarissa’s letter after the rape as “beyond anything I had ever read”), could have degenerated into bathos or caricature but instead attains a level of intensity and reality unique in the novel prior to 1740. Though Clarissa dominates the novel, Richardson is almost as successful with Lovelace, despite the fact that in the early portions of the novel he seems for the most part like Squire B., just another Restoration rake. His transformation, following his violation of Clarissa, grows and deepens: “One day, I fancy,” he reflects, “I shall hate myself on recollecting what I am about at this instant. But I must stay till then. We must all of us have something to repent of.” Repent he does, after his terse letter announcing the consummation of the rape: “And now, Belford, I can go no further. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.” Belford, like the reader, is horror-stricken. By the rape, Lovelace has acted not as a man, but as an animal, and his expiation is, in its own way, much more terrible than that of Clarissa, who at times somewhat complacently contemplates her own innocence and eventual heavenly reward. Lovelace remains a haunted man (“sick of myself! sick of my remembrance of my vile act!”) until his death in a duel with Colonel Morden, a death which is really a kind of suicide. The final scene of the novel, and Lovelace’s last words, “Let this Expiate!,” are among the most memorable of the entire novel, and Richardson’s portrayal of a character soiled and tarnished, an eternally damaged soul, is unforgettable. Sir Charles Grandison · As early as February, 1741, an anonymous correspondent had asked Richardson to write the “history of a Man, whose Life would be the path that we should follow.” By the end of the decade, with Pamela and Clarissa behind him, and influenced by old friends, including Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson began thinking seriously about such a novel. Despite increasing ill health and the continuing demands of his business, he was soon immersed in the project, a novel designed to “present” the character of a “Good Man,” and to show the influence such a character exerted “on society in general and his intimates in particular.” Although he had at one time decided not to publish the novel during his lifetime, the first volumes of Sir Charles Grandison came out in 1753. Even before the seventh and last volume was in print the following year, some critics were stating their dissatisfaction with Sir Charles’s “Unbelievable Perfection,” a criticism Richardson repudiated in a concluding note to the last volume: “The Editor (that is, Richardson himself) thinks human nature has often,

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of late, been shown in a light too degrading; and he hopes from this series of letters it will be seen that characters may be good without being unnatural.” Subsequent critical opinion of the novel has varied widely, a few critics considering it Richardson’s masterpiece, while many regard it as his least successful novel. Sir Charles Grandison differs dramatically from its predecessors in its concern with the English upper class and aristocracy, a world which Richardson freely acknowledged he had never known or understood: “How shall a man obscurely situated . . . pretend to describe and enter into characters in upper life?” In setting, too, the novel was a new departure, ranging as it does from England to Italy and including a large number of Italians, highlighted by Clementina, certainly the most memorable character in the novel. The conflict in Clementina’s heart and soul, her subsequent refusal to marry Sir Charles because he is a Protestant, and her ensuing madness are as effective as anything Richardson ever wrote, and far more convincing than Sir Charles’s rescue of Harriett Byron following her abduction by Sir Hargrove Pollexfen and their eventual marriage. Harriett, though not as interesting a character as either Pamela or Clarissa, shares with them one basic habit: She is an indefatigable letter writer, perhaps the most prolific in the history of English prose fiction, at times sleeping only two hours a night and, when not admiring Grandison from afar, writing letters to him (not uncharacteristic of her style is her appeal to the clergyman who is supposed to marry her to Sir Hargrove: “Worthy man . . . save a poor creature. I would not hurt a worm! I love everybody! Save me from violence!”). Sir Charles himself is similarly less interesting than either Squire B. or Lovelace, and it is difficult today for even the most sympathetic reader to find a great deal to admire in the man who is against masquerades, dresses neatly but not gaudily, is time and time again described as a “prince of the Almighty’s creation,” an “angel of a man,” and “one of the finest dancers in England.” Most of the other characters, including the Italians (with the notable exception of Clementina), are similarly either unconvincing or uninteresting, except for two small masterpieces of characterization: Aunt Nell, Grandison’s maiden aunt; and Lord G., Charlotte Grandison’s husband, a gentle and quiet man, in love with his temperamental wife, often hurt and bewildered by her sharp tongue and brusque actions. Horace Walpole is said to have written off Sir Charles Grandison as a “romance as it would be spiritualized by a Methodist preacher”; and Lord Chesterfield also dismissed it, adding that whenever Richardson “goes, ultra crepidem, into high life, he grossly escapes the modes.” On the other hand, Jane Austen specifically “singled . . . [it] out for special praise,” and Richardson’s major biographers believe that in Sir Charles Grandison, his “surface realism and his analysis of social situations are at their height.” Whatever his weaknesses, Richardson was one of the seminal influences in the development of the novel. His impact upon his contemporaries and their immediate successors was profound, not only in England but on the Continent as well, and eventually on the beginnings of the novel in the United States. He popularized the novel of manners as a major genre for several decades, and his use of the epistolary method added another dimension to the art of narrative. Though his novels have frequently suffered in comparison with those of his major contemporary, Henry Fielding, in recent years a renewed interest in and appraisal of Richardson and his work have placed him securely in the ranks of the major English novelists. William Peden

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Other major works NONFICTION: The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum: Or, Young Man’s Pocket Companion, 1733; Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions, 1741; A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, 1755; The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 1804 (Anna Barbauld, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Samuel Richardson. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This collection reprints in order of their appearance what Bloom judges to be the best of modern criticism of Richardson. In addition to Bloom’s own introduction, there are six essays devoted to Clarissa and two each to Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison. The book also includes a chronology of Richardson’s life and a brief bibliography. Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Samuel Richardson: The Triumph of Craft. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974. Rejecting the notion that Richardson’s unconscious produced great novels in spite of the author—a view held by even his later biographers—Brophy examines Richardson’s statements about fiction in his letters and his prefaces and postscripts to his novels. Having determined his theories about fiction, Brophy then compares these ideas with Richardson’s practice. Two short appendices discuss the novelist’s “nervous complaint” and conclude that he probably suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Bueler, Lois E. Clarissa’s Plots. London: Associated University Presses, 1994. Examines the themes in Richardson’s seminal work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Doody, Margaret Anne. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1974. Seeks the antecedents of Richardson’s fiction in seventeenth and eighteenth century drama, romance, religious writing, thought, and art. Doody shows how Richardson transformed these materials into fiction probing “man’s relation to himself and his fate.” Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971. The definitive biography, based on fifteen years of research. Devotes three chapters to each of the novels and concludes with four excellent chapters on Richardson’s personality, thoughts, reading, and achievements. Golden, Morris. Richardson’s Characters. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963. A psychological study of Richardson that sees in his characters aspects of himself. Suggests that while ostensibly Richardson supported morality, at least unconsciously he favored passion. Kinkead-Weakes, Mark. Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973. Seeking to understand Richardson’s achievement and his appeal to nineteenth century writers such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, this study demonstrates Richardson’s dramatic use of immediacy and explores the implications of his “writing to the moment.” McKillop, Alan Dugald. Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. Long the standard biography, this study remains a good treatment of Richardson’s life, which McKillop discusses in a lengthy appendix. The text itself focuses “on the origins, publication, and reception of” the three novels. Myer, Valerie Grosvenor, ed. Samuel Richardson: Passion and Prudence. London: Vision

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Press, 1986. As in other collections of Richardson criticism, the majority of this volume’s essays concern Clarissa, with one critical piece devoted to Pamela and one to Sir Charles Grandison. Myer also includes, in a section titled “The Sex’s Champion,” two essays on Richardson’s influence. Unlike other collections of this type, Myer’s book also contains a helpful index. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Contains excellent chapters on Pamela and Clarissa, praising the psychological depth of the characters. Analyzes Richardson’s contribution to the development of English prose fiction and relates the novels to the social situation of their day. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972. Examines Richardson’s novels, especially Clarissa, as psychological and social studies, relating them to twentieth century psychology and eighteenth century Puritanism.

Susanna Rowson Susanna Rowson

Born: Portsmouth, England; 1762 Died: Boston, Massachusetts; March 2, 1824 Principal long fiction · Victoria, 1786; The Inquisitor: Or, Invisible Rambler, 1788; Mary: Or, The Test of Honour, 1789; Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, 1791 (pb. in U.S. as Charlotte Temple, 1797); Mentoria: Or, The Young Lady’s Friend, 1791; The Fille de Chambre, 1792 (better known as Rebecca: Or, The Fille de Chambre, 1814); Trials of the Human Heart, 1795; Reuben and Rachel: Or, Tales of Old Times, 1798; Sarah: Or, The Exemplary Wife, 1813; Charlotte’s Daughter: Or, The Three Orphans, 1828. Other literary forms · Susanna Rowson was a prolific, well-rounded writer. Besides her ten works of long fiction, she produced three volumes of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects (1788), A Trip to Parnassus (1788), and Miscellaneous Poems (1804). Between 1794 and 1797, she wrote about seven dramatic works, most of which were probably performed but not published; the most popular of these was Slaves in Algiers: Or, A Struggle for Freedom (1794). She also composed the lyrics for numerous songs and contributed to the production of at least two periodicals: the Boston Weekly Magazine, for which she wrote articles on a wide range of subjects and apparently also served as editor between 1802 and 1805; and the New England Galaxy, which was founded in 1817 and for which Rowson wrote chiefly religious and devotional prose pieces. Finally, she wrote and had published six pedagogical works: An Abridgement of Universal Geography (1805), A Spelling Dictionary (1807), A Present for Young Ladies (1811), Youth’s First Step in Geography (1818), Exercises in History (1822), and Biblical Dialogues (1822). Achievements · Opinions of Rowson’s achievements as a novelist have fluctuated widely since the nineteenth century. Earlier critics were high in their praises of the moral tendency of her work and her storytelling skills, while later estimates have tended to disparage both and to find her writing limited and ordinary. As Dorothy Weil has shown, a well-developed system of aims and values emerges from all of Rowson’s writings and gives her work notable unity and breadth. In particular, as Weil has demonstrated, Rowson’s belief in the equality of the sexes and her concern with feminist issues and positive goals for women deserve wider recognition than they have received. In other respects, Rowson’s novels are typical of the novelist’s theory and practice in newly independent America and are interesting and revealing as a window on the nature of fiction in the late eighteenth century. Biography · Susanna Haswell Rowson’s remarkably full, active life began in Portsmouth, England, where she was born in 1762. Her mother died shortly after, and Rowson’s first visit to America occurred when her father settled and married in Massachusetts and, in 1767, brought his daughter to join him, his new wife, and his three stepsons. Some of Rowson’s experiences during this visit, including a shipwreck, appear later in Rebecca. By 1778, she was back in England, her father’s apparently doubtful loyalty having led the fledgling American government first to confiscate his property and intern his family and him and then return them to England. 787

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Rowson’s independence and initiative soon revealed themselves. By the time she was in her twenties, she had secured a position as governess in the family of the Duchess of Devonshire, beginning a life of service through teaching and writing; she also helped her father gain a pension, and she began publishing her fiction and poetry. Rowson was twenty-four when her first novel, Victoria, appeared in London in 1786. The work’s subtitle, a sign of her aims and interests as a novelist, declared that Victoria was “calculated to improve the morals of the female sex, by impressing them with a just sense of the merits of filial piety.” Later in 1786, she married William Rowson, with whom she shared an interest in music and theater. The marriage lasted for thirty-eight years. Between the time of her marriage and her immigration to America in 1793, she wrote prolifically, pubLibrary of Congress lishing five novels and two books of verse. In 1792, following the failure of her husband’s hardware business, the couple, along with Rowson’s sister-in-law Charlotte, decided to join a theater company and tour the British Isles. The decision was fateful, because in 1793 they were seen by Thomas Wignell, an American who was recruiting players for the theater he was about to open in Philadelphia. Wignell took them to America in 1793, and thus began Rowson’s American period, during which she blossomed both as a performer and as an educator and moralist who attempted to serve others through many activities, including novel writing. Rowson published her four-volume novel, Trials of the Human Heart, in 1795, and continued acting and writing in the theater until 1797. Then, once again, she turned her life and her career of service in a new direction. She opened a Young Ladies’ Academy in Boston in 1797. Starting with only one pupil, she had one hundred and a waiting list within a year. She continued to instruct young women in her school until 1822, but she also continued to do so through her writing. She published the novels Reuben and Rachel and Sarah as well as another book of poetry, various songs and odes, and a theatrical piece. Her major works, however, were the six pedagogical books she wrote and published between 1805 and 1822 for use in her school. All of this got done even as Rowson found time and energy for rearing several adopted children and for supporting church and charity, which included holding the presidency of Boston’s Fatherless and Widow’s Society. When she died on March 2, 1824, Rowson left in manuscript her final work, Charlotte’s Daughter, the sequel to Charlotte; it was published posthumously in 1828.

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Analysis · Benjamin Franklin certainly had neither women nor novelists foremost in his mind when he published his “Information for Those Who Would Remove to America” in 1782. Yet Susanna Rowson, who would remove to America a little more than a decade later, was exactly the sort of migrant Franklin would have wanted. America, he said, required useful members of society rather than persons “doing nothing of value, but living idly on the labour of others.” Citizens of the new nation “do not inquire concerning a stranger, what is he? but what can he do? If he has any useful art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him.” Rowson understood the kind of labor Franklin meant, and the years she spent in America as a writer and educator show that she cared about becoming a useful, respected member of society. Doing this as a novelist was no easy task, for while fiction might be popular among young readers, the “common verdict with respect to novels,” as Noah Webster expressed it in 1788, was that “some of them are useful, many of them pernicious, and most of them trifling.” Rowson responded by producing novels that consistently stress Franklin’s service ideal, especially for the young women she saw herself addressing. “We are not sent into the world to pass through it in indolence,” says one of Rowson’s wise widows to the heroine of Trials of the Human Heart. “Life which is not serviceable to our fellow creatures is not acceptable to our Creator.” Such was the ideal that Rowson held up to the women for whom she wrote and that she herself sought to embody by writing novels that would be an honor to herself and a benefit to society. For many modern readers and writers of fiction, there may well be something objectionable about regarding novel writing as akin to useful arts of the kind Franklin mentions with approval in his prospectus—farming, carpentry, tanning, weaving, shoemaking, and the like—but Rowson and a few other scrupulous early American novelists were in effect trying to do just that: produce fiction that would be of direct, lasting benefit to its readers by helping them live happy, fulfilled lives. Rowson’s novels typically exhibit a clear moral purpose and an unmistakable connection between virtue and happiness. The strong didactic element which modern readers may find distasteful in Rowson and her contemporaries was in fact the essential finishing touch for many early American novelists. Of what use, these writers might have said, was an uncultivated field or undeveloped talent? Almost from the outset, Rowson stressed that the moral purpose of her fiction and the well-being of her readers were more important to her than financial or critical success. Rowson realized, of course, that there were too many novels which were either trifling or pernicious, as Webster said, and did their readers no good. Her awareness was sharp enough that in The Inquisitor she offers a detailed summary of what she considered a typical “Modern Novel.” To Rowson, the problem with such novels was that they were more likely to harm than improve the reader, mislead rather than enlighten. They tended to encourage vice and error by showing that they lead to happiness rather than suffering, thus making them attractive instead of repugnant to the unwary reader. Novels such as these, and writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wilhelm von Goethe, were said to misuse the power of fiction by ennobling errant behavior such as suicide or adultery and charming the reader into accepting and even living by untruths made too attractive. For Rowson and her contemporaries, fiction was never to make error noble and vice fascinating, deluding the reader and ultimately causing her unhappiness; it should have exactly the opposite psychological effect. Rowson would have agreed

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with what Columbia College student Daniel Tompkins, in 1794, called fiction’s “true design and intent.” Novels, he wrote in his journal, “are representations of men and things qualified to excite to the love of virtue and the detestation of vice.” Such novels used the power of narrative and the feelings and imaginations of readers to move the reader away from vicious behavior and toward that which was virtuous and rewarding. As Rowson describes this process in her preface to Trials of the Human Heart, she hopes to “awaken in the bosoms of . . . youthful readers a thorough detestation of vice, and a spirited emulation to embrace and follow the precepts of Piety, Truth, and Virtue.” At the heart of Rowson’s novels, then, is her concern with what she likes to call the “true felicity” of her readers and her belief that virtue leads to happiness as surely as vice and error do not. In changing the reader for the better, the novels seek to be both moral and affective. They work through the feelings and imagination and end in well-rooted, satisfying behavior. A closer look at three representative novels of Rowson’s will show how she tried to achieve these results. Charlotte · As Dorothy Weil observes in her study of Rowson, In Defense of Women (1976), Charlotte (entitled Charlotte Temple in the American edition of 1797) is one of the wonders of American literature, primarily because of its immediate and long-lasting popularity. It was widely read upon its publication in America in 1797—about twenty-five thousand copies sold shortly after it appeared—and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become the most frequently published popular novel in America. By 1905, it had gone through as many as two hundred editions, and in 1933, in his bibliographical study of Rowson, R. W. G. Vail claimed that more people had read Charlotte than any other work of fiction printed in America. Fueled by the novel’s popularity, legends about the real-life identities of its main characters have flourished. In New York City’s Trinity Churchyard, the grave of Charlotte Stanley, supposedly the model for the novel’s heroine, now bears a slab with the inscription “Charlotte Temple.” The novel is also a revealing example of one kind of narrative by which Rowson tried to affect her readers as useful fiction was supposed to do. She does this by relating and having her readers imaginatively participate in one of the eighteenth century’s favorite plots: the story of the causes and consequences of youthful error and delusion in which the heroine herself, and thus the reader, learns by bitter experience to love virtue and hate vice. Rowson also presents the heroine’s learning process in a moral context of clearly stated values, thereby ensuring that the nature of virtue and vice is well defined throughout. The main events of the novel are easily summarized. Charlotte Temple is a fifteen-year-old student at a boarding school in Chichester, England; the year is 1774. One day, she meets Lieutenant Montraville, who, finding Charlotte attractive and eventually deciding that he loves her, persuades her to see him and then to accompany him to America. Although she doubts herself the moment she decides to go, Charlotte nevertheless leaves her friends and her parents behind and, in the company of her lover, his deceitful friend Belcour, and her evil teacher Mademoiselle La Rue, sails to America. Once there, Montraville falls in love with another woman even as Belcour deceives him into believing that Charlotte has been unfaithful; Montraville abandons her, though she is now pregnant with his child. Virtually alone and friendless, Charlotte has her baby and dies just after her distracted father has finally located her. Montraville kills Belcour in a duel and lives out his days married to the

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woman he loves but still sad and remorseful over his part in Charlotte’s ruin. La Rue later dies in misery brought on by her life of dissipation. This is the grisly narrative that Rowson attempts to make useful and instructive to the “young and thoughtless of the fair sex.” She does this first by anchoring the events of the story in a context of contrasting values. In a novel designed to make virtue lovely and vice and error detestable, the reader should be very certain just what virtue and its opposites are. Among the important good people offered as attractive examples of the life of virtue are Charlotte’s parents and Mrs. Beauchamp, her only real friend in America. These characters are distinguished by that active service to others that Rowson valued so highly. Each possesses a feeling heart and a generous hand, and each knows the exquisite satisfaction of comforting less fortunate fellow creatures. Moreover, these characters have given up fast-paced city life in favor of the simple, contented rural existence that befits men and women of feeling. In contrast to such characters are the novel’s bad people, especially La Rue and Belcour, who represent the false pleasures and values of selfishness. These clear contrasts between virtue and vice are established early in the novel and are regularly reinforced by a narrator who both relates and freely comments on the story. “Oh, my dear girls, for to such only am I writing,” she says at one point in a typical utterance, “listen not to the voice of love unless sanctioned by parental approbation . . . pray for fortitude to resist the impulse of inclination when it runs counter to the precepts of religion and virtue.” The secret of fiction’s power to further the happiness of readers lay not in static commentary and contrast, however, as much as in process—the learning process which the feeling reader would go through by participating imaginatively in the experience of the novel’s heroine, Charlotte Temple. She is a poor deluded child who must learn by adversity that virtue leads to happiness, vice to misery. The novel is thus a psychological history of the causes and effects of error and vice, with Charlotte starting the novel as “an innocent artless girl” and ending “a poor forsaken wanderer” suffering “extreme agitation of mind” and “total deprivation of reason” as a result of her mistakes. Rowson tries to show that Charlotte’s basic problem is her inability to resist an impulse when it runs counter to the precepts of religion and virtue. Despite the fact that she was reared by exemplary parents, Charlotte falls, and she does so, Rowson shows, because she allows herself to come under the influence of bad people who disable her power to resist dangerous, delusive inclinations in herself—just what was said to happen to weak, unwary readers of pernicious novels. Charlotte thus ends as “the hapless victim of imprudence and evil counsellors,” the “poor girl by thoughtless passion led astray.” Like bad novels, the evil counsellors who overwhelm Charlotte’s discretion and good sense are capable of using appearances—particularly the power of language and dress—to disable and deceive. A sorceress possessed of the “art of Circe,” La Rue convinces Charlotte to meet, and later to continue seeing, Montraville against her own better judgment. Thus does Charlotte “forsake the paths of virtue, for those of vice and folly.” Eloping to America with Montraville, becoming pregnant and then left abandoned “to die with want and misery in a strange land,” the very opposite of a useful and respectable member of society, Charlotte is “held up as an object of terror, to prevent us from falling into guilty errors.” The reader, Rowson would hope, sees and feels that deviation from virtue is “an object of detestation,” and vice and error themselves as detestable as their opposites, embodied in happy characters, are

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desirable. The ideal reader is the “reader of sensibility” who will “acutely feel the woes of Charlotte” and therefore behave so as to avoid them. Mentoria · Implicit in Charlotte is a pattern for a second type of useful novel which Rowson employed in Mentoria. As noted, the third-person narrator of Charlotte both relates and comments on the tale, making sure her readers understand its moral import and learn from it. In Mentoria, the nameless, wholly reliable preceptress of Charlotte becomes the story’s main character. Her name is Helena Askham, and, in a series of letters to Lady Winworth’s three daughters for whom she earlier was governess, Helena dispenses stories and lessons based on her own experience, which are designed to instruct young women on subjects of concern to them. Like Charlotte, Helena combines humble origins with a good education. Unlike Charlotte, she is strong enough to resist impulses which run counter to the precepts of religion and virtue. She is able to do so because, sensitive and feeling though she is, she is also “endowed with discernment and sense far superior to the generality of young women of her age.” She shows her mettle early on when, placed in a situation very much like Charlotte’s with Montraville, she is courted by Lady Winworth’s son. Unlike Charlotte, who allowed the rhetoric and appearance of La Rue and Montraville to disable her judgment and excite errant, delusive hopes, Helena displays the control of feeling and pleasing inclination that is the mark of Rowson’s strong women, and that enables her to stifle her rising passion for her suitor and reject him. Later, he does in fact marry someone closer to him in rank and fortune, and so does Helena, until her husband’s death leaves her free to become governess and then mentor to the three Winworth children. As this wise widow, a woman who, like the narrator of Charlotte, combines sensibility with strong good sense, Helena becomes the central character of Mentoria. The several stories she relates, therefore, are meant to do what the single story of Charlotte did: Use the power of narrative as a memorable, striking means of instruction for young women, a way of making “a lasting impression on the minds of fair readers” and thereby of advancing their happiness. For example, the life of Helena’s friend Louisa Railton is offered as “a model by which every young woman who wishes to promote her own felicity, will regulate her conduct.” The beauty of the virtue of filial piety is illustrated by Louisa’s choosing, after her mother’s death, “a low roofed mansion, scanty meals, and attendance on a sick peevish father, to the lofty apartments, plenteous table, and variety of amusements she might have enjoyed with Lady Mary,” her rich relative. She thereby gains, however, “a contented happy mind, [and] serenity dwelt in her heart and cheerfulness beamed in her eyes. . . . She lived beloved by all and died universally regretted.” Made desirable and attractive, and distinguished as in Charlotte from its selfish opposite, the virtue of filial devotion should impress the reader and prompt her to imitation. As Helena writes her pupils, “Be wise, my dear children, follow Louisa’s example, so shall your lives be happy and your last moments peace.” Helena continues to deal similarly with such topics as friendship, reputation, love, pleasure, and marriage, using the force of the striking instance to impress readers with the felicity of the virtuous life and the miseries of vice and error. Trials of the Human Heart · In Trials of the Human Heart, Rowson demonstrates a third type of “useful fiction.” Her aim is to achieve the same effect as before—“to awaken in

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the bosoms of my youthful readers,” as she says in the novel’s preface, “a thorough detestation of vice, and a spirited emulation, to embrace and follow the precepts of Piety, Truth and Virtue.” Like Charlotte, Trials of the Human Heart is a story of adolescent initiation, but rather than involving the reader in the misfortunes of a heroine such as Charlotte whose imprudence is her undoing, Rowson offers the character of Meriel Howard, who is the undeserving victim of the cruelty or caprice of others and as a result suffers through what one character calls “some of the heaviest trials to which the human heart is incident”—four volumes’ worth, in fact, related through letters exchanged among the characters. Like other Rowson heroines, Meriel is artless and innocent at the start, having indeed spent much of her childhood in a convent, and she possesses a generous heart as well. As she writes her convent friend Celia, “I am weak as an infant, whenever a scene of distress or happiness meets my eye; I have a tear of sympathy for the one, and a smile of gratulation for the other.” Thus endowed, Meriel leaves the convent and enters a world that ends up causing her far more distress than happiness. The first incidents of the novel, when Meriel is about sixteen, are typical of the pattern of disappointed expectation that repeats itself in Meriel’s life and occasions her learning and uttering many lessons about life. On her way home to Bristol, she thinks about the coming reunion with her parents, whom she has not seen for most of her childhood. “I pictured them to myself, as very amiable old people—and, in fancy, felt their embraces and kissed off the tears of joy I saw falling from their eyes.” What she finds instead is a “suffering saint” of a mother, her settled melancholy the result of living with a husband who is cruel and unfeeling and a son notable for “frigid coldness.” Meriel soon discovers that her father—who much later in the novel turns out not to be her father—is a freethinker and a hypocritical villain, concealing under the “mask of integrity and honour every vice which can disgrace human nature.” Indeed, it was because of her father’s vitiated morals that Meriel was originally placed in a convent. She now finds him ardently pursuing an adulterous affair; after she succeeds in breaking that up, she herself becomes the object of his amorous attention, an event one character describes as “too dreadful, too shocking to human nature, to wear even the face of probability.” Soon after, Meriel reflects that she no doubt has many more trials yet to endure, and she is absolutely right. In one episode after another, she—like her counterpart Rebecca, the heroine of the novel of the same name—attracts the compromising notice rather than the solicitude of married men and the venom rather than the pity of other women. As Meriel remarks later, looking back over her life, “how hard is my fate. Possessed as I am of a heart moulded to compassion, glowing with universal affection toward my fellow creatures, I am constantly thrown among people, whose every feeling is absorbed in self.” For Meriel as for the reader of this and virtually every other Rowson novel, the purpose of the heroine’s experiences is to teach about truth and error, what Meriel calls the “useful lessons taught me in the school of adversity.” Born to be the sport of fortune, Meriel learns that “this is a sad—very sad world to live in.—For if we love anything we are sure to lose it.” The truly important lesson, however, follows on this. Having so painfully discovered the error of her innocent belief that “every heart glowed with humanity, friendship and sincerity toward each other,” Meriel periodically entertains the opposite error. “What a world this is,” she writes to her enviably placid convent friend. “Were it not impious, I could wish I had never entered it.” Despair is indeed impious, and the heroine, like the reader, learns that such

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feelings run counter to the precepts of religion and virtue. Unlike Charlotte, however, Meriel is capable of pulling back from harmful vice and error. The proper response to misfortune is, first, to bear up under it; one’s duty, as Meriel says, is “to submit without repining, to the will of Him, who never lays on his creatures the rod of affliction but for some wise purpose.” Second, one must serve, not retreat: “We are not sent into the world to pass through it in indolence,” Meriel is told. “Remember, that life which is not in some measure serviceable to our fellow creatures, is not acceptable to our Creator.” As Meriel and the reader learn, the suicidal response in any form is never appropriate. At the end of the novel, Meriel anticipates a happy marriage and hopes both to deserve and preserve her good fortune “by exerting the abilities with which I am amply endowed to chear the desponding heart, sooth the afflicted spirits and soften the bed of pain.” Like other Rowson heroines, Meriel has found the secret of happiness. For her readers, Rowson wanted nothing less. Living happily in the real world of human folly and disappointment is the ideal which her many novels and her own varied life embody. To have found so many ways to demonstrate that ideal is surely a tribute to her strength and her inventiveness. Michael Lowenstein Other major works PLAYS: Slaves in Algiers: Or, A Struggle for Freedom, pr., pb. 1794; The Female Patriot, pr. 1795; The Volunteers, pr., pb. 1795; Americans in England, pb. 1796, pr. 1979 (revised as The Columbian Daughter). POETRY: Poems on Various Subjects, 1788; A Trip to Parnassus, 1788; Miscellaneous Poems, 1804. NONFICTION: An Abridgement of Universal Geography, 1805; A Spelling Dictionary, 1807; A Present for Young Ladies, 1811; Youth’s First Step in Geography, 1818; Exercises in History, 1822; Biblical Dialogues, 1822. Bibliography Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Davidson’s superb interdisciplinary study of the eighteenth century “reading revolution” highlights commonplace responses to Charlotte Temple and analyzes Rowson’s complex characterization of the villain Montraville. Argues that Rowson’s plots of “sexual crime and feminine punishment” expose society’s double standard of justice. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Stein & Day, 1966. Although a classic study of the novel, Fiedler defines sentimentalism and specifically Charlotte Temple as “not literature” and “completely a woman’s book”; he is equally mean-spirited in his denigration of Rowson’s literary skills. The study has minor use for placing Rowson in the literary context of “Prototypes and Early Adaptations.” Loshe, Lillie Deming. The Early American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1907. Significant biographical details support Loshe’s contention that Rowson relied upon personal experience for many of her themes. This study is of most value, however, for placing Rowson’s work in the context of the early sentimental novel: Unlike most authors of “domestic melodrama,” Rowson developed realistic rather than romantic plots.

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Spengemann, William C. The Adventurous Muse: The Poets of American Fiction, 17891900. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977. Spengemann argues that Charlotte Temple is a “pure” example of “the spirit of domesticity.” Although he criticizes the emotionalism of Rowson’s characterizations and her extravagant style, Spengemann acknowledges the value Rowson placed on factuality. Most useful for its discussion of the distinguishing features of American “domestic romances.” Stern, Julia A. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Studies Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster’s Coquette, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond. Vail, R. W. G. Susanna Haswell Rowson, the Author of “Charlotte Temple”: A Bibliographical Study. Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1933. Vail’s comprehensive bibliography of Rowson’s writings includes not only standard lists of editions of her various novels but also such delightfully unusual features as the parts Rowson portrayed as an actress and auction records that attest to her continuing popularity among collectors. Brief biographical essays are also included. Weil, Dorothy. In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762-1824). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. An astute analysis of Rowson’s literary aspirations and accomplishments and of her extensive concern for the religious, moral, and intellectual education of young women. Weil’s text incorporates extensive excerpts from rarely published works by Rowson and includes an excellent bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Dorothy L. Sayers Dorothy L. Sayers

Born: Oxford, England; June 13, 1893 Died: Witham, England; December 17, 1957 Principal long fiction · Whose Body?, 1923; Clouds of Witness, 1926; Unnatural Death, 1927 (also as The Dawson Pedigree); Lord Peter Views the Body, 1928; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928; The Documents in the Case, 1930 (with Robert Eustace); Strong Poison, 1930; The Five Red Herrings, 1931 (also known as Suspicious Characters); The Floating Admiral, 1931 (with others); Have His Carcase, 1932; Ask a Policeman, 1933 (with others); Murder Must Advertise, 1933; The Nine Tailors, 1934; Gaudy Night, 1935; Six Against the Yard, 1936 (with others; also known as Six Against Scotland Yard ); Busman’s Honeymoon, 1937; Double Death: A Murder Story, 1939 (with others); The Scoop, and Behind the Scenes, 1983 (with others); Crime on the Coast, and No Flowers by Request, 1984 (with others). Other literary forms · In addition to the twelve detective novels that brought her fame, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote short stories, poetry, essays, and plays, and distinguished herself as a translator and scholar of medieval French and Italian literature. Although she began her career as a poet, with Basil Blackwell bringing out collections of her verse in 1916 and 1918, Sayers primarily wrote fiction from 1920 until the late 1930’s, after which she focused on radio and stage plays and a verse translation of Dante. She also edited a landmark anthology of detective fiction, Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928-1934; also known as The Omnibus of Crime). Outside of her fiction, the essence of Sayers’s mind and art can be found in The Mind of the Maker (1941), a treatise on aesthetics that is one of the most illuminating inquiries into the creative process ever written; in her essays on Dante; and in two religious dramas, The Zeal of Thy House (1937), a verse play written for the Canterbury Festival that dramatizes Sayers’s attitude toward work, and The Man Born to Be King, a monumental series of radio plays first broadcast amidst controversy in 1941-1942, which takes up what Sayers regarded as the most exciting of mysteries: the drama of Christ’s life and death, the drama in which God is both victim and hero. Of her many essays, the 1946 collection Unpopular Opinions and the 1947 Creed or Chaos? provide a good sampling of the acumen, wit, and originality with which Sayers attacked a variety of subjects, including religion, feminism, and learning. In 1972, James Sandoe edited Lord Peter, a collection of all the Wimsey stories. Two other collections, both published during Sayers’s lifetime (Hangman’s Holiday, 1933, and In the Teeth of the Evidence and Other Stories, 1939), include non-Wimsey stories. At her death, Sayers left unfinished her translation of Dante’s Cantica III: Paradise, which was completed by her friend and colleague Barbara Reynolds and published posthumously in 1962 as the final volume in the Penguin Classics edition of Dante that Sayers had begun in 1944. An unpublished fragment of an additional novel, called Thrones, Dominations and apparently abandoned by Sayers in the 1940’s, was also left unfinished, as was her projected critical/biographical study of Wilkie Collins. This last fragment was published in 1977. From 1973 to 1977, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) produced excellent adaptations of five of the Wimsey novels for television, thus creating a new audience for Sayers’s work. 796

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Achievements · One of the chief pleasures for readers of Dorothy Sayers is the companionship of one of fiction’s great creations, Lord Peter Wimsey, that extraordinarily English gentleman, cosmopolite, detective/scholar. Although the Wimsey novels were created primarily to make money, his characterization demonstrates that his creator was a serious, skillful writer. As the novels follow Wimsey elegantly through murder, mayhem, and madness, he grows from an enchanting caricature into a fully realized human being. The solver of mysteries thus becomes increasingly enigmatic himself. Wimsey’s growth parallels Sayers’s artistic development, which is appropriate, since she announced that her books were to be more like mainstream novels than the cardboard world of ordinary detective fiction. Lord Peter is something of a descendant of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, and at times he emulates Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but in Wimsey, Sayers essentially created an original. Sayers’s novels integrate elements of earlier detective fiction, especially the grasp of psychological torment typified by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the fine delineation of manners exemplified in Wilkie Collins—with subjects one would expect from a medieval scholar: virtue, corruption, justice, punishment, suffering, redemption, time, and death. The hallmarks of her art—erudition, wit, precision, and moral passion—provoke admiration in some readers and dislike in others. Sayers’s novels are filled with wordplay that irritates those who cannot decipher it and delights those who can. Her names are wonderful puns (Wimsey, Vane, Freke, de Vine, Snoot, Venables); her dialogue is embedded with literary allusions and double entendres in English, French, and Latin; and her plots are spun from biblical texts and English poetry. Reading a Sayers novel, then, is both a formidable challenge and an endless reward. Hers are among the few detective novels that not only bear rereading, but actually demand it, and Sayers enjoys a readership spanning several generations. To know Sayers’s novels is to know her time and place as well as this brilliant, eccentric, and ebullient artist could make them known. Because of her exquisite language, her skill at delineating character, and her fundamentally serious mind, Sayers’s detective fiction also largely transcends the limits of its time and genre. Certainly this is true of novels such as Strong Poison, The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon, books which did much toward making the detective novel part of serious English fiction. Biography · Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born on June 13, 1893, in the Choir House of Christ Church College, Oxford, where her father, the Reverend Henry Sayers, was headmaster. Mr. Sayers’s family came from County Tipperary, Ireland; his wife, the former Helen Mary Leigh, was a member of the old landed English family that also produced Percival Leigh, a noted contributor to the humor magazine Punch. Sayers’s biographer, James Brabazon, postulates that her preference for the Leigh side of the family caused her to insist upon including her middle initial in her name; whatever the reason, the writer wished to be known as Dorothy L. Sayers. When Sayers was four, her father left Oxford to accept the living of Bluntishamcum-Earith in Huntingdonshire, on the southern edge of the Fens, those bleak expanses of drained marshland in eastern England. The contrast between Oxford and the rectory at Bluntisham was great, especially as the new home isolated the family and its only child. Sayers’s fine education in Latin, English, French, history, and mathematics was conducted at the rectory until she was almost sixteen, when she was sent to study at the Godolphin School, Salisbury, where she seems to have been quite

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unhappy. Several of her happiest years followed this experience, however, when she won the Gilchrist Scholarship in Modern Languages and went up to Somerville College, Oxford, in 1912. At Somerville, Sayers enjoyed the congenial company of other extraordinary women and men and made some lasting friends, including Muriel St. Clare Byrne. Although women were not granted Oxford degrees during Sayers’s time at Somerville, the university’s statutes were changed in 1920, and Sayers was among the first group of women to receive Oxford degrees in that year (she had taken first honors in her examination in 1915). Following her undergraduate days, Sayers did various kinds of Library of Congress work for several years: first, as poetry editor for Blackwell’s in Oxford from 1916 to 1918, then as a schoolmistress in France in 1919, and finally in London, where she worked as a freelance editor and as an advertising copywriter for Benson’s, England’s largest advertising agency. At Benson’s, Sayers helped create “The Mustard Club,” a phenomenally successful campaign for Colman’s mustard. Around 1920, when Sayers’s mind was focused not only upon finding suitable employment but also upon surviving economically, the character of Lord Peter Wimsey was miraculously born, and Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body?, introduced him to the world in 1923. These early years in London were scarred by two bitterly disappointing love affairs, one of which left Sayers with a child, born in 1924. The novelist married Oswald Atherton Fleming, a Scottish journalist, in 1926, and shortly thereafter assumed financial responsibility for him as he became ill and ceased working several years after their marriage. Perhaps these pressures encouraged Sayers to keep turning out the increasingly successful Wimsey novels. By the end of the 1930’s, however, Sayers was in a position to “finish Lord Peter off” by marrying him to Harriet Vane, the detective novelist who first appeared in Strong Poison and who, like Wimsey, reflected part of Sayers’s personality. After the Wimsey novels, Sayers was free to do the kind of writing she had always wanted to do: manifestly serious work such as religious dramas and a translation of Dante that would occupy most of her time from 1944 to 1957. While working on these demanding projects and writing incisive essays on a wide range of issues, Sayers also became something of a public figure, playing the role of social critic and Christian apologist with great brilliance and panache. On December 17, 1957, Sayers died of an apparent stroke while alone in the house that she had shared with Fleming from 1928 until his death in 1950. Although she left an unpublished autobiographical fragment, “My Edwardian Childhood,” much of

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Sayers’s life is reflected in her novels, which depict the Oxford of her college days (Gaudy Night), the Fen wastes of her girlhood (The Nine Tailors), and the excitement and confusion of the London she knew as a young writer (Murder Must Advertise). Excellent though much of her other work is, Sayers will probably be remembered primarily for her novels. Analysis · If one should wish to know England as it was between the two world wars—how it was in its customs, among its different classes, and in its different regions, how it regarded itself and the world, what weaknesses festered, what strengths endured—there is no better place to learn its soul or to revel in its singular delights and peccadilloes than in the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. When Harriet Vane marries Peter Wimsey in Busman’s Honeymoon, she happily realizes that she has “married England,” revealing that Sayers herself recognized the symbolic import of her hero. As a survivor of World War I, a war that decimated a generation of young Englishmen and left their society reeling, Wimsey represents England’s fragile link with a glorious past and its tenuous hold on the difficult present. His bouts of “nerves” and persistent nightmares dramatize the lasting effects of this “War to End All Wars,” while his noble attempts at making a meaningful life represent the difficult task of re-creating life from the rubble. Sayers’s England encompasses tiny villages unchanged for centuries (Busman’s Honeymoon), the golden-spired colleges of Oxford (Gaudy Night), the “gloom and gleam” of London (Murder Must Advertise), the deceptive calm of the southern seacoast (Have His Carcase), the brooding Fens (The Nine Tailors), and the primitive north counties (Clouds of Witness). The novelist ranges throughout this varied landscape with some constants: Accompanied by his indefatigable “man,” Bunter (who is Jeeves transformed), Lord Peter reasons his way through all but one mystery (he is absent from The Documents in the Case). Through Wimsey’s well-wrought consciousness, Sayers maintains a certain Weltanschauung that seems a peculiar blend of mathematical rigor and lush, witty, insightful language. Carolyn Heilbrun’s praise for Sayers’s special blend of “murder and manners” points out to an understanding of both the novelist’s appeal and her place in English fiction: Sayers is an inheritor not only of the more literary branch of detective fiction, but also of the older comedy-of-manners tradition. She can reveal a character, time, or place in a bit of dialogue or one remark. From a brief sentence, for example, the reader knows the Duchess of Denver: “She was a long-necked, long-backed woman, who disciplined herself and her children.” A short speech summarizes all The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, revealing not only a character but also the values and condition of his world: Look at all the disturbance there has been lately. Police and reporters—and then Penberthy blowing his brains out in the library. And the coal’s all slate. . . . These things never happened before the War—and great heavens! William! Look at this wine! . . . Corked? Yes, I should think it was corked! My God! I don’t know what’s come to this club! The character upon whom Sayers lavishes most of her considerable talent is Lord Peter. Although it is possible, as some of her critics have said, that Sayers created Wimsey, the perfect mate for an intellectual woman, because actual men had disappointed her, the psychobiographical approach can explain only part of her novels’ motivation or meaning. In Wimsey, Sayers dramatizes some significant human prob-

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lems, including the predicament of the “Lost Generation,” the necessity of every person’s having a “proper job,” and the imperative synthesis of forces that are often perceived as opposites, but which are really complementary: intellect and emotion, good and evil, male and female. When viewed in these terms, Sayers’s fictional world fits naturally into the entire cosmos of her creation, because it deals with some of the very subjects she addressed in other, more patently serious forms. It is appropriate to speak of all Sayers’s work as one, for, as she concludes in The Mind of the Maker, “the sum of all the work is related to the mind [of the artist] itself, which made it, controls it, and relates it to its own creative personality.” From beginning to end, Sayers’s work investigates the possibility of creative action; for her the creative act consists of establishing equilibrium among competing powers, of drawing together disparate, even warring elements. Of course, since she wrote detective novels, Sayers focused upon the opposite of creative action in the crimes of her villains, crimes that destroy life, property, sanity, peace. Wimsey, who solves the mysteries and thereby makes a life from destruction, is the creative actor. The Mind of the Maker argues that there is a discoverable moral law, higher than any other, that governs the universe. In a way, Sayers’s novels attempt to discover or reveal this universal moral law, which in its most superficial form is reflected in civil codes. This process of moral discovery, however, becomes increasingly complex and ambiguous; if Sayers’s subjects are constant, her understanding of them deepens as her art matures. Since Sayers’s artistic maturation parallels her hero’s development, a comparison of how Wimsey functions in the early and late novels will elucidate both the consistency and the change that mark Sayers’s fiction. Whose Body? · The most striking quality of Whose Body? as a first novel is the deftness with which it presents Sayers’s hero and his world. In its opening pages, the reader gets to know Lord Peter Wimsey, the dashing man-about-town and collector of rare books (which, amazingly, he seems to read). Keen of mind and quick of tongue, like an exotic bird chirping in a formal English garden that, perhaps, conceals a jolly corpse or two, he is a remarkable personage at birth. Wimsey is also quite marvelously a wealthy man who knows how to spend both his time and his money; his elegant apartment’s only acknowledged lack is a harpsichord for his accomplished renditions of Domenico Scarlatti. The product of an older England marked by civility, restraint, and order, Wimsey is accompanied in his first tale by two challengers to his wits and position: his valet, Bunter, and the middle-class Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard, who will make sure that Wimsey never nods during fourteen years of fictional sleuthing. Even his mother, the delightfully balmy duchess of Denver, is introduced here, and the reader quickly guesses from their relationship that Sayers is interested in how men and women coexist in this world. The Dowager Duchess and her son are as different in appearance as they are similar in character, the narrator remarks, thus signaling that the superficial differences between men and women often conceal more important similarities. Wimsey and his entourage enter the world nearly complete, and their creator has a firm grasp of character, dialogue, and the mystery plot from the beginning of her career. The theme of Whose Body? plants the seeds of one of Sayers’s ever-flourishing ideas. Her first and perhaps most horrid villain, Sir Julian Freke, suffers from one of the great problems facing modern people: the disassociation from mind and heart that often renders “civilized” people incapable of moral behavior. The great surgeon Freke, who is aptly named because he is a freakish half-human, denies the importance of intangi-

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bles such as the conscience, which he considers akin to the vermiform appendix. With this perfectly criminal attitude, Freke coolly kills and dissects an old competitor, ironically from one of the oldest, least rational of motives, jealousy and revenge. Freke therefore demonstrates Sayers’s point: that people, as creatures of both intellect and passion, must struggle to understand and balance both if moral action is to be possible. Freke, the dissector of life, destroys; the destruction he causes awaits the truly healing powers of a creative mind. The somewhat surprising link between moral action and detective work is suggested by Wimsey, who observes that anyone can get away with murder by keeping people from “associatin’ their ideas,” adding that people usually do not connect the parts of their experience. The good detective, however, must study the fragments of human life and synthesize the relevant data. This synthesis, the product of imagination and feeling as well as reason, reveals not only “who did it,” but how, and why. Thus, according to Sayers’s own definitions, her detective pursues moral action in his very sleuthing, not only in its final effects of punishment for the criminal and retribution for society. Wimsey’s detective method typifies this creative synthesis by incorporating different aspects of a rich experience: poetry, science, history, psychology, haberdashery, weather reports. When Wimsey finally realizes that Freke is the murderer, he remembers “not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything, the whole thing, perfect and complete . . . as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space.” In this moment, Wimsey is not merely a successful detective, he is a creator, his mind flashing with godlike insight into human life. The story has moved, therefore, from destruction to creation because disparate aspects of life have been drawn together. Freke’s failure as a human being is exemplified in his failure as a physician, just as Wimsey’s successful life is instanced in the skillful performance of his “job,” his compulsive “hobby of sleuthing.” More than a hobby, detection is actually Wimsey’s “proper job.” In a crucial discussion with Inspector Parker, Wimsey admits to feeling guilty about doing detective work for fun, but the perceptive Parker warns him that, as a basically responsible person for whom life is really more than a game, he will eventually have to come to terms with the seriousness of his actions. What is clear to the reader at this point is that Wimsey, an English aristocrat displaced by social change and scarred by World War I, is at least carving out a life that is socially useful while it is personally gratifying. He is not simply feeding the Duke of Denver’s peacocks. The Nine Tailors · If Wimsey seems almost too perfect in the early novels, Sayers redeems him from that state by slowly revealing the finite, flawed, and very human man within the sparkling exterior. To make this revelation, she has to create a woman capable of challenging him, which she does in the character of Harriet Vane. By the time he appears in The Nine Tailors, Wimsey is less of a god and more of a human being. After all, the great lover has been humiliatingly unsuccessful in wooing Harriet Vane, whom he saved from the hangman four years earlier in Strong Poison. The beginning of The Nine Tailors finds Wimsey, the super-sleuth, wandering about the Fens, that bleak terrain of Sayers’s childhood, muttering about the misery of having one’s car break down on a wintery evening and dreaming of hot muffins. When offered shelter at the rectory of Fenchurch St. Paul, the great connoisseur of haute cuisine is delighted with tea and oxtail stew. The greatest change in Wimsey’s character and in Sayers’s fiction, however, is evidenced in the novel’s richer, more

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subtle structure, and in its newly complex view of crime and punishment, of good and evil. Indicative of Sayers’s increasing subtlety, The Nine Tailors is as much a metaphysical meditation on time and change as it is a murder mystery; there is not even a corpse until Part 2. In place of Lord Peter’s jolly but rather macabre singing of “We insist upon a [dead] body in a bath” (in Whose Body?), The Nine Tailors resonates with the sound of church bells and an explication of campanology (bell or change-ringing). The bells at Fenchurch St. Paul, which are rung for both weddings and funerals, seem ambiguously to stand for both life and death, good and evil. The whole question of good versus evil is quite complicated here, for unlike the wholly innocent victim of the cold-blooded murder in Whose Body?, the man killed here is probably the worst person in the book, and he is accidentally killed by the ringing of holy bells. Locked in the church’s bell chamber as a precaution by someone who knows of his criminal past, Geoffrey Deacon is killed by the intense sound of the bells, and ultimately by the hands of every man who unwittingly pulls a bell rope that New Year’s Eve. This group includes Wimsey, who just happens to be there because of several coincidences. Although Deacon perhaps deserves to die, not only for his jewel robbery but also because of a generally dishonorable life, his death forces Wimsey to reexamine himself and his motives. In ringing the changes, Wimsey thought he was simply following a set of mathematical permutations to a neat conclusion; in reality, he was taking a man’s life. This greatly sobers the old puzzle-solver, who has always had some qualms about attacking life as a game. Indeed, Wimsey’s role in Deacon’s death is but an exaggerated version of the detective’s role in any mystery: He causes the villain or criminal to come to justice, which usually means death. Wimsey cannot ignore the consequences of his actions in The Nine Tailors, because they are direct, obvious, and significant in human terms. He voices his concern about the morality of all his “meddling” to the rector, who assures him that everyone must “follow the truth,” on the assumption that this path will lead invariably if somewhat indirectly to God, who has “all the facts” in the great case of life. Thus, it is impossible to be too curious, to probe too far, to ask too many questions, even though some answers or consequences may be painful. In this great novel, Wimsey actually experiences the central Christian paradox, that of good coming from evil or of the two being inextricably linked. The mystery is over when he realizes, in a grisly pun, that Deacon’s killers are already hanged, since they are the very bells in the church’s tower. As one of the inscriptions on this ancient church says, the nine tailors, or the nine peals, “make a man,” suggesting that the bells not only signify a man when they toll his passing, but also stand as timeless, disinterested judges of human behavior. The dead man, Deacon, mocked honorable work in his thievery, and thus began the cycle of destruction that ends in his own death, a death which ironically leads to Wimsey’s discovery or creative act. From evil thus confronted and comprehended, good may grow. Mr. Venables, the rector, wittily pricks Wimsey with the irony that “there’s always something that lies behind a mystery . . . a solution of some kind.” For Wimsey, as for Sayers, even the solution to a mystery leads to further mysteries; the answer to the mystery of Deacon’s death leads to a more subtle inquiry into one of the essential mysteries of life: how to determine responsibility or meaning for human action. In this paradoxical world, victims may be villains and right action is often based in error, chance, or even transgression.

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Gaudy Night · Wimsey leaves this complex novel with greater insight into himself and the ambiguous nature of life; he is, therefore, finally ready to come to terms with the greatest mystery of his life, Harriet Vane, who is also about ready to accept his inquiry. In Gaudy Night, Wimsey reaches his fulfillment, a fulfillment that is expressed in terms of resolving the conflict between man and woman, between intellect and emotion, and between good and evil. In fact, Wimsey’s fulfillment represents the culmination of Sayers’s search for a resolution of these forces. The novel’s subject is also one of Sayers’s oldest: the moral imperative for every person to do good work that is well done, and the terrible consequences of not doing so. All these ideas come into play in this subtle novel, which is on one level the mystery of the “Shrewsbury Poison Pen” and on another, more important one, an unusual and profound love story. Reflecting the subtlety and delicacy with which Sayers spins her tale, there is not even a death in this book; the psychological violence caused by the Poison Pen is alarming, but here evil is banal, and all the more powerful for being so. Gaudy Night takes place at Oxford, which held happy memories for Sayers as the place of her birth and formal education, and the entire novel is a paean to that golden-spired city. Harriet Vane goes to Oxford to attend the Shrewsbury Gaudy, an annual spring homecoming celebration, where she has the opportunity to judge her old classmates and teachers in terms of how well they, as women, have been able to live meaningful lives. Shrewsbury is obviously a fictional version of Somerville, Sayers’s college, and just as clearly Vane, a famous detective novelist who is wrestling with the question of “woman’s work” and with the problem of rendering reality in fiction, is to some extent Sayers, the self-conscious artist. Having been pursued by Wimsey for five frustrating years, Vane finally accepts him at the end of Gaudy Night. She accepts him because the experiences in this book teach her three interrelated things: that Wimsey, as an extraordinary man, will not prevent her from doing her “proper job,” a consequence she feared from any relationship with a man; that men and women can live together and not destroy each other, but create a good life; and therefore, that there can be an alliance between the “intellect and the flesh.” Vane’s discoveries in this novel thus signal the solution of problems that had preoccupied Sayers throughout her career. Vane learns all these things through Wimsey’s unraveling of the mystery of the Poison Pen, who is a woman frightfully flawed because she has never been able to strike a balance between the intellect and the flesh, and therefore has never done her proper job. Annie Wilson, the Poison Pen who creates so much confusion and instills so much fear in the intellectual women of Shrewsbury, is the victim of sentimentality and a radically disassociated sensibility; she hates all learning because her dead husband was punished long ago for academic dishonesty. Ironically, Harriet Vane suffers from the same problem, but in its other manifestation; she begins the novel capable of trusting only the intellect, and fears any bonds of the flesh or heart. When she finally sees that neither the sentimentality of Annie nor the hyperintellectualism of Shrewsbury can solve the “problem of life,” Harriet realizes that it is only through balancing intellect and passion that creative or truly human action is possible. Wimsey, who solves the mystery because he is able to bring these forces into equilibrium and to acknowledge the potency of both, is rendered acceptable to Vane because of this ability. Her new willingness to admit her feelings reveals to her what Sayers’s readers had known for a long time: She loves Wimsey. The man she loves has changed, too. He is no longer an unattainable paragon who sees good and evil as discrete and life as a game, but a middle-aged man who fears rejection and death, who

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is idiotically vain about his hands, and who, to Harriet’s surprise, looks as vulnerable as anyone else when he falls asleep: the man behind the monocle. All of this does not argue that Wimsey is less extraordinary than he was; in fact, perhaps what is most extraordinary about him now is that he seems a real person—flawed, finite, vulnerable—who is yet capable of that rare thing, creative action. Indeed, his very life seems a work of art. Busman’s Honeymoon · Wimsey and Vane finally embark upon marriage, that most mundane and mysterious of journeys, in Busman’s Honeymoon, the final novel that Sayers aptly called a “love story with detective interruptions”: The detective novelist had moved that far from the formula. In the closing scene of this last novel, Wimsey admits that his new wife is “his corner,” the place where he can hide from a hostile, confusing world and shed tears for the murderer whose execution he caused. This is not the Wimsey who blithely dashed about in the early novels, treating criminals as fair game in an intellectual hunting expedition, but it is the man he could have become after fourteen years of living, suffering, and reflecting. Indeed, it was a masterful stroke for Sayers to create Harriet Vane, a woman who could match Wimsey’s wits and passions, because through her and through his loving her, the reader can learn the most intimate facts of this once-distant hero. If a man is to cry in front of anyone, that witness should most likely be his wife, especially if she is an extraordinary person who understands his tears. The early Wimsey may have been the kind of man that an intellectual woman would imagine for a mate, but the mature Wimsey is one with whom she could actually live. The fragment of a later novel called Thrones, Dominations indicates that the Wimsey-Vane marriage was just this workable. Finally, the marriage of Wimsey and Vane symbolizes the paradoxical and joyful truth of good coming out of evil, for if Harriet had not been falsely accused of murder, they would never have met. She quiets Wimsey in one of his familiar periods of painful self-scrutiny about his “meddling” by reminding him that, if he had never meddled, she would probably be dead. The point seems clear: that human action has consequences, many of which are unforeseen and some painful, but all necessary for life. It is not difficult to imagine a novelist with this vision moving on shortly to the drama of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, nor even the next step, her study and translation of that great narrative of good and evil, desire and fulfillment, mortality and eternity, Dante’s The Divine Comedy (c. 1320). Indeed, all of Sayers’s work is of a piece, creating that massive unity in diversity by which she defined true art. Catherine Kenney Other major works SHORT FICTION: Hangman’s Holiday, 1933; In the Teeth of the Evidence and Other Stories, 1939; Lord Peter, 1972 ( James Sandoe, editor); Striding Folly, 1972. PLAYS: Busman’s Honeymoon, pr. 1937 (with Muriel St. Clare Byrne); The Zeal of Thy House, pr., pb. 1937; The Devil to Pay, Being the Famous Play of John Faustus, pr., pb. 1939; Love All, pr. 1940; The Just Vengeance, pr., pb. 1946; The Emperor Constantine, pr. 1951 (revised as Christ’s Emperor, 1952). RADIO PLAY: The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, pr. 1941-1942. POETRY: Op 1, 1916; Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, 1918; Lord, I Thank Thee—, 1943; The Story of Adam and Christ, 1955.

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NONFICTION: The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, 1938; Strong Meat, 1939; Begin Here: A War-Time Essay, 1940; Creed or Chaos?, 1940; The Mysterious English, 1941; The Mind of the Maker, 1941; Why Work?, 1942; The Other Six Deadly Sins, 1943; Unpopular Opinions, 1946; Making Sense of the Universe, 1946; Creed or Chaos? and Other Essays in Popular Theology, 1947; The Lost Tools of Learning, 1948; The Days of Christ’s Coming, 1953, rev. 1960; The Story of Easter, 1955; The Story of Noah’s Ark, 1955; Introductory Papers on Dante, 1957; Further Papers on Dante, 1957; The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, and Other Posthumous Essays on Literature, Religion, and Language, 1963; Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World, 1969; Are Women Human?, 1971; A Matter of Eternity, 1973; Wilkie Collins: A Critical and Biographical Study, 1977 (E. R. Gregory, editor). CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Even the Parrot: Exemplary Conversations for Enlightened Children, 1944. TRANSLATIONS: Tristan in Brittany, 1929 (Thomas the Troubadour); The Heart of Stone, Being the Four Canzoni of the “Pietra” Group, 1946 (Dante); The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, 1949-1962 (Cantica III with Barbara Reynolds); The Song of Roland, 1957. EDITED TEXTS: Oxford Poetry 1917, 1918 (with Wilfred R. Childe and Thomas W. Earp); Oxford Poetry 1918, 1918 (with Earp and E. F. A. Geach); Oxford Poetry 1919, 1919 (with Earp and Siegfried Sassoon); Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, 1928-1934 (also known as The Omnibus of Crime); Tales of Detection, 1936.

Bibliography Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. The “authorized” biography based upon Sayers’s private papers, containing an introduction by her only son, Anthony Fleming. Brabazon shows that Sayers’s real desire was to be remembered as an author of poetry and religious dramas and as a translator of Dante. Coomes, David. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life. New York: Lion Publishing, 1992. Coomes concentrates on reconciling the author of religious tracts with the detective novelist, thereby providing a portrayal of a more “complex Sayers.” He draws heavily on her papers at Wheaton College. Brief notes, no bibliography. Dale, Alzina, ed. Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration. New York: Walker, 1993. Memoirs and essays situating Sayers in the history of detective fiction. Includes a brief biography and annotated bibliography. Gaillard, Dawson. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. In a brief 123 pages, Dawson tries to establish a link between Sayers’s detective fiction and her other literary works. One chapter is devoted to her short stories, four to her mystery novels, and a sixth to a summary of Sayers’s literary virtues. Hall, Trevor H. Dorothy L. Sayers: Nine Literary Studies. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980. In nine critical essays, Hall discusses the connection between Sayers’s creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, Sherlock Holmes. Hall also speculates in some detail on the influence of Sayers’s husband, Atherton Fleming, on her writing. Scott-Giles, Charles Wilfrid. The Wimsey Family: A Fragmentary History from Correspondence with Dorothy Sayers. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Scott-Giles, an expert on heraldry, creates a family history and biography for Sayers’s most memorable creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. Illustrations include the Wimsey family coat of arms, designed by Sayers. Youngberg, Ruth Tanis. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

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An extensive guide to 942 English-language reviews, articles, books, introductions, and addresses published between 1917 and 1981. The annotations are designed to provide information, rather than criticism, to allow the reader to evaluate the particular item’s usefulness.

Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott

Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; August 15, 1771 Died: Abbotsford, Scotland; September 21, 1832 Principal long fiction · Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, 1814; Guy Mannering, 1815; The Antiquary, 1816; The Black Dwarf, 1816; Old Mortality, 1816; Rob Roy, 1817; The Heart of Midlothian, 1818; The Bride of Lammermoor, 1819; A Legend of Montrose, 1819; Ivanhoe, 1819; The Monastery, 1820; The Abbot, 1820; Kenilworth, 1821; The Pirate, 1821; The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822; Peveril of the Peak, 1823; Quentin Durward, 1823; St. Ronan’s Well, 1823; Redgauntlet, 1824; The Betrothed, 1825; The Talisman, 1825; Woodstock, 1826; The Fair Maid of Perth, 1828; Anne of Geierstein, 1829; Count Robert of Paris, 1831; Castle Dangerous, 1831; The Siege of Malta, 1976. Other literary forms · Sir Walter Scott’s first published work was a translation of two ballads by Gottfried August Bürger, which appeared anonymously in 1796. In 1799, he published a translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1773 drama Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand. In 1802, the first two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border appeared, followed by the third volume in 1803. This was a collection of popular ballads, annotated and often emended and “improved” with a freedom no modern editor woud allow himself. A fascination with his country’s past, formed in his early years and lasting all his life, led him to preserve these ballads, the products of a folk culture that was disappearing. In 1805 came The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the first of the series of long narrative poems that made Scott the most widely read poet of the day. It was followed by Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808). The Lady of the Lake (1810) brought him to the height of his popularity as a poet. The later poems were less successful and he was gradually eclipsed by Lord Byron. In 1813, he completed the manuscript of a novel he had laid aside in 1805. This was Waverley, which appeared anonymously in 1814. (Scott did not publicly admit authorship of his novels until 1827.) It created a sensation and launched him on the series that remained his chief occupation until the end of his life. Other important works were his editions of Dryden (1808) and of Swift (1814), a series of lives of the English novelists completed in 1824, and The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, begun in 1825 and published in nine volumes in 1827. Chronicles of the Canongate (1827) is composed of three short stories: “The Highland Widow,” “The Two Drovers,” and “The Surgeon’s Daughter.” Achievements · The central achievement of Scott’s busy career is the series of novels that is conventionally designated by the title of the first of them. The sheer bulk of the Waverley novels is in itself impressive, as is the range of the settings they present. For example, Ivanhoe is set in twelfth century England, The Talisman in the Holy Land of the Third Crusade, Quentin Durward in fifteenth century France, The Abbot in the Scotland of Queen Mary, Kenilworth in the reign of Elizabeth, and The Fortunes of Nigel in that of James I. In spite of his wide reading, tenacious memory, and active imagination, Scott was not able to deal convincingly with so many different periods. Moreover, he worked rapidly and sometimes carelessly, under the pressures of financial necessity and, in later years, failing health. Some of the novels are tedious 807

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and wooden, mechanical in their plots and stilted in their dialogue. Scott himself was aware of their flaws and he sometimes spoke and wrote slightingly of them. Yet most readers find that even the weaker novels have good things in them, and the best of them have a narrative sweep and a dramatic vividness that render their flaws unimportant. The best of them, by common consent, are those set in Scotland as far back as the latter part of the reign of Charles II. When he attempted to go further back, he was less successful, but in such novels as the four discussed below—Waverley, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and The Heart of Midlothian—Scott’s sense of history is strong. They are among the most impressive treatments of his great theme, the conflict between the old and the new, between Jacobite and Hanoverian, between the heroic, traditional, feudal values of the Tory Highlands and the progressive commercial interests of the Whig Lowlands, between stability and change. Though some of the other novels offer historical conflict of a comparable kind (Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, for example), the Scottish novels present the conflict with particular insight and force and convey a strong sense of the good on both sides of it. Scott values the dying heroic tradition even as he recognizes the benefits that change brings. Earlier writers had mined the past to satisfy a market for the exotic, the strange, or the merely quaint. Scott saw the past in significant relation to the present and created characters clearly shaped by the social, economic, religious, and political forces of their time, thus providing his readers with the first fictions that can properly be called historical novels. Biography · An important factor in the vividness of the Scottish novels was the strong oral tradition to which Sir Walter Scott had access from his early childhood. After a bout with polio in his second year, he was sent away from Edinburgh to his paternal g r a n d f a t h e r ’ s h o u s e a t S a ndyknowe in the Border country, in the hope that the climate would improve his health. It did, and though he remained lame for the rest of his life, his boyhood was an active one. In this region from which his ancestors had sprung, he heard stories of Border raids, Jacobite risings, and religious struggles from people for whom the past survived in a living tradition. Throughout his life he added to his fund of anecdotes, and his notes to the novels show how very often incidents in them are founded on actual events which he had learned about from the participants themselves or from their more immediate descendants. Scott’s father was a lawyer, and in 1786, having attended Edinburgh High School and Edinburgh Library of Congress University, Scott became an ap-

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prentice in his father’s office. In 1792, he was admitted to the bar, and all his life he combined legal and literary activities. After losing his first love, Williamina Belsches, to a banker, he married Charlotte Carpenter in 1798. In 1805, he entered into a secret partnership with the printer James Ballantyne, and four years later they formed a publishing firm. This firm ran into financial difficulties, and in 1813, Scott escaped ruin only through the intervention of another publisher, Archibald Constable. Scott continued to overextend himself. In 1811, he had bought a farm on the Tweed at a place he named Abbotsford, and in the years that followed he wrote furiously to provide funds for building a splendid house and buying additional land. His ambition was to live the life of a laird. In 1826, the financial collapse of Constable and Ballantyne ruined Scott. In his last years, he worked tirelessly to pay his creditors. The effort told on his health, and he died in 1832, at the age of sixty-one. The debts were finally cleared after his death by the sale of his copyrights. Analysis · Waverley displays, at the start of Sir Walter Scott’s career as a novelist, many of the features that were to prove typical of his best work. In the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, he saw an instance of the conflict between the older feudal and chivalric order, strongly colored with heroic and “romantic” elements, and the newer order of more practical and realistic concerns which had already begun to supplant it. His focus is not on the great public figures whose fates are at stake, and this too is typical. The Pretender, Prince Charles Edward, is not introduced until the novel is more than half over, and most of the major events of this phase of his career are only alluded to, not presented directly. He is shown almost exclusively in his dealings with the fictional character for whom the novel is named, and largely through his eyes. Waverley · Edward Waverley, like so many of Scott’s heroes, is a predominantly passive character who finds himself caught between opposing forces and “wavering” between his loyalty to the House of Hanover and the attractions of the Stuart cause. Though his father occupies a post in the Whig ministry, he has been reared by his uncle Sir Everard, a Tory who had supported the earlier Jacobite rebellion of 1715, though not so actively as to incur reprisals when it was put down. His father’s connections procure Edward a commission in King George’s army, and he is posted to Scotland. Shortly after arriving, he makes an extended visit to his uncle’s Jacobite friend, the Baron of Bradwardine, and his daughter Rose. When a Highland raider, Donald Bean Lean, steals several of the Baron’s cows, Waverley goes into the Highlands in the company of a follower of Fergus MacIvor, a chieftain who has the influence to secure the return of the cows. Waverley is impressed by Fergus and infatuated with his sister Flora. They are both confirmed Jacobites preparing to declare for the Pretender upon his arrival in Scotland. As a result of Waverley’s protracted absence and of a mutiny among the small band of men from his family estate who had followed him into the army, Waverley is declared absent without leave and superseded in his office. By coincidence, his father also loses his government position. Waverley’s resentment at this twofold insult to his family by the Hanoverian government is heightened when, on a journey to Edinburgh to clear himself, he is arrested. Rescued by Donald Bean Lean, he is later brought to Edinburgh (now in the hands of the Jacobites), meets the Pretender, and is won over to his cause. He takes part in the Jacobite victory at Preston but is separated from Fergus’s troop in a skirmish at Clifton, in which Fergus is captured. After a period in hiding, Waverley is pardoned, through the good offices of Colonel Talbot, whom he

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had saved from death and taken prisoner at Preston. Fergus is executed for treason. Objections to Waverley usually center on the character of the hero, whom Scott himself called “a sneaking piece of imbecility.” Certainly it is possible to be impatient with his lack of self-awareness, and the frequency with which he is acted upon rather than acting puts him often in a less than heroic light. Waverley, however, is not intended to be a romantic hero, and his susceptibility to external influence is necessary to enable Scott to show within a single character the conflict between the two forces that compose the novel’s theme. For most of the book, Scott’s view of the hero is ironic, emphasizing his failings. There is, for example, his vanity. One of the things that reconciles his Jacobite Aunt Rachel to his serving in the Hanoverian army is the fact that he is becoming infatuated with a local girl. Scott mocks Waverley’s feelings, first by giving their object the inelegant name of Cecilia Stubbs, and then by telling the reader that on Waverley’s last Sunday at the parish church he is too preoccupied with his own dashing appearance in his new uniform to notice the care with which Miss Stubbs has arrayed herself. The complement of this detail occurs later in the novel when Waverley, having joined the Jacobites, puts on Highland dress for the first time, and one of Fergus’s followers remarks that he is “majoring yonder afore the muckle pier-glass.” More seriously, the memory of “the inferior figure which he had made among the officers of his regiment,” resulting from his inability to keep his mind on detail and routine, contributes to his decision to change sides. In addition to exposing his vanity, Scott often undercuts Waverley’s Romantic view of experience. On finding himself for the first time in the Highlands, he muses over “the full romance of his situation.” It occurs to him that “the only circumstance which assorted ill with the rest, was the cause of his journey—the Baron’s milk cows! this degrading incident he kept in the background.” If, instead of deploring Waverley’s inadequacy as a romantic hero, one attends to the irony with which Scott undercuts his fascination with romance and heroism, one will be better prepared for the author’s reluctant dismissal of heroic virtues at the end of the novel. Waverley’s character is perfectly appropriate to one who will survive into the new age, an age in which the dashing but destructive energies of Fergus have no place. The real problem with the character is not his passivity or his ordinariness, but Scott’s occasional failure to dramatize certain features of his personality, as opposed to merely making assertions about them. On two occasions he is credited with remarkable conversational powers, but no sample of them is given. During Waverley’s period in hiding, Scott declares, “he acquired a more complete mastery of a spirit tamed by adversity, than his former experience had given him,” but there is no demonstration of this “mastery.” These flaws, however, hardly justify dismissing the characterization as a failure. The eagerness of Waverley’s response to the new scenes and experiences he encounters, the growth of his resentment against the established government and his conversion to Jacobitism, his delayed recognition of his love for Rose, the cooling of his regard for Fergus as he comes to see the chieftain’s selfishness and then the reawakening of that regard when Fergus is in danger—all these phases of his development are convincingly presented. Moreover, there are a few scenes where he shows real firmness (for example, his confrontation with Fergus when he has been shot at by one of Fergus’s men), and several where he displays active generosity. This said, one may concede that Waverley remains a rather slender figure to carry the weight of a novel of this length. He does not have to, however, for Scott surrounds him with a number of vivid characters from a wide range of classes and backgrounds. It is chiefly through their speech that he makes his characters live. The dialogue is not

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consistently successful: The bright small talk between Fergus and Flora can be downright dreadful, and some of the language of the other upper-class characters is stiff. The speech of most of the secondary characters, however, is convincing, and the dialect writing is particularly effective. Scott’s most important contribution here is the achievement of a wide variety of tones in dialect speech. Before Scott, dialect was almost exclusively a comic device, but he was able to write dialect in different keys all the way up to the tragic. The best evidence of this is the scene in which Fergus and his follower Evan Dhu Maccombich are condemned to death. When Evan Dhu offers his life and the lives of five others in exchange for his chieftain’s freedom, volunteering to go and fetch the five others himself, laughter breaks out in the courtroom. In a speech that loses nothing in dignity by being couched in dialect, Evan Dhu rebukes the audience and then proudly rejects the judge’s invitation to plead for grace, preferring to share his chieftain’s fate. Fergus is perhaps the most interesting of the major characters. He possesses throughout the capacity to surprise the reader. Scott prepares the reader carefully for his first appearance. Waverley first hears of him in chapter 15 as an extorter of blackmail or protection money and is surprised to learn that he is nevertheless considered a gentleman. When he is introduced several chapters later, the reader discovers that this feudal leader of a troop of half-savage Highlandmen is a polished and literate individual with a very good French education. He is clearly fond of his sister, and yet quite prepared to exploit her as bait to draw Waverley into the Jacobite ranks. In the early part of the novel, the emphasis is on his courage, his hospitality, and his ability to inspire loyalty, and he is for the most part an attractive figure. Gradually, however, both Waverley and the reader come to view him more critically. It grows increasingly clear that his commitment to the Jacobite cause is founded on self-interest. On learning that Prince Charles Edward is encouraging Bradwardine to leave his estate to Rose instead of to a distant male relative, he attempts to make the Prince promote his marriage to Rose. When the Prince refuses, he is furious, later saying that he could at that moment have sold himself to the devil or King George, “whichever offered the dearest revenge” (chap. 53). Yet as the Jacobite fortunes ebb, his generosity returns, and for the first time he attempts to use his influence over Waverley for the latter’s good, telling him there is no dishonor in his extricating himself from the now certain wreck of their cause and urging him to marry Rose: “She loves you, and I believe you love her, though, perhaps, you have not found it out, for you are not celebrated for knowing your own mind very pointedly.” He refuses to allow Waverley to witness his execution, and, by a generous deception regarding the hour at which it is to take place, he spares his sister the pain of a final interview. As he strides out of his cell, it is he who is supporting Waverley. Throughout the novel, the portrait of Fergus is sharpened by a number of contrasts, explicit and implicit, between him and other characters. The contrast with Waverley is obviously central. There is also a contrast between him and his sister. While Fergus’s Jacobitism is tinged with self-interest and he sometimes resorts to duplicity to advance the cause, Flora’s devotion to the Stuarts is absolutely pure. She cannot reconcile herself to her brother’s dealing with a thief of Donald Bean Lean’s stripe even in the interest of the cause, and she resists his wish that she encourage Waverley’s infatuation with her in order to win him to their side. Fergus’s preoccupation with the more practical aspects of the campaign is set against Bradwardine’s comically pedantic concern with form and ceremony in the question of whether and how to exercise his hereditary privilege of drawing off the king’s boots. Yet Bradwardine’s old-fashioned

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loyalty lacks all taint of self-interest, and, though he has been largely a comic figure, he behaves after the failure of the rebellion with a gallant fortitude comparable to that of Fergus. In the latter part of the novel, a new character enters to serve as Fergus’s complete antithesis. Colonel Talbot, who supplants him in guiding Waverley’s fate, differs from Fergus on practically every count—political affiliation, disinterested generosity, attitude toward women, and even age. Several other characters are paired in contrast. Flora’s strength of character, heroic bent, intellectual accomplishments, and striking beauty are repeatedly contrasted with the less remarkable gifts of the placid and domestic Rose. Sir Everard Waverley and his brother Richard are opposite numbers in all respects. When Waverley is arrested on his way to Edinburgh, Melville and Morton, the magistrate and the clergyman who hear his defense, take differing views of his case. One of Fergus’s henchmen, Callum Beg, commits a crime for his master when he attempts to shoot Waverley, while Humphry Houghton, one of Waverley’s followers, involves himself in a conspiracy and mutiny. Both are carrying out what they mistakenly believe to be their masters’ wishes, and they receive differing treatment for their actions. This network of contrasts contributes much to the unity of a novel that is sometimes criticized as loosely structured. Scott’s general preface to the 1829 edition of the whole series lends credence to this charge: “The tale of Waverley was put together with so little care, that I cannot boast of having sketched any distinct plan of the work. The whole adventures of Waverley, in his movements up and down the country with the Highland cateran Bean Lean, are managed without much skill.” Whatever Scott meant by this, it cannot really be said that the book is loosely plotted. A glance at the retrospective explanations contained in chapters 31 and 65 will remind any reader of the great number of details that at first looked unimportant but that turn out to be essential to the mechanics of the plot. Such after-the-fact explanations may be technically awkward, and they may lay Scott open to the charge of unnecessary mystification in the episodes leading up to them, but they certainly evidence some careful planning. It is rather for excessive reliance on coincidence that the plot can be criticized. The retrospective explanations just mentioned make some of these appear less unreasonable and incredible, but there are still a great many of them, and this is true of all Scott’s novels. Also, the pace of the narrative is at times uncertain. Although the opening chapters describing Waverley’s education are important to an understanding of the character, they make an undeniably slow beginning, and some of the set pieces retard the narrative flow. In spite of its flaws, however, the novel is sustained by its central theme of the process of historical change and by Scott’s ability to do justice to both sides in the conflict. Part of him responded strongly to the gallant romance of the Jacobite and to the love of tradition behind it. At the same time, he realized that the world had passed all that by. As Waverley himself points out, there have been four monarchs since James II was deposed, and the divine right absolutism for which the Stuarts stood would have sorted ill with the political and economic realities of the mid-eighteenth century. So Fergus is executed, his head is stuck up over the Scotch gate, and the Edinburgh youth whom Waverley has engaged as a valet comments, “It’s a great pity of Evan Dhu, who was a very weel-meaning, good-natured man, to be a Hielandman; and indeed so was [Fergus MacIvor] too, for that matter, when he wasna in ane o’ his tirrivies [tantrums].” In a snatch of dialogue, the heroic perspective is replaced by one more down-to-earth and commonplace. The threat to the prevailing order that the

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rebellion represented is already diminishing in importance in the popular view. To the common man secure in the established order, the energies that burned in Fergus amount to no more than “tirrivies.” Old Mortality · Old Mortality deals with an earlier rebellion, one in which the issue is religious. Charles II had won the support of the Scottish Presbyterians by subscribing to the Solemn League and Covenant, which provided for the establishment of Presbyterianism as the state religion in Scotland and in England and Ireland as well. After the Restoration, however, Charles sought to impose episcopacy on Scotland, and the Covenanters were persecuted for their resistance to the bishops. In 1679, the assassination of the Archbishop of St. Andrews by a small party of Covenanters led by John Balfour of Burley sparked a gathering of insurgents who managed at Drumclog to defeat the Cavalier forces, under John Graham of Claverhouse, that were sent against them. A few weeks later, however, the Covenanters, divided by moderate and extremist factions, were routed at Bothwell Bridge by an army commanded by the Duke of Monmouth. The novel’s title is the nickname of an old man who travels through Scotland refurbishing the markers on the graves of the martyred Covenanters. Out of these events, Scott built one of his starkest and swiftest plots. Once again he portrays a hero caught between conflicting forces. Just after the Archbishop’s murder, Henry Morton gives shelter to Burley because Burley and his father had been comrades-in-arms and Burley had saved the elder Morton’s life. Henry Morton’s moderate principles lead him to condemn the murder, but he also deplores the oppression that provoked it, and Burley hopes that he will eventually take up arms with the Covenanters. Morton is, however, drawn to the Cavalier side by his love for Edith Bellenden (one of Scott’s more pallid heroines) and by his friendship for her granduncle. Morton receives some firsthand experience of the oppressive measures of the Cavaliers when he is arrested for harboring the fugitive Burley and is brought before Claverhouse. This figure is Burley’s opposite number, rather as Talbot is Fergus MacIvor’s in Waverley, except that Talbot is wholly admirable while Claverhouse is a more complex character. Like Burley, Claverhouse sees in Morton qualities of courage and leadership that could be valuable to the rebels. He is about to have him executed when one of his subordinates, Lord Evandale, intervenes. Evandale is a suitor of Edith, and at her request he generously asks Claverhouse to spare his rival’s life. Morton is carried along as a prisoner with Claverhouse’s troops, and when they are defeated by the Covenanters at Drumclog, he is set free. Under Burley’s auspices, he is given a high post in the rebel army. In this phase of the novel, Morton shows himself a much more active hero than Waverley. He quickly repays his debt to Evandale by saving his life in the rout of the loyalist forces, and he does so again in a later chapter, when Evandale has become Burley’s prisoner. He plays a prominent part in the Covenanters’ attempts to take Glasgow. He draws up a statement of the rebels’ grievances and presents it to Monmouth just before the battle of Bothwell Bridge, and even though the Covenanters obstinately refuse the terms he secures, he does not defect, but instead fights heroically in the battle that ensues. In spite of the vigor with which Morton fulfills his commitment to the Presbyterians, they distrust him, and Scott sharply dramatizes their ignorance, factiousness, bigotry, and cruelty. He also exposes the unscrupulous streak in Burley’s enthusiasm.

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This zealot is convinced that the most barbaric cruelties and the rankest deceptions are justified by his cause. He is surrounded by a gallery of fanatics, of whom the most horrifying is the insane preacher Habbakuk Mucklewrath. In flight after the defeat at Bothwell Bridge, Morton and his servant Cuddie stumble upon a group of Covenanting leaders in an isolated farmhouse at Drumshinnel. They have been praying for guidance, and the arrival of Morton, whom they irrationally regard as the cause of their defeat, convinces them that God has sent him to them as a sacrifice. They conduct a kind of trial, though the verdict of death is never in doubt. It is the Sabbath, however, and they are unwilling to execute him before midnight. Eventually, Mucklewrath jumps up to put the clock ahead, crying, “As the sun went back on the dial ten degrees for intimating the recovery of holy Hezekiah, so shall it now go forward, that the wicked may be taken away from among the people, and the Covenant established in its purity.” This display of the Covenanters’ fanaticism is the complement of the earlier trial before Claverhouse, in which Morton was threatened with the arbitrary cruelty of the Cavalier side. Ironically, it is Claverhouse who now arrives to save Morton. (He has been led to the farmhouse by Cuddie, who had been allowed to escape.) Most of the Covenanters are slaughtered. Riding back to Edinburgh in the custody of his rescuers, Morton is divided between horror at Claverhouse’s habitual cold indifference to bloodshed and admiration for his urbanity and his valor. Claverhouse admits that he is as much a fanatic as Burley but adds, “There is a difference, I trust, between the blood of learned and reverend prelates and scholars, of gallant soldiers and noble gentlemen, and the red puddle that stagnates in the veins of psalm-singing mechanics, crack-brained demagogues, and sullen boors.” Scott counters this assessment in the very next chapter by showing the fortitude of one of the Covenanting leaders, Ephraim MacBriar, as he is brutally tortured and then condemned to death. The reader may also recall that it was prolonged imprisonment by the Cavaliers that drove Mucklewrath insane. As in Waverley, Scott sees both sides objectively. Morton is sentenced to exile, and there is a gap of ten years in the narrative. In 1689, when the Glorious Revolution has put William and Mary on the throne, Morton is free to return to Scotland. Edith is on the point, finally, of accepting marriage to Evandale. Claverhouse, loyal to the Stuarts, is now ironically a rebel in his turn. He is killed in the battle of Killecrankie, but his army is victorious. He had once said to Morton, “When I think of death . . . as a thing worth thinking of, it is in the hope of pressing one day some well-fought and hard-won field of battle, and dying with the shout of victory in my ear—that would be worth dying for, and more, it would be worth having lived for!” The rather too crowded closing pages describe the deaths of Burley and Lord Evandale. The novel displays Scott’s dramatic gifts at their best. Though the language of Morton, Edith, and Evandale is sometimes stiff, the dialogue of the rest of the characters is vigorous and precisely adjusted to their various stations and backgrounds, and the language of the Covenanters, loaded with scriptural allusions, idioms, and rhythms, constitutes a particularly remarkable achievement. In addition to the characters already discussed, three others stand out. One is Sergeant Bothwell, who is descended from an illegitimate son of James VI and resents his failure to attain preferment. He is one of the novel’s chief embodiments of the bullying oppression and extortion to which the Covenanters are subjected, but he is also capable of the courtesy and bravery that he regards as incumbent on one of his blood. Another is Mause Headrigg, whose compulsive declarations of her extreme Presbyterian princi-

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ples are always ill-timed, to the chagrin of her pragmatic son Cuddie, who has no ambition to become a martyred Covenanter. The third is Jenny Dennison, Edith’s maid. Like her mistress, Jenny has a suitor on each side of the conflict, and Scott thus creates a comic parallel to the Morton-Edith-Evandale triangle. She chooses Morton’s servant Cuddie over her other suitor, a soldier in the Cavalier army, and this match foreshadows the eventual union of Edith and Morton. Jenny, however, has more vitality, resourcefulness, and charm than her mistress. She has been criticized for trying to promote Edith’s marriage to the wealthy Evandale with a view to securing the future of herself, her husband, and their children. One can admit this fault and go on to point out that it is related to the success of the characterization. The most convincing characters in Old Mortality are those in whom Scott reveals a mixure of motivations or a blending of admirable with deplorable traits. Rob Roy · Rob Roy is probably the least successful of the four novels considered here. It resembles Waverley in that it takes a young Englishman into the Highlands during a Jacobite rising, this time that of 1715. Like Edward Waverley, Frank Osbaldistone has a romantic and poetical turn and responds eagerly to the unfamiliar world of the Highlands. Like Waverley, he has a touch of vanity and of obstinacy in his temper. Like Waverley, he is slow to understand his feelings for the heroine. That he is not as slow as Waverley was to realize that he loved Rose may be attributed to two factors: There is only one possible object for Frank’s affections, not two; and that object, Diana Vernon, bears a much closer similarity to Flora, who captivated Waverley immediately, than to Rose. Frank Osbaldistone, however, is a less interesting hero than Waverley, largely because he does not experience any serious internal conflict. In spite of his love for Diana, a committed Jacobite, he never considers supporting the Pretender. His conflicts are all external. Having angered his father by refusing to follow him into trade, Frank is sent to stay with his uncle’s family in Northumberland, to be replaced in the firm by one of his cousins. Though it is understandable that his father should turn to a nephew when his son has disappointed him, it is not clear what point he has in sending Frank to Osbaldistone Hall. Frank’s uncle and five of his cousins are boors with no interests beyond hunting and drinking. The sixth son, Rashleigh, is clever, villainous, ugly, and lame. He is the one chosen to take Frank’s place in the firm. He had been tutor to Diana, who is his cousin on his mother’s side, but had attempted to seduce her, and she has since kept him at a distance. Nevertheless, their common Jacobite sympathies remain a bond between them. Rashleigh, resenting Diana’s obvious liking for Frank and smarting under an insult from him, forms a plan that will ruin the Osbaldistone firm and at the same time hasten the rising of the clans in support of the Pretender. The financial details of this scheme are not clear, and it therefore lacks credibility. This flaw in the plot is fairly serious because in Rob Roy commercial activity has considerable thematic importance. Once in London, Rashleigh wins his uncle’s confidence and then absconds with certain crucial documents. Frank’s task is to follow him to Glasgow and then into the Highlands to recover them. It is in fact not Frank but Diana Vernon’s father (whose identity is a mystery to Frank and the reader until the end of the book) who gets the documents back, and this in spite of the fact that he is also a Jacobite and might thus be expected to further rather than thwart Rashleigh’s plot. Punishment comes to Rashleigh not from Frank but from the Highland chieftain Rob Roy. Rashleigh turns traitor to the Jacobites, and, after the failure of the rebellion, he arranges the arrest of

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Diana and her father. In the process of rescuing them, Rob Roy kills Rashleigh. Thus, though Frank is a party to his fair share of adventures, he is too often merely a party rather than the chief actor, even though he is clearly meant to be the hero. Although Rob Roy appears at practically every crisis of the story, those appearances are intermittent, and the crises mark stages in the experience of Frank. Everything, down to the use of Frank as first-person narrator, points to him as the central character. (Everything, that is, except the title, but a writer with Scott’s sense of what sells would hardly call a book Osbaldistone.) At too many crucial points, however, Rob Roy displaces Frank as the focus of the reader’s interest. Though their relationship may appear to resemble that of Waverley and Fergus or of Morton and Burley, Morton and even Waverley are more active characters than Frank and thus are never eclipsed by Burley and Fergus to the extent that Frank is by Rob Roy. This seems to be largely a result of the bonds that unite Fergus with Waverley and Morton with Burley in a common enterprise for much of their respective stories. The cause shared by each pair of characters makes it possible for each pair to share the spotlight, so to speak, against a common background without compromising the novel’s unity. Rob Roy and Frank, by contrast, do not act together in a public cause, since Frank is not a Jacobite. Furthermore, the distance between them is emphasized in the early part of the novel by the fact that, though he takes action several times in Frank’s behalf, Rob Roy’s identity is unknown to Frank until the novel is half over. In short, the plot keeps these characters separate as Waverley is not kept separate from Fergus nor Morton from Burley, and as a result the novel seems marred by a divided focus. There is also a failure to unify the public and the private themes as convincingly as in the other two novels. The vagueness of the link between the ruin of the Osbaldistone firm and the rising of the clans has already been noted. A related problem is the absence of specificity about Diana Vernon’s Jacobite activities. A wary reader will recognize Scott’s irony in having Frank respond to an early warning about Diana with the words, “Pshaw, a Jacobite?—is that all?” There is, however, a lack of concrete detail about her role in the conspiracy. This is perhaps inevitable, given the first-person point of view and the fact that Diana keeps Frank out of the secret of the conspiracy, but it weakens the characterization of the heroine. In contrast, Flora MacIvor’s political obsession is fully convincing. Diana is perhaps not meant to seem as much a fanatic as Flora, yet she too has sacrificed all personal inclination to the cause—or to her father’s will. At the end of the novel, the reader learns that her father has been a central figure in the conspiracy and has often stayed at Osbaldistone Hall in the disguise of a priest, and that Rashleigh’s hold over Diana resulted from his having penetrated her father’s disguise. This is a fairly dramatic situation, but the reader is, so to speak, asked to do the dramatizing for himself in retrospect. The specifics about Diana’s part in the conspiracy are too little too late. Since Sir Frederick Vernon has no identity for the reader until the closing pages, he can never be more than a minor figure. Yet to him, Scott assigns the account of the actual rebellion. In the penultimate chapter, the rebellion and its collapse are perfunctorily described by Sir Frederick in less than two pages. This is a signal failure to unify the personal and historical dimensions. Instead of the climax that it should have been, the 1715 rising seems almost an afterthought. There is, however, a good deal of effective characterization in the novel. Diana Vernon is probably the most attractive and interesting of Scott’s heroines. She is well educated, strong-minded, outspoken, aggressive, and witty. She may not quite hold her own in the company to which critical opinion sometimes promotes her, the

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company of William Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, but the dialogue Scott gives her does indeed amply express intelligence and vitality. If there is one false note, it is Scott’s finally allowing her to marry Frank, but one’s reservations may be qualified by the consideration that Frank seems politically almost neutral. If he does not support the Stuarts, he is not in the debt of Hanover either. It is not quite as if Flora MacIvor had married Edward Waverley. Diana first appears before Frank on horseback wearing “what was then somewhat unusual, a coat, vest, and hat, resembling those of a man, which fashion has since called a riding-habit.” Scott several times underlines her firm and forthright behavior by comparing it to a man’s. There is a much stronger masculine streak in the only other important female character in this book which has just four speaking roles for women. Rob Roy’s wife Helen is a virago capable of ambushing a British troop with only a small band and of cold-bloodedly ordering the drowning of a hostage. She should have been a powerful figure, but the language she speaks is impossibly bookish and rhetorical, an objection which is not sufficiently answered by Scott’s later remarking that her “wild, elevated, and poetical” style is caused by the fact that she is translating from Gaelic into English, “which she had acquired as we do learned tongues.” The characterization of Rob Roy himself is on the whole successful, despite a certain lack of impact in his first few appearances, during which a reader who has skipped Scott’s unusually cumbersome prefatory material may not even realize that this is the titular character. He gains added weight by being the chief embodiment of one side of the novel’s main thematic conflict. The focus of the novel is not on the Jacobite-Hanoverian struggle but on the related but distinguishable conflict between the half-barbaric feudal life of the Highland clans and the modern commercial world of trade. Rob Roy is an outlaw relying on blackmail to support himself and his followers, who acknowledge no leader but him. Their way of life breeds narrow loyalties (a point emphasized also by the judge in the trial of Fergus MacIvor). Helen MacGregor cannot “bide the sight o’ a kindly Scot, if he come frae the Lowlands, far less of an Inglisher.” The clansmen are a threat to peace and order because rebellion and disorder are conditions far more likely to improve their lot. As Rob Roy says of the expected uprising, “Let it come . . . and if the world is turned upside down, why, honest men have the better chance to cut bread out of it.” Rob Roy is contrasted with the Glasgow weaver and magistrate Bailie Nichol Jarvie. A business associate of the Osbaldistone firm, he accompanies Frank in his pursuit of Rashleigh. Scott makes Rob Roy and Jarvie kinsmen in order to point out the contrasts between them more sharply. These contrasts are most clearly drawn in two fine scenes, one in the Glasgow jail midway through the novel and the other near the end. In the latter scene, when Bailie Nichol Jarvie deplores the ignorance of Rob Roy’s sons, the Highlander boasts, “Hamish can bring down a black-cock when he’s on the wing wi’ a single bullet, and Rob can drive a dirk through a twa-inch board.” Jarvie retorts, “Sae muckle the waur for them baith! . . . An they ken naething better than that, they had better no ken that neither.” Rob Roy scorns his kinsman’s offer to take his sons as apprentices: “My sons weavers! . . . I wad see every loom in Glasgow, beam, traddles, and shuttles, burnt in hell-fire sooner!” Shortly afterward, however, he admits to Frank that he is troubled at the thought of his sons “living their father’s life.” That kind of life in fact remained possible for only about three more decades, for after the rising of 1745, the rule of law was extended into the Highlands and the power of the clans was permanently broken.

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That defeat in effect completed the Union of England and Scotland that had been established in 1707. In chapter 27, when Andrew Fairservice, Frank’s servant, speaks disparagingly of the Union, Jarvie sternly rebukes him: Whisht, sir—whisht! it’s ill-scraped tongues like yours, that make mischief atween neighbourhoods and nations. . . . I say, Let Glasgow flourish! . . . judiciously and elegantly putten round the town’s arms, by way of by-word—Now, since St. Mungo catched herrings in the Clyde, what was ever like to gar [make] us flourish like the sugar and tobacco trade? Will ony body tell me that, and grumble at the treaty that opened us a road westawa’ yonder? Jarvie expresses Scott’s own sense of the benefits that the growing commercial activity of the eighteenth century had brought to Scotland. Emotionally, he admired the romantic and adventurous character of Rob Roy’s way of life, but his reason put him finally on the Bailie’s side. Jarvie states the theme in terms of honor versus credit: “I maun hear naething about honour—we ken naething here but about credit. Honour is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about making frays in the street; but Credit is a decent honest man, that sits at hame and makes the pat play [pot boil]” (chap. 26). The Heart of Midlothian · The Heart of Midlothian is regarded by many as Scott’s best work. In addition to the familiar virtues of a fully realized specific historical milieu and a large cast of characters from a variety of social levels who create themselves through the dialogue, the novel has for its heroine one of the common people, with whom Scott’s powers of characterization were at their surest, and it has a truly serious ethical theme in the heroine’s refusal to lie to save the life of her younger sister. Jeanie Dean’s dilemma enables Scott to examine the relation of the law to justice and to mercy. The novel opens with an extended presentation of an actual historical event, the Porteous riots in Edinburgh in 1736. Immediately after the execution of a smuggler named Wilson, John Porteous, Captain of the City Guard, reacts to a minor disturbance among the spectators by needlessly ordering his troop to fire upon the crowd. Several people are killed, and Porteous is sentenced to be hanged. On the very day set for his execution, he is reprieved by Queen Caroline. That night a mob storms the prison, the Tolbooth (to which the novel’s title is a reference). Porteous is dragged out and hanged. In Scott’s version, the mob is led by George Robertson, an accomplice of Wilson, who would have died along with him had Wilson not generously made possible his escape. Robertson has another reason besides revenge on Porteous for breaking into the Tolbooth. In the prison is Effie Deans, who has been seduced by him and has borne his child. She is to stand trial under a statute which stipulates that if a woman conceals her pregnancy and then can neither produce the infant nor prove that it died a natural death, she shall be presumed to have murdered it and shall suffer the death penalty. Once inside the prison, Robertson seeks her out and urges her to make her escape in the confusion, but she refuses. (One wonders why he did not remove her forcibly, but evidently he has his hands full directing Porteous’s fate.) The next night, Robertson summons Effie’s sister Jeanie to a remote spot and tells her that the case can be removed from under the statute if Effie is found to have communicated her condition to anyone. Jeanie refuses to lie about her sister’s having done this, and she repeats her refusal in an affecting interview with Effie just before the trial. When Effie is condemned to death, Jeanie travels on foot all the way from Edinburgh to London,

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wins the support of the Duke of Argyle, and persuades Queen Caroline to pardon her sister. A few days after Effie is released, she elopes with Robertson. At this point the novel is in effect finished, or nearly so, but Scott added a fourth volume to stretch the book to the length for which he had contracted. In it, the Duke of Argyle arranges for Jeanie, her new husband Reuben Butler (a clergyman), and her father to remove to a remote part of Scotland under his protection. This pastoral coda contrasts too strongly with the tone of the rest of the novel, and there is an unfortunate emphasis on the material blessings showered on Jeanie that rather qualifies one’s sense of the disinterested heroism of her achievement. The closing chapters are, to be sure, tied to the main plot by the reappearance of Effie and her husband and by the discovery of their son, now a member of a small gang of bandits. Robertson is killed in an encounter with this gang, probably by his own son. There is an interesting variation on the novel’s central situation, for the son, probably actually guilty of unnatural murder as his mother Effie was not, escapes when Jeanie goes to the room where he is confined and in her compassion loosens his painfully tight bonds. If this repetition of the novel’s central event, Jeanie’s saving a prisoner from execution, is aesthetically interesting, it is nevertheless ethically problematic, for the youth is a lawless individual who shows no compunction at what he has done and who does not hesitate, once Jeanie has loosened his bonds, to endanger her life by setting a fire in order to effect his escape. Jeanie’s mercy seems in this case ill-judged. It is the first three volumes that contain the most effective probing of the relation of the law to justice and to mercy. Scott contrasts a number of characters, each of whom stands in a different relation to the law. Wilson is a criminal justly condemned for smuggling, but his last offense is the generous one of saving a life by enabling his young accomplice to escape, and it wins him the sympathy of the populace and sets him in sharp contrast to the enforcer of the law, the Captain of the City Guard. Porteous’s excessive zeal in the performance of his office leads to the loss of life and earns him the hatred of the populace when he gives the order to fire upon the crowd. His callousness is also shown by his earlier refusal to loosen Wilson’s painfully tight handcuffs on the way to the execution, pointing out that all his pain will soon be at an end. Among the mob that punishes Porteous, Robertson is concerned to preserve order because he wishes to stress the justice of their action, yet in his own person he has much to fear from justice. He is, moreover, clearly moved more by a desire for revenge than by a true concern for justice, and also, as has already been noted, he has in Effie Deans an ulterior motive for storming the Tolbooth. Of all the prisoners the novel describes, Effie is in the worst plight, since she is entirely innocent of the crime she is charged with and since the statute does not even require that a crime be proved to have occurred. Moreover, she is in a sense to suffer for the guilt of others, for the government wishes to make an example of her because of the increasing frequency of child murder. Also, the Queen’s anger at the response to the pardon of Porteous makes a royal pardon for Effie unlikely. Her situation is rendered more hopeless by these two factors that in strict justice have no bearing on her case. Effie is linked with Wilson in that he and she have both sacrificed themselves for Robertson. Effie staunchly refuses to reveal her seducer’s identity, even when she is “offered a commutation and alleviation of her punishment, and even a free pardon, if she would confess what she knew of her lover.” In her desire to protect Robertson, she goes so far as to withhold all information concerning Meg Murdockson, the woman to whom Robertson had sent her when her child was due.

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Robertson clearly does not deserve her generosity (nor Wilson’s, for that matter). He is completely selfish. Effie is not the first girl he has abused. Meg Murdockson had long been a servant in his family, and he had seduced her daughter Madge. When her mother put Madge’s infant out of the way so it would not pose an obstacle to Madge’s finding a husband, Madge lost her wits. She is one of a number of pathetic simpletons who wander through Scott’s novels, a company that includes David Gellatley in Waverley and Goose Gibbie in Old Mortality. Robertson’s guilt in Madge’s case has far-reaching consequences, for it is anger at the prospect of Effie taking her daughter’s place that moves Meg Murdockson to spirit away Effie’s infant and later to attempt to waylay Jeanie on her journey to London. Robertson’s real name is Staunton. He has been among other things an actor, and this is appropriate, for, besides being selfish, he is the rankest hypocrite. In the scene where he confronts Jeanie to explain how she can save her sister, he heaps blame on himself liberally, but it is all empty gesture and rhetoric. He expects someone else to solve the problem. Jeanie is to save Effie by telling a lie when he could do it by surrendering himself and telling the truth. When Effie has finally been sentenced, then indeed he leaps on his horse with the intention of securing her reprieve by giving himself up as the leader of the Porteous mob, but his horse loses its footing and Staunton is thrown and severly injured. Jeanie learns of this on her journey to London when, by a remarkable coincidence, she meets him in his father’s house, where he is recuperating. He authorizes her to trade his life for that of her sister, but only if her own unsupported plea is refused. When Effie is reprieved and Staunton marries her, he becomes an actor in good earnest, and so does she. Sir George and Lady Staunton live for years in fear that their past will be discovered, and his unhappiness is much aggravated by the fact that they are childless. A series of coincidences reveals that their son is not dead, but is part of a small gang of bandits in the very vicinity where Jeanie and her family now live. When Staunton arrives in search of him and is killed, Jeanie prepares the body for burial. She discovers “from the crucifix, the beads, and the shirt of hair which he wore next his person, that his sense of guilt had induced him to receive the dogmata of a religion, which pretends, by the maceration of the body, to expiate the crimes of the soul” (chap. 52). The verb pretends conveys Scott’s view of the appropriateness of Staunton’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Jeanie Deans, in contrast, is firmly anchored in her father’s rigid Presbyterianism and has a horror of every kind of pretense or falsehood. Her principles prevent her from lying to save Effie, but her generosity enables her to accomplish what all of Staunton’s empty heroics are powerless to achieve. It is interesting to consider a misunderstanding that arises between Jeanie and her father, David Deans, regarding her testifying at Effie’s trial. Deans is a Cameronian, the strictest kind of Scottish Presbyterian, and his memory goes back to the battle of Bothwell Bridge and the persecutions that followed it. He is doubtful of the propriety of even appearing in court, since doing so might seem to constitute an acknowledgment of a government that has abandoned the Solemn League and Covenant and that exercises what he regards as undue influence over the Kirk. Though Deans has never before hesitated to tell anyone what to do, in the present case he says to himself, “My daughter Jean may have a light in this subject that is hid frae my auld een—it is laid on her conscience, and not on mine—If she hath freedom to gang before this judicatory, and hold up her hand for this poor cast-away, surely I will not say she steppeth over her bounds” (chap. 18). The inconsistency is too touching and too clearly rooted in his

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love for Effie to be called hypocrisy. It is another instance of the conflict between principles of conduct and emotional claims, and it enriches the character and underlines his relation to the central theme. When he attempts to convey to Jeanie his resolution of his scruples, she, who has no thought of refusing to appear in court, takes it that he is encouraging her to give false testimony. The misunderstanding increases her sense of isolation and lack of support and thus makes her behavior all the more heroic. The heroic impact of the journey itself is marred somewhat by the melodramatic events with which Scott seeks to enliven it. The lurid coloring is overdone in the scene of Jeanie’s captivity at the hands of Meg, Madge, and two underworld cronies of theirs (to whom the old woman is known as Mother Blood). Scott is more successful when he modulates into comedy in the scene in which the demented Madge, in the absence of Meg and the others, leads Jeanie to a nearby village and then into church, where Madge’s fantastic behavior causes her captive considerable embarrassment. The tension between the comic elements here and the very real danger of Jeanie’s situation makes a strong effect. Shortly afterward, however, the tone shifts back to melodrama with the coincidental meeting with the convalescent Staunton, and the dramatic temperature drops during one of those retrospective narratives which Scott’s complex plotting often forced on him. The climactic confrontation with the Queen is very well done. Oddly enough, although Scott often had trouble finding a convincingly natural mode of utterance for his invented characters of the upper class, for actual historical figures he often succeeded in writing dialogue that is elevated without being stilted, polished without being wooden. Such is the language of Prince Charles Edward in Waverley, of Claverhouse in Old Mortality, and of Queen Caroline here. The psychology of the Queen and her language are noteworthy. Jeanie’s simple plea is effective, but it is not, or not only, emotional considerations that cause the Queen to grant the pardon. Even her response to Jeanie’s main speech—“This is eloquence”—suggests objective evaluation of the speech more than emotional assent, and Scott keeps the scene well clear of sentimentality by a persistent emphasis on the political factors in the Queen’s decision. She is divided between resentment of the Scots for their response to her pardoning of Porteous and her inclination to remain on good terms with Jeanie’s sponsor, the Duke of Argyle. Even though he is at present out of favor, her policy is based on the principle that political allies may become opponents and opponents may again become allies. Another element in the scene is her complex attitude toward Lady Suffolk, also present at the interview. The Queen has so arranged matters that Suffolk is both her chief confidante and the King’s mistress. After inadvertently making a remark that the Queen construes as a reflection on herself, Jeanie rights herself with a chance reference to “the stool of repentance,” the punishment in Scotland “for light life and conversation, and for breaking the seventh command.” The Queen is amused at the obvious embarrassment of “her good Suffolk.” The novel as a whole indicates that although the law is an absolute necessity, it can never do more than approximate justice because it is made and administered by human beings. It is ironically the generous instincts of Effie (in protecting Staunton) and the uncompromising honesty of Jeanie that make Effie the victim of a law which, it is repeatedly suggested, is a bad law because it exacts punishment in cases where there may have been no crime. It seems unjust too that the strict enforcement in the present instance is caused by factors external to Effie’s case, the rise in child murder

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and the royal anger over the Porteous affair. Moreover, the author tends to place the human agents who enforce the law in an unflattering light. Porteous abuses the authority vested in him. The Doomster, or executioner, is a kind of untouchable who inspires horror in everyone when he makes his ritual appearance at Effie’s sentencing. Ratcliffe, a thief four times condemned to the gallows, is the only prisoner besides Effie who rejects the opportunity to escape when the mob breaks into the Tolbooth. His reason is that he wants the post of underturnkey. The authorities actually grant this audacious request after considering how valuable his knowledge of the underworld is likely to prove. Scott provides a striking emblem of the amount of practical compromise involved in the enforcing of the law when he shows Ratcliffe and Sharpitlaw, the superintendent of police, at the start of the interview in which they bargain over Ratcliffe’s request: “They sate for five minutes silent, on opposite sides of a small table, and looked fixedly at each other, with a sharp, knowing, and alert cast of countenance, not unmingled with an inclination to laugh.” The scene with the Queen indicates that the prerogative of mercy that is intended to mitigate the sternness of the law or correct miscarriages of justice is likewise governed by considerations of policy and expediency. The outcome of that scene, however, shows that the gap between ideal justice on one hand, and policy or expediency on the other, can be bridged by the selfless exertions of someone motivated simply by love. Although the four novels discussed here are likely to appear on anyone’s list of the best of Scott, they are by no means the only ones worthy of a modern reader’s attention. The Antiquary, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, and Woodstock have all found advocates among modern critics. There is also a very successful third panel in what might be called the Jacobite triptych that includes Waverley and Rob Roy: Redgauntlet, set in the 1760’s, describes the last throes of the Jacobite movement. In addition to a plot full of intrigue, it is noteworthy for its combination of letters and journals with third-person narration and for autobiographical elements in the main characters of Alan Fairford and Darsie Latimer. Obviously Scott will never again have the huge audience he enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century, but he is more than merely a chapter in literary history. In addition to establishing the genre of the historical novel and influencing nineteenth century historiography, he wrote several novels that can be judged major achievements by any but the most narrow and rigid criteria. John Michael Walsh Other major works SHORT FICTION: Chronicles of the Canongate, 1827. PLAYS: Halidon Hill, pb. 1822; Macduff’s Cross, pb. 1823; The Doom of Devorgoil, pb. 1830; Auchindrane: Or, The Ayrshire Tragedy, pr., pb. 1830. POETRY: The Eve of Saint John: A Border Ballad, 1800; The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805; Ballads and Lyrical Pieces, 1806; Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, 1808; The Lady of the Lake, 1810; The Vision of Don Roderick, 1811; Rokeby, 1813; The Bridal of Triermain: Or, The Vale of St. John, in Three Cantos, 1813; The Lord of the Isles, 1815; The Field of Waterloo, 1815; The Ettrick Garland: Being Two Excellent New Songs, 1815 (with James Hogg); Harold the Dauntless, 1817. NONFICTION: The Life and Works of John Dryden, 1808; The Life of Jonathan Swift, 1814; Lives of the Novelists, 1825; The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte: Emperor of the French, with a Preliminary View of the French Revolution, 1827.

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TRANSLATIONS: The Chase, and William and Helen: Two Ballads from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger, 1796; Goetz von Berlichingen, 1799 ( Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). EDITED TEXTS: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802-1803 (3 volumes); A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 1809-1815 (13 volumes); Chronological Notes of Scottish Affairs from the Diary of Lord Fountainhall, 1822.

Bibliography Crawford, Thomas. Scott. Rev. ed. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982. A revision and elaboration of Crawford’s widely acclaimed study of Scott. Examines Scott’s work as a poet, balladist, and novelist in a compact style. Daiches, David. Sir Walter Scott and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. A well-written account of Scott, generously illustrated. Contains much valuable information in a readable style by an eminent scholar of Scott. deGategno, Paul J. Ivanhoe: The Mask of Chivalry. New York: Twayne, 1994. This volume of the Twayne Masterwork Series follows the series format, placing the novel in literary and historical context before it is given a particular reading. DeGategno’s reading emphasizes the novel’s pertinence to its own time and its importance as a reflection of Scott’s society. But then, interestingly, deGategno concludes his book with a selection of his students’ responses to Ivanhoe. This book provides a good general introduction to one of Scott’s most compelling and long-lived works. Hart, Francis R. Scott’s Novels: The Plotting of Historical Survival. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1966. A survey of Scott’s novels, generally favorable and emphasizing the author’s diversity. Humphrey, Richard. Waverley. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. This short volume also provides a useful introduction to a seminal Scott novel. Humphrey divides his analysis of the novel into four parts: “Scott’s changing world and the making of Waverley,” “Waverley as story,” “Waverley as history,” and “Waverley as initiator”—by which he means that the novel provided a model not only for subsequent Scott works but also for novels written by many other writers. An interesting appendix contains contemporary accounts of the Battle of Prestonpans. Johnson, Edgar. Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Now considered the definitive biography of Scott, replacing John Gibson Lockhart’s. Johnson has used the many sources and information available on Scott to present an accurate portrayal of the author. A must for the serious Scott scholar. Lauber, John. Sir Walter Scott. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. A good introduction to Scott, ideal for the beginning student or new reader of Scott. Rather than concentrating on the Waverley novels, takes a “sampling” of Scott’s finest works. Contains a useful bibliography.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Born: London, England; August 30, 1797 Died: London, England; February 1, 1851 Principal long fiction · Frankenstein, 1818; Valperga: Or, The Life of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, 1823; The Last Man, 1826; The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, 1830; Lodore, 1835; Falkner, 1837. Other literary forms · Mary Shelley was a prolific writer, forced into copiousness by economic necessity. Punished by Sir Timothy Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s father, for her violation of his moral codes with his son, Mary Shelley was denied access to the Shelley estate for a long time after her husband’s death. Her own father, William Godwin, was eternally in debt himself and spared her none of his troubles. Far from helping her, Godwin threw his own financial woes in her lap. It fell to Mary to support her son by writing, in addition to her novels, a plethora of short stories and some scholarly materials. The stories were mainly available to the public in a popular annual publication called the Keepsake, a book intended for gift-giving. Her stories were firmly entrenched in the popular gothic tradition, bearing such titles as “A Tale of Passion,” “Ferdinand Eboli,” “The Evil Eye,” and “The Bride of Modern Italy.” Her scholarly work included contributions to The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men in Lardner’s Cabinet Encyclopedia (1838). She attempted to write about the lives of both her father and her husband, although her efforts were never completed. She wrote magazine articles of literary criticism and reviews of operas, an art form that filled her with delight. She wrote two travel books, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (1817) and Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). Shelley edited two posthumous editions of her husband’s poetry (1824 and 1839), and she wrote several poetic dramas: Manfred, now lost, Proserpine (1922), and Midas (1922). She wrote a handful of poems, most of which were published in Keepsake. Achievements · Shelley’s literary reputation rests solely on her first novel, Frankenstein. Her six other novels, which are of uneven quality, are very difficult indeed to find, even in the largest libraries. Nevertheless, Mary Shelley lays claim to a dazzling array of accomplishments. First, she is credited with the creation of modern science fiction. All subsequent tales of the brilliant but doomed scientist, the sympathetic but horrible monster, both in high and mass culture, owe their lives to her. Even Hollywood’s dream factory owes her an imaginative and economic debt it can never repay. Second, the English tradition is indebted to her for a reconsideration of the Romantic movement by one of its central participants. In her brilliant Frankenstein fantasy, Mary Shelley questions many of the basic tenets of the Romantic rebellion: the Romantic faith in people’s blissful relationship to nature, the belief that evil resides only in the dead hand of social tradition, and the Romantic delight in death as a lover and restorer. Finally, she created one of the great literary fictions of the dialogue with the self. 824

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The troubled relationship between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is one of the foundations of the literary tradition of “the double,” doubtless the mother of all the doubles in Charles Dickens, in Robert Louis Stevenson, and even in Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad.

Library of Congress

Biography · Mary Shelley, born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, lived the life of a great romantic heroine at the heart of the Romantic movement. She was the daughter of the brilliant feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the equally distinguished man of letters William Godwin. Born of two parents who vociferously opposed marriage, she was

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the occasion of their nuptials. Her mother died ten days after she was born, and her father had to marry for the second time in four years to provide a mother for his infant daughter. He chose a rather conventional widow, Mary Jane Clairmont, who had two children of her own, Jane and Charles. In her childhood, Mary Shelley suffered the torments of being reared by a somewhat unsympathetic stepmother; later, she led the daughter of this extremely middle-class woman into a life of notoriety. The separation traumas in her early years indelibly marked Mary Shelley’s imagination: Almost all of her protagonists are either orphaned or abandoned by their parents. Mary Shelley’s stormy early years led, in 1812 and until 1814, to her removal to sympathetic “foster parents,” the Baxters of Dundee. There, on May 5, 1814, when she was seventeen years old, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was then married to his first wife, Harriet. By March 6, 1815, Mary had eloped with Shelley, given birth to a daughter by him, and suffered the death of the baby. By December 29, 1816, the couple had been to Switzerland and back, had another child, William, and had been married, Harriet having committed suicide. Mary Shelley was then nineteen years old. By the next year, Mary’s stepsister, Jane Clairmont, who called herself Claire Clairmont, had had a baby daughter by Lord Byron, while Mary was working on Frankenstein, and Mary herself had given birth to another child, Clara. The network of intimates among the Shelley circle rapidly increased to include many literati and artists. These included, among others, Leigh and Marrianne Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and John Polidori. The letters and diaries of the Shelleys from this period offer a view of life speeded up and intensified, life at the nerve’s edge. While the Shelleys were touring Switzerland and Italy, they sent frantic communications to their friends, asking for financial help. Mary issued frequent requests for purchases of clothing and household items such as thread. There were also legal matters to be taken care of concerning publishing, Shelley’s estate, and the custody of his children from his previous marriage. The leaves of the letters and diaries are filled with urgent fears for the safety of the Shelley children and the difficulties of what was in effect an exile necessitated by the Shelleys’ unorthodox style of life. In 1818, Clara Shelley died, barely a year old, and in 1819, William Shelley died at the age of three. Five months later, a son, Percy Florence, was born, the only child of the Shelleys to grow to maturity. In 1822, Mary Shelley’s flamboyant life reached its point of desolation. Percy Shelley, while sailing with his close friend Edward Williams, in his boat Ariel, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. Mary’s letters and diaries of the time clearly reveal her anguish, her exhaustion, and her despair. Her speeding merry-go-round suddenly and violently stopped. Literary historians find themselves in debate over this point in Mary Shelley’s life. Her letters and diaries record unambiguous desolation, and yet many scholars have found indications that Percy Shelley was about to leave her for Jane Williams, the wife of the friend with whom he drowned. There is also some suspicion that Mary’s stepsister had recently given birth to a baby by Percy Shelley, a rumor that Mary Shelley denied. Because of Percy Shelley’s mercurial nature, such speculations are at least conceivable. Against them stands Mary’s diary, a purely private diary, which suggests that she would have no reason to whitewash her marriage among its confidential pages.

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Mary’s tragedy did not prompt warmth and help from her estranged father-in-law. He refused to support his grandson, Percy Florence, unless Mary gave the child to a guardian to be chosen by him. This she would not do, and she was rewarded for her persistence. Her son became heir to the Shelley estate when Harriet Shelley’s son died in 1826. After the death, Mary’s son became Lord Shelley. Just as important, however, was the warm relationship that he maintained with Mary until her death. Mary Shelley’s life ended in the tranquil sunshine of family affection. Her son married happily and had healthy children. Mary seems to have befriended her daughter-inlaw, and, at the last, believed herself to be a truly fortunate woman. Analysis · Mary Shelley’s six novels are written in the gothic tradition. They deal with extreme emotions, exalted speech, the hideous plight of virgins, the awful abuses of charismatic villains, and picturesque ruins. The sins of the past weigh heavily on their plot structures, and often include previously unsuspected relationships. Shelley does not find much use for the anti-Catholicism of much gothic fiction. Her nuns and priests, while sometimes troublesome, are not evil, and tend to appear in the short stories rather than in the novels. She avoids references to the supernatural so common in the genre and tends instead toward a modern kind of psychological gothic and futuristic fantasy. Like many gothic writers, she dwells on morbid imagery, particularly in Frankenstein and The Last Man. Graphic descriptions of the plague in the latter novel revolted the reading public which had avidly digested the grotesqueries of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796). With the exception of Frankenstein, Shelley’s novels were written and published after the death of her husband; with the exception of Frankenstein, they appear to be attempting to work out the sense of desolation and abandonment that she felt after his death. In most of her novels, Shelley creates men and particularly women who resign themselves to the pain and anguish of deep loss through the eternal hope of love in its widest and most encompassing sense. Reconciliation became Shelley’s preponderant literary theme. Frankenstein · Frankenstein is Shelley’s greatest literary achievement in every way. In it, she not only calls into the world one of the most powerful literary images in the English tradition, the idealistic scientist Victor Frankenstein and his ironically abominable creation, but also, for the one and only time, she employs a narrative structure of daring complexity and originality. The structure of Frankenstein is similar to a set of Chinese boxes, of narratives within narratives. The narrative frame is composed of the letters of an arctic explorer, Robert Walton, to his sister, Mrs. Saville, in England. Within the letters is the narrative of Victor Frankenstein, and within his narrative, at first, and then at the end within Walton’s narrative, is the firsthand account of the monster himself. Walton communicates to England thirdhand then secondhand accounts of the monster’s thoroughly unbelievable existence. Here, it would seem, is the seminal point of Joseph Conrad’s much later fiction, Heart of Darkness (1902): the communication to England of the denied undercurrents of reality and England’s ambiguous reception of that intelligence. In Frankenstein as in Heart of Darkness, the suggestion is rather strong that England cannot or will not absorb this stunning new perception of reality. Just as Kurtz’s fiancé almost a century later cannot imagine Kurtz’s “horror,” so Mrs. Saville’s silence, the absence of her replies, suggests that Walton’s stunning discovery has fallen on deaf ears.

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The novel begins with Walton, isolated from his society at the North Pole, attempting to achieve glory. He prowls the frozen north “to accomplish some great purpose”; instead, he finds an almost dead Victor Frankenstein, who tells him a story which, in this setting, becomes a parable for Walton. Frankenstein, too, has isolated himself from society to fulfill his great expectations, and he has reaped the whirlwind. Frankenstein tells Walton of his perfect early family life, one of complete kindness and solicitude. It is a scene across which never a shadow falls. Out of this perfection, Victor rises to find a way of conquering death and ridding himself and humankind of the ultimate shadow, the only shadow in his perfect middle-class life. Like a man possessed, Frankenstein forges ahead, fabricating a full, male, human body from the choicest corpse parts he can gather. He animates the creature and suddenly is overwhelmed by the wrongness of what he has done. In his success, he finds utter defeat. The reanimated corpse evokes only disgust in him. He abandons it in its vulnerable, newborn state and refuses to take any responsibility for it. From that day, his life is dogged by tragedy. One by one, all his loved ones are destroyed by the monster, who at last explains that he wanted only to love his creator but that his adoration turned to murderous hate in his creator’s rejection of him. Ultimately, Frankenstein feels that he must destroy the monster or, at the very least, die trying. He succeeds at both. After Frankenstein’s death in the presence of Walton—the only man other than Frankenstein to witness the monster and live—the monster mourns the greatness that could have been and leaves Walton with the intention of hurling himself onto Frankenstein’s funeral pyre. The critical task regarding this fascinating work has been to identify what it is that Frankenstein has done that has merited the punishment which followed. Is the monster a kind of retribution for people’s arrogant attempt to possess the secrets of life and death, as in the expulsion from Eden? Is it the wrath of the gods visited on people for stealing the celestial fire, as in the Prometheus legend, a favorite fiction of Percy Shelley? Or is this a rather modern vision of the self-destructiveness involved in the idealistic denial of the dark side of human reality? Is this a criticism of Romantic optimism, of the denial of the reality of evil except as the utterly disposable dead hand of tradition? The mystery endures because critics have suggested all these possibilities; critics have even suggested a biographical reading of the work. Some have suggested that Victor Frankenstein is Shelley’s shrewd insight into her husband’s self-deceived, uncritical belief in the power of his own intelligence and in his destined greatness. Valperga · Valperga, Shelley’s second novel, has a fairy-tale aura of witches, princes, maidens in distress, castles, and prophecies. The author uses all these fantasy apparatuses, but actually deflates them as being part of the fantasy lives of the characters which they impose on a fully logical and pragmatic reality. The novel pits Castruccio, the Prince of Lucca, a worldly, Napoleonic conquerer, against the lost love of his youth, the beautiful and spiritual Euthanasia. Castruccio’s one goal is power and military dominion, and since he is enormously capable and charismatic, not to mention lucky, he is successful. Nevertheless, that he gains the world at the price of his soul is clearly the central point of the novel. To gain worldly sway, he must destroy Valperga, the ancestral home of his love, Euthanasia. He must also turn Italy into an armed camp which teems with death and in which the soft virtues of love and family cannot endure. His lust for power raises to predominance the most deceitful and treacherous human beings because it is they who function best in the context of raw, morally unjustified power.

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In the midst of all this, Castruccio, unwilling to recognize his limits, endeavors to control all. He wants to continue his aggrandizing ways and have the love of Euthanasia. Indeed, he wants to marry her. She reveals her undying love for him but will yield to it only if he yields his worldly goals, which he will not do. As his actions become more threatening to her concept of a moral universe, Euthanasia finds that she must join the conspirators against him. She and her cohorts are betrayed, and all are put to death, with the exception of Euthanasia. Instead, Castruccio exiles her to Sicily. En route, her ship sinks, and she perishes with all aboard. Castruccio dies some years later, fighting one of his endless wars for power. The vision of the novel is that only pain and suffering can come from a world obsessed with power. Surely the name Euthanasia is a remarkable choice for the novel’s heroine. Its meaning in Shelley’s time was “an easy death”; it did not refer to the policy of purposefully terminating suffering as it does today. Euthanasia’s death is the best one in the story because she dies with a pure heart, never having soiled herself with hurtful actions for the purpose of self-gain. Possibly, the import of Shelley’s choice is that all that one can hope for in the flawed, Hobbesian world of Valperga is the best death possible, as no good life can be imagined. It is probable that this bleak vision is at least obliquely connected with the comparatively recent trauma of Percy Shelley’s death and Mary Shelley’s grief and desolation. The Last Man · The degenerating spiral of human history is the central vision of The Last Man. Set in the radically distant future of the twenty-first century, this novel begins with a flourishing civilization and ends with the entire population of the world, save one man, decimated by the plague. Lionel Verney, the last man of the title, has nothing to anticipate except an endless journey from one desolate city to another. All the treasures of man are his and his alone; all the great libraries and coffers open only to him. All that is denied to him—forever, it seems—is human companionship. The novel begins before Lionel Verney’s birth. It is a flashback narrated by Lionel himself, the only first-person narrator possible in this novel. Lionel describes his father as his father had been described to him, as a man of imagination and charm but lacking in judgment. He was a favorite of the king, but was forced out of the king’s life by the king’s new wife, a Marie Antoinette figure. The new queen, depicted as an arrogant snob, disapproves of Verney’s father and effects his estrangement from the king by working on her husband’s gullible nature. Verney’s father, in ostracized shame, seeks refuge in the country, where he marries a simple, innocent cottage girl and thus begets Lionel and his sister Perdita. Verney’s father can never, however, reconcile himself to his loss of status and dies a broken man. His wife soon follows, and Lionel and Perdita live like wild creatures until chance brings the king’s son, Adrian, into their path. Their friendship succeeds where the aborted friendship of their fathers failed, despite the continued disapproval of the queen. What is remarkable to the modern reader is that Shelley, having set her story two hundred years in the future, does not project a technologically changed environment. She projects instead the same rural, agrarian, hand and animal-driven society in which she lived. What does change, however, is the political system. The political system of The Last Man is a republican monarchy. Kings are elected, but not at regular intervals. The bulk of the novel concerns the power plays by which various factions intend to capture the throne by election rather than by war. Adrian and Lionel are endlessly involved with a dashing, Byronic figure named

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Lord Raymond, who cannot decide whether he wants life in a cottage with Perdita, or life at the top. Ultimately, Raymond, like the protagonist of Valperga, wants to have both. He marries Perdita and gives up all pretensions to power, but then returns with her to rule the land. Power does not make him or his wife happy. Despite the sublimation of the power process into an electoral system, the rage for power remains destructive, degenerating finally into war. The plague which appears and irrevocably destroys humankind is merely an extension of the plague of people’s will to power. Not only Raymond and Perdita, but also their innocent children, Lionel’s wife, Iris, and Adrian’s sister, who stayed home to eschew worldly aspirations, are destroyed. No one is immune. Lionel’s survival carries with it a suggestion of his responsibility in the tragedy of humankind. His final exile in a sea of books and pictures suggests that those who commit themselves solely to knowledge and art have failed to deal with the central issues of life. In simply abdicating the marketplace to such as Lord Raymond, the cultivators of the mind have abandoned humanity. Through Lionel, they reap a bitter reward, but perhaps the implication is that it is a just reward for their failure to connect with their fellow human beings. A number of critics consider The Last Man to be Mary Shelley’s best work after Frankenstein. Like Frankenstein, this novel rather grimly deals with the relationship between knowledge and evil. Its greatest drawback for modern audiences, however, is its unfortunate tendency to inflated dialogue. Every sentence uttered is a florid and theatrical speech. The bloated characterizations obscure the line of Shelley’s inventive satire of people’s lemminglike rush to the sea of power. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck · The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck attempts to chronicle the last, futile struggles of the House of York in the Wars of the Roses. Perkin Warbeck was a historical character who claimed to be Richard, the son of Edward IV of England. Most scholars believe that Richard died in the tower with his brother Edward; Perkin Warbeck claimed to be that child. Warbeck said that he had survived the tower, assumed another identity, and intended to reclaim the usurped throne held by Henry VII. Shelley’s novel assumes that Perkin was indeed Richard and documents his cheerless history from his childhood to his execution in manhood by Henry VII. The novel attempts to explore once more man’s fruitless quest for power and glory. Richard is an intelligent, virtuous young man who finds true companionship even in his outcast state, and the love of a number of women, each different, utterly committed, and true. He is unable, however, to forsake the dream of conquest and live simply. As he presses onward to claim the throne, he suffers a series of crushing losses, not one of which will he yield to as a revelation of the wrongheadedness of his quest. His rush toward the throne achieves only the death of innocent persons. When he is executed at the end of the novel, his wife Katherine is given the last words. She needs to find a way of continuing to live without him. She is urged by his adherents to forsake the world, and for his sake to live a reclusive life. Although Katherine appears only briefly in the interminable scenes of war and the grandiose verbiage through which the reader must trudge, her appearance at the end of the novel and her refusal to forsake the world in her grief are the most impressive moments in the work. In refusing to retreat from the world, Katherine commits herself to the only true value in the novel, love, a value which all the senseless suffering of Richard’s quest could not destroy. Katherine, as the widow of the gentle but misguided warrior,

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becomes a metaphor for the endurance of love in a world that has its heart set on everything but love. Her final, gracious words are a relaxing change from the glory-seeking bombast of the action, “Permit this to be, unblamed—permit a heart whose sufferings have been and are, so many and so bitter, to reap what joy it can from the strong necessity it feels to be sympathized with—to love.” Once again, Shelley’s basic idea is an enthralling one, but her execution of her plan includes a grandiose superfluity of expression and incident. Lodore · Lodore and Shelley’s last novel, Falkner, form a kind of reconciliation couplet to end her exploration of loss and desolation. Reward for persistence in loving through the trials of death and social obliquity is her final vision. In Lodore, an extremely long parade of fatal misunderstandings, the central image is the recovery of a lost mother. The novel begins veiled in mystery. Lord Lodore has exiled himself and his fairylike, delicate daughter, Ethel, to the forests of Illinois in far-off America. Lord Lodore is without his wife, who has done something unnamed and perhaps unnameable to provoke this unusual separation. Reunion with her is the central action of the plot. Lord Lodore is a perfect gentleman amid the cloddish but honest American settlers. His one goal is to produce the perfect maiden in his daughter, Ethel. Father and daughter are entirely devoted to each other. A series of flashback chapters reveal that Lady Lodore, very much the junior of Lord Lodore, had been overly influenced by her mother, who had insinuated herself between husband and wife and alienated her daughter’s affections from Lord Lodore. Lord and Lady Lodore lived what life they had together always on the brink of rapprochement, but utterly confounded by the wiles of the mother-in-law, who managed to distort communicated sentiments to turn husband and wife away from each other, finally effecting a radical separation that neither Lord nor Lady Lodore wanted. The American idyll ends for Ethel and her father when Ethel is about fifteen years old. The unwanted attentions of a suitor threaten Ethel’s perfect life, and her father moves his household once more. Lodore thinks of reestablishing the bond with his estranged wife but is killed in a duel hours before departing for England. His last thoughts of reconciliation are buried with him, because the only extant will is one recorded years ago when he vindictively made Lady Lodore’s inheritance dependent on her never seeing Ethel again. Ethel returns to England shaken and abandoned, but not to her mother. Instead, she lives with Lodore’s maiden sister. Ethel is wooed and won by a gentleman, Edward Villiers, coincidentally one of the few witnesses to her father’s death and many years older than herself. The marriage of this truly loving couple is threatened because Edward, reared in luxury, is in reduced financial circumstances owing to the irresponsibility of his father, one of the few truly despicable characters in the novel. Much suffering ensues, during which Edward and Ethel endeavor to straighten out priorities: Which is more important, love or money? Should they part to give Ethel a chance at a more comfortable life, or should they endure poverty for love? They choose love, but Edward is taken to debtor’s prison, Ethel standing by for the conjugal visits that the prison system permits. Through a series of chance encounters, Lady Lodore, now a seemingly shallow woman of fashion, becomes aware of Ethel’s needs and of her need to be a mother to the young woman. Telling no one but her lawyer what she intends, she impoverishes herself to release Edward from prison and to set the couple up appropriately. She then

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removes herself to a humble country existence, anticipating the blessings of martyrdom. She is, however, discovered, the mother and daughter are reunited, and Lady Lodore is even offered an advantageous marriage to a rich former suitor who originally was kept from her by the machinations of his sisters. Lodore includes many particulars that are close to the biographical details of the author’s life: the penury and social trials of her marriage to Shelley, the financial irresponsibility of her father, and the loss of her mother. Shelley’s familiarity with her material appears to have dissolved the grandiose pretensions of the previous novels, which may have sprung from her distance from their exotic settings and situations. Lodore has the force of life despite its melodramatic plot. If it were more widely available, it would be a rich source of interest for historians and literary scholars. It contains an interesting image of America as envisioned by the early nineteenth century European. It also contains a wealth of interest for students of women’s literature. Falkner · If Lodore offers a happy ending with the return of a long-lost mother, then Falkner finds contentment in the restoration of an estranged father. Here, the father is not the biological parent, but a father figure, Rupert Falkner. The plot is a characteristic tangle of gothic convolutions involving old secrets and sins, obdurate Catholic families, and the pure love of a young girl. The delightful Elizabeth Raby is orphaned at the age of six under severe circumstances. Because her fragile, lovely parents were complete strangers to the little town in Cornwall to which they had come, their death left Elizabeth at the mercy of their landlady. The landlady is poor, and Elizabeth is a financial burden. The landlady keeps her only because she suspects that the now decimated, strange little family has noble connections. Thus begins a typical Shelley fiction—with abandonment, innocence, and loss of love. The plot is set in motion by a mysterious stranger who identifies himself as “John Falkner.” Falkner undertakes the guardianship of Elizabeth, not only because of her charm, but also because of an unfinished letter found in the family cottage. This letter connects Elizabeth’s mother to one “Alithea.” The reader comes to learn that Falkner was Alithea’s lover, that he carries the guilt of her ruin and death since Alithea was a married woman, and that her husband continues to bear his wife’s seducer a vindictive grudge. Happily, for the moment, Alithea’s husband believes that the seducer was surnamed Rupert. Alithea’s husband was and is an unsuitable mate for a sensitive woman, and the marriage was one from which any woman would have wanted to flee. Alithea’s infraction was only against the letter of the marriage bond, not its spirit. The vindictive husband has conceived a hatred for Alithea’s son, Gerard, on account of Alithea’s connection with “Rupert.” Elizabeth, Falkner’s ward, coincidentally meets and forms an attachment to Gerard. Falkner repeatedly attempts to separate them because of his guilty feelings. Their attachment blooms into a love which cannot be denied, and Falkner is forced to confess all to Gerard after the boy saves Falkner’s life. He is the infamous Rupert, Rupert Falkner. With the revelation comes the separation of Elizabeth and Gerard, she to stand loyally with Falkner, he to defend his father’s honor. For the first time in his life, Gerard finds himself on his father’s side, but familiarity breeds contempt. Gerard wants to fight a manly duel for honor, while his father wants to crush Falkner for economic gain in the legal system. Gerard finds this an inexcusable pettiness on his father’s part. He then joins Elizabeth to defend Falkner in court. To do this, they will

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need to go to America to bring back a crucial witness, but the witness arrives and saves them the voyage: Falkner is acquitted. The legal acquittal is also metaphorical: In comparison with the ugly sins of greed, the sins of passion are pardonable. Elizabeth, the reader knows, is also the product of an elopement in defiance of family, a sin of passion. The proud Catholic family which once spurned her decides to acknowledge Elizabeth. Gerard and Elizabeth, both wealthy and in their proper social position, marry. Falkner will have a home with them in perpetuity. Once again, Shelley’s fictional involvement in the domestic sphere tones down her customary floridity and affords the reader fascinating insights into the thinking of the daughter of an early feminist, who was indeed an independent woman herself. It can only clarify history to know that such a woman as Mary Shelley can write in her final novel that her heroine’s studies included not only the “masculine” pursuits of abstract knowledge, but also needlework and “the careful inculcation of habits and order . . . without which every woman must be unhappy—and, to a certain degree, unsexed.” Martha Nochimson Other major works SHORT FICTION: Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, 1976. PLAYS: Proserpine, pb. 1922; Midas, pb. 1922. NONFICTION: History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, 1817; Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, 1838 (Numbers 63, 71, 96); Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1844; The Letters of Mary Shelley, 1980 (2 volumes; Betty T. Bennett, editor). Bibliography Baldick, Chris. In “Frankenstein” ’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1987. Baldick analyzes the structure of modern myth as it has adapted and misread Shelley’s novel until the film version of 1931. Focuses on Shelley’s novel as itself a monster, which is assembled, speaks, and escapes like its protagonist. Also examines transformations in E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Elizabeth Gaskell; links Frankenstein to Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Karl Marx; and traces the novel’s influence on late Victorian stories of mad scientists, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence. The last chapter argues that literary realism is itself a result of Frankenstein’s shadow. Includes footnotes, five illustrations, an appendix summarizing the novel’s plot, and an index. Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of “Frankenstein” from Mary Shelley to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Examines the influence of Shelley’s novel on the history of theater and cinema from 1832 to 1930, discussing in great detail the popularization of the story until it became an enduring myth. After an introduction to the prevailing theater in London from 1823 to 1832, Forry studies the various Victorian adaptations of the novel from 1832 to 1900 and its revivals in twentieth century drama and cinema from 1900 to 1930. Provides the texts of seven dramatic adaptations of Frankenstein, from Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 Presumption to John Lloyd Balderston’s 1930 Frankenstein. Contains thirty-one illustrations, a list of ninety-six dramatizations from 1821 to 1986, an appendix with the music from Vampire’s Victim (1887), a bibliography, and an index.

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Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. An important book on Romantic prose fiction, including Shelley’s gothic romances, which analyzes in depth twelve Romantic novels to define the intellectual context of the era. Notes that concepts of reality were tested and changed by Romantic novels and Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime modified aesthetic forms. Shelley makes a significant contribution to this general thesis, and Frankenstein is analyzed in detail. Examines the story as a tragedy of suffering and superiority, in which a nightmarish experience carries moral themes. Finds a common drift toward death in most novels of this genre. Includes a set of notes and an index. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Methuen, 1988. An important book which argues against trends of analysis which subordinate Shelley to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Extends feminist and psychoanalytic criticism of Frankenstein to include all of Shelley’s life and work, arguing that her stories are creations of the family she never enjoyed. The strength of her stories is their expression of her ambivalent desire for and criticism of the bourgeois family as an exploitation of property and women by a patriarchal ideology. Establishes Shelley’s need for family, her feminist critique of science, and her analysis of the relationship between fathers and daughters. Includes eight illustrative plates, a chronology, ample notes, a bibliography, and an index. Nitchie, Elizabeth. Mary Shelley: Author of “Frankenstein.” New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953. This critical biography evaluates Shelley in her own right in the milieu of people and places she knew. Assesses Shelley’s temperament and talent, discussing her faults and strengths. Follows her life and career, from her earliest appearance as a self-conscious girl with a critical mind to her widowhood when she wrote largely forgotten works. Although primarily a biography, contains valuable comments on her writings, seen as art and as expressions of her life. A bibliography, an index, and six appendices, including a chronology, a list of works, a note on the unpublished novella Mathilda, the stage history of Frankenstein, and some unpublished poems, are provided. Smith, Johanna M. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne, 1996. This good introductory volume on Mary Shelley opens with a chapter devoted to her biography, then divides Shelley’s works into categories. Separate chapters consider science fiction (including Frankenstein), historical fiction, domestic-sentimental fiction, literary biography and criticism, and travel narratives. More descriptive than analytical, this overview of Shelley’s career is most accessible. A selected bibliography includes both primary and secondary sources. Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley. London: Constable, 1988. A revision of Spark’s Child of Light (Essex, England: Tower Bridge, 1951) which reassesses the view that Shelley craved respectability after her husband’s death. Spark skillfully narrates Shelley’s life and then analyzes her writings. Argues that Shelley’s pessimism was the consequence of her rationalist upbringing by William Godwin, but that she possessed an inner tranquility with which she created her novels. Concentrates on Frankenstein as the end of gothic fiction for its rational exposé of gothic mystery, on The Last Man as an expression of Shelley’s feeling of solitude, and on The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck as her challenge to learn from Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. Contains eight pages of illustrations, a selected bibliography, and an index.

Tobias Smollett Tobias Smollett

Born: Dalquhurn, Scotland; March 19, 1721 (baptized) Died: Antignano, Italy; September 17, 1771 Principal long fiction · The Adventures of Roderick Random, 1748; The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle: In Which Are Included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, 1751; The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, 1753; The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, 1760-1761; The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 1771. Other literary forms · Tobias Smollett combined his medical practice with an active and varied career as a man of letters. His earliest, though unsuccessful, effort was as a playwright with The Regicide: Or, James the First of Scotland, a Tragedy (1749), published by subscription a full ten years after fruitless attempts at having it staged in London. Two other disappointments followed with his inability to secure a production for Alceste (1748-1749), a combination of opera, tragedy, and masque, and with the rejection of his first comedy, The Absent Man (1751), which was never produced or published. Both of these works have now been lost. His only success on the stage came finally with The Reprisal: Or, The Tars of Old England (1757), a comedy; this farce was produced by David Garrick at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Smollett’s deep moral energy surfaced in two early verse satires, “Advice: A Satire” (1746) and its sequel, “Reproof: A Satire” (1747); these rather weak poems were printed together in 1748. Smollett’s poetry includes a number of odes and lyrics, but his best poem remains “The Tears of Scotland.” Written in 1746, it celebrates the unwavering independence of the Scots, who had been crushed by English troops at the Battle of Culloden. As Smollett’s literary career grew, his hackwork for publishers increased with translations. His most popular work among these projects was A Complete History of England (1757-1758) and its sequel, Continuation of the Complete History of England (17601765). He took great pride in his achievements as a historian and as a historical editor of A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages (1756). A diversity of interests from medicine to politics prompted the writing of numerous pamphlets and essays. An Essay on the External Use of Water (1752) was a farsighted proposal for the improvement of public hygiene at Bath that caused a furor among the resort’s staff and patrons. Though his health was rapidly deteriorating from overwork, Smollett completed a thirty-five-volume edition of The Works of M. de Voltaire (1761-1774). In the hope that a warm climate would improve his health, he traveled to France and Italy, and on returning to England he published Travels Through France and Italy (1766). His didactic observations instructed his readers to accept England, for all its faults, as the best nation for securing happiness on earth. His last nonfiction works were The Present State of All Nations (1768-1769) and the political satire The History and Adventures of an Atom (1749, 1769). Lewis M. Knapp offers the best modern edition of the Letters of Tobias Smollett (1970). Achievements · Smollett cannot be said to have added dignity to the art of the novel in the manner of Henry Fielding’s imitation of the epic, nor can it be argued that he 835

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gave form to the genre as did Samuel Richardson, yet the eighteenth century novel cannot be discussed without giving full attention to Smollett’s stylistic virtuosity and satiric intent. Smollett successfully challenged Richardson’s and Fielding’s substantial popular reputation by providing “familiar scenes in an uncommon and amusing point of view.” In The Adventures of Roderick Random (commonly known as Roderick Random), his first novel, he displayed a thorough understanding of the distinction between the novel and the romance, of which Samuel Johnson would speak in The Rambler essays (1750-1752). Borrowing from Latin comedy and Elizabethan drama, Smollett created caricatures of human beings with the dexterity of William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson. Though his characters lack the psychological depth of Richardson’s, they possess breathtaking energy and evocative power. Only in the late twentieth century did Smollett’s role in the development of the English novel become fully appreciated. Criticism of that time emphasized the wrongheadedness of viewing Smollett’s satiric energy as a deviation from Fielding’s epic ambitions for the novel. Instead, Smollett is seen at the beginning of another tradition. Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens both valued Smollett’s work; Dickens acknowledged his debt to Smollett’s picaresque realism and comic characterization in Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). Among modern novelists, the savage comedy of writers as various as Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Heller is in Smollett’s tradition rather than that of Fielding or Richardson. Smollett’s works continue to provoke critical inquiry. Several books and numerous dissertations have appeared, as well as many articles. The Oxford English Novels series has published all five of his novels, and the University of Delaware has begun to publish its Bicentennial Edition of the Works of Tobias Smollett, under the editorship of O. M. Brack, with The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (commonly known as Humphry Clinker) appearing in 1979. Biography · Tobias George Smollett was born at Dalquhurn, Dumbartonshire, in western Scotland, and baptized on March 19, 1721. He was the son of Archibald Smollett, a lawyer, who suffered from ill health, and Barbara Cunningham Smollett, a woman of taste and elegance but no fortune. Smollett’s grandfather, of whom the boy was especially proud, had been knighted by King William in 1698 and had become an influential member of the landed gentry as a local Whig statesman. When Smollett’s father died only two years after his son’s birth, the family suffered from lack of money. Smollett’s education, for all of his family’s financial deterioration, was of superior quality though erratic. He entered Dumbarton Grammar School in 1728, remaining for five years, and received the traditional grounding in the classics. His matriculation to Glasgow University (though officially unrecorded) was interrupted when he became a Glasgow surgeon’s apprentice while still attending university medical lectures. In the fall of 1739, Smollett was released from his apprenticeship to go to London; now eighteen, he had some reputation as a writer of earthy satires and doggerel. While traveling to London, Smollett carried the manuscript of a tragedy, The Regicide, which, he soon realized, would provide no entrée for him with the London theater managers. He is described at this time as “attractive, entertaining as a raconteur, and blessed with self-assurance.” His future as a London man of letters uncertain, Smollett received advice from a number of Scottish physicians suggesting he continue practicing medicine. On March 10, 1740, he received a medical warrant from the Navy Board

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and embarked on the HMS Chichester as a surgeon’s second mate. The author’s naval experience, material used later for Roderick Random, began during the outbreak of war with Spain and continued through the bloody Carthagena, West Indies, expedition of 1741. Smollett returned to England in 1742 but was drawn back to Jamaica, where he resided until 1744. While living on the island, he met the daughter of an established family of planters, the Lassellses; he married Anne Lassells in 1743. She is described as an affectionate and beautiful woman, in her early twenties, of considerable fortune. Smollett, on the advice of her family, returned to London alone, where he set up a practice as a surgeon on Downing Street in May, 1744. Having never lost hope of a literary career, he worked on improving his fluency in Spanish and then began his translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), which was published in 1755. The years from 1747 to 1750 were marked by considerable literary activity, numerous changes in residence, various trips abroad, a widening circle of acquaintances, and the birth of his only child, Elizabeth, in 1747. In January, 1748, Roderick Random was published; this was followed by the impressive translations of Alain Le Sage and Cervantes, and in 1749, The Regicide was printed. The success of Roderick Random was instantaneous and prolonged, with sixty-five hundred copies sold in twenty-two months; it was to rival the popularity of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742). The success of Roderick Random, which was written in less than six months, became a kind of revenge on the theater managers of London. During this period, Smollett made plans to produce Alceste, his opera (George Frideric Handel was contracted for the music), but this effort was to fail; only a lyric from this work survives. His comedy The Absent Man was submitted to David Garrick but not accepted; Smollett’s failure at drama was a continuing source of frustration throughout his career. In June, 1750, Smollett purchased his medical degree from Marischal College, Aberdeen, and in the same month moved his family to Chelsea, a fashionable London suburb. It became an ideal home for him, where both his medical practice and his writing flourished; he remained there for thirteen years until forced abroad by his health in 1763. It was in Chelsea that he wrote The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (commonly known as Peregrine Pickle), a work of nearly 330,000 words composed at top speed in anticipation of a trip to Paris. On February 25, 1751, his second novel was published to laudatory reviews and wide popularity. Smollett’s involvement with various periodicals began during the 1750’s, first as a book reviewer for the Monthly Review and later as editor and proprietor of the Critical Review. Smollett joined Oliver Goldsmith in launching the British Magazine (the Monthly Repository beginning in 1760), remaining as coeditor until 1763. With a final venture, Smollett gained public notoriety and untold enemies by agreeing to write the Briton, a political effort in support of Lord Bute’s ministry. Of Smollett’s various journalistic efforts, only the work in the Critical Review is exceptional; as a literary periodical, it remains one of the most significant of the last half of the eighteenth century. In the early 1750’s, Smollett was driving himself in order to escape debt. Publishing a medical paper, An Essay on the External Use of Water, brought him little money, and in February, 1753, his third novel, The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (commonly known as Ferdinand, Count Fathom), was published with poor financial results. The book attracted few readers, and Smollett was forced to borrow money and to supplement his medical fees with further hackwork. The years of hack writing began

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in earnest with A Complete History of England, a translation of Voltaire’s writings, a geographical reference work, and several digests of travel. The period from 1756 to 1763 destroyed Smollett’s health, but his reputation as a critic and a successful writer became unquestioned. Unfortunately, this frantic production hardly kept him from debtor’s prison. Returning to the novel in the British Magazine, Smollett published ”the first considerable English novel ever to be published serially”—The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (commonly known as Sir Launcelot Greaves). In monthly installments from January, 1760, to December, 1761, the novel gave the six-penny periodical substantial popularity. In the midst of this literary hard labor, Smollett was imprisoned for three months, having been convicted of libeling an Admiral Knowles in an article in the Critical Review. On his release in early 1761, Smollett continued fulfilling his contracts with certain booksellers but also traveled extensively, possibly to Dublin, even though troubled by asthma and tuberculosis. In addition to these difficulties, his spirit was nearly broken by the illness and death of his daughter in April, 1763. This final shock caused him to cut all his London ties and move his family to the Continent, hoping to calm his wife and cure his ailments in the mild climate of the south of France and Italy. He spent two years abroad, returning to England in July, 1765; the literary result of his tour was Travels Through France and Italy. Though ill health plagued him, he sought for the third time a consulship but was rejected; in 1768 he left England for the last time. Arriving in Pisa, Italy, Smollett visited with friends at the university, finally settling at his country villa in Antignano, near Leghorn, in the spring of 1770, where he completed his masterpiece, Humphry Clinker. Immediately following its publication, he received the rave notices of friends and critics concerning the novel, but he had little time to enjoy the praise. On September 17, 1771, he died from an acute intestinal infection and was buried at the English cemetery at Leghorn. Analysis · Tobias Smollett is not only a great comic novelist; he is also a morally exhilarating one—a serious satirist of the brutality, squalor, and hideous corruption of humankind. His definite moral purposes are firmly grounded in the archetypal topic of all novelists—people’s unceasing battle for survival in the war between the forces of good and evil. Smollett insists that people defy “the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind”; in such a struggle, the hero will ultimately prevail and will be rewarded for his or her fortitude. Roderick Random · The principal theme of Smollett’s first novel, Roderick Random, is the arbitrariness of success and failure in a world dominated by injustice and dishonesty. Smollett’s decision to use realistic detail as a guise for his satire produces a lively and inventive work; moreover, the hero, Roderick, is not a mere picaro nor a passive fool but an intent satiric observer “who recognizes, reacts, and rebukes.” The novel is organized in a three-part structure. The initial stage reveals Roderick’s numerous trials as a young man; he loses his innocence during the years of poverty in Scotland, of failure in London, and of brutal experience in the Navy. The middle of the narrative embodies “the lessons of adversity” as the hero declines into near collapse. In a final brief section, Roderick recovers his physical and moral equilibrium and promotes the simple human values of friendship, love, and trust as the only viable bases for a satisfying existence. Roderick’s problem is both to gain knowledge of the world and to assimilate that

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knowledge. M. A. Goldberg, in Smollett and the Scottish School (1959), finds that “at first his responses are dictated by his indignation, by passions . . . eventually, he learns . . . to govern the emotions with reason.” The struggle between these two forces is central to an understanding of eighteenth century England and its literature. In Smollett’s first novel, good sense seems a sufficient defense against the sordid viciousness of the world. Good sense, however, can only be achieved, or learned, when the hero can control his pride and passionate nature, which are inextricably linked. Equilibrium, an orderly existence, arises paradoxically from the ashes of his random adventures. This understanding develops as the hero pursues the happiness he thinks he deserves but can never fully attain; as a good empiricist, Roderick gathers knowledge from each reversal, finally achieving a “tranquility of love” with the prudent Narcissa. In Roderick Random, the hero’s search for happiness differs significantly from the quest of the traditional picaro. While gaining an education and suffering the rebukes of others, Roderick remains good and effectual, unlike Don Quixote, who is powerless against cruelty. Roderick’s youthful ferocity contributes to the practicality of the satire. Smollett’s approach to correcting the ills of society is to allow no attack or insult to go unavenged. A thorough whipping of a bully or the verbal punishment of a pedant lifts the book beyond the picaresque and advances it past the formal verse satire. The center of the satiric discussion implicates the surroundings and not the hero, thus permitting Smollett to offer a long list of evil, self-centered figures who provide an excellent contrast to the goodness and charity of the ill-served protagonist. Only his faithful servant, Strap; his uncle, Tom Bowling; and the maid, Narcissa, join him in opposing his neglectful grandfather, the scoundrel Vicar Shuffle, the tyrannical Captain Oakum, the dandiacal Captain Whiffle, and the rapacious Lord Strutwell. The last section of the novel provides the hero with the riches of his long quest: family, wealth, and love. The moral of the adventures follows as Roderick’s recently discovered father “blesses God for the adversity I had undergone,” affirming that his son’s intellectual, moral, and physical abilities had been improved “for all the duties and enjoyments of life, much better than any education which affluence could bestow.” The felicity of this final chapter provides a conventional ending, but the crucial point is that Roderick, having completed a rigorous education in the distinctions between appearance and reality, is now deserving of these rewards. Peregrine Pickle · The protagonist of Smollett’s long second novel, Peregrine Pickle, reminds one of Roderick in every aspect, except that Peregrine is an Englishman, not a Scot. The supporting players are improved; among the novel’s outstanding comic creations are Commodore Hawser Trunnion and the spinster, Grizzle Pickle. Often described as the best picaresque novel in English, Peregrine Pickle satirizes the upper classes of mid-eighteenth century England. Rufus Putney argues in “The Plan of Peregrine Pickle” (1945) that Smollett “meant to write a satire on the affectations and meannesses, the follies and vices that flourished among the upper classes in order that his readers might learn with Peregrine the emptiness of titles, the sordidness of avarice, the triviality of wealth and honors, and the folly of misguided ambition.” The novel begins by sketching Peregrine’s social and emotional background and introducing other principal characters. Following this introductory section, Smollett’s protagonist describes his adolescence and education at Winchester and Oxford, where he becomes addicted to coarse practical jokes and to satisfying his overbearing pride. Here the hero meets Emilia, a beautiful orphan with whom he falls in love; because of his capricious nature, however, he cannot remain long with her. Having

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become alienated from his parents, Peregrine departs on the Grand Tour with the best wishes of his guardian, Trunnion. Peregrine returns from France an unprincipled, arrogant rogue whose every action supports his vanity. After numerous incidents including the death of Trunnion and his replacement with the eccentric Cadwallader Crabtree as Peregrine’s mentor, the hero tests the virtue of Emilia and is rebuffed. The remainder of the novel observes the long distress, the eventual imprisonment, and the final rehabilitation of the protagonist, who by now is convinced of the fraud and folly of the world. As Putney mentions, only after matriculating to the “school of adversity,” which reduces his pride and vanity, can Peregrine hope to achieve wealth, marry his true love, triumph over his enemies, and retire to the country. Adversity teaches him to distinguish between the complex vices of the urban sophisticates and the simpler but more substantial pleasures of generosity and love in a rural retreat. Despite its picaresque vigor and satisfactory resolution, the novel suffers from a confusion of purposes: Peregrine’s arrogance undermines the credibility of his role as a satirist of high society. Thus, Smollett’s satiric intentions are blunted by his aspirations to a novel of character. Ferdinand, Count Fathom · Ferdinand, Count Fathom is remembered today for its dedication, in which Smollett gives his famous definition of the novel, and for its place as the first important eighteenth century work to propose terror as a subject for a novel. In The Novels of Tobias Smollett (1971), Paul-Gabriel Boucé finds that the major defect of the novel is the author’s “mixture of genres, without any transition brought about by unfolding of the story or the evolution of the characters.” Fathom’s dark cynicism informs the majority of the work, with the last ten chapters unraveling into a weak melodrama; nevertheless, Smollett’s satire remains effective as a bitter denunciation of the hypocrisy and violence of elegant society. As an early contribution to the literature of terror, the novel probes the emotions of a young, virtuous girl who undergoes isolation, deprivation, and sadistic brutality at the hands of a rapacious creature. The figure of Fathom is used to undercut sentimental conventions and show their uselessness when civilized norms are forgotten. Sir Launcelot Greaves · Sir Launcelot Greaves completed serialization in December, 1761, and was published as a book in March, 1762. Because of its serial publication, the novel’s structure suffers from the frequent contrivance of artificial suspense. Recent criticism, however, has pointed to an underlying thematic unity based upon a series of variations on the theme of madness, with minute investigation into the physical, psychological, and moral aspects of the disorder. Greaves, the quixotic hero, launches a noble crusade for reform. His hopeless demand that a corrupted world listen to reason embraces Smollett’s social idealism. If moral intention were the only measure of a novel’s worth, then the didactic power of Sir Launcelot Greaves would guarantee its success; unfortunately, the delicate balance of the genre remains disordered by the force of an overobvious moral preoccupation. Humphry Clinker · Smollett’s last novel, Humphry Clinker, appeared in the bookstalls on June 15, 1771; Smollett had written the three volumes over a five-year period. It is his masterpiece, and it remains among the great English novels. The work was inspired by the epistles of Christopher Anstey’s witty and popular New Bath Guide (1766). Using the epistolary method instead of the travel narrative of the early novels, Smollett characterizes his correspondents by means of their wonderfully individual

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letter-writing styles. Old Matthew Bramble of Brambleton Hall, Wales, travels with his household through Gloucester, Bath, London, Scarborough, Edinburgh, Cameron (Smollett country), Glasgow, and Manchester, and home again. Squire Bramble suffers various physical complaints, and his ill health makes him sensitive to the social ills surrounding him on his journey. Bramble searches for a recovery but finds himself becoming worse, not better, yet his compassionate nature remains undiminished. The journey was begun so that Bramble might distract his young niece, Lydia Melford, from a strolling actor named Wilson. The party also includes Tabitha, his aging, narrow-minded, old-maid sister; her malapropic maid, Winifred Jenkins, the classic example of the illiterate servant; and the modishly cynical nephew, Jery. En route, they adopt, much to Tabitha’s delight, a Scottish veteran of American Indian warfare, Obadiah Lismahago. Soon, they add Humphry Clinker to the party as a new footman; he turns out to be the natural son of Matthew. There are three major plots to develop, and numerous minor episodes, all of which hinge upon the characteristic picaresque device of the journey; Smollett exchanged the rogue hero for a group of picaros—Bramble and nephew Jery—who analyze and observe society. Through careful stages in letter after letter, Matthew’s character is revealed to the reader, who learns to trust him as a reliable observer of society’s foibles; in this respect Humphry Clinker is much stronger than Peregrine Pickle, where the satire was blunted by the protagonist’s unreliability. Smollett’s satire strikes not individuals but categories of people and assorted social institutions; in particular Humphry Clinker is an exposé of the false attitudes and disordered life of the eighteenth century nouveaux riches. His conservative political views are displayed in Bramble’s rages against an unrestricted press, politically biased juries, and the ignorance of the mob, and, as in Peregrine Pickle, he contrasts the folly and depravity of urban life with idealized pictures of the country. Smollett’s achievement in Humphry Clinker depends on his skillful use of the picaresque and epistolary traditions. His last novel is also distinguished by a warmth and tolerance not found to such a degree in his earlier works. Bramble’s cynicism never becomes obnoxious to the reader; the brutality of Roderick is muted here. Smollett allows his hero to accept human society, despite “the racket and dissipation.” Finally, for all his burlesque of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary method, Smollett’s characterization of Lydia has a depth and intensity that raises her above mere romantic convention. In contrast to many critical reports, Humphry Clinker ends on a buoyant note of pure happiness, a happiness which fulfills the eighteenth century dictum of conformity to the universal order. Smollett’s novels embrace moral and virtuous methods for pursuing one’s goals. Passions and reason must remain in balance, and within this harmony, nature and art can moderate the demands of vice and folly. Paul J. deGategno Other major works PLAYS: The Regicide: Or, James the First of Scotland, a Tragedy, pb. 1749; The Reprisal: Or, The Tars of Old England, pr. 1757. NONFICTION: The History and Adventures of an Atom, 1749, 1769; An Essay on the External Use of Water, 1752; A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages, 1756; A Complete History of England, 1757-1758; Continuation of the Complete History of England, 1760-1765; Travels Through France and Italy, 1766; The Present State of All Nations, 1768-1769; Letters of Tobias Smollett, 1970 (Lewis M. Knapp, editor).

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TRANSLATIONS: The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, 1748 (Alain René Le Sage); The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, 1755 (Miguel de Cervantes); The Works of M. de Voltaire, 1761-1774 (35 volumes); The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses, 1776 (François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon).

Bibliography Bold, Alan, ed. Smollett: Author of the First Distinction. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982. Contains four essays dealing with general issues and five concentrating on each of Smollett’s major novels. Indexed. Boucé, Paul-Gabriel. The Novels of Tobias Smollett. Translated by Antonia White. London: Longman, 1976. A slightly abridged version of the 1971 French study. Includes a biographical sketch, chapters on the major novels, and good discussions of Smollett’s realism and comic devices. Contains a chronologically arranged bibliography of secondary works from 1928 to 1975. Bulckaen, Denise. A Dictionary of Characters in Tobias Smollett. Nancy, France: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993. An extremely useful way of keeping track of the plethora of characters in Smollett’s fiction. Each character is identified; chapter and page number of the character’s first appearance are also cited. There is also an index of the main categories of characters. Grant, Damian. Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977. As the title suggests, Grant ignores questions of realism and moral purpose to concentrate on what he regards as Smollett’s three styles: comic, passionate, and, to a lesser extent, lyrical. Knapp, Lewis Mansfield. Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949. The standard life, sympathetic and detailed, but with little critical analysis of the works. Rousseau, G. S. Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982. Collects fifteen previously published essays and reviews on such topics as Smollett as letter writer and his role in various medical controversies of his day. Makes a good case, inter alia, for not regarding Smollett’s novels as picaresques. Rousseau, G. S., and Paul-Gabriel Boucé, eds. Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Includes ten essays that examine all aspects of Smollett’s writings, including his voluminous, oft-neglected histories. The index allows for cross-references. Spector, Robert D. Smollett’s Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Organized differently from most books on Smollett, with chapters on society, personality, and literary tradition; heroines, fallen women, and women as victims; and the comic and the grotesque. Includes notes and bibliography. ____________. Tobias George Smollett. 1968. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. The first chapter of the book quickly surveys Smollett’s minor works and the rest consider his novels. Contains a useful annotated bibliography of secondary criticism. Wagoner, Mary. Tobias Smollett. New York: Garland, 1984. Provides an extensive list of editions of Smollett’s works as well as an annotated bibliography of secondary material. Arranged by subject (for example, “Biographies and Biographical Material” and “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker”) and therefore easy to use for locating criticism on a specific topic.

C. P. Snow C. P. Snow

Born: Leicester, England; October 15, 1905 Died: London, England; July 1, 1980 Principal long fiction · Death Under Sail, 1932, 1959; New Lives for Old, 1933; The Search, 1934, 1958; Strangers and Brothers series (includes Strangers and Brothers, 1940 [reissued as George Passant, 1972]; The Light and the Dark, 1947; Time of Hope, 1949; The Masters, 1951; The New Men, 1954; Homecomings, 1956 [pb. in U.S. as Homecoming]; The Conscience of the Rich, 1958; The Affair, 1960; Corridors of Power, 1964; The Sleep of Reason, 1968; Last Things, 1970); The Malcontents, 1972; In Their Wisdom, 1974; A Coat of Varnish, 1979. Other literary forms · Reflecting his various careers and interests, C. P. Snow published, in addition to his novels, a number of books, including the literary biographies Trollope: His Life and Art (1975) and The Realists (1978), as well as many reviews and articles. He had some interest in the drama, encouraging the staging of his novels The Affair, The New Men, and The Masters; writing a full-length play, A View over the Bridge, produced in London in 1950; and collaborating with his wife, Pamela Hansford Johnson, on six one-act plays published in 1951: Spare the Rod, The Pigeon with the Silver Foot, Her Best Foot Forward, The Supper Dance, To Murder Mrs. Mortimer, and Family Party. Achievements · As a man, Snow’s accomplishments were many and varied; as a novelist his achievement was more limited, and yet probably more long lasting. Snow the scientist and Snow the public figure cannot, however, be divorced from Snow the writer. Just as his novels drew upon his experiences in his nonliterary careers, so were his sociopolitical ideas presented in his novels. Yet, there is less of the details of “doing” science, less of the specificity of the public life than one might have expected from Snow’s background had he been more of a naturalistic novelist, and there is less ideological content than might have been anticipated from one with Snow’s strong views had he been more of a propagandist. Snow was, rather, a realistic novelist, using his particular knowledge, background, and political ideology not primarily for their own sake, but in the service of his art. This art was conventional, relatively old-fashioned. Snow had limited patience with James Joyce and the literary avant-garde. As a roman-fleuve, Strangers and Brothers has a few interesting features, but it certainly lacks the subtlety that Snow admired in Marcel Proust. Snow did little to advance novelistic techniques; his own craftsmanship shows scant development over the course of a long writing career. His style has frequently been described as dull or pedestrian; Edmund Wilson found his novels “unreadable.” Snow implicitly defended his own style in discussing Anthony Trollope’s, praising his predecessor for using language that was often intentionally made flat in order to be clear. Snow’s style is certainly more serviceable than inspired. His imagery is limited and repetitious. Unity and impact are achieved through the recurrence of a limited number of images, such as those of lighted windows and rivers, but the impact is gained at the expense of a degree of monotony. 843

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If Snow’s style and imagery are little more than adequate, his plot construction is only somewhat more skillful. Unlike Trollope, whom Snow admired and to whom he has frequently been compared, Snow uses plots that are usually suspenseful; one reads his books partly to see how they will come out. This element of suspense, going back to his first published novel, a “whodunit,” no doubt helps explain his having attracted a fairly wide and loyal audience, many of whom were not regular readers of novels. Snow’s plots, however, are seldom particularly ingenious or original; essentially, they are a means to the revelation of character. It is in characterization that Snow’s prime virtue as a novelist lies; yet his characterizations excel only within certain limits. These limits arise from his subject matter. As has been frequently noted, Snow is particularly effective in dealing with “man in committee.” This focus, related to the election, by thirteen Fellows, of a new head of their college, is central to Snow’s most highly praised novel, The Masters. A similar focus is present in a number of his other novels, most strongly in The Affair. The men operate in committees because of the nature of their work—they are professionals involved in their careers, as academics, businessmen, scientists, civil servants. This work—not the physical labor described in a “proletarian novel” but the work of “The New Men,” the professional, bureaucratic, technological, managerial classes—is presented with knowledgeable detail to be found in hardly any other novelist. Snow’s work, in effect, filled a vacuum. Snow filled another vacuum in his treatment of love and sex. While these topics have hardly been ignored by novelists, Snow’s consideration of the social dimensions of a love affair or a marriage—the effect, for example, of a particular passion upon a man’s career, such as Jago’s protective love, in The Masters, for his wife—is rare, if not unique, among modern novelists, especially as, in Snow, the passion per se, however important, is never (not even in Time of Hope) the central concern. This concern is character; the conditions of work, the politicking in committee, the impact of love—all these are used to reveal character in action. Thus, Snow is fundamentally a very traditional novelist, even though his distinctive reputation rests upon his having been a kind of contemporary social psychologist, carefully observing particular segments of modern society. While he is likely to continue to be read for some time for the picture of parts of society that his special experience allowed him to present, he may well still be read when this picture, encrusted by time, is of only historical interest. If, as seems likely, his novels do so survive, it will be because, while dealing with the time-bound particulars of their age, they were able to rise to an understanding of fundamental human motivation and thus to enjoy the longevity of true art. Biography · Charles Percy Snow was born on October 15, 1905, in the Midland city of Leicester, the second of four sons. His background was similar to that of his fictional persona, Lewis Eliot. Snow’s family had risen to the lower levels of the middle class; his father worked as a clerk in a shoe factory. Like Eliot’s father, who led a choir, Snow’s father played the organ in church; when he was no longer able to do so, he died soon after, at the age of eighty-four. In school, Snow specialized in science; after graduation he worked as a laboratory assistant while he prepared for the examination which won him a scholarship, in 1925, at the University College of Leicester. He was graduated, in 1927, with First Class Honors in chemistry and received a grant that allowed him to proceed to a Master of Science degree in physics in 1928. Subsequently, he gained a scholarship to Cam-

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bridge, where he entered Christ’s College as a research student in physics, published a paper on the infrared investigation of molecular structure, and, in 1930, received a Ph.D. and was elected a Fellow of Christ’s College, a post he held until 1950, serving as Tutor from 1935 until 1945. Like the fictional Lewis Eliot, whose law career hinged upon doing well in examinations and receiving scholarships, Snow must have worked hard (as did the hero of The Search) and must have been driven by ambition. His lifelong friend William Cooper (H. S. Hoff) has written novels about the life of the young people in Leicester in which the young Snow appears in fictional form; this work helps confirm the autobiographical quality of Snow’s Time of Hope. Snow himself suggests the autobiographical aspect of The Conscience of the Rich, writing that when he was “very poor and very young,” he “was taken up by one of the rich patrician Anglo-Jewish families.” Just as Lewis Eliot changes careers, and as the narrator of The Search turns from science to writing, Snow also did not rest in the comfort of being a rising young scientific don. He later wrote that since eighteen or so he knew that he wanted to be a writer, and while an undergraduate he wrote a novel, never published, called Youth Searching. He had gone into science because it offered a practical possibility for a poor boy. Although he did good scientific work at Cambridge and published some significant papers, according to William Cooper in C. P. Snow (1959), when some of Snow’s scientific research went wrong through oversight, he abandoned scientific experimentation and turned more to his writing. Snow had already published his first novel, Death Under Sail, a detective story, in 1932; he looked on it as practice for his later, more serious fiction. The next year he published New Lives for Old, combining his interest in science and politics in a work of science fiction. Worried that it would hurt his scientific career, he published this novel anonymously; it has never been reprinted. The first of his “serious” novels, The Search, appeared in 1934; like the Lewis Eliot series, it had a significant autobiographical element. Snow did not move away from science to a complete commitment to literature at this time; rather, he became involved in administration, starting at his college. In 1939, he was appointed to a committee of the Royal Society that was organizing scientists for the war effort. This position led to a career in civil service; during World War II, he worked with the Ministry of Labour, being responsible for scientific personnel; after the war, he recruited scientists for government service. Beginning in 1944, he was associated with the English Electric Company, becoming a member of its Board of Directors in 1947. He was a Civil Service Commissioner from 1945 until 1960. Snow’s public life led to public honors; in 1943 he was made a Commander of the British Empire; in 1957 he was knighted. In 1964, when the Labour Party resumed power, Snow, making a decision different from Lewis Eliot’s, was made a life peer, Baron Snow, of the City of Leicester and served for two years as parliamentary secretary of the Ministry of Technology. During these years of public service, Snow was, of course, also living a personal life. He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950. Like Margaret Davidson in the Strangers and Brothers series, she had been previously married, and like Lewis Eliot, Snow became a stepfather before having a son of his own, Philip Hansford Snow, born in 1952. Lady Snow has written autobiographically; her accounts are especially interesting in suggesting the similarities and differences between

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her children and the fictional children presented, especially in Last Things, by Snow. Both the public and the personal sides of Snow’s life were reflected in the Strangers and Brothers series, the idea for which occurred to him, he wrote, on January 1, 1935, while he was in France. It is difficult to determine the degree to which the whole series was worked out in advance. It would seem that Snow developed early certain controlling themes, such as “possessive love” and the idea of the “resonance” of experience upon the narrator, Lewis Eliot, while remaining flexible regarding the number and nature of the volumes that would make up the series. The first volume, Strangers and Brothers, which was to give the title to the whole series, appeared in 1940. It was followed in 1947 by The Light and the Dark. The subsequent nine volumes of the series appeared at roughly two-year intervals. They continued to draw directly upon his own life, including his eye operations, his cardiac arrest, his interest in the Moors murder case, and his experience in Parliament. The course of Snow’s simultaneous literary and public careers brought him increased recognition and honors, including numerous honorary degrees, and appointment as rector of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. (Like Lewis Eliot, he postponed the first of his eye operations in order to attend this academic installation.) They also involved him in notable controversy, the most famous resulting from his Cambridge lectures in 1959, later published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Snow’s position, which included a criticism of intellectuals’ general lack of understanding of modern science, provoked much discussion and a strong attack, renewed in 1961 by the noted Cambridge literary critic, F. R. Leavis. In 1960, Snow, while on one of his trips to the United States, stirred up another controversy by his lectures at Harvard. In those lectures, he criticized some of the military-scientific decisions made by Winston Churchill’s government during World War II. In his later years, Snow continued to speak out on public policies. He remained a controversial figure, but he gradually acquired the image of an elderly, liberal sage, even if his sagacity was frequently questioned by both the political Left and Right. Following the completion of the Strangers and Brothers series, he revised it for an “Omnibus Edition” and continued his writing, publishing The Malcontents, In Their Wisdom, and, ending his career as he began it, with a detective story (of sorts), A Coat of Varnish. His remarkably full life ended on July 1, 1980. Analysis · Characterization is the foundation of Snow’s fiction. While theme and idea, as one might expect from a writer as political and engagé as was C. P. Snow, are important to his work, and while plot is nearly always a major source of interest, character is fundamental. It was his special approach to characterization, at once limited and complex, that allowed him to employ theme and plot, as well as style and imagery, in its service and which made certain subject matter particularly appropriate. Consequently, his works have their own distinctive and satisfying unity. In his study of Anthony Trollope, a writer whom he valued highly and with whom he identified in a number of ways, Snow speaks interestingly of characterization. He defines character as persona, distinguishes it from inherent, individual nature, and considers personality to be a fusion of nature and character. These distinctions are certainly relevant to Snow’s own work. His starting interest is in “characters,” that is, an individual’s personal qualities that are conditioned by, and expressed in, social experience. Yet, recognizing that this “character” interacts with “nature,” Snow, in attempting to represent a rounded picture of “personality,” must demonstrate the interaction. His fiction, then, is simultaneously concerned with showing people their

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“character” in social situations, indicating their “nature” or personal psychology, and presenting the interplay of the two, the social character and the private nature. All people have, in differing proportions, both a private and a social side to their personalities; all are both strangers and brothers. Given this approach, it is not difficult to understand why Snow dealt frequently with “man in committee,” or why he balanced this social material with presentation of individual passions, such as Lewis Eliot’s for Sheila. Work and careers, seen in relation to individual “nature” and love and sex, were the two poles to which his subject matter flowed. As the social side of personality developed, Snow was able to suggest its changing formation. One observes, for example, Walter Luke’s evolution from a brash young scientist to Lord Luke of Salcombe; his persona, but not his basic nature, changes with the years. Because an individual’s “nature” is inherent (like his or her physiology), it is taken as a donnée, and its effects are dealt with. It is, for example, a given fact that Roy Calvert is a kind of “manic-depressive”; the reader discovers what the results of this nature will be, both for Calvert himself and for those with whom he interacts. It was convenient for Snow that this approach to character was quite appropriate to the type of plotting that he apparently preferred. Most of his novels pose a question: “What will Martin decide?” “Who will be elected master?” “Will Roger Quaife succeed?” The reader, in attempting to anticipate the answer, and Snow, in providing and justifying it, must consider the personalities involved. This consideration requires some understanding of the characters’ public personae, their social interactions, and their private passions. Plot, a strong element in its own right, is based on character. Imagery also consistently reinforces Snow’s binocular view of personality. The light of brotherhood wages a never-ending Manichaean conflict with the dark of private estrangement. Windows may be lit, inviting people to “come home” to social involvement, but they often walk the dark streets, locked out in their lonely individuality. Much of Snow’s style also reflects his view of personality. E. A. Levenston, in a careful study of Snow’s sentence structure (ES, 1974), has noticed the prevalence of qualifying “interrupters.” Many of these are a result of Snow’s comparing the particular to the general, one person’s qualities to many people’s. Expressions such as “very few men, George least of all” or “Roy was not a snob, no man was less so,” run throughout his work. Thus, Snow was consistent in his craft. If this consistency imposed some limitations on his achievements, it also provided a valuable unity to his whole literary corpus. Death Under Sail · For reasons that he later described as “obscure,” Snow “signalled” that he intended to abandon his scientific career by writing “a stylised, artificial detective story very much in the manner of the day.” Death Under Sail is a competent example of this form; it remains quite readable and in some ways foreshadows his more significant work. Told in the first person (curiously, for a book by a twenty-sixyear-old, the narrator is sixty-three), it employs light and dark and also water imagery; it includes a political discussion regarding class society being justified through the ranks of the elite being open to talent; and it is concerned with friendship and the “generation gap.” More important, the plot hinges on character. While the novel’s characterization is relatively superficial, it involves both social character, as seen in the interaction of a small group (the narrator, the detective, and the suspects), and the individual psychology of concealed motives. It is thus typical of Snow’s novels, most

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of which have the element of a suspense story based on the two sides, public and private, of personality. New Lives for Old · Snow’s second published novel, New Lives for Old, is the weakest of his whole canon, but it is not without its virtues. The story involves the discovery of a rejuvenating process and the subsequent questions of whether the process will be suppressed, its effects on the love lives of some of the characters, and the political implications of the discovery. These three questions are not well unified; instead of integrating the love interest and the politics, in this one instance Snow treats them as essentially separate stories, at the expense of both. The love story in the middle section becomes tedious; in the last section of the book Snow, atypically, lets a political interest stifle the story. The first part of the book, however, is fairly successful. Here, the plot is related to character, social interactions, private motivations, and moral decisions. Snow is doing what he does best. The falling-off of the work after its relatively effective beginning, however, justifies his decision not to have it reprinted; it is now a difficult book to obtain. The Search · His third published novel, The Search, was slightly revised and reprinted twenty-four years after its first appearance. It is generally superior to the first two novels and more easily related to the Strangers and Brothers series, especially Time of Hope and Homecoming. Although Snow warns the reader, in his preface to the 1958 edition, that the book’s narrator and protagonist, Arthur Miles, is “not much like” Snow himself, clearly there is an autobiographical element in the story of a poor boy’s using his talent, determination, and scholarships to make a career in science, later to abandon it to turn to writing. The book was praised for its accurate picture of what it is like to be a scientist; in fact, very little scientific activity per se is present. Rather, professional concerns, ambitions, the relation between love and career, and the decisions made by men in committees constitute the basic material of the book. The protagonist might just as easily be a barrister as a scientist. Indeed, The Search, while a worthwhile book in its own right, can be seen as a trying out of the material that Snow was to go on to develop in his series. The defects of The Search result primarily from attempting to try out too much at once; the book’s construction becomes somewhat confused. The virtues arise from Snow’s basing his work on personal experience; he employed, more thoroughly than in his first two published novels, his skill in showing the interconnections of the personal and public aspects of personality. The favorable reception given to The Search certainly encouraged Snow to continue his career as a novelist; within a year of its publication, he conceived of the series on which his reputation rests. He must have made various plans for the series as a whole; the first volume, however, did not appear until 1940, six years after The Search. Writing a roman-fleuve, as opposed to a series of individual novels, presents an author with certain problems and various opportunities. While Snow avoided some of the pitfalls, such as narrative inconsistency, he failed to take advantage of some of the potentialities of the form. The overall pattern of this series is more blurred than it need have been. This is indicated by the order in which the books were published; it is not the essentially chronological order of the “Omnibus Edition,” published after the series was concluded. While this authorial rearrangement must be accepted, the fact that Snow did not originally insist on it suggests a certain random quality to the series’ organization as first conceived of and executed. Furthermore, proposed systems of classification of the books within the series—as, for example, novels of “observed

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experience” and of “direct experience,” or novels dealing with individuals, groups, or a mixture of both—while useful, fail to make clear a compelling pattern. Indeed, the individual volumes of the series, with the possible exception of the final Last Things, stand on their own and easily can be enjoyed separately. That is not to say that nothing is gained by reading them all in the order that they appear in the “Omnibus Edition.” As compared, however, to a work such as Anthony Powell’s roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), Strangers and Brothers fails to develop the potential cumulative effect of a series. The series form does allow the overlapping of incident and the “resonance” between events as seen and felt by the narrator, Lewis Eliot. Snow has an interesting concept here but he does too little with it. The reader does not, as in some of the novels of Joyce Cary, see the same events through different eyes; rather, one is given different accounts by a relatively consistent Eliot. The result is that events described for the second time sometimes bore the reader; at other times the reader feels cheated by the inadequacy of the first account. Only occasionally does the technique work well, as, for example, in the two accounts, in The Light and the Dark and The Masters, of Roy Calvert’s giving of a self-damning paper to Winslow. The first account omits material in order to focus on Calvert; subsequently, as one learns of the larger implications of the act, it takes on new meaning. The Strangers and Brothers series · More obvious benefits of a series novel are present in Strangers and Brothers; the reader observes more characters, over a longer period of time, than would normally be possible in a single volume. Snow, however, possibly in the interest of verisimilitude, does relatively little with his opportunity. Roy Calvert is killed off, George Passant’s change is not traced; one does see more of Martin Eliot and Francis Getliffe, but their developments, such as they are, have little drama. There is little in Snow corresponding to the surprises that Powell gives the reader when, for example, his villain, Widmerpool, makes one of his sudden appearances. Only quite rarely does Snow make effective use of surprise, as when the elderly Hector Rose is found to have acquired a younger, sexy wife. The time span of the series does, however, allow Snow to present the succession of generations, and he does a fine job of suggesting how childhood experiences affect parents as they react to their own children and their friends’ children. The parents’ point of view is an important part of human experience, infrequently treated in fiction; here again, in presenting parental love, Snow effectively filled a vacuum. A more fundamental aspect of the roman-fleuve is the development of the narrator. Lewis Eliot does change, both in his attitudes and in his style, becoming more ironic in the later volumes. Looking back on earlier events, such as his support of Jago in The Masters, he recognizes his errors. While Eliot’s development adds interest to the whole series, it would be difficult to maintain that this interest is central. There are two final aspects of a series novel that make Strangers and Brothers something other than eleven separate books—repetition and thematic development. The former is a two-edged device. Any reader of the whole series will be struck by the frequent repetition of certain phrases, sententious remarks, images, and tricks of style, and can readily assemble a list. Are the values of the repetition—interesting variations on a theme and a sense of continuity—greater than the drawback of monotony? In Snow’s case, it is something of a toss-up. On balance, although many readers may be inclined to say “Oh no! Not another lighted window,” the recurring images of light and darkness do form a pattern that unifies the series and reinforces its themes.

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Finally, there is theme. Snow himself, in a note preceding The Conscience of the Rich, indicated the importance of recurring themes, including “possessive love” and love of, and renunciation of, power. The list could be easily expanded; as has been indicated, the title of the series itself points to a fundamental thematic concern. By seeing these various themes dramatized through different characters in differing circumstances, and learning Lewis Eliot’s reactions, the reader certainly gains a perspective that would be impossible in a single volume. Thematic perspective, then, provides the most convincing justification for Snow’s series. It is a sufficient justification; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That Snow’s strength lay more in characterization than thematic presentation may account for the occasional failures of the series. A brief discussion of three of the eleven novels of the series may serve to suggest aspects of the volumes considered as individual works. Time of Hope is both an early novel and one that focuses upon Lewis Eliot; The Masters, generally the most highly regarded of the series, is from the middle period and has a “collective hero”; Corridors of Power, a later novel, centers on a protagonist other than Eliot. Time of Hope · Time of Hope was the third volume in the series; in terms of internal chronology, however, it comes first, dealing with the years 1914 to 1933, during which Lewis Eliot matures from a boy of nine to an established barrister, involved in an “impossible” marriage. Strongly unified by its plot, it is perhaps the most emotionally moving volume of the whole series, and one of the more successful. Indicative of Snow’s central concern for the interconnections of the public and private aspects of character, the title refers both to the hope for a better society that Lewis Eliot shares with George Passant’s group and to the hero’s private ambitions. Asked what he wants from life, Eliot, in a phrase he returns to much later in the series, replies that he wants to see a better world, spend his life not unknown, and gain love. The suspense in the novel is based on the question of whether Eliot will succeed, whether he will at least be started on the road to realizing these hopes. The conflict and tension behind this question provide the angst that contrasts to the hope. The book begins with a “homecoming,” dreaded by the young Eliot. (In a clear parallel with Marcel Proust, Snow picks this up at the start of the very last volume of the series.) Just as he had reason to fear this first homecoming, Eliot later dreads subsequent returns to the woman he manages to marry. Eliot’s success is mingled with failure. Through a combination of his “nature,” which gives him the drive to struggle, and his social “character,” which wins him the help of George Passant, Eliot’s “personality” wins through on the public level: He succeeds in becoming a barrister. On the personal level, however, while he “succeeds” in marrying Sheila, his possessive love evokes no response; his marriage is personally disastrous and a handicap to his career. Snow in Time of Hope thus successfully utilizes his approach to character and his recurring themes in a self-contained story, but one which also prepares for subsequent volumes. His techniques in this volume are typical of the series: The imagery of light and darkness prevails; secondary characters, such as Herbert Getliffe, the barrister under whom Eliot trains, are well drawn; the “nature” of a major character is presented as a donneé. Not being shown what makes her the strange person she is, one must take Sheila’s problems as given. Fortunately for the story, it is easier to do so than to accept Roy Calvert’s inherent depression in The Light and the Dark. As a Bildungsroman, Time of Hope is more conventional than the majority of the volumes in

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the series. Consequently, it is both one of the more satisfactory of Snow’s novels and one of the less distinctively interesting. The Masters · While Time of Hope has a clear protagonist, The Masters, the first volume in the revised series, has no one hero. Snow is particularly good at dealing with interactions within a group, and The Masters has been the most highly regarded of his novels. The title refers to two “masters” or heads of a college; after the first one dies, a new one must be elected. It is on this election, involving the votes of thirteen Fellows of the college, that the plot centers. The election comes down to two candidates, Jago and Crawford. While Lewis Eliot, now one of the Fellows, supports Jago, and while the reader’s sympathies are involved on this side, Snow is careful to avoid making the choice one between good and evil. There are very few outright villains in Snow’s novels, and Crawford is certainly not one. Politically on the left, but personally not so well suited for the mastership, he is contrasted to Jago, whom Eliot finds less appealing politically but much more appealing as a man. Thus, the issue is essentially between personal “nature” and public “character.” The different Fellows line up on this basis, thereby reflecting their own natures and characters; their ultimate votes demonstrate the balance of these two aspects of “personality.” Interestingly, given Snow’s famous dispute, following the publication of the The Masters, over “the two cultures,” the literary and the scientific, one might see Jago, a scholar of English literature, as the humanists’ candidate, and Crawford, a member of the Royal Society, as the scientists’. Snow, opposed to the split between the “cultures,” does not have the Fellows vote on the basis of this split. Walter Luke, a scientist, judges by nature and sticks with Jago. Francis Getliffe, also a scientist, although recognizing Jago’s virtues, is motivated by “public” principle and supports Crawford. Eustace Pilbrow, a literary scholar, agrees with Getliffe. Nightingale, another scientist, jealous of Crawford’s professional success, initially supports Jago. Paradoxically, Despard-Smith, because he identifies with Jago, supports Crawford. Having established the initial lineup of votes, Snow skillfully shows the interactions of motives that cause some of them to shift. One particularly important consideration is the question of Jago’s wife; her character, thought to be unsuitable for that of a Master’s spouse, becomes an issue in the election. The personal issue here involves another form of “possessive love” and sets up a “resonance” for Eliot, who is ambivalently trapped in his marriage to Sheila. Snow handles the development of the plot and the suspense leading to the election quite effectively. In bringing so many insightful changes on the interactions of the personalities within a small group, Snow wrote what may be his own masterpiece. In the later volumes of the series, Eliot moves from college to national and international political maneuvers; the implications are that there is not that much difference. Nevertheless, the “Tolstoyan” view of history—that individuals are secondary to the larger forces of history, which is explicitly mentioned more than once in the series—is more pronounced in the later volumes. Snow suggests that with other people, probably the same policies would be carried out, the same forces would operate. Thus, the mechanisms of politics are of primary interest, but to understand them, one must understand the people who work and are worked by them. As Snow once said, one must understand how the world “ticks” if one is to change it for the better. Corridors of Power · Corridors of Power, the ninth volume in the series, gives the reader a picture of how the high-level decision making that he also described in The New Men

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and questioned in Science and Government (1961) does operate. However deterministic its underlying historical philosophy, the novel supports the statement of one of its characters that what is important is how something is done, who it is done by, and when it is done. The story centers on Roger Quaife, a politician committed to an “enlightened” view of the use of atomic weapons. Once again, one sees both the public and private side of a protagonist, the “nature” and “character” that interact to form Quaife’s “personality”; again, however, the nature is essentially a donneé—Quaife is to be taken as found. Ostensibly happy in his marriage, Quaife has a mistress; she is a factor, although not a decisive one, in his political career. Snow is quite good at showing the interactions of career considerations and more personal feelings within the triangle composed of Quaife; his wife, Caro; and his mistress, Ellen. Sex is seen as a relationship, social as well as emotional and physical. In order to present this relationship, however, verisimilitude must be stretched a bit, because Lewis Eliot, the narrator, has to be in places and hear confidences from which one would expect him to be barred. Not only does Eliot learn much about private lives, but also he is rather surprisingly ubiquitous at political councils. Here, in describing some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvers, Snow is quite effective, as he is with the presentation of secondary characters, such as the member of Parliament, “Sammikins,” and the important civil servant, Hector Rose. After the completion and revision of the Strangers and Brothers series, Snow not only worked on biographical studies—Trollope (1975), The Realists (1978), The Physicists (1981)—but also continued his novel writing. Although the final volume in the series, Last Things, was diffuse in plotting, he returned, in his final novels, to the use of a strong plot line. Both The Malcontents and A Coat of Varnish are forms of the “whodunit,” and In Their Wisdom, like The Sleep of Reason, maintains the reader’s interest in the outcome of a law case. The Malcontents · The Malcontents received generally poor reviews. It does have obvious weaknesses; the dialogue, usually one of Snow’s stronger points, is somewhat unconvincing. Well attuned to the talk of his cohorts, Snow’s ear for the speech of contemporary youth was less acute. A more serious defect is related to the mysterystory requirement of providing a goodly number of suspects. Too many characters are introduced at the beginning; the reader has an initial problem in differentiating them, and the book gets off to a slow start. Once the story is underway, however, the narrative interest is strong. It involves the interaction of a group of seven young people, planning to take action against the establishment. One of them is known to be an informer. Typically for a Snow novel, to appreciate the narrative fully one must consider the formative aspects of each individual’s personality. Class background, family relations, ideological positions, and love interests all enter in. Diffused through seven characters, however, Snow’s analysis of these factors is somewhat superficial, with the exception of Stephen Freer, whose relationship to the older generation is presented with sensitivity. An underlying sympathy for the ends, if not the means, of the young radicals informs much of the book. This sympathy, while somewhat Olympian, avoids being patronizing and becomes one of the novel’s virtues. In Their Wisdom · In Their Wisdom is a more successful work. Again, to develop narrative interest, a problem is posed. In this instance, it involves an argument over a will and the results of a trial over the disputed legacy. Just as the reader’s sympathy

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is involved, in The Masters, on Jago’s side, here there is no question of whom to support in the contest. Julian, a selfish and opportunistic young man, is Snow’s closest approach to a clear villain. By simplifying some of the characters, Snow is able to devote more attention to the others. Jenny is particularly interesting, different from characters in Snow’s earlier books. In showing her life of genteel poverty and the effect upon her of the trial and its outcome, Snow once again effectively intertwines the personal and the public. Although it devotes an excessive amount of space to the House of Lords, In Their Wisdom is one of Snow’s more successful novels. A Coat of Varnish · His last novel, A Coat of Varnish, was a return to the detective-story genre of his first book. A less pure example of this genre than Death Under Sail, however, it is somewhat unsatisfactorily considered simply as a mystery. The title refers to a line within the book, to the effect that civilization is a thin coat of varnish over barbarism, a notion relevant also to The Sleep of Reason. A fairly interesting cast of characters is introduced, but none of them is treated with the depth of analysis of which Snow was capable. Here, character is secondary to plot, and plot itself is used to comment on society. To try to work out who is guilty, one must understand motives: money, sex, and power. In understanding these motives, one gains, Snow expects, an understanding of society. Although this is one of Snow’s weaker novels, certainly not ending his career triumphantly, it does manage a degree of fulfillment of the Horatian formula, to delight and to instruct. Perhaps one should ask for no more. Throughout his career as a novelist, Snow, although with varying degrees of success, never failed to provide a number of intelligent readers with these twin satisfactions. This may not put him in the ranks of a Leo Tolstoy or a Proust; it is, nevertheless, no small accomplishment. William B. Stone Other major works PLAYS: A View over the Bridge, pr. 1950; The Supper Dance, pb. 1951 (with Pamela Hansford Johnson); Family Party, pb. 1951 (with Johnson); Spare the Rod, pb. 1951 (with Johnson); To Murder Mrs. Mortimer, pb. 1951 (with Johnson); The Pigeon with the Silver Foot, pb. 1951 (with Johnson); Her Best Foot Forward, pb. 1951 (with Johnson); The Public Prosecutor, pr. 1967 (with Johnson; adaptation). NONFICTION: Richard Aldington: An Appreciation, 1938; Writers and Readers of the Soviet Union, 1943; The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959 (revised as Two Cultures and a Second Look, 1964); The Moral Un-Neutrality of Science, 1961; Science and Government, 1961; A Postscript to Science and Government, 1962; Magnanimity, 1962; C. P. Snow: A Spectrum, Science, Criticism, Fiction, 1963; Variety of Men, 1967; The State of Siege, 1969; Public Affairs, 1971; Trollope: His Life and Art, 1975; The Realists, 1978; The Physicists, 1981. Bibliography De la Mothe, John. C. P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Chapters on Snow’s view of literature, science, and the modern mind and his career as writer and public intellectual. Includes extensive notes and bibliography. Karl, Frederick S. C. P. Snow: The Politics of Conscience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. A generally useful study of Snow that analyzes his novels

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up to and including The Affair. Some of the statements about him are misleading, however, and should be read with caution. Ramanathan, Suguna. The Novels of C. P. Snow: A Critical Introduction. London: Macmillan, 1978. A fresh, sympathetic assessment of Snow that discusses all of his novels save his two earliest works, Death Under Sail and New Lives for Old. Notes Snow’s “imaginative impulse,” his understanding of the changing social scene in England over a span of fifty years, and the gradual change in his outlook from hopefulness to doom. Upholds Snow as being free from fanaticism. A recommended reading. Shusterman, David. C. P. Snow. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1991. A competent, compact study of Snow, including his early life, the controversies surrounding his nonfiction, and his literary output. Contains an in-depth analysis of the Strangers and Brothers series of novels, noting their interest apart from their literary value. Includes a chronology and a select bibliography. Snow, C. P. C. P. Snow: A Spectrum, Science, Criticism, Fiction. Edited by Stanley Weintraub. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963. A useful introduction to Snow’s life and works. The commentary covers many aspects of his fiction, criticism, and writings on science. Thale, Jerome. C. P. Snow. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965. Considered an excellent secondary source on Snow that is both readable and informative. Presents Snow’s work up to and including 1964. Discusses his nonfiction writings, among which are his two controversial works The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution and Science and Government.

Muriel Spark MurielS park

Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; February 1, 1918 Principal long fiction · The Comforters, 1957; Robinson, 1958; Memento Mori, 1959; The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960; The Bachelors, 1960; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961; The Girls of Slender Means, 1963; The Mandelbaum Gate, 1965; The Public Image, 1968; The Driver’s Seat, 1970; Not to Disturb, 1971; The Hothouse by the East River, 1973; The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale, 1974; The Takeover, 1976; Territorial Rights, 1979; Loitering with Intent, 1981; The Only Problem, 1984; A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988; Symposium, 1990; The Novels of Muriel Spark, 1995; Reality and Dreams, 1996; Aiding and Abetting, 2000. Other literary forms · In addition to her novels, Muriel Spark produced a sizable amount of work in the genres of poetry, the short story, drama, biography, and criticism. Her volumes of poetry include The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952) and Collected Poems I (1967). Her first collection of short stories, entitled The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories, appeared in 1958, followed by Collected Stories I (1967) and The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985). Voices at Play, a collection of short stories and radio plays, appeared in 1961, and a play, Doctors of Philosophy, was first performed in London in 1962. Spark’s literary partnership with Derek Stanford resulted in their editing Tribute to Wordsworth (1950), a collection of essays on the centenary of the poet’s death, and My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Shelley (1953). Spark and Stanford also edited Letters of John Henry Newman (1957). Spark produced a study of Mary Shelley, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951, revised as Mary Shelley, 1987), and of John Masefield (1953). Spark also edited The Brontë Letters (1954; pb. in U.S. as The Letters of the Brontës: A Selection, 1954). Achievements · Critical opinion about Spark’s status as a novelist is sharply divided. In general, her work is less highly valued by American critics; Frederick Karl, for example, dismissed her work as being “light to the point of froth” and said that it has “virtually no content.” English critics such as Frank Kermode, Malcolm Bradbury, and David Lodge, on the other hand, would consider Spark a major contemporary novelist. Kermode complimented her on being “obsessed” with novelistic form, called The Mandelbaum Gate a work of “profound virtuosity,” and considered her to be a “difficult and important artist.” Bradbury, who regarded Spark as an “interesting, and a very amusing, novelist” from the beginning of her career, later added his assessment that she is also a “very high stylist” whose work in the novella shows a precision and economy of form and style. In a reassessment of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Lodge commented on the complex structure of the novel and Spark’s successful experimentation with authorial omniscience. Spark is known for being able to combine popular success with critical acclaim. In 1951, she received her first literary award, the Observer Story Prize for the Christmas story “The Seraph and the Zambesi.” A radio drama based on The Ballad of Peckham Rye won the Italia Prize in 1962, and in the same year she was named Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1965, Spark received the prestigious James Tait Black 855

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Memorial Prize for Fiction for the The Mandelbaum Gate. Spark earned the Order of the British Empire in 1967. Biography · Muriel Sarah Spark was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on February 1, 1918, of a Jewish father, Bernard Camberg, and an English mother, Sarah Uezzell Camberg. She attended James Gillespie’s School for Girls in Edinburgh, an experience that later formed the background for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She lived in Edinburgh until 1937, when she married S. O. Spark and moved to Africa. During the next two years she gave birth to her son, Robin, and divorced Spark, who had become abusive and was showing signs of mental illness. She moved into an apartment with a young widow and her child and wrote poems and plays while waiting for the long process of her divorce to conclude. Her life in Rhodesia and South Africa provided background material for some of her earliest successful short stories, such as “The Portobello Road” and “The Seraph and the Zambesi.” The onset of World War II interfered with her plans to return to Scotland, and she worked at a number of jobs before managing to book a passage home in 1944; because there were travel restrictions for children, her son was unable to join her for a year and a half. During her sojourn as young divorcee awaiting the arrival of her child, she moved to London to find work, and she lived at the Helena Club, which had been endowed by Princess Helena, the daughter of Queen Victoria, for “ladies from good families of modest means who are obliged to pursue an occupation in London.” Spark’s experiences at the Helena Club with other young women earning a living in a big city became the background for her novel The Girls of Slender Means. From 1944 to 1946, she worked in the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office, an experience she later drew upon when writing The Hothouse by the East River. Her interest in poetry led to her serving as General Secretary of the Poetry Society in London from 1947 to 1949 and as editor of the Poetry Review; in 1949, she introduced a short-lived journal entitled Forum Stories and Poems. In the 1950’s, she began a successful career as a critic and editor which included books on William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, John Masefield, and John Henry Newman, publishing several of these works with her literary partner and friend Derek Stanford. The major turning point in Spark’s career as a writer occurred in 1954, when she converted to Roman Catholicism. Brought up in the Presbyterian religion, she said that she had “no clear beliefs at all” until 1952, when she became “an Anglican intellectually speaking,” although she did not formally join the Anglican Church until late in 1953. The Church of England was, however, a halfway house for Spark, who was an Anglo-Catholic for only nine months before her conversion to Roman Catholicism. She believed that the writings of John Henry Newman were an important factor in her move to the Catholic Church. Her conversion initially caused her a great deal of emotional suffering, and she said that her mind was, for a period of time, “far too crowded with ideas, all teeming in disorder.” This feeling of mental chaos gave way later to what she called “a complete reorganization” of her mind that enabled her to begin writing fiction. Several persons encouraged her to produce a novel, among them Graham Greene and Macmillan and Company, which was looking for new writers at the time; the result was The Comforters. In 1961, Spark traveled to Jerusalem to research the background for The Mandelbaum Gate, and in 1964 she moved from her home in London to New York. She lived for less than a year in an apartment close to the United Nations Building, a location

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that later became the setting for The Hothouse by the East River. In 1967, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire and left England to settle in Italy. In 1982, after fifteen years in Rome, she moved to Tuscany. Analysis · Muriel Spark frequently used the word “minor” to describe her achievement as a novelist, a term which, in her vocabulary, is not as derogatory as it may at first appear. Believing that the artist is by definition a “minor public servant,” Spark claimed that she chose to write “minor novels deliberately.” This characterization of the artist and of her own intentions as a writer reflects her concerns about the novel as a form and the creative process in general, issues which are present throughout her work. She admitted that while writing her first novel, The Comforters, she had difficulty resigning herself to the fact that she was writing a novel, a genre which, in her opinion, was a “lazy way of writing poetry.” For Spark at that time, poetry was the only true literature, while the novel was an “inferior way of writing” whose “aesthetic validity” was very much in doubt. Although she apparently revised her earlier low estimation of the novel, she said that she always considered herself a poet rather than a novelist and believed that her novels are “the novels of a poet.” Spark’s distrust of the novel form also results from her suspicions about fiction’s relationship to truth; she said that she was interested in “absolute truth” and that fiction is a “kind of parable” from which a “kind of truth” emerges which should not be confused with fact. The truth that the novel can embody is similar to her definition of “legend” in Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work. Speaking of the literary legends that surround a writer such as Emily Brontë, she said that these stories, though not literally true, are “the repository of a vital aspect of truth” which should be accorded respect in their own right. It remains imperative, however, for writers and readers to discriminate among types of truth and between life and art, a discrimination that Charmian Colston, the aged novelist in Memento Mori, is capable of making. She tells another character that “the art of fiction is very like the practice of deception,” and, when asked if the practice of deception in life is also an art, replies, “In life . . . everything is different. Everything is in the Providence of God.” Spark, who was careful to maintain this distinction in her statements about her work, described her own novels as a “pack of lies.” Caroline Rose in The Comforters, who shares this distrust of fiction, struggles against being a character in a novel because she resents being manipulated by the novelist. At Jerry Bauer one point, she describes the author

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of the fiction as an “unknown, possibly sinister being.” The writer’s “sinister” nature results from his or her ability to create fictions that are imaginative versions and extensions of the truth rather than the truth itself; perhaps more important, the novelist deprives his or her characters of their free will and independence. As Patricia Stubbs observed, Spark perceives a parallel between God and the novelist, and the act of creating fiction is, in a sense, “dabbling in the devil’s work.” As a result, Spark’s novels are filled with would-be artists and artist-figures, people who attempt to create fictions in real life and consequently bring about discord and mischief. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie begins to view the people around her as characters in a story she is creating and attempts to bring about sexual pairings and heroic deeds in her self-made “plot” with disastrous results. Both Alec Warner in Memento Mori and Dougal Douglas in The Ballad of Peckham Rye are involved in “research” into the lives of the people around them; Douglas carries his curiosity about others a step further, fictionalizing an autobiography for an actress and later becoming the author of “a lot of cock-eyed books.” In two later novels, The Public Image and Territorial Rights, fictions are devised even more consciously—and are potentially more dangerous. In The Public Image, film actress Annabel Christopher is, for the most part, merely the product of a clever publicity campaign with its accompanying lies, distortions, and omissions. After her husband’s suicide, she becomes the victim of his well-planned attempt to destroy her career, for he has left behind a group of letters that would impugn her sexual morality and destroy her carefully devised “public image.” In Territorial Rights, Robert Leaver stages his own kidnapping and sends threatening letters filled with truth and lies to his family and friends. In addition, he leaves fragments of a “novel” he is supposedly writing that contain a sensational mixture of fact and fiction which could hurt many of the people around him. Just as these characters are guilty of trying to manipulate reality by inserting carefully constructed “fictions” into the lives of real people, Sir Quentin Oliver in Loitering with Intent overtly plagiarizes a fictional model to accomplish his ends. After reading Fleur Talbot’s novel Warrender Chase, he begins to orchestrate the lives of the members of the Autobiographical Association according to its plot, an action which causes Fleur to complain that “He’s trying to live out my story.” The ubiquitous “listening devices” and spying present in Spark’s fiction are another aspect of her fascination with the process of creating fictions. Dougal Douglas, the artist-to-be, sells tape recorders to African witch doctors; the Abbey in The Abbess of Crewe is bugged; and Curran in Territorial Rights has a sudden moment of paranoia in a restaurant when he wonders if his fellow diners are all spies armed with “eavesdropping devices.” As the servants in Not to Disturb realize, recording and preserving experience allows the person doing the recording to alter, and, in a sense, to create reality. Armed with tape recorders and cameras, they are busy creating their own version of the events of an evening that culminates in the deaths of the Baron and Baroness Klopstock and their secretary; the servants are artist-figures, manipulating the plot of the story which they will soon sell to the public media. Spark sees the novelist, like the “typing ghost” who plagues Caroline Rose in The Comforters, as an eavesdropper who spies upon his characters and then manipulates their actions in order to create a fiction; and she peoples her novels with characters who are also engaged in this process. Because Spark is so intent upon acknowledging her fiction as fiction, most of her novels are consciously artificial in both form and content. She never had a desire to be a realistic novelist or to write the “long novel”; she said she grew bored writing her

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only lengthy novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, because of its length. Rather, she claimed to speak in a “kind of shorthand” in which the narrative voice is curiously impersonal. Not surprisingly, in several novels, among them Not to Disturb and The Driver’s Seat, she experimented with her own version of the New Novel. In Spark’s fiction, however, unlike that of many of the antinovelists, all details, no matter how arbitrary they at first appear, are ultimately significant. In fact, a word that appears throughout her statements about fiction and in her novels is “economy.” In The Takeover, the narrator mentions the “intuitive artistic sense of economy” that characterizes the creative person, and Spark emphasized her belief that the artist should carefully select only the most appropriate details in order to create meaning. At the same time, holding the belief that it is “bad manners to inflict emotional involvement on the reader,” in her novels the narrator’s witty detachment from the subject matter signifies Spark’s goal of creating art that remains distanced from the human suffering it presents. Literature, according to her, should not continue to sympathize with the victims of violence and tyranny; art should instead abandon sentimental depictions of the human condition so that it can “ruthlessly mock” the forces which cause the individual to suffer. It is Spark’s belief that art needs “less emotion and more intelligence” and should aspire to become an art of satire and ridicule. The world, for Spark, is essentially absurd, and “the rhetoric of our time should persuade us to contemplate the ridiculous nature of the reality before us, and teach us to mock it.” The Comforters · Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, reflects the two pivotal experiences of her life: her conversion to Roman Catholicism and her change as a writer from poet to novelist. Spark said that in order to overcome her aesthetic skepticism about the novel form, it was necessary for her “to write a novel about somebody writing a novel.” In addition, she believed that The Comforters is a result of the “complete reorganization” of her mind that followed her conversion and that its theme is “a convert and a kind of psychic upheaval.” Caroline Rose, the novel’s central character, is in the process of coming to terms with both these issues. A recent convert to Catholicism who dislikes many of her fellow Catholics, Caroline is writing a book called Form in the Modern Novel and trying to understand why she has begun to overhear a disembodied “novelist,” complete with typewriter, who is writing a novel about her and her friends. The Comforters is about the battle between the author and her characters, a battle in which Caroline struggles to preserve her free will in the face of the novelist’s desire to control the events of the story. Caroline finds the experience of being “written into” someone else’s narrative painful, just as her friend Laurence Manders protests that “I dislike being a character in your novel” when he discovers that Caroline is writing fiction that includes the story of their relationship. Caroline believes that it is her “duty” to “hold up the action” of the novel, to “spoil” it, and she asserts her right to make her own decisions, finding, however, that this is usually impossible; the predetermined “plot” of the novelist prevails. Caroline remains unaware, however, that she in turn is capable of affecting the novel as it is being written. The narrator admits that Caroline’s “remarks” continue to interfere with the book and that she does not realize her “constant influence” on the story’s development. From Caroline’s perspective, she has only partial knowledge of the plot, and she complains that the voices she overhears only give her “small crazy fragments” of a novel in which there may be other characters whom she does not

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know. In this sense, Caroline is a surrogate for Spark the novelist, a character who “discovers” the plot, as does its creator, while it is being written. As a result, The Comforters concludes with Caroline leaving London to write a novel which apparently will be The Comforters. Spark would appear to be working out both the technique and the morality of writing fiction in her first novel. Caroline’s fascination with “form in the modern novel” is also Spark’s fascination, and Spark writes a story about the problems involved in writing a story: The Comforters is about the struggle between the novelist’s will to impose form and the continued growth and development of the characters, who begin to become independent entities in the narrative, insisting upon the right to break free of the restraints of plot and situation. One of the reasons Caroline Rose gives for opposing the novelist is that Caroline “happens to be a Christian”; Spark, as a Catholic, is uneasy with the idea of the novelist “playing God” and depriving her characters of choice. The Comforters is also about Catholicism and the recent convert’s attempts to find an identity as a Catholic. Georgina Hogg, the Catholic in the novel whom Caroline particularly despises, symbolizes Caroline’s (and Spark’s) reservations about individual Catholics. These reservations are not, it should be emphasized, about Catholicism as a religion. Rather, Mrs. Hogg represents a Catholicism which, in the hands of a certain type of individual, becomes simply dogma. Mrs. Hogg, who lacks insight or any true feeling about her religion, uses her sense of self-righteousness to impinge upon the people around her. In the novel, she is called a “sneak,” a “subtle tyrant,” and a “moral blackmailer,” and she is indeed guilty of all these accusations. At one point in the story, Caroline decides that Mrs. Hogg is “not a real-life character . . . merely a gargoyle”; she is so lacking in identity that she literally “disappears” when there are no other people around to perceive her existence. As several characters observe, Georgina Hogg “has no private life,” a phrase which ironically underscores her lack of substance as a character and a Catholic. Mrs. Hogg’s lack of identity is a major theme of the novel, and a problem which several other characters share. Helena Manders, when she has a sudden sense of how “exhilarating” it is to be herself, actually perceives her personality as belonging to someone else. Eleanor Hogarth, as Caroline realizes, has completely lost contact with her true personality because she has for so long been satisfied with mimicking others, adopting other roles to play. Caroline’s auditory hallucinations are another aspect of this problem, for she feels that her free will as an individual is being taken from her: Is she Caroline Rose, or simply a character in someone else’s novel? At the same time, she is obsessed with the identity of what she calls the “typing ghost,” at one point making a list entitled “Possible identity” which speculates about who the typist-novelist may be—Satan, a hermaphrodite, a woman, or a Holy Soul in Purgatory. The characters’ lack of identity is related to their isolation and inability to communicate with one another. “Is the world,” asks Caroline, “a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else’s derangement?” Although she rejects this idea, The Comforters certainly depicts a world in which individuals search for an identity while remaining locked into a very subjective set of preconceptions about everything external to them. The way out of this trap, at least for Caroline, is to write a novel, the novel which Spark has actually written. The Comforters represents Spark’s successful confrontation with and resolution of the issues of Catholicism, creativity, and the novel as a genre. Her interest in the novel as a form and the process of creating fictions has continued throughout her career as a novelist.

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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie · In an interview, Spark said that the eponymous protagonist of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie represents “completely unrealised potentialities,” a descriptive phrase which reflects the same ambiguity with which she is treated in the novel. The story of an Edinburgh schoolmistress and her effects on the lives of six of her pupils, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie concentrates on the relationship between Jean Brodie and Sandy Stranger, the student who eventually “betrays” her. Like many other characters in Spark’s fiction, Miss Brodie begins to confuse fact and fiction, and it is when Sandy perceives that her teacher has decided that Rose Stanley must begin an affair with art teacher Teddy Lloyd that Sandy realizes that Jean Brodie is no longer playing a game or advancing a theory: “Miss Brodie meant it.” As David Lodge notes in his article on the novel in The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), Sandy and Jenny intuitively understand when their fiction, a made-up correspondence between Miss Brodie and music teacher Gordon Lowther, should be buried and forgotten; unlike her students, Jean Brodie does not know when fantasies should be discarded. In addition to seeing herself as an artist-figure who can manipulate the lives of her students and lovers, Jean Brodie is also guilty, in Sandy’s eyes, of serious religious and political errors. Although she has not turned to religion at the time, a very young Sandy is frightened by her vision of all the “Brodie set” in a line headed by their teacher “in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose.” Later, Sandy is horrified to discover that her former teacher “thinks she is Providence” and that she can see the beginning and the end of all “stories.” Jean Brodie’s lack of guilt over any of her actions results from her assurance that “God was on her side”; she elects herself to grace with an “exotic suicidal enchantment” which drives her to the excesses that eventually result in her forced retirement. Jean Brodie’s view of herself as “above the common moral code,” a phrase she applies to Rose, her chosen surrogate for an affair with Teddy Lloyd, is related to her political views as well. An early admirer of Italian Premier Benito Mussolini and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler whom Sandy later characterizes as a “born fascist,” she sees herself as duty-bound to shape the personalities and the destinies of the young girls around her. “You are mine,” she says to her “set,” whom she has chosen to receive what she calls the “fruits of her prime,” which will remain with the girls “always,” a prophecy which is partially true. The complexity of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie lies in the fact that Jean Brodie is not simply a villainous character who oversteps her bounds as a teacher and begins to exert a potentially corruptive force on the young people entrusted to her. Although she flirts with fascism (after the war she calls Hitler “rather naughty”), she at the same time encourages a fierce individualism in her chosen students, who, as the headmistress of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls sadly learns, are totally lacking in “team spirit.” She makes good her promise to “put old heads on young shoulders” and creates the “capacity for enthusiasm” for knowledge that remains with several of her students for life. The lecture to her girls on her theory of education—“It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. . . . Never let it be said that I put ideas into your heads”—is, like the portrait of Jean Brodie that Spark presents in the novel, open to several interpretations. Although in the later years of her prime, Miss Brodie does attempt to put “ideas” into the girls’ heads, at the same time she bequeaths to her students a knowledge of and sensitivity to art, culture, and ideas that would have been impossible in a more conventional educational situation.

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Just as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about “unrealised potentialities,” Miss Brodie also communicates to her students a knowledge of the unlimited potential inherent in all experience. In her late thirties, Jenny Gray has an experience that reawakens a memory of her “sense of the hidden possibility in all things” that she felt as an eleven-year-old student under the tutelage of Jean Brodie. More important, however, is the teacher’s influence on Sandy Stranger. In his book on Spark, Derek Stanford said that “Truth, for Muriel Spark, implies rejection,” and Sandy laments in the novel that she has had nothing, particularly in the religious realm, to react against or reject. Jean Brodie finally provides this catalyst, and Sandy’s decision to “put a stop” to her results from a variety of reasons: her moral indignation over Miss Brodie’s “plans” for Rose and Joyce Emily, sexual jealousy of Teddy Lloyd’s continued infatuation with her teacher, and her awakening sense of Christian morals. As an adult, however, Sandy acknowledges that Jean Brodie was her most important formative influence and in a sense responsible for the course her life has taken. Her conversion to Catholicism and taking of the veil are the result of her affair with Teddy Lloyd, an affair she instigates in order to subvert Jean Brodie’s plans. Although Spark does not indicate the exact subject of the psychological treatise that has made Sandy famous, other than the fact that it concerns the nature of “moral perception,” its title, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” reveals that it in some way deals with the mind’s ability to alter everyday reality. Clearly, this topic owes a debt to Jean Brodie’s communication to her students of the endless “possibilities” that surrounded them and is a reflection of Jean Brodie’s constantly changing nature in the novel. The narrator observes that, unlike her colleagues, Miss Brodie is in a “state of fluctuating development”; like her students, her “nature was growing under their eyes, as the girls themselves were under formation.” One element of Jean Brodie’s “prime” is her nonstatic personality, and the problem, of course, is the direction in which the changes take place. As the narrator notes, “the principles governing the end of her prime would have astonished herself at the beginning of it.” In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark is at the height of her powers as a novelist, and nowhere else in her fiction is she more in control of her subject.The “flash-forwards” which occur throughout the novel cause the reader to concentrate on the characters’ motivations and interrelationships rather than on any intricacies of the plot, and Spark makes use of the principle of “economy” that she so values on almost every page, providing only the most telling details of the story while refraining, for the most part, from any authorial interpretation. In fact, the idea of economy is an important thematic element in the book. Sandy is first fascinated by the economy of Jean Brodie’s fusing her tales of her dead lover, Hugh, with her current associations with Gordon Lowther and Teddy Lloyd, and later she is angered and intrigued by the economy of the art teacher’s paintings, which make Jean Brodie’s students resemble their teacher. When Sandy betrays Miss Brodie to the headmistress, she uses this principle after concluding that “where there was a choice of various courses the most economical was the best.” Both in form and style, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie shows Spark utilizing her own “intuitive artistic sense of economy.” The Driver’s Seat · In The Driver’s Seat, Spark writes her revisionist version of the New Novel. She said that she disagreed with the philosophical tenets of the antinovel, and she adopted many of its techniques to prove the invalidity of its philosophy. Although The Driver’s Seat initially appears to be filled with randomly chosen, objectively described phenomena, ultimately the novel denies the entire concept of contingency.

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As Frank Kermode states in The Sense of an Ending (1966), Spark’s fiction is not about any kind of “brutal chaos” but rather presents a “radically non-contingent reality to be dealt with in purely novelistic terms.” Every event, every description becomes, in the light of the ending of The Driver’s Seat, significant. The novel concerns a young woman named Lise who leaves her home in northern Europe to travel south. Spark carefully fails to specify which cities are involved in order to create the same impersonal, anonymous air in the novel that characterizes Lise’s world in general. The purpose of her journey is to find a man to murder her, and in this story Spark inverts the typical thriller: The “victim” relentlessly stalks her murderer and finally “forces” him to act. Lise, who has abandoned the sterile loneliness of her former existence symbolized by her apartment, which “looks as if it were uninhabited,” takes control of her life for the first time and decides to take the most dramatic final step possible. In the opening scene, she shouts at a salesgirl who attempts to sell her a dress made of nonstaining fabric because, having already decided that she is to be stabbed to death, she wishes for clothing that will provide the more lurid touch of bloodstains. At the conclusion of the scene, Lise again shouts at the salesgirl “with a look of satisfaction at her own dominance over the situation,” and the remainder of the novel is about Lise’s carefully planned murder and the trail of information and clues she leaves for Interpol all across Europe. Unlike Caroline Rose in The Comforters, whose response to being a character in a novel is to write a novel about characters in a novel, Lise actually wrests control of the plot from the narrator, who is forced to admit ignorance of her thoughts and intentions. “Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?” asks the narrator, who is even unsure as to whether or not Lise tints her hair or the reason she attracts so much attention. As a result, the narrator is forced to give only external information, but this information is, as the reader begins to realize, all pertinent to the outcome of the novel. Only at the conclusion, after Lise’s death, does the narrator seem privy to the interior knowledge accessible to the omniscient author. One of the most important themes in The Driver’s Seat is, as in many other Spark novels, the inability of people to communicate with one another. In the majority of the conversations, no logical connections are made between the participants, who remain isolated in their own worlds of obsessional concerns. It would even appear that the more sane the individual, the less likely it is that any communication can take place. Instead, it is the more psychotic characters who are capable of nonverbal, intuitive understanding. Lise realizes immediately, as does Richard, that he is the man who is capable of murdering her, and he initially avoids any conversation with her. The three men who do converse with her, Bill, Carlos, and the sickly looking man on the plane, are not, as she phrases it, “her type”; this is because they attempt to communicate verbally with her. As Lise says of the salesman in the department store, “Not my man at all. He tried to get familiar with me. . . . The one I’m looking for will recognize me right away for the woman I am, have no fear of that.” The verb “sense,” which is used several times in the novel, signifies the subterranean, psychotic apprehension of other people that is the only perception taking place in The Driver’s Seat. Although most of Mrs. Friedke’s conversations with Lise have the same illogical, uncommunicative structure that characterizes the other dialogues, she does momentarily enter Lise’s realm of supernatural perception. She buys a paper knife for her nephew Richard similar to the one Lise decides against purchasing at the beginning of her journey, and this gift becomes the weapon Richard uses to murder Lise. She also prophetically insists that “you and my nephew are meant for each other . . . my

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dear, you are the person for my nephew.” It is at this point that Lise reveals how she will recognize the man for whom she is searching. In a phrase that tells a great deal about her past life, she says that she will know him not as a feeling of “presence” but as a “lack of absence.” Malcolm Bradbury, in his essay on Spark in Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel (1973), says that Spark’s fiction “conveys significant absences, a feeling of omission, and so has considerable resemblances to a good deal of contemporary art, including the nouveau roman.” Lise’s search for a “lack of absence” is a statement about the emptiness and lack of meaning in her own existence and the type of novel Spark has chosen to write about her: The form of the antinovel is used to comment both on the psychosis of the main character and on the failure of the New Novel to deal with the ultimate significance of phenomena. In the New Novel, the present tense frequently signifies the meaninglessness and ephemerality of events; in The Driver’s Seat, the present tense is used to create a world of terrifying inevitability in which the smallest details become integral elements in Lise’s carefully plotted death. Spark called The Driver’s Seat “a study, in a way, of self-destruction” but also admitted that the novel was impossible for her to describe. She said that she became so frightened while writing the story that she was forced to enter a hospital in order to complete it. The fear the novel inspired in her—and many readers—cannot be explained simply by Lise’s self-destructiveness; Lise’s decision to assert herself, to play god with her life independent of any control by the novelist or a higher power, also contributes to the frightening dimension of the novel. Spark, who expressed a belief that “events are providentially ordered,” creates a character who decides to become providence and the author of her own story; unlike Jean Brodie, who mistakenly thinks she can see the “beginning and the end” of all stories, Lise successfully orchestrates the novel’s conclusion. Loitering with Intent · In Loitering with Intent, Spark’s heroine, novelist Fleur Talbot, frequently quotes from Benvenuto Cellini’s The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (wr. 1558-1562): “All men . . . who have done anything of merit, or which verily has a semblance of merit . . . should write the tale of their life with their own hand.” Loitering with Intent is the fictional autobiography of its “author,” Fleur Talbot, and a meditation by Spark on her own career as a novelist; it is, in addition, a meditation on the creative process and the relationship between fiction and autobiography. Spark shows that she has come a long way from her early distrust of the novel: Loitering with Intent is a paean to the artistic, fiction-making sensibility. Although the habitual tension between life and art and the danger of confusing the two are still present in this novel, Spark firmly comes down on the side of art, defending it against individuals who would seek to “steal” its myth and pervert its truth. Fleur Talbot frequently comments on “how wonderful it is to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.” At the conclusion, she admits that she has been “loitering with intent”; that is, she has used her observations about the people and events around her as fictional material, taking joy in both the comic and tragic occurrences in the lives of the individuals who become characters in her own “autobiography.” “I rejoiced in seeing people as they were,” she says, and the word “rejoice” occurs many times in the novel as Fleur repeatedly uses Cellini’s phrase, saying that she “went on her way rejoicing.” In her later life she is accused by her friend Dottie of “wriggling out of real life,” but Fleur makes no apologies for the way in which she handles the relationship between her life and her creativity; instead,

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Loitering with Intent calls into question the use “real” people make of the fictions of others. Fleur becomes the secretary of Sir Quentin Oliver, head of the spurious Autobiographical Association he has formed in order to bring people together to compose their memoirs. Like the character of Warrender Chase in the novel Fleur is in the process of completing, Sir Quentin begins to exert a devastating influence on the Association’s members, psychologically manipulating them not for blackmailing purposes but for the enjoyment of pure power. Instead of encouraging them to fictionalize their autobiographies, as Fleur attempts to do, Sir Quentin begins to fictionalize their lives with tragic results. Fleur says that I was sure . . . that Sir Quentin was pumping something artificial into their real lives instead of on paper. Presented fictionally, one could have done something authentic with that poor material. But the inducing them to express themselves in life resulted in falsity. Fiction, when acknowledged as fiction, can help the individual to comprehend reality more clearly, as Fleur notes when she tells a friend that she will have to write several more chapters of Warrender Chase before she will be able to understand the events of the Autobiographical Association. In the same way, she says that one can better know one’s friends if they are imaginatively pictured in various situations. Sir Quentin, however, inserts “fictions,” frequently stories and events taken from Fleur’s novel, into the lives of the Association’s members. The relationship between Sir Quentin and Fleur symbolizes the battle between life and art that is waged in Loitering with Intent, for Fleur accuses him of “using, stealing” her myth, “appropriating the spirit” of her legend, and trying to “live out the story” she creates in Warrender Chase. Although she believes that it is wrong for Sir Quentin to take her “creation” from her, she in turn believes that he may well be a creation of hers, particularly when he begins to resemble her character Warrender Chase as the story progresses. She takes pride in saying that she could almost “have invented” Sir Quentin and that at times she feels as if she has invented him; in fact, this feeling so persists that she begins to wonder if it is Warrender Chase who is the “real man” on whom she has partly based the fictional character of Sir Quentin. From Fleur’s point of view, this kind of inversion of life and art is necessary and productive for the artistic process and is not dangerous because it results in a bona fide fiction that acknowledges itself as fiction; Sir Quentin’s appropriation of her “myth,” however, is dangerous because he refuses to acknowledge the fictiveness of his creation. One irony of this situation is editor Revisson Doe’s refusal to publish Warrender Chase because it too closely resembles the activities of the Autobiographical Association: Sir Quentin’s literal and figurative theft of Fleur’s novel almost results in its never becoming a work of art available to the public. The relationship between life and art has another dimension in Loitering with Intent. In this novel, Spark is also concerned with the psychic potential of the artist, the ability of the creative imagination to foresee the future in the process of creating fictions. Just as Fleur remarks that writing a novel or imagining her friends in fictional situations helps her to understand them better, so does the artist often predict the future while constructing a work of art. At the end of the novel, Dottie admits that Fleur had “foreseen it all” in Warrender Chase, and the events of Loitering with Intent do bear an eerie resemblance to the plot of Fleur’s first novel. In her book on Emily Brontë, Spark said that “Poetic experience is . . . such that it may be prophetic.” In Loitering

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with Intent, Fleur uses reality as raw material for her novel, while Sir Quentin attempts to use art to tamper with the lives of real people; at another level, however, Fleur’s poetic imagination perceives and creates future events. Loitering with Intent also permits Spark to look back on her life as a novelist and defend many of her fictional techniques. Fleur’s philosophy of art is, to a great degree, Spark’s philosophy, and Fleur’s descriptions and explanations of her craft could easily be addressed by Spark directly to her readers. Like Spark, Fleur is a believer in economy in art, observing “how little one needs . . . to convey the lot, and how a lot of words . . . can convey so little.” Fleur does not believe in authorial statements about the motives of her characters, or in being “completely frank” with the reader; in fact, “complete frankness is not a quality that favours art.” She defends herself against the charge of writing novels that are called “exaggerated” by critics and states that her fiction presents “aspects of realism.” The novel, she believes, is not a documentary transcription of reality but should always seek to transform its subject. “I’m an artist, not a reporter,” she informs her readers. Fleur also answers the critics who in the past have accused Spark of treating her material in a flippantly detached manner. She says that she treats the story of Warrender Chase with a “light and heartless hand” which is her method when giving a “perfectly serious account of things” because to act differently would be hypocritical: “It seems to me a sort of hypocrisy for a writer to pretend to be undergoing tragic experiences when obviously one is sitting in relative comfort with a pen and paper or before a typewriter.” At one point in the novel, Spark even challenges the “quality” of her readers, having her narrator remark that she hopes the readers of her novels are of “good quality” because “I wouldn’t like to think of anyone cheap reading my books.” The most significant theme of Loitering with Intent, however, is joy: the joy the artist takes in the everyday reality that contributes to the imaginative act, and the euphoria the artist feels in the act of creation. Spark has indeed traveled a great distance from her early suspicions of the fiction-making process and of the novel as form. The Only Problem · In her three novels after Loitering with Intent— The Only Problem, A Far Cry from Kensington, and Symposium—Spark continued to play variations of her characteristic themes. The Only Problem centers on the problem of evil: How can a just God “condone the unspeakable sufferings of the world”? Spark’s protagonist, Harvey Gotham, an eccentric Canadian millionaire, wrestles with this question in a treatise on the Book of Job. Harvey’s study is repeatedly interrupted as a consequence of the escapades of his young wife, Effie, who joins a terrorist group, kills a French policeman, and is herself eventually shot and killed by the police during a raid on a terrorist hideout. The intrusion of these events helps Harvey to appreciate the ultimate inscrutability of the human condition. Here again Spark celebrates the fiction-making process: In contrast to scholars who attempt to rationalize Job’s story or abstract the philosophical issues from it, Harvey recognizes the unique power to the story itself. Spark’s novel is thus a “commentary” on Job that remains true to the spirit of the original. A Far Cry from Kensington · A Far Cry from Kensington, like Loitering with Intent, draws on Spark’s experiences in postwar London. A Far Cry from Kensington is a retrospective first-person narrative; from the vantage point of the 1980’s, the narrator recalls events that took place in 1954 and 1955. She was then in her late twenties, a war widow who

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had married at age eighteen a man whom she had met only a month before. Throughout the narrative other characters address her as Mrs. Hawkins (her married name), rather than by her given name, and she is regarded as a reliable confidante, in part, she suggests, because she was then rather fat. As Mrs. Hawkins loses weight, she acquires a first name, Nancy, and gradually becomes Nancy in her own eyes and those of others. Some of her neighbors and office peers worry that she is ill and wasting away, especially the superstitious war refugee Wanda, who believes there is a curse on her. The medical student, William, who lives in the flat next to Nancy, begins to see her as a woman, not merely as a confidante and a doer of good works. Nancy and William begin an affair and ultimately get married. As Mrs. Hawkins loses weight and gains a personal life of her own, she is less willing to fill the needs of others. She says to the reader, My advice to any woman who earns the reputation of being capable, is not to demonstrate her ability too much. You give advice; you say, do this, do that, I think I’ve got you a job, don’t worry, leave it to me. All that, and in the end you feel spooky, empty, haunted. And if you then want to wriggle out of so much responsibility, the people around you are outraged. You have stepped out of your role. It makes them furious. Spark shows how the transformation of Mrs. Nancy Hawkins evokes resentment from those around her for services not rendered, services others never should have expected. The backdrop of the story is the London publishing scene, especially its dubious fringe. The narrator’s encounters with a variety of publishers and literary hangers-on are deftly sketched; also figuring in the plot are devotees of “radionics,” a pseudoscience employing a device similar to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box. In particular, Mrs. Hawkins jousts with a hack writer and an adept of radionics, Hector Bartlett, whom she dubs a pisseur de copie. Initially, this conflict might seem to be merely a matter of aesthetics, and Bartlett—with his absurd pretensions and truly awful writing—merely a figure of comedy, yet he is shown to be an agent of evil, responsible for the death of a troubled woman. Unsettled by this mixture of nostalgia and satire, light comedy and metaphysical probing, the reader is never allowed to become comfortable. Evidently, this is Spark’s intention. Symposium · Symposium, focusing on a dinner party in Islington, offers a similarly unsettling mixture, for which the reader is duly prepared by an epigraph from Plato’s Symposium that suggests the interdependence of comedy and tragedy. Symposium features an omniscient narrator who tells of the robbery of two of the dinner guests prior to the beginning of the main story, then injects flashbacks and parallel happenings, as the dinner, which constitutes the body of the story, progresses. Spark’s technique owes something to that used by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925); her juxtaposition of a gala dinner party and a murder that is occurring simultaneously also remind the reader of W. H. Auden’s 1939 poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” At the beginning of the novel, many characters are introduced and described; some prove to be unimportant and are never mentioned again. Spark seems to be deliberately confusing the reader by obscuring the main focus of the novel, perhaps in imitation of real-life events, in which often the most important elements are initially obscure and only become clear with time. Neither the guests nor those who serve them are what they seem. The butler and his attractive young assistant, an American

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graduate student who has been employed by several of the guests and is admired for working his way through school, are in a burglary ring that observes houses and files away conversations spoken at society parties about valuable possessions. Among the guests are a newly married young couple; the bride is a fresh, appealing Scottish girl who is so innocent and kind she appears to be too good for this world. In time the reader will come to see this young lady in a different light. As Symposium progresses, the plot grows denser and darker, although an overlay of superficial dinner conversation pervades the novel. There is talk of the “evil eye” (reminiscent of the occult machinations of Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington). The concept is absurd, and yet as the narrative develops there is evidence that one of the women present at the party genuinely possesses this maleficent power. In this novel, more than ever, Spark manipulates her characters with detachment: The reader is always aware that this is a performance. Yet if Spark’s novels are coolly ironic entertainments, they are also oblique parables that explore with obsessive persistence the nature of evil. Angela Hague, updated by Isabel Bonnyman Stanley Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories, 1958; Voices at Play, 1961 (with radio plays); Collected Stories I, 1967; The Stories of Muriel Spark, 1985; Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories, 1997. PLAY: Doctors of Philosophy, pr. 1962. POETRY: The Fanfarlo and Other Verse, 1952; Collected Poems I, 1967. NONFICTION: Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1951 (rev. as Mary Shelley, 1987); Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, 1953 (with Derek Stanford); John Masefield, 1953; Curriculum Vitae, 1992 (autobiography). CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Very Fine Clock, 1968. EDITED TEXTS: Tribute to Wordsworth, 1950 (with Derek Stanford); My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Shelley, 1953 (with Stanford); The Brontë Letters, 1954 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of the Brontës: A Selection, 1954); Letters of John Henry Newman, 1957 (with Stanford). Bibliography Montgomery, Benilde. “Spark and Newman: Jean Brodie Reconsidered.” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (Spring, 1997): 94-106. An insightful study of the influence of John Henry Newman on the tension between Jean Brodie and Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, arguably Spark’s most enduring novel. Page, Norman. Muriel Spark. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Part of the Modern Novelists series, this book contains biographical information, criticism, and interpretation of Spark and her works. Includes bibliography and index. Randisi, Jennifer Lynn. On Her Way Rejoicing: The Fiction of Muriel Spark. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. A good view of Spark’s fiction that both updates and complements earlier studies. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. Muriel Spark. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. A valuable resource on Spark that includes commentary on her plays. Chapter 8, “The Darkening Vision,” gives sound interpretations of The Driver’s Seat, The Public Image, and Not to Disturb.

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Walker, Dorothea. Muriel Spark. Boston: Twayne, 1988. An informative study on the main themes of Spark’s work, with emphasis given to the wit and humor of her characters. The extensive bibliography is particularly helpful. Whittaker, Ruth. The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. A definitive look at Spark and the relationship between the secular and the divine in her work. This scholarly study, with its extensive bibliography, is a fine source for reference and critical material on Spark.

Laurence Sterne Laurence Sterne

Born: Clonmel, Ireland; November 24, 1713 Died: London, England; March 18, 1768 Principal long fiction · The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., 1759-1767; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 1768. Other literary forms · Laurence Sterne began his literary career with political pieces in the York-Courant in 1741. Two years later, he published a poem, “The Unknown World,” in The Gentleman’s Magazine (July, 1743). His song, “How Imperfect the Joys of the Soul,” written for Kitty Fourmantel, appeared in Joseph Baildon’s Collection of New Songs Sung at Ranelagh (1765), and a four-line epigram, “On a Lady’s Sporting a Somerset,” was attributed to Sterne in Muse’s Mirror (1778). His sermons were published in three installments: two volumes in 1760, another two in 1766, and a final three volumes in 1769. A political satire entitled A Political Romance was published in 1759 but quickly suppressed. After Sterne’s death, Letters from Yorick to Eliza appeared in 1773, and his daughter arranged for the publication of Letters of the Late Rev. Mr. L. Sterne to His Most Intimate Friends (1775, three volumes). These volumes include an autobiographical Memoir and the Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais. In 1935, Oxford University Press published the definitive edition of Sterne’s letters, edited by Lewis Perry Curtis. The Journal to Eliza, composed in 1767, was not published until 1904. Achievements · When Sterne went to London in March, 1760, he was an obscure provincial parson. He rode as a guest in Stephen Croft’s cart, and he brought with him little more than his “best breeches.” Two months later, he returned to York in his own carriage. Robert Dodsley, who the year before had refused the copyright of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (commonly called Tristram Shandy) for 50 pounds, now gladly offered Sterne 250 pounds for the first two volumes, 380 pounds for the next two, as yet unwritten, and another 200 pounds for two volumes of sermons. The famous artist William Hogarth agreed to provide a frontispiece to the second edition of volume 1 and another for volume 3; Joshua Reynolds painted Sterne’s portrait. Like Lord Byron, Sterne could have said that he awoke to find himself famous. As Sterne did say, in a letter to Catherine Fourmantel, “I assure you my Kitty, that Tristram is the Fashion.” Despite the carpings of a few—Horace Walpole thought Tristram Shandy “a very insipid and tedious performance,” and Samuel Richardson thought it immoral—the novel was the rage of London, inspiring so many continuations and imitations that Sterne had to sign the later volumes to guarantee their authenticity. After the novel’s initial popularity, sales did drop off. In book 8, Tristram complains that he has “ten cart-loads” of volumes 5 and 6 “still unsold.” Dodsley abandoned publication of the work after volume 4, and Sterne’s new publisher, Thomas Becket, complained in April, 1763, that he had 991 copies of volumes 5 and 6 unsold (from a printing of 4,000). Samuel Johnson’s famous comment, though ultimately incorrect, probably reflected the opinion of the day: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” Even Sterne may have tired of the work; the 870

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volumes grew slimmer, and volume 9 appeared without its mate, volume 10 having, in Sterne’s apt words for an obstetrical novel, “miscarried.” Yet Tristram Shandy has lasted. It retains its readership, even if it has continued to justify Sterne’s complaint of being “more read than understood.” Twentieth century readers have made great, perhaps exaggerated, claims for the novel, seeing it as the harbinger of the works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Albert Camus, who, it is said, derived from Sterne the concept of relative time, the stream of consciousness, and a sense of the absurd. Even if one discounts such assertions, there can be no question of the work’s importance in the development of the novel or of Tristram Shandy’s place in the first rank of eighteenth century fiction.

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Less has been claimed for A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (commonly called A Sentimental Journey), yet this work, apparently so different from and so much simpler than Tristram Shandy, greatly influenced Continental, especially German, literature of the Romantic period. Though critics debate the sincerity of the emotions in the work, eighteenth century readers generally did not question Yorick’s sentimentality, which contributed to the rise of the cult of sensibility exemplified by such works as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Sarah Morton’s The Power of Sympathy (1789). Because of its brevity, its benevolence, and its accessibility, A Sentimental Journey has enjoyed continued popularity since its first appearance. Though lacking the stature of Tristram Shandy, it remains a classic. Biography · Laurence Sterne was born in Clonmel, Tipperary, Ireland, on November 24, 1713. On his father’s side, he could claim some distinction. His great-grandfather, Richard Sterne, had been Archbishop of York, and his grandfather, Simon Sterne, was a rich Yorkshire country squire. Roger Sterne, Laurence’s father, was less distinguished. Sterne describes his father as “a little smart man—active to the last degree, in all exercises—most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full measure.” Sterne added that his father was “of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design.” Many have seen Roger Sterne as the model for Uncle Toby Shandy. At the age of sixteen, Roger joined the Cumberland Regiment of Foot, and on September 25, 1711, he married Agnes Nuttall. Agnes, according to her son, was the daughter of “a noted sutler in Flanders, in Queen Ann’s wars,” whom Roger married because he was in debt to her father. Actually, she may have been the daughter of a poor but respectable family in Lancashire. From his birth to the age of ten, Sterne led a nomadic life, wandering from barracks to barracks across Great Britain. During these years, he may have acquired some of the military knowledge that appears throughout Tristram Shandy, or at least that fondness for the military which marks the work. When Sterne was ten, his uncle Richard sent him to school near Halifax, in Yorkshire, and in 1733, Sterne’s cousin sent him to Jesus College, Cambridge, where his great-grandfather had been a master and where both his uncle Jaques and his cousin had gone. At Cambridge, Sterne met John Hall, who later renamed himself John Hall-Stevenson. Hall-Stevenson was to be one of Sterne’s closest friends throughout his life; his library at “Crazy Castle” would furnish much of the abstruse learning in Tristram Shandy, and he would himself appear in both that novel and A Sentimental Journey as “Eugenius,” the sober adviser. While at Cambridge, Sterne suffered his first tubercular hemorrhage. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in January, 1737, Sterne had to choose a profession. Because his great-grandfather and uncle had both gone into the Church, Sterne followed their path. After Sterne served briefly in St. Ives and Catton, his uncle Jaques, by then Archdeacon of Cleveland and Canon and Precentor of the York Cathedral, secured for him the living of Sutton on the Forest, a few miles north of York. A second post soon followed; Sterne received the prebend of Givendale, making him part of the York Cathedral chapter and so allowing him to preach his turn there. At York, Sterne met Elizabeth Lumley, a woman with a comfortable fortune. Their courtship had a strong sentimental tinge to it. Indeed, if Sterne actually wrote to Elizabeth the letters that his daughter published after his death, his is the first recorded use of the word sentimental, and the emotions expressed in these letters foreshadow

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both A Sentimental Journey and the Journal to Eliza. Even if these letters are spurious, Sterne’s description of his courtship in the Memoirs is sufficiently lachrymose to rival the death of Le Fever in Tristram Shandy. Unfortunately for Sterne, he, unlike Tristram, did go on; on March 30, 1741, he married Elizabeth. The unfavorable portrait of Mrs. Shandy owes much to Sterne’s less than sentimental feelings toward his wife, whom he called in March, 1760, the “one Obstacle to my Happiness.” The year 1741 was also important for Sterne because it marked his first appearance in print. His uncle Jaques was a strong Whig, and he recruited his nephew to write in support of the Whig candidate for York in that year’s election. Sterne wrote, the Whig won, and Sterne received the prebend of North Newbold as a reward. The Whig success was, however, short-lived. When the Walpole government fell in 1742, Sterne wrote a recantation and apology for his part in “the late contested Election,” and thereby earned the enmity of his uncle, an enmity that ended only with Jaques’s death in 1759. For the next eighteen years, Sterne lived as a typical provincial clergyman, attending to the needs of his parishioners and publishing two sermons. One of these, “For We Trust We Have a Good Conscience,” Sterne reprints in its entirety in the second volume of Tristram Shandy. In 1751, he received the commissaryship of Pickering and Pocklington, despite his uncle’s efforts to secure this position for Dr. Francis Topham. Sterne and Topham collided again in 1758, when Topham intended to include his son in a patent and thus secure for him a post after his own death. When the dean of York Cathedral blocked the inclusion, a pamphlet war ensued. Sterne fired the final shot; his A Political Romance so squashed Topham that he agreed to abandon the fray if Sterne would withdraw his pamphlet. Sterne did withdraw A Political Romance, but he was not finished with Topham, who was to appear in Tristram Shandy as Phutatorius and Didius. A Political Romance is little more than a satirical squib, but it shows that Sterne was familiar with the works of Jonathan Swift. In its use of clothes symbolism as well as in its severity it recalls A Tale of a Tub (1704), and it shows that Swift’s work was running in Sterne’s head between 1758 and 1759. He was making other use of Swift, too. On May 23, 1759, Sterne wrote to Robert Dodsley, “With this You will receive the Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which I choose to offer to You first.” By this time, the first volume of the novel was finished. Although Dodsley refused the copyright for the fifty pounds Sterne requested, Sterne continued to write, completing a second volume and revising the first to remove “all locality” and make “the whole . . . more saleable,” as he wrote to Dodsley several months later. Salable it was. The York edition sold two hundred copies in two days when it appeared in December, 1759, and when Sterne went up to London, he was told that the book was not “to be had in London either for Love or money.” Dodsley, who had been unwilling to risk 50 pounds on the copyright, now purchased it for 250 pounds, gave another 380 pounds to publish the still unwritten volumes 3 and 4, and yet another 200 pounds for two volumes of Sterne’s sermons. Sterne was honored by the great. Thomas Gray wrote to Thomas Wharton, “Tristram Shandy is still a greater object of admiration, the Man as well as the Book. One is invited to dinner, where he dines, a fortnight beforehand.” In March, 1760, Sterne also succeeded to the curacy of Coxwold, a better position than his earlier one at Sutton. In May, 1760, he therefore settled at Coxwold, renting Shandy Hall from Earl Fauconberg. Here he worked on the next two volumes of Tristram Shandy, which he brought to London at the end of the year. In 1761, he

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repeated this pattern, but he did not return to Yorkshire after delivering the manuscript of volumes 5 and 6. Having suffered a tubercular hemorrhage, he set off for the warmer, milder air of France. There he repeated his earlier triumph in London, and he incidentally acquired materials for book 7 of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. Sterne remained in France for almost two years; when he returned to England, he hastily wrote the next two volumes of Tristram Shandy, which appeared in January, 1765. In October of that year, he brought twelve sermons to London rather than more of his novel. After leaving the manuscript with his publisher, he again set off for the Continent; he would combine the adventures of this trip with those of his earlier one in writing A Sentimental Journey. In June, 1766, Sterne was back in Coxwold, where he wrote what proved to be the last installment of Tristram Shandy. This he brought with him to London in late December; shortly after his arrival, he met Eliza Draper, the wife of an East India Company clerk twenty years her senior. Though initially unimpressed with her, Sterne was soon madly in love. When Sterne met her, she had already been in England some two years, and she was to return to India less than three months later, yet she was to color Sterne’s last year of life. Before she sailed on the Earl of Chatham on April 3, 1767, Sterne visited her daily, wrote letters to her, drove with her, and exchanged pictures with her. After their separation, Sterne continued his letters; those he wrote between April 13 and the beginning of August, 1767, constitute the Journal to Eliza. When he broke off this journal with the words “I am thine—& thine only, & for ever” to begin A Sentimental Journey, her spirit haunted that work, too, as the Eliza upon whom Yorick calls. By December, Sterne had finished the first half of A Sentimental Journey and again set off for London and his publisher. On February 27, 1768, A Sentimental Journey, volumes 1 and 2, appeared. Less than a month later, on March 18, Sterne died. He was buried in London on March 22; on June 8, 1769, he was reinterred in the Coxwold churchyard in Yorkshire. Analysis · Readers may be tempted to see Laurence Sterne’s works either as sui generis or as eighteenth century sports that had no mate until Marcel Proust and James Joyce. In fact, Sterne was very much a product of his age. His humor owes much to such earlier writers as François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Jonathan Swift, all of whom influenced his experimentation with the form of the newly emerged novel. Even this experimentation is typical of the age. Thomas Amory’s The Life and Opinions of John Buncle Esquire (1756-1766) may have suggested to Sterne his complete title The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. Like Tristram Shandy, Amory’s book is full of digressions, and its narrator is conceited. Sterne’s experimentation did go beyond the traditional. One need look no farther than the typography, the varying length of the chapters in Tristram Shandy, from four lines to sixty pages, or the unusual location of certain conventional elements—for example, the placing of Tristram Shandy’s preface after the twentieth chapter of book 3 or Yorick’s writing the preface to A Sentimental Journey after chapter 6. At the same time, Sterne relied on the conventions of the novel. He is meticulous in his descriptions of clothing, furniture, and gesture. His characters are fully developed: They walk, sometimes with a limp, they cough, they bleed, they dance. From Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson, Sterne took the first-person narrator. From Richardson, he adopted the technique of writing to the moment; from Henry Fielding, he got

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the idea of the novel as a comic epic in prose. From numerous sources—Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, to name but three—he learned of the satiric potential of the genre. A Political Romance reveals Sterne’s powerful satiric abilities, but this work has little in common with the novels. True, the personal satire of the pamphlet does persist. Sterne lampoons Dr. Burton (Dr. Slop), Dr. Richard Meade (Dr. Kunastrokius), and Francis Topham (Phutatorius, Didius) in Tristram Shandy; Tobias Smollett (Smeldungus) and Samuel Sharp (Mundungus) in A Sentimental Journey. For the most part, though, Sterne is after bigger game. As he wrote to Robert Dodsley, the satire is general; and, as he wrote to Robert Foley some years later, it is “a laughing good tempered Satyr,” another distinction between the novels and the pamphlet. The objects of this general satire are several: system-makers of all types, pedants, lawyers, doctors, conceited authors, prudes, and self-deceivers. A common thread uniting all these satiric butts is folly, the folly of believing that life should conform to some preconceived notion, of trying to force facts to fit theories rather than the other way around. Sterne’s insistence on common sense and reason is consistent with the Augustan tradition, which itself is rooted in Anglican beliefs that Sterne emphasized in his sermons as well as in his fiction. Although Sterne’s satire is good-tempered, it attacks people’s tendency to evil, a tendency noted in Article IX of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church. Like his fellow Augustans, Sterne saw this tendency to evil in many spheres. Like them, therefore, he attacked these deviations from the norm as established by religion and reason (which for Sterne are the same), by nature, by tradition, and by authority. The characters in Tristram Shandy and Yorick in A Sentimental Journey (who is the only sustained character in that work) are laughable because they deviate from the norm and because they refuse to accept their limitations. Sterne repeatedly reminds the reader of people’s finiteness. Thus, death haunts the novels: In Tristram Shandy, Toby, Walter, Mrs. Shandy, Yorick, Trim, and Bobby are all dead, and Tristram is dying. In A Sentimental Journey, a resurrected Yorick sees death all around him—a dead monk, dead children, a dead ass, dead lovers. Another, less dramatic symbol of the characters’ limitation is their inability to complete what they begin. Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey remain fragments. Trim never finishes his tale of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles. Walter never finishes the Tristrapaedia. Obadiah never goes for yeast. Yorick never finishes the story of the notary. Nor can characters communicate effectively with one another: Walter’s wife never appreciates his theories, Toby’s hobbyhorse causes him to understand all words in a military sense, Dr. Slop falls asleep in the middle of Trim’s reading, and Yorick in A Sentimental Journey never pauses long enough to develop a lasting friendship. Death, the prison of the self, the petty and great disappointments of life—these are the stuff of tragedy, yet in Sterne’s novels they form the basis of comedy, for the emphasis in these novels is not on the tragic event itself but rather on the cause or the reaction. Bobby’s death, for example, is nothing to the reader, not only because one never meets Bobby alive but also because one quickly becomes involved in Walter’s oration and Trim’s hat. In A Sentimental Journey, Sterne focuses on Yorick’s reaction to Maria rather than on her poignant tale: Consequently, one laughs at Yorick instead of crying with Maria. The prison of words that traps the characters is not the result of people’s inherent isolation but rather of a comic perversity in refusing to accept the plain meaning of a statement. The tragic is further mitigated by its remoteness. Though Tristram writes to the moment, that moment is long past; Tristram’s account

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is being composed some fifty years after the events he describes, and Yorick, too, is recollecting emotions in tranquillity. The curious order of Tristram Shandy and the rapid pace of A Sentimental Journey further dilute the tragic. Yorick dies in book 1 but cracks the last joke in book 9. Yorick has barely begun a sentimental attachment with a fille de chambre in Paris when he must set off for Versailles to seek a passport. Though the disappointments, interruptions, failures, and deaths recur, individually they quickly vanish from view. What remains are the characters, who are comic because they refuse to learn from their failures. Sterne’s world is therefore not tragic; neither is it absurd. In the world of the absurd, helpless characters confront a meaningless and chaotic world. For Sterne, the world is reasonable; he shares the Augustan worldview expressed so well by Alexander Pope: “All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee,/ All Chance Direction which thou canst not see.” The reasonableness of the world is not, however, to be found in the systematizing of Walter Shandy or the sentimentalism of Yorick. People can live in harmony with the world, Sterne says, only if they use common sense. The comedy of these novels derives in large part from people’s failure or laziness to be sensible. Tristram Shandy · In Aspects of the Novel (1927), E. M. Forster writes: “Obviously a god is hidden in Tristram Shandy and his name is Muddle.” There is no question that the muddle is present in the novel. Chapters 18 and 19 of book 9 appear as part of chapter 25. The preface does not appear until the third volume. There are black, marbled, and white pages. In book 4, a chapter is torn out and ten pages dropped. Uncle Toby begins knocking the ashes out of his pipe in book 1, chapter 21, and finishes this simple action in book 2, chapter 6. The novel begins in 1718 and ends, if it may be said to end, in 1713. Although called The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., the novel recounts the life of Uncle Toby and the opinions of Walter Shandy. One must distinguish, though, between the muddle that the narrator, Tristram, creates, and the ordered universe that Sterne offers. Theodore Baird has demonstrated that one can construct an orderly sequence of events from the information in Tristram Shandy, beginning with the reign of Henry VIII (III,xxxiii) through the wounding of Trim in 1693 (VIII,xix; II,v), the siege of Namur at which Toby is wounded in 1695 (I,xxv), the conception and birth of Tristram Shandy in 1718 (I-III), the death of Bobby (1719; IV,xxxii and v,ii), the episode of Toby and the fly (1728; II,xii), the death of Yorick (1748; I,xii), and the composition of the novel (1759-1766). Tristram does attempt to impose some order upon these events; the first five and a half books trace his life from his conception to his accident with the window sash and his being put into breeches. He then breaks off to recount the amours of Uncle Toby, which again appear essentially in sequence, with the major exception of book 7, Tristram’s flight into France. Although Tristram attempts to order these events, he fails. He fails not because life is inherently random or absurd, but because he is a bad artist. He pointedly rejects the advice of Horace, whose The Art of Poetry (c. 17 b.c.e.) was highly respected among eighteenth century writers. He will not pause to check facts and even refuses to look back in his own book to see whether he has already mentioned something; this is writing to the moment with a vengeance. He refuses to impose any order at all upon his material, allowing his pen to govern him instead of acting the part of the good writer who governs his pen. In governing his pen, the good writer carefully selects his material. Many a person has told a plain, unvarnished tale in less space than Tristram, but Tristram cannot

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decide what is important. Must one know what Mrs. Shandy said to Walter on the night of Tristram’s begetting, which, incidentally, may not be the night of Tristram’s begetting at all, since the night described is only eight months before Tristram’s birth rather than nine—does Tristram realize this fact? Does one need so vivid an account of how Walter falls across the bed upon learning of Tristram’s crushed nose? Is it true that one cannot understand Toby’s statement, “I think it would not be amiss brother, if we rung the bell,” without being dragged halfway across Europe and twenty-three years back in time? Such details serve the purpose of Tristram’s creator by highlighting the follies of a bad writer, but they hardly help Tristram proceed with his story. Tristram’s failure to select his material derives in part from laziness. “I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy,” he writes (I,xxiii), for it requires intellectual effort to balk a fancy. In part, too, this failure to select reflects Tristram’s belief that everything concerning himself is important. His is a solipsistic rendering of the humanist’s credo, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“I am a man, and nothing that relates to man can be foreign to me.” He is confident that the more the reader associates with him, the fonder he (the reader) will become. Hence, the reader will want to know about his failure with Jenny, about his aunt Dinah’s affair with the coachman, about his attire as he writes, about his casting a fair instead of a foul copy of his manuscript into the fire. Tristram sets out to write a traditional biography, beginning with a genealogy and proceeding to birth, education, youthful deeds that foreshadow later achievements, marriage, children, accomplishments, death, and burial. He becomes so bogged down in details, however, that he cannot get beyond his fifth year. The episode of Toby and the fly must substitute for a volume on education, and the setting up of his top replaces an account of his youthful deeds. Although Tristram refuses to impose any system on his writing, he is a true son of Walter Shandy in his willingness to impose systems on other aspects of his world. He devises a scale for measuring pleasure and pain, so that if the death of Bobby rates a five and Walter’s pleasure at delivering an oration on the occasion rates a ten, Walter proves the gainer by this catastrophe. Tristram has another scale for measuring his own writing; he awards himself a nineteen out of twenty for the design of the novel. Tristram attaches much significance to the way he is conceived, believing that one’s conception determines his entire life. His declared method of describing character is similarly reductive, focusing strictly on the individual’s hobbyhorse. He has a theory on knots, on window sashes, and on the effect of diet on writing. Tristram thus serves as a satire on systematizers as well as on bad writers. The more obvious butt of Sterne’s satire on system-makers is Walter Shandy. The Augustan Age has also been called the Age of Reason, and Sterne recognizes the importance of reason. At the same time, the Augustans recognized that a person’s reason alone is often an insufficient guide because it can be corrupted by a ruling passion, as Yorick’s sermon in Tristram Shandy reveals. Tristram fails as an author because he trusts exclusively to his own logic instead of following conventional guidelines. Walter Shandy is another example of one who becomes foolish because of his reliance on his own reason. Like Pope’s dunces, Walter is well read, and like Pope’s dunces, he fails to benefit from his learning because he does not use common sense. He will look in the Institutes of Justinian instead of the more obvious, and more reliable, catechism—part of Sterne’s joke here is that the source Walter cites does not contain what he wants. Walter will consult Rubenius rather than a tailor to determine of what cloth Tristram’s breeches should be made. From his reading and reasoning

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he develops a host of theories: that cesarean birth is the best way of bringing a child into the world, that Christian names determine one’s life, that auxiliary verbs provide a key to knowledge. Each of these theories rests on a certain logic. Walter is correct that no one would name his child Judas. From this true observation, though, he erects a most absurd theory, proving Tristram’s statement that “when a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,—or, in other words, when his Hobby-Horse grows headstrong,—farewell cool reason and fair discretion” (II,v). Neither Walter nor his son will rein in his hobbyhorse, and, as a result, they become ridiculous. They may also become dangerous. While Walter is busily engaged in composing his Tristrapaedia that will codify his theories of child rearing, Tristram grows up without any guidance at all. Walter is willing, indeed eager, to have his wife undergo a cesarean operation because he believes that such an operation will be less harmful to the infant than natural childbirth. That such an operation will cause the death of Mrs. Shandy is a fact that apparently escapes him. Even the benign and lovable Uncle Toby makes himself ridiculous by yielding to his hobbyhorse. Not only does this hobbyhorse lead him into excessive expense and so deprive him of money he might put to better use, but also it keeps his mind from more worthwhile occupations. Repeatedly, Sterne, through Tristram, likens Toby’s garden battlefield to a mistress with whom Toby dallies; the Elizabethan sense of hobbyhorse is precisely this—a woman of easy virtue. As Tristram notes early in the novel, when “one . . . whose principles and conduct are as generous and noble as his blood” is carried off by his hobbyhorse, it is better that “the Hobby-Horse, with all his fraternity, (were) at the Devil” (I,viii). Deluding himself that he is somehow contributing to the defense of England, Toby blinds himself to the real horrors of war. Wrapped up in his military jargon, he isolates himself verbally from those around him; a bridge or a train has only one meaning for him. No less than Tristram, he is betrayed by words, but in his case as in Tristram’s the fault lies not with the words but with the individual betrayed. Nor is Toby’s hobbyhorse dangerous to himself alone. It keeps him away from the Widow Wadman and so prevents his fulfilling his legitimate social responsibilities of marrying and begetting children; his hobbyhorse renders him sterile even if his wound has not. This hobbyhorse also comes close to rendering Tristram sterile, for Trim removes the weights from the window sash to make cannon for Toby’s campaigns. Each of the major characters is trapped in a cell of his own making. Tristram can never finish his book because his theory of composition raises insurmountable obstacles. The more he writes, the more he has to write. Walter’s and Toby’s hobbyhorses blind them to reality and prevent their communicating with each other or anyone else. The Shandy family is well named; “shandy” in Yorkshire means crackbrained. Significantly, the novel begins with an interrupted act of procreation and ends with sterility. As in Pope’s The Dunciad (1728-1743), the uncreating word triumphs because of human folly. Sterne’s vision is not quite as dark as Pope’s, though; the novel ends not with universal darkness but with a joke. Yorick, the voice of reason and moderation, remains to pull the reader back to reality. Yorick is a jester, and the role of the jester is to remind his audience of the just proportion of things as well as to make them laugh. Yorick does not put a fancy saddle on a horse that does not deserve one. He will destroy a sermon because it is too bad (unlike Tristram, who destroys a chapter because it is too good). He makes only modest claims for his sermons and is embarrassed even by these (unlike Tristram, who repeatedly proclaims himself a

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genius). Yorick thus offers in word and deed an example of living reasonably and happily. Sterne offers a second consolation as well. Even though characters isolate themselves with their hobbyhorses, even though they cannot or will not understand one another’s words, they can and do appreciate one another’s feelings. These emotional unions are short-lived, but they are intense and sincere. Walter will continue to make fun of Toby even after promising not to, but at the moment the promise is made, the two are united spiritually and physically. Tristram and Jenny quarrel, but they also have their tender moments. Trim looks for a carriage in a book by shaking the leaves, and he mistakes fiction for reality in a sermon, but he allows his parents three halfpence a day out of his pay when they grow old. The benevolence that Sterne urged in his sermons is capable of bridging self-imposed isolation. Although one laughs at the characters in Tristram Shandy, one therefore sympathizes with them as well, seeing their weaknesses but also their underlying virtue. Though they have corrupted that virtue by yielding to a natural tendency to evil, they redeem themselves through their equally natural tendency to kindness. Tristram Shandy offended many contemporary readers because of its bawdy tales; reviewers much preferred such seemingly sentimental episodes as the death of Le Fever and urged Sterne to refine his humor. A Sentimental Journey superficially appears to have been written to satisfy these demands. It is full of touching scenes, of tears, of charity, of little acts of kindness. Moreover, in a letter to Mrs. William James in November, 1767, Sterne describes the novel as dealing with “the gentle passions and affections” and says his intention is “to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do.” Sterne’s letters, and especially his Journal to Eliza, reveal him as a man of feeling, and Tristram Shandy satirizes all aspects of human life except for benevolence. Sterne’s sermons reinforce his image as a believer in the importance of charity. As a Latitudinarian, he believed that the Golden Rule constitutes the essence of religion, that ritual and church doctrine, while important, are less significant than kindness. Because Yorick in Tristram Shandy is Sterne’s spokesman, it is tempting to see Yorick in A Sentimental Journey as having the same normative function. Though the narrator of Tristram Shandy is a dunce and a satiric butt, can one not still trust the narrator of A Sentimental Journey? No. In a famous letter to Dr. John Eustace, Sterne thanks Eustace for the gift of a curious walking stick: “Your walking stick is in no sense more shandaic than in that of its having more handles than one.” Readers could regard Tristram Shandy as total nonsense, as a collection of bawdy stories, as a realistic novel, as a satire on the realistic novel, or as a satire on the follies of humankind. Sterne’s second novel, too, is “shandaic.” The reader can see it as a tribute to the popular spirit of sentimentality or can view it as a satire of that spirit, yet a careful reading of the book will demonstrate why Sterne wrote to the mysterious “Hannah” that this novel “shall make you cry as much as ever it made me laugh.” In other words, Sterne is sporting with rather than adopting the sentimental mode. A Sentimental Journey · The object of Sterne’s laughter is Yorick. The Yorick who recounts his travels is not the same normative parson as appears in Tristram Shandy. He is by now twice dead—dead in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600-1601) and dead again in Tristram Shandy some fifteen years prior to the events of A Sentimental Journey. This second resurrection may itself be a joke on the reader, who should recall Yorick’s death in book 1 of the earlier novel.

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This revived Yorick bears a great similarity to Tristram. He is, for one thing, a systematizer. He establishes three degrees of curses; he discovers “three epochas in the empire of a French woman” (“Paris”), he is able to create dialogues out of silence, and he derives national character not from “important matters of state” but rather from “nonsensical minutiae” (“The Wig—Paris”). Like Tristram, too, Yorick is vain. He gives a sou to a beggar who calls him “My Lord Anglois” and another sou for ”Mon cher et très charitable Monsieur.” He does not worry about being unkind to a monk but is concerned that as a result a pretty woman will think ill of him. Even his style, though less difficult to follow than Tristram’s, bears some similarities to that of Sterne’s earlier narrator. In the midst of the account of his adventures in Versailles, Yorick introduces the irrelevant anecdote of Bevoriskius and the mating sparrows, thus combining Tristram’s habit of digressing with Walter’s love of abstruse learning. Yorick later interpolates an account of the Marquis d’E****, and while telling about Paris he presents a “Fragment” that does nothing to advance the story. Like Tristram, too, Yorick cannot finish his account, breaking off in mid-sentence. Apparently, he is more governed by his pen than governing. Yorick also reminds the reader of the narrator in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, who believes that happiness is the state of being well deceived. Yorick is disappointed to learn that his small present to Le Fleur has been sufficient only to allow his servant to buy used clothes: “I would rather have imposed upon my fancy with thinking I had bought them new for the fellow, than that they had come out of the Rue de friperie” (“Le Dimanche—Paris”). Instead of inquiring about the history of the lady at Calais, he invents a pleasant account of her until he gets “ground enough for the situation which pleased me” (“In the Street—Calais”). He deceives himself into believing that he is accompanying a pretty fille de chambre as far as possible to protect her when actually he wants her company. Even his benevolence is self-deception. He conjures up images to weep over—a swain with a dying lamb, a man in the Bastille, an imaginary recipient of charity. When in this last instance he confronts the reality, his behavior is hardly benevolent, though. Sterne is not satirizing benevolence as such. In his sermons “The Vindication of Human Nature” and “Philanthropy Recommended” he rejects the notion that people are inherently selfish and stresses his belief in humankind’s natural benevolence. Yet he had to look no farther than his own nose to discover that benevolence can become a hobbyhorse that can carry a person away from the path of reason. Yorick’s hobbyhorse of benevolence is no less dangerous than Uncle Toby’s or Walter Shandy’s. Yorick will weep over a carriage, over a dead ass, or over a caged starling. He admits that he does not even need an object for his sympathy: “Was I in a desert, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affection” (“In the Street—Calais”). Real human misery, however, he cannot understand. He can weep over his imagined prisoner in the Bastille, but he cannot imagine the real suffering there. He can be callous to the poor, but never to a pretty young woman. Yorick’s benevolence is thus a compound of self-deception and lust. He will give no money to the poor monk until he wants to impress a pretty woman. He gives a sou to a beggar with a dislocated hip, but he gives an unsolicited crown to a pretty fille de chambre, and he gives three louis d’or to a pretty grisette. He imagines that in offering to share his chaise with another pretty young lady, he is fighting off “every dirty passion” such as avarice, pride, meanness, and hypocrisy. Actually, he is yielding to desire. True benevolence is guided by reason, and it is not a thing of the moment only, as

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Sterne points out in his sermon on the Good Samaritan. Yorick’s benevolence is impulsive and short-lived. The cry of a caged starling moves him greatly: “I never had my affections more tenderly awakened,” he says (“The Passport—The Hotel at Paris”). The hyperbole of the language is itself a warning of Yorick’s inability to temper emotion with reason. After such a reaction, his attitude changes abruptly; Yorick buys the starling but never frees it. After tiring of it, he gives it away to another as callous as himself. At Namport, he mourns for a dead ass and praises its owner for his kindness, adding, “Shame on the world! . . . Did we love each other, as this poor soul but loved his ass—’twould be something” (“Namport—The Dead Ass”). By the next page, Yorick is sending his postillion to the devil. Yorick goes out of his way to find the mad Maria, whom Sterne had introduced in book 7 of Tristram Shandy. He weeps with Maria at Moulines; she makes such an impression on him that her image follows him almost to Lyon—an entire chapter. Yorick is humorous because, like Tristram, Walter, and Toby, he is the victim of his hobbyhorse. He gallops away from reason, failing to examine his motivation or to temper his sudden fanciful flights. In “Temporal Advantages of Religion,” Sterne provides a picture of the ideal Christian traveler. “We may surely be allowed to amuse ourselves with the natural or artificial beauties of the country we are passing through,” Sterne notes, but he warns against being drawn aside, as Yorick is, “by the variety of prospects, edifices, and ruins which solicit us.” More important, Yorick forgets the chief end of people’s earthly sojourn: “Various as our excursions are—that we have still set our faces towards Jerusalem . . . and that the way to get there is not so much to please our hearts, as to improve them in virtue.” Yorick has come to France for knowledge, but he learns nothing. His benevolence is much closer to wantonness than to virtue; it is fitting that he ends his account in the dark, grasping the fille de chambre. In A Sentimental Journey, as in Tristram Shandy, Sterne mocks excess. He shows the folly that results from the abdication of reason. Though he introduces norms such as Yorick in Tristram Shandy or the old soldier in A Sentimental Journey, the ideal emerges most clearly from a depiction of its opposite—perverted learning, bad writing, and unexamined motives. When Sterne came to London in 1760, Lord Bathurst correctly embraced him as the heir to the Augustan satirists. Joseph Rosenblum Other major works NONFICTION: A Political Romance, 1759; The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 1760 (vols. 1-2), 1766 (vols. 3-4); Sermons by the Late Rev. Mr. Sterne, 1769 (vols. 5-7); Letters from Yorick to Eliza, 1773; Sterne’s Letters to His Friends on Various Occasions, to Which Is Added His History of a Watch Coat, 1775; Letters of the Late Rev. Mr. L. Sterne to His Most Intimate Friends, 1775 (3 volumes); In Elegant Epistles, 1790; Journal to Eliza, 1904. Bibliography Cash, Arthur Hill. Laurence Sterne. 2 vols. London: Methuen, 1975-1986. The definitive biography. The first volume follows Sterne’s life to early 1760 and offers many details about his role in the religious and political affairs of York. The second volume treats Sterne the author. Presents a realistic picture freed from Victorian strictures and romantic glosses. The appendices provide a series of portraits and of letters never before published. ____________. Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey.

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Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966. Comparing Sterne’s sermons with A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Cash finds a moral stance in the novel, one that condemns Yorick for excessive sentimentality. Sterne laughs at Yorick, at himself, and at humankind for abandoning reason. Cash, Arthur Hill, and John M. Stedmond, eds. The Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971. A collection of essays on a range of subjects, including Sterne’s style, his reputation outside England, and his fictional devices. Includes some helpful illustrations. Hartley, Lodwick. This Is Lorence: A Narrative of the Reverend Laurence Sterne. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943. Still the best general introduction to the man and his work. In a sprightly biography for the general reader, Hartley quotes generously from Sterne and sets him clearly in his age. Kraft, Elizabeth. Laurence Sterne Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1996. Kraft begins her short book with two chapters about Sterne’s early writings, then devotes one chapter each to Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. The first chapter is primarily biographical, giving readers an overview of Sterne’s life as a cleric before he became a literary celebrity. The second chapter concerns the fruit of Sterne’s years as a clergyman, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick. Kraft also includes a final chapter on Sterne’s changing critical reputation as well as a selected bibliography. Myer, Valerie Grosvenor, ed. Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984. Contains eleven essays on The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., covering such matters as the nature of Sterne’s comedy, the intellectual background of the novel, and Sterne’s influence on the work of Jane Austen. Includes a brief annotated bibliography. New, Melvin. ”Tristram Shandy”: A Book for Free Spirits. New York: Twayne, 1994. After providing a literary and historical milieu for Sterne’s most famous work, New explores five different methods of approaching Tristram Shandy: “Satire,” “Heads” (that is, intellectually), “Hearts” (that is, emotionally), “Joy,” and “Tartuffery” (as a humorous attack on hypocrisy). New’s approach is somewhat too schematic and too dependent on Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings about Tristram, but it could act as a helpful guide for students attempting to come to terms with this shifting and slippery text. Putney, Rufus D. “The Evolution of A Sentimental Journey.” Philological Quarterly 19 (1940): 349-369. Treats the novel as a hoax in which readers could find the sentimentality they were seeking, while Sterne could create the humorous fiction he wanted to write. Stedmond, John M. The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne: Convention and Innovation in “Tristram Shandy” and “A Sentimental Journey.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. Sterne’s novels highlight the comic distance between aspiration and attainment that is endemic in human existence. Provides helpful readings of the novels and an appendix recording Sterne’s direct borrowings.

Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson

Born: Edinburgh, Scotland; November 13, 1850 Died: Vailima, near Apia, Samoa; December 3, 1894 Principal long fiction · Treasure Island, 1881-1882 (serial), 1883 (book); Prince Otto, 1885; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886; Kidnapped, 1886; The Black Arrow, 1888; The Master of Ballantrae, 1889; The Wrong Box, 1889; The Wrecker, 1892 (with Lloyd Osbourne); Catriona, 1893; The Ebb-Tide, 1894 (with Osbourne); Weir of Hermiston, 1896 (unfinished); St. Ives, 1897 (completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch). Other literary forms · In addition to his novels, Robert Louis Stevenson published a large number of essays, poems, and short stories, most of which have been collected under various titles. The best edition of Stevenson’s works is the South Seas Edition (32 volumes) published by Scribner’s in 1925. Achievements · A man thoroughly devoted to his art, Stevenson was highly regarded during his lifetime as a writer of Romantic fiction. Indeed, few, if any, have surpassed him in that genre. Combining a strong intellect and a wide-ranging imagination with his ability to tell a story, he produced novels that transport the reader to the realms of adventure and intrigue. After his death, his literary reputation diminished considerably, until he was regarded primarily as a writer of juvenile fiction, unworthy of serious critical attention. With the growth of scholarly interest in popular literature, however, Stevenson is sure to enjoy a reevaluation. Certainly his narrative skill speaks for itself, and it is on that base that his literary reputation should ultimately rest. Anyone who has vicariously sailed with Jim Hawkins in quest of buried treasure or sipped a potion that reduces intellect to instinct with Henry Jekyll can vouch for the success of Stevenson as a writer and agree with what he wrote in “A Gossip of Romance” (1882): “In anything fit to be called reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.” Biography · The only child of Thomas and Margaret (Balfour) Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was in poor health even as a child, and he suffered throughout his life from a tubercular condition. Thomas, a civil engineer and lighthouse keeper, had hopes that Stevenson would eventually follow in his footsteps, and the youngster was sent to Anstruther and then to Edinburgh University. His fragile health, however, precluded a career in engineering, and he shifted his efforts to the study of law, passing the bar in Edinburgh in 1875. Even during his preparation for law, Stevenson was more interested in literature, and, reading widely in the essays of Michel de Montaigne, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, he began imitating their styles. Their influence can be seen in the style that Stevenson ultimately developed—a personal, conversational style, marked by an easy familiarity. 883

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Between 1875 and 1879, Stevenson wandered through France, Germany, and Scotland in search of a healthier climate. In 1876, at Fontainebleau, France, he met Fanny Osbourne, an American with whom he fell in love. She returned to California in 1878, and in that same year became seriously ill. Stevenson set out immediately to follow her. Traveling by steerage, he faced considerable hardships on his journey, hardships that proved detrimental to his already poor health. In 1880, he married Fanny and settled for a few months in a desolate mining camp in California. After a return to Scotland, the couple journeyed to Davos, Switzerland, for the winter. Again returning to Scotland in the spring, Stevenson worked on his novel Treasure Island. Moving Library of Congress back and forth between Scotland and Switzerland was not conducive to improved health, and Stevenson decided to stay permanently in the south of France. Another attack of illness, however, sent him to Bournemouth, England, a health resort, until 1887, during which time he worked assiduously on his writing. In August of that year he sailed for America, settling at Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondacks. There he wrote The Master of Ballantrae in 1889. He finally settled in the islands of Samoa in the South Seas, a setting that he used for The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. He died there on December 3, 1894, ending a short but productive life. Analysis · By the time that Robert Louis Stevenson published his first novel, Treasure Island, the golden age of Victorianism in England was over. The empire was far-flung and great, but the masses of England had more immediate concerns. The glory of the Union Jack gave small comfort to a working class barely able to keep its head above water. If earlier novelists wrote for the middle-class reader, those of the last twenty years of the century revolted against the cultural domination of that class. Turning to realism, they dealt with the repression caused by a crushing environment. Stevenson, however, disdained moral and intellectual topics, preferring the thin, brisk, sunny atmosphere of romance. Consequently, he stands apart from such figures as Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and George Gissing. In “A Humble Remonstrance,” Stevenson spoke of the function of a writer of romance as being “bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in capturing the lineament of each fact, as in marshalling all of them to a common end.” Perhaps, then, Stevenson should be seen not simply as an antirealistic writer of romance, but as a writer whose conception of realism was different from that of his contemporaries.

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In his study of Stevenson, Edwin Eigner points out that the novelist’s heroes are drawn from real life and are usually failures. Moreover, says Eigner, “very few of the characters, whether good or evil, manage even to fail greatly.” Stevenson himself wrote in his essay “Reflection and Remarks on Human Life” that “our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.” His own ill health may have caused him to see life in terms of conflict, and in his case a conflict that he could not win. This element of failure adds a somber dimension to Stevenson’s romances—a note of reality, as it were, to what otherwise might have been simply adventure fiction. It is the element of adventure superimposed on reality that gives Stevenson’s writing its peculiar character. A writer’s stories, he remarked, “may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the daydream.” In doing this, the writer’s greatest challenge, according to Stevenson, is to give “body and blood” to his stories. Setting, circumstance, and character must all fall into place to give a story the power to make an impression on the mind of the reader, ”to put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up at one blow our capacity for sympathetic pleasure.” In this way a story becomes more than merely literature; it becomes art. Stevenson regarded the tales of the Arabian Nights as perfect examples of the storyteller’s art: tales that could captivate the reader in his childhood and delight him in his old age. Such was the goal that he sought in his own works: to bring the reader to the story as an involved spectator who does not shy away from the unpleasantries or the villainy, but finds in witnessing them the same pleasure he does in witnessing the more optimistic and uplifting aspects of the piece. Perhaps this is Stevenson’s greatest achievement: He illustrates with his stories a sometimes forgotten truth—“Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child.” Treasure Island · “If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day,” Stevenson wrote in a letter to Sidney Colvin on August 25, 1881. He was speaking of Treasure Island, the novel on which he was then at work. He need not have worried, for since its publication it has been a favorite of children everywhere—and, indeed, of many adults. Stevenson wrote the book, according to his own account, in two bursts of creative activity of about fifteen days each. “My quickest piece of work,” he said. The novel was begun as an amusement for his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, then twelve years old. Upon its completion in November of 1881, the novel was serialized in the magazine Young Folks; since it did not raise circulation to any degree, it was not considered particularly successful. The book was an altogether different story. As a tale of adventure, Treasure Island stands as one of the best. Buried treasure has always had an aura of mystery and intrigue about it, and this case is no exception. Young Jim Hawkins is the hero of the novel; the adventure starts when Bill Bones, an old seaman, comes to Jim’s father’s inn, the Admiral Benbow, to wait for a one-legged seaman, who does not arrive. Bones does have two other visitors: a seaman named Black Dog, whom he chases away after a fight, and a deformed blind man named Pew, who gives him the black spot, the pirates’ death notice. Bones is so frightened that he dies of a stroke. In the meantime, Jim’s father has also died, leaving Jim and his mother alone. Opening Bones’s locker, they find an oilskin packet that Jim gives to Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey. Finding in the packet a treasure map, Trelawney and Livesey decide to outfit a ship and seek the treasure. Jim is invited to come along as cabin boy. Just before they sight the island where the treasure is supposed to be, Jim overhears the ship’s cook, the

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one-legged Long John Silver, and some of the crew plotting a mutiny. When Silver and a party are sent ashore, Jim smuggles himself along to spy on them. When Trelawney and Livesey learn of Silver’s duplicity, they decide to take the loyal crew members and occupy a stockade they have discovered on the island, leaving the ship to the pirates. Unable to take the stockade, Silver offers a safe passage home to its defenders in return for the treasure map. The offer is refused, and, after another attack, the party in the stockade is reduced to Trelawney, Livesey, Captain Smollett, and Jim. Jim rows to the ship, shoots the only pirate on board, and then beaches the ship. Returning to the stockade, he finds his friends gone and Silver and the pirates in control. Silver saves Jim’s life from the other pirates and reveals the treasure map, which Dr. Livesey had given him secretly when the former had come to treat some of the wounded pirates. What Silver does not know is that Ben Gunn, the lone resident of the island, has already found the treasure and moved it to his own quarters. When the pirates find no treasure, they turn on Jim and Silver, but Gunn and Jim’s friends arrive in time to rescue them. The ship is floated by the tide, and Jim, his friends, and Silver leave the island. Silver jumps ship with only a bag of coins for his efforts, but the rest of the group divide the treasure. “Drink and the devil had done for the rest.” Though Jim may be the hero of the novel, it is Long John Silver who dominates the book. He is an ambiguous character, capable of murder, greed, and double-dealing on one hand and magnanimity on the other. He was Stevenson’s favorite character—and the one who ultimately raises the book from a pedestrian adventure story to a timeless, mythically resonant tale which has absorbed generations of readers. The unifying theme of Treasure Island is people’s desire for wealth. Trelawney and Livesey may be more moral in society’s eyes than Silver, but their motivation is certainly no higher. As for Jim, he cannot, like Silver, give a belly laugh in the face of such a world and go off seeking another adventure. One such adventure is enough for Jim, and that one he would rather forget. The Black Arrow · Serialized in Young Folks in 1883, The Black Arrow was labeled by Stevenson as “tushery,” a term he and William Henley used for romantic adventures written for the market. In a letter to Henley in May, 1883, he said, “Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush.” Stevenson had hopes, however, that The Black Arrow would strike a more receptive note in Young Folks than did Treasure Island, and in this respect, his hopes were realized. Though it lacks the depth of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow was enormously popular in its time and does not deserve its critical neglect. Set in the fifteenth century against the background of a minor battle of the Wars of the Roses and the appearance of the infamous Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the story recounts the adventures of Dick Shelton as he attempts to outwit his scheming guardian, Sir Daniel Brackley. An unscrupulous man, Sir Daniel has fought first on one side of the war and then on the other, adding to his own lands by securing the wardships of children orphaned by the war. Planning to marry Dick to Joanna Sedley, an orphaned heiress, Sir Daniel has ridden away to take charge of the girl. In his absence, Moat House, his estate, is attacked by a group of outlaws led by a man with the mysterious name of John Amend-All, who pins a message to the church door of Moat House swearing vengeance on Sir Daniel and others for killing Dick’s father, Henry Shelton.

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Dick, deciding to remain quiet until he can learn more of the matter, sets out to inform Sir Daniel of the attack. In the meantime, Joanna, dressed as a boy, has eluded Sir Daniel. On his way back to Moat House, Dick meets Joanna in the guise of “John Matcham.” Unaware that Sir Daniel has planned the marriage and unaware that John is Joanna, Dick offers to help his companion reach the abbey at Holywood. They eventually arrive at Moat House, where Dick learns that John is really Joanna and that his own life is in danger. He escapes and, after a lengthy series of intrigues and adventures, saves the life of Richard of York, Duke of Gloucester, and rescues Joanna from Sir Daniel, who is killed by Ellis Duckworth ( John Amend-All). Dick then marries Joanna and settles at Moat House. As an adventure story, The Black Arrow is thoroughly successful. The movement from episode to episode is swift, and the reader has little opportunity to lose interest. The love story between Dick and Joanna is deftly handled, with Joanna herself a delightfully drawn character. Still, the novel does not venture beyond the realm of pure adventure. Like many adventure stories, it is often contrived and trivial, but this fact does not detract from its readability. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde · Stories and theories abound regarding the writing of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In “A Chapter of Dreams” (1888), Stevenson himself gave an account of the composition of the novel, explaining that “for two days I went about racking my brain for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window; and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously.” The whole, according to Stevenson, was written and revised within a ten-week period. The novel is based on the idea of the double personality in every person, an idea with which Stevenson had long been concerned. Referring to Jekyll, he said to Will H. Low, a painter, that “I believe you will find he is quite willing to answer to the name of Low or Stevenson.” Not the first to use the idea in literature, Stevenson does give it a different twist. Hyde is not the double of the sinner, a conscience as it were, but, as one reviewer put it, Hyde is a personality of “hideous caprices, and appalling vitality, a terrible power of growth and increase.” As the story opens, Richard Enfield and Mr. Utterson, a lawyer, are discussing the activities of a Mr. Hyde, who has recently trampled down a small child. Both friends of Dr. Henry Jekyll, they are perturbed that the latter has named Hyde as heir in his will. A year later, Hyde is wanted for a murder, but he escapes. Soon after, Dr. Jekyll’s servant Poole tells Utterson of strange goings-on in his employer’s laboratory. He is concerned that possibly Jekyll has been slain. Poole and Utterson break into the laboratory and find a man dead from poison. The man is Edward Hyde. A note in the laboratory contains Jekyll’s confession of his double identity. Early in life, he had begun leading a double existence: a public life of convention and gentility and a private life of unrestrained vice. Finally, he discovered a potion that transformed him physically into Edward Hyde, his evil self. Though Jekyll wanted desperately to be rid of Hyde, he was not strong enough to overcome his evil side. He finally closed himself in his laboratory, seeking a drug that would eliminate Hyde. Failing in his search, he committed suicide. As an exploration into the darkest recesses of the human mind, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is skillfully constructed. Not only are Jekyll and Hyde presented in a haunting fashion, but Utterson also is a character brought clearly to life. The plot,

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sensational though it is, does not rely on the standard gothic claptrap to hold the reader. On the contrary, the story is subtly undertold, and the reader is drawn into the horror of it by Stevenson’s penetrating imagination and his easy mastery of language and style. The reader, said one reviewer, “feels that the same material might have been spun out to cover double the space and still have struck him as condensed and close knit workmanship. It is one of those rare fictions which make one understand the value of temperance in art.” Kidnapped · Stevenson completed Kidnapped in the spring of 1886, intending it originally as a potboiler, and it surely has all the ingredients of high adventure: a stolen inheritance, a kidnapping, a battle at sea, and several murders. Having gained an interest in Scottish history from his travels through the Highlands, Stevenson used as his principal source of historical information Trial of James Stewart (1753), a factual account of the 1752 Appin murder trial. Kidnapped is the story of David Balfour, whose only inheritance from his father is a letter to Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, David’s uncle. On the way to see Mr. Rankeillor, the family lawyer, to get the true story of the inheritance, David is tricked and sent off on a ship for slavery in the American colonies. He meets Alan Breck, an enemy of the monarch because of his part in a rebellion against King George, and, though David is loyal to the king, the two become fast and true friends. Escaping from the ship, they have numerous adventures, finally returning to Scotland, where David learns the truth of the inheritance. His father and uncle had both loved the same woman; when David’s father married the woman (David’s mother), he generously gave up his inheritance to his brother Ebenezer. Ebenezer knew that such an arrangement would not hold up legally, and thus he tried to kill David. David accepts Ebenezer’s offer of two-thirds of the income from the inheritance, and, with the money, he helps Alan reach safety from the king’s soldiers who are pursuing him. Kidnapped is rich in its depiction of the Scottish Highlands, and the novel’s dialogue is particularly effective. The contrast between David, a Lowlander and a Whig, and Alan, a Highlander and a Jacobite, for example, is well drawn. Ignoring their differences, the two, like Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), prove that their friendship is more important than geographical and political differences. Whatever Stevenson thought of Kidnapped, his friend Edmund Gosse thought it the “best piece of fiction that you have done.” Many would argue with Gosse’s statement. While it perhaps has more human interest than does Treasure Island, it lacks the sharpness and force of Stevenson’s masterpiece. The Master of Ballantrae · Although not as well known as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae is considered by many to be Stevenson’s best novel. Stevenson himself saw it as a “most seizing tale,” a “human tragedy.” Despite his preoccupation with character delineation in the story, he still regales the reader with a plethora of adventurous incidents. Set in eighteenth century Scotland, The Master of Ballantrae recounts the story of two brothers as they compete for title and love. When Stuart the Pretender returns to Scotland in 1745 to claim the English throne, Lord Durrisdeer decides to send one son to fight with Stuart and to keep one at home, hoping that way to make his estate secure regardless of the outcome of the struggle. James, Master of Ballantrae and his father’s heir, joins Stuart, and Henry remains behind. When news of Stuart’s defeat and James’s death comes, Henry becomes

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Master of Ballantrae. He marries Alison Graeme, who had been betrothed to James. James, however, is not dead, and, after adventures in America and France, returns to Scotland. Goading Henry and pressing his attentions on Alison, James soon angers his brother to the point of a midnight duel. Henry thinks that he has killed James, but again the latter escapes death—this time going to India. He surprises Henry once more by showing up alive at Durrisdeer. Taking his family, Henry secretly leaves for America, but James, with his Indian servant Secundra Dass, follows. Searching for treasure that he buried on his previous trip to America, James falls sick and dies, but Henry, thinking his brother able to return at will from death, goes to the grave one night and sees Secundra Dass performing strange ministrations over James’s exhumed body. Although the servant is unable to revive James, Henry believes that he sees his brother’s eyes flutter and dies from heart failure. Thus, both Masters of Ballantrae are united in death. The Master of Ballantrae, perhaps more than any other of Stevenson’s novels, goes beyond the bounds of a mere adventure story. Adventure is a key element in the book, but the characters of James and Henry Durie are drawn with such subtlety and insight that the novel takes on dimensions not usually found in Stevenson’s works. Like Long John Silver in Treasure Island, James Durie is not an ordinary villain. Henry, who moves from a kind of pathetic passivity in the first part of the novel to a villainy of his own, is unable to assume the true role of Master of Ballantrae. Overmatched and possessed by James, he lacks the dash and charm and strength of personality that makes the latter the real Master of Ballantrae. “In James Durie,” wrote one reviewer, “Mr. Stevenson has invented a new villain, and has drawn him with a distinction of touch and tone worthy of Vandyke.” With all the attributes of a hateful fiend, James nevertheless has a wit and a courage that are captivating. Perhaps the novel does, as Stevenson himself feared, leave the reader with an impression of unreality. Still, whatever its shortcomings, The Master of Ballantrae has all the trademarks of Stevenson’s fiction: an intricately and imaginatively designed plot, power of style, clear evocation of scene, and lifelike characters. G. K. Chesterton felt that Stevenson was the “first writer to treat seriously and poetically the aesthetic instincts of the boy.” In his own way, Stevenson contributed a fair number of readable and memorable works to the English literary heritage, and that heritage is the richer for it. Wilton Eckley Other major works SHORT FICTION: The New Arabian Nights, 1882; More New Arabian Nights, 1885; The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, 1887; Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893. PLAYS: Deacon Brodie, pb. 1880 (with William Ernest Henley); Macaire, pb. 1885 (with Henley); The Hanging Judge, pb. 1887 (with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson). POETRY: Moral Emblems, 1882; A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885; Underwoods, 1887; Ballads, 1890; Songs of Travel and Other Verses, 1896. NONFICTION: An Inland Voyage, 1878; Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, 1878; Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, 1879; Virginibus Puerisque, 1881; Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882; The Silverado Squatters: Sketches from a Californian Mountain, 1883; Memories and Portraits, 1887; The South Seas: A Record of Three Cruises, 1890; Across the Plains, 1892; A Footnote to History, 1892; Amateur Emigrant, 1895; In the South Seas, 1896; The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, 1988.

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Bibliography Bell, Ian. Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. Bell, a journalist rather than an academic, writes evocatively of Stevenson the dreamer and exile. This brief study of Stevenson’s brief but dramatic life does a fine job of evoking the man and the places he inhabited. It is less accomplished in its approach to the work. Calder, Jenni, ed. The Robert Louis Stevenson Companion. Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1980. Forty-one illustrations accompany eight articles by different authors on the life and work of Stevenson. Some of the authors knew Stevenson personally. These topical articles were written between 1901 and 1979. Daiches, David. Robert Louis Stevenson and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. A standard popular biography written in chronological and narrative style. Complete with 116 illustrations and a chronological page of events pertinent to Stevenson. Hammond, J. R. A Robert Louis Stevenson Companion: A Guide to the Novels, Essays, and Short Stories. London: Macmillan, 1984. The first three sections cover the life and literary achievements of Stevenson and contain a brief dictionary which lists and describes his short stories, essays, and smaller works. The fourth section critiques his novels and romances, and the fifth is a key to the people and places of Stevenson’s novels and stories. Knight, Alanna. The Robert Louis Stevenson Treasury. London: Shepherd-Walwyn, 1985. An extremely useful compendium, arranged in eight parts with twenty-eight illustrations. Contains four maps: of Scotland, France, the South Seas, and the United States, as they pertained to Stevenson’s life. Includes an alphabetized index of his works, letters, and characters, as well as works published about him in text, film, and radio. Also covers people and places that factored in his life. McLynn, Frank. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1993. Published on the eve of Stevenson’s centenary (1994), McLynn’s biography seeks to rehabilitate Stevenson’s literary reputation. For McLynn, Stevenson is Scotland’s greatest writer of English prose. This an accomplished, serious reappraisal of a writer long relegated to the shelves of “boy’s books.” A final epilogue helps to explain how Stevenson’s family squandered his legacy. Swearingen, Roger G. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980. A complete (350-entry) chronological list of Stevenson’s prose writings—from his earliest childhood until his death in 1894—which is concerned with his literary activity as his career progressed. The data include the first appearance of each work, with its particular history of development, and actual locations of the works today.

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift

Born: Dublin, Ireland; November 30, 1667 Died: Dublin, Ireland; October 19, 1745 Principal long fiction · A Tale of a Tub, 1704; Gulliver’s Travels, 1726 (originally entitled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships). Other literary forms · Jonathan Swift’s oeuvre includes a large and important body of verse, best assembled in The Poems of Jonathan Swift (1937, 1958), edited by Harold Williams. His letters may be found in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (1963-1965), also edited by Williams. Outstanding among a variety of political writings are Swift’s contributions to The Examiner (1710-1711), the treatise called The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry, in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (1711), and the important The Drapier’s Letters to the People of Ireland (1735). His prose, collected in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift (1939-1968), is a fourteen-volume collection edited by Herbert Davis. Achievements · It is generally conceded that Swift is the greatest English satirist, possibly the most brilliant ironist and acerb wit in any language. Yet the force of his satiric barbs has rendered him controversial, and many critics have retaliated against his potent quill by claiming that Swift is reckless, uncontrolled, spiteful, insensate, heathenish, and insane. Such rash responses merely demonstrate the powerful effect his writing instigates. Swift is not an overt lampooner, diatribe-monger, or name-caller. Curiously, he never utilizes the direct approach: he almost always speaks through a defective mouthpiece, a flawed, self-incriminating persona who forges a case against himself. Indeed, Swift is to be remembered as a grand satiric mimic, finely shaping and generating the voices of knaves and fools alike (the “modern” hack writer in A Tale of a Tub, the ignorant serving-woman Frances Harris, the idiot astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff, the callous and mathematical Modest Proposer, the proud but demented simpleton Lemuel Gulliver). Swift’s ear for clichés and inflections of dullness is almost perfect, and an author such as Herbert Read (in English Prose Style, 1928) hails Swift as the inevitable and clear master of “pure prose” style. Swift is, without doubt, the major satirist in prose, yet he is also a first-rate light poet (in the manner of Horace and the coarser Samuel “Hudibras” Butler), and, if anything, his reputation as a poet is rising. Furthermore, Swift wrote political pamphlets with ruthless force, and his prose in sermons, letters, and treatises is virile and direct. Finally, Swift should not be forgotten as wit and jester. He invented a child-language when corresponding with Stella, wrote mock-Latin sayings, devised wicked epigrams, created paraphrases of Vergil and Ovid, and could even toy with versifying when devising invitations to dinner. In a word, Swift is the all-around English expert in straightforward exposition—especially when it is bent to provoke savage mockery and the jeu d’esprit. 891

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Biography · Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on November 30, 1667, after the death of his father, a lower-middle class Anglo-Irishman. His grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Swift, had been a vicar in Herefordshire. His father, Jonathan, had settled in Ireland to work as a steward of the King’s Inns in Dublin. His mother was Abigail Erick, the daughter of a Leicestershire clergyman. Swift’s mother had entrusted her young son to a nurse; the nurse had spirited the infant Swift away from Ireland for several years, and although he was eventually returned, Jonathan was peculiarly linked with Ireland throughout his life. In any case, it was his fancy to picture himself a lonely outcast amid barbarians. He attended Kilkenny School in his youth and Trinity College, Dublin, obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in 1686. He spent most of the following decade at Moor Park, Surrey, in the household of Sir William Temple, the distinguished Whig statesman. It was at Moor Park that Swift met, in 1689, the child of Esther Johnson (whom Swift later immortalized as “Stella”), the daughter of Temple’s widowed housekeeper. Swift helped in supervising her education and inaugurated a lifelong (and little understood) relationship, for Stella later immigrated to Dublin and spent her life near the Anglican Dean Swift. Naturally, under Temple’s aegis, Swift hoped for introductions and advancement, but little came of promises and possibilities; and in 1694, he returned to Dublin long enough to be ordained an Anglican priest (in 1695). He subsequently was reunited with Temple until the latter’s death in 1699. Thereafter, he returned to Ireland as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley. His reputation for talent and wit was rapidly growing. Swift’s great political period took place in London from 1708 to 1714. He became the chief spokesman, apologist, and pamphleteer for the powerful Tory leaders then in power, Robert Harley and Henry St. John Bolingbroke. Their fall and disgrace ushered in a lengthy era of Whig dominance that permanently drove Swift back to what he must have considered exile in Ireland. Swift had been finally rewarded (although he would have perceived it as a paltry recognition) with the Deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he served for the remainder of his life. His powerful satires had earned him powerful enemies, and significant advancement in the Church or in England was never permitted to him. In any event, Swift served with precision, justness, and rectitude as a clergyman, and continued throughout his career to be an admirable satirist and wit. He even elected to champion the rights of the maltreated Irish, and he came to be admired as their avatar and protector, a “Hibernian Patriot.” In his last years, Swift suffered increasingly from deafness and vertigo (the results of a lifelong affliction by Ménière’s Syndrome, a disease of the inner ear), which resulted in senility, and most likely a stroke. Guardians were appointed in his last years, and he died in 1745, shortly before his seventy-eighth birthday. Swift’s last ironic jest was played upon humankind in his will, which committed the bulk of his estate to the founding of a “hospital” for fools and madmen, just as he had pronounced the plan in his Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (1731): He gave the little Wealth he had, To build a House for Fools and Mad; And shew’d by one satyric Touch, No Nation wanted it so much Analysis · Initially, it must be noted that Jonathan Swift’s “fictions” are nothing like conventional novels. They seldom detail the “adventures” of a hero or even a

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protagonist and never conclude with his Romantic achievement of goals or fulfillment of desires. Indeed, Swift is the great master of fictionalizing nonfiction. His satires always purport to be something factual, humdrum, diurnal, unimaginative: a treatise, a travel diary, an annotated edition, a laborious oration, a tendentious allegory, a puffed-out “letter-to-a-friend.” Extremist Protestant sects condemned fi ction, and “pr ojectors” an d would-be investigators in the dawning Age of Science extolled the prosaic, the plodding, the scholarly, the methodical, and the factual. At the same time, urban population growth and the rise of the middle class created a growing new audience, and printing presses multiplied in accordance with demand. Library of Congress Many “popular” and best-seller art forms flourished: sermons, true confessions, retellings (and Second Parts) of hot-selling tales and political harangues, news items, hearsay gossip, and science all became jumbled together for public consumption, much of which led to spates of yellow journalism. Throughout his life Swift rebelled against such indelicacies and depravities, and his satiric procedure included the extremist parody of tasteless forms—reductio ad absurdum. It was by such means that Swift secured his fame as an author. A Tale of a Tub · Doubtless his most dazzling prose performance of this kind was his earliest, A Tale of a Tub, which appeared anonymously in 1704. (Swift, in fact, published most of his satires anonymously, although his work was usually instantly recognized and acclaimed.) A Tale of a Tub is actually a “medley” of pieces imitating the penchant for an author’s combining fiction, essays, letters, verse, fragments, or anything to enable him to amass a book-length manuscript. It contained “The Battle of the Books,” a wooden allegorical piece in the manner of Aesop’s Fables, detailing the “quarrel of ancients versus moderns,” and a fragmentary treatise upon “The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” trussed up in the inept form of a casual letter to a friend. The treatise mocked the new “scientific” trend of reducing all things to some species of Cartesian (or Newtonian) materialism. Rather comically, it deploys in a blasé manner the language of ancient Greek and Roman atomists—Democritus and Epicurus—as if they were contemporary modernists. Indeed, one pervasive theme throughout this volume is the ridiculousness of the modernist position of “independence”—although they might be ignorant of the past, the ideas and genres of classical antiquity keep recurring in their works, a fact which belies the Moderns’ supposed originality (even while demonstrating that, as a result of solipsism, their form and control disintegrate into chaos).

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Clearly, the titular piece, “A Tale of a Tub,” is Swift’s early masterpiece, and one of the great (and most difficult) satires in any language. In its pages, an avowed fanatic “modern” aspires to “get off” an edition, to tout and sell himself, to make money, to demonstrate his uniqueness and, however evanescently, tyrannically to be “the latest modern.” He seeks to reedit an old tale of three brothers and their adventures. Naturally, he decorates and updates such a version to give it the latest cut and fashion, the style and wit and jargon of the moment. (It is perhaps an accident that this tale of the dissensions of Peter, Martin, and Jack parallels the vicissitudes of the history of Christianity, as it splinters into differing and quarreling religious sects. The Modern appears ignorant of historical sense.) The new version of the old story, however, is fragmented: Every time the Modern’s imagination or his fancy supplies him with a spark, he promptly follows his rather meandering Muse and travels into an elaboration, an annotation, or a digression. In fact, the opening fifty pages of the work are cluttered with the paraphernalia of “modern” publishing: dedications, publisher’s comments, introductions, apologies, gratulations, notes to the second edition, acknowledgments, prefaces, and forewords. Thereafter, when such a cloud of ephemeral formalities would seem to have been dispensed with, the author still manages to interject a plethora of digressions—afterthoughts, asides, cute remarks apropos nothing, commentary, snipings at critics, obsequious snivelings for the reader, canting pseudophilosophy for the learned, and pity and adoration for himself. In no time at all, the entire tale is awash in detours, perambulations, and divagations. This modern storyteller is nothing if not effervescent, boorish, and chronically self-indulgent. He claims that his pipe dreams and diversions are in essence planned excursions and in fact deliberately philosophic meditations, rich with allegorical meanings. The opposite is also true, and the Modern’s Tub is like an empty cart—rattling around most furiously in its vacuity, making the most noise. Furthermore, the digressions become unwieldy. The tale is disrupted more and more frequently and the digressions become longer and longer. The Modern is his most penetrating in the trenchant Section IX—a digression in praise of madness—as he coyly confesses that his reason has been overturned, his intellectuals rattled, and that he has been but recently confined. The continued multiplication of digressions (until they subvert sections of the tale) and the finale when the Modern loses his notes and his ramblings give out entirely are easily understood as the wanderings of a madman—a Modern who suppresses the past, memory, reason, and self-control. If Swift’s warning about the growing taste for newness, modernity, and things-ofthe-moment appears madcap and farcical, it is nevertheless a painfully close nightmare preview of future fashions, fantasms, and fallacies that subsequently came to be real. A Tale of a Tub clearly demonstrates several of Swift’s most common fictional ploys and motifs. Some representative of the depraved “moderns” is usually present, always crass, irreligious, ignorant, arrogant, proud, self-adulatory, concerned with the events of the moment. Indeed, Swift was fond of scrupulously celebrating every April 1 as All Fool’s Day, but he also recognized April 2: All Knave’s Day. He doubtless felt that both halves of humankind deserved some token of official recognition. Yet Swift also favored mixing the two: He frequently shows readers that a man who is manipulator, con man, and knave in one set of circumstances is himself conned, befooled, and gulled in another. As such, the Modern reveals an unexpected complexity in his makeup; he also illustrates the era (as Swift imagines it) that he inhabits, a period

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overfull of bad taste and poor writing which are the broad marks of cultural decadence. In the work of a satirist, the world is regularly depicted as cyclic in historic periods, and usually in decline. Swift and Sir William Temple both stressed some trend toward decay in the modern era, and spoke often of barbarians and invasions; it was a type of satiric myth suitable to the disruptive fictions that the satirist envisions. In Section IX of A Tale of a Tub, the Modern vacillates between viewing all humankind as being “curious” or “credulous,” as busy probers, analysts, and excavators, and the superficial and the inert: knaves versus fools. As is typical of Swift, the fool and knave personas are infused with enough familiar traits to suggest that all people partake of either. Further, Swift entraps his reader by implying that there are no other categories: One is either fool or knave or both. His irony is corrosive and inclusive, capturing the reader in its toils. In that sense, Swift is deliberately disruptive; he seeks to startle and to embroil the reader in his fictions about stupidity and depravity. To such an end, he tampers with logic to make his case appear substantial and manipulates paradox to keep his readers off balance. Such techniques lend Swift his volatile force. These strategies are to be found in Swift’s best verse; the same may be said for his two great, ironic short-prose pieces: An Argument to Prove That the Abolishing of Christianity in England May, as Things Now Stand, Be Attended with Some Inconveniences, and Perhaps Not Produce Those Many Good Effects Proposed Thereby (1708) and A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public (1729). Both of these works seek to shock the reader and to propose the discomforting, the alarming, the untenable. Gulliver’s Travels · Swift’s undisputed masterpiece is Gulliver’s Travels, originally entitled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships. This fictional work accommodates all of Swift’s perennial themes and does so effectually. First, the work is perhaps the definitive study of new middle-class values, specifically the preoccupation with slang, cash, smug self-righteousness, self-assertion, and self-gratulation. Second, it might not be considered a “novel” in the conventional sense of the term, but it is a delightfully fact-filled simulation of adventure fiction, and it stems assuredly from the satiric picaresque tradition (in Spain and France) that greatly contributed to the formulation of modern novelistic techniques and themes. Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver (a mulish gull) is a model representative of the fool and the knave: He aspires to befool others but nevertheless befuddles himself. His medium is the very popular literary genre of the travelogue or record of a “voyage of discovery.” The genre grew popular through its Cartesian emphasis upon an inductive observer-self and the Romantic subject of adventures in far-off lands. Such a travelogue format allows the narrator to take his readers on a vicarious journey of adventure and concludes by suggesting that the traveler has fulfilled the pattern of the Bildungsroman and has attained education, growth, experience, and Aristotelian cognitio (insight, maturation, the acquisition of new knowledge). As might be expected in an exemplary case manipulated by Swift, Gulliver is anything but the apt learner. He is a crass materialist for whom experiences consist of precise measurements of objects observed; a tedious cataloging of dress, diet, and customs; and an infinite variety of pains in note-taking, recording, transcribing, and translating. He is superficiality and rank objectivity incarnate. Naturally, therefore, his everyday mean density prevents his acquisition of any true understanding.

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Gulliver is a minor physician, the mediocre little man, eager, like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, to make sight-seeing tours and to acquire cash. His first of four voyages carries him to the land of six-inch mites, the Lilliputians, and his Second Voyage to the land of gargantuan giants, the Brobdingnagians. Gulliver remains myopic in either location, for he can hardly consider that little midgets can (and do) perpetuate monstrous deeds; and, once he perceives that the giants are rather tame, he leaps to the conclusion that they are infinitely superior to other human types (even though their political and social institutions are no better than they should be, given the quirks and flaws of human nature). In sum, the tour from very small to very large merely stimulates in Gulliver a sense of wondrous contrast: He expects in these different worlds wondrous differences. Amusingly, what the reader finds is much the same, that is the uneven and imperfect human nature. Equally amusing, Gulliver behaves much the same himself in his attempts to ingratiate himself with his “superiors”: He aspires to become a successful competitor in all worlds as a “titled” nobleman, a Nardac, a “courtier” with “connections” at court. Like many middle-class people, he is a man in the middle, aspiring above all for upward mobility, mouthing the commonplaces of the day, utterly incapable of judging people and events. He is also the worst sort of traveler; he is a man who sees no farther than his own predilections and preconceptions and who imitates all the manners that he sees around him. Actually, the realms of big and little are merely distortions of the real world. Here, one of the work’s central ironies is found in the fact that Gulliver could have learned as much, or as little, if he had stayed at home. The world of sizes is replaced in the Third Voyage by the world of concepts: The muddled peoples he visits are victims of mathomania and abstraction-worship. At the same time, it is revealed that the world of the past, like the world of the present, has been tainted and corrupt. Even the potentially ideal Struldbruggs—immortals who live forever—are exposed as being far from lucky. They are, rather, especially accursed by the afflictions of impotence, depression, and senility. Swift has, with cartoon facility, carted Gulliver all around the world, showing him the corrosive face of fallen humanity, even among the various robbers, cowards, pirates, and mutineers that had beset him as he traveled in European ships; but Gulliver does not see. The stage is properly set for the Fourth Voyage. Utilizing his favorite ploys of reversal and entrapment, Swift puts Gulliver into a land of learned and rational horses (the Houyhnhnms) and debauched hairy monkeylike beasts (the Yahoos). Once again, there is no middle ground: All in this world is rational horse or wolfish (and oafish) bestiality. Obviously, Gulliver chooses the equestrian gentlemen as his leaders and masters. (Indeed, throughout all the voyages, Gulliver the conformist has been in quest of a staid position and “masters” who will tell him what to do and grant him praise and sustenance for his slavish adulation.) Slowly it is revealed, however, the Yahoos are men: Gulliver is a debased, gross, and deformed member of the Yahoo tribe; as Swift sweetly and confoundingly phrases it, Gulliver is a “perfect yahoo.” The horses themselves rebuff this upstart, and Gulliver, who has undergone every other sort of ignominy in the course of his travels, is finally evicted as an undersirable alien from the horsey paradise. At last, Gulliver thinks he has learned a lesson; he aspires to be a horse, and, back in Europe, he shuns the human species and favors the environs of straw and stables. He has hardly acquired the rationality of his leaders and appears quite mad. Swift’s ultimate paradox seems to imply that people can “know” about reason and ideals but can never master

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or practice them. Yet, even here, Swift cruelly twists the knife at the last moment, for the fond Gulliver, several years later, is revealed as slowly forgetting his intense (and irrational) devotion to the Houyhnhnms and is slowly beginning to be able to tolerate and accept the lowly human race that he had earlier so intransigently spurned. Gulliver cannot even stick to a lesson painfully and rudely learned during many years; he has neither the brains, drive, ambition, nor consistency to keep him on any course. Gulliver’s travels eventually get him nowhere. In sum, Gulliver’s Travels makes a huge tragicomical case for the absurdity of pretentious man. Gulliver is fool enough to believe that he is progressing and knave enough to boast about it, and to hope to gain some position and affluence from the event. Yet, at his proudest moments, he is little more than a driveller, a gibbering idiot who is raveningly insane. Gulliver’s painful experiences and the brute instruction his readers acquire are a caustic finale to much of the heady and bold idealism of the Renaissance, and a cautionary plea for restraint in an era launched on celebrating reason, science, optimism, and enlightenment. Time has shown that Swift was largely right; blithe superconfidence in people, their sciences, and their so-called “progress” is very likely to come enormously to grief. Gulliver’s Travels speaks to everyone because it addresses crucial issues about the human condition itself. John R. Clark Other major works POETRY: Cadenus and Vanessa, 1726; Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, 1731; On Poetry: A Rapsody, 1733; The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 1937, 1958 (3 volumes; Harold Williams, editor). NONFICTION: A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, 1701; The Battle of the Books, 1704; An Argument to Prove That the Abolishing of Christianity in England May, as Things Now Stand, Be Attended with Some Inconveniences, and Perhaps Not Produce Those Many Good Effects Proposed Thereby, 1708; A Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners By a Person of Quality, 1709; The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry, in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War, 1711; A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, in a Letter to the Most Honourable Robert Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain, 1712; The Public Spirit of the Whigs, Set Forth in Their Generous Encouragement of the Author of the Crisis, 1714; A Letter from a Lay-Patron to a Gentleman, Designing for Holy Orders, 1720; A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, 1729; The Drapier’s Letters to the People of Ireland, 1735; A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, According to the Most Polite Mode and Method Now Used at Court, and in the Best Companies of England, in Three Dialogues, by Simon Wagstaff Esq., 1738; Directions to Servants in General . . . , 1745; The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, by the Late Jonathan Swift DD, DSPD, 1758; Journal to Stella, 1766, 1768; Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage, 1797; The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 1963-1965 (5 volumes; Harold Williams, editor). MISCELLANEOUS: Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 1711; Miscellanies, 1727-1733 (4 volumes; with Alexander Pope and other members of the Scriblerus Club); The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 1939-1968 (14 volumes; Herbert Davis, editor).

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Bibliography Ehrenpreis, Irvin. Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962-1983. A monumental biography that rejects longheld myths, provides much new information about Swift and his works, and relates him to the intellectual and political currents of his age. Fox, Christopher, and Brenda Tooley, eds. Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. The introduction discusses Swift and Irish studies, and the subsequent essays all consider aspects of Swift as an Irish writer. Individual essays have notes, but there is no bibliography. Hunting, Robert. Jonathan Swift. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. In this revision of his earlier book on Swift, Hunting incorporates recent scholarship to provide an overview of Swift’s life and his major works. Includes a chronology and a selective, annotated secondary bibliography. Nokes, David. Jonathan Swift, a Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1985. Draws heavily on Swift’s own writings, offering a good introduction for the general reader seeking information about his life and works. Nokes views Swift as a conservative humanist. Palmieri, Frank, ed. Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. Divided into sections on Swift’s life and writings, Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub and eighteenth century literature, and his poetry and nonfiction prose. Includes index but no bibliography. Quintana, Ricardo. The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift. 1936. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press, 1953. One of the standards of Swift criticism, concentrating on the public Swift. Examines his political activities and writings, tracing the intellectual sources of his thought. Includes synopses of his major works and provides a useful historical background. The 1953 edition contains additional notes and an updated bibliography. Rawson, Claude. The Character of Swift’s Satire: A Revised Focus. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983. Presents eleven essays by Swift scholars, including John Traugatt’s excellent reading of A Tale of a Tub, Irvin Ehrenpreis on Swift as a letter writer, and F. P. Lock on Swift’s role in the political affairs of Queen Anne’s reign. Real, Hermann J., and Heinz J. Vienken, eds. Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985. Includes twenty-four essays on all aspects of Swift’s work, each preceded by an abstract. Indexed for cross-referencing.

William Makepeace Thackeray William Makepeace Thackeray

Born: Calcutta, India; July 18, 1811 Died: London, England; December 24, 1863 Principal long fiction · Catherine: A Story, 1839-1840 (as Ikey Solomons, Jr.); The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1841 (later as The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1848); The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century, 1844; Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, 1847-1848; The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy, 1848-1850; Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance upon Romance, 1850 (as M. A. Titmarsh); The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire, a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne, 1852 (3 volumes); The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, 1853-1855; The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century, 1857-1859; Lovel the Widower, 1860; The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World, Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him, and Who Passed Him By, 1861-1862; Denis Duval, 1864. Other literary forms · William Makepeace Thackeray’s career as a satirist and journalist contributed to his novelistic style. His works appeared in a number of periodicals, including The National Standard, which he owned, The Constitutional, for which he was Paris correspondent, and The New Monthly Magazine. More important, however, the bulk of his writing appeared in Fraser’s Magazine and in Punch, until, in 1860, he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. In many of his reviews, short stories, burlesques, and travel writings, he adopts facetious pen names that reveal the snobbish preconceptions of his personae. “The Yellowplush Correspondence” appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in 1837-1838 as the supposed diary of Charles James Yellowplush, an illiterate footman who betrays all the social prejudices of his employers. The story was later published as Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush in 1856. Thackeray assumed two pseudonyms for some of his comic pieces. As Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Thackeray published A Legend of the Rhine (1845), Mrs. Perkin’s Ball (1847), and The Rose and the Ring: Or, The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo (1855) among others, in addition to some nonfiction works such as The Paris Sketch Book (1840), The Irish Sketch Book (1843), and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo . . . (1846); as George Savage Fitz-Boodle, an aging and susceptible bachelor, Thackeray wrote The Confessions of George Fitz-Boodle, and Some Passages in the Life of Major Gahagan (1841-1842) and Men’s Wives (1843). “Punch’s Prize Novelists,” which appeared in Punch magazine, was a series of parodies of popular novelists of the day, such as Benjamin Disraeli and James Fenimore Cooper, and was perhaps even more effective than the burlesque Catherine (which he wrote as Ikey Solomons, Jr.). Thackeray’s other achievements include The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853) and The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life (1860); a number of tales and short stories, including A Shabby Genteel Story and Other Tales (1852), and a series of ballads and verses, such as the nostalgic “The Ballad of Bouillabaisse” (1849). Achievements · Long remembered as a social satirist par excellence, Thackeray wrote more in the manner of Henry Fielding than of Samuel Richardson and more in the 899

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realistic vein than in the style of the “novel of sensibility,” that production of the early nineteenth century that sought to achieve heightened emotional effects at the expense of believable plot and characterization. Both in his miscellaneous writings and in his first great novel, Vanity Fair, Thackeray sought to counter the kind of melodramatic and pretentious entertainment provided by such authors as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, William Harrison Ainsworth, and even the early Charles Dickens. He attempted, instead, to make his readers see through the social and literary hypocrisy that, as he believed, characterized the age. To this end, he adopted a number of pseudonyms in his early essay writing, pseudonyms that can be said to foreLibrary of Congress shadow the personae he used in his fiction. In reviewing both art and literature for such magazines as Fraser’s Magazine and The New Monthly Magazine, Thackeray adopted the Yellowplush and Titmarsh signatures; he was thus able to ridicule in a lively way what he found false. His reviews were no less devastating to the current trend of idolizing criminals and rogues, as seen in the series of popular “Newgate Novels.” As Ikey Solomons, Jr., he produced Catherine, the tale of a murderess, but even here, his attempt to deglamorize the account was mitigated by his growing sympathy for his created characters. Again, A Shabby Genteel Story attempted to deal with the middle class in unvarnished terms. His first sustained narrative, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, features an Irish adventurer recounting his own life; the novel follows the rise and fall of its picaresque hero to illustrate the specious nature of worldly success. Perhaps most telling in his ten-year preparation for fiction writing were two series that appeared in Punch. “The Snobs of England” was a series of verbal portraits of social types, most drawn for their pretension; “Punch’s Prize Novelists” was a collection of parodic rewritings of popular novelists’ works. In his sustained works, however, Thackeray leaves his readers not with a collection of isolated vignettes but with a panoramic study of humankind under the guidance of a witty persona whose satirical bent is tempered by the realization that he himself partakes of the foibles of his own characters. Thackeray’s characteristic persona derives not only from Fielding and his prefaces to the various books of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), but also from Samuel Johnson, who ends Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) by suggesting that since an ideal world is impossible, a wise individual will stoically accept the one that exists. Certainly, Thackeray’s experimentations with the persona in The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire, for example, a novel written in the memoir form, laid the groundwork for such masters of psychological realism and irony as Henry James and James Joyce. In addition, Thackeray’s experi-

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mentations with the generational form, in which several novels are melded together through the familial relationships of their characters, look forward to such productions as John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922). In presenting the affairs of Henry Esmond’s grandsons and the development of the beautiful Beatrix Esmond into a worldly old woman in The Virginians, he was also implicitly exploring the kind of genetic and environmental influence that the naturalists defined as determinism. While many modern readers are perhaps not as comfortable as their nineteenth century forebears with the conception of the authorial voice as a constant, even necessary factor in the plot, Thackeray nevertheless remains noteworthy, especially in his early novels, both for the realistic renderings of individuals in all social walks and for his moral standpoint, best expressed in the preface to Vanity Fair as a charitable outlook on human foibles. Biography · William Makepeace Thackeray was born on July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India. His father, Richmond Thackeray, pursued a family career in the East India Company; his mother, Anne Becher, traced her ancestry back to a sixteenth century sheriff of London. The senior William Makepeace Thackeray and John Harman Becher had extensive interests in India. After his father’s death in 1815, Thackeray’s mother married Major Henry Carmichael-Smith, a former suitor. As was the custom, Thackeray was sent to England at the age of five for reasons of health and education. His unhappy, early experiences at the Arthurs’ school and at Chiswick were later rendered in “Dr. Birch and his Young Friends” (1849). At Cambridge, as a member of a privileged class, he was trained in the standards and preconceptions that he later pilloried in his The Book of Snobs (1848, 1852) and in many other works. He was left with a distaste for bullying and with a distrust of his own intellectual abilities. After two years at Cambridge, Thackeray abandoned the pursuit of academic honors. Although he believed that his education had, on the whole, served him ill, it nevertheless had given him a background in history and culture, a double appreciation that is well evidenced in The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire; it also convinced him of his social status, although his expensive aristocratic habits were to prove difficult to control. The gentle satire evident in Vanity Fair’s Pumpernickel chapters reflect Thackeray’s happy six-month tour of Germany before he undertook to study law in London. While the discipline soon proved not to his taste, his life as a gentleman of fashion (a life that included large gambling debts) was congenial, at least until the collapse of many of the Indian commercial houses reversed his inheritance prospects. Almost relieved to be forced to make his own way, Thackeray decided to develop his talent for drawing, making friends with Daniel Maclise and being tutored by George Cruikshank. While in Paris studying art, he met and married Isabella Shawe, the daughter of a colonel in the Indian army. He endeavored to support his family through journalistic activities, even offering to illustrate Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). His friendship with Daniel Maginn made his “Yellowplush Papers” welcome in the columns of Fraser’s Magazine, whose readers were regaled with the malapropisms of a rascally footman. In addition, he wrote for the London Times and for a number of obscure journals. His first long attempt at fiction was Catherine, a parody of the “Newgate Novel”; in quick succession he produced A Shabby Genteel Story and The Paris Sketch Book. In 1840, Thackeray was visited by domestic calamity; upon the birth of their third daughter, his wife, Isabella, went insane and required institutionalization. The child-

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rearing was assumed by Thackeray’s parents, leaving him to recoup his writing career, initially with The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond and soon with contributions to Punch and the Morning Chronicle. During these middle years, Thackeray solaced himself for the want of domestic connections with a series of friendships with old Cambridge acquaintances such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and W. H. Brookfield, as well as with journalistic brethren such as Francis Sylvester Mahoney (the “Father Prout” of Fraser’s Magazine fame) and with Dickens himself, whom Thackeray could, however, never accept as a “gentleman.” His travel literature was published at this time. His connection with Punch, begun in 1842, was an important one. From contributing fillers, he went on to write a number of series; moreover, Thackeray’s rivalry with the other principal writer, Douglass Jerrold, was to affect the course of Punch’s publishing history, turning the tide from radicalism and democracy to a Whiggish conservatism of which Dickens himself much disapproved. The year 1847 was crucial for Thackeray. He began to parody novels for Punch in the “Punch’s Prize Novelists” series, he began a long platonic affair with Jane Brookfield, and he published Vanity Fair, the novel that has achieved abiding interest for its panoramic social view and its narrator’s satircal viewpoint. His four-year relationship with Jane Brookfield certainly affected his writing; much of the nostalgia and agonizing provoked by the affair are reproduced in The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire. Just as important was his entreé into aristocratic circles, for he, along with his daughters Anny and Minnie, with whom he had set up an establishment in Kensington, were welcome not only at Holland House but also in the demirep world of Lady Blessington. Leaving his daughters was the only blight on his first American tour in 1852, when he lectured about “English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century” and marveled at the way in which the nouveaux riches mingled with the best society. Upon his return, Thackeray entered the height of the London social season and visited his daughters in Paris. He began The Newcomes, a novel much interrupted by illness but, even as its title suggests, much influenced by his social experiences. His work on the “Four Georges,” an indictment of the House of Hanover as well as of the monarchy and the upper classes, indicated his changed attitudes. After his second American tour (undertaken, like the first, to provide stipends for his daughters), Thackeray not only published The Virginians but also became editor of Cornhill Magazine, a project that allowed him to move “out of novel-spinning back into the world” of the essay. The periodical was an immediate success, publishing such authors as Anthony Trollope and George Henry Lewes. Although Thackeray retired as editor in 1862, he continued to publish his “Roundabout Papers” there until the year after. Indeed, his last unfinished novel, Denis Duval, appeared in Cornhill Magazine posthumously in 1864, after Thackeray had died on December 24, 1863, in London. Analysis · While William Makepeace Thackeray may indeed be best known as the author of Vanity Fair, to examine all of his novels is to understand why his contribution to the history of the novel is singular. His use of the intrusive narrator, although presaged by Henry Fielding, was developed so carefully that it became a new form of fiction, a “genuine creation of narrative experiment,” as critic Alexander Welsh calls it. In addition, his panoramic realism—although creating that anathema of Henry James, the novel that is “a loose and baggy monster”—explored, both seriously and satirically, a number of topics from which other Victorian writers shied away, such as married life and the development of the middle-class gentleman. Quite aside from the interest generated by the story line, many of Thackeray’s

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novels offer explanations of the art of creating fiction as well as criticism of some of his contemporaries’ inadequacies. When Amelia in Vanity Fair, for example, tries to visualize George’s barracks, the doors are closed to her, for the romantic imagination is in all respects inadequate to the exigencies of real life. In The Newcomes, Thackeray compares his method of character-building to the work of the paleontologist who discovers a series of bones and who must construct the habits, behavior, and appearance of his subject from a mere skeleton. He thereby suggests that any such “reality” is merely an illusion, for like the paleontologist, the author must work with probabilities. Insofar as his characters follow a probable course of events, they are true to life and, in a sense, interact without the help of the author. That Thackeray meant his novels to be something more than believable illusionary worlds is clear when his conclusions are examined. In The Newcomes, for example, Thackeray retreats at the end from Pendennis’s narrative to suggest that the sentimental world he has created has no basis in fact, although the reader may believe so if he wishes to delude himself, and in the well-known ending to Vanity Fair, Thackeray puts his “puppets”—his characters—back into their box. Rather than following Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s idea of “willing suspension of disbelief,” Thackeray is philosophical, inviting the reader into a reconsideration of his own or of conventional beliefs and preconceptions. Certainly, Thackeray’s satire is operative here, particularly in his Punch series, in Catherine, and in The Luck of Barry Lyndon, in which he deliberately spoofed popular historical, crime, and romantic novels, respectively. The reader is asked to look at more than literary conventions, however; he is asked to examine his own degree of hypocrisy and snobbery. In so doing, the reader is reminded again and again that if he laughs at his neighbors, he condemns himself. Thackeray’s work is thus truly homiletic, both in a literary and in an extraliterary sense. Unlike many of his predecessors, he examined in detail the difficulties occasioned not only by marriage but also by other personal relationships; rather than assuming that a novel should end with marriage, he makes it his subject. Certainly, his personally tragic domestic situation and his affair with Jane Brookfield are reflected in Rachel Esmond’s trials with her reckless husband in Henry Esmond’s growing love for her. In the family chronicle The Newcomes, Thackeray looks at the misery occasioned by parental marriage choices; Mrs. Mackenzie (known as the “Campaigner”), a strong-minded virago who runs her daughter’s life, is modeled on Mrs. Shawe, Isabella’s termagant mother. Finally, in The Virginians, he traces the development of family characteristics and family ties. Another one of the many senses in which Thackeray’s novels are educative is the way in which he redefines the word “gentleman” to apply not to a member of a particular social class, but rather to one who possesses a set of personal characteristics, such as clear-sightedness, delicacy, generosity, and humanitarianism. His upper-class upbringing in India as well as his Cambridge education coupled with his love of the high life would seem to mitigate against such a redefinition, but, in fact, it is the greengrocer’s son, Dobbin, in Vanity Fair who is the gentleman, rather than the pompous, vain George Osborne, and it is Colonel Newcome who, despite his misguided attempts to settle his son Clive’s happiness, emerges as the paradigmatical enemy to snobbery and to greed. Vanity Fair · Vanity Fair, whose title is taken from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), proved to be Thackeray’s most successful novel. Indeed, its attention to realistic detail and its panoramic sweep, to say nothing of the constant presence of the

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author-cum-narrator, caused many reviewers to label Thackeray “the Fielding of the nineteenth century.” While neither the initial reviews nor the sales were immediately promising, interest in the serial grew steadily until the publication of the volume guaranteed the author a financial as well as a critical success. Rivaling Thackeray at the time was Charles Dickens, whose Dombey and Son (1846-1848) appealed to a wide audience; even Thackeray himself, upon reading the passage describing little Paul’s death, despaired about writing “against such power.” Thackeray, however, had his own power, that of the saritist who created “A Novel Without a Hero” and thus ran counter to his readership’s expectations, and that of the moralist who included his reader and himself in his reflective view of society. The hero that Vanity Fair must do without is the typically romantic hero. George Osborne (whose first name conjures up the dandified Regency court) is handsome, dashing, and well loved, but he is also vain, shallow, and pompous. After Joseph Sedley has gone bankrupt, George marries the pining Amelia Sedley only at the urging of his friend William Dobbin; during their honeymoon, he engages in a flirtation with Becky Sharp, herself newly married to Rawdon Crawley. Killed at the battle of Waterloo, George is cherished as a hero only by Amelia. Dobbin is at the other extreme: Gangly, awkward, and low in social standing, he is nevertheless possessed of compassion and understanding, yet he is so blinded by his selfless love for Amelia that he does not see until the end of the novel on how slight a character he has set his affection. Even Rawdon, who develops from a typical “heavy dragoon” who lives by his gambling into an affectionate father for his neglected son, lacks intellectual acumen, and, after his separation from Becky, accepts the post that her prostitution to Lord Steyne earned him. As A. E. Dyson suggests, Thackeray is indeed writing “an irony against heroes”—and against heroines as well. Amelia and Becky are as different as George and Dobbin. Initally, Amelia seems to be a conventional heroine, but the reader who views her in that light will be shocked to discover that he is idealizing the passivity, self-sacrifice, and hero-worship that are the earmarks of neuroticism, the three characteristics well seen in her treatment of her son Georgy, who is absurdly spoiled despite Amelia’s and her parents’ penury. No wonder, then, that readers preferred “the famous little Becky puppet” for her wit and ambition. From the moment she rides away from Miss Pinkerton’s finishing school, leaving Dr. Johnson’s dictionary lying in the mud, her energy in making a place for herself in society is impressive. Failing to entangle Amelia’s brother Jos, she eventually marries Rawdon, the favorite of his wealthy aunt, and only repines when Lord Crawley himself proposes—too late. She turns her very bohemianism into an asset as she gains entry into the best society, and while she claims that she too could be a “good woman on £5000 a year,” her energy in luring dupes to Rawdon’s card table, wheedling jewels from Lord Steyne, being presented to the king, and playing charades at a social affair belies her claim. As John Loofbourow shows, as Becky comes into social ascendancy, Amelia declines into obscurity. Amelia lacks Becky’s energy, while Becky lacks Amelia’s morality. In the end, when Dobbin has won his prize, Becky has devolved into a female picaresque rogue, traveling across the Continent from disreputable gaming table to questionable boarding house. Neither she nor Amelia qualifies as a heroine. It is Thackeray’s preface that reveals the moral purpose behind his satire. Posing as the “Manager of the Performance,” Thackeray reminds his readers that they are embarked on a fictional journey through an emblematic Vanity Fair, an evocation related only partly to the original in Bunyan’s work. Vanity Fair, for Thackeray, is a

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representation of the human condition; it is not for the reader, like Bunyan’s Christian, to pass through and eschew its lures, but rather to experience it “in a sober, contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind,” for the reader and author alike are part of the fair. Thackeray’s comments throughout serve the purpose of distancing the reader from the characters and forcing him to judge not only the created “puppets” but also his own preconceptions. If everyone is indeed part of the fair, to condemn the booth-owners’ hypocrisy, or social climbing, or snobbery, or mendacity, is to condemn one’s own failings. To be possessed of “charity”—to be able to pity others with the same care one has for oneself—this, Thackeray suggests, is the best that can be expected when the puppets are put back in the box. The History of Pendennis · The subtitle of The History of Pendennis—His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy—gives ample indication that the novel is a Bildungsroman. As Juliet McMaster points out, however, it is also a Künstlerroman; that is, a tale about the development of an artist. It is perforce autobiographical, detailing as it does the way in which a young man learns enough about the world and himself to become a writer of “good books.” The novel is important in a study of Thackeray’s technique, presenting, as it does, the background for the persona who was to narrate The Newcomes and showing Thackeray’s struggles with Victorian prudery. Indeed, in his preface he complains that his readers, unlike those of Fielding, are unwilling to accept a truthful portrayal of human beings unless they are given “a conventional simper.” Thackeray’s reviewers, however, welcomed the novel, their only complaint being the cynicism with which he endowed Pen. Such cynicism refutes Henry James, Sr.’s remark that Thackeray “had no ideas,” for Thackeray’s wryness results from a consideration of political and religious turmoil, from the “skepticism” brought about by the 1848 French Revolution, and from the controversy occasioned by the Oxford movement and Cardinal John Henry Newman’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism. Clearly, one reason for Thackeray’s contemporary appeal was that he reflected the very doubts of his own readers, for whom belief was an exercise in paradox. The tension between the heart and the world that animates The History of Pendennis is well represented by the frontispiece to the first volume, in which a youthful figure is clasped on one side by a woman representing marital duty and on the other by a mermaid representing the siren lure of worldly temptations. Within the dictates of the plot, the same tension is demonstrated by the demands of Pen’s sentimental mother, Helen Pendennis, who urges her son to marry the domestic Laura, her ward, and those of his uncle, Major Pendennis, who is willing to blackmail his acquaintance, Sir Francis Clavering, so that Pen can have a seat in Parliament and the hand of Clavering’s wealthy but artificial daughter Blanche. Between the two, Pen must, as McMaster points out, find his own reality; he must acquire “his uncle’s keen perception without the withering selfishness” and participate in his mother’s world of emotions without engaging in “romantic illusion.” Pen’s education progresses primarily through his amours, but also through his choice of career, for to be a writer, he must determine the relationship between fact and fiction. Pen’s abiding interest in the nature of experience makes his involvement with an actress allegorical in nature. His first affair is with Emily Costigan (known as “the Fotheringay”), an Irish actress older than he and one who plays her parts serenely unconscious of their philosophical implications; her ignorance Pen passes off as “adorable simplicity.” Extricated by his uncle, who “lends” Emily’s father a small sum

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in return for Pen’s love letters, Pen next enters Oxbridge, and then, influenced by his roommate, George Warrington, determines to study law and to become a writer. His affair with Fanny Bolton, the daughter of his landlady, is again one of an attraction to “adorable simplicity,” and his consequent illness a kind of purgation. His attachment to Blanche Clavering is more serious and more dangerous, for Blanche is a social “actress” with whom Pen plays the role of world-weary lover. With her he believes he has matured because he is willing to compromise with disillusionment. His real moment of maturity comes, however, when he finds that he cannot put up with his uncle’s worldliness, for in discovering that Clavering’s second marriage is bigamous and that the Baronet is paying blackmail money to his wife’s first husband, the Major in turn blackmails Clavering to give up his seat in Parliament to Pen and to cede his estate to Blanche. Pen’s responsible decision to honor his proposal to Blanche despite the resultant scandal is, in fact, unnecessary, for she jilts him for a more suitable match, freeing him to marry Laura, whose steadfast, honest devotion represents the alternative to Blanche’s sham affection. Laura, in fact, is Pen’s muse, his living “laurel wreath”; she has insight and a critical faculty that force Pen to come face to face with himself. With her, Pen finally frees himself from both romantic illusion and worldly disillusionment. Henry Esmond · Like Dickens, who turned from the largely unplotted “loose and baggy monsters” of his novelistic apprenticeship to produce the tightly controlled Dombey and Son, Thackeray moved from the looseness occasioned by serial publication to the careful construction of The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire, a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne, more commonly known as Henry Esmond. While the novelist Anthony Trollope agreed with Thackeray that the book was his “very best,” initial critical reaction was mixed, ranging from high praise for Thackeray’s realism to a scandalized outcry against what Gordon Ray calls the “emotional pattern” of the work—Esmond’s marriage to Lady Castlewood, his cousin and senior by eight years. All agreed, however, that the novel was profoundly moving. Much of its power is owing to its genesis: Written when Thackeray was recovering from his alienation from Jane Brookfield, the novel reflects his own emotional current, his nostalgia, his suffering, and his wish-fulfillment. In addition, Henry Esmond may be read on many levels—as historical fiction, as novel of manners, and as romance. Superficially, Thackeray might seem an unlikely figure to write a historical novel, inasmuch as he composed a series of parodies of “costume dramas” (as he called them) for Punch and inasmuch as the historical novel was going out of fashion by 1852. Nevertheless, because Thackeray was steeped in seventeenth century history, the work has a verisimilitude that, in the view of some critics, allowed him to outstrip even Sir Walter Scott. The point of view he adopts, that of the first-person narrator, adds to the illusion. This tour de force is accomplished with a success that even Henry James, the master of psychological realism, might envy. The entire story is presented from the limited point of view of Esmond, the cheated heir of the Castlewood estate, who is adopted by his cousins, falls in love with the beautiful but irresponsible Beatrix Esmond, and for her sake joins the Jacobite cause; then, when Beatrix becomes the Pretender’s mistress, he realigns himself on the side of the Stuarts, marries Beatrix’s mother, and immigrates to America. That Thackeray could, through a limited narrator, represent the complexity of Lady Castlewood’s growing love for the innocent and unconscious Henry is remarkable in its own right. Thackeray’s own memories of his boyhood helped him to

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re-create Henry’s loneliness; his relationship with Jane Brookfield shaped his characterization of Lady Castlewood. As John Tilford points out, Thackeray prepares carefully for the marriage, doubtless aware that it challenged many readers’ expectations and moral assumptions. Through nuances of dialogue, Rachel Castlewood’s awareness of her feelings and of Henry’s is revealed. A number of crucial scenes prepare for the denouement: Rachel’s hysterical reaction to Henry’s early affair with the blacksmith’s daughter, an affair that brings smallpox to the family; her vituperation of Henry as he lies in prison for his involvement in a duel that killed Lord Castlewood, whose drinking, gambling, and hunting had contributed to a loveless marriage; and, finally, her overwhelming joy when she sees Henry after his long period of military service. One early criticism of the novel was recorded by William Harrison Ainsworth, with whom Thomas Carlyle joined in objecting to the exultation of “sentiment above duty” in the novel; other critics found the comparison between the excitement of romantic love and marital unhappiness to be dangerous. The more sophisticated analysis of McMaster registers an “ironic tension” between “Rachel’s moral rectitude and . . . the psychological damage” it can cause. Like Henry James’s Mme de Mauves, Rachel is possessed of a cool virtue based on a conviction of moral and intellectual superiority; as McMaster suggests, she may indeed welcome evidence of her husband’s coarseness as a way of rationalizing her affection for Henry and may therefore be responsible for exacerbating her husband’s untoward behavior. Thackeray does give both sides: While Castlewood, like Fielding’s Squire Western, is rough and careless, pursuing a prodigal, adulterous life once his wife has lost her beauty to smallpox, he accuses her of pride and of a blighting coldness, and pleads for “the virtue that can forgive.” Even Beatrix complains that her mother’s saintliness provided so impossible a model that she was driven to ambitious selfishness. Such complaints themselves sound like rationalizations, however, for at the end of the novel, Rachel has undergone a long period of repentance. Having sent her temptation—Henry—away, she lives with the renunciation of happiness while he matures. Upon his return, then, she is no longer an angel, but, as he says, “more fondly cherished as woman perhaps than ever she had been adored as divinity.” The Newcomes · Subtitled Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, The Newcomes is a novel of manners that explores the way in which four generations of a nouveau riche family acquire social respectability. The novel, the first third of which is densely packed with background material and consequently slow-moving, is a deliberate return to the serial format that Thackeray had abandoned in Henry Esmond. While some modern critics object to the pace of this “monster,” nineteenth century reviewers believed that, with this novel, Thackeray had outstripped even Dickens, whose antiutilitarian manifesto, Hard Times (1854), was running concurrently. To be sure, a number of reviewers noted some repetition in theme and characters, a charge against which Thackeray defended himself in the “Overture” but admitted to in private, acknowledging a failure of invention because of sheer exhaustion. One such “repetition,” which is, in fact, a way of extending the scope of the novel, is that Pendennis is the “editor” of the Newcome memoirs. This device allows Thackeray not only to assume an objective stance from which his satire is more telling, but also to criticize the very social punctiliousness that Pendennis reveals, thereby achieving an advanced form of psychological analysis. What provides the novel’s “unifying structural principle,” as McMaster notes, is

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“the repetition of the mercenary marriage and its outcome between various couples.” This theme, however, is a manifestation of the larger examination of the nature of “respectability,” as the subtitle implies. For Barnes Newcome, the banker, for the aristocratic Lady Kew, and even for her granddaughter, Ethel Newcome, affection and generosity are weighed against wealth and social position and found wanting. The touchstone figure is Colonel Thomas Newcome, Barnes’s half brother; unworldly, honest, and loving, he is seen by Gordon Ray as a model of Christian humility. The underlying cynicism of the novel is underscored by the inability of the characters to gain happiness, whether they satisfy their acquisitiveness or rebel against such a value, for Thackeray reminds his readers that real fulfillment only exists in “Fable-land.” To pursue the marriage theme is to understand that in Thackeray’s world even the best intentions go awry. Certainly, the unhappiness that accrues in some relationships seems self-created: While the joining of money and class in Barnes’s marriage to Lady Clara Pulleyn satisfies the dictates of the marriage market, Barnes’s brutality drives his wife to elope with a former suitor. In contrast, Clive Newcome, the Colonel’s son, is forbidden by Lady Kew to marry Ethel because his profession as an artist is unacceptable. Even Clive himself is infected by the view, for he neglects his modest muse to devote himself to society. For his part, the Colonel, seeing Clive’s unhappiness, schemes to marry him to the sweet but shallow Rosey Mackenzie, the niece of his old friend James Binnie. The loveless though well-intentioned match is unhappy, for Clive longs for Ethel’s companionship and the couple is tormented by the dictatorial Mrs. Mackenzie after the Colonel’s bankruptcy. Ethel, like Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond, is a complex heroine, one who, through much trial and error, weans herself from the respectable avarice she was reared to accept. In love with Clive despite her relations’ objections, she nevertheless admits that she delights in admiration, fine clothes, and jewelry, and, although she despises herself for it, that she enjoys being a coquette. Her fine sense of irony about the marriage market, however, prompts her to wear a “sold” ticket pinned to her dress, much to the annoyance of her respectable relatives. At first affianced to Lord Frank Kew, she breaks the engagement; then, capitulating to social pressure, pursues the feeble-minded Lord Farintosh, only to repent at the last moment when the devastation of Barnes’s marriage, on which her own is to be patterned, is borne in upon her. In revulsion from her family’s values, she devotes herself to Barnes’s children and manages to divert some of the Newcome fortune to the impoverished Colonel and his son. Ethel’s “conversion” and Rosey’s death do not, however, lead necessarily to a happy ending, for in the years of following Ethel hopelessly, of neglecting his painting, and, finally, of engaging in a loveless marriage, Clive has become less resilient, more demoralized. Indeed, a conventional ending to The Newcomes would be as unwieldy as the happy denouement that Dickens was persuaded to tack on to Great Expectations (1860-1861). All Thackeray does promise is that in “Fable-land . . . Ethel and Clive are living most comfortably together.” As McMaster points out, “poetic justice does not operate in life, however it operates in romance and fairytale.” In the end, Thackeray refuses to cater to weak sentimentality. The Virginians · Written while Thackeray was fighting a lingering illness, The Virginians is a long, formless novel, many of whose characters appear in earlier works. The weight of critical opinion, both contemporary and twentieth century, implies that Thackeray, as he well suspected, was at the end of his fictional powers. To Walter

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Bagehot, the novelist merely presented an “annotated picture,” and, indeed, many complained about the plethora of details that substituted for imaginative creation. Thackeray’s habit of digressing grew more pronounced, aided by his failure to preserve a distance between himself and his persona for the second half of the novel, the sardonic George Warrington. Connected with such digressions was Thackeray’s increasing propensity to justify himself in the eyes of his critics; such justification introduced in a work of fiction was as gratuitous, many felt, as the air of mordant rumination that colored the novel. On the other hand, Thackeray’s supporters cited his adept portraiture of character and his classical style. Geoffrey Tillotson’s suggestion that all of Thackeray’s works are like one long novel well represents this point of view. In reviving earlier characters and in introducing their descendants, Thackeray studies the development of character traits as well as repetitive familial situations. Beatrix Esmond, for example, having been mistress to the Pretender and the King and having buried two husbands, one a bishop, reappears as a fleshy old woman with a caustic tongue and piercing black eyes. The enigmatic George Washington in The History of Pendennis reappears in the person of his namesake; George and Henry Warrington are twin sons of Rachel, Henry Esmond’s daughter. Unfortunately, Thackeray was unable to pursue his original plan, which was to place the brothers on opposite sides in the Revolutionary War and to insert real-life sketches of such figures as Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Samuel Johnson. The American section was foreshortened, although Thackeray’s prodigious reading in American history lends it a remarkably realistic air—so realistic that some American readers were initially incensed that George Washington should be portrayed in so commonplace a light. The book falls into halves, the first reserved for the English adventures of the innocent, gullible Henry. As Gordon Ray points out, the theme, although difficult to discern, is “the contrast between American innocence and Old World corruption.” Henry becomes involved with his cousins at Castlewood, who welcome him as the heir of the Virginia estates, on the supposition that George has died in the battle of Fort Duquesne. Enticed into a proposal by the elderly Maria and encouraged to dissipate his fortune by his infamous cousins, Henry is rescued from debt by his twin, who had not died but was taken prisoner by the French. Deceived by his fortune-seeking relatives, Henry returns to Virginia to marry the housekeeper’s daughter. The second half, narrated by George, details his adventures in London. Kept on short funds by his mother, he marries Theo Lambert, the daughter of the gentlemanly General Lambert, a figure much like Colonel Newcome. Even a brief plot outline of The Virginians reveals a number of Thackeray’s recurring themes. The attraction of young men to older women is one: Just as Henry Esmond married Rachel, many years his senior, so his grandson becomes attached to Maria, and, conversely, so his mother, Mrs. Esmond Warrington, becomes attached to a much younger suitor. The dogmatic and clinging nature of the parent-child relationship is another, much-explored theme: Hetty Lambert gives up her love for Harry to nurture the General, who is loathe to let either of his daughters leave; Mrs. Esmond Warrington throws impediments in the way of George’s marriage to Theo; even George himself meditates on his fear that his own daughters will eventually marry. In the final analysis, while The Virginians is justly faulted for its digressiveness, Thackeray’s treatment of character and his mellow, pure style grant to this work what Gordon Ray calls “a modest vitality.”

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Overshadowed in modern assessments by his great contemporaries, Dickens and George Eliot, Thackeray is an essential figure in the history of the English novel, and his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is among the great novels in the language. It is with this work that Thackeray is assured a place among the great authors in British literature. Patricia Marks Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Yellowplush Papers, 1837-1838; Some Passages in the Life of Major Gahagan, 1838-1839; Stubb’s Calendar: Or, The Fatal Boots, 1839; Barber Cox and the Cutting of His Comb, 1840; The Bedford-Row Conspiracy, 1840; Comic Tales and Sketches, 1841 (2 volumes); The Confessions of George Fitz-Boodle, and Some Passages in the Life of Major Gahagan, 1841-1842 (as George Savage Fitz-Boodle); Men’s Wives, 1843 (as Fitz-Boodle); A Legend of the Rhine, 1845 (as M. A. Titmarsh); Jeames’s Diary: Or, Sudden Wealth, 1846; The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves, 1846-1847 (later as The Book of Snobs, 1848, 1852); Mrs. Perkin’s Ball, 1847 (as Titmarsh); ‘Our Street,’ 1848 (as Titmarsh); A Little Dinner at Timmins’s, 1848; Doctor Birch and His Young Friends, 1849 (as Titmarsh); The Kickleburys on the Rhine, 1850 (as Titmarsh); A Shabby Genteel Story and Other Tales, 1852; The Rose and the Ring: Or, The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo, 1855 (as Titmarsh); Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush [with] The Diary of C. Jeames De La Pluche, Esqr., 1856. POETRY: The Chronicle of the Drum, 1841. NONFICTION: The Paris Sketch Book, 1840 (2 volumes; as M. A. Titmarsh); The Irish Sketch Book, 1843 (2 volumes; as Titmarsh); Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by Way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople and Jerusalem, Performed in the Steamers of the Penninsular and Oriental Company, 1846 (as Titmarsh); The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 1853; Sketches and Travels in London, 1856; The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life, 1860. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. William Makepeace Thackeray. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This critical anthology brings together major essays on Thackeray’s main novels. Includes a chronology and a bibliography. ____________, ed. William Makepeace Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.” New York: Chelsea House, 1987. In addition to Bloom’s original introductory essay, the volume reprints, in the order in which they appeared, seven important previously published critical essays on the novel. Subjects range from Dorothy Van Ghent’s evaluation of Becky Sharp to H. M. Daleski’s consideration of the form of Thackeray’s most important work. Carey, John. Thackeray: Prodigal Genius. London: Faber & Faber, 1977. Takes a thematic approach, concentrating on his earlier writings and the shaping of Thackeray’s imagination, especially its obsessive quality. The last two chapters relate this theme to the later fiction, Vanity Fair in particular. Indexed. Clarke, Micael M. Thackeray and Women. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995. Examines Thackeray’s treatment of female characters. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Colby, Robert A. Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity: An Author and His Public. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979. Colby seeks to capture Thackeray’s “Protean” personality as expressed in his fiction. A very full text which contains a chronology.

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Harden, Edgar F. Thackeray the Writer: From Journalism to “Vanity Fair.” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. A thorough study of Thackeray’s literary career. ____________. ”Vanity Fair”: A Novel Without a Hero. New York: Twayne, 1995. A clear, understandable review of the seminal novel. Excellent for any student of Vanity Fair. Hardy, Barbara. The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray. London: Peter Owen, 1972. Takes a thematic approach to Thackeray’s fiction, seeking to demonstrate the satiric and revolutionary feeling behind it. The themes covered include love, feasting, art and nature, and the exploitation of art. Peters, Catherine. Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987. Relates Thackeray’s fiction to his life, stressing particularly Thackeray’s challenge to his society. A selected bibliography is provided.

J. R. R. Tolkien J. R. R. Tolkien

Born: Bloemfontein, South Africa; January 3, 1892 Died: Bournemouth, England; September 2, 1973 Principal long fiction · The Hobbit, 1937; The Lord of the Rings, 1955 (includes The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954; The Two Towers, 1954; The Return of the King, 1955); The Silmarillion, 1977; The Book of Lost Tales I, 1983; The Book of Lost Tales II, 1984; The Lays of Beleriand, 1985; The Shaping of Middle-Earth, 1986; The Lost Road and Other Writings, 1987; The Return of the Shadow: The History of “The Lord of the Rings,” Part One, 1988; The Treason of Isengard: The History of “The Lord of the Rings,” Part Two, 1989; The War of the Ring: The History of “The Lord of the Rings,” Part Three, 1990; Sauron Defeated, the End of the Third Age: The History of “The Lord of the Rings,” Part Four, 1992; Morgoth’s Ring, 1993; The War of the Jewels, 1994; The Peoples of Middle-Earth, 1996 (previous 12 novels collectively known as The History of Middle-Earth). Other literary forms · J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels represent only a small part of the complicated matrix from which they evolved. During his lifetime, he published three volumes of novellas and short stories, Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), Tree and Leaf (1964), and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). Some of these tales had originally been bedtime stories for his own children, such as the posthumous The Father Christmas Letters (1976) or Roverandom (1998). The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth (1980) both contain stories Tolkien composed early in his life, material that sets the stage for the events in his novels. His poetry collections, Songs for the Philologists (1936), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), and The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (1967), link Tolkien’s poetic formulations of Middle-Earth’s themes with the historical and linguistic themes of which both his professional work and much of his dreams were made, “the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons.” Tolkien’s academic publications dealt with the history of the English language and Middle English literature: A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) and editions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925) with E. V. Gordon and the Ancrene Wisse (1962). His seminal essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) and his only play, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son (1953), offer fresh interpretations of ancient English epic poems. Tolkien’s novels have been adapted for cinema and television, and many, though not all, of his fragmentary stories, articles, and letters have been published since his death. His histories of Middle-Earth, a remarkable invented mythology comprising chronicles, tales, maps, and poems, were edited as a series by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Volumes include The Book of Lost Tales, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-Earth, and The Lost Road and Other Writings. Achievements · Tolkien’s fiction dismayed most of his fellow scholars at the University of Oxford as much as it delighted most of his general readers. Such reactions sprang from their recognition of his vast linguistic talent, which underlay both his professional achievements and his mythical universe. Tolkien led two lives at once, quietly working as an Oxford tutor, examiner, editor, and lecturer, while concurrently Middle-Earth and its mythology were taking shape within his imagination. 912

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For twenty years after he took First Class Honours in English Language and Literature at Oxford, Tolkien’s teaching and linguistic studies buttressed his scholarly reputation. Editing the fourteenth century text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon helped bring Tolkien the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. His lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” approached the Anglo-Saxon epic poem from an entirely new perspective and is considered a landmark in criticism of Western Germanic literature. As he was shaping his linguistic career, however, Tolkien was also formulating an imaginary language, which as early as 1917 had led him to explore its antecedents, its mythology, and its history, all of which he molded into the tales of The Silmarillion. Over the years, he shared them with friends, but he never finished putting them into a unified structure. His preoccupation with Middle-Earth and the practical demands of his teaching distracted Tolkien from scholarship, and between his celebrated essay On Fairy Stories in 1939 and his edition of the Middle English Ancrene Wisse in 1962, Tolkien published only fiction, a circumstance acknowledged with polite forbearance by most of Oxford’s scholarly community, although his novels eventually met with astonishing popular success. The Hobbit, originally a children’s story, was published in 1937 after a six-year gestation, and by 1949, The Lord of the Rings was complete. Its sales, though steadily increasing after its publication in 1954-1955, did not soar until 1965, when

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an unauthorized American printing proved a disguised blessing, resulting in a campus cult responsible for the sale of three million copies by 1968. Most critics of The Lord of the Rings have not achieved moderation. As W. H. Auden observed, “People find it a masterpiece of its genre, or they cannot abide it.” Auden himself and C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s Oxford friend, headed the “masterpiece” faction, while Edwin Muir in England and Edmund Wilson in America deplored Tolkien’s style and aims. Honorary fellowships, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford and a C.B.E. from Queen Elizabeth all descended upon Tolkien with the unexpected wealth of his last years, which were nevertheless darkened by his reluctance to complete The Silmarillion. His reputation rests not on his academic talent or scholarly production, nor even on his brilliant linguistically oriented “mythology for England,” but upon the novels that began as tales for his children and blossomed into a splendid imaginative tree of fiction whose roots feed upon the archetypes of northern European civilization and whose leaves shelter its finest aspirations. Biography · John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892. The piano-manufacturing firm of his father’s family, originally descended from German aristocracy, had gone bankrupt, and the elder Tolkien had taken a South African bank position in hopes of improving his shaky finances. Tolkien’s mother, Mabel Suffield, joined her husband at Bloemfontein, but when the climate strained J. R. R.’s health, she took their two sons home to England in 1895. Less than a year later, Arthur Tolkien died in South Africa, leaving his widow and children nearly penniless. In the summer of 1896, Mabel Tolkien rented a rural cottage at Sarehole Mill, close to Birmingham, and for the next four years she taught her boys French, Latin, drawing, and botany, to save school expenses. Much later, Tolkien called these “the longest-seeming and most formative part” of his life. Mabel Tolkien’s attraction to Roman Catholicism led to her conversion in 1900, and she moved to a Birmingham suburb from which Tolkien attended one of England’s then leading grammar schools, King Edward’s, on a scholarship. Already, he was demonstrating the fascination with ancient languages which was to determine his career. He was involved in learning such northern European languages as Norse, Gothic, Finnish, and Welsh, as well as the Old and Middle English in which he achieved his academic reputation. He claimed this philological bent dated from the time he was five or six years old. In 1904, his mother died at thirty-four, leaving her children in the care of Father Francis Morgan, her friend and pastor. Tolkien’s devotion to his mother was inextricably intertwined with his own Catholic faith, and both played vital roles in the development of his fiction. Thus at sixteen, Tolkien looked back upon a series of grievous losses: his father, whom he considered as “belonging to an almost legendary past”; the Sarehole countryside he loved; his mother, whom he considered a martyr to her faith. Not surprisingly for a lonely boy, Tolkien fell in love early when he met Edith Bratt, another orphan, in his Birmingham boarding house. She was three years older than he, and she had just enough inheritance to support herself modestly while she dreamed of becoming a musician. Recognizing the boy’s scholarly talent and fearing for his future, Father Morgan finally stopped all communication between Tolkien and Edith until Tolkien was twenty-one. Tolkien himself commented thirty years later, “Probably nothing else would have hardened the will enough to give such an affair (however genuine a case of true love) permanence.” When he and Edith were

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reunited in 1913, they seemed to have little in common, but on the eve of his military departure to France in 1916, they were married. By this time Tolkien had won a scholarship to Oxford University and graduated with first-class honors in 1913. He enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915, embarking for France in 1916. He survived the Battle of the Somme but was invalided back to England suffering from trench fever. While in a military hospital in 1917, Tolkien began The Book of Lost Tales, the genesis of The Silmarillion, although he dated the original ideas for the complete oeuvre from as early as 1910 and the original story of Beren and Tinuviel back to 1913. By 1918 he had read a version of “The Fall of Gondolin” to a college group. After demobilization, Tolkien gained employment on the new Oxford English Dictionary, until in 1921 he was appointed to the University of Leeds in Yorkshire to lecture in Old English. While there he began to establish an academic reputation with his Middle English Vocabulary and an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight done with Professor E. V. Gordon. On the strength of these and his connections back at Oxford, he was appointed the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon Studies at Oxford in 1925, a post he held until 1945, when he was appointed Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the same university. He held this post until his belated retirement in 1959. Various honorary degrees were bestowed upon him, and in 1938 he was Andrew Lang Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews, where he gave his famous lectures on fairy stories. However, the central part of his life lay in his secret creation of the mythology of Middle-Earth. It was initially the demands of his growing family (three boys and a girl) that brought any of this to light, particularly in The Hobbit, which was first drafted, according to his close friend and science-fiction novelist C. S. Lewis, by the beginning of 1930. Then it was through the influence of the Inklings, a club or group of like-minded university friends, that The Hobbit was reformulated and sent for eventual publication in 1937. The importance of the Inklings cannot be stressed enough, especially the friendship of C. S. Lewis, who encouraged Tolkien with The Lord of the Rings during World War II and immediately after, and who reviewed it in glowing terms. In a sense, Lewis was repaying the enormous debt he owed Tolkien for his conversion to Christianity. The Inklings continued till Lewis’s death in 1963, though the two men had drifted apart somewhat by then. Even so, the vast bulk of Middle-Earth mythology lay in a constant state of revision, expansion, and rearrangement, and despite the best efforts of friends and publishers, it was unpublished at his death. In fact, after the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1955, he concentrated again on his academic work, and only after retirement did he make any serious inroads again into the mythology. In the end, it was left to his third son, Christopher, also an academic, to order the material and have it published, as he did with a number of incomplete academic studies. Tolkien’s death in 1973 had been preceded by his wife’s in 1971. They were both buried outside Oxford, their graves suitably inscribed with the names Beren and Lúthien. The year before his death he had been made Companion of the Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.) by Queen Elizabeth II. Analysis · Looking back around 1951 upon his Middle-Earth, J. R. R. Tolkien commented, “I do not remember a time when I was not building it . . . always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of inventing.” He conceived of fantasy as a profound and powerful form of literature with intense

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philosophical and spiritual meaning, serious purposes, and eternal appeal. He believed the imagination, the mental power of making images, could be linked by art to “sub-creation,” the successful result of imagemaking, and so he regarded the genuine artist as partaking in the Creator’s divine nature. Three major factors of Tolkien’s personality and environment combined to shape the theory of fantasy underlying his novels, as first enunciated in the essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1938). His love of language for its singular rewards, his delight in the English countryside, and his shattering experience of trench warfare during World War I all provided the seeds for his three longest pieces of fiction. They also contributed to the points of view, astonishingly nonhuman and yet startlingly convincing, of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, where Elves and Hobbits illuminate the world of Men. Even as a boy, Tolkien had been enchanted by Welsh names on railway coal cars, a sign of his unusual linguistic sensitivity, and as a mature scholar, he devoted himself to the mystery of the word in its northern manifestations. In “On Fairy-Stories,” he wrote that “spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.” Tolkien cast his spells in the building blocks of words drawn from the imaginary languages he had been constructing as long as he could remember. The two languages he formulated for his Elves, the Elder Race, both derived from a common linguistic ancestor as human languages do, and this “nexus of languages” supplied the proper names for his fiction, so that despite their considerable length and complication they possess “cohesion, consistency of linguistic style, and the illusion of historicity.” The last was possibly the greatest achievement of Tolkien’s mastery of language in his novels, fostering vital credence in his imaginary world. He felt that the finest fairy stories “open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through . . . we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.” In his own childhood, a “troublous” one Tolkien said, he had “had no special ‘wish to believe’ ”; he instead “wanted to know,” as, perhaps, do his readers, aided by the resonance of his masterful use of words. The memory of his years at Sarehole, the happiest of his boyhood, gave Tolkien an abiding love of nature, “above all trees,” which formed the basis for one of his principal concepts, “the inter-relations between the ‘noble’ and the ‘simple.’” He found “specially moving” the “ennoblement of the ignoble,” a theme which recurs throughout his fiction. Tolkien’s Elves practice love and respect toward nature, as do his Hobbits, “small people” connected closely to “the soil and other living things” who display both human pettiness and unexpected heroism “in a pinch.” The Elves, Hobbits, and good Men are countered in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth by the threat of the machine, by which he meant “all use of external plans or devices,” as opposed to “the development of inner powers or talents.” The evil of the machine in Tolkien’s eyes (he did not own a car after World War II) derived from the misguided human desire for power, itself a rebellion against the Creator’s laws, a Fall from Paradise, another recurring theme in his fiction. The horrors of World War I must have struck Tolkien as evil incarnate, with new military technology that devastated the countryside, struck down the innocent, and left no place for chivalry, heroism, or even common decency. Unlike Andrew Lang, an early Scottish collector of fairy tales, who felt children most often ask, “Is it true?,” Tolkien declared that children far more often asked him of a character, ”Was he good? Was he wicked?” Tolkien shared G. K. Chesterton’s conviction that children “are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” The child’s stern perception of right and wrong, as opposed to the “mercy untem-

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pered by justice” which leads to “falsification of values,” confirmed Tolkien’s longheld inclination toward the steely world of the northern sagas, where human heroism faces inevitable defeat by the forces of evil, and the hero, according to Edith Hamilton, “can prove what he is only by dying.” From his basic distrust of the machine and his firsthand memories of the Somme, Tolkien drew one of the major lessons of his fiction: “that on callow, lumpish and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom.” Reconciling this harsh northern Weltbild with his Roman Catholic faith did not seem to be difficult for Tolkien. An indispensable element of his theory of fantasy is the “sudden joyous ‘turn’” of a “eucatastrophic” story, a moment in fiction accompanied by “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.” By inserting the “turn” convincingly into his tale, the subcreator “denies universal final defeat” and gives “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Hence, Tolkien believed that such a joy was the “mark of the true fairy story,” the revelation of truth in the fictional world the sub-creator built. It might even be greater, “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.” Tolkien was able to see the Christian Gospels as “the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe,” believing that in fantasy the human sub-creator might “actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.” Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings form, as he always hoped, one coherent and archetypal whole. His “creative fantasy” effectively shows the three dissimilar faces his theory demanded: “the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity toward Man.” Humanity’s “oldest and deepest desire,” the “Great Escape” from death, is satisfied in Tolkien’s major fiction, not by denying Mortality but by accepting it gracefully as a gift from the Creator, a benefit to humankind that Tolkien’s immortal Elves envied. The Elves’ own magic is actually art, whose true object is “sub-creation” under God, not domination of lesser beings whose world they respectfully share. Scorn for fallen people (and fallen Elves and Hobbits as well) abounds in Middle-Earth, but pity, too, for guiltless creatures trapped in the most frightful evil Tolkien could envision, evil that he believed arises “from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others—speedily—and according to the benefactor’s own plans.” Middle-Earth lives forever in Tolkien’s novels, and with it an affirmation of what is best, most true, and most beautiful in human nature. For almost fifty years, mostly in the quiet academic atmosphere of Oxford, Tolkien built his resounding tales of “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story.” He consciously dedicated it simply “to England; to my country.” The intellectual absorption with language he had always enjoyed gave him the starting place for his mythology, which he implemented in The Silmarillion, whose unifying theme is the Fall of Elves and Men. His happiness in the English countryside seems to have provided him the landscape from which The Hobbit grew, perhaps his most approachable “fairy-story” for both children and adults, illustrating the happiness to be gained from simplicity and the acceptance of the gift of mortality. The chivalric dreams of noble sacrifice shattered for Tolkien’s generation by World War I were redeemed for him by his realization that the humble may effectively struggle against domination by the misguided technological values of modern civilization. The heroic legend of The Lord of the Rings best illustrates Tolkien’s resolution of the conflict between the northern

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values he had admired from youth and the Roman Catholic religion of hope and consolation to which he was devoted. Tolkien wanted to illuminate the simplest and the highest values of human existence, found in a human love that accepts and transcends mortality. Tolkien’s “mythology for England,” a unique gift of literature and language, has earned its immense popular success by appealing to humanity’s eternal desire to understand its mortal lot. As Hilda Ellis Davidson commented of the great northern myths, so like Tolkien’s own, “In reaching out to explore the distant hills where the gods dwell and the deeps where the monsters are lurking, we are perhaps discovering the way home.” The Silmarillion · Both in Tolkien’s life and in the chronology of Middle-Earth, the tales of The Silmarillion came first, but the book was not published until four years after his death. The volume called The Silmarillion contains four shorter narratives as well as the “Quenta Silmarillion,” arranged as ordered chronicles of the Three Ages of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth by his son Christopher, following his father’s explicit intention. Tolkien began parts of The Silmarillion in 1917 after he had been invalided home from France. The work steadily evolved after more than forty years, and, according to Christopher Tolkien, “incompatibilities of tone” inevitably arose from his father’s increasing preoccupation with theology and philosophy over the mythology and poetry he had originally favored. Tolkien himself never abandoned his work on The Silmarillion, even though he found himself unable to complete it. As Christopher Wiseman had suggested to Tolkien, “Why these creatures live to you is because you are still creating them,” and so Tolkien painstakingly revised, recast, and polished these stories, unwilling to banish their characters from his imagination. The Silmarillion opens with “Ainulindalë,” a cosmogonical myth revealing the creation of Middle-Earth by God (“Iluvatar”) in the presence of the Valar, whom Tolkien described as angelic powers. He wanted “to provide beings of the same order . . . as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology” acceptable to “a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.” The universe to which Middle-Earth belonged was set in living motion by music, “beheld as a light in the darkness.” The short “Valaquenta” enumerates the individual Valar, whose personal responsibilities covered all created things of Middle-Earth, stopping short of the act of creation itself. One of the Valar, Melkor, rebelled in the First Age; Tolkien believed that “there cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall.” Melkor “began with the desire of Light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he descended . . . into a great burning.” One of Melkor’s servants was Sauron, who later embodied evil in the Third Age of Middle-Earth. The twenty-four chapters of the “Quenta Silmarillion” recount the legendary history of the immortal Elves, the First-Born of Iluvatar, whom Tolkien elsewhere called “rational incarnate creatures of more or less comparable stature with our own.” After writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien clearly indicated that the Elves were “only a representation of an apprehension of a part of human nature” from which art and poetry spring, but, he said, “that is not the legendary mode of talking.” The Elves originally share the Paradise of the Valar, Valinor, but the Elves suffer a fall from that grace in the “Quenta Silmarillion,” the rebellion and exile to Middle-Earth of one of the great families of Elves, led by their chief, the artificer Fëanor, who has captured the primal light of Iluvatar in the three Silmarils. Tolkien described these great jewels as aglow with the “light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifi-

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cally (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and ‘says that they are good’—as beautiful.” Fëanor’s lust to possess the Silmarils for himself leads to their capture by Melkor, and in the struggle to redeem them, splendid deeds are performed by Beren, a Man of Middle-Earth beloved of the Elvish princess Lúthien. Tolkien called this “the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history . . . are often turned . . . by the seemingly unknown and weak.” The union of Beren and Lúthien is the first between mortal Man and immortal Elf; they win Paradise together, and eventually Earendil the Elven Mariner closes the “Quenta Silmarillion” by bringing the gem Beren painfully rescued from Melkor to the land of the Valar. His Silmaril was set into the sky as its brightest star, while the others were lost in the depths of the earth and sea, and the First Age of Middle-Earth came to its end. Tolkien saw the Second Age of Middle-Earth as dark, and he believed “not very much of its history is (or need be) told.” The Valar continued to dwell at Valinor with the faithful Elves, but the exiled Elves with Fëanor were commanded to leave Middle-Earth and live in the lonely Isle of Eressëa in the West. Some of them, however, ignored the order and remained in Middle-Earth. Those Men of MiddleEarth who had aided the Elves to redeem the Silmarils were given the Atlantis-like realm of Númenor as their reward, as well as lifespans three times the normal age of Men. Though Melkor was chained, his servant Sauron remained free to roam Middle-Earth, and through his evil influence, both Men of Númenor and the Delaying Elves came to grief. The decay of Númenor is told in the Akallabeth, a much briefer illustration of Tolkien’s belief that the inevitable theme of human stories is “a Ban, or Prohibition.” The long-lived Númenoreans were prohibited by the Valar from setting foot on “immortal” lands in the West. Their wrongful desire to escape death, their gift from Iluvatar, causes them to rebel and bring about their own watery destruction through the worship of Sauron, Melkor’s servant. At the same time, the Elves who delayed in Middle-Earth suffered the painful consequences of their flawed choice. Tolkien said they “wanted to have their cake without eating it,” enjoying the perfection of the West while remaining on ordinary earth, revered as superior beings by the other, lesser races. Some of them cast their lot with Sauron, who enticed them to create three Rings of Power, in the misguided hopes of making Middle-Earth another Valinor. Sauron secretly made another ring himself, one with the power to enslave all the others. The ensuing war between Sauron and the Elves devastated Middle-Earth, but in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men against Sauron, the One Ring was lost. Tolkien calls this the “catastrophic end, not only of the Second Age, but of the Old World, the primeval age of Legend.” The posthumous collection called The Silmarillion ends with Tolkien’s résumé “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age,” which introduces the motives, themes, and chief actors in the next inevitable war between Sauron and the Free Peoples of Middle-Earth. Although The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have proved vastly more popular, and both can be enjoyed without the complicated and generally loftily pitched history of The Silmarillion, its information is essential to a thorough understanding of the forces Tolkien set at work in the later novels. Even more important, The Silmarillion was for Tolkien, as his son Christopher has said, “the vehicle and depository of his profoundest reflections,” and as such, it holds the bejewelled key to the autobiography Tolkien felt was embedded in his fiction.

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The Hobbit · Around 1930, Tolkien jotted a few enigmatic words about “a hobbit” on the back of an examination paper he was grading. “Names always generate a story in my mind,” he observed, and eventually he found out “what hobbits were like.” The Hobbits, whom he subsequently described as “a branch of the specifically human race (not Elves or Dwarves),” became the vital link between Tolkien’s mythology as constructed in The Silmarillion and the heroic legend that dominates The Lord of the Rings. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s official biographer, believes that Bilbo Baggins, hero of The Hobbit, “embodied everything he [Tolkien] loved about the West Midlands.” Tolkien himself once wrote, “I am in fact a hobbit, in all but size,” and beyond personal affinities, he saw the Hobbits as “rustic English people,” small in size to reflect “the generally small reach of their imagination—not the small reach of their courage or latent power.” Tolkien’s Hobbits appear in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, in an ominously quiet lull before a fearful storm. Sauron had been overthrown by the Elflord Gil-galad and the Númenorean King Elendil, but since evil is never completely vanquished, Sauron’s creatures lurk in the margins of Middle-Earth, in the mountain-enclosed region of Mordor, while a few Elves keep watch on its borders. Descendants of a few Númenoreans were saved from their land’s disaster (Atlantean destruction was a recurrent nightmare for both Tolkien and his son Christopher), and they rule in the Kingdoms of Arnor in the North of Middle-Earth and Gondor of the South. The former Númenoreans are allies of the Homeric Riders of Rohan, whose human forefathers had remained in Middle-Earth when Númenor came to be. The three Elven Rings of Power secretly guard Rivendell and Lothlórien, which Tolkien called “enchanted enclaves of peace where Time seems to stand still and decay is restrained, a semblance of the bliss of the True West.” The Hobbits live in The Shire, in “an ordered, civilised, if simple rural life.” One day, the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins receives an odd visitor, Gandalf the Wizard, who sends Bilbo off with traveling dwarves, as a professional burglar, in search of Dragon’s Gold, the major theme of the novel. In the process, Tolkien uses the humble Hobbit to illustrate one of his chief preoccupations, the process by which “small imagination” combines with “great courage.” As he recalled from his months in the trenches, “I’ve always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.” Starting from the idyllic rural world of The Shire, The Hobbit, ostensibly a children’s book, traces the typical quest of the northern hero about whom Tolkien himself had loved to read in his youth. Gandalf shares certain characteristics with the Scandinavian god Odin, said to wander among people as an “old man of great height,” with a long grey cloak, a white beard, and supernatural powers. Gandalf, like Odin, understands the speech of birds, being especially fond of eagles and ravens, and his strange savage friend Beorn, who rescues the Hobbits at one critical point, recalls the berserkers, bearskin-clad warriors consecrated to Odin who fought with superhuman strength in the intoxication of battle. The Dwarves of Middle-Earth distinctly resemble their Old Norse forebears, skilled craftsmen who made treasures for the gods. Smaug the Dragon, eventually slain by the human hero Bard, is surely related to “the prince of all dragons” who had captured Tolkien’s boyish imagination and who would reappear in Farmer Giles of Ham. The Germanic code of the comitatus, the warrior’s fidelity unto death, celebrated in the tenth century Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Maldon,” inspired Tolkien’s only play and applies to The Hobbit, too, since Bilbo’s outward perils are overshadowed by the worst threat of all to the northern hero, the inward danger of proving a coward.

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Bilbo’s hard-won self-knowledge allows him to demonstrate the “indomitable courage of small people against great odds” when he saves Dwarves, Men, and Elves from suicidal war against one another, after the Dragon has been slain and its treasure freed. The Hobbit far exceeded its beginnings as a bedtime story for Tolkien’s small sons, since it is also a fable about the child at the heart of every person, perceiving right and wrong as sternly as did the heroes of the North. In late 1937, at the suggestion of his British publisher, Stanley Unwin, Tolkien began a sequel to The Hobbit. To the East, a malignant force was gathering strength in the Europe that even the mammoth sacrifices of World War I had not redeemed from oppression, and while Tolkien often cautions against interpreting his works allegorically, the apprehensive atmosphere of prewar England must have affected his own peace of mind. He described his intention in The Lord of the Rings as “an attempt to . . . wind up all the elements and motives of what has preceded.” He wanted “to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose.” The moral of this novel, not a “trilogy” but, he stressed, “conceived and written as a whole,” was “obvious”: “that without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.” The Lord of the Rings · The Lord of the Rings is a vast panoramic contest between good and evil, played out against the backdrop of Tolkien’s mythology as presented in The Silmarillion. The One Ring of Sauron, long lost, was found by little Bilbo Baggins, and from him it passed to his kinsman Frodo, who becomes the central figure of the quest-in-reverse: Having found the Ring, the allied Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits must destroy it where it was forged, so that its power can never again dominate Middle-Earth. Another quest takes place simultaneously in the novel, as the mysterious Strider who greets the Hobbits at Bree on the first stage of their perilous journey is gradually revealed as Aragorn, son of Arathorn and heir to Arnor in the North, descendant of Elendil who kept faith with the Valar; he is the human King of Middle-Earth who must reclaim his realm. Sauron’s minions rise to threaten the Ringbearer and his companions, and after many adventures, a great hopeless battle is fought before the Gates of Mordor. As Tolkien stated in “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age,” “There at the last they looked upon death and defeat, and all their valour was in vain; for Sauron was too strong.” This is the paradoxical defeat-andvictory of the northern hero, whose glory is won in the manner of his death. As a practicing Christian, though, Tolkien had to see hope clearly in the ultimate struggle between right and wrong, “and help came from the hands of the weak when the Wise faltered.” Frodo the Hobbit at last managed to carry the Ring to Mount Doom in spite of Sauron, and there it was destroyed, and “a new Spring opened up on Earth.” Even then, Frodo’s mission is not completed. With his three Hobbit companions, he has to return to the shire and undo the evil that has corrupted the hearts, minds, and landscape of that quiet region. Only after that may Frodo, with the Elves, depart for the far west. In retrospect, Tolkien acknowledged that another central issue of The Lord of the Rings was “love in different modes,” which had been “wholly absent from The Hobbit.” Tolkien considered the “simple ‘rustic’ love” between Sam, Frodo’s faithful batman, and his Rosie was “absolutely essential” both to the study of the main hero of the novel and “to the theme of the relation of ordinary life . . . to quests, to sacrifice, causes, and the ‘longing for Elves,’ and sheer beauty.” The evidence of Tolkien’s own life indicates

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the depth of his ability to love, like Beren, always faithful to his Lúthien. Such love that made all sacrifice possible forms the indestructible core of The Lord of the Rings, which moved C. S. Lewis to speak of “beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron . . . a book that will break your heart.” Love exemplified in two important romances softens the necromancy and the battles of The Lord of the Rings: the poignant “mistaken love” of Eowyn for Aragorn, as Tolkien described it, and the novel’s “highest love-story,” the tale of Aragorn and Arwen, daughter of Elrond, leader of the Elves of Middle-Earth. Eowyn is niece to Theoden, King of Rohan, the land of the horsemen Tolkien patterned after ancient Anglo-Saxon tribes he had first encountered through William Morris’s House of the Wolfings (1889). In Theoden’s decline, the shield-maiden Eowyn gives her first love to the royalty-in-exile she senses in Aragorn, and though he in no sense encourages her, Eowyn’s tragedy is one only he can heal once he is restored as King. In contrast, Tolkien merely alludes to the love of Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings, since it seems almost too deep for tears. Arwen must forsake her Elven immortality and join Aragorn in human death, paralleling the earlier story of Beren and Lúthien. Like Tolkien’s own love for Edith, Aragorn’s for Arwen is temporarily prevented from fruition until he can return to her in full possession of his birthright. The shadow of her possible loss lends stature to the characterization of Aragorn, the hero of The Lord of the Rings. In 1955, Tolkien observed that “certain features . . . and especially certain places” of The Lord of the Rings “still move me very powerfully.” The passages he cited sum up the major means by which the novel so strongly conveys love, redemption, and heroism achieved in the face of overwhelming odds. “The heart remains in the description of Cerin Amroth,” he wrote, the spot where Aragorn and Arwen first pledged their love and where, many years later at the beginning of his fearful quest, “the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord tall and fair.” Tolkien magnifies this small epiphany of love through the eyes of the Hobbit Frodo. Another key episode, the wretched Gollum’s failure to repent because Sam interrupts him, grieved Tolkien deeply, he said, for it resembled “the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy.” In his favorite passage, however, Tolkien was “most stirred by the sound of the horns of the Rohirrim at cockcrow,” the great “turn” of The Lord of the Rings, a flash of salvation in the face of all odds that comes beyond hope, beyond prayer, like a stroke of unexpected bliss from the hand of the Creator. The “turn” that makes The Lord of the Rings a “true fairy-story” in Tolkien’s definition links fidelity to a vow, a Germanic value, to the Christian loyalty that animated many of the great Anglo-Saxon works Tolkien had spent his scholarly life studying. By weaving the immensely complex threads of Elves, Hobbits, Men, and Dwarves into his heroic legend of the last great age of Middle-Earth, he achieved a valid subcreation, sharing in the nature of what for him was most divine. The History of Middle-Earth · Tolkien’s son Christopher undertook the massive task of editing and commenting on the many drafts and manuscripts Tolkien left unpublished. These volumes, grouped under the generic title of The History of Middle-Earth, became commentary of a painstaking, scholarly kind, such as Tolkien himself would have enjoyed, no doubt, though it leaves the average reader rather befuddled. Each volume reprints, compares, and comments on original draft material in chronological order. One interesting feature is the emergence of the Annals, running alongside the

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stories; another is the evolution of the Elvish languages and etymologies. Tolkien’s original attempt to make this a mythology of England through the character of Aelfwine, an Anglo-Saxon who had somehow reached Middle-Earth and then translated some of its material into Old English, can also be seen. The Lost Road (1937) emerges as a fragment produced as part of an agreement with C. S. Lewis for a science-fiction story on time travel that would complement a story by Lewis on space. The latter produced Out of the Silent Planet (1938), but Tolkien gave up on his, though the attempt to connect it to the Akallabeth can be seen clearly. Christopher also edited the childhood stories and poetry; others have dealt with Tolkien’s drawings, illustrations, and mapmaking predelictions. The production of such Tolkiana is perhaps in some danger of overshadowing the myth that gave it life. Tolkien saw all of his work as unfinished and imperfect. As C. S. Lewis saw too in his Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), our myths can only ever be the first page of the Great Myth that goes on forever. Mitzi M. Brunsdale, updated by David Barratt Other major works SHORT FICTION: Tree and Leaf, 1964, revised 1988; Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth, 1980 (Christopher Tolkien, editor); The Book of Lost Tales, 1983-1984. PLAY: The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, pb. 1953. POETRY: Songs for the Philologists, 1936 (with E. V. Gordon et al.); The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, 1962; The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle, 1967 (music by Donald Swann); Poems and Stories, 1980; The Lays of Beleriand, 1985. NONFICTION: A Middle English Vocabulary, 1922; The Letters from J. R. R. Tolkien: Selection, 1981 (Humphrey Carpenter, editor); The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, 1983. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Farmer Giles of Ham, 1949; Smith of Wootton Major, 1967; The Father Christmas Letters, 1976; Roverandom, 1998. TRANSLATIONS:Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, 1975; Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode, 1982. EDITED TEXTS: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 1925 (with E. V. Gordon); Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, 1962; The Old English Exodus: Text, Translation, and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1981. MISCELLANEOUS: The Tolkien Reader, 1966. Bibliography Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin, 1977. Written with access to Tolkien’s unpublished letters and diaries, this mostly chronological narrative traces the development of the world of Middle-Earth from Tolkien’s philological work. Balances the details of his rather pedestrian life with the publishing history of Tolkien’s writings. An extensive section of black-and-white photographs, a detailed bibliography, a family genealogy, and an index add to the value of this standard biography. Crabbe, Katharyn W. J. R. R. Tolkien. Rev. ed. New York: Continuum, 1988. A study of Tolkien’s writings (including a chapter on The Silmarillion and another on the posthumous History of Middle-Earth series) unified by a vision of “the quest.” After a brief biographical chapter, Crabbe considers Tolkien’s use of languages to

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delineate character in his major works. Argues that his quest was for a suitable pre-Christian mythology which could ground the imaginative works of the future in a great mythic past for his beloved Britain. Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien—Myth and Modernity. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Curry examines the relevance of Tolkien’s mythological creation, especially in terms of its depiction of struggle of community, nature, and spirit against state. There are chapters on politics, ecology, and spirituality. Foster, Robert. The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth: From “The Hobbit” to “The Silmarillion.” Rev. ed. New York: Ballantine, 1978. An alphabetical annotated compendium of each of the proper names in Tolkien’s major works, including persons, places, and things, with page references to standard editions of each work. An invaluable reference, written from a perspective within the world created by Tolkien. The guide provides translations of Middle-Earth tongues, chronologies as appropriate, and masterful summaries of complex events. Hammond, Wayne, and Christina Scull. J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. London: HarperCollins, 1995. A full commentary on Tolkien’s illustrations for his major, minor, and unfinished stories. It brings out Tolkien’s own skills as an artist and the quality of his visual imagination. Isaacs, Neil D., and Rose A. Zimbardo, eds. Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. A collection of fifteen original and reprinted critical articles dealing with The Lord of the Rings as literature. Among the contributors, C. S. Lewis offers a paean to the author, critic Edmund Fuller allows that Tolkien’s work lifts one’s spirits, and translator Burton Raffel calls most of Tolkien’s poetry “embarrassingly bad.” An index of Middle-Earth references completes a lively and accessible volume. Reynolds, Patricia, and Glen GoodKnight, eds. Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, 1992. Altadena, Calif.: Mythopoeic Press, 1995. As the title suggests, this is a collection of papers given at the Tolkien conference held at Keble College, Oxford, in 1992 and represents a significant collection of views on Tolkien.

Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope

Born: London, England; April 24, 1815 Died: London, England; December 6, 1882 Principal long fiction · The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 1847; The Kellys and the O’Kellys, 1848; The Warden, 1855; Barchester Towers, 1857; The Three Clerks, 1858; Doctor Thorne, 1858; The Bertrams, 1859; Castle Richmond, 1860; Framley Parsonage, 1860-1861; Orley Farm, 1861-1862; The Small House at Allington, 1862-1864; Rachel Ray, 1863; Can You Forgive Her?, 1864-1865; Miss Mackenzie, 1865; The Belton Estate, 1865-1866; The Claverings, 1866-1867; The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867; Phineas Finn, the Irish Member, 1867-1969; He Knew He Was Right, 1868-1869; The Vicar of Bulhampton, 1869-1870; The Eustace Diamonds, 1871-1873; Phineas Redux, 1873-1874; The Way We Live Now, 18741875; The Prime Minister, 1875-1876; The American Senator, 1876-1877; Is He Popenjoy?, 1877-1878; John Caldigate, 1878-1879; The Duke’s Children, 1879-1880; Dr. Wortle’s School, 1880; Ayala’s Angel, 1881; The Fixed Period, 1881-1882; The Landleaguers, 18821883; Mr. Scarborough’s Family, 1882-1883. Other literary forms · Anthony Trollope’s novels were frequently serialized in various periodicals such as Cornhill Magazine and The Fortnightly Review. They appeared subsequently in a two- or three-volume format. Trollope wrote several books of cultural reportage which were more than mere travelogues: The West Indies (1859), North America (1862), Australia and New Zealand (1873), and South Africa (1878), along with the more impressionistic Travelling Sketches (1865-1866). Three volumes of short stories appeared: Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories (1867), An Editor’s Tales (1870), and Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices and Other Stories (1882). He wrote sketches of clerical men in Clergymen of the Church of England (1865-1866) and detailed biographies of William Makepeace Thackeray, a longtime friend (1879), and Lord Palmerston, the prominent politician (1882). His own Autobiography appeared posthumously in 1883. He tried his hand at classical translation in an edition of The Commentaries of Caesar (1870). Trollope’s letters were edited by Bradford A. Booth (1951), but 205 complete and three fragmentary letters remain unpublished at Princeton University. Achievements · Trollope was acknowledged during his lifetime as a prominent though not necessarily a weighty or enduring writer. He wished to entertain and he did so, at least until the late 1860’s when He Knew He Was Right turned out to be a failure. His posthumous reputation was harmed by his Autobiography, which claimed that he wrote automatically, that his characters were imitations of commonly observed types, that he transcribed reality without much aesthetic control, and that he forced his production by his methodical habits of composition whatever the circumstances. These admissions brought upon him the wrath of the next generation of writers in the 1880’s and 1890’s who were imbued with more aesthetic doctrines of carefully contrived and consistent viewpoints, detailed representation of interior states, a conscious interplay of ideas, and a complex style to suit a more complex method of storytelling. Later, Trollope suffered from those who deemed him a pedestrian realist padding 925

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his work with creaking plots, flat characters, prosaic situations, and dull prose. He was, and still is for much of the public, the novelist of a single work, Barchester Towers, but other writers and critics have not forgiven him for writing more than thirty novels and setting himself a goal to exceed in quantity if not in quality. Despite what seems to be a simple theory of fiction—the writer tries as closely as possible to make the reader’s experience approximate his own, to make his characters and events appear to parallel actual life—Trollope was more sophisticated than he allows. Walter Kendrick finds that before Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, his inner thought is not distinguished from outer events, consciousness is presented chronologically, and characters, at least by implication, appear without authorial intervention. Afterward, character becomes “a zone of space on a canvas” with changes of age, feeling, and appearance even while outside the narrative. Various linear plots create a spatial unity for the reader, and they become a mosaic on which the character exists. Fiction writing becomes a subject in the novel, and the characters are a warning against efforts to define their existence with the narrative. This view sees the characters as a complex interplay between narrative and reader. Nathaniel Hawthorne had a very different view of Trollope, equating him to a giant hewing a great lump out of the earth as the earth’s inhabitants go about the business of putting it under a glass case. This comment leads, unfortunately, in the direction of Henry James’s evaluation after Trollope’s death that he had “a great deliberate apprehension of the real” but that his “great fecundity is gross and importunate.” Trollope is a mixture of several kinds of writer, sometimes realistic in the sociological way of Honoré de Balzac, analyzing class and caste, sometimes a comedian of manners and mores like Henry Fielding, at times a sentimental melodramatist like Charles Dickens, fairly often an ironist deliberately breaking fictional illusions like Thackeray, often introspective if not as equally learned as George Eliot, and periodically a brilliant chronicler of dementia like Joseph Conrad. This mixture is what creates havoc with critical response. Trollope is a master of convincing and accurate dialogue, good at retrospective interior analysis, and gifted with varieties of ironic voices. The building of his reputation, aided by Michael Sadleir’s biography in the 1920’s, was materially assisted by The Trollopian (now Nineteenth Century Studies), a journal devoted to studies of his novels; further work by scholars, such as Ruth apRoberts, Robert M. Polhemus, and James R. Kincaid; and new critical techniques, which have given Trollope his present reputation as a leading English novelist. Biography · Anthony Trollope, born on April 24, 1815, in London, seems to have owed his boisterous energy, booming voice, quarrelsome touchiness, and reticent sensitivity to a childhood of off-handed upbringing. C. P. Snow refers to him as “weighed down by 20 years of neglect and humiliation.” His father was a tactless and impractical barrister who had pretensions about being a landowner in Harrow. There, he established his family in an elegant though quickly declining farm, Julians, later the model for the experimental Orley Farm in the novel of that name. Trollope’s mother, Frances, was the driving force of the family; she was closer to Trollope’s oldest brother, Tom, than to Anthony: Anthony received neither much encouragement nor much regular affection from her. After starting his education at Sunbury School, with a brief stint at Harrow, Anthony was sent to Winchester, his father’s old school, for three years. In 1827, the family was forced to move into a smaller house in Harrow for financial reasons. Meanwhile, his mother made the acquaintance of a zealous utopian reformer,

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Fanny Wright, and went with her and three of her children—Henry, Cecilia, and Emily—to America. Their experiences there border on black comedy. Among other misfortunes, Frances, without past experience or common sense, started a fancy emporium or bazaar in Cincinnati; the building evolved into a grand structure modeled upon an Egyptian temple. The enterprise only succeeded in making the family penniless. Through the efforts of a painter friend, her husband, and son Tom, they managed to piecemeal their way home to England. In 1830 Anthony was removed from Winchester, which deprived him of the chance to enter Oxford Library of Congress University, from which he might have entered into the clergy, the usual course at that time. He returned as a day student to Harrow School, where the intense and entrenched snobbery made the shabby boy the butt of ridicule and persecution, and perhaps began his lifelong pattern of irritability. Also at that time, Trollope’s father sank into petty miserliness and self-pitying moroseness, becoming more obsessively preoccupied with his scholarly work, an ecclesiastical encyclopedia. The success of Frances’s The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), a book adversely critical of American society, temporarily kept the family from bankruptcy, but her husband’s financial mismanagement created more debts. To prevent his arrest for bankruptcy in 1834, the family, without Anthony, went to Bruges, Belgium. Any possible happiness they might have found was destroyed by tuberculosis, which killed Anthony’s father, brother Henry, and sister Emily between 1834 and 1836. Frances Trollope was obviously too occupied with nursing to pay much attention to Anthony, but she did get him a tutoring position in Belgium for a short time. He returned to England where he survived in squalid lodgings in Marylebone, London, at a clerk’s job in the main post office for seven years. At age twenty-six, he got the chance which changed his life, obtaining the post of deputy surveyor, the overseer of mail service, in western Ireland. At Banaghar, he found a comfortable social milieu for the first time, though his manner with carriers and postmasters was brusque and his temper was at times violent. Trollope became a man jovial with companions, truculent with superiors, bullying with inferiors, and tender with close friends and family. In 1842, he married Rose Heseltine, an Anglo-Irish woman. Her bank-manager father, like one of Trollope’s own shady characters, was an embezzler. A trusted partner, Rose handled Trollope’s financial affairs, edited his manuscripts, and accompanied him on his journeys around the world. The portraits of solid, sensible, and compassionate wives and mothers found throughout his work, such as Lady Staveley in Orley Farm, suggest the type of woman Trollope had found in Rose.

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Irish scenery and politics, and the models of his mother and his brother, Tom, led Trollope to his own fiction writing. Thus, not coincidentally, his first two novels have an Irish theme. In these years, Trollope also began rearing a family, two sons. Henceforth, Trollope’s career ran on a dual path, pursuing his duties for the postal service and his writing. Posted to southwest England in 1851 to correct faults in rural delivery, Trollope and his family led a roving existence for three years until he became his own boss as full surveyor in Belfast, at age thirty-nine. The experience of sleepy country towns and a current topic—the Anglican Church’s misuse of endowed charity funds to create sizable incomes for administrators—resulted in the writing of The Warden, finished in Belfast and published in 1855; it was his first major success. When Trollope moved his family to Dublin, he established a daily routine of writing. The successor to The Warden, Barchester Towers, his best-known novel, is a social comedy in the eighteenth century mock-heroic vein of Henry Fielding or Oliver Goldsmith. During a visit to see his mother and brother in Italy, Trollope met a young American woman, Kate Field, and began a long and close friendship, mostly carried out by correspondence. C. P. Snow thinks that Trollope was impressed by the independent and self-assertive woman, who was rather unlike English women. Intrigued by Kate’s advocacy of feminine freedom, in Orley Farm Trollope presents a woman who affronts social and moral conventions by an act of forgery to save the inheritance of her infant son. The motivation is a bit slick, but the fact that the resolute heroine succeeds against a determined male antagonist suggests that Kate’s independence was sympathetically perceived. Trollope went to North America during the early Civil War (1861-1862), a trip which resulted in a travel book. Like his mother’s work, the book took a negative stance toward American institutions. He then published, among others, Rachel Ray, The Last Chronicle of Barset, and The Claverings, which gained Trollope his biggest sales price ever. His works were also being serialized in various periodicals, such as The Fortnightly Review. It became obvious, however, that Trollope’s continued output led him to repeat themes and recycle characters. Immersed as he was in writing and somewhat resentful of his position at the post office, Trollope resigned in October, 1867, after the offer of the editorship of a new journal, St. Paul’s Magazine. He continued to do some work on behalf of the post office, however, since he went to Washington to negotiate a postal treaty in 1868. Trollope ran St. Paul’s Magazine for three years before it went under financially. He was not temperamentally suited to deal with authors. In his own writing, Trollope tended, as Walter Kendrick sees it, to turn toward more sensational materials, which other authors had discarded, but he was also experimenting in the psychological novel. In He Knew He Was Right, Trollope treats the subject of insanity and he presents a fascinating study of psychosis. Ruth apRoberts praises the novel for its economy and the supporting relationships of closely knit characters. Yet, Trollope’s work began to command less popular attention, and he increasingly turned to the political world. He created Phineas Finn, an Anglo-Irish politician, who appears in the novel of that name in 1869 and reappears in Phineas Redux, part of the loose series sometimes referred to as the Palliser novels. Trollope, however, did not give up what is really his chief subject: conflict between the sexes. In 1871, having sold Waltham House and given up his editorship, Trollope and his wife embarked on an eighteen-month visit to New Zealand and a stay with their son,

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Fred, a relatively unprosperous sheep-farmer in Australia. Trollope continued to write during their stay in the primitive sheep-station. A travel commentary and materials for John Caldigate were the result of the voyage, as well as further work on the novel The Eustace Diamonds. The Trollopes then settled in London where he wrote on the current topic of “the condition of England” in The Way We Live Now and The Prime Minister. Trollope presented his skeptical views about the ability of a democratic society to govern itself effectively. The final stage of Trollope’s life was a restless one in his sixties. He took another trip to Australia for eight months in 1875, returning through the United States and meeting with Kate Field. Then, he immediately went to South Africa to inspect the Boer territory with the encroaching British settlement based on gold and diamond exploitation. The Trollopes again returned to the land by moving into a refined farmhouse at Hartung, near Hastings, where Trollope worked on his autobiography. Along with other fiction, he wrote a mystery novel, Mr. Scarborough’s Family, which was serialized before his death but published posthumously in 1883. Farm living aggravated Trollope’s asthma which drained his energy, thus causing him to return to London. He was enjoying club life, dinners, and letters to his son, Henry, who was also a writer, when Trollope suffered a sudden stroke in the fall of 1882 that left him paralyzed, and a month later, on December 6, 1882, he died, at the age of sixty-seven. Analysis · Twentieth century criticism of Anthony Trollope acknowledged his affinity with comic satirists of the eighteenth century, and this affinity is reflected in his best-known work, Barchester Towers. There are two distinct worlds in the novel: that of London vanity, represented by Mr. Slope, the London preacher who comes to Barchester as the protégé of Mrs. Proudie; and that of the smaller, conservative rural world, represented by Archdeacon Grantly of Barchester Cathedral, who opposes Mr. Slope with “high and dry” Anglicanism. At the end, Slope is rejected but so is the siren of the comic interlude, Signora Madeleine Vesey Neroni, daughter of the gentlemanly but parasitic, self-indulgent Dr. Vesey Stanhope, canon of the Cathedral. Barchester Towers · The novel is concerned with the pursuit of Eleanor Bold, a young prosperous widow and daughter of Mr. Harding, by Obadiah Slope, a brash and unctuous social climber. The newly vacant position of warden provokes a struggle between the Grantly forces and the Proudie forces (including Mr. Slope), with Mrs. Proudie at the head. In this strand of the plot, the mock-heroic or mock-epic combat parodies the Miltonic epic tradition, with Grantly and his supporters as the rebel angels struggling against the tyrant Mrs. Proudie, with Slope as a kind of fallen angel. Slope is first supported by Mrs. Proudie in his efforts to prevent the return of the vacant post to Harding, but Slope, in his effort to attain favor with Eleanor Bold, eventually gets the position for Harding. Slope is emasculated by Signora Neroni, who transfixes him with her bright eyes and silvery laughter during rural games and festivities at Ullathorne, the ancient seat of the Thornes and center of a static pastoral world. Seduced by her witchery, he is humiliated by this demoniac Eve and defeated by the godlike rebuff of Eleanor, who slaps his face as he presses his suit upon her. Further, he incurs the wrath of his patroness, Mrs. Proudie, with his attentiveness to Signora Neroni, who, although crippled, rules from a couch where she resides in state like Cleopatra. In this world of sham battles, Grantly celebrates his triumph, including a dean’s position for Mr.

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Harding in a solemn conclave of the clergy. The disputants in these mock-exercises practice their feints around innocent third parties: Bishop Proudie between Slope and Mrs. Proudie; Quiverful, the other candidate for the wardenship, a pathetically comic father of numerous children, between his determined wife and Slope; and Harding between Slope and Grantly. In this formally ordered structure, it is appropriate that Eleanor and Frances Arabin, the naïve Oxford academician, be matched by Miss Thorne, reaffirming the power of the old order, yet still contending with Proudies. The marriage of Eleanor and Arabin asserts the two worlds, old and new, country and city, innocent and corrupt. The novel has a rich galaxy of minor characters. For example, there is Bertie Stanhope, the dilettante sculptor, who is pressed into proposing to Eleanor, but he undermines his own courtship by the candid admission of his motives; Mr. Harding, the unwilling tool of both Slope and Grantly, who takes such delight in the cathedral music that he mechanically saws an imaginary cello during moments of partisan plots and counterplots; and Mrs. Quiverful, who functions like a wailing chorus in a Greek tragedy, piteously reminding the world and Mrs. Proudie of the cruel difficulties of pinched means and a large family. Although Trollope did write important novels on more serious themes, Barchester Towers remains his best known, with its effective comic scenes, the balletlike entrances and exits, the lively irony, and the mock-heroic bathos. The orchestration of speaking styles ranging from the pomposity of the Archdeacon to the vacuity of Bertie Stanhope is another example of the buoyancy and playful wit that Trollope achieved only intermittently thereafter. Orley Farm · Orley Farm was written during Trollope’s middle period. Its central situation revolves around the plight of Lady Mason, the second wife of a rich man, who, twenty years earlier, forged a codicil to her dying husband’s will so that it leaves Orley Farm, her sole economic support, to her and her young child, Lucius. The possession of the farm has become a matter of regret, as the suspicions of the legitimate heir, Joseph Mason, otherwise the inheritor of considerable wealth, eventuate in a trial to break the will. The effort fails only because Lady Mason commits perjury. Using the omniscient viewpoint, Trollope shows both her guilt and her anguish in trying to provide security for her infant son. Lucius, as the novel opens, is a proud, priggish young man given to notions of scientifically reforming agricultural practice; he is well educated, theoretical, and self-righteous. The novel’s unusual perspective poses two main themes: first, how justice can be accomplished, and second, whether justice can actually be achieved. In setting human rights against legal rights, Trollope portrays Lady Mason’s crime in the light of vested interests and the selfish motives of various people. Like C. P. Snow in a novel such as The Masters (1951), Trollope displays in Orley Farm an abstract ideal distorted and transformed by human emotions, calculations, and egotism. Joseph Mason is more concerned with defeating Lady Mason than enjoying the actual property; Sir Peregrine Orme, a highly respected landowner, proposes marriage to Lady Mason in order to extend the protection of his name, but even he is forced to realize the stain upon his honor if the truth should come out, and after Lady Mason refuses his offer, he, having been told the damning truth, keeps his promise to support her in her new trial. Another perspective is provided through Mr. Dockwrath, the country lawyer who discovers the evidence which necessitates the new trial, and hopes it will prove lucrative and will enhance his legal reputation. Lady Mason’s solicitor, Mr. Furnival, carefully avoids definite knowledge of her guilt, though he suspects it, while also

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wishing she were proven guilty so that he might forgive her with pleasure. A less selfish attitude is seen in Edith Orme, Sir Peregrine’s widowed daughter-in-law, who recognizes with compassion the necessity for Lady Mason’s crime and the suffering it has entailed for her. Trollope reveals some of his other typical thematic concerns in the subplots of Orley Farm. He explores various attitudes toward marriage and money in the romances of Peregrine, Jr., Lucius Mason, and Felix Graham, a poor barrister, with a variety of modern young women. The women’s responses to the gentlemen’s advances run from prudent calculation of worldly advantages to prudent reticence in acknowledging love until family wisdom approves it. Also, Trollope’s impulses toward indulgence of children are exemplified in Lord and Lady Staveley, who, having made their way without worldly advantages, are willing to offer the same chance to their children by permitting the engagement of a daughter to Felix Graham, whose success has been impeded by his honesty. Trollope’s conservatism is revealed through the reluctance of these young people to avow their love until they have consent from the Staveleys. With regard to the central theme of moral and legal justice, purely through the oratorical skills of the trial lawyer, Lady Mason is found innocent of perjury, a finding wholly incorrect. The trial frees the guilty, turns the truthful into villains, makes the innocent bear the burden of deceit, challenges the loyalty of lawyers, and implicates the idealists’ posturings. The system has turned Lady Mason’s desperate chicanery into heroism. It is somewhat anticlimactic that Trollope has the pure Edith Orme take Lady Mason to her heart and, from a sense of Christian charity, refuse to render judgment against her. Meanwhile, Lady Mason’s greatest trial has been alienation from Lucius who, unaware of her guilt, has attempted vigorous countermeasures to defend her honor rather than respecting her dignified silence. His discovery of the truth cuts deeply into his priggish pride, destroys his dreams of becoming a gentleman-farmer, and makes him restore the farm to Joseph Mason before departing abroad with his mother. Again, Trollope makes an ambivalent statement through this conclusion. Although forgiveness implies repentance and restitution, Lady Mason has not been, at least in public, repentant, and the restitution is as much a matter of pride as of justice. The effect is a tacit denial of Lady Mason’s innocence and thus the aborting of the whole effort to save her reputation. Can You Forgive Her? · If the power of money, or the distortions of human choice and desire which money brings, is Trollope’s major concern, the warfare of the sexes and the frustrations which that warfare brings are secondary themes in his novels. Can You Forgive Her?, the first of the Palliser series—which includes Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister, each grounded in politics—raises the issue of what sort of love a woman wishes in marriage or indeed whether marriage is a suitable institution. The novel presents the case of Alice Vavasour, a “new woman” who does not know what she wants in life but resents the demands of social propriety. She especially resents the expectation that she accept the marriage proposal of John Grey, whom she really does love, merely because everyone knows him to be a suitable partner. Her cousin, the heiress Lady Glencora McCluskie, has married Plantagenet Palliser, the dull younger son of a ducal family, to support his Liberal political career with her money; but she has fallen in love with the handsome Burgo Fitzgerald, an unconventional, ruinous, yet passionate charmer. Alice reinstitutes her former affection for her cousin George Vavasour, another charmingly irresponsible man who needs her money to

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campaign to keep his seat in Parliament. For Alice, the masculine excitement of politics makes George attractive, although she honestly admits his desire for her money. The novel has low-comedy relief in Alice’s aunt, Arabella Greenow, and her two suitors, a grocer with money and a retired military officer without it. Arabella means to have her own way, giving her lovers only as much liberty as she desires, choosing the officer because of “a sniff of the rocks and the valleys” about him. The comedy underscores the desire of Alice and Glencora, who, if they had a choice, would put themselves at the mercy of weak men. In a melodramatic turn of the main plot, George knocks down his sister, Kate, for refusing to assist him in overturning their grandfather’s will, which had left all the family property to her. This turn of the plot demonstrates, through George’s furious masculine rage, the falsity of the normal economic subjugation of women, which has been reversed in Kate’s case. Arabella Greenow, for her part, is also financially independent and can bargain her way into a satisfactorily romantic liaison balancing “rocks and valleys” against “bread and cheese.” Glencora, aware of being sold into matrimony, almost runs off with Burgo but is dissuaded at the last minute by the vigilance of Alice, who makes clear to Plantagenet the temptation he has given to his wife by his conduct. In an improbable reversal that displays Trollope’s own romanticism, Plantagenet sacrifices his political hopes for a cabinet appointment in order to take her away from the scenes of her misery after she has confessed her infatuation. Indeed, he is even willing to provide Burgo, who becomes a frequenter of gambling tables, with an allowance at her behest when they encounter him abroad. Plantagenet can make a sacrifice for Glencora because he has money and social position; George Vavasour, by contrast, is defeated in politics and exiled for lack of money. John Grey, meanwhile, has interposed himself in Alice’s arrangement with George so that her fortune is not at stake. This conduct, chivalrous in one sense, paternalistic in another, results in George’s challenging him to a duel. The Victorian world is not that of Regency rakes, however, and George’s blustering challenge is physically rebuffed, and he is sent away degraded. Alice finally accepts John Grey in a contrite mood. Although Grey has kindly intentions, Alice’s undefined longings for autonomy anticipate those Henrik Ibsen made memorable through Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House (1879), where Nora sacrifices love in the effort to mould her own destiny. If the future of his heroines seems to lie within conventional marital arrangements or respectable spinsterhood secured by inherited money, Trollope’s questioning title for the novel seems to turn the issue of feminine aspiration somewhat ambivalently to the reader. He has shown women challenging the decorum of prudent emotions and affections based on money, but only the ungenteel Mrs. Greenow succeeds in mastering her destiny through financial manipulation. The Eustace Diamonds · In The Eustace Diamonds, Trollope shows the psychologically damaging effects of survival in an upper-class and aristocratic hierarchy, a society that channels affections and loyalties in terms of property and money, where people struggle for ascendancy, domination, and power, while subscribing to Romantic illusions of unfettered expression and creative self-development. The narrator ironically undercuts the Romantic pretensions as the novel delineates the unrealistic strategies of men and women coping with the moral corruption of social ambition. They seek security, status, prestige, and elegance while evincing pretentiousness,

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snobbery, envy, and parasitism. Trollope takes an anarchic pleasure in those egotistical characters who subvert institutions by undermining the rules of conduct, stretching them to the point of fatuity. In the novel, Lizzie Eustace appropriates the diamonds without specific authority from her late husband, Sir Florian, and uses them as weapons against the respectable family lawyer, Mr. Camperdown, and the man she intends as her second husband, the morally honorable Lord Fawn. The diamonds become a symbol of Lizzie’s inner rage against the world, a rage arising from self-doubt prompted by the excessive demands of her own idealized views of herself. While denying that ownership of the necklace gives her any pleasure, Lizzie simultaneously insists that she will throw the diamonds away while guarding them zealously. When the box in which she ostentatiously houses them is stolen, Lizzie claims that the necklace has been stolen as well. The lie is psychologically predictable. The diamonds exemplify her attitudes toward herself, toward Lord Fawn, whom she despises for his complete disdain of the diamonds, and toward Frank Greystock, her champion before the world, whom she has lured away from his serious attentions to Lucy Morris. The supposed theft is Lizzie’s symbolic punishment for a guilt which will be lessened if the diamonds are believed stolen, but it is also an aggrandizement of her own self-esteem since secretly she knows they are still in her possession. The diamonds, however, are stolen in a second robbery, which ends Lizzie’s control of the situation. Lizzie’s desire for social domination gains dimension through the narrator’s ironic moral judgment and through the close-ups of the omniscient viewpoint that reveal her own rationalizations and fears. Seeking support, Lizzie confesses to Lord George, hoping that he will be cynically brutal, but instead she receives his weak acknowledgment of her supposed cunning. When the police discover the truth, Lizzie prefers the illusion of submitting to the police administrator to the reality of confronting her own self-destructive behavior. Lizzie then tries desperately to reestablish control by triumphing over someone: She reproaches Mrs. Carbuncle, her friend; breaks her engagement with Lord Fawn, ignoring his earlier efforts to end the relationship and pretending to be heartlessly jilted; offers herself to Lord George, who also refuses her; and finally bids for the attentions of Frank Greystock through his need for money, yet Frank is simply provoked into promising he will abandon her utterly if she persists. Yielding to a fantasy logic, Lizzie entertains a marriage proposal from Mr. Emilius, an impudent and sanctimonious popular preacher whom she had once refused. She deliberately accepts him knowing that he is a fraud and admitting that his bogus qualities attract her. Lizzie’s limited knowledge of how the world operates is supported by Emilius’s brazen effrontery, which will offer her a new chance for social domination. The secondary characters are drawn with an equal sense of psychological aberration. For example, there is the cynical honesty of Lord George, which conceals a fearful vacillation that abhors responsibility yet is resolute in pushing his companion, Sir Griffin Tewett, into marriage with Lucinda Roanoke. Alternately submissive and aggressive, he turns vindictive in denouncing Lizzie for the damage she has caused his reputation by creating suspicions of his complicity in her concealment of the necklace. He is also forgiving, on the other hand, of Mrs. Barnacle, his former mistress, for her good intentions in encouraging her niece, Lucinda, to marry for money. Lord George appears cognizant of obligations assumed by others though irresolute in taking them upon himself. Further, he shows the unreality of Lizzie’s dreams; but his own conduct is the model of a romantic neurosis. Other examples of

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psychologically crippled characters are Lucinda, who suffers from strong sexual repression and emotional sterility, and Sir Griffin, cool, vindictive, and arrogant, who is repelled by anyone who would love him. These characters are set up in contrast to the more conventional ones, such as Mrs. Hittaway, who reflect the pathological tendencies that a materialistic society encourages. The baffled efforts of Lizzie, Lord George, Sir Griffin, and Lucinda to deal with destructive self-deception reflect the results of social forces inhibiting real creative growth in understanding. V. S. Pritchett has criticized Trollope for being ”a detailed, rather cynical observor of a satisfied world,” and said that “we recognize that he [Trollope] has drawn life as people say it is when they are not speaking about themselves.” C. P. Snow commented that an exploratory psychological writer such as Trollope “has to live on close terms with the blacker—including the worse—side of his own nature.” The Eustace Diamonds is the record of Trollope’s endurance of a mental nature that was divided. Pritchett has accused Trollope of not capturing or presenting the depth of moral experience. This may reflect a demand for a more complex style, a more intensive depiction of the intricacies of moral struggle, and a more insistent emphasis on values. Snow, however, perceived the simple, direct style as cutting out everything except the truth. Trollope was not temperamental or self-advertising, but as a novelist he covers a wide range of social, institutional, and religious issues and controversies constituting the fabric of Victorian society. He dramatizes the moral and intellectual dilemmas often arising from them and has considerable insight as well as the ability to present the sheer flux of mental life, which anticipates later developments in the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson. Roger E. Wiehe Other major works SHORT FICTION: Tales of All Countries, 1861, 1863; Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories, 1867; An Editor’s Tales, 1870; Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices and Other Stories, 1882. NONFICTION: The West Indies, 1859; North America, 1862; Clergymen of the Church of England, 1865-1866; Travelling Sketches, 1865-1866; The Commentaries of Caesar, 1870 (translation); Australia and New Zealand, 1873; South Africa, 1878; Thackeray, 1879; Lord Palmerston, 1882; Autobiography, 1883; The Letters of Anthony Trollope, 1951 (Bradford A. Booth, editor). Bibliography Felber, Lynette. Gender and Genre in Novels Without End: The British Roman-fleuve. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. Discusses Trollope’s Palliser novels, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. An excellent study. Hall, N. John. Trollope: A Biography. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1991. One of several biographies of Trollope that have appeared since the mid-1980’s, Hall’s book draws heavily on the great Victorian’s own words—not surprising, as Hall also edited the two-volume edition of Trollope’s Letters (1983)—and pays particular attention to Trollope’s travel writing and his final decade. ____________, ed. The Trollope Critics. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1981. Of a number of critical anthologies, this is probably the best for introductory purposes. Includes twenty leading Trollope critics and covers a wide range of topics. An

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excellent bibliography is provided. Halperin, John. Trollope and Politics. New York: Macmillan, 1977. This study focuses on each of the six Palliser novels and includes several more general chapters. Contains a select bibliography and indexes. Mullen, Richard, and James Munson. The Penguin Companion to Trollope. New York: Penguin, 1996. A thorough guide to Trollope’s life and works. With an index and Trollope bibliography. Pollard, Arthur. Anthony Trollope. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Pollard seeks to put all of Trollope’s novels and a variety of miscellaneous works within the context of his life and time. Stresses Trollope’s evocation of his age and his guiding moral purpose. Includes an index. Terry, R. C., ed. Trollope: Interviews and Recollections. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. This invaluable collection is a useful adjunct to the numerous biographies of Trollope. Terry collects forty-six memories of Trollope by a host of individuals who knew him at various points in his life. These selections are arranged in roughly chronological order, starting with his granddaughter Muriel’s reminiscences about Anthony’s mother and ending—again with Muriel—with images of Anthony as an old man. Terry also includes critical evaluations of Trollope’s work. Wright, Andrew. Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1983. This brief study of fifteen of Trollope’s novels sees them as contemporary fictions, transfiguring life in a certain way. Contains a bibliography and an index.

John Wain John Wain

Born: Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England; March 14, 1925 Died: Oxford, England; May 24, 1994 Principal long fiction · Hurry on Down, 1953 (pb. in U.S. as Born in Captivity); Living in the Present, 1955; The Contenders, 1958; A Travelling Woman, 1959; Strike the Father Dead, 1962; The Young Visitors, 1965; The Smaller Sky, 1967; A Winter in the Hills, 1970; The Pardoner’s Tale, 1978; Young Shoulders, 1982 (pb. in U.S. as The Free Zone Starts Here); Where the Rivers Meet, 1988; Comedies, 1990; Hungry Generations, 1994. Other literary forms · A complete man of letters, John Wain published short stories, poetry, drama, many scholarly essays, and a highly respected biography in addition to his novels. Wain’s writing reflects his determination to speak to a wider range of readers than that addressed by many of his modernist predecessors; it reflects his faith in the common reader to recognize and respond to abiding philosophical concerns. These concerns include his sense of the dignity of human beings in the midst of an oftentimes cruel, indifferent, and cynical world. His concern is with a world caught up in time, desire, and disappointment. Most significant among Wain’s writings other than novels are several collections of short stories—including Nuncle and Other Stories (1960), Death of the Hind Legs and Other Stories (1966), The Life Guard (1971), and King Caliban and Other Stories (1978)—and volumes of poetry, such as Mixed Feelings (1951), A Word Carved on a Sill (1956), Weep Before God: Poems (1961), Wildtrack: A Poem (1965), Letters to Five Artists (1969), The Shape of Feng (1972), Feng: A Poem (1975), and Open Country (1987). Wain also published criticism that communicates a sensitive and scholarly appreciation of good books. Readers should pay particular attention to Preliminary Essays (1957), Essays on Literature and Ideas (1963), A House for the Truth: Critical Essays (1972), Professing Poetry (1977), and his autobiography, Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography (1962). Most readers believe that Samuel Johnson (1974) is the best and most lasting of all Wain’s nonfiction. In this monumental biography, many of the commitments reflected in Wain’s other writings come through clearly and forcefully. Achievements · John Wain is noted for his observance of and compassion for human sorrow. Young Shoulders, an examination of the ramifications of a fatal accident on the people left behind, won the 1982 Whitbread Best Novel Award. Biography · Although his world was that of the twentieth century, John Wain was very much an eighteenth century man. He delighted in pointing out that he and eighteenth century writer Samuel Johnson were born in the same district (“The Potteries”) and in much the same social milieu; that he attended the same university as Johnson (Oxford, where he served from 1973 to 1978 as Professor of Poetry); and that he knew, like Johnson, the Grub Street experiences and “the unremitting struggle to write enduring books against the background of an unstable existence.” What chiefly interests the critic in surveying Wain’s formative years are the reasons for his increasingly sober outlook. Wain’s autobiography, Sprightly Running, remains the best 936

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account of his formative years as well as offering engaging statements of many of his opinions. In it, the reader finds some of the profound and lasting effects on Wain’s writing of his childhood, his adolescence, and his years at Oxford. John Barrington Wain was born on March 14, 1925, in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, an industrial city given over to pottery and coal mining. Here, as in other English cities, a move upward in social status is signaled by a move up in geographical terms. Therefore, the Wain family’s move three years later to Penkhull—a manufacturing complex of kilns and factories and, incidentally, the setting for Wain’s third novel, The Contenders—marked a step up into the middle-class district. From infancy, Wain had a genuine fondness for the countryside. He immersed himself in the sights and sounds and colors of rural nature, all of which made an impression on him that was distinctive as well as deep. This impression developed into an “unargued reverence for all created life, almost a pantheism.” On holidays, he and his family traveled to the coast and hills of North Wales, an association which carried over into his adult years, when, at thirty-four, he married a Welsh woman. His feeling for Wales—for the independent life of the people, the landscape and mountains, the sea, the special light of the sun—is recorded in A Winter in the Hills. Here and elsewhere is the idea that nature is the embodiment of order, permanence, and life. Indeed, the tension between the nightmare of repression in society and the dream of liberation in the natural world is an important unifying theme throughout Wain’s work. The experience of living in an industrial town also left an indelible imprint upon Wain’s mind and art. His exposure to the lives of the working class and to the advance of industrialism gave him a profound knowledge of working people and their problems, which he depicts with sympathy and humanity in his fiction. Moreover, Wain’s experiences at Froebel’s Preparatory School and at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School impressed on him the idea that life was competitive and “a perpetual effort to survive.” He found himself surrounded and outnumbered by people who resented him for being different from themselves. His contact with older children, schoolboy bullies, and authoritative schoolmasters taught Wain that the world is a dangerous place. These “lessons of life” were carried into his work. The reader finds in Wain’s fiction a sense of the difficulty of survival in an intrusive and demanding world. The worst of characters is always the bully, and the worst of societies is always totalitarian. Beginning with Hurry on Down, each of Wain’s published novels and stories is concerned in some way with the power and control that some people seek to exercise over others. To cope with these injustices as well as with his own fears and inadequacies during his early years, Wain turned to humor, debate, and music. For Wain, the humorist is above all a moralist, in whose hands the ultimate weapon of laughter might conceivably become the means of liberating humankind from its enslavement to false ideals. Thus, his mimicry of both authorities and students was used as the quickest way to illustrate that something was horrible or boring or absurd. In both Hurry on Down and The Contenders, the heroes use mockery and ridicule to cope with their unjust world. Wain’s interest in jazz also influenced his personal and literary development. He spoke and wrote often of his lifelong enthusiasm for the trumpet playing of Bill Coleman, and he admitted that Percy Brett, the black jazz musician in Strike the Father Dead, was created with Coleman in mind. Accompanying this interest was a growing interest in serious writing and reading. Unlike many youths, Wain did not have to endure the agonizing doubt and indecision of trying to decide what he wanted to do

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in life. By the age of nine, he knew: he wanted to be an author. He began as a critically conscious writer who delighted in “pastiche and parody for their own sake,” though he had problems maintaining a steady plotline. Wain matched his writing with voracious reading. His early interest in the novels of Charles Dickens, Tobias Smollett, Daniel Defoe, and others in the tradition of the English novel influenced his later literary style. Like these predecessors, Wain approached his characters through the conventional narration of the realist, and his concerns were social and moral. The second major period in Wain’s life occurred between 1943, when he entered St. John’s College, Oxford, and 1955, when he resigned his post as lecturer in English at Reading University to become a full-time writer. Two friends made in his Oxford period especially influenced his writing. One was Philip Larkin, whose “rock-like determination” provided an inspiring example for Wain. The other friend was Kingsley Amis, whose work on a first novel inspired Wain to attempt writing a novel in his spare time. Wain wrote his first novel, not particularly because he wished to be a novelist, but to see if he could write one that would get into print. In 1953, Frederick Warburg accepted Hurry on Down, and its unexpected success quickly established Wain as one of Britain’s promising new writers. Wain’s exhilarating experience with his first book was, however, poor preparation for the sobering slump that followed. Ill health, divorce proceedings, and the drudgery of a scholar’s life pushed him into a crisis of depression and discouragement. He tried to climb out of this crisis by leaving the university for a year and retreating to the Swiss Alps. There, he let his imagination loose on his own problems. The result was Living in the Present, a depressing book of manifest despair and disgust. Out of this period in his life, Wain developed a profound awareness of love and loneliness, union and estrangement. The essential loneliness of human beings, and their more or less successful attempts to overcome their loneliness by love, became major themes in his later fiction. Although Wain was never sanguine about the human condition or the times in which he lived, his life was to be more fulfilling than he anticipated at this time. As a result of his year of self-assessment, in 1955 Wain did not return to the junior position he had held at the University of Reading but instead began working full-time at his writing. Little more than a decade later, his reputation had become so well established that he could reenter the academic world as a visiting professor. Eventually Wain was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post he held from 1973 to 1978. Sprightly Running, published in 1962, was evidence that Wain was much more contented than he had been seven years before. He was now happily married to Eirian James, an intelligent, insightful woman who provided him with companionship and sometimes help with his work (she coedited The New Wessex Selection of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry in 1978). They had three sons. Their life together ended only with Eirian’s death in 1987. The following year, Wain married Patricia Dunn. Despite ill health and diminished vision, Wain labored on courageously at what proved to be his final project, three novels that together constitute the Oxford Trilogy. On May 24, 1994, Wain died of a stroke at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Analysis · As a novelist, John Wain has been described as a “painfully honest” writer who always, to an unusual degree, wrote autobiography. His own fortunes and his emotional reactions to these fortunes are, of course, transformed in various ways. His purpose is artistic, not confessional, and he shaped his material accordingly. As Wain himself stated, this intention is both pure and simple: to express his own feelings

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honestly and to tell the truth about the world he knew. At his best—in Hurry on Down, Strike the Father Dead, A Winter in the Hills, and The Pardoner’s Tale—Wain finds a great many ways to convey the message that life is ultimately tragic. Human beings suffer, life is difficult, and the comic mask conceals anguish. Only occasionally is this grim picture relieved by some sort of idealism, some unexpected attitude of unselfishness or tenderness. What is more, in all his writings Wain is a thoughtful, literate man coming to terms with these truths in a sincere and forthright manner. To understand something of Wain’s uniqueness as a novelist, the reader must look back at least to the end of World War II. For about ten years after the war, established writers continued to produce successfully. English novelists such as Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, C. P. Snow, and Anthony Powell had made their reputations before the war and continued to be the major literary voices. Most of them had been educated in “public” schools, then at Oxford or Cambridge, and were from upper or upper-middle-class origins. Their novels were likely to center around fashionable London or some country estate. Often they confined their satire to the intellectual life and the cultural as well as social predicaments of the upper-middle class. A combination of events in postwar England led to the appearance of another group of writers, soon referred to by literary journalists as the “Angry Young Men.” Among these writers was John Wain, who, along with Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Osborne, Angus Wilson, Alan Sillitoe, and others, turned away from technical innovations, complexity, and the sensitive, introspective protagonist to concentrate on concrete problems of current society. Thus, in the tradition of the eighteenth century novel, Wain fulfills most effectively the novelist’s basic task of telling a good story. His novels move along at an even pace; he relies upon a simple, tightly constructed, and straightforward plot; clarity; good and bad characters; and a controlled point of view. The reader need only think of James Joyce and Franz Kafka, and the contrast is clear. What most of Wain’s novels ask from the reader is not some feat of analysis, but a considered fullness of response, a readiness to acknowledge, even in disagreement, his vision of defeat. Wain’s typical protagonist is essentially an “antihero,” a man at the mercy of life. Although sometimes capable of aspiration and thought, he is not strong enough to carve out his destiny in the way he wishes. Frequently, he is something of a dreamer, tossed about by life, and also pushed about, or at least overshadowed, by the threats in his life. Wain’s Charles Lumley (Hurry on Down) and Edgar Banks (Living in the Present) bear the marks of this type. Often there is discernible in his characters a modern malaise, a vague discontent, and a yearning for some person or set of circumstances beyond their reach. Sometimes, this sense of disenchantment with life as it is becomes so great that the individual expresses a desire not to live at all, as Edgar Banks asserts in Living in the Present and as Gus Howkins declares in The Pardoner’s Tale. Wain is also accomplished in his creation of place and atmosphere. In Strike the Father Dead, he fully captures the grayness of a London day, the grayness of lives spent under its pall, the grayness of the people who wander its streets. When Wain describes an afternoon in which Giles Hermitage (The Pardoner’s Tale) forces himself to work in the subdued light at home, when Arthur Geary (The Smaller Sky) walks the platforms at Paddington Station, when Charles Lumley walks in on a literary gathering, or when Roger Furnivall (A Winter in the Hills) makes his way home through the Welsh countryside—at such moments the reader encounters Wain’s mastery of setting and atmosphere.

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The themes communicated through Wain’s novels are, like his method, consistent. It is clear that he sees the eighteenth century as a time of dignity, pride, and self-sufficiency—qualities lacking in the twentieth century. Like Samuel Johnson, Wain defends the value of reason, moderation, common sense, moral courage, and intellectual self-respect. Moreover, his fictional themes of the dignity of the human being, the difficulty of survival in the modern world, and the perils of success have established him principally as a moralist concerned with ethical issues. In later works, the value of tradition, the notion of human understanding, and the ability to love and suffer become the chief moral values. In all his novels, he is primarily concerned with the problem of defining the moral worth of the individual. For all these reasons, Wain is recognized as a penetrating observer of the human scene. One final point should be noted about Wain’s capacities as a novelist. Clearly, the spiritual dimension is missing in the world he describes, yet there is frequently the hint or at least the possibility of renewal, which is the closest Wain comes to any sort of recognized affirmation. Charles Lumley, Joe Shaw, Jeremy Coleman, and Roger Furnivall are all characters who seem to be, by the end of their respective stories, on the verge of rebirth of a sort, on the threshold of reintegration and consequent regeneration. In each case, this renewal depends on the ability of the individual to come to terms with himself and his situation; to confront and accept at a stroke past, present, and future; and to accept and tolerate the contradictions inherent in all three. Wain’s sensitive response to the tragic aspects of life is hardly novel, but his deep compassion for human suffering and his tenderness for the unfortunate are more needed than ever in an age when violence, brutality, and cynicism are all too prevalent. Hurry on Down · In his first novel, Hurry on Down, Wain comically perceives the difficulties of surviving in a demanding, sometimes fearful world. Detached from political causes and progress of his own life, the hero is a drifter, seeking to compromise with or to escape from such “evils” as class lines, boredom, hypocrisy, and the conventional perils of success. Although the novel carries a serious moral interest, Wain’s wit, sharp observations, and inventiveness keep the plot moving. His comedy exaggerates, reforms, and criticizes to advocate the reasonable in social behavior and to promote the value and dignity of the individual. Hurry on Down has the characteristic features of the picaresque novel: a series of short and often comic adventures loosely strung together; an opportunistic and pragmatic hero who seeks to make a living through his wits; and satirical characterization of stock figures rather than individualized portraits. Unlike the eighteenth century picaro, however, who is often hard-hearted, cruel, and selfish, Wain’s central character is a well-intentioned drifter who compromises enough to live comfortably. His standby and salvation is a strong sense of humor that enables him to make light of much distress and disaster. Lumley’s character is revealed against the shifting setting of the picaresque world and in his characteristic response to repeated assaults on his fundamental decency and sympathy for others. He remains substantially the same throughout the novel; his many roles—as window cleaner, delivery driver, chauffeur, and the like—place him firmly in the picaresque tradition. Lumley’s versatility and adaptability permit Wain to show his character under a variety of circumstances and in a multiplicity of situations. Lumley’s character is established almost immediately with the description of his conflict with the landlady in the first chapter. The reader sees him as the adaptable

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antihero who tries to control his own fate, as a jack of all trades, a skilled manipulator, an adept deceiver, an artist of disguises. Wain stresses Lumley’s ingenuity rather than his mere struggle for survival; at the same time, he develops Lumley’s individual personality, emphasizing the man and his adventures. The role that Lumley plays in the very first scene is one in which he will be cast throughout the story—that of a put-upon young man engaged in an attempt to cope with and outwit the workaday world. The satire is developed through the characterization. Those who commit themselves to class, who judge others and define themselves by the class structure, are satirized throughout the novel. Surrounding the hero is a host of lightly sketched, “flat,” stock figures, all of whom play their predictable roles. These characters include the proletarian girl, the American, the landlady, the entrepreneur, the middle-class couple, and the artist. In this first novel, Wain’s resources in characterization are limited primarily to caricature. The comedy functions to instruct and entertain. Beneath the horseplay and high spirits, Wain rhetorically manipulates the reader’s moral judgment so that he sympathizes with the hero. In the tradition of Tobias Smollett and Charles Dickens, Wain gives life to the grotesque by emphasizing details of his eccentric characters and by indicating his attitude toward them through the selection of specific bodily and facial characteristics. Wain has also adopted another convention of eighteenth century fiction: the intrusive author. The active role of this authorial impresario accounts for the distance between the reader and the events of the novel; his exaggerations, his jokes, and his philosophizing prevent the reader from taking Lumley’s fate too seriously. In later novels, Wain’s authorial stance changes as his vision deepens. Any discussion of comic technique in Hurry on Down leads inevitably to the novel’s resolution. Ordinarily, readers do not like to encounter “perfect” endings to novels; nevertheless, they are not put off by the unrealistic ending to this novel because they know from the beginning that they are reading a comic novel which depends upon unrealistic exaggeration of various kinds. Elgin W. Mellown was correct when he called the novel “a pastiche: Walter Mitty’s desire expressed through the actions of the Three Stooges—wish fulfillment carried out through outrageous actions and uncharacteristic behavior.” The reader feels secure in the rightness of the ending as a conclusion to all the comic wrongness that has gone on before. Strike the Father Dead · In Strike the Father Dead, Wain further extended himself with a work more penetrating than anything he had written before. Not only is it, as Walter Allen said, a “deeply pondered novel,” but it is also a culmination of the promises inherent in Wain’s earlier works. Plot, theme, character, and setting are integrated to tell the story of a son who breaks parental ties, thereby freeing himself to make his own way in life as a jazz pianist. Pointing to the foibles of his fellowman and probing the motives of an indignant parent, Wain’s wit and sarcastic humor lighten this uncompromising study of the nonconformist’s right to assert his nonconformity. Two later Wain novels—A Winter in the Hills and The Pardoner’s Tale—continue and elaborate upon many of the central themes of his fiction, but they surpass the earlier novels in richness and complexity. Both novels exhibit, far more than do his earlier writings, an interest in the tragic implications of romantic love; a greater complexity in character development allows Wain to portray convincingly men whose loneliness borders on self-destruction. Each novel is not simply another story of isolation or spiritual desolation, although it is that. Each hero is cast into a wasteland, and the

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novel in a sense is the story of his attempts to find the river of life again, or possibly for the first time. One of the themes that develops from this period in Wain’s career is that personal relationships are the most important and yet most elusive forces in society. The plot of Strike the Father Dead is arranged in an elaborate, seven-part timescheme. Parts 1 and 6 occur sometime late in 1957 or early in 1958; part 2 takes place in the immediate prewar years; and the other divisions follow chronologically up to the last, which is set in 1958. The scene shifts back and forth between a provincial university town and the darker, black-market-and-jazz side of London, with a side trip to Paris. Wain narrates the story from the points of view of four characters. The central figure, Jeremy Coleman, revolts against his father and the academic establishment in search of self-expression as a jazz pianist. Alfred Coleman, Jeremy’s father and a professor of classics, is an atheist devoted to duty and hard work. Eleanor, Alfred’s sister and foster mother to Jeremy, is devoted to Jeremy and finds comfort in innocent religiosity. Percy Brett, a black American jazz musician, offers Jeremy his first real parental leadership. Like Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), Jeremy escapes from an oppressive existence; he has a passion for music, and once he has the opportunity to develop, his shrinking personality changes. Strike the Father Dead marks a considerable advance over Hurry on Down in the thorough rendering of each character and each scene. By employing a succession of first-person narrators, Wain focuses attention more evenly on each of the figures. The result is that the reader comes away knowing Jeremy even better, because what is learned about him comes not only from his own narration but from other sources as well. Inasmuch as there are three central characters, Strike the Father Dead represents a larger range for Wain. Each interior monologue is a revelation; the language is personal, distinctive, and descriptive of character. In the manner of a Bildungsroman, Strike the Father Dead is also a novel which recounts the youth and young manhood of a sensitive protagonist who is attempting to learn the nature of the world, discover its meaning and pattern, and acquire a philosophy of life. Setting plays a vital role in this odyssey. The provincial and London backgrounds and the accurate rendering of the language make the novel come alive. Strike the Father Dead moves between two contemporary worlds—a world of rigidity and repression, represented by Alfred, and a world of creativity, international and free, represented by London and Paris. The first world oppresses Jeremy; the second attracts and draws him. He dreams about it and invents fictions about it. Central to this new world is Jeremy’s love of jazz. For him, the experience of jazz means beauty, love, life, growth, freedom, ecstasy—the very qualities he finds missing in the routine, disciplined life of Alfred. Although Strike the Father Dead tells the story of a British young man who becomes successful, the success is to a certain extent bittersweet. In his triumphs over his home circumstances, Jeremy loses something as well. There are various names given to it: innocence; boyhood; nature; the secure, predictable life at home. The world beyond the academic life waits for Jeremy, and he, unknowingly, does his best to bring it onstage. With such a life comes a developing sense of injustice, deprivation, and suffering. These concerns become focal points in Wain’s subsequent novels, as he turns toward the impulse to define character and dilemma much more objectively and with greater moral responsibility.

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A Winter in the Hills · With its setting in Wales, A Winter in the Hills marked a departure from Wain’s first seven novels, all of which were centered in England. The story expresses, perhaps more comprehensively than any other, Wain’s feelings for the provincial world, its cohesion and deep loyalties, and its resistance to innovation from outside. Here the reader finds Wain’s sympathy for the underdog, his respect for decency and the dignity of humanity, and his affirmation of life; here, too, is expressed Wain’s deep interest in the causes and effects of loneliness and alienation. The reader’s first inclination is to approach the novel as primarily a novel of character, the major interest and emphasis of which is the constantly developing character of Roger Furnivall himself. Using third-person narration, Wain keeps the focus on his main character as he progresses straight through several months that constitute a time of crisis in his life. Through most of the novel, Roger struggles doggedly against a combination of adverse circumstances, always in search of a purpose. Outwardly, he forces himself on Gareth, for example, as a way of improving his idiomatic Welsh. Inwardly, he “needed involvement, needed a human reason for being in the district.” The guilt he carries because of his brother’s suffering and death helps to propel him into a more active engagement with contemporary life. His conflict with Dic Sharp draws him out of his own private grief because he is helping not only Gareth, but also an entire community of people. The reader learns about Roger in another way, too: Wain uses setting to reveal and reflect the protagonist’s emotions and mental states. Roger’s walk in the rain down the country roads, as he attempts to resolve his bitterness and disappointment at Beverley’s rejection of him, is vividly depicted. It carries conviction because Roger’s anxiety has been built up gradually and artistically. The pastoral world is a perpetually shifting landscape, and Wain depicts its shifts and contrasts with an acute eye for telling detail. Especially striking are the sketches of evening coming on in the Welsh hills, with their rocks and timber and vast expanses of green. Such descriptions help to convey Roger’s yearning for happiness in a world which seems bent on denying it to him. One major theme of the book is the invasion of the peaceful, conservative world of Wales by outsiders who have no roots in the region, and therefore no real concern for its inhabitants. These invaders are characterized by a sophisticated corruption that contrasts sharply with the unspoiled simplicity and honesty of the best of the natives. A related theme is the decline of the town: its economic insecurity, its struggle to resist the progressive and materialistic “cruelty, greed, tyranny, the power of the rich to drive the poor to the wall.” Through Roger’s point of view, Wain expresses his opposition to the pressures—economic, political, cultural—that seek to destroy the Welsh and, by implication, all minority enclaves. Thus, A Winter in the Hills is more than a novel about the growth of one human being from loneliness and alienation to mature and selfless love; it is also a powerful study of the quality of life in the contemporary world, threatened by the encroachments of bureaucracy, greed, and materialism. The Pardoner’s Tale · The somewhat optimistic resolution of A Winter in the Hills stands in stark contrast to that of The Pardoner’s Tale, Wain’s most somber novel. In no other work by Wain are the characters so lonely, so frustrated, or so obsessed with thoughts of mutability, lost opportunities, and death. The novel is really two stories: a first-person tale about Gus Howkins, an aging Londoner contemplating divorce, and a third-person narrative (the framing narrative) about Giles Hermitage, an established

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novelist and bachelor living in an unnamed cathedral town, who gets involved with the Chichester-Redferns, a woman and daughter, while he is working out the story of Howkins. It is the interplay between these two stories which constitutes the plot of The Pardoner’s Tale. Giles Hermitage is obviously the figure with whom Wain is the most intimately involved. He is a highly idiosyncratic figure with very recognizable weaknesses; he is easily discouraged (there is an early thought of suicide), and he resorts to excessive drinking. The root cause of his death wish and of his drinking is loneliness. Like Wain’s earlier heroes, he is very much a modern man: vague in his religious and humanitarian aspirations, rootless and alienated from the social life of the community in which he lives, and initially weak and confused in his relationships with women. Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontent, and a sense of inner emptiness, he seeks peace of mind under conditions that increasingly militate against it. Add to his problems the ever-growing urge toward self-destruction, and the reader begins to recognize in this novel a truly contemporary pulsebeat. Hermitage is a stranger in a world that does not make sense. Unlike Wain’s earlier heroes, however, Hermitage tries to make sense of the world through the medium of his writing by stepping back into what he calls “the protecting circle of art.” His approach to writing is autobiographical, personal, even subjective. The hero of his novel is a mask for himself. The author is creating a character who is in his own predicament, and the agonies he endures enable him to express his deepest feelings about life. In Hermitage, Wain presents a character who tries to create, as artists do, a new existence out of the chaos of his life. The remaining major characters in The Pardoner’s Tale bear family resemblances to those in other of Wain’s novels. If the part of the lonely, alienated hero so effectively carried in A Winter in the Hills by Roger Furnivall is here assigned to Giles Hermitage, then the role of the manipulator is assigned in this novel to Mrs. Chichester-Redfern. Although a good deal less ruthless than Dic Sharp, she nevertheless seeks to exploit the hero. The process by which Mrs. Chichester-Redfern is gradually revealed through the eyes of Hermitage is subtle and delicate. At first merely a stranger, she comes to seem in time a calculating and educated woman, the innocent victim of a man who deserted her, a seventy-year-old woman grasping for answers to some vital questions about her own life. She summons Hermitage under the pretense of wanting to gain insight into her life. From these conversations, the reader learns that she, like Hermitage, is confronted and dislocated by external reality in the form of a personal loss. Also like the hero, she desires to come to some understanding of her unhappy life through the medium of art. Her true motive is revenge, however, and she wants Hermitage to write a novel with her husband in it as a character who suffers pain. Then, she says, “there will be that much justice done in the world.” In addition to the alienated, lonely hero and the manipulator, most of Wain’s fiction portrays a comforter. In his latest novel, the comforter is embodied in Diana Chichester-Redfern, but the happiness Diana offers is only temporary. In this novel, love is reduced to a meaningless mechanical act: Diana, also, is living in a wasteland. The basic tension of this novel is a simple and classic one—the life-force confronting the death-force. As surely as Mrs. Chichester-Redfern is the death-force in the novel, Diana is the active and life-giving presence. She is depicted as an abrasive, liberated, sensual, innately selfish modern young woman who stands in positive contrast to the deathlike grayness of her mother. She is earthy and fulfilled, accepting and content

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with her music (playing the guitar satisfies her need for proficiency), her faith (which takes care of “all the moral issues”) and her sexuality (which she enjoys because she has no choice). Diana goes from one affair to another, not in search of love (she claims she “can’t love anybody”) but out of a need for repetition. Diana defines love and meaning as the fulfillment of a man or woman’s emotional requirements. To her, love does not mean self-sacrifice; rather, love is synonymous with need. The world of The Pardoner’s Tale is thus the archetypal world of all Wain’s fiction: random, fragmented, lonely, contradictory. It is a world in which wasted lives, debased sexual encounters, and destroyed moral intelligences yield a tragic vision of futility and sterility, isolation from the community, estrangement from those who used to be closest to one, and loneliness in the midst of the universe itself. Young Shoulders · Amid all this, Wain’s unflinching honesty and his capacity for compassion make his definition of the human condition bearable. Both characteristics are evident in Young Shoulders. Again, Wain focuses on senseless waste. A plane of English schoolchildren crashes in Lisbon, Portugal, killing everyone aboard. Seventeen-year-old Paul Waterford, whose twelve-year-old sister Clare was one of the victims, describes his journey to Lisbon with his parents, their encounters with other grief-stricken relatives, the memorial service they attend, and their return to England. Because he is still untainted by convention, Paul feels free to see the other characters as they are, often even to find them funny; however, he has to admit that he can be wrong about people. The seemingly calm Mrs. Richardson, a teacher’s widow, collapses during the memorial service; the restrained Janet Finlayson howls in the hotel lobby that God is punishing them all; Mr. Smithson, whom Paul assessed as a man on his way up, goes crazy on the tarmac; and everyone depends upon Paul’s parents: the mother Paul saw only as a drunk and the father Paul dismissed as hopelessly withdrawn. Because Wain has the eighteenth century writer’s hunger for universals, we may assume that the real subject of Young Shoulders is not how individuals behave in the face of tragedy but what the young protagonist and, by extension, the reader has learned by the end of the novel. Paul comes to see that human beings avoid acknowledging their emotions in so many ways that an outsider’s judgment is likely to be inaccurate. He also recognizes the extent to which he deludes himself, whether by imagining a utopian society he will govern or by addressing “reports” to Clare, thus denying that she is dead. By losing his innocence, Paul gains in compassion. The Oxford Trilogy · With its single plotline, its compressed time scheme, and its limited cast, Young Shoulders is much like a neoclassical play. By contrast, the three novels composing the Oxford Trilogy have an epic quality, as indeed they must if they are to “describe and dramatize the Oxford that has been sinking out of sight, and fading from memory, for over thirty years,” as Wain states in his preface to the final volume. The series does indeed cover three decades. Where the Rivers Meet introduces the protagonist Peter Leonard and takes him through his undergraduate years at Oxford; Comedies begins in 1933, with Leonard’s appointment as a fellow, and ends after World War II; and Hungry Generations covers Leonard’s life from 1947 to 1956. There is a multitude of characters, ranging from Oxford intellectuals to the patrons of the pub that Leonard’s parents run, each with definite ideas about local politics, world news, and the progress of society. Wain’s honesty is reflected in the way he permits all the characters to speak their minds; his compassion is revealed in his

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attempt to understand even the least appealing of them. These qualities, along with his creative genius and his consummate artistry, should ensure for John Wain a permanent place in twentieth century literary history. Dale Salwak, updated by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Other major works SHORT FICTION: Nuncle and Other Stories, 1960; Death of the Hind Legs and Other Stories, 1966; The Life Guard, 1971; King Caliban and Other Stories, 1978. PLAYS: Harry in the Night: An Optimistic Comedy, pr. 1975; Johnson Is Leaving: A Monodrama, pb. 1994. TELEPLAY: Young Shoulders, 1984 (with Robert Smith). RADIO PLAYS: You Wouldn’t Remember, 1978; A Winter in the Hills, 1981; Frank, 1982. POETRY: Mixed Feelings, 1951; A Word Carved on a Sill, 1956; A Song About Major Eatherly, 1961; Weep Before God: Poems, 1961; Wildtrack: A Poem, 1965; Letters to Five Artists, 1969; The Shape of Feng, 1972; Feng: A Poem, 1975; Poems for the Zodiac, 1980; Thinking About Mr. Person, 1980; Poems, 1949-1979, 1981; Twofold, 1981; Open Country, 1987. NONFICTION: Preliminary Essays, 1957; Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Idiom of Desperation, 1959; Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography, 1962; Essays on Literature and Ideas, 1963; The Living World of Shakespeare: A Playgoer’s Guide, 1964; Arnold Bennett, 1967; A House for the Truth: Critical Essays, 1972; Samuel Johnson, 1974; Professing Poetry, 1977; Samuel Johnson 1709-1784, 1984 (with Kai Kin Yung); Dear Shadows: Portraits from Memory, 1986. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Lizzie’s Floating Shop, 1981. EDITED TEXTS: Contemporary Reviews of Romantic Poetry, 1953; Interpretations: Essays on Twelve English Poems, 1955; International Literary Annual, 1959, 1960; Fanny Burney’s Diary, 1960; Anthology of Modern Poetry, 1963; Selected Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy, 1966; Selected Shorter Stories of Thomas Hardy, 1966; Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts,” 1966; Shakespeare: Macbeth, a Casebook, 1968; Shakespeare: Othello, a Casebook, 1971; Johnson as Critic, 1973; The New Wessex Selection of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry, 1978 (with Eirian James). Bibliography Gerard, David. John Wain: A Bibliography. London: Mansell, 1987. Contains a critical introduction to Wain’s writings and a comprehensive list of his books and contributions to books and periodicals. Also includes other critical and biographical references and reviews of works by Wain. Gindin, James. “The Moral Center of John Wain’s Fiction.” In Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Gindin contends that Wain creates characters who always exhibit dignity and moral commitment. Considers Wain’s first four novels and his stories in the volume Nuncle and Other Stories. In an introductory essay, Gindin evaluates Wain in the context of other authors from the 1950’s. Hague, Angela. “Picaresque Structure and the Angry Young Novel.” Twentieth Century Literature 32 (Summer, 1986): 209-220. Hague views Wain’s Hurry On Down as erroneously grouped with the “Angry Young Men” novels of the 1950’s. She compares Wain’s heroes with those in the novels of Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch; all are essentially loners who, like the picaresques of the eighteenth century, respond to tensions between traditional values and societal change.

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Heptonstall, Geoffrey. “Remembering John Wain.” Contemporary Review 266 (March, 1995): 144-147. An appreciation of the author and a thoughtful assessment of his place in the literary tradition. Though Wain has fallen out of favor with critics, it is argued that his works will continue to appeal to the public and that his worth will be recognized by future generations. An excellent overview. Rabinovitz, Rubin. “The Novelists of the 1950’s: A General Survey.” In The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950-1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Rabinovitz places Wain in the context of novelists who embraced traditional values rather than those who experimented with unconventional ideas or forms, aligning Wain’s novels with those of Arnold Bennett and eighteenth century picaresque novelists. Salwak, Dale. Interviews with Britain’s Angry Young Men. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1984. This useful resource characterizes Wain as an “eighteenth century man.” Engages Wain in a discussion of the role of criticism in the author’s life, his goals as a writer, his response to the phenomenon of the Angry Young Men, and the sources and themes in several of his novels. ____________. John Wain. Boston: Twayne, 1981. After a chapter introducing Wain’s life and art, the text contains four chapters on his novels, focusing on his early works, Hurry on Down and Strike the Father Dead, and two of his late works, A Winter in the Hills and The Pardoner’s Tale. “Other Fiction, Other Prose” covers Wain’s stories, poems, and biographical works. A selected bibliography completes the text. Taylor, D. J. After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. An attempt to define the nature of postwar writing. Wain is grouped with William Cooper and Kingsley Amis as being antimodernist, or opposed to the psychological emphasis and stylistic complexity of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and antiromantic.

Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Waugh

Born: London, England; October 28, 1903 Died: Combe Florey, England; April 10, 1966 Principal long fiction · Decline and Fall, 1928; Vile Bodies, 1930; Black Mischief, 1932; A Handful of Dust, 1934; Scoop, 1938; Put Out More Flags, 1942; Brideshead Revisited, 1945, 1959; Scott-King’s Modern Europe, 1947; The Loved One, 1948; Helena, 1950; Men at Arms, 1952; Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future, 1953; Officers and Gentlemen, 1955; The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 1957; The End of the Battle, 1961 (also known as Unconditional Surrender); Basil Seal Rides Again: Or, The Rake’s Regress, 1963; Sword of Honour, 1965 (includes Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle). Other literary forms · Evelyn Waugh wrote seven travel books, three biographies, an autobiography, and numerous articles and reviews. The only completed section of Waugh’s planned three-volume autobiography, A Little Learning (1964), discusses his life at Oxford and his employment as a schoolmaster in Wales—subjects fictionalized in Brideshead Revisited and Decline and Fall. The autobiographical background for virtually all of Waugh’s novels is evident in his travel books, his diaries, and his letters. His articles and reviews for English and American periodicals include a wide range of topics—politics, religion, and art—and contribute to his reputation as a literary snob, an attitude Waugh himself affected, especially in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Achievements · Waugh was esteemed primarily as a satirist, especially for his satires on the absurdly chaotic world of the 1920’s and 1930’s. His ability to make darkly humorous the activities of the British upper class, his comic distance, and his vivid, at times brutal, satire made his early novels very popular among British and American literary circles. His shift to a more sentimental theme in Brideshead Revisited gave Waugh his first real taste of broad popular approval—especially in the United States—to which he reacted with sometimes real, sometime exaggerated, snobbishness. Waugh’s conservative bias after the war, his preoccupation with religious themes, and his expressed distaste for the “age of the common man” suggested to a number of critics that he had lost his satiric touch. Although his postwar novels lack the anarchic spirit of his earliest works, he is still regarded, even by those who reject his political attitudes, as a first-rate craftsman of the comic novel. Biography · Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh was born in Hampstead, a suburb of London, in 1903 to Arthur and Catherine Waugh. He attended Lancing College from 1917 to 1924 and Hertford College, Oxford, from 1921 to 1924, from which he left without taking a degree. Although Waugh turned to writing novels only after aborted careers as a draftsman, a schoolmaster, and a journalist, his family background was literary; his father directed Chapman and Hall publishers until 1929, and his older brother Alec published his first novel, The Loom of Youth, in 1917. Waugh’s years at Oxford and his restless search for employment during the 1920’s brought him experiences which were later fictionalized in several of his novels. After 948

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leaving Oxford in 1924, he enrolled in the Heatherley School of Fine Art, where he aspired to be a draftsman; later in that year, he was apprenticed to a printer for a brief period. His employment as a schoolmaster in Wales in 1925 and in Buckinghamshire in 1926 formed the background for his first novel, Decline and Fall. His struggle to establish himself as a writer and his participation in the endless parties of London’s aristocratic youth during the last years of the 1920’s are fictionalized in his second novel, Vile Bodies. In 1927, Waugh was engaged to Evelyn Gardner and, despite the objections of her family, married her in 1928 when his financial prospects seemed more secure after the publication of his life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his first novel. Library of Congress In 1929, while Waugh was working in seclusion on Vile Bodies, his wife announced that she was having an affair; the couple, temperamentally unsuited to each other, were divorced that year. The next seven years of Waugh’s life were a period of activity and travel. Two trips to Africa in 1930 and 1931 resulted in a travel book and provided Waugh with the background of Black Mischief. A journey through Brazil and British Guiana in 1932 resulted in another travel book and his fourth novel, A Handful of Dust. In addition, Waugh traveled to the Arctic and once more to Africa; he was a correspondent for the London Times, reviewed books for The Spectator, and wrote a biography of Edmund Campion, a British-Catholic martyr. During this unsettled period, Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930, an event which provided much of the stability of his later life. In 1933, he met Laura Herbert, a Catholic, whom he married in 1937, after securing an annulment of his previous marriage from the Catholic Church. Waugh’s experiences during World War II are fictionalized in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy. After several months unsuccessfully seeking military employment, Waugh joined the Royal Marines in 1939 and was part of an ineffectual assault on Dakar in 1940. Later in 1940, Waugh joined a commando unit with which he served in the Middle East, taking part in the battle of Crete in 1942. In 1943, after an injury in parachute training, Waugh was forced to resign from the commandos, and, in 1944, he was granted military leave to write Brideshead Revisited. In the last year of the war, he served as a liaison officer with the British Military Mission in Yugoslavia, where he struggled against the persecution of Roman Catholics by the partisan government. Waugh’s life from 1945 to 1954 was relatively stable. The success of Brideshead Revisited, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in America, brought him moderate

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financial security and several offers from filmmakers. Although none of these film offers materialized, they resulted in the trip to Hollywood in 1947 that inspired The Loved One, and in several commissioned articles for Life. During this nine-year period, Waugh published four short novels and the first volume of the World War II trilogy. In the first three months of 1954, on a voyage to Ceylon, Waugh suffered the mental breakdown that he later fictionalized in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh led a relatively reclusive life during the last ten years, avoiding the public contact that had made him notorious earlier. In this period, he finished the war trilogy and published a biography of Ronald Knox, another travel book on Africa, the first volume of his autobiography, a revision of Brideshead Revisited, and the recension of the war trilogy into a single volume; he also began several other projects which were never completed. Waugh died on Easter Day in 1966. Analysis · Evelyn Waugh’s novels are distinguished by the narrative detachment with which they survey the madness and chaos of the modern age. His characters participate in a hopeless, often brutal, struggle for stability which hardens them to the absurdities of civilization and leads them, ultimately, to an unheroic retreat from the battle of life. Ironic detachment, thus, is Waugh’s principal comic technique and his principal theme as well. Because each of Waugh’s novels reflects actual experiences, the nature of this detachment changes through the course of his career. In his early works, which satirize the havoc and instability of the 1920’s and 1930’s, he achieves comic detachment by splicing together the savage and the settled, the careless and the care-ridden, the comic and the tragic. Victims and victimizers alike are caught in the whirlwind of madness. Waugh’s satiric method changes in his postwar novels: Comically ineffectual characters still wage battle against the absurdities of life, but one is more aware of their struggle to maintain or recapture spiritual and moral values amid the absurdity. Waugh maintains comic distance in these novels by recommending a quiet sort of spiritual heroism as the only source of people’s happiness in the uncertain postwar world. Decline and Fall · Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, traces the misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather, a temperate, unassuming student of theology at Scone College, Oxford. He is “sent down” for indecent behavior when drunken members of the university’s most riotous (and, ironically, most aristocratic) club assault him, forcing him to run the length of the quadrangle without his trousers. Like Voltaire’s Candide, Pennyfeather is an innocent victim temperamentally ill suited for the world into which he is thrust. Indeed, Decline and Fall owes much to Candide (1759): its Menippean satire, its cyclical “resurrection” of secondary characters, and the hero’s ultimate resignation from life. The action itself provides a thin framework for Waugh’s satire on modern life. Pennyfeather finds employment, as Waugh himself did, as a schoolmaster in Wales— the only occupation, Pennyfeather is told, for a young man dismissed from the university for indecent behavior. At Llanabba Castle, he meets three characters with whose stories his own is interlaced: Grimes, a pederast and bigamist who pulls himself out of the continual “soup” he gets into by feigning suicide; Prendergast, a doubting cleric who becomes a “modern churchman” and is eventually murdered by a religious fanatic; and Philbrick, the school butler, a professed imposter, jewel thief, and arsonist who manages to secure a continual life of luxury by his preposterous stories about his

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criminal life. At Llanabba, Pennyfeather also meets Margot Beste-Chetwynde, a rich socialite to whom he becomes engaged; he is arrested the afternoon of their wedding for unknowingly transporting girls to France for her international prostitution ring. His innocent association with Margot thus leads to his conviction for another act of “indecent behavior,” this time leading to a prison sentence in Blackstone Gaol—a “modern” penal institution. What strikes one about the novel is not the injustices served Pennyfeather, but the very madness of the world with which his innocence contrasts. Characters with criminal designs—Margot, Philbrick, and Grimes—are unaffected by changes in fortune; those in charge of social institutions—Dr. Fagan of Llanabba Castle and Sir Lucas-Dockery of the experimental prison—are eccentrically out of touch with reality. Their absurdity, when contrasted with Pennyfeather’s naïve struggle, defines Waugh’s theme: The only sanity is to become cautiously indifferent to the chaos of modernism. At the end of the novel, when Pennyfeather returns to Oxford under a new identity and continues his study of the Early Church, he assumes the role of a spectator, not a participant, in the madness of life. Although Decline and Fall ’s narrative structure is more derivative and its characters less fully rounded than those of Waugh’s later novels, it displays techniques typical of his fiction at its best. The callous descriptions of the tragic—little Lord Tangent’s death from Grimes’s racing pistol or Prendergast’s decapitation at Blackstone Gaol—and their fragmented interlacement into the plot are hallmarks of Waugh’s comic detachment. Tangent’s slow death from gangrene is presented through a series of casual offstage reports; the report of Prendergast’s murder is incongruously worked into verses of a hymn sung in the prison chapel, “O God, our Help in Ages Past.” The tragic and the savage are always sifted through an ironic filter in Waugh’s novels, creating a brutal sort of pathos. A Handful of Dust · Waugh’s fourth novel, A Handful of Dust, was his first to present a dynamically sympathetic protagonist. Pennyfeather, from Decline and Fall, and Adam Symes, from Vile Bodies, attract one’s interest largely because they provide a detached perspective from which one can observe the chaos of modern civilization. Basil Seal in Black Mischief, although a participating rogue, is amiable largely because of his comic disregard for the mischief he makes. Tony Last of A Handful of Dust, however, is a fully sympathetic character as well as a pathetic victim of the modern wasteland to which the title alludes. Unlike Paul Pennyfeather, Tony is not simply an observer of social chaos: His internal turmoil is set against the absurdity of external events, and in that respect, his quest for lost values anticipates that of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and of Guy Crouchback in Sword of Honour. Waugh’s theme is the decadence of tradition, emblematized, as it is in many of Waugh’s novels, by the crumbling estates of the aristocracy. Tony’s futile effort to maintain his Victorian Gothic estate, Hetton Abbey, thus symbolizes his struggle throughout the plot. He is wedded to the outmoded tradition of Victorian country gentlemen, while his wife, Brenda, embraces the social life of London. She eventually cuckolds Tony by having an affair with the parasitic John Beaver, whose mother, an interior decorator, sees in her son’s affair an opportunity to “modernize” Hetton with chromium plating and sheepskin carpeting. The pathos one feels for Tony is ultimately controlled by the absurd contexts into which Waugh sets the pathetic scenes. When his son, John Andrew, dies in a riding accident, Tony is left emotionally desolate, yet the cause of the accident is ironic; John

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Andrew’s horse is startled by a backfiring motorcycle, a modern “horse.” Later, one is made brutally aware of the irony of Tony’s grief when one learns of Brenda’s initial reaction to the news of her son’s death: She assumes it was John Beaver, her lover, not John Andrew, her son, who died. In the same way, Tony’s later divorce from Brenda empties him of values he traditionally respected. He consents to the legal convention that he should give evidence of his infidelity, even if his wife has been the unfaithful partner. His evidence incongruously turns into an uncomfortable weekend with a prostitute and her daughter at Brighton, and the absurdity of this forced and inconsummate infidelity further defines Tony’s loneliness. Ironically, it provides him with a means to deny an exorbitant divorce settlement that would force him to sell Hetton Abbey. In the end, Tony searches for his Victorian Gothic city in the jungles of South America and suffers a delirium in which his civilized life at Hetton Abbey is distorted; these scenes are made comically pathetic by interlaced scenes of Brenda in London trying to regain the civilized life she lost in her estrangement from Tony. Ultimately, she does not find in London the city she sought, nor does Tony in South America. Tony does find, instead, an aberration of his vision; he is held captive by an illiterate who forces him to read aloud from Charles Dickens’s novels in perpetuity. Perhaps Waugh’s emotional reaction to his own divorce from Evelyn Gardner prior to the publication of the novel accounts for the increase of pathos in A Handful of Dust. Perhaps Waugh realized that thinness of characterization in his earlier novels could lead only to stylistic repetition without stylistic development. Whatever the reason, this novel depicts characters struggling for moral equilibrium in a way that no previous Waugh novel had done. Brideshead Revisited · Brideshead Revisited is different from Waugh’s earlier novels in two important ways. First, it is the only novel Waugh finished which employs the first-person point of view. (He had attempted the first person in Work Suspended in 1942, but either the story itself faltered, or Waugh could not achieve a sufficient narrative detachment to complete it.) Second, Brideshead Revisited was the first novel in which Waugh explicitly addressed a Roman Catholic theme: the mysterious workings of divine grace in a small aristocratic Catholic family. As a result, it is Waugh’s most sentimental and least funny novel. Although it departed radically from his earlier satires, it was Waugh’s most popular and financially successful work. The narrative frame creates much of what is sentimental in the novel but also provides a built-in detachment. Charles Ryder’s love for Sebastian Flyte during his years at Oxford in the 1920’s and for Julia Mottram, Sebastian’s sister, a decade later, live vividly in Ryder’s memories when he revisits the Brideshead estate during a wartime bivouac. His memories tell the story of Sebastian’s and Julia’s search for happiness, but because they are remembered by an emotionally desolate Ryder, the novel is a study of his spiritual change as well. Before he meets Sebastian, Ryder is a serious-minded Oxford undergraduate, not unlike Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall. Like Pennyfeather, he is drawn into a world for which he is unprepared, yet unlike Waugh’s earlier protagonist, Ryder is enthralled by a make-believe world of beauty and art. The Arcadian summer Ryder spends with Sebastian at Brideshead and in Venice are the most sumptuously written passages in any of Waugh’s novels, reflecting—as Waugh admitted in his 1959 revision of the novel—the dearth of sensual pleasures available at the time of its composition. The change in style also reflects a change in theme. Sebastian’s eccentricities about

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his stuffed bear, his coterie of homosexual “aesthetes,” and his refusal to take anything seriously would have been the object of satire in Waugh’s earlier novels. In Brideshead Revisited, however, the absurdities are sifted through the perspective of a narrator aware of his own desperate search for love. When Sebastian’s make-believe turns to alcoholism, the narrator himself becomes cynically indifferent. Ryder’s love for Julia ten years after he has left Brideshead is an attempt to rediscover the happiness he lost with Sebastian. One is more aware, in this second half of the narration, of Ryder’s cynicism and of the discontentment which that cynicism hides. When he and Julia fall in love on a transatlantic voyage back to England, they are both escaping marriages to spouses whose worldly ambitions offer no nourishment for the spiritual emptiness each feels. Julia’s return to the Church after the deathbed repentance of her father causes Ryder to realize that he has fathomed as little about Julia’s faith as he had about Sebastian’s. The narration itself thus ends on a note of unhappiness which recalls the separation of Ryder and Sebastian. In the epilogue following Ryder’s memories, however, Waugh makes it clear that the narrator himself has converted to Catholicism in the intervening years. Ryder sees in the sanctuary light of the chapel at Brideshead the permanence he sought with Sebastian and Julia and finds contentment, if not hope for the future. It is easy to overstress the religious implications of the novel. Indeed, many critics find Julia’s hysteria about sin, Lord Marchmain’s return to the Church, and Ryder’s conversion strained. Some, such as Edmund Wilson, see the novel as an adulation of the British upper classes. Brideshead Revisited, however, is less a Roman Catholic novel than it is a lament for the past and a study in spiritual and artistic awakening. It was a turning point in Waugh’s fiction: His novels after Brideshead Revisited dealt less with the absurdity of life and more with the spiritual values that have disappeared as a result of the war. The Loved One · Perhaps the grimmest of Waugh’s satires, The Loved One presents a sardonic vision of American culture. Its principal satiric target is Forest Lawn Memorial Park—a place that in many ways served for Waugh as the epitome of American pretensions to civilization. In “Half in Love with Easeful Death,” an essay Waugh wrote for Life in 1947 after his visit to Hollywood, Waugh describes Forest Lawn as it would appear to archaeologists in the next millennium: a burlesque necropolis, like the tombs of the pharaohs in its aspirations, but, in fact, the product of a borrowed, devalued culture. His version of Forest Lawn, Whispering Glades, is a distorted wonderland in which the cosmetic and the artificial substitute for beauty and in which banality is glorified and substitutes for the poetic vision. It is fitting that the protagonist, Dennis Barlow, be a poet—even though an unproductive one who has been seduced to Hollywood by a consultantship with Megalo Studios. Like many of Waugh’s other protagonists, he is the filter through which one sees absurdities satirized. Like Basil Seal in Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, he is an opportunist, flexible enough to engineer a profit for himself out of the chaotic world into which he is thrust. His vision is grimly sardonic, however, in a way that even Seal’s is not. When he first enters Whispering Glades, he is intrigued, as Seal would be, by its absurd glamour and by the potential of using that glamour to improve his own position at The Happier Hunting Grounds, a pet mortuary where he is employed. Whispering Glades, however, has a far deeper attraction; it would be the kind of place, if it were real, that would appeal to any poet, but Barlow is enchanted by its

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very fraudulence. At the human-made Lake Isle of Innisfree (complete with mechanized humming bees), Barlow falls in love with a mortuary cosmetician and enchants her by the very fact that he is a poet. The enchantment is false, just as everything is at Whispering Glades; he sends her plagiarized verses from The Oxford Book of English Verse and pledges his troth to her by reciting a stanza from Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” at The Lover’s Nook near the Wee Kirk o’ Auld Lang Syne. If plagiarism lies at the heart of Barlow’s involvement at Whispering Glades, it also lies at the heart of Whispering Glades itself and the characters who work there—even though the place and the people are possessed by the utmost seriousness. The girl with whom Barlow falls in love is named Aimee Thanatogenos. Although she professes to be named after Aimee McPherson—the American huckster of religion whom Waugh satirized in Vile Bodies—her given name and her surname both translate into the euphemism that embodies all of Whispering Glades’s false coating: “The loved one.” Her enchantment with Barlow eventually takes the form of a burlesque tragedy. She is torn between Barlow and the head mortician, Mr. Joyboy, a poet of a different sort, whose special art is preparing infant corpses. Aimee’s tragedy results from a bizarre sequence of events, comic in its effects. When she discovers Joyboy’s mother fixation and Barlow’s fraudulence, she seeks advice from her oracle, the Guru Brahmin, an advice columnist. When the Guru, Mr. Slump—fired from his job and in an alcoholic funk—advises Aimee to jump off a roof, she kills herself in the more poetic environment of Whispering Glades. Her suicide by drinking embalming fluid gives a doubly ironic force to her name and to the title of the novel. The tragedy ends with a darkly humorous catharsis. Joyboy, fearful that Aimee’s death on his table might mar his lofty position at Whispering Glades, consents to Barlow’s extortion and to Barlow’s plan to cremate their beloved Aimee at The Happier Hunting Grounds. The novel’s conclusion, thus, strikes the grimmest note of all: Barlow sits idly by, reading a cheap novel, while the heroine—a burlesque Dido—burns in the furnace. In some ways, The Loved One is atypical of Waugh’s postwar novels. In Scott-King’s Modern Europe and the Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh turns his satiric eye to political issues. The Loved One, however much it satirizes American values, transcends topical satire. Barlow lacks the spiritual potential of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, even though he displays Ryder’s callousness. Barlow is an artist in search of beauty, but he leaves California, ironically, with an artist’s load far different from what he expected. It is the view of an ironist, like Waugh himself, who could hardly make a better travesty of Whispering Glades than it makes of itself. Sword of Honour · The Sword of Honour trilogy, like Brideshead Revisited, is infused with a predominantly religious theme; it traces Guy Crouchback’s awakening to spiritual honor—a more active form of spiritual growth than Charles Ryder experienced. Like Brideshead Revisited, Sword of Honour is more somber and more deliberately paced than Waugh’s satires in the 1920’s and 1930’s, but it shares with his early works a detached satiric framework. Each volume is composed at a distance of ten or more years from its historical occurrence and, as a result, reflects a greater consciousness of the long-range implications of the absurdities presented. Men at Arms · Men at Arms concerns the chaos of Britain’s first entry into the war, much like Waugh’s wartime satire Put Out More Flags. One is immediately aware, however, of the difference in Waugh’s detachment. Put Out More Flags was the product

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of a writer in his mid-thirties looking wryly at the days of peace from the middle of the war. Its protagonist, Basil Seal, is a mischief-making opportunist for whom greater chaos means greater fun and profit; the novel satirizes the madness of a world which leaves the characters trapped in the ever-changing insanity of war. Men at Arms, however, and, indeed, the entire trilogy, looks back from the perspective of the author’s later middle age, with a sense of disappointment at the final results of the war. Appropriately enough, Guy is an innocent at the outset of the war, not a mischief maker like Basil Seal. He is a middle-aged victim who is literally and figuratively cast into a battle for which he is ill prepared. Guy’s heroic illusions are shattered in three successive stages through the separate volumes of the trilogy. Men at Arms concerns Guy’s search for the self-esteem he lost eight years earlier after his divorce from his wife. As an officer-trainee in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, Guy temporarily finds self-respect, but the elaborate traditions of the Halberdiers and his traineeship at commandeered preparatory schools cause Guy to revert to adolescence. His physical awkwardness, his jealousy of fellow trainees, his vanity about growing a mustache, his ineffectual attempt to seduce his former wife on Saint Valentine’s Day, and the blot he receives on his military record at the end of the novel all seem more appropriate for a schoolboy than for an officer preparing to lead men into battle. As in Waugh’s earlier novels, the comedy of Men at Arms depends not on the protagonist, but on the events and characters that he encounters. Apthorpe, a middleaged miles gloriosus, and Ben Ritchie-Hook, Guy’s brigadier, represent two forms of the military insanity for which Guy trains. Apthorpe’s preoccupation with boots, salutes, and his portable field latrine, the “Box,” makes him an unlikely candidate for leading men into battle; Ritchie-Hook, whose only notion of military strategy is to attack, makes an elaborate game out of officer training by booby-trapping Apthorpe’s “Box”—a prank that causes Apthorpe to sink deeper into his madness. The confrontation between Apthorpe and Ritchie-Hook defines an absurd pattern which recurs later in the trilogy. Seeming madmen control the positions of power, and the protagonist is unwittingly drawn into their absurd worlds. Officers and Gentlemen · Officers and Gentlemen further trains Guy in the illogic of military life, this time focusing on the efforts of gentlemen soldiers to re-create the comforts of their London clubs during the war. The novel ends on a more somber note, however, than did Men at Arms. Guy finds temporary solace in the commando unit to which he is transferred after his disgrace as a Halberdier and believes again that he will find some honorable role to play in the war, but the British defeat at Crete at the end of this volume negates whatever notions of honor he entertained. Even more than Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen relentlessly travesties esprit de corps and pretentions to heroism. Ian Kilbannock’s gentlemanly service as a military journalist, for example, is to transform the ineffectual Trimmer into a propaganda hero for the common person. Julia Stitch’s yacht, the Cleopatra, brings the comforts of the English social world to the Mediterranean war. The burrowing Grace-GroundlingMarchpole absurdly continues the secret file he began in Men at Arms about Guy’s supposed counterintelligence activities. All these events occur while England is suffering the first effects of German bombing and while the British disgrace at Crete looms ahead. For a time, Guy imagines that the commandos are the “flower of England”; he even sees Ivor Claire as the ideal soldier, the kind of Englishman whom Hitler had not

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taken into account. The flower withers, however, in the chaotic retreat of British forces from Crete. Although Guy himself manages to maintain an even keel through most of the ordeal, the officers with whom he serves prove unheroic. His commander, “Fido” Hound, suffers a complete mental collapse in the face of the retreating troops; Ivor Claire, unable to face the prospect of surrendering, deserts his men and flees to India, where he is protected by his genteel birth. Eventually, Guy unheroically joins a boat escaping from the island and, exhausted, suffers a mental collapse. Guy initially resists Julia Stitch’s efforts to cover up Claire’s disgrace, but eventually destroys his own diary recording the orders to surrender when he learns that nothing will be done about Claire’s desertion and when he learns of England’s alliance with Russia. Unlike the first volume, the second volume ends with Guy’s realization that he is an ineffectual player in a war that has lost a sense of honor. It is curious to note that Waugh announced in the dust-jacket blurb for Officers and Gentlemen that, although he had planned the series for three volumes, he wanted his readers to regard it as finished with this second volume. The grimness of Guy’s disillusionment thus sheds a somber light on Waugh’s personal dilemma during the mid-1950’s. After completing about a third of the draft of this second volume, Waugh suffered the mental collapse fictionalized in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Guy’s hallucination at the end of Officers and Gentlemen probably owes some of its vividness to the madness Waugh himself endured in 1954, and perhaps the numbness that affects Guy at the end of the novel reflects Waugh’s own consciousness of his failing physical and mental powers. The End of the Battle · Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen each deflate Guy’s illusions about honor. The End of the Battle follows the same pattern in terms of wartime politics and in terms of Guy’s military life, but in personal terms, Guy achieves a kind of unheroic, unselfish honor by the end of the novel. As a soldier, Guy accomplishes nothing heroic; even his efforts to liberate the Jewish refugees from partisan Yugoslavia is unsatisfying. Although most of the refugees are liberated, the leaders of the group—the Kanyis—are imprisoned and presumably executed. Guy’s struggle with the Yugoslavian partisans and his disgust at Britain’s alliance with the Communist-bloc countries further define the dishonorable end that Guy and Waugh see in the war. Unlike the two previous volumes, however, The End of the Battle ends on a note of tentative personal hopefulness, effected by Guy’s renewed Roman Catholic faith. In the first two novels of the trilogy, Guy’s religion lay dormant—a part of his life made purposeless since his divorce from Virginia. In The End of the Battle, the death of Guy’s piously religious father causes Guy to realize that honor lies not in the “quantitative judgments” of military strategy, but in the spiritual salvation of individual souls. Guy’s efforts to rescue the Yugoslavian Jews is selflessly honorable, even if ultimately futile. His remarriage to Virginia, who is pregnant with Trimmer’s baby, is directed by the same sense of honor. Guy has little to gain emotionally from his remarriage; he does it for the preservation of the child’s life and, implicitly, for the salvation of its soul. It is a different sort of heroism than he sought at the beginning of the war, possible only because Virginia has died. Sword of Honour is, in many ways, a fitting climax to Waugh’s literary career. It poignantly expresses his reverence for religious values yet recognizes the anomalous existence of those values in the modern world. It burlesques the eccentric and the absurd, yet moves beyond superficial satire to a more deeply rooted criticism of postwar politics. It displays Waugh’s masterful ability to capture minor characters in

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brisk, economical strokes while working them thematically into the emotional composition of the protagonist. Waugh’s importance as a novelist lay in his ability to achieve this kind of economy in a traditional form. He kept alive, in short, a tradition of the comic novel that reaches back to the eighteenth century. James J. Lynch Other major works SHORT FICTION: Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing, 1936; Tactical Exercise, 1954; Charles Ryder’s Schooldays and Other Stories, 1982. NONFICTION: Rossetti: His Life and Works, 1928; Labels, 1930; Remote People, 1931; Ninety-two Days, 1934; Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr, 1935; Waugh in Abyssinia, 1936; Robbery Under the Law, 1939; The Holy Places, 1952; The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, 1959; Tourist in Africa, 1960; A Little Learning, 1964; The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, 1976 (Christopher Sykes, editor); The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 1980 (Mark Amory, editor). Bibliography Carens, James F., ed. Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Contains twenty-six essays divided into three sections: general essays, essays on specific novels, and essays on Waugh’s life and works. In his lengthy introduction, Carens provides a chronological overview of Waugh’s literary work and a discussion of Waugh criticism. This well-indexed book also contains a bibliography of Waugh’s writings and a selective list of secondary sources. Cook, William J., Jr. Masks, Modes, and Morals: The Art of Evelyn Waugh. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971. Considers Waugh’s novels squarely in the ironic mode, tracing Waugh’s development from satiric denunciation to comic realism to romantic optimism to ironic realism. Cook provides lengthy analyses of the novels, which he suggests move from fantasy to reality and from satire to resignation. Well indexed and contains an excellent bibliography, which also lists articles. Crabbe, Katharyn. Evelyn Waugh. New York: Continuum, 1988. Crabbe’s book is most helpful: She provides a chronology of Waugh’s life, a short biography, and five chapters of detailed criticism on Waugh’s major novels. Crabbe reads The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as an autobiographical novel. A concluding chapter on style is followed by a bibliography and a thorough index. Davis, Robert Murray. Evelyn Waugh: Writer. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981. Drawing from previously unavailable manuscript materials, Davis examines Waugh’s fiction in terms of his artistic technique, his extensive revisions, and his reworking of his novels. After an opening chapter on Waugh’s biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Davis focuses exclusively on the novels, Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour in particular. Well documented and well indexed. Hastings, Selina. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. An excellent one-volume biography. Hastings notes that hers is not an academic biography such as Stannard has written, but a lively attempt to recapture Waugh’s personality as it seemed to him and to his friends. Lane, Calvin W. Evelyn Waugh. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Indispensable for Waugh scholars, Lane’s relatively short volume contains a detailed chronology, a biography stressing the factors influencing his literary career, and lengthy treatments of

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Waugh’s novels. Stresses Waugh’s irony, satire, and conversion to Catholicism, which greatly influenced his fiction after 1930. Lane’s selected bibliography contains articles, annotated book-length studies, and four interviews with Waugh. Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. A scholarly, welldocumented account of Waugh’s early literary career, Stannard’s biography provides valuable publication details about the novels and utilizes Waugh’s diaries and letters. Also contains many photographs and illustrations, a genealogical chart of Waugh’s ancestry, a selected bibliography, and an excellent index. ____________. Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City, 1939-1966. London: Dent, 1992. The second volume of a meticulous, scholarly biography. Includes notes, bibliography, illustrations, and two indexes: a general index and one of Waugh’s work.

Fay Weldon Fay Weldon

Born: Alvechurch, England; September 22, 1931 Principal long fiction · The Fat Woman’s Joke, 1967 (pb. in U.S. as . . . And the Wife Ran Away, 1968); Down Among the Women, 1971; Female Friends, 1974; Remember Me, 1976; Words of Advice, 1977 (pb. in England as Little Sisters, 1978); Praxis, 1978; Puffball, 1980; The President’s Child, 1982; The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, 1983; The Shrapnel Academy, 1986; The Rules of Life, 1987; The Hearts and Lives of Men, 1987; The Heart of the Country, 1987; Leader of the Band, 1988; The Cloning of Joanna May, 1989; Darcy’s Utopia, 1990; Growing Rich, 1992; Life Force, 1992; Affliction, 1993 (pb. in U.S. as Trouble, 1993); Splitting, 1995; Worst Fears, 1996; Big Women, 1997 (pb. in U.S. as Big Girls Don’t Cry, 1997); Rhode Island Blues, 2000. Other literary forms · Fay Weldon began her writing career with plays for radio, television, and theater, but she soon transferred her efforts to novels, for which she is best known. She has also published short stories, a biography of Rebecca West, and an introduction to the work of Jane Austen in fictional form, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984). Achievements · In addition to a successful career as an advertising copywriter, Fay Weldon has enjoyed a long career as a television scriptwriter, a playwright (for television, radio, and theater), and a novelist. Her radio play Spider (1972) won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Radio Play in 1973, and Polaris (1978) won the Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play in 1978. Weldon has earned growing acclaim for her humorous fictional explorations of women’s lives and her biting satires that expose social injustice, and her novel Praxis was nominated for the Booker Prize, a prestigious literary award in England. In 1983, Weldon became the first woman chair of judges for the Booker Prize. She was again recognized for her many achievements in 1997, when she received the Women in Publishing Pandora Award. Although her works often focus primarily on the lives of women, Weldon comments on a wide-ranging number of issues with relevance to all. Her work reveals a deep yet unsentimental compassion for all human beings, an understanding of their weaknesses and foibles, and a celebration of their continued survival and ability to love one another in the face of adversity. Biography · Fay Weldon was born into a literary family in the village of Alvechurch, England, in 1931. Her mother, her maternal grandfather, and her uncle were all published novelists. While still a child, Weldon emigrated with her family to New Zealand, where she grew up. When she was six years old, her parents (Frank Thornton Birkinshaw, a doctor, and Margaret Jepson Birkinshaw) were divorced; Weldon continued to live with her mother and sister. This experience of being reared by a single mother in an era that did not easily accommodate single-parent families gave Weldon early insight into the lot of women who flouted social norms. When she was fourteen, Weldon, her mother, and her sister joined her grandmother in London. These were years of hardship in postwar England, but the strong and independent 959

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women of the family set a good example. Weldon was able to observe, at first hand, both the trials women faced and the importance of family and of humor in overcoming these difficulties. In 1949, Weldon earned a scholarship to St. Andrews University in Scotland, and in 1952 she was graduated with an M.A. in economics and psychology. In 1955, she had her first son, Nicholas, whom she supported as a single mother. Weldon’s literary ambitions had not yet crystallized—though she had begun writing—so she drifted into a series of writing jobs: propaganda for the Foreign Office; answering problem letters for a newspaper; and, finally, composing advertising copy. In this last career she was quite successful, producing many jingles and slogans that would become household sayings and honing her talent for concision, wit, and catchy, memorable phrasing. In 1960, she married Ronald Weldon, a London antiques dealer, and together they settled in a North London suburb, where they had three children: Daniel (born 1963), Thomas (born 1970), and Samuel (born 1977). Beginning in the mid-1960’s, Weldon combined professional and family responsibilities with a burgeoning career as a writer. Her efforts were at first directed toward writing plays. Her one-act play “Permanence” was produced in London in 1969 and was followed by many successes. For British television networks, Weldon has written more than fifty plays, as well as other scripts, including an award-winning episode of Upstairs, Downstairs. Writing for television led to fiction: Weldon’s first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, in 1967, had begun as a television play. Her third novel, Female Friends, solidified her reputation. In the 1970’s, Weldon left her job in advertising. She was able to devote more of her time to writing, earning further acclaim for Praxis in 1978. The President’s Child, in 1982, was an even bigger best-seller, thanks to its “thriller” quality, while The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, in 1983, introduced Weldon’s work to a mass audience when it was made into a motion picture, She-Devil (1990), starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. In addition to her novels, in the 1980’s and 1990’s Weldon also published collections of her short fiction, including Moon over Minneapolis: Or, Why She Couldn’t Stay (1991) and Wicked Women: A Collection of Short Stories (1995). She also put her comic gifts to work in three books for children, Wolf the Mechanical Dog (1988), Party Puddle (1989), and Nobody Likes Me (1997). Meanwhile, after the author and her husband of thirty-four years were divorced in 1994, she married Nicholas Fox and settled down in London. There she continued to write and to crusade for writers’ rights and to attack the two great enemies of her profession, censorship and exploitation by unscrupulous publishers. Analysis · In her fiction, Fay Weldon explores women’s lives with wit and humor. She is caustic in her implicit condemnation of injustice but avoids preaching by satirizing both sides of every issue and by revealing the gulf between what characters say and what they do. Despite their realistic settings, her novels blend fable, myth, and the fantastic with satire, farce, and outlandish coincidence to produce tragicomedies of manners. Weldon’s admiration for writers such as Jane Austen (whose work she has adapted for television) is expressed openly in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, but it is also evident from the parallels in Weldon’s own work. In a typical Weldon novel, a limited cast of characters interacts in a well-defined setting. A series of misunderstandings or trivial coincidences initiates the action, which then takes on a momentum of its own, carrying all along with it until an equally trivial series of explanations or

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coincidences brings closure and a resolution that restores all to their proper place. The theme is often a minor domestic drama, such as a marital crisis, rather than an epic upheaval, but such personal interactions are seen to represent in microcosm society as a whole and therefore have a universal appeal. . . . And the Wife Ran Away · This structure is present even in Weldon’s early work, no doubt because it is a formula that works well for television. In her first novel, originally entitled The Fat Woman’s Joke but renamed . . . And the Wife Ran Away for its American publication in 1968, Weldon takes as her subject the crisis in the marriage of a middle-aged, middle-class couple, Esther and Alan Wells, when Alan decides to have an affair with his young and attractive secretary, Susan. The beginning of Alan’s affair coincides with Esther and Alan’s decision to go on a diet, a symbolic attempt, Weldon suggests, to recapture not only their lost youthful figures, but also their youthful love, ambition, and optimism. Infidelity, the novel therefore subtly suggests, is related to aging and to a more deep-seated identity crisis. Weldon frequently uses hunger or the satisfaction of food as a metaphor for other, more metaphysical and intangible, needs, and this theme recurs in a number of her works (for example, in the short story “Polaris,” 1985). The influence of Weldon’s background as a scriptwriter (and the novel’s origin as a play) is also evident in its form. Esther, who has left her husband at the opening of the novel, recounts her version of events to her friend Phyllis, as she gorges herself on food to compensate for the self-denial she has suffered during the diet. Esther’s narrative is intercut with scenes of Susan telling her version to her friend Brenda. The novel is thus almost entirely conveyed through dialogue describing flashbacks seen from the perspective of the female characters. This technique is evident elsewhere in Weldon’s early work—for example, in Female Friends, where parts of the novel are presented in the form of a script. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil · The Life and Loves of a She-Devil stands as one of Weldon’s most accomplished works. It represents the themes that are the hallmark of Weldon’s fiction (a concern with women’s lives and the significance of human relationships such as marriage) while encompassing her use of fantasy in one of her most carefully constructed and formally satisfying novels. The plot tells the story of a middle-class, suburban housewife, Ruth, whose accountant husband leaves her for a rich and attractive writer of romance novels. Unlike the typical wife, however, Ruth does not simply bow to the inevitable. When her husband calls her a “she-devil” in a moment of anger, this becomes her new identity, and she musters a formidable array of resources to live up to it. Through a series of picaresque adventures, she makes the life of her husband Bobbo and his new love Mary Fisher impossible, has Bobbo framed and then imprisoned for embezzlement, destroys Mary’s ability and will to write, and finally undergoes massive plastic surgery so that she looks just like the now-dead rival Mary and can assume her place in Bobbo’s broken life. The configuration at the end of the novel thus mirrors the beginning, but with the variation that the power dynamics of the relationship have been inverted: Ruth is now in command, while Bobbo has been humiliated and accepts his fate like a downtrodden wife. The tale not only presents a certain kind of symmetry reminiscent of fairy stories but also evokes a poetic magic in the telling of it. Many of the chapters begin with a variation on the opening line of the novel: “Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea.” These incantations, repeated with variations, have the hypnotic

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quality of a witch’s spell, reinforcing both Ruth’s supernatural power and her obsession with Mary Fisher (whose residence in a tower evokes a fairy-tale princess). This poetic refrain also unifies the narrative and gives a cyclical structure to the plot. The Shrapnel Academy · At first glance, The Shrapnel Academy appears to be a variation on the theme of the “country house weekend” plot, a staple of British literature. A group of characters, most of them unknown to one another, are seen arriving at the Shrapnel Academy, a military institute, for a weekend. Bad weather will ensure that they remain confined to the academy, cut off from the outside world and forced to confront one another and the problems that arise. While many novelists fail to acknowledge the presence of the host of servants who make such country weekends possible, Weldon’s novel takes the reader below stairs and into the lives of the hundreds of illegal immigrant servants and their extended families and camp followers. The Shrapnel Academy could thus be subtitled “Upstairs, Downstairs,” like the television series about an upper-class Edwardian family and its servants (to which Weldon contributed an award-winning episode). The Shrapnel Academy strays far beyond the realist conventions of the television series, however, and by presenting the clash between shortsighted, class-based militarism and the struggle for survival and dignity in the microcosm of the academy, Weldon succeeds in painting an apocalyptic allegory. The Shrapnel Academy illustrates how Weldon avoids assigning blame by showing how character flaws and opportunity combine to create problems. Despite the black humor of this novel, Weldon’s moral universe is not one of black and white. The reader is made to sympathize with the choices of the militarists and is shown the complicity of the victims so that simplistic judgments become impossible. As in most of Weldon’s novels, no one villain is responsible for the misfortunes that befall the characters; instead, everyone bears some degree of responsibility for the accumulation of trivial choices and decisions that combine to make up the “frightful tidal wave of destiny.” The theme of destiny increasingly preoccupies Weldon; it is one of the major themes in The Cloning of Joanna May, for example, in which the role of coincidence is the subject of mystical and metaphysical speculation. Many thematic and stylistic elements of Weldon’s work also recur in The Shrapnel Academy, such as the revenge fantasy theme, food symbolism, and the revision of mythology and fable. Since war affects everyone—increasingly, Weldon argues, women and children—the militaristic theme of The Shrapnel Academy should not be construed as belying a male-oriented narrative. Weldon uses the female characters in this novel to offer characteristic insight into the position of the various women above stairs—Joan Lumb, the officious administrator, the General’s mistress Bella, Shirley the unquestioning and dutiful wife, Muffin the fluff-brained assistant—as well as the often anonymous women who are raped, die in childbirth, or become prostitutes in the “third world” below stairs. Formally, too, the novel displays typical characteristics of Weldon’s work (short narrative passages with aphoristic asides, the use of dialogue), as well as innovative and experimental qualities. Weldon interrupts the narrative at frequent intervals, sometimes to offer a satirical summary of military history, highlighting advances in warfare or giving accounts of famous battles. Weldon brings out the absurdity of celebrating such “progress” and uses her fine wit to draw the reader’s attention to the Orwellian doublespeak and the underlying assumptions of military thinking. At other times, Weldon interpellates the reader directly, apologizing for the delay in getting on

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with the story or inviting readers to put themselves in the place of one of the characters—invitations that pointedly drive home the lesson that the reader is no better than the characters he or she is inclined to judge. Weldon even interrupts the story to offer a recipe for cooking pumpkin, only one of the ways Weldon breaks with the conventional codes of narrative (elsewhere she offers lists, timetables, and even a seating plan and a menu). Life Force · Weldon also breaks with her readers’ expectations, as in Life Force, which, instead of being an indictment of male callousness and infidelity, is a lusty tribute to male sexuality. The central figure in the book is Leslie Beck, a man with no virtues except his power to please women through the skillful use of his huge genitalia and his equally outsized imagination. Structurally, Life Force follows the pattern established in Weldon’s earlier novels: It begins with a seemingly unimportant incident that stimulates the narrator to relive and reassess complex relationships. That incident eventually becomes a crucial element in a dramatic resolution, in which a woman avenges herself upon a man who has wronged her. When Leslie Beck turns up at the Marion Loos Gallery, carrying a large painting by his late wife Anita, it does not seem possible that this unappealing, sixty-year-old man could for so long have been the Lothario of upper-middle-class London. However, the owner of the gallery, who at this point is the first-person narrator, explains to the reader why she is so shocked when she sees the unimpressive painting that her former lover expects her to sell on his behalf. Its subject is the bedroom and the bed in which Leslie once gave Marion so much pleasure. Naturally, the painting prompts Marion to recall her involvement with Leslie and to wonder how much Anita knew about the affair. However, nothing in this novel is as straightforward as it seems. In the second chapter, not only does Weldon change narrators, now telling the story through the eyes of Nora, another of Beck’s former lovers, but also she has Nora admit that it was she, not Marion, who actually wrote the first chapter, simply imagining herself as Marion. Although the two narrators continue to alternate as the book progresses, from time to time the author reminds us that Marion’s narrative is Nora’s fiction, based as much on gossip and guesses as on fact. Thus, Weldon suggests that since the only approach to truth is through what human beings see and say, what we call reality will always include as much fiction as fact. Trouble · After Life Force, in which she showed both genders as being controlled by their own animal instincts, Weldon again turned her attention to a society that permits men to victimize women. The protagonist of Trouble, which was published in England under the title Affliction, is Annette Horrocks, a woman who, after ten years of trying, has finally become pregnant, only to find that her once-devoted husband Spicer has become monstrous. Not only does he now seem to loathe Annette, but also none of his tastes, opinions, and prejudices are what they were just a few months before. Eventually, Annette discovers the source of the problem: Spicer has been seduced by a pair of unscrupulous, sadistic New Age psychiatrists. Before she is finally cured of what she comes to recognize as her addiction to Spicer, Annette loses her home, her baby, and very nearly her mind. If in Life Force Weldon shows the battle of the sexes as essentially comic, in Trouble Weldon tells a story with tragic overtones. Again she points out how vulnerable women are in a society that believes men have a monopoly on the truth, but in this case she shows what can happen when the male

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version of reality is reinforced by the self-seeking therapy industry, the primary target of satire in this novel. Weldon’s fiction has developed from dialogue-based, scriptlike narratives to a style that resembles more conventional forms of the novel, although still with a characteristic lack of reverence for the conventions of storytelling. Her themes have expanded from domestic dramas and personal relationships to topical questions of national and international import, but without abandoning the belief that the personal remains the minimal unit of significance at the base of even the largest human networks. Humor has remained a constant feature of her work, her delicious wit and sharp irony the armor that protects her from charges of overseriousness, preaching, or doctrinaire political stances. Melanie Hawthorne, updated by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman Other major works SHORT FICTION: Watching Me, Watching You, 1981; Polaris and Other Stories, 1985; Moon over Minneapolis: Or, Why She Couldn’t Stay, 1991; Wicked Women: A Collection of Short Stories, 1995; A Hard Time to Be a Father, 1999. PLAYS: Permanence, pr. 1969; Time Hurries On, pb. 1972; Words of Advice, pr., pb. 1974; Friends, pr. 1975; Moving House, pr. 1976; Mr. Director, pr. 1978; Action Replay, pr. 1979 (also known as Love Among the Women); I Love My Love, pr. 1981; After the Prize, pr. 1981 (also known as Wordworm). TELEPLAYS: Wife in a Blonde Wig, 1966; The Fat Woman’s Tale, 1966; What About Me, 1967; Dr. De Waldon’s Therapy, 1967; Goodnight Mrs. Dill, 1967; The Forty-fifth Unmarried Mother, 1967; Fall of the Goat, 1967; Ruined Houses, 1968; Venus Rising, 1968; The Three Wives of Felix Hull, 1968; Hippy Hippy Who Cares, 1968; £13083, 1968; The Loophole, 1969; Smokescreen, 1969; Poor Mother, 1970; Office Party, 1970; On Trial, 1971 (in Upstairs, Downstairs series); Old Man’s Hat, 1972; A Splinter of Ice, 1972; Hands, 1972; The Lament of an Unmarried Father, 1972; A Nice Rest, 1972; Comfortable Words, 1973; Desirous of Change, 1973; In Memoriam, 1974; Poor Baby, 1975; The Terrible Tale of Timothy Bagshott, 1975; Aunt Tatty, 1975 (adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s story); Act of Rape, 1977; Married Love, 1977 (in Six Women series); Pride and Prejudice, 1980 (adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel); Honey Ann, 1980; Watching Me, Watching You, 1980 (in Leap in the Dark series); Life for Christine, 1980; Little Miss Perkins, 1982; Loving Women, 1983; Redundant! Or, The Wife’s Revenge, 1983. RADIO PLAYS: Spider, 1972; Housebreaker, 1973; Mr. Fox and Mr. First, 1974; The Doctor’s Wife, 1975; Polaris, 1978; Weekend, 1979 (in Just Before Midnight series); All the Bells of Paradise, 1979; I Love My Love, 1981. NONFICTION: Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, 1984; Rebecca West, 1985. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Wolf the Mechanical Dog, 1988; Party Puddle, 1989; Nobody Likes Me, 1997. EDITED TEXT: New Stories Four: An Arts Council Anthology, 1979 (with Elaine Feinstein). Bibliography Barreca, Regina, ed. Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994. This important volume contains thirteen essays by various writers, in addition to five by Weldon. The editor’s introduction provides a useful overview of Weldon criticism. Indexed.

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Cane, Aleta F. “Demythifying Motherhood in Three Novels by Fay Weldon.” In Family Matters in the British and American Novel, edited by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth Mahn Nollen, and Sheila Reitzel Foor. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. Cane points out that in Puffball, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and Life Force, dysfunctional mothers produce daughters who are also dysfunctional mothers. Obviously, it is argued, Weldon agrees with the feminist position about mothering, that it cannot be improved until women cease to be marginalized. Mitchell, Margaret E. “Fay Weldon.” In British Writers. Supplement 4 in Contemporary British Writers, edited by George Stade and Carol Howard. New York: Scribner’s, 1997. A very comprehensive study of Weldon’s life and work. A lengthy but readable analysis is divided into sections on “Weldon’s Feminism,” “The Personal as Political,” “Nature, Fate, and Magic,” “Self and Solidarity,” and “Fictions.” Contains a biographical essay and a bibliography. Weldon, Fay. “Towards a Humorous View of the Universe.” In Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, edited by Regina Barreca. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988. A short (three-page) article about humor as a protection against pain, with perceptive comments about class-related and gendered aspects of humor. Although Weldon herself does not draw the connections specifically, the reader can infer much from her comments about the role of humor in her own work. Wilde, Alan. “‘Bold, but Not Too Bold’: Fay Weldon and the Limits of Poststructuralist Criticism.” Contemporary Literature 29, no. 3 (1988): 403-419. The author focuses primarily not on Weldon’s work but on literary theory, using The Life and Loves of a She-Devil as an arena to pit poststructuralism against New Criticism. The argument is at times obscure, but Wilde offers some useful comments regarding moderation versus extremism in this novel.

H. G. Wells H. G. Wells

Born: Bromley, Kent, England; September 21, 1866 Died: London, England; August 13, 1946 Principal long fiction · The Time Machine: An Invention, 1895; The Wonderful Visit, 1895; The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1896; The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure, 1896; The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance, 1897; The War of the Worlds, 1898; When the Sleeper Wakes: A Story of the Years to Come, 1899; Love and Mr. Lewisham, 1900; The First Men in the Moon, 1901; The Sea Lady, 1902; The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth, 1904; Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, 1905; In the Days of the Comet, 1906; The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted, 1908; Tono-Bungay, 1908; Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story, 1909; The History of Mr. Polly, 1910; The New Machiavelli, 1910; Marriage, 1912; The Passionate Friends, 1913; The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, 1914; The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind, 1914; Bealby: A Holiday, 1915; The Research Magnificent, 1915; Mr. Britling Sees It Through, 1916; The Soul of a Bishop: A Novel—with Just a Little Love in It—About Conscience and Religion and the Real Troubles of Life, 1917; Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education, 1918; The Undying Fire: A Contemporary Novel, 1919; The Secret Places of the Heart, 1922; Men Like Gods, 1923; The Dream, 1924; Christina Alberta’s Father, 1925; The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Age, 1926 (3 volumes); Meanwhile: The Picture of a Lady, 1927; Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, 1928; The King Who Was a King: The Book of a Film, 1929; The Autocracy of Mr. Parham: His Remarkable Adventure in This Changing World, 1930; The Buplington of Blup, 1933; The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Resolution, 1933; The Croquet Player, 1936; Byrnhild, 1937; The Camford Visitation, 1937; Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia, 1937; Apropos of Dolores, 1938; The Brothers, 1938; The Holy Terror, 1939; Babes in the Darkling Wood, 1940; All Aboard for Ararat, 1940; You Can’t Be Too Careful: A Sample of Life, 1901-1951, 1941. Other literary forms · H. G. Wells’s short stories appear in such collections as The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895), Tales of Space and Time (1899), The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911), and A Door in the Wall and Other Stories (1911). The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920) and Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain Since 1866 (1934) extended his literary range. His sociological essays include A Modern Utopia (1905) and Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945). Achievements · Wells is best known for his science-fiction novels, some having been adapted as popular films. A socialist and Fabian, he was a spokesman for women’s rights and international peace movements, for which he wrote books of advocacy in essay and fictional form. He was also an effective novelist of social satire and comedy. Biography · Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 at Bromley in Kent, England, to Joseph and Sarah Neal Wells. He attended a commercial academy from 1874 to 1880. Having run away from his apprenticeship in a drapery shop, he taught in a preparatory school. Then he attended the London Normal School of Science from 966

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1884 to 1887, studying biology under T. H. Huxley. In 1891 he was married to Isabel Mary Wells, and he published “The Rediscovery of the Unique.” The Time Machine brought him fame in 1895, the same year that he divorced Isabel to marry Amy Catherine Robbins. In 1901, Wells’s son George Philip was born; Frank Richard followed in 1903. In 1914, having visited Russia, Wells published a prophecy, The War That Will End War; that year his son Anthony West was born to Rebecca West. After visiting soldiers on the front lines of World War I, Wells supported a “League of Free Nations,” and he entered the propaganda effort against Germany. In 1920 he Library of Congress made another trip to Russia, to meet Vladimir Ilich Lenin, and published Russia in the Shadows. Wells was defeated as a Labour candidate for Parliament in 1922, and Amy Catherine died in 1927. He coauthored a book on biology before visiting Russia and the United States in 1934 to meet Joseph Stalin and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1935 he wrote film scenarios for Things to Come and The Man Who Could Work Miracles. In 1938 Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds frightened people in the United States, paving the way for Wells’s successful lecture tour there in 1940. Wells died in London on August 13, 1946. Analysis · H. G. Wells’s early scientific romances begin with The Time Machine (1895) and conclude with The First Men in the Moon (1901). His social satire and comic romance commence with Kipps (1905) and end with The History of Mr. Polly (1910). Didactic fiction dominated his last decades, from Ann Veronica (1909) to You Can’t Be Too Careful (1941). Throughout is a struggle between science and socialism. Visions of doom alternate with calls for reform and renewal; individuals acquire knowledge of science but lose control of their destinies. The Time Machine · Wells’s early novels are journeys of ironic discovery. The enduring point of The Time Machine is in the Time-Traveller’s frightening discovery in the year 802701. He encounters the Eloi, who have been terrorized by the Morlocks, molelike creatures who prey upon the flesh of the Upper-worlders. They are the fruits of an evolutionary process of separating capitalists from workers. Before he returns to his own time, the Time-Traveller accidentally moves even further into the future, to an Earth about to fall into a dying Sun. The Island of Dr. Moreau · Edward Prendick, narrator of The Island of Dr. Moreau, is a castaway, grateful to reach Moreau’s island—until he realizes its horrors. He thinks that Moreau is turning people into animals, but when he finds the Beast-people, he

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realizes his mistake. Moreau explains that pain is animality, and he excises pain to humanize animals, but they kill him as they revert to their animal natures. Prendick barely escapes becoming an animal before he returns to civilization, where he has anxiety attacks about people’s animality. Pessimism is never far from the surface of Wells’s writing. Losing faith in reason, he turned to prophetic satire, as in The Invisible Man. In this story, Griffin, having failed to anticipate the awful effects of losing visibility, has lapsed in ethical responsibility because he had no training or economic opportunity to make better use of his knowledge. Lacking love, he lacks constructive purpose for his power. His invisibility represents knowledge itself, as either destructive or constructive. Knowledge and power combine without sympathy in The War of the Worlds to result in catastrophe. The narrator is a frightened man struggling to compete for survival of the fittest. He believes that the Martians are little more than brains, dispassionate reason threatening annihilation. All brain with no sympathy threatens civilization, but so does instinct with no brain. The Martians near success, when suddenly they die, ironically having succumbed to the tiniest life form, bacteria. The First Men in the Moon · Wells reverses the cosmic journey in The First Men in the Moon, as Bedford accompanies eccentric scientist Cavor to mine the Moon, adding private enterprise to science. The heroes find an intoxicating mushroom, which prompts Bedford to speculate that his private motive for profit will produce public benefits—even for the Moon itself. This madly grandiose notion is subverted when Bedford and Cavor are captured by the antlike Selenites, who live under the surface of the Moon. When Bedford escapes alone to Earth, Cavor sends messages that he is to be executed to prevent Earth inhabitants from returning with their violent ways, to do to the Moon what Wells had envisioned in The War of the Worlds, where Earth was invaded by Martians. The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth · The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth edges beyond science and humor into socialism and satire. Experiments with Boomfood on a chicken farm cause mass destruction through the creation of giant chickens, rats, and wasps; human babies become giants, and ordinary mortals grow terrified. Wells is on the giants’ side, because they can make a new world by destroying the faults of the old. People accommodate to preserve old ways, but they shut their eyes to truth, eventually causing a crisis of choice between old and new. The story ends as the giants prepare for a war with the little people. In the Days of the Comet · With In the Days of the Comet Wells presents a more optimistic view of changes that can be made in the world. Willie Leadford describes life before the great “change,” when a comet turned Earth into paradise. The power of the novel, however, is in the rhythm of rage and hate that accelerates as Willie pursues the woman he loved, to kill her and her new lover. This momentum is accented by other accelerating events, including economic crisis and war with Germany. The comet changes all, including Willie and his beloved, Nettie, who offers to live with both lovers. In a new world, people learn to accept polygamy as natural and right. Kipps · Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul is a story like Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861). The aunt and uncle who reared Kipps expected him to become a store clerk; Kipps has not been very skilled at anything he has undertaken,

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and he proves no better at handling an unexpected inheritance. Kipps has a dreary existence: He gains no real pleasure from life, not even from reading. Life in lower-middle-class commercial and shopkeeping society is without substance, imagination, or purpose. Kipps’s first thought is to buy a banjo, though he cannot play it. Thinking more seriously of his prospects, he asks his art teacher to marry him, and she proceeds to teach him to speak and dress properly. Kipps tries and hopes, until he encounters an old love, Ann Pornick, working as a maid. He snubs her and in his guilt asks her forgiveness; she not only forgives him, but also marries him. Thus, Kipps has stumbled through mistake after mistake, from education to apprenticeship to courtship and marriage. Finally, when he loses most of his fortune, he and his wife resign themselves to a restricted life and open a bookshop. Wells’s satire is directed at Kipps for trying to be more than he can be, for misplacing values in a system of manners; indeed, Wells intensely scorns the social superficialities. The protagonist of Tono-Bungay, George Ponderevo, has much in common with Kipps, but George is less simple and more reflective. His early life is like Kipps’s (and Wells’s) in that he resists training for trade, shows a talent for science, marries above his class, divorces, and rediscovers a childhood romance, through scenes of satirical analysis of the social snobs, religious bigots, and capitalist cutthroats of England. More sympathetic is ambitious Uncle Teddy, who makes a fortune with Tono-Bungay, a bogus medicine, and launches a disastrous career in the “romance of modern commerce.” George Ponderevo is more a master of his destiny than is Kipps. After the collapse of his uncle’s financial empire, George turns to engineering as a means of commitment to scientific objectivity. He is beyond society and governments, as he is alone in the world of love. Science triumphs over socialism and capitalism in Tono-Bungay, while individual vitality triumphs over all ideas in The History of Mr. Polly, another of Wells’s best comic novels from his middle period. This story begins with a discontented middle-aged shopkeeper, Mr. Polly, contemplating his boredom, indigestion, and proud misuse of English. He decides to burn his shop and cut his throat. Having succeded in his arson but having forgotten to cut his throat, he deserts his wife for happy obscurity as a fat woman’s handyman, forgetting the life he detested. Although Mr. Polly is an absurd creature, surrounded by stupid, unambitious people, he is sympathetic because he rebels against that absurdity and stupidity. Wells rewards Mr. Polly well for his rebellion. Ann Veronica · Wells also rewards the heroine of his infamous novel Ann Veronica, which takes up more fully themes of free love and women’s rights. Ann Veronica Stanley rebels against her father’s authority and flees to London, where she attends university lectures in biology. Having thrown herself into the cause of women’s suffrage, she is arrested and imprisoned. Then she elopes with her biology instructor, a married man, to Switzerland. This unconventional woman, however, receives a very conventional reward: She marries her lover, has children, and becomes reconciled with her father. Having put new ideas into old literary forms with Ann Veronica, Wells set the direction of his writing for the rest of his life. In his later novels, ideas, argument, debate, and intellectual analysis become prominent, often at the expense of literary form. Feminist causes give way to issues of world peace in books dealing with the world wars, the one that was and the one to come. Mr. Britling Sees It Through is one of the best, though it is a troubling confusion of political despair and comic resignation. Touches of good humor keep the book going with scenes of absurdity, as when

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Mr. Britling tries to drive his car or Mr. Direck tries to understand British manners. This good humor erodes, however, under the pressure of the events of World War I. Mr. Britling’s son is killed, his children’s German tutor also is killed, and his private secretary is terribly wounded. The war nearly destroys Mr. Britling, but he sees it through, clinging to a religious hope of divine struggle through human suffering. He commits himself to the cause of world peace, but in the course of writing a letter to the German parents of his children’s tutor, he gradually gives way to outrage against Germany and finally collapses in grief. The novel ends when Mr. Britling gets up from his writing to look out his window at the sunrise. Such an ending hints of an uncertainty in Wells’s own commitment to hope. His novels analyze the dead end of civilization and call for redirection through peaceful applications of scientific discoveries. Wells’s bitterness at the barbarism of World War I emerges again in Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, whose hero, driven by an unhappy love affair and a failing business, travels to forget. This is one of Wells’s most interesting later works, combining anthropology and psychology with experimentation in form. Mr. Blettsworthy’s experience with cannibals on Rampole Island may be a fantasy of his madness or an insight into reality, but his experience on the battlefield of World War I is a plunge into an all-too-real madness. Blettsworthy’s romantic life of optimism finally yields to a cynical discontent with reality. His perspective is not, however, Wells’s final word, since Blettsworthy’s business partner, Lyulph Graves, speaks at the end for a philosophy of “creative stoicism,” like the attitude which is assumed by Mr. Britling and, perhaps, by Wells himself. Certainly there were differing points of view in Wells’s imagination. These differences may express intellectual confusion, but they gave substance to his fiction and saved it from succumbing utterly to his tendency to preach. The Autocracy of Mr. Parham · The opposition of Blettsworthy and Graves is repeated in the relationship of Mr. Parham with Sir Bussy Woodcock in The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, which envisions a time when humankind might destroy itself through another barbarous world war. Mr. Parham voices the Fascist call (by Benito Mussolini) to traditional discipline and order as a way to prevent self-destruction; Sir Bussy expresses suspicion of dictatorship, social discipline, and intellectual utopias. Wells employs an entertaining device for exposing the differences between his protagonists: He brings them into a fantasy of the future as the result of a séance. Possessed by a Nietzschean force calling itself the “Master Spirit,” Mr. Parham’s ego is loosed upon the world as the British dictator Lord Paramount. He goes to war with the United States and Germany, aiming for Russia, but he cannot command the obedience of Sir Bussy, who refuses to use a powerful new gas to destroy the opposition. After the séance, Mr. Parham discovers that Sir Bussy has had a dream very much like his own fantasy. Wells’s use of comic irony is very strong in the conclusion, as Mr. Parham is deflated by Sir Bussy’s plans to preach peace through the very means by which Mr. Parham had hoped to reach the world himself: journalism. Mr. Parham is a smug intellectual who knows where the world ought to go, if it would only follow his instructions; Sir Bussy is a muddled businessman, limited by the contingencies of immediate events and satisfied with the disorganized vitality that distresses Mr. Parham. This difference between creative capitalism and intellectual autocracy is imaged as a difference in personalities caught in a play of life’s ironies. Wells’s scientific romances display an optimistic hope for a future made better by scientific discoveries, countered by the pessimistic doubt that humankind could make

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the necessary choices for social and political progress. Wells shows sympathy and scorn for the stunted characters of his middle novels, for Kipps, George Ponderevo, and Mr. Polly; he exposes their inadequacies, largely as products of a narrow, stultifying environment, but he also rescues them in life-affirming conclusions. Finally, between the great wars, H. G. Wells, like his Mr. Britling, “saw it through,” exercised the “creative stoicism” of Lyulph Graves, and occasionally managed to rise above his pamphleteering style to produce entertaining novels of lives muddled by uncertainty, conflict, and contradiction. Richard D. McGhee Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, 1895; The Plattner Story and Others, 1897; Thirty Strange Stories, 1897; Tales of Space and Time, 1899; The Vacant Country, 1899; Twelve Stories and a Dream, 1903; The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, 1911; A Door in the Wall and Other Stories, 1911; The Short Stories of H. G. Wells, 1927; The Favorite Short Stories of H. G. Wells, 1937. NONFICTION: Text-Book of Biology, 1893 (2 volumes); Honours Physiography, 1893 (with Sir Richard A. Gregory); Certain Personal Matters, 1897; A Text-Book of Zoology, 1898 (with A. M. Davis); Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, 1902 (also known as Anticipations); The Discovery of the Future, 1902; Mankind in the Making, 1903; A Modern Utopia, 1905; Socialism and the Family, 1906; The Future in America: A Search After Realities, 1906; This Misery of Boots, 1907; New Worlds for Old, 1908; First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life, 1908; The Great State: Essays in Construction, 1912 (also known as Socialism and the Great State); The War That Will End War, 1914; An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters, 1914 (also known as Social Forces in England and America); God, the Invisible King, 1917; The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, 1920; Russia in the Shadows, 1920; The Salvaging of Civilization, 1921; A Short History of the World, 1922; Socialism and the Scientific Motive, 1923; The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution, 1928; Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy, 1929; The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and Its Possibilities, 1929-1930 (with Julian S. Huxley and G. P. Wells); The Way to World Peace, 1930; What Are We to Do with Our Lives?, 1931 (revised edition of The Open Conspiracy); The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind, 1931 (2 volumes); After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation, 1932; Evolution, Fact and Theory, 1932 (with Huxley and G. P. Wells); Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain Since 1866, 1934 (2 volumes); The New America: The New World, 1935; The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis, 1936; World Brain, 1938; The Fate of Homo Sapiens: An Unemotional Statement of the Things That Are Happening to Him Now and of the Immediate Possibilities Confronting Him, 1939; The New World Order: Whether It Is Obtainable, How It Can Be Attained, and What Sort of World a World at Peace Will Have to Be, 1940; The Common Sense of War and Peace: World Revolution or War Unending?, 1940; The Conquest of Time, 1942; Phoenix: A Summary of the Inescapable Conditions of World Reorganization, 1942; Science and the World Mind, 1942; Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church, 1943; ’42 to ’44: A Contemporary Memoir upon Human Behaviour During the Crisis of the World Revolution, 1944; Mind at the End of Its Tether, 1945. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Adventures of Tommy, 1929.

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Bibliography Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester, England: University Press, 1961. Bergonzi examines Wells’s fin de siècle milieu and analyzes the scientific romances to The First Men in the Moon; he concludes that the early writings deserve recognition. Includes a bibliography, an appendix providing texts of “A Tale of the Twentieth Century” and “The Chronic Argonauts,” notes, and an index. Costa, Richard Hauer. H. G. Wells. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A sympathetic survey of Wells’s career and influence, with an emphasis on the major novels in the context of literary traditions before and after Wells. A chronology, a review of contemporary trends in Wells criticism, notes, an annotated bibliography, and an index strengthen this helpful book. Hammond, J. R. An H. G. Wells Chronology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. A guide to Well’s life and work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. ____________. An H. G. Wells Companion. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. Part 1 describes Wells’s background and his literary reputation. Part 2 is an alphabetical listing and annotation of every title Wells published. Part 3 provides succinct discussions of his short stories; part 4 contains a brief discussion of book-length romances, and part 5 addresses individual novels. Part 6 is a key to characters and locations. There is also an appendix on film versions of Wells’s fiction and a bibliography. An indispensable tool for the Wells scholar. Haynes, Roslynn D. H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future. London: Macmillan, 1980. This is a thorough study of the influence of science on Wells’s fiction and sociological tracts. It shows how science helped Wells to achieve an analytical perspective on the problems of his time, from art to philosophy. A bibliography and an index follow notes for the text. Huntington, John, ed. Critical Essays on H. G. Wells. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Essays on his major writings, including Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly, as well as discussions of his science fiction and his treatment of social change, utopia, and women. Includes an introduction but no bibliography. Smith, David C. H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. The most scholarly biography of Wells, covering, with authority, every aspect of his life and art. Includes very detailed notes and bibliography.

Paul West Paul West

Born: Eckington, England; February 23, 1930 Principal long fiction · A Quality of Mercy, 1961; Tenement of Clay, 1965; Alley Jaggers, 1966; I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon, 1970; Caliban’s Filibuster, 1971; Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas, 1972; Colonel Mint, 1972; Gala, 1976; The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, 1980; Rat Man of Paris, 1986; The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, 1988; Lord Byron’s Doctor, 1989; The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, 1991; Love’s Mansion, 1992; The Tent of Orange Mist, 1995; Sporting with Amaryllis, 1996; Terrestrials, 1997; Life with Swan, 1999; The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, 2000; O.K.: The Corral, the Earps, and Doc Holliday, 2000. Other literary forms · Paul West is a remarkably prolific novelist whose literary interests also include poetry, criticism, and other nonfiction. In addition to his books of verse, Poems (1952), The Spellbound Horses (1960), and The Snow Leopard (1964), West has published memoirs: I, Said the Sparrow (1963) recounts his childhood in Derbyshire; Words for a Deaf Daughter (1969), one of West’s most popular works, poignantly relates the experiences of his deaf daughter, Mandy; and Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe (1983) describes the author’s determination to learn to swim at middle age. His short stories were collected in The Universe and Other Fictions in 1988. Besides his numerous essays and book reviews in dozens of periodicals, journals, and newspapers, West has published The Growth of the Novel (1959), Byron and the Spoiler’s Art (1960), The Modern Novel (1963), Robert Penn Warren (1964), The Wine of Absurdity: Essays in Literature and Consolation (1966), and a series of books entitled Sheer Fiction (vol. 1, 1987; vol. 2, 1991; vol. 3, 1994). A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery was published in 1995, and The Secret Lives of Words was published in 2000. Achievements · When West arrived on the literary scene as a novelist, he was regarded as an author who possessed a compelling voice but also as one who wrote grotesque and verbally complex fictions. The unevenness of critical reaction cannot overshadow, however, the regard with which serious readers have approached his work, and a list of his fellowships and awards clearly indicates a writer of significant stature: He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1962), a Paris Review Aga Kahn Prize for Fiction (1974), the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for science studies (1975), the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing (1980), the Hazlett Memorial Award for Excellence in the Arts (1981), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1985), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction (1985). In 1998 the French government decorated him Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Besides teaching at Pennsylvania State University from 1962 to 1995, West was a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at numerous American universities. As his fiction developed, West showed himself to be a highly imaginative, experimental, and linguistically sophisticated writer. Critics usually commend him for his original style and note the striking diversity of his oeuvre. 973

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Biography · Paul Noden West was born in Eckington, Derbyshire, on February 23, 1930, one of two children, into a working-class family. After attending local elementary and grammar schools, West went to Birmingham University, then to Lincoln College, Oxford, and in 1952 to Columbia University on a fellowship. Although profoundly attracted to New York life, West was forced to return to England to fulfill his military service in the Royal Air Force and there began his writing career. Once he concluded his service, West taught English literature at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, wrote a volume of poems, and did considerable work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1962 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and returned to the United States, where he took up permanent residence. He was a member of the English and comparative literature faculties at Pennsylvania State University from 1962 to 1995, dividing his time each year between teaching and writing in New York. Upon his retirement, he devoted himself to writing and guest lectureships at Goucher College, University of Miami, Cornell University, and the United States Air Force Academy. He prefers the United States to England, and he has become an American citizen. Analysis · Paul West has long insisted that what is most important to him as a writer is the free play of the imagination. What the imagination invents, he contends, becomes something independent and actual. West himself states the case most clearly when noting that “elasticity, diversity, openness, these are the things that matter to me most.” Thus his fictions often revolve, both thematically and structurally, around the interplay between the individual and his or her imagination and an absurd, threatening universe. Often these fictions rely heavily upon dreams of one sort or another, with characters living in their dreams or living out their dreams or becoming confused about where dreams leave off and the world begins. Consequently, West’s fictions often abound with a sense of precariousness as characters who are constrained in one form or another struggle to free themselves and find their places in the world. Sanity frequently becomes the central issue in these lives, with protagonists taking on the forces of conventionality in their private wars with the drab and mundane. Typical West heroes are outsiders, often marginal or largely inconsequential figures, who will not or cannot conform to the forces about them and who, in striking out on their own, pay steep prices for their individuality. A Quality of Mercy · A Quality of Mercy, West’s first novel and a work which he largely disowns, deals with a collection of embittered and failed lives overseen by Camden Smeaton, the novel’s central consciousness. The novel is otherwise unmemorable except insofar as it anticipates concerns West more successfully developed in later novels: alienation, immersion in dream and illusion, the idea of an irrational universe, and the use of stylistic fragmentation. Tenement of Clay · On the other hand, Tenement of Clay, West’s second novel, stands as a far more accomplished work, controlled, stylistically inventive, morally probing. Here West introduces the reader to the voices of two narrators, each of whom is compelling and unique. The work is divided into three chapters, the two shortest forming a frame offered by Pee Wee Lazarus, a dwarf wrestler whose direct idiom immediately assaults the reader and demands his attention. His desire is to “involve” the reader in his tale, a story that revolves around Papa Nick, narrator of the middle section, who along with Lazarus meets a taciturn giant he names Lacland. Lacland

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appears to have no home or clear destination, so Nick takes him back to his rooms, where Nick presides over a private flophouse for local bums. Kept in the darkened basement, Lacland soon develops, under Lazarus’s perverse tutelage, a sexual appetite and his own abusive language. After a series of horrible misadventures, Lacland reverts to his despondency and silence and eventually becomes Nick’s legal ward. All these events, extreme and dramatic as they may appear, actually operate as a backdrop to Nick’s personal turmoil. For years he has carried on a fitful relationship with Venetia, a former film actress, who exhorts him to abandon his altruism toward the derelicts and to run off with her to a life of leisure. When Nick physically collapses from the burden of Lacland and Lazarus’s escapades, Venetia nurses him back to health, leaves him when he returns to his bums, and dies in a car crash in Florida. The novel’s soul comes in the form of Nick’s constant ruminations, which offer a way of coping with and sometimes solving the dilemmas of his existence. Gradually the line between straight narration and Nick’s hallucinations begins to dissolve; the two become one, and the reader learns something fundamental about this world: Dream and reality invade each other; there is no escaping one for the other. The novel is furthermore important for the moral questions it raises. Perhaps the most telling of these involves one’s responsibilities to other human beings; in particular terms, is Nick responsible for the lives he admits into his home? As Lacland and Lazarus demonstrate, Nick has assumed the role of a Dr. Frankenstein and created his own monsters, whom he has unwittingly unleashed upon the world. Is the answer to this dilemma incarceration? Lacland’s temporary internment in the basement suggests that it is not. For Nick, these are the questions that finally come with life itself, and his failure to arrive at any fixed solution suggests a form of authorial honesty about the complexity of modern existence. In this context, the epigraph from Samuel Beckett makes sense: “If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable.” The novel’s title comes from a passage in John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681-1682), and certainly the images of tenements abound in the work: all the buildings in this metropolis Lazarus calls New Babylon, especially Nick’s flophouse, the grave into which Venetia is lowered, and the human body itself, which contains and in many cases entraps the spirit. In their concerns with their corporeal selves, most of these characters miss the important questions Nick poses throughout. Life, then, amounts to inhabiting one vast tenement, and the point is never escape, but how one chooses to live that life. Alley Jaggers · With his next novel, Alley Jaggers, West moved even further into depicting a consciousness at odds with the rest of the world. Alley is as compelling a narrator as Lazarus or Nick, and like them he speaks in a language that is distinct and unique, an idiom that oddly combines Irish brogue, Midlands accent, and personal argot. Alley is a profoundly frustrated little man who realizes that his job and marriage are unfulfilling but who has no idea how to remedy his situation. He spends his most satisfying moments dreaming of horses and the elaborate names owners concoct for them and creating airplanes in his attic retreat. Alley wants desperately to make an impression of some kind, and one of his creations, an androgynous, semihuman form emitting a silent scream, both intrigues his fellow workers and stands as an effigy of his own condition.

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Eventually his boredom and frustration explode into violence when he accidentally kills a young woman during an unsuccessful sexual tryst. In fear and confusion, he wraps her body in plaster and makes a companion for his own statue. When the police inevitably discover the body, Alley has finally and inadvertently stumbled into prominence: In the police he finds his first willing audience in years. West’s purpose here is far more sophisticated than the old cliché of the criminal as artist or as misunderstood noble creature. Instead, Alley represents the alienated individual, the small person cut off from any meaningful existence who struggles in hopeless confusion to make his life somehow mean something. Unfortunately, Alley is locked in the prison of himself, both convict and jailer at once, and remains in fundamental confusion about what to do. Nevertheless, his most vital moments are spent in his imagination, which is infinitely more extravagant and vital than his quotidian existence. I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon · The second novel in the Jaggers trilogy, I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon, represents an entirely different turn in West’s career. Here he not only shifts his attention from Alley to his much maligned wife, Dot, but also creates a more controlled, straightforward type of narrative. The real daring in this work comes in West’s attempt to enter the consciousness of a woman, to take the same world of the first novel and shift the perspective to see through the eyes of another member of the family. Where Alley was frustrated and irresponsible to anyone outside himself, Dot lives a life of devotion and caring: attending to Alley’s irascible mother, ministering to her dying father in a nursing home, and visiting Alley in the mental hospital. Like Alley, she needs a release from boredom and conventionality, which eventually she achieves through immersion in her sensual self. The measure of her change can be seen in her eventual decision to throw over her old life and run away to Birmingham with Jimsmith Williams, a black bus-driver. Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas · Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas, the final volume in the trilogy, finds Alley (now referred to as AJ) in analysis with Dr. Withington (With) in a state institution. Who is counseling whom becomes vague as With is drawn increasingly into AJ’s fractured mind, and the two eventually reverse roles, thus effecting AJ’s temporary freedom and With’s incarceration. More than any of the previous novels, this one dramatically stakes its claim to stylistic and linguistic experimentation. Attempting to enter AJ’s mind as fully as possible, West fashions one of his densest, most verbally complex fictions. While the reader is often at a loss to understand the exact meaning of many passages, what one does comprehend is AJ’s indefatigable desire to experience as much as he can as quickly as he can. The result is criminal melee with AJ commandeering a bulldozer and digging up graves in search of his dead father, threatening customers in a bar, sodomizing and murdering a cow, covering himself with the animal’s blood and sawdust, and starting a fire in a factory near his mother’s home. AJ’s immersion in his own mind becomes so complete that, like a Beckett character, he reaches a state of almost total silence by the end of the novel. Once again, West examines the line between madness and sanity, originality and convention, but like all of his fictions, the work is no polemic; AJ is neither saint nor hopelessly depraved misanthrope but a tortured human being who desperately wants “a bit of individuality.” The work is also significant for the fact that West actually intrudes on the fiction

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in spots, first in a long footnote in which he explains the eccentricities of his characters’ names and ends by noting that “in this text, optical illusion is empirically sound,” and later in another footnote announcing his own presence throughout the narrative. The point in both cases is to assert artifice as a fictional construct: Fictions are both stories about people and about fiction itself. Caliban’s Filibuster · West deals with some of these same concerns in Caliban’s Filibuster, the novel that was published immediately before Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas. This work represents West at his most experimentally extreme as he takes his deepest plunge into an individual’s consciousness. Cal, the narrator, is yet another of West’s profoundly frustrated protagonists, in this case a failed novelist-cum-screenwriter who chafes at bastardizing his talent for decidedly mercenary ends. As he travels over the Pacific Ocean with his companions Murray McAndrew, a ham actor, and Sammy Zeuss, a crass film producer and Cal’s employer, voices representing various of Cal’s divided selves carry on endless debates about his artistic aspirations. Thus the reader is not only taken fully into the character’s mind but also given access to the dimensions of his troubled psyche. To appease these voices and satisfy himself, Cal concocts three separate yet interdependent scenarios in which he and his companions play significant roles. In creating these tales, Cal attempts to convince himself of his abused talent and also to distance himself from his experience, like a viewer before a screen in a theater watching versions of his own life. Like Caliban, his Shakespearean namesake in The Tempest (1611), Cal seethes with revenge, cursing those who control him. On his behalf, however, readers must regard his filibuster as an attempt to retain his individuality, which he sees as being eroded by the sterile conventions of his profession. One way to view the novel is as West’s paean to language itself, for it abounds in extravagant verbal complexities: anagrams, puns, malapropisms, acronyms, rhymes, and alphabet games. Language operates not only as Cal’s professional tool but also as his saving grace; it literally keeps him sane, affording him the diversity of experience that the world denies. Like so many of West’s heroes, Cal feels himself trapped, contained by forces which inexorably press against and threaten to destroy him. Language becomes his one potent defense. Colonel Mint · In Colonel Mint, West operated from a seemingly straightforward, but by no means uncomplicated, premise: An astronaut in space claims that he has seen an angel. Whether he has or not is beside the point; instead, the fact that he thinks he has and that others want to disabuse him of this belief becomes the subject of this alternately humorous and morally serious work. For his comment Mint is shunted off to the hinterlands of Washington State and is forced to undergo endless hours of interrogation. If he recants he can go free; otherwise, he must indefinitely remain a prisoner of the space program. The more Mint refuses to cooperate, the more clever and depraved the methods used against him become. After threats, physical beatings, and sexual sadism fail to make Mint waver, his tormentor, General Lew R., begins—like Dr. With in Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas—gradually to assume Mint’s point of view. He wonders what it would be like to see an angel, what exactly an angel is, and finally he accepts, though he cannot empirically confirm, that Mint has seen an angel. When the two men escape from the interrogation compound for the wilds of the surrounding woods, it appears they have defeated the forces of conformity and

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conventional thinking. As is the case in so many of West’s fictions, however, those forces track the characters down and exact payment: Lew R. is shot and Mint is frozen. Thus, in this novel, to assert one’s individuality becomes tantamount to political treason, and the response of the state is swift, final, and utterly unforgiving. Stylistically the novel is far more straightforward than Caliban’s Filibuster, but in at least one important respect it recalls a feature of Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas. The tone of the novel, for all of its physical and psychological horror, is remarkably level, often nonchalant and conversational. Here the narrator, not necessarily the author, addresses the audience directly a number of times. For example, early in the work, when the reader begins to doubt the plausibility of Mint’s abduction, the narrator anticipates one’s objections by remarking, “You might ask, now, where is the humanity in all this; where sweet reason went. . . .” The effect here and later in the work, when the intrusions continue, is one of complicity; the audience cannot remain at the safe distance of voyeur but must participate, psychologically and emotionally, in the events that transpire. The forces of conformity involve everyone, and the audience becomes uncomfortably aware of this throughout the narrative. Gala · In Gala, West extends the range of his experimentation but also returns to some familiar territory as he develops fictionally the situation described in Words for a Deaf Daughter. Here, novelist and amateur astronomer Wight Deulius and his deaf child Michaela construct a model of the Milky Way in their basement. The reader takes a stellar journey through the universe, moving increasingly toward what appear to be the limits of the imagination. What is especially intriguing about this work is the form West’s experimentation takes. Recalling the practice of earlier novels, but especially Caliban’s Filibuster, West fashions a unique structure for the fiction. Where in the latter work he relies upon the International Date Line and the color spectrum (different sections of the novel are devoted primarily to different colors), in Gala elements of physics and the genetic code symbols offer the pattern for the story. West explains this practice when remarking, “I am a compulsive exotic and structural opportunist. I have no idea what structures I will choose next—although I do feel that they will probably be from nature rather than from society.” The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg · In his ninth novel, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, West once again shifted focus and style to re-create the details of one of Adolf Hitler’s would-be assassins. The novel represents the best in historical fiction, a seemingly effortless blending of fact, elaboration, and pure fantasy, with the result that history becomes for the reader felt experience rather than a catalog of dry, distant details. As West points out in a preface, Stauffenberg is important not only for his public persona but also as someone whose military experience recapitulates, to greater or lesser degrees, that of West’s father and all those who lived through World War II. Thus the reader comes to understand an important feature of this writer’s fiction, which he expresses as follows: “Whatever I’m writing evinces the interplay between it and my life at the moment of writing, and the result is prose which, as well as being narrative and argumentative and somewhat pyrotechnical, is also symptomatic.” While the narrative, on the surface, seems markedly different from the novels which immediately precede it, one can also see characteristic West concerns emerging. For example, most of the novel places the audience squarely in Stauffenberg’s

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mind as he copes with his war wounds, struggles to express the abiding love he feels for his wife and family, ponders the responsibilities that come with his social and military class, and rages increasingly at the psychopathic perversity of Hitler, the displaced paperhanger. West manages to avoid the obvious trap of the revisionist historian who might be tempted to make Stauffenberg into a martyr or saint. Instead, he emerges as a deeply committed, idealistic man but also one whose psyche is profoundly bruised and disturbed by the events of which he finds himself a part. The structure of this novel is also just as experimental as that of earlier novels. West had been reading a number of medieval books of hours, lay breviaries that offer devotional prayers alongside richly illuminated paintings. Stauffenberg’s rich hours are the last thirty-six of his life; the novel, however, does not stop with his execution. West imaginatively allows the count to speak to the audience from the grave, becoming, then, the most authoritative and omniscient of narrators describing those turbulent last months of the Third Reich. Rat Man of Paris · Rat Man of Paris, his most popular novel, found West exploring yet again the effects of the Third Reich on the life of yet another alienated, marginal figure, in this case a boulevardier of modern Paris who spends his time accosting passersby with a rat he conceals in his overcoat. Étienne Poulsifer, the rat man, has survived the Nazi occupation and destruction of his childhood village, and he carries about with him the emotional and psychological baggage of his horrifying past, as well as the rats which serve as metaphor for that growing legacy. When he learns of Klaus Barbie’s extradition to France, Poulsifer confuses him with the Nazi commander responsible for his parents’ death and goes on a personal campaign to become the conscience of an entire nation. Watching all this is Sharli Bandol, Rat Man’s lover, who desperately tries to bring some order and love into the chaos of his condition. The birth of a son appears to temper Poulsifer’s extremism, but to the end he retains his eccentricity and thus his individuality. Like The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, Rat Man of Paris carefully examines the interplay between personal and public trauma, and as West puts it, “Everybody who’s born gets the ontological shock, and some people get the historical shock as well, and he has both. Because he has the historical shock, he has the ontological shock even worse, and this has blighted his life.” Thus the rat man stands as a contemporary Everyman, radically imperfect, overwhelmed by the world in which he finds himself, but tenaciously determined to make something of his existence. Also like other of West’s protagonists, Poulsifer demonstrates the vitality of the creative imagination. Were it not for his wild musings, the delight he takes in yoking utterly disparate things together in his mind, he would be consumed by history and dreary conventionality. In many ways he is the last free man, an essential primitive who refuses the definitions and restrictions of others for a life created on his own terms. Terrestrials · West’s seventeenth novel, Terrestrials, was actually a story over which he had labored for twenty years or more. It involves a pair of American pilots flying a secret reconnaissance jet over Africa. During one routine flight, they are forced to eject over the Danakili Desert. One of the men is put to work by members of a local tribe in the grueling duties of a salt-mining crew, while the other is stranded in his ejection capsule on the ledge of a nearby mountain. Miraculously they are both

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rescued, ferried off to Turkey, and “debriefed” by junior officers they despise who question their loyalty. They are then returned to the United States and are kept on a base for more questioning. Eventually they escape, open an air touring business, and evade an assassination attempt. On the surface the plot may seem confusing and unspectacular; however, plotting is neither the novel’s primary concern nor the source of its achievement. The novel is a bold attempt to evince some of what two minds undergo as a result of life-altering trauma. Each is oppressed with guilt, feeling that he has betrayed the other, and although the two are not actually friends, they are devoted to and dependent upon each other. They grow closer as a result of their shared experience. In many ways the novel can be seen as a paean to friendship and near-filial devotion, and it asserts the intimate interconnectedness of all life. Life with Swan · Another intimate portrait can be found in Life with Swan, a roman à clef about West’s early courtship and years with his spouse of more than twenty years, poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman (an anagram of her name—Ariada Mencken—is used for the female character’s). Set in the 1970’s, the novel follows a middle-aged professor as he falls in love with a younger woman, against the advice of many of his friends and colleagues. The two begin a life that saves him from his excesses. Their mutual fascination with astronomy develops into a full-blown passion and culminates with their being witnesses, at the behest of Raoul Bunsen (a character who is an echo of cosmologist Carl Sagan), to the launches of the Viking spacecraft to Mars and the Voyager to Jupiter. If Terrestrials is a paean to friendship, Life with Swan is a companion piece that examines and glorifies the saving grace of unselfish love. The prose is lush and extravagant, every page lovingly adorned with West’s incomparable lyricism. Throughout his career, West has drawn criticism for his own stylistic eccentricities and rich verbal texturings. The usual complaint holds that he is self-indulgent and willfully obscure. While indeed his fiction makes considerable demands of his audience, he is anything but deliberately perverse or obscure. In fact, West consistently attempts to reach and communicate with his audience, to involve them, in each of his rich fictional stories. His note at the beginning of Tenement of Clay, the interview appended to Caliban’s Filibuster, the footnotes in Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas, the moments of direct address in Colonel Mint, the announcement in the middle of Gala of the novel’s particular structure, and the preface to The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg—all demonstrate that West is fully aware of his audience and always desirous of its sympathetic participation in the fictional experience. West is committed to the proposition that writing matters and that good writing must present its own unique experience. As he says in his essay “In Defense of Purple Prose,” “The ideal is to create a complex verbal world that has as much presence, as much apparent physical bulk, as the world around it. . . . This is an illusion, to be sure, but art is illusion, and what’s needed is an art that temporarily blots out the real.” David W. Madden Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Universe and Other Fictions, 1988. POETRY: Poems, 1952; The Spellbound Horses, 1960; The Snow Leopard, 1964. NONFICTION: The Growth of the Novel, 1959; Byron and the Spoiler’s Art, 1960, 2d ed. 1992; I, Said the Sparrow, 1963; The Modern Novel, 1963; Robert Penn Warren, 1964; The

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Wine of Absurdity: Essays in Literature and Consolation, 1966; Words for a Deaf Daughter, 1969; Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe, 1983; Sheer Fiction, 1987; Portable People, 1990 (drawings by Joe Servello); Sheer Fiction, vol. 2, 1991; Sheer Fiction, vol. 3, 1994; A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery, 1995; My Mother’s Music, 1995; The Secret Lives of Words, 2000. EDITED TEXT: Byron: Twentieth Century Views, 1963. Bibliography Bryfonski, Dedria, and Laurie Lanza Harris, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. Contains extracts from reviews of West’s works, including Gala and Words for a Deaf Daughter, from such sources as The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. Most of the reviews are favorable, addressing West’s intelligent writing as both an advantage and a disadvantage. One reviewer praises Words for a Deaf Daughter, calling it a “sympathetic book for anyone who feels responsible for someone else.” Another review describes Gala in terms of its “startling, dazzling meditations.” Lucas, John. “Paul West.” In Contemporary Novelists, edited by James Vinson. London: St. James Press, 1976. Lucas discusses the Alley Jaggers sequence of novels, which “deservedly won his reputation as an original novelist,” although he faults them for their lack of psychological study. Mentions West’s highly acclaimed study of Lord Byron’s poetry and Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas. Lists West’s works up to 1975 and includes a statement by West. McGuire, Thomas G. “The Face(s) of War in Paul West’s Fiction.” War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1998): 169-186. Traces the persistence of West’s rumination on warfare and conflict. Three principal novels—The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, and Rat Man of Paris—form the basis of the argument. The journal also contains an interview with West and three of the author’s short fictions. Madden, David W. “Indoctrination to Pariahdom: Liminality in the Fiction of Paul West.” Critique 40, no. 1 (Fall, 1998): 49-70. Examines five of West’s novels to explain the confusions and violence found so frequently there. The essay argues that each novel presents characters suspended in a liminal state from which they have difficulties extracting themselves. ____________, ed. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 1 (Spring, 1991). A special half-issue devoted to West. Contains thirteen essays, an interview, and a primary bibliography of West’s work up to The Women of Whitechapel, examining his novels from a variety of perspectives. The collection also features three short fictions from West. ____________. Understanding Paul West. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. A book-length study on West that provides an overview of his work through The Women of Whitechapel. Intended as an introductory study to West’s life and fiction, it traces the development of the themes of identity, artistic creation, and imagination’s freedom. Pope, Dan. “A Different Kind of Post-Modernism.” The Gettysburg Review 3, no. 4 (Autumn, 1990): 658-669. Looks at West’s 1988 short-story collection, The Universe and Other Fictions, in the company of Rick DeMarinis’s The Coming Triumph of the Free World and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s If the River Was Whiskey. A fine sustained consideration of West’s short fiction. Saltzman, Arthur M. “Beholding Paul West and The Women of Whitechapel.” Twentieth

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Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 40, no. 2 (Summer, 1994): 256-271. Examines West’s thirteenth novel in terms of the author’s wit and inventive verbal energy and the uneasy balance between ontology and linguistic inventiveness. West, Paul. “Paul West.” In Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, edited by Mark Zadrozny. Vol. 7. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. A beautifully written autobiography, filled with rich images and information about West’s early life, his ideas about writing, and other writers who became his friends. Includes a bibliography of his works.

T. H. White T. H. White

Born: Bombay, India; May 29, 1906 Died: Piraeus, Greece; January 17, 1964 Principal long fiction · Dear Mr. Nixon, 1931 (with R. McNair Scott); First Lesson, 1932 (as James Aston); They Winter Abroad, 1932 (as Aston); Darkness at Pemberley, 1932; Farewell Victoria, 1933; Earth Stopped: Or, Mr. Marx’s Sporting Tour, 1934; Gone to Ground, 1935; The Sword in the Stone, 1938; The Witch in the Wood, 1939; The Ill-Made Knight, 1940; Mistress Masham’s Repose, 1946; The Elephant and the Kangaroo, 1947; The Master: An Adventure Story, 1957; The Candle in the Wind, 1958; The Once and Future King, 1958 (tetralogy; includes The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind); The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to “The Once and Future King,” 1977. Other literary forms · T. H. White’s first literary productions were two poetry collections. Several short stories enclosed within the satirical frame narrative of Gone to Ground were reprinted along with later items in the posthumously issued The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981). The majority of White’s nonfiction books celebrate his strong interest in field sports; The Goshawk (1951), which describes his experiments in falconry, is the most notable. The title of The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959) refers to a legendary monument on the island of Inniskea. White also wrote two books on famous scandals, The Age of Scandal: An Excursion Through a Minor Period (1950) and The Scandalmonger (1952). Achievements · White labored long and hard in relative obscurity before achieving literary success. His most successful work, The Sword in the Stone, was considered by many a children’s book. White intended from the very beginning, however, that the story should be the introduction to a comprehensive modern rendering of the Arthurian legend, and the second and third volumes became increasingly adult in their concerns and much darker in their implications. The fourth part languished unpublished for nearly twenty years, but after it was finally revised to form the conclusion of The Once and Future King the collection was eventually recognized as a masterpiece of modern fantasy. Even that version lacked the original fifth part, however, which remained unpublished for another nineteen years—thirteen years after the author’s death. Although the animated film of The Sword in the Stone (1963) and the film version of the Once and Future King-based stage musical Camelot (1967) have reached a far wider audience than the original novels, the Arthurian sequence can now be seen as a work comparable in ambition and quality to the similar endeavors of fantasy novelist J. R. R. Tolkien. Biography · Terence Hanbury White was born in Bombay, the son of a district supervisor of police and the grandson of a judge. He spent his first five years on the Indian subcontinent before returning to England with his mother, Constance. His childhood was difficult because Constance—who eventually obtained a judicial separation from her husband but not the divorce that would have allowed her to marry 983

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her live-in lover—was mentally disturbed, and White was frightened of her. Removal to Cheltenham College in 1920 provided no relief; mistreatment from classmates maintained his misery, but he still won admission to Queen’s College in Cambridge. He might have been happier there were it not for anxieties about his own condition, in which homosexual feelings and alcoholism were further confused by the total loss of his early religious faith and irrepressible sadomasochistic fantasies. As if this were not enough, he contracted tuberculosis while in his second year at Cambridge, and his teachers had to donate money to send him to Italy to convalesce; it was there that he wrote his first novel. White returned from Italy in much better condition. His determination to stay fit and healthy cemented his interest in field sports, but his triumph over physical frailty was shadowed by an exaggerated awareness of his mortality, which added furious fuel to all his activities. After obtaining a first-class degree with distinction in 1929 he became a schoolmaster for a while—concluding with a four-year stint at one of England’s best public schools, Stowe, in 1932-1936, before the autobiographical potboiler England Have My Bones (1936) sold well enough to win him a commission to deliver a book every year to his publisher, Collins. He rented a gamekeeper’s cottage on the Stowe estate in order to pursue his new career. Fearful of conscription into a war he desperately did not want to be involved in, White moved to Ireland (which remained neutral throughout World War II) in 1939, lodging in Doolistown in County Meath and at Sheskin Lodge in County Mayo. In these two locations, living as an exile, he wrote the fourth and fifth parts of the Arthurian series, but Collins ended the book-per-year arrangement after issuing The Ill-Made Knight; the subsequent hiatus in his career lasted until 1946. In that year he relocated to the Channel Islands, living briefly in Jersey before settling in Aldernay in 1947; he died in his cabin, apparently of heart failure, while on a Mediterranean cruise in 1964. Analysis · White’s first five novels, one of which was written in collaboration with R. McNair Scott and two of which were concealed under the pseudonym James Aston, were all naturalistic. The only one which is now remembered is his nostalgic panorama of the Victorian era, Farewell Victoria, which was also the only one not solidly rooted in his own experiences. The first he wrote, They Winter Abroad—the third published, under the Aston pseudonym—is of some interest for the insight it offers into his youthful state of mind. Earth Stopped and Gone to Ground · Earth Stopped is a satiric comedy paying respectful homage to the works of English novelist Robert Smith Surtees, whose addiction to hunting, shooting, and fishing White shared. White’s similarly addicted friend Siegfried Sassoon had introduced him to a reprint of Surtees’ 1845 novel Hillingdon Hall in 1931. Sassoon’s autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) reflects sarcastically on the fact that he had been sent to a sanatorium to save him from a court-martial when he refused to return to the front after being wounded in action in 1917, and his influence on White’s attitudes was profound. Earth Stopped introduces the inept revolutionary Mr. Marx into a Surtees-like party gathered for a weekend’s sport at an English country house. The party remains blithely good humored until the final chapters, when a world war abruptly precipitated by the forces of communism and fascism breaks out, at which point “the universe split open like a pea-pod, informed by lightning but far transcending thunder.”

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The story continues in Gone to Ground, in which the survivors of the house party swap tall tales while they hide from the catastrophe, taking psychological refuge in fantasy while taking physical refuge underground. Although its prophetic pretensions were supposedly impersonal, this provided an ironic metaphorical account of the subsequent shape of White’s life and career. The book ends with the conclusion of the final tale—reprinted in The Maharajah and Other Stories as “The Black Rabbit”—in which Keeper Pan, who was the inventor of panic as well as the god of nature, asserts his ultimate dominion over the objects of human sport. The Once and Future King · Anticipation of a new world war, which many imaginative people expected to put an end to civilization, overwhelmed English fantastic fiction in the late 1930’s. Other English writers were writing apocalyptic fantasies far more terrifying than Earth Stopped, but White decided to go in the opposite direction, becoming a connoisseur of playful escapism. The account of the boyhood and education of Arthur set out in The Sword in the Stone is as firmly rooted in personal experience as White’s earliest novels are, but it is a calculated magical transformation of the oppressions that afflicted the author and his ultimate redemption from them. The Sword in the Stone begins with an exotic schoolroom syllabus devised for the future Sir Kay by his governess, who cannot punish her noble student but can and does take out her frustrations on his whipping boy, “the Wart,” who is not recognized as the future embodiment of England and the chivalric ideal until he acquires a far more inspiring tutor in Merlyn. The debt that White owed to his tutor at Cambridge and longtime correspondent L. J. Potts is acknowledged in the fact that Merlyn, whose prophetic gifts result from living his life in reverse, actually served as a Cambridge tutor in the twentieth century, which lay in his distant past. The account of the childhood of Gareth and his brothers contained in The Witch in the Wood is far darker—in spite of comic relief provided by the alcoholic lapsed saint Toirdealbhach and King Pellinore’s obsessive pursuit of the Questing Beast—because their lustful, neglectful, and unbalanced mother is a transfiguration of White’s own. The characterization of Lancelot in The Ill-Made Knight probably owes something to Siegfried Sassoon as well as to White’s perception of himself, and it is significant that the text explicitly compares the greatest of all the Arthurian knights to one of the great sportsmen of the late 1930’s, the Australian cricketer Donald Bradman. Lancelot’s obsessive anxiety that his forbidden love for Guenever will sap the strength that makes him England’s champion and deny him the chance to find the Holy Grail is a transfiguration of White’s anxieties about his homosexuality and terror of military service (both of which were implicated in his decision to live as a recluse as soon as it became economically viable). Given the deep personal significance of the first three volumes, it is hardly surprising that the dourly harrowing The Candle in the Wind, which White wrote in the latter months of 1940, is saturated with his anxiety for the blitzkrieg-devastated England that he had left and the civilization that it represented. He wrote to Potts on December 6, 1940, that he had discovered that “the central theme of the Morte d’Arthur is to find an antidote to war.” In the fifth volume, Arthur goes underground with his old tutor, and they analyze the dismal failure of the Grail quest and look for a new way forward. While they do so, in The Book of Merlyn, they are surrounded by the animals Arthur loved so much as a boy, and Keeper Pan is certainly present in spirit, if not in person. Two key sequences from The Book of Merlyn were transposed into the version of The Sword in the Stone contained in The Once and Future King, and other

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elements were grafted onto the new version of The Candle in the Wind to supply the sense of an ending, but these devices distorted the balance and meaning of the whole, which was not published in its intended form. J. R. R. Tolkien set out to expand his children’s fantasy The Hobbit (1937) into an epic at almost exactly the same time White began to elaborate The Once and Future King. Tolkien was a Catholic and an Old English scholar who carefully excluded everything that had arrived in Britain with the Norman conquest (1066) from the mythos of his fantastic secondary world, Middle Earth; however, it was precisely that imported tradition of chivalric romance that White chose for the heart of his own exercise. There is, therefore, a curious sense that the two resultant masterpieces of fantasy are as complementary and opposed as the universities of Oxford, which was Tolkien’s home, and Cambridge, White’s spiritual home, to which he remained anchored by his correspondence with L. J. Potts. One might also compare and contrast The Once and Future King with the fantasies of an older Cambridge man who was also troubled by inescapable sadomasochistic fantasies, John Cowper Powys, who eventually followed up the Grail epic A Glastonbury Romance (1932) with a more explicit transfiguration of Arthurian myth, Porius (1951), which was never issued in its entirety. Powys tackled the problem of designing a mythology for the much-conquered island of Britain by producing his own syncretism of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman elements with earlier Celtic and Greek myths. All three of these writers were trying to construct or reconstruct a neomythological epic for an island that had somehow never contrived to produce a real one, which would also embody and allegorize the crisis at which the contemporary British nation had arrived in the pause between World War I and World War II. Of the three, White’s is by far the most lighthearted but also—by virtue of its precipitous plunge into tragedy in The Candle in the Wind—the most emotional. It is perhaps ironic that Tolkien, who was not nearly as committed to the politics of escapism as White, should have become the parent of a whole genre of escapist fantasy, while White became best known as the inspirer of a Walt Disney film and a musical comedy. Thanks to the University of Texas edition of The Book of Merlyn, however, modern readers and critics have the opportunity to reconstruct White’s masterpiece as he intended it to be read, and to judge its true worth as an epic for the isle of Britain. Later novels · The three fantasies that White wrote after he recovered from the disappointment of Collins’s initial refusal to publish The Candle in the Wind are best regarded as footnotes to the main sequence of his novels, displaying a gradual acceptance of the fact that he was seen as a children’s writer. The Elephant and the Kangaroo is an allegorical comedy in which an English atheist in Ireland witnesses a visitation by the archangel Michael and sets out to build an ark in response to the threat of an impending second deluge. In Mistress Masham’s Repose, a young girl discovers descendants of the Lilliputians of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) living on an island and sets out to defend them from commercial exploitation by Hollywood filmmakers. The Master is a science-fiction story for children, whose juvenile heroes thwart the eponymous island-based villain’s plans for world domination. Brian Stableford

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Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Maharajah and Other Stories, 1981. POETRY: Loved Helen and Other Poems, 1929; The Green Bay Tree: Or, The Wicked Man Touches Wood, 1929. NONFICTION: England Have My Bones, 1936 (autobiography); The Age of Scandal: An Excursion Through a Minor Period, 1950 (anecdotes); The Goshawk, 1951; The Scandalmonger, 1952 (anecdotes); The Godstone and the Blackymor, 1959 (autobiography); America at Last, 1965 (autobiography). TRANSLATION: The Book of Beasts, 1954 (of medieval bestiary). Bibliography Brewer, Elisabeth. T. H. White’s “The Once and Future King.” Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1993. Examines White’s work and other Arthurian romances, historical fiction, and fantastic fiction. Includes bibliography and an index. Crane, John K. T. H. White. New York: Twayne, 1974. A competent overview of White’s work. For the beginning student. Irwin, Robert. “T. H. White.” The St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. A good summary account of White’s fantasies. Kellman, Martin. T. H. White and the Matter of Britain. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1988. The second volume of a series on the historical novel. Kellman studies the Arthurian legend in detail. Manlove, C. N. The Impulse of Fantasy Literature. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983. The chapter on White carefully relates his work to the book’s other subjects and the tradition of British fantasy. Warner, Sylvia Townsend. T. H. White: A Biography. London: Cape/Chatto & Windus, 1967. A sensitive biography, whose central conclusions are summarized in Warner’s introduction to The Book of Merlyn.

Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde

Born: Dublin, Ireland; October 16, 1854 Died: Paris, France; November 30, 1900 Principal long fiction · The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 (serial), 1891 (expanded). Other literary forms · Oscar Wilde wrote in a number of literary forms. His earliest works were poems published in various journals and collected in a volume entitled Poems in 1881. His later and longer poems, including The Sphinx (1894), were occasionally overwrought or contrived, but his final published poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), is regarded by many as a masterpiece. Wilde wrote two collections of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). He wrote several plays, most notably the comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), the successful farce The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and the controversial and temporarily banned Salomé (1893). Finally, Wilde wrote a few short stories, including “The Canterville Ghost” (1887) and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (1887). Achievements · Oscar Wilde’s works remain popular a century after his death. This is due in part to the enduring beauty of his poetry and his prose, as well as the timeless insight he offers about art and morality. Wilde’s conclusions are presented with such easy elegance and wit that readers enjoy the seduction of the narrative. No doubt Wilde’s provocative statements and iconoclastic poses, as well as the notoriety of his trial, helped to immortalize his life and thus to sustain interest in his writings for generations. Wilde received Trinity College’s Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek in 1874, and he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry in 1878. Biography · Oscar Wilde was born to ambitious, successful Irish parents in Dublin in 1854. As a young man he attended Trinity College, and in 1874 (at age twenty) he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, on a scholarship. Wilde was drawn to art criticism and literature in his studies, and he was strongly influenced by several mentors, most notably writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater. At college Wilde discovered, developed, and began to refine his extraordinary gifts of creativity, analysis, and expression. These he pressed into the service of aestheticism, an iconoclastic artistic movement promoted by Pater, which advocated “the love of art for art’s sake.” Wilde would come to personify aestheticism, with all its intellectual refinement, provocative posing, and hedonistic excess. Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884 and with her had two sons. Although throughout his short life Wilde evinced great love and devotion to his wife and sons, he grew increasingly involved in sexual liaisons with men. Most notably and tragically, Wilde became engrossed in an obsessive and rocky homosexual friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensberry. Douglas helped to lead Wilde deeper into London’s homosexual underworld. While Douglas at times seemed to genuinely love Wilde, he periodically became impatient, selfish, and abusive toward his older friend. Still, Wilde remained, with increasing recklessness, committed to Douglas. 988

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During the second half of the 1880’s Wilde wrote poems, plays, and stories with increasing success. To a large extent, however, it was his provocative and radical remarks, made at public lectures and at the social functions he so frequently attended, that gained for him sustained public attention. Wilde was a gifted speaker with a keen sense of timing and an ability to lampoon societal standards with his humorous remarks.

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The Victorian public’s amusement with Wilde’s contrarianism turned to contempt in 1895. In this year the Marquis of Queensberry, furious over the writer’s continuing relationship with his son, accused Wilde of being a “sodomite.” Wilde ill-advisedly sued for libel, maintaining that he was not, in fact, homosexual. The Marquis, to support his claim about Wilde’s homosexuality, entered into court various letters and other pieces of evidence. When Queensberry’s lawyer was about to produce as witnesses young male prostitutes who had had sexual relations with Wilde, Wilde’s lawyer withdrew from the suit. Queensberry was acquitted by the jury. Almost immediately after the trial, Wilde was arrested for violation of England’s sodomy laws. By now the public had all but deserted Wilde, and after his conviction even most of his friends disavowed him. Wilde spent two years in prison for his offenses. Upon his release from prison in 1897 Wilde left England to live in exile, finally locating in Paris. He lived under the alias Sebastian Melmoth, attempting to expunge his notoriety as the humiliated Oscar Wilde. Yet his spirits and his health had been broken by his prison sentence, and Wilde died within three years, at age forty-six. Analysis · Wilde began his literary efforts with poetry, which was a common approach in his day. He published Ravenna in 1878. He would write little poetry after the release of Poems in 1881. For the next several years he gave lectures in Europe and America, establishing his name on both sides of the Atlantic. He also assumed the editorship of a monthly magazine, The Lady’s World, which was rechristened The Woman’s World. In the late 1880’s Wilde wrote two collections of fairy tales, as well as a number of short stories, essays, and book reviews. He steadily gained attention as a writer, social critic, and, most of all, aesthete. Literary critics frequently were unenthusiastic, or even hostile, toward his works, finding them to be overly contrived or recklessly immoral. It is true that Wilde’s writing can at times assume a baroque ornamentation and artificiality. There is no doubt that Wilde’s characteristic indolence (which he exaggerated for show) constrained his ability to see his works through to the final stages of editing and polishing. It is true also that Wilde’s writing frequently ridiculed social conventions, mores, and morals. Yet Wilde was indisputably an ingenious analyst of art and culture, possessing a mastery of prose and verse, and equipped with a keen sense of paradox. The Picture of Dorian Gray · Oscar Wilde’s only novel was published in its complete form in 1891. It is not a long book, and some of its features reflect the writer’s haste or carelessness. However, the story is a fascinating and engaging one, at once depicting basic elements of human nature and conjuring fantastic, almost gothic images. Its plot is rather simple, but the ideas and issues that the narrative presents are complex and even profound. Perhaps for this reason the book has stood the test of time. The story centers on three figures: an artist (Basil Hallward), his clever but impudent friend (Lord Henry Wotton), and a young, attractive, and impressionable man (Dorian Gray). Basil paints a full-length portrait of young Dorian and presents it to him as a gift. Lord Henry, who meets Dorian for the first time at Basil’s studio, talks at length about the supreme value, but transience, of youth. Immediately drawn to Lord Henry’s theories, Dorian observes the just-completed portrait of himself and remarks on “how sad it is” that he “shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. . . . If it were only the other way!” In the first section of the book, therefore, Wilde sets up a framework to examine some funda-

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mental ideas about art and beauty: the transience of beauty, the inevitability of aging and death, the goal of the artist to “capture” beauty in art, and the corruptive influence of ideas, among others. Wilde uses Lord Henry—whom Wilde later declared to be a depiction of how the public perceived Wilde—to provide the corruptive theories and ideas. Throughout the book Lord Henry utters clever aphorisms and paradoxes in Wilde’s celebrated wordplay. Dorian is infatuated by Lord Henry and appears receptive to his theories and values. Readers soon see evidence of the corruptive influence of those theories and values in Dorian’s behavior. Dorian becomes smitten by a young actress in a seedy theater. He returns with Basil and Lord Henry to watch her perform, but this time he is disappointed by her acting. After the performance the actress declares to Dorian that he has helped her see how false is her world of acting—the false world of the stage—and she declares her love for him. Dorian, however, spitefully dismisses her, claiming that she had thrown away her artistic genius and poetic intellect. Now, she “simply produce(s) no effect.” Upon returning home, Dorian observes a slight change in the portrait Basil had painted of him. Dorian notes a “touch of cruelty in the mouth.” It becomes evident that the painting shows the outward signs of sin and of aging, while Dorian himself does not change appearance. Although first horrified by this, Dorian eventually learns to take advantage of the situation. The narrative traces an ever-worsening degradation of Dorian Gray’s soul. He lives for sensations and self-gratification, without regard for the consequences of his actions upon others. He is seemingly unbound by any sense of morality—indeed, the very notion of violating moral strictures seems to be an attractive prospect for him. Near the climax of the story Dorian goes so far as to murder Basil. The story thus raises provocative questions about morality and self-imposed restraint. If a person could be assured that any indulgences, including gluttony, sexual abandon, and avarice, would have no effect upon one’s earthly body, would selfcontrol survive? What opportunities and temptations are imposed upon one who possesses unusual and eternal beauty? What is the relationship between virtue and constraint? What are the consequences of unexposed moral degradation? Indeed, what are the causes of immorality? The Picture of Dorian Gray aroused enormous indignation in Wilde’s contemporaries, and it was treated especially harshly by most critics. There seemed to be a consensus that the book itself was immoral, that it could corrupt readers, and that it somehow promoted decadent behavior. Yet one can easily arrive at the opposite conclusion. The story clearly emphasizes the costs of self-indulgent, immoral behavior. It literally shows this in the changes that appear in the painting, which is understood to portray the condition of Dorian’s soul. The story also makes a point of noting the harm done to others by Dorian’s misbehavior: reputations ruined, hearts broken, suicides induced, murders committed. In no way does the book portray the corruption of Dorian Gray in a glamorous or seductive way. Instead, the effect is to repulse the reader. The book might be somewhat corruptive in its suggestion that immorality may be less a choice than simply a product of circumstances. We have no reason to believe that Dorian Gray is intrinsically evil; rather, if the book’s basic premise that one’s soul is normally reflected in one’s appearance, then the introduction of Dorian as possessing “youth’s passionate purity” conveys the idea that he is especially innocent. Ironically, Wilde himself was accused of corrupting a young man (Lord Alfred

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Douglas), and his writings (including The Picture of Dorian Gray) were held up as evidence of his dangerous ideas. That Wilde responded that he believed there was no such thing as an immoral book, only a badly written one, compounds the irony. The fatalistic view of sin (which might be consistent with Wilde’s religious upbringing, such as it was) is further evidenced when Dorian is unable to change his course toward the end of the book. He feels his past starting to catch up with him as people he has wronged, or their defenders, begin to identify him and his actions. Resolving to abandon his ways, Dorian decides to do a good deed; he cancels an arranged plan to go off with (and undoubtedly take advantage of) a young female acquaintance. Yet when he subsequently examines the portrait for evidence of his good deed, he detects only a smirk of hypocrisy. In a conclusion laden with symbolism, Dorian considers his situation hopeless. He reflects that “there [is] a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven.” Yet he cannot fathom how he could ever confess his sins, and he recognizes that even his attempt to do good sprung from a hypocritical desire to experience new sensations. In desperation, he decides to drive a knife into the loathsome painting, which reflects all his sins. The servants downstairs hear a scream, and when they enter the room they see the portrait, restored to its original beauty, hanging on the wall. Dorian Gray lies on the floor with a knife in his heart, looking just as the figure in the loathsome portrait had moments earlier. The conclusion creates a striking and stark symmetry, although how it answers the questions raised earlier is unclear. Still, the ending is satisfying in that it allows reality to finally come out of hiding. The parallels to Wilde’s life are exceptional. While Wilde noted that the character of the languid iconoclast Lord Henry reflected how people viewed Wilde, he also asserted that it was the artist, Basil, whom Wilde actually resembled, and that it was Dorian himself whom Wilde wanted to be. Steve D. Boilard Other major works SHORT FICTION: “The Canterville Ghost,” 1887; The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888; The House of Pomegranates, 1891; Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, 1891. PLAYS: Vera: Or, The Nihilists, pb. 1880; The Duchess of Padua, pb. 1883; Lady Windermere’s Fan, pr. 1892; Salomé, pb. 1893 (in French), pb. 1894 (in English); A Woman of No Importance, pr. 1893; An Ideal Husband, pr. 1895; The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, pr. 1895; A Florentine Tragedy, pr. 1906 (one act; completed by T. Sturge More); La Sainte Courtisane, pb. 1908. POETRY: Ravenna, 1878; Poems, 1881; Poems in Prose, 1894; The Sphinx, 1894; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898. NONFICTION: Intentions, 1891; De Profundis, 1905; Letters, 1962 (Rupert Hart-Davies, editor). MISCELLANEOUS: Works, 1908; Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1948 (Vyvyan Holland, editor); Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems, 1960. Bibliography Calloway, Stephen, and David Colvin. Oscar Wilde: An Exquisite Life. New York: Welcome Rain, 1997. A brief, heavily illustrated presentation of Wilde’s life. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. A biography of Wilde, drawing much insight from Wilde’s published works. The book is exten-

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sively documented and footnoted and makes use of many of Wilde’s writings and recorded conversations. Includes bibliography and appendices. Hardwick, Michael. The Drake Guide to Oscar Wilde. New York: Drake, 1973. A description, with excerpts, of a number of Wilde’s writings. Also includes a brief biography and an alphabetical index of descriptions of the major characters in the stories and plays. Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde. New York: Carrol and Graf, 1997. A biography written by one of Wilde’s dedicated friends. Although hardly an objective work, Harris’s book, written in the first person, provides details and insights about Wilde’s life that many books do not. Hyde, H. Montgomery. Oscar Wilde: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. Detailed discussion of Wilde’s life, with emphasis on his trials and his exile. Many passages in this book draw upon published essays, poems, letters, and even testimony at Wilde’s trial. Includes bibliography.

A. N. Wilson A. N. Wilson

Born: Stone, England; October 27, 1950 Principal long fiction · The Sweets of Pimlico, 1977; Unguarded Hours, 1978; Kindly Light, 1979; The Healing Art, 1980; Who Was Oswald Fish?, 1981; Wise Virgin, 1982; Scandal, 1983; Gentlemen in England, 1985; Love Unknown, 1986; Incline Our Hearts, 1988; A Bottle in the Smoke, 1990; Daughters of Albion, 1991; The Vicar of Sorrows, 1993; Hearing Voices, 1995; A Watch in the Night: Being the Conclusion of the Lampitt Chronicles, 1996; Dream Children, 1998. Other literary forms · Despite the regularity with which A. N. Wilson produces novels, he has never been limited to that form alone. He is one of the best-known journalists in Great Britain, having served as literary editor to The Spectator, the prestigious weekly journal of conservative social and political opinion, and as the literary editor of the Evening Standard. His own writing has not been confined to reviewing books, and he is often a commentator on social and political subjects. Wilson has a special interest in religion, and aside from his occasional essays on that subject, he published a study of the layman’s dilemma in matters of Christian belief, How Can We Know? (1985), and historical biographies of Jesus and of the apostle Paul. He taught at the University of Oxford and wrote biographies of writers Sir Walter Scott, John Milton, Hilaire Belloc, Leo Tolstoy, and C. S. Lewis. He has also published volumes of essays and reviews, Pen Friends from Porlock (1988) and Eminent Victorians (1989), as well as children’s books, mostly about cats, such as Stray (1987) and The Tabitha Stories (1997). Achievements · The Sweets of Pimlico gained for Wilson the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1978, and The Healing Art won three prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award for 1980 and the Arts Council National Book Award for 1981. Wise Virgin brought him the W. H. Smith Annual Literary Award in 1983, and his study of Scott, The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott (1980), won the Rhys prize for him once again. Another of his biographies, Tolstoy (1988), won the Whitbread Award in 1988. There are several formidable writers in Wilson’s generation, but it is possible to distinguish Wilson as one of the best of the satirists and, as such, one of the most perceptive commentators on Great Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Given his talent, and his capacity to comment attractively (if sometimes improperly) on the excesses of his society, it is not surprising that he has become something of a public personality, the literary figure most often identified with the “Young Fogeys,” that amorphous group of literary, social, and political figures who espouse the principles of landowning Toryism and look with nostalgia back to the old Empire and to the days when High Anglicanism was a spiritual power in the land. Part of their conservatism is sheer mischief-making, part of it a matter of temperament and class, but in Wilson’s case, it is a love for the aesthetic detail of what he sees as a richer and more caring society (which does not stop him from making wicked fun of it). 994

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Biography · Andrew Norman Wilson, born in Stone, Staffordshire, England, in 1950, was educated at Rugby, one of the great English public schools, and at New College, Oxford. He won the Chancellor’s Essay Prize in 1971 and the Ellerton Theological Prize in 1975. He was a lecturer in English at New College and at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, from 1976 to 1981. He was then appointed literary editor of The Spectator for two years and later became the literary editor of the Evening Standard. In addition to his fiction, his nonfiction, and his children’s books, he has published in The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, Daily Mail, Observer, and the Sunday Telegraph. In 1992, he narrated Jesus Before Christ, a presentation by Thames Television Production which presents a demythologized approach to Jesus’ life. His declaration of loss of faith and departure from the Church of England in the early 1990’s ran parallel with events in the lives of a number of major characters throughout the corpus of his fiction. His new understanding and interpretation of Jesus and Saint Paul are presented in his biographies, published in 1992 and in 1997 respectively, of those early Christian figures. During his second year of studies at Oxford, Wilson married Katherine Duncan-Jones, one of his tutors in English at Oxford’s Somerville College and a specialist in Renaissance literature. Early in the marriage they became the parents of two daughters. After the marriage ended in divorce, he married Ruth Guilding, an art historian whom he met in 1989 when filming a television episode of Eminent Victorians, which he was narrating. Wilson was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981 and is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Analysis · A. N. Wilson’s novels are part of the tradition of sophisticated wittiness—sometimes comic, sometimes satiric—that explores the English caste system (with particular emphasis upon the middle and upper-middle classes), long a subject for English letters, particularly in the 1930’s. The promise that World War II would not only stop international tyranny but also destroy the British social hierarchy did not, in fact, come true. Great Britain may have fallen on hard times economically, and may have become less important politically, but the class structure, though shaken, would prevail. The Sweets of Pimlico · Evelyn Waugh was the foremost social satirist prior to the war and until his death in 1966, commenting on the dottier aspects of life among the well-born, the titled, the talented, and the downright vulgar climbers and thrusters, determined to ascend the greasy pole of social, political, and economic success. Wilson’s first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico, might well have been written by a young Waugh. Thinly plotted, but written with astringent grace and wide-ranging peripheral insights into the fastidious improprieties of the privileged, it tells of the queer love life of Evelyn Tradescant (whose surname alone is appropriately bizarre, but whose credentials are established by the fact that her father is a retired diplomat, Sir Derek Tradescant, of some minor political reputation). By chance, Evelyn tumbles (literally) into an association with a much older man, Theo Gormann—wealthy, pleased by the attentions of a young woman, and mysteriously ambiguous about his past, which seems to have involved close association with the Nazis before the war. While Theo urges his peculiar attentions on Evelyn, so does his closest friend, John “Pimlico” Price, and Evelyn learns that everybody seems to know one another in varyingly confusing ways. Her father and mother remember the Gormann of Fascist persuasion, and her brother, Jeremy, is also known to Theo through his connection with Pimlico, who proves to be an occasional male lover of

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Jeremy, who in his last year at Oxford is doing little work but considerable loving, including a sudden excursion into incest with Evelyn. Wilson is teasingly and sometimes feelingly successful in exploring the sexual brink upon which Evelyn and Theo hover in their relationship and which convinces Theo to give part of his estate to Evelyn. Pimlico, the present heir, knows that someone is being considered as a joint recipient of the estate, but he never suspects Evelyn, and Theo dies before the will is changed. All is well, however, since Evelyn and Pimlico decide to marry. It is farce of high order in which coincidence, arbitrary behavior, and sophisticated silliness are mixed with moments of genuine tenderness (but not so tender as to overcome the sly mockery of money and influence in the smart set of south London). Unguarded Hours and Kindly Light · In his next two novels, Unguarded Hours and Kindly Light, Wilson eschews the underplayed wit of The Sweets of Pimlico for comic excess, reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse in its extravagant playfulness. These theological comedies are strongly cinematic in their incident and character and they display, if ridiculously, Wilson’s strong interest in, and deep knowledge of, English Anglicanism and its constant flirtation with Roman Catholicism as well as his affectionate enthusiasm for the detail, the knickknackery of religious ceremony and trapping. The two novels ought to be read in the proper chronological order, since the hero escapes in a balloon at the end of Unguarded Hours and begins in the next one, having floated some distance away, once again trying to make his way into the clerical life. The Healing Art · The Healing Art, one of Wilson’s most admired works, reveals how wide his range can be, not only tonally but also thematically. The novel is a “black comedy” in the sense that acts which normally offend are portrayed in such a way that readers enjoy the improprieties without worrying about the moral consequences. Two women, one a university don, one a working-class housewife, meet while having surgery for breast cancer and comfort each other, despite the fact that they otherwise have nothing in common. Their doctor, overworked but peremptory, unfeeling, and vain, may have misread the women’s X rays and deems one of them cured and the other in need of chemotherapy. The gifted, handsome, successful younger woman, informed of her possibly fatal condition, refuses treatment, energetically determined to live out her life quickly and to explore her personal relations with some fervor. In the process, she learns much about herself and her male friends and becomes involved in a love affair with the cast-off, occasional mistress of the man whom she presumed was, in fact, her lover (even if such love had not, to the moment, been consummated). Wilson juxtaposes the range of experience open to a woman of the upper middle class, searching for some meaning for the last days of her life, surrounded by the many pleasures and alternatives of her world, to the life of a working-class woman, supposedly healthy, but obviously wasting away and ignored by family and by the medical profession as something of a nuisance. The cruelty of it all is subtly explored by Wilson, and the final ironies for both women are unnervingly sad and comic. Wilson proves with this novel that he is serious, and sensitive, particularly in dealing with the emotional lives of the two women. Who Was Oswald Fish? · In Who Was Oswald Fish?, which might be called a contemporary black fairy tale, coincidence simply struts through the novel. The mysterious Oswald Fish, a turn-of-the-century architect and designer whose one church—a Gothic ruin in the working-class district of Birmingham—is to be the center of life and death

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for the parties drawn together to decide its fate, proves to be related to everyone who matters (and some who do not). In the retrieval of Fish’s reputation from the neglect and indifference of twentieth century tastelessness and vulgarity, one suicide, one manslaughter, and two accidental deaths occur, the latter two in the rubble of his lovely old church. No one means any harm (although there are two children in this novel who could put the St. Trinian’s gang to flight). Fanny Williams, former pop star and model and survivor of the English rock revolution of the early 1960’s, is, in the late 1970’s, famous again as the owner of a chain of trash-and-trend novelty shops dealing in Victorian nostalgia, and she is determined to protect the ruined church from demolition at the hands of soulless civic planners. Sexy, generous, and often charmingly silly, her life is an extravagant mess, a whirlpool of sensual, slapstick nonsense in which some survive and some, quite as arbitrarily, drown. Behind the farcical escapades lies Wilson’s deep affection for the rich clutter of Victoriana juxtaposed to the new efficiency. Wise Virgin · After the comic excesses of Who Was Oswald Fish?, Wilson pulled back into the narrower range of his early work in Wise Virgin. There has always been a sense that not only Waugh but also Iris Murdoch influenced him (The Sweets of Pimlico had been dedicated to her and to her husband, the literary critic John Bayley), particularly in the way in which she uses love as an unguided flying object, which can strike any character in the heart at any moment. Love tends to strike arbitrarily in Wilson’s fiction, for he, like Murdoch enjoys tracing the madness of fools in love. Also reminiscent of Murdoch, Wilson works interesting technical detail into his novels, often of the religious world, but in Who Was Oswald Fish? his interest in Victorian architecture and objets d’art predominates and adds amusingly to the texture of the novel. In Wise Virgin, Wilson utilizes his own special knowledge as a literary scholar, since his protagonist, Giles Fox, is a medievalist, working on a definitive edition of an obscure text, A Treatise of Heavenly Love, on the relation of virginity and the holy life. Fox, irascible, snobbish, and sometimes vicious, has two virgins on his hands, his daughter, whom he has sought to educate without benefit of twentieth century influence, and his assistant, Miss Agar, who is determined to marry him. Wilson has been accused of gratuitous cruelty in the way in which he allows his characters to comment upon the gracelessness of contemporary British society, and it is true that Fox is a master of the unfair comment and is insensitive to the possibility that some kinds of stupidities, particularly in the less privileged classes, are only innocent gaucheries. Certainly Fox is an unattractive protagonist, but he is also a man who has suffered much, having lost one wife in childbirth and another in a motor accident, and having himself gone blind in midcareer. He is something of a twentieth century Job (although more deserving of punishment), and the tone and plot of the novel suggest black comedy bordering on tragedy. On the lighter side, Wilson satirizes Fox’s sister and brother-in-law, who, suffering from that peculiar kind of arrested development which strikes some people as cute, indulge interminably in the baby talk of the schoolboys whom the husband teaches in a public school, clearly based upon Wilson’s own school, Rugby. Gentlemen in England · Gentlemen in England takes place in the late Victorian period of which Wilson is so fond. With this work, Wilson has written a trick novel, partly in the tradition of Thomas Keneally and E. L. Doctorow, in which actual historical events and characters intrude on, and affect, the action. Wilson, however, refuses to

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use obvious historical allusions carefully chosen to satisfy the vanities of intelligent, well-informed readers. Much of the historical structure requires a deep knowledge of Victorian England. For example, although the novel definitely takes place in 1880, the exact date is never stated but must be gathered from certain facts mentioned by the characters. Allusions to George Eliot and Henry James might be easy to pick up, but those to public figures of the time, such as Charles Bradlaugh, E. B. Pusey, and Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, require a formidable cultural memory. The story centers on a father who has lost his Christian faith in the face of Darwinism; a son who is flirting with the late stages of the Oxford movement in religion, with the more theatrical experiments of High Anglicanism, and with the revival of the Roman Catholic Benedictine movement; and a daughter pursued by a disciple of Alma-Tadema, the popular painter of the time. Wilson recounts their family drama in a Victorian style, most reminiscent of the works of Anthony Trollope— slightly arch, witty, but restrainedly so, and inclined to overripe ironies. Like Victorian furniture and design, it is rich and heavy to the point of ponderousness. Inside this lovingly detailed, historically accurate structure, Wilson plays out pure farce: A mother, still beautiful in early middle age, falls in love with a young painter, who falls in love with the daughter, who is half in love with her mother’s old lover, who is half in love with both of them, and who is Wilson’s way into the real world of London life. Called, with obvious intent, Chatterway, the former lover is intimately associated with the major figures of London life in that particularly lively year, 1880. Gentlemen in England is, in many ways, a work which illustrates Wilson’s manipulative curiosity about the ways in which novels can be pushed and pulled about. Kingsley Amis has similar ideas, and his Riverside Villas Murder (1973) anticipated Wilson in its careful re-creation of a 1930’s-style English murder mystery in which content, structure, and language were scrupulous imitations of the real thing. This awareness of the novel as a form which could be used in many ways allows Wilson many humorous moments. In Who Was Oswald Fish?, he introduces, in a minor role, Jeremy Tradescant, who was the sexually confused brother of Evelyn, the heroine of The Sweets of Pimlico. He goes even further in making a comment on the fate of Evelyn’s marriage to Pimlico Price, incomprehensible to all but those who have read the earlier novel. Wilson introduces into Gentlemen in England a genuinely thoughtful discussion of the problem of Christian faith, which is tonally at odds with the clutter of Victorian sexual high jinks. He has, in short, no sense of decorum, not because he does not know, but because he knows so well. Sometimes, as in Scandal and Love Unknown, he seems to have returned to social satire; the latter novel is puzzling until one recognizes that it is based upon the most pathetic kind of popular romance. Wilson is off again, manipulating the genre, enriching junk literature by imposing first-class literary technique on banality and turning it into something it hardly deserves. The Lampitt Chronicles · In a vein similar to his other novels, Wilson’s five novels that constitute the Lampitt Chronicles focus on a group of middle- and upper-class English whose lives become intertwined through a variety of typically Wilsonian “coincidences.” With its ironic overview of twentieth century English society, this roman-fleuve quintet chronicles the life of the first-person narrator, Julian Ramsey, and the lives of several members of the upper-class Lampitt family. The first two novels recount the early events in Julian’s life. In Incline Our Hearts, a twelve-year-old orphaned Julian is living with his Uncle Roy, the vicar at Timpling-

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ham. Roy, obsessed with the Lampitt family, continuously recounts “Lampitt-lore” to Julian, who develops an interest in James Petworth (“Jimbo”) Lampitt, a minor Edwardian writer whose death begins the novel. This hilarious commentary on English snobbery and English institutions follows Julian at school (the “English Gulag”) and through his adolescence. A Bottle in the Smoke, a darker satire, records Julian’s marriage to Anne, a Lampitt niece. Some of the exasperation, confusion, and emptiness over modern relationships between the sexes expressed in poet T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is echoed here (and in the next three novels). The satire continues in Daughters of Albion, as Julian becomes “Jason Grainger” on the nationally popular radio series The Mulberrys. Raphael Hunter ( Jimbo’s biographer, who outraged the family by presenting Jimbo as a homosexual) successfully sues a would-be Blakean poet, Albion Pugh, for accusing him of murdering Jimbo. Interspersed with his satire on the world of publishing, radio, and television, Wilson, through both the narrator and Pugh, presents ideas about myth, Christianity, Jesus, and Saint Paul, which later find their nonfiction counterparts in Wilson’s religious biographies. Hearing Voices is a mystery as well as a comedy of manners. Ramsey, asked to write an authorized biography of the Lampitts, goes to America to do research, and he marries for the second time (unsuccessfully). The murder of the American tycoon who had bought Jimbo’s literary papers remains unsolved, as Wilson’s emphasis continues to be on human interactions. In A Watch in the Night: Being the Conclusion of the Lampitt Chronicles, Ramsey, in his late sixties and at peace with himself, addresses dramatist William Shakespeare—as Saint Augustine does God in his Confessiones (397-400; Confessions, 1620)—as he reflects on his life and its intersection with the lives of countless characters. This Proustian summary clarifies major and minor ambiguities in the earlier novels (and resolves the murders). Although Wilson’s satiric tone varies in his novels from caustic to gentle, his works are generally amusing, perceptive about the human condition, and memorable for their characters (despite their chaotic lives). His insight into English society and its institutions, past and present, reflects the deep confusions not only of contemporary England but also of twentieth century Western civilization. Whether he should be grouped primarily with Angus Wilson and Evelyn Waugh for serious farce, with Iris Murdoch and Joyce Cary for analytical comedy, or with Kingsley Amis for caustic irony, it is clear that Wilson is one of the twentieth century’s major English authors. Charles H. Pullen, updated by Marsha Daigle-Williamson Other major works NONFICTION: The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott, 1980; The Life of John Milton, 1983; Hilaire Belloc, 1984; How Can We Know?, 1985; Pen Friends from Porlock, 1988; Tolstoy, 1988; Eminent Victorians, 1989; C. S. Lewis, 1990; Jesus, 1992; The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor, 1993; Paul: The Mind of the Apostle, 1997; God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization, 1999. CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: Stray, 1987; The Tabitha Stories, 1988; Hazel the Guinea Pig, 1989. EDITED TEXTS: The Faber Book of Church and Clergy, 1992; The Faber Book of London, 1993.

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Bibliography CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 10, no. 8/9 ( June/July, 1990): 1-16. Introduction is by Jerry L. Daniel, and articles are by John Fitzpatrick, George Sayer, and Eugene McGovern. The entire issue is devoted to reviews of Wilson’s 1990 biography of C. S. Lewis, which are mostly unfavorable because of disagreement with his biographical approach and speculative interpretation. Landrum, David W. “Is There Life After Jesus? Spiritual Perception in A. N. Wilson’s The Vicar of Sorrows.” Christianity and Literature 44 (Spring/Summer, 1995): 359368. A discussion of Wilson’s first novel after he declared his unbelief in Christianity. Wilson deals much more seriously here with the problem of evil and other difficult religious questions than in his other fiction. Weales, Gerald. “Jesus Who?” The Gettysburg Review 6, no. 4 (Autumn, 1993): 688-696. A comparison of Gore Vidal’s treatment of Christ in his novel Live from Golgotha (1992) to Wilson’s treatment of Christ in Jesus. Weinberg, Jacob. “A. N. Wilson: Prolific to a Fault.” Newsweek 112 (September 13, 1988): 75. A short but well-written essay, interspersed with comments by Wilson, on his novels and biographies. Also concerns Wilson as a “Young Fogey,” a term used to describe young members of the Conservative party in England. Wilson, A. N. “PW Interviews A. N. Wilson.” Interview by Michele Field. Publishers Weekly 231 (May 15, 1987): 262-263. In the course of this interview, Wilson discusses his Anglo-Catholicism, the inevitable comparison of his works with those of Evelyn Waugh, the “cruel” nature of his novels, and his views on the writing of biography. Also contains much valuable biographical information. Wolfe, Gregory. “Off Center, on Target.” Chronicles 10, no. 10 (1986): 35-36. Wolfe’s essay concerns Wilson’s affinities with Evelyn Waugh, particularly in terms of their style and in their perspectives on Western Christianity. Sees Wilson as in the tradition of P. G. Wodehouse, who epitomized the light comic novel, but in Wilson’s hands that novel becomes a vehicle for satire and social criticism.

Angus Wilson Angus Wilson

Born: Bexhill, East Sussex, England; August 11, 1913 Died: Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England; June 1, 1991 Principal long fiction · Hemlock and After, 1952; Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, 1956; The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, 1958; The Old Men at the Zoo, 1961; Late Call, 1964; No Laughing Matter, 1967; As If by Magic, 1973; Setting the World on Fire, 1980. Other literary forms · Angus Wilson started his literary career in 1946, at the age of thirty-three, by writing short stories. The earliest stories were published in Horizon. The Wrong Set and Other Stories (1949), Such Darling Dodos and Other Stories (1950), and A Bit off the Map and Other Stories (1957) deal with the same problems and use the same imagery as his novels. Wilson also wrote drama, and in the 1970’s, he became a leading reviewer of fiction. His literary journalism and criticism for The Spectator, The Observer, and London Magazine center mainly on the problem of the English novel. The range of writers he discussed in articles, introductions, or lectures is extremely wide and includes, among others, the Victorians, the Bloomsbury Group, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevski, Irving Shaw, Robert Penn Warren, and William Golding. He also published three full-length literary monographs: Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels (1952), The World of Charles Dickens (1970), and The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977). Wilson’s many lectures and articles display his concern with a wide range of problems relevant to the second half of the twentieth century. Most important for the study and understanding of his art is the volume The Wild Garden: Or, Speaking of Writing (1963), which contains lectures given in California in 1960. Some of his criticism was collected in Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson (1983). Travel pieces written over several decades are collected in Reflections in a Writer’s Eye (1986). Achievements · Most critics agree that by the 1980’s, Wilson had secured a place among the most distinguished contemporary British novelists. He even became recognized outside the English-speaking world, particularly in France. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the number of interviews with the artist increased, signifying his growing recognition among critics. Whether the critics use Stephen Spender’s terminology of “modern” and “contemporary,” or speak of experimental, psychological, aesthetic, or modern versus the traditional, sociological English novel, they all try to assess Wilson in relation to these categories. Some contend that Wilson’s main concern rests with the sociological aspects of human life, but almost all critics concede that his interest goes beyond social issues. Without abandoning his commitment to depicting reality, Wilson was always committed to probing deeper into the dark depths of the human self. This concern with the inner self separates him sharply from the “angry” writers who also wrote in the 1950’s: Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe. Wilson, however, was dedicated to experimenting in both content and method. In his novels and critical writings, he emerged as a champion for a new type of novel, standing between the traditional and the experimental. 1001

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Biography · Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, on August 11, 1913, the sixth son of a middle-class family. His father was of Scottish extraction; his mother came from South Africa, and he spent some time there as a child. In constant financial troubles, his parents tried to maintain pretense and appearance, which left a deep impression on Wilson: At a very early age, he became aware of the chasm separating the real world and the world of fantasy into which many people escape to avoid the unpleasant facts of their lives. Frequently lonely (he was thirteen years younger than his next older brother), he realized that his clowning ability made him popular with the schoolchildren. He attended prep school in Seaford; from there he went to Westminster School and then to Merton College, Oxford. At the University of Oxford, his history training was on the Marxist line; that fact and his left-wing political activities in the 1930’s account for his Labour sympathies. In 1937, he started work at the British Museum, and, with an interruption during World War II, he stayed there until 1955. During the war, he was associated with an interservice organization attached to the Foreign Office, and for a while he lived in the country in a home with a Methodist widow and her daughter. During this time, he had a serious nervous breakdown; his psychotherapist suggested creative writing as therapy. In 1946, Wilson rejoined the staff at the British Museum and, at the same time, started writing seriously. His first published writing, the short story “Raspberry Jam” (1946), reflects his personal crisis and foreshadows the dark atmosphere of most of his work to come. The whole experience at the British Museum, situated in London’s sophisticated Bloomsbury district, and especially his job as Deputy Superintendent at the Reading Room provided him with an understanding and knowledge of the cultural establishment and of the management of cultural institutions, which he used later in The Old Men at the Zoo. Also, observing scholars, book addicts, and eccentric visitors to the Reading Room gave him material for creating some of his fictional characters, such as Gerald Middleton in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. In 1952, he published his first novel, Hemlock and After, and a critical monograph, Émile Zola. He gave talks on the novel for the British Broadcasting Corporation that were later published in The Listener. In 1955, a contract with Secker and Warburg as well as his ongoing reviewing activity for The Spectator and Encounter made it possible for him to resign his post at the British Museum. He then retired to the Sussex countryside, thus reviving his childhood garden-dream. As a result of his freedom from job-related responsibilities, he published four novels in a rapid sequence: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, The Old Men at the Zoo, and Late Call. Furthermore, his participation in the cultural and literary life of England as a journalist, critic, and lecturer became more extensive. In 1963, he started his association with the University of East Anglia as a part-time lecturer, becoming professor in 1966. Also in 1966, he became Chairman of the Literary Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1967, he lectured at Berkeley, California, as a Beckerman Professor, and in the same year No Laughing Matter appeared. In 1968, he was made Commander of the British Empire and Honorary Fellow of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz. He honored the Dickens Centennial in 1970 with The World of Charles Dickens. Between 1971 and 1974, he served as Chairman of the National Book League while receiving two more distinctions in 1972, becoming a Companion of Literature and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the latter a sign of his growing reputation in France. A sixth novel, As If by Magic, appeared in 1973; in it he made use of his teaching experience and involvement with young intellectuals. He continued to live in the country, his many activities

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including travel. His Asian journey resulted in his book The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling. He was John Hinkley Visiting Professor at The Johns Hopkins University in 1974, and, in 1977, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Delaware; he also lectured at many other American universities. In 1980, he published another novel, Setting the World on Fire. His manuscripts, deposited at the Library of the University of Iowa, provide ample material for future researchers. After suffering a stroke, Wilson died on June 1, 1991, in a nursing home in the southeast of England. He was seventy-seven years old. Analysis · “Self-realization was to become the theme of all my novels,” declared Angus Wilson in The Wild Garden. Self-realization does not take place in a vacuum; the process is closely linked with a person’s efforts to face and to cope with the world. Wilson’s childhood experience, among déclassé middle-class people living in a fantasy world, initiated the novelist’s interest in the conflict between two worlds and in the possibility or impossibility of resolving the conflict. The rapidly changing scene in England as the Edwardian Age gave way to the postwar 1920’s, with the cultural dominance of Bloomsbury, and then to the radical leftist 1930’s, impressed on him the urgency of such a search. His encounter with Marxism at Oxford intensified Wilson’s tendency to see the world as one of opposing forces. The dichotomy of town and country, of the classes, and of old and new forms the background of Wilson’s fiction as the remnants of Edwardian England disappeared and the dissolution of the British Empire left the island nation searching for its place in the modern world. In The Wild Garden, Wilson describes his creative-writing process in terms of a dialectic; he reveals that he “never felt called upon to declare allegiance to either fantasy or realism,” but then he adds that “without their fusion I could not produce a novel.” Wilson is desperately looking for syntheses to all kinds of conflicts and insists that self-realization is an absolute necessity to achieve them. His own breakdown as well as Sigmund Freud’s impact on his generation pushed Wilson in the direction of psychoanalysis and the search for identity. In an age of tension, violence, and suffering, he insists on the necessity of self-realization in order to overcome despair. Wilson’s heroes all have crippled, wasted lives and broken families, and the novelist explores their “cherished evasions.” Bernard Sand in Hemlock and After has to be shocked into self-knowledge by facing sadism in his own nature; Gerald Middleton, in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, gets a new chance for a satisfactory, if not happy, life in old age when he is ready to resume responsibility as a scholar and to reveal a shameful hoax. Both these heroes are presented in their private and public lives because, in Wilson’s view, both of these aspects of life are equally important to modern people. This view of human life in the dialectic of the private and the public is even more important for Meg Eliot, the heroine of The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot; after many frustrations she emerges at the end of the novel as a career woman. Similarly, Sylvia Calvert in Late Call discovers a meaningful (retirement) life of her own, independent of her family. Wilson was a very “British” writer with a subtle sense for the typical English understatement, while his Hegelian drive for reconciliation of conflicts agrees with the spirit of the traditional English compromise. He was constantly searching for ways to save the remnants of the liberal, humanistic values that have remained dear to him in a world that did not seem to have any use for them. His heroes and heroines, saved from final disintegration, are restored to some kind of meaningful life through selfknowledge and are brought closer to other people in defiance of loneliness and despair.

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Hemlock and After · In his first novel, Hemlock and After, Wilson extends the exploration of the theme of self-knowledge to both the private and public life of his hero. The novel is about Bernard Sand’s troubled conscience, a most private matter; but Bernard is an important public figure, described as “the country’s own ambassador to the world outside,” and a successful, self-confident novelist who organizes a subsidized writers’ colony, Valden Hall, in order to support young talent. Overtly successful, his family life is in shambles. His wife, Ella, lives in “neurotic misery”; his son is a staunch conservative in strong disagreement with Bernard’s liberal views; his unmarried daughter, a journalist, feels lonely and unhappy. As an indication of the overhanging disaster, Bernard’s first novel is entitled Nightmare’s Image. In the title, “Hemlock” suggests poisonous wrong, evil, and even violence. Poisoning and violence occur in a “massacre of innocence,” as related to Eric, Bernard’s young homosexual partner, and to the little girl Elzie, whom the disreputable Mrs. Curry wants to make available to Hugh Rose. Wilson deliberately links the fate of the two young people by calling them both “rabbits.” Rose and Mrs. Curry strike their deal at the “Lamb” Inn. The word “After” in the title refers to the aftermath of knowledge: self-knowledge. A crucial scene occurs at the end of book 1 when a still complacent and self-confident Bernard watches the arrest of young homosexuals at Leicester Square and is shocked suddenly by the discovery that he experienced sadistic enjoyment in watching the terror in the eyes of those youths. This discovery has a devastating effect on Bernard’s life and destroys not only him but also Valden Hall. The long-awaited opening of the young artists’ colony becomes a total disaster, as its erupting violence grows into a symbol of the modern predicament. Wilson describes the scene as one of chaos, disorder, disappointment, strain, and hostility. After this startling event, Bernard’s life goes downhill very rapidly; self-knowledge paralyzes his will, and he is entirely unable to act. The discovery of sadistic tendencies makes him suspect of his own motives. He realizes with frightening clarity the abyss of the human soul and is driven to utter despair about the motivation behind any action. He has a horrifying vision of the subtle difference between intention and action, and as a consequence, Bernard loses his determination to deal with Mrs. Curry. At the same time, Ella almost miraculously recovers from her nervous breakdown and, after Bernard dies, acts on his behalf in arranging efficient management at Valden Hall and a prison sentence for Rose and Mrs. Curry. Rose commits suicide in prison, while Mrs. Curry earns an early release with her good behavior. It is briefly indicated that she might continue her former activity; thus the epilogue ends the novel on an ambiguous note of qualified optimism. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes · The title Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, derived from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), suggests a typically English atmosphere; it is Wilson’s most Victorian novel, a broad social comedy. At the same time, it displays experimental technique in the use of the flashback, which provides all the background to Gerald Middleton’s crisis in his private and public life. The hero, a sixty-year-old failure, is a historian. In the beginning of the novel, sitting by himself at a Christmas party given by his estranged wife, Inge, Gerald overhears broken sentences of conversation that remind him of the most significant episodes of his life. Wilson makes it very clear that self-knowledge is important for Gerald; it is both a psychological need to him and a matter of “intellectual honesty,” a duty to the professional community of historians.

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Gerald’s crisis of conscience concerns a cruel hoax that occurred back in 1912 when he participated with a team in an excavation. Young Gilbert Stokeway, a disciple of T. H. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis and the son of the leader of the team, put a fake idol in the tomb under research at Melpham. His hoax was successful, and the fake came to be hailed as a pagan idol. At that time, Gerald was a Prufrock-like antihero: disabled physically by a sprained ankle, and disabled emotionally by his love for Gilbert’s wife, Dollie. His affair with her played an important role in his silence about the fake idol. Gerald’s feelings of guilt center on “the two forbidden subjects of his thoughts,” his marriage and the hoax. His life, “rooted in evasion,” appears to him empty, meaningless, and futile. His professional career fell victim to his decision not to reveal the hoax. Because of his affair with Dollie, he evaded dealing with Inge’s inadequacies as a mother. In fact, none of the minor characters has a happy, self-fulfilling life. While Gerald still believes in the liberal tradition, neither of his sons adheres to his beliefs. His elder son, Robert, a businessman, stands rather to the right and the younger son, John, is a radical, and they have violent clashes whenever they meet. Both sons are unhappy in their personal relationships as well. Robert is married to the conventional MarieHélène but loves the more modern Elvira Portway. John has a short-lived homosexual relationship with an unruly young Irishman, Larry, who is killed in a wild drive in which John loses a leg. Gerald’s daughter, Kay, has a serious crisis in her marriage to the smart right-wing young sociologist, Donald. Wilson employs specific imagery to drive home to the reader the overwhelming atmosphere of frustration of all these people. Expressions such as “flat and dead” and “deadly heaviness” abound, referring to the behavior of people at parties when communication is impossible. Gerald’s house is “noiseless as a tomb,” and during the Christmas party at the home of the “Norse Goddess” Inge, all those present “shivered” in spite of the central heating. Realizing the failure of his family, Gerald has to admit that he is to take the blame; when he selected Inge to be his wife, he decided for second-best. Yet, at the end, Gerald manages to pull himself out of his dead life. By revealing the hoax, he succeeds in restoring his professional status, and after a long silence, he becomes active again in research. The novel, however, like Hemlock and After, ends on a note of qualified optimism as Gerald remains estranged from his family. The picture of Gerald’s life, combined with the divergent subplots, reveals a world in which relationships do not last, where options are limited. The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot ·Critics believe that they can recognize Wilson in most of his central characters; the novelist, however, admits the connection only in the case of Meg Eliot, the heroine of his third novel, The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot. “Meg,” he says, “is in large part modelled on myself,” while David Parker’s nursery recalled to Wilson childhood memories of a garden of a friendly family. Meg Eliot, a well-to-do barrister’s childless, worldly, spoiled wife, experiences sudden tragedy when her husband dies from a gunshot wound as he tries to protect a local minister. The novel depicts Meg’s nervous breakdown and painful recovery: her journey to self-knowledge. She is first revealed to be holding desperately to her old friends; yet, their lives are no more secure than hers. Lady Pirie in her “decaying genteel jail” is preoccupied with her son only, bohemian Polly Robinson lives a kind of “animated death,” and Jill Stokes is obsessed with the memory of her dead husband. These “lame ducks” cannot help Meg, nor can drugs. Meg’s brother, David Parker, who runs the nursery with his homosexual partner, is sheltered in the pleasant

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quiet atmosphere, which suggests a return to lost innocence. Yet, Wilson is ambiguous about the validity of the garden image, since David’s nursery is commercial, an irony in itself. Meg cannot share her brother’s lifestyle, his abnegation of action and the human world. Wilson does not censure David for his contemplative lifestyle, but it is evident that he prefers Meg’s choice “to be with people!” Meg is determined to find meaning in life, in a life with people. She is strikingly reminiscent of George Eliot’s heroines; similar to them, she used to live in self-delusion and is shocked into consciousness by the “remorse of not having made life count enough” for her husband. Moreover, again like the Victorian woman, she returns to a fuller life. Two factors are important in her recovery. First, she refuses any kind of opium, a George Eliot ideal; second, she is determined to build herself a meaningful, useful life. While she admits that she “used to be Maggie Tulliver,” she also resembles Gwendolen Harleth from Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). She shares with her an unhappy childhood and the horrors of remorse, but she shares also in Gwendolen’s way of redemption. Like the Victorian heroine, Meg too had to learn in a painful way that the outside world could intrude into her life at any time and destroy it if she is taken unaware. As she takes a paying secretarial job, Meg is full of confidence in her farewell letter to David: “At any rate in a few years at least, the modern world won’t be able to take me by surprise so easily again.” The Old Men at the Zoo · From the omniscient narrator of his early works, Wilson shifts to a more modern device in The Old Men at the Zoo by creating a first-person narrator in Simon Carter. In the beginning of the novel, Simon is a gifted, dedicated yet disabled naturalist, very much like Gerald Middleton at the time of the excavation. He is prevented from continuing research in Africa because of amoebal dysentery. He joins the London Zoo as an administrator at a crucial time when the zoo itself becomes a battleground of conflicting ideas, reflecting a conflict of values in British politics. Wilson creates an armed conflict between England and Allied Europe, followed by a Fascist invasion of England when all standards of civilized behavior collapse and give way to brutality. When the war breaks out, the Fascists want to put on a spectacle with prisoners of war fighting the zoo animals. Simon is horrified, but as he later tries to drive the animals to safety, he finds himself killing his favorite badgers to feed a boy and his mother. Almost an antihero, trying to avoid any kind of involvement with people, an administrator following orders, Simon emerges at the end of the novel ready to face the world, to be involved with people, even running for director. Because of his loyalty to the zoo under three different administrations, representing three different political ideologies, some are inclined to view him as a Vicar of Bray. In the twentieth century, however, many people had to face Simon’s fundamental dilemma: whether to follow orders or to take up independent responsibility. Simon’s American-born wife, Martha, disapproves of his behavior; she would like him to give up his job. Simon refuses, saying, “What do you think I am, a weathercock?” There is cruel irony in this remark; however, Wilson’s irony is not pointed at Simon but rather at the general human predicament of a rapidly changing world in which choices are limited and people are continuously bombarded with dilemmas. Simon’s only independent action is his attempt to save the animals, which ends in disaster. In him, Wilson presents modern society struggling with despair in a desperate race to catch up with challenges. Simon’s painful adjustment commands respect; he almost achieves heroic status when, after all the horrors and violence, he describes

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this modern world as “a demie-paradise.” In this sense, The Old Men at the Zoo is Wilson’s least pessimistic novel. No Laughing Matter · No Laughing Matter is one of Wilson’s most complex novels and requires close reading. The narrative is interwoven with dramas, enacted by the characters and reflecting various dramatic styles, including the absurd. Pastiches and parody of writers are important features of the novel, and literary references abound. John Galsworthy’s 1922 A Forsyte Saga-like family chronicle of the Matthews family, the novel is also a historical document covering the twentieth century to 1967. The father, Billy Pop, a Micawber of the twentieth century, is a failure in his writing profession and ineffectual in his family life, letting his selfish wife dominate the children. All six of them have a crippled childhood and are deprived of privacy. By the end of the novel, they all achieve some kind of success in their professional lives; some even attain fame, such as Rupert, the actor, and Quentin, the political journalist, later a celebrated television commentator. Success does not make him lovable, and his cynicism, enjoyed by a million common viewers, questions the role of the media. The final scene, in 1967, brings the whole clan together. While Margaret and her brother Marcus, a homosexual art dealer, are discussing and quarreling about Margaret’s art, Hassan, who will inherit Marcus’s cooperatively run scent factory, makes a final statement: the last words of the novel. He considers Marcus’s ideas of a cooperative absurd. Hassan admires “ambition, high profit and determined management.” His coldly calculating thoughts cast a dark shadow on the future; they underline once again Wilson’s skepticism about the survival of liberal humanistic ideals in the modern world. A strong moral sense links Wilson to George Eliot, and his sense of the caricature and the grotesque shows affinities with his favorite author, Charles Dickens. At the same time, his fiction is full of experiments into new literary methods. With almost each novel, Wilson made an important step forward in his search for new techniques. Tragedy and laughter coexist in his novels; there is tragedy in the private lives of the characters, but Wilson has a grotesque view of people’s behavior, and his ability to create atmosphere through concentrating on speech habits promotes laughter. In his commitment to duty, in his moral seriousness, Wilson is definitely akin to George Eliot, but he differs from the Victorian novelist in that he cannot believe in “meliorism.” George Eliot firmly maintained that self-awareness would lead to selfimprovement and in consequence, to the individual’s improved performance in the human community. Wilson is much more skeptical. Like E. M. Forster, he, too, is painfully aware of the decline of liberal hopes. In The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, he came to the sad conclusion that “self-knowledge had no magic power to alter,” and in his sixth novel, he killed magic with finality. As If by Magic · In As If by Magic, magic, the ultimate evasion, is destroyed forever for the two central characters. Moreover, this time they are not middle-aged or elderly intellectuals paralyzed by frustration; they are young people. Wilson’s teaching experience in Britain and America caused him to concentrate on the young, the future generation. Hamo Langmuir is a dedicated young scientist on a worldwide factfinding tour to study the benevolent affects of his “magic” rice, destined to solve the problem of starvation in underdeveloped countries. His goddaughter, Alexandra Grant, in the company of her fellow hippies, is also on a world tour in search of an occult answer to all human problems. A bewildered Hamo must find out that his

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magic rice solution has introduced a farming method for which natives are not yet prepared and, consequently, it is causing more damage than good. Hamo falls victim to the anger of a crowd at a moment when he is ready to get involved in the human aspects of research. He, like Alexandra, who gets to Goa at the same time, had to learn through experience that the intrusion of Western ways into radically different cultures can cause disruption and many unnecessary tragedies. At the end of the novel, a sober Alexandra, cured of her hippie ways, resumes the responsibility of building a normal life for her son, a legacy of the hippie venture. A millionaire through an inheritance, she is ready to support and subsidize food research, but she knows by now that the possibilities are limited and that no easy answers are available; magic of any kind is only for the neurotics who are unable to face reality or for the power-hungry who use it to dominate others. Setting the World on Fire · Wilson’s concern with human nature and with what it means for the future of the world dominates Setting the World on Fire. This novel is a family chronicle like No Laughing Matter but more condensed, more limited in time (1948-1969) and in the number of characters. Indeed, the writer concentrates on two brothers, Piers and Tom, the last generation of an old aristocratic family. Literary references are replaced by other arts: theater, music, architecture, and painting. Piers hopes to dedicate his life to the theater, and as a promising student, he earns the admiration of family, friends, and teachers with his stage-managing and directing abilities. The final part of the novel is about the preparations for the first performance of a new play, with the younger brother Tom supporting Piers as best he can in the hectic work. Everything is set for success when, unexpectedly, Scotland Yard intervenes and orders the premises emptied because of a bomb threat. The author of the play, an old employee of the family, masterminded the plot, simultaneously aimed at the family and at the government. Tom saves Piers’s life by knocking him down, but he himself gets killed. On his way home from the hospital where Tom died, Piers is on the verge of a breakdown and about to give up hope as well as artistic ambitions, because what good are the wonders of art in “a chaotic universe”? He calms down, however, and decides to stage the play anyway; he must not “lose the power to ascend the towers of imagination,” he says. The tragedy brought Piers to a fuller realization of his duty as an artist, which means doing the only thing left to him: to create in, and for, a world threatened by chaos, violence, and destruction. Wilson, a mixture of a twentieth century Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and E. M. Forster, with an increasingly dark vision of the modern predicament, rededicated himself, the artist, to his moral obligation. He continued writing in a desperate attempt to impose some kind of order on chaos and, by making people aware, to try to save humankind from itself. Anna B. Katona Other major works SHORT FICTION: The Wrong Set and Other Stories, 1949; Such Darling Dodos and Other Stories, 1950; A Bit off the Map and Other Stories, 1957; Death Dance: Twenty-five Stories, 1969. PLAY: The Mulberry Bush, pr., pb. 1956. NONFICTION: Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels, 1952; For Whom the

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Cloche Tolls: A Scrapbook of the Twenties, 1953 (with Philippe Jullian); The Wild Garden: Or, Speaking of Writing, 1963; Tempo: The Impact of Television on the Arts, 1964; The World of Charles Dickens, 1970; The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, 1977; Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson, 1983; Reflections in a Writer’s Eye, 1986. Bibliography Conradi, Peter. Angus Wilson. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1997. A very fine introduction to Wilson’s work, including a biographical outline, a section on his stories, chapters on his major novels, notes, and a very useful annotated bibliography. Drabble, Margaret. Angus Wilson: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Written by a fine novelist and biographer, this book is a sympathetic, well-researched, and astute guide to Wilson’s life and work. Includes notes and bibliography. Faulkner, Peter. Angus Wilson: Mimic and Moralist. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Follows a chronological approach to Wilson’s writings, including pertinent biographical background and evaluations of one or two main works each chapter in order to illustrate the evolution of Wilson’s art. Also contains a bibliography of Wilson’s major publications and selected secondary sources. Gardner, Averil. Angus Wilson. Boston: Twayne, 1985. The first full-length study of Wilson published in the United States, representing a well-rounded introduction to Wilson’s fiction. Includes a biographical sketch and analyses of Wilson’s stories and novels through 1980. Contains a useful annotated bibliography of secondary sources. Halio, Jay L. Angus Wilson. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964. The first full-length study of Wilson, this slender volume covers Wilson’s writing through The Wild Garden. After a biographical sketch, Halio examines Wilson’s fiction in chronological order. Concludes with a chapter on Wilson’s literary criticism. ____________. ed. Critical Essays on Angus Wilson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Includes an overview of Wilson’s writings, several reviews of his work, three interviews with the author, and fourteen essays that offer a diverse study of Wilson’s individual works as well as his career as a whole. The selected bibliography draws readers’ attention to further resources. Stape, J. H., and Anne N. Thomas. Angus Wilson: A Bibliography, 1947-1987. London: Mansell, 1988. This thorough and indispensable resource includes a foreword by Wilson and a useful chronology of his life. Part 1 is a bibliography of works by Wilson, including books, articles, translations of his works, and interviews. Part 2 is a bibliography of works about Wilson.

P. G. Wodehouse P. G. Wodehouse

Born: Guildford, Surrey, England; October 15, 1881 Died: Southampton, Long Island, New York; February 14, 1975 Principal long fiction · The Pothunters, 1902; A Prefect’s Uncle, 1903; The Gold Bat, 1904; The Head of Kay’s, 1905; Love Among the Chickens, 1906; Not George Washington, 1907 (with Herbert Westbrook); The White Feather, 1907; Mike: A Public School Story, 1909 (also known as Enter Psmith, Mike at Wrykyn, and Mike and Psmith); The Swoop: How Clarence Saved England, 1909; Psmith in the City: A Sequel to “Mike,” 1910; A Gentleman of Leisure, 1910 (also known as The Intrusion of Jimmy); The Prince and Betty, 1912; The Little Nugget, 1913; Something Fresh, 1915 (also known as Something New); Psmith Journalist, 1915 (revision of The Prince and Betty); Uneasy Money, 1916; Piccadilly Jim, 1917; Their Mutual Child, 1919 (also known as The Coming of Bill ); A Damsel in Distress, 1919; The Little Warrior, 1920 (also known as Jill the Reckless); Indiscretions of Archie, 1921; The Girl on the Boat, 1922 (also known as Three Men and a Maid ); The Adventures of Sally, 1922 (also known as Mostly Sally); The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923 (also known as Jeeves); Leave It to Psmith, 1923; Bill the Conqueror: His Invasion of England in the Springtime, 1924; Sam the Sudden, 1925 (also known as Sam in the Suburbs); The Small Bachelor, 1927; Money for Nothing, 1928; Summer Lightning, 1929 (also known as Fish Preferred and Fish Deferred); Very Good, Jeeves, 1930; Big Money, 1931; If I Were You, 1931; Doctor Sally, 1932; Hot Water, 1932; Heavy Weather, 1933; Thank You, Jeeves, 1934; Right Ho, Jeeves, 1934 (also known as Brinkley Manor: A Novel About Jeeves); Trouble Down at Tudsleigh, 1935; The Luck of the Bodkins, 1935; Laughing Gas, 1936; Summer Moonshine, 1937; The Code of the Woosters, 1938; Uncle Fred in the Springtime, 1939; Quick Service, 1940; Money in the Bank, 1942; Joy in the Morning, 1946; Full Moon, 1947; Spring Fever, 1948; Uncle Dynamite, 1948; The Mating Season, 1949; The Old Reliable, 1951; Barmy in Wonderland, 1952 (pb. in U.S. as Angel Cake); Pigs Have Wings, 1952; Ring for Jeeves, 1953 (also known as The Return of Jeeves); Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, 1954 (also known as Bertie Wooster Sees It Through); French Leave, 1956; Something Fishy, 1957 (also known as The Butler Did It); Cocktail Time, 1958; Jeeves in the Offing, 1960 (also known as How Right You Are, Jeeves); Ice in the Bedroom, 1961; Service with a Smile, 1961; Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, 1963; Biffen’s Millions, 1964 (also known as Frozen Assets); Galahad at Blandings, 1965 (also known as The Brinkmanship of Galahad Threepwood: A Blandings Castle Novel ); Company for Henry, 1967 (also known as The Purloined Paperweight); Do Butlers Burgle Banks? 1968; A Pelican at Blandings, 1969 (also known as No Nudes Is Good Nudes); The Girl in Blue, 1970; Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, 1971 (also known as Much Obliged, Jeeves); Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin, 1972 (also known as The Plot That Thickened); Bachelors Anonymous, 1973; The Cat-Nappers: A Jeeves and Bertie Story, 1974 (also known as Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen); Sunset at Blandings, 1977. Other literary forms · In addition to writing more than ninety novels, P. G. Wodehouse wrote hundreds of short stories, some eighteen plays (of which ten were published), the lyrics for thirty-three musicals, and a vast, uncollected body of essays, reviews, poems, and sketches. So much of Wodehouse’s early work has been lost that it is impossible to measure his total literary output, and collections of his stories 1010

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published under the title “Uncollected Wodehouse” are likely to appear with some frequency for the next twenty years. He also wrote two comic autobiographies, Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1953; revised as Author! Author!, 1962) and America, I Like You (1956; revised as Over Seventy: An Autobiography with Digressions, 1957). Achievements · Wodehouse has always been regarded as a “popular” writer. The designation is just. “Every schoolboy,” wrote Ogden Nash, “knows that no one can hold a candle to P. G. Wodehouse.” His novels and short stories were among the best-selling works of their generation, but it should be remembered that Wodehouse’s appeal transcended his popular audience. Many of the major writers of Courtesy D.C. Public Library the twentieth century have professed a deep admiration for the art of “Plum,” as Wodehouse was known to his friends and family. T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Bertrand Russell—all were fanatic enthusiasts of Wodehouse. Hilaire Belloc said that he was the greatest writer of the twentieth century, and Evelyn Waugh offered the following tribute to his genius: “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.” It is unfortunately true that critics and readers who expect high seriousness from their literary pleasures will never quite approve of one who makes a lighthearted mockery of most of England’s and America’s most sacred cows. F. R. Leavis, the celebrated English scholar, pointed to the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Wodehouse as proof of declining literary standards. Other critics have been even more emphatic in their deprecation of Wodehouse’s lack of seriousness. For sheer enjoyment, however, or what Dr. Johnson called “innocent recreation,” no one can touch P. G. Wodehouse. Biography · Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, on October 15, 1881, the third of four sons born to Henry Ernest and Eleanor Deane Wodehouse. Wodehouse’s father was a member of the English Civil Service and spent most of his working years in Hong Kong; indeed, it was a mere chance that Wodehouse was not born in Hong Kong. Whether it was miscalculation or the event was premature, his birth occurred during one of his mother’s rare and rather brief visits to England. Wodehouse was reared away from his parents; they were, he often remarked, like distant aunts and uncles rather than parents. Wodehouse entered Dulwich College at the age of twelve and remained there for the next six years. The school was not

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prominent in the sense that Harrow and Eton were prominent; it was simply a good middle-class school. The headmaster was the most impressive figure and may have served as the model for Wooster’s nemesis, the Reverend Aubrey Upjohn; the headmaster was not impressed with his student. He once wrote to Wodehouse’s parents: “He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour. . . . One is obliged to like him in spite of his vagaries.” The vagaries, apart from the student’s drawing match figures in his classical texts, are unrecorded. In those final years at Dulwich, Wodehouse had found his vocation. He was appointed editor of the school paper and sold his first story to a boy’s weekly, The Public School Magazine. The story won first prize for fiction in that year. Following graduation in 1900, Wodehouse went to work for the London branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. His work there was not a complete disaster for the banking industry, but very nearly so. Wodehouse was no good at checks and balances and served only as an unpleasant distraction for those who were. At night, he continued to write fiction and reviews or plays and was given a position on the Globe in 1902, the year the first of his many novels was published. Punch accepted an article from him the next year, and a second novel was also published in 1903. From that time, Wodehouse averaged more than a novel, several short stories, and either a play or musical a year. In 1914, Wodehouse married Ethel Rowley, a widow with one child. The marriage was a happy one, and the author frequently expressed his gratitude to his wife for the support she had given to his work. For the Wodehouse reader, however, the following year had a much greater significance: Something New, the first of the Blandings novels, was published. A few years later, My Man Jeeves (1919) appeared, the first of the Jeeves and Wooster saga. Novels and stories appeared with an unfailing regularity, and in the next two decades, Wodehouse became an acknowledged master. In 1939, Oxford paid tribute to his greatness by conferring on him the honorary Doctorate of Letters (D.Litt.). The doctorate meant that Jeeves, Wooster, Emsworth, and the rest were accepted as part of the heritage of English literature. The London Times supported the Oxford gesture, noting that the praise given to Wodehouse the stylist was especially apt: “Style goes a long way in Oxford; indeed the purity of Mr. Wodehouse’s style was singled out for particular praise in the Public Orator’s happy Horatian summing up of Mr. Wodehouse’s qualities and achievements.” Wodehouse and his wife had lived in France throughout much of the 1930’s, and though war with Germany was believed imminent, he returned to France after he received the doctorate at Oxford. In 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. In various prison camps, he made a series of broadcasts over German radio which were interpreted as a form of collaboration with the enemy. Wodehouse was innocent of all the charges, but it was perhaps his innocence, the vital ingredient in most of his heroes, that almost undid him. The closest Wodehouse came to collaboration was his remark to the effect that he was not unhappy in prison, for he was able to continue his work. One scholar has called that broadcast “clearly indiscreet,” but those who have read the Wodehouse letters know that he scarcely thought about anything else beside his work. After his release, Wodehouse eventually returned to America, where he took permanent residence; he was naturalized in 1955. In 1973 he was knighted, and he died in 1975 at the age of ninety-three. Analysis · Few of P. G. Wodehouse’s novels are ever far from the school environment, for the plots of the later Jeeves and Blandings series of novels frequently derive from

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the desire of one schoolmate, usually Bertie Wooster, to help another. Yet the early school novels represent a distinct type within the body of Wodehouse’s fiction. The school novels · Perhaps, as one scholar has observed, these eight school novels are no more than “bibliographical curiosities,” in that only the most ardent fan of Wodehouse would be led to read them after the later work had been written. Still, the works are different in tone and theme. The novels are set at Wrykyn College, which seems to closely resemble Dulwich, the author’s alma mater. The emphasis is on sports, and this emphasis gives a serious tone to the work. Boys are measured largely by their athletic skills. One might suggest that the ever-present sports motif was a symbol of the particular virtues of youth: comradeship, loyalty, and perseverance. Enlarging upon these virtues, Wodehouse was following what was almost a cliché in the boy’s fiction of the time. The cliché, however, was one particularly congenial to the author, who once noted that he would never be able to write his autobiography, for he had not had one of the essentials in the background of an autobiographer— “a hell of a time at his public school.” Wodehouse loved Dulwich College, and the eight school novels are a record of his affection. The schoolmasters are a decent group; the boys, with few exceptions, are generous and loyal; and the setting of the college is one of great beauty. The distinctive element in the novels is the happiness which pervades them, and the reader need only remember George Orwell’s, Graham Greene’s, and Evelyn Waugh’s accounts of their own school days to notice the sharp difference between Wodehouse and many of his contemporaries. The only curiosity about the novels is not the absence of horror and malice, but that no one in the school novels seems to have learned anything at Wrykyn. It should also be remembered that many of Wodehouse’s most celebrated idiots are graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. Wodehouse once said of his work: “I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring life altogether.” The Blandings series of novels is perhaps the best example of the author’s determined resistance to “real life.” These twenty-odd novels are centered on the beautiful estate of Lord Emsworth, who serves as unwilling host to almost everyone who goes in and out of his ancestral home. Lord Emsworth is old and absentminded, and his affections are limited to his younger brother Galahad, his roses, and his pig, the Empress of Blandings. This pig, as Emsworth remarks several times in each of the novels, has won the silver prize for being the fattest in Shropshire County. Only Galahad can really appreciate the high distinction that has been conferred on the Empress, and one feels that even he is not very serious about the pig. Yet the Empress is very nearly the catalyst for all the actions that take place in the novels. She is stolen, which makes it imperative to effect a rescue; she is painted an outrageous color and introduced into strange bedrooms to make the recipients of such favors “more spiritual” in their outlook; and on one occasion, her portrait is done at the behest of Lord Emsworth. The Blandings novels · This last episode in the life of the Empress occurs in one of the best of the Blandings novels and is a fair measure of the formula used by Wodehouse in the series. Full Moon, in which the portrait is commissioned, has all the characteristics of the Blandings novels. Emsworth has the insane idea that the pig’s portrait should be done by an eminent painter, but they have all turned down his request. While this action is debated, Lady Constance, Emsworth’s sister, has come

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to the castle with a young lady in tow. Her intent is to keep the young woman away from the man to whom she has become foolishly engaged, foolishly because the fellow does not have any money, which is the essential requisite for a good marriage in the mind of Lady Constance. Galahad arranges to have the young man invited to the castle on the pretext that he is Edwin Landseer, celebrated painter of animal pictures, including “Pig at Bey.” Galahad’s ruse works for a while, but the young man’s painting is rejected by Emsworth, who complains that the painting makes the Empress look as if she had a hangover. The young man is ejected from Blandings but soon returns, wearing a beard resembling that of an Assyrian monarch. He makes a tragic mistake when he gives a love note to one of Emsworth’s other sisters, thinking that she is a cook. He is again thrown out. By the novel’s end, however, he has successfully won the hand of his beloved, and the sisters are all leaving the estate. Galahad has once more succeeded in spreading “sweetness and light” in all directions, except that of his usually irate sisters. There are few variations in the Blandings series. At least one and sometimes as many as three courtships are repaired; the pig is safe from whatever threatens it; the sisters have been thwarted in usually about five ways by Galahad; and Lord Emsworth has the prospect of peace and quiet in front of him at the novel’s end. Yet Emsworth, Galahad, the sisters, and a host of only slightly less important or interesting characters are among the most brilliant comic figures in the whole of English literature. In writing the Blandings novels, Wodehouse followed his own precept: “The absolute cast-iron rule, I’m sure, in writing a story is to introduce all your characters as early as possible—especially if they are going to play important parts later.” Yet his other favorite maxim that a novel should contain no more than one “big” character—is seldom observed in the Blandings series. Each of the characters has his own element of fascination, and each is slightly crazy in one way or another. As absurd and funny as is Lord Emsworth’s vanity about his pig, it is only a little more so than his sisters’ vanity about their social position and wealth. If the formula for this series does not vary, neither does the uniform excellence of each novel in the series. The Jeeves and Wooster novels · More than a dozen novels use Jeeves and Bertie Wooster as the main characters. These novels have commonly been regarded as Wodehouse’s “crowning achievement,” but the author once noted that the idea of the latent greatness of Jeeves came to him very slowly. In his first appearance in a short story, he barely says more than “Very good, Sir.” Jeeves is the manservant to Bertie Wooster, who is preyed upon by aunts, friends, and women who wish to help him improve his mind as a prerequisite to marriage with him. Wooster has been dismissed as silly and very stupid. Compared to Jeeves, perhaps he is both, but he is also extremely generous with both his money and time, and it is his unfailing willingness to help others that invariably places him in the precarious situation that is the main plot. Wooster is an Oxford graduate, but detective novels are his most demanding reading. He never uses a word of more than two syllables without wondering whether he is using the word properly. Wooster is the “big” character in the Jeeves series, and such a character, according to Wodehouse, is worth “two of any other kind.” The marriage motif is very much a part of the Wooster and Jeeves saga, but frequently the central issue of this series is helping Bertie keep away from the wrong woman. It is not quite accurate to describe him as one of “nature’s bachelors,” for he has been engaged to nearly a score of females and is threatened with marriage in nearly every one of the novels in the series. Some of these women are insipid and

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poetic, others are coarse and athletic; the worst are intellectual women who want to improve his mind. He is assigned books to read that he finds boring and incomprehensible, told never to laugh aloud, and threatened, after marriage, with having his membership in the Drones Club revoked. Bertie is quite content with the state of his mind and soul. At the threat of marriage and all the other threats that the novels present, Jeeves comes to the rescue. In spite of Bertie’s chronic need of Jeeves’s aid, he is ostensibly the main character in the novels and one of Wodehouse’s most brilliant creations. It is through the eyes of Bertie that the reader observes and passes judgment on what is taking place in the novel. Such a process was an enormous technical difficulty for his creator: Wooster must be stupid and generous in order for the plot to develop, but not so stupid that the reader casts him off. The character of Jeeves, perfect as it is, is one of the most traditional aspects of Wodehouse’s craft, for the wise servant of a stupid master is a hoary cliché. Jeeves has never been to Oxford, and he has no aristocratic blood flowing in his veins to spur him into action. His central motive for rescuing Bertie and the legions of others who come to him for counsel is a manifestation of what is called in this series of novels “the feudal spirit.” Though not a university man, Jeeves knows French, Latin, and the whole of English literature. He quotes freely from the Shakespearean tragedies and even has at his disposal a host of obscure lines from obscure poets in Latin and English. He is not a gloomy person, but Benedictus de Spinoza is his favorite author. He is well acquainted with psychology, and his rescue of Bertie or others in trouble frequently derives from his knowledge of the “psychology” of the individuals in question. He is moved by the feudal spirit, but he is tipped in a handsome way by his employer for services rendered, and he accepts the just praises of all whom he serves. The series is also distinguished by a host of lesser figures who threaten to jostle Bertie out of his role as the main character. Gussie Fink-Nottle is an old schoolmate of Bertie, and he is engaged to a particularly insipid woman, Madelaine Basset, a romantic intellectual. She has a poetic phrase for everything and drives Bertie and all who know her crazy merely by opening her mouth. Madelaine is one of Bertie’s former girlfriends, and she imagines that Bertie is still in love with her. The hero’s duty is to see that the pending nuptials between Gussie and Madelaine take place, but Gussie, who is even less intelligent than Bertie, keeps fouling things up. Bertie goes at once to his aid, but nothing works until Jeeves puts his brain to the trial. Eulalie Soeurs · Jeeves never fails in his destined role as guardian angel to Wooster, but the plots frequently have an additional twist. Jeeves, though not omniscient as a character, has recourse to a body of information that none of the others shares. As a butler and member of a London club for butlers, he has access to a private collection of anecdotes supplied by other butlers about their masters. It is a point of honor for a manservant to supply all vital information about his employer—tastes, eccentricities, and even weaknesses—so that others will be well advised before taking employment with the same person. The collection has something about almost every rich male in England, and when affairs take on a desperate note, Jeeves is dispatched to London to find out something about the adversary that might serve as blackmail. Thus, one of the silliest of Wodehouse’s creations, a proto-Fascist named Spode who is inclined to bully everyone and especially Wooster, is disarmed when it is discovered that he designs ladies’ underwear. As Wooster is being threatened with decapitation by Spode, he mentions the name of Spode’s company, Eulalie Soeurs, and the man is silent

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and servile, though it is only at the very end and with the bribe of a trip around the world that Jeeves tells Wooster the meaning of that magic phrase. The Jeeves novels, then, have at least three plots running through them, and it is in his scrupulous concern for the development of the plot that the author exhibits one of his greatest talents. The key to Wodehouse’s concerns for the logic and probability of his plots derives, perhaps, from his lifelong interest in detective novels; Wodehouse frequently avowed that they were his favorite kind of reading. The plots of the great Wodehouse comedies develop like that of a superb mystery: There is not an extraneous word or action in them. The Psmith novels · For most Wodehouse readers, the Blandings and Jeeves series of novels represent the highest level of Wodehouse’s art, but there are many other novels that do not fit into either category. In 1906, Wodehouse published Love Among the Chickens, which has in it the first of Wodehouse’s several “nonheroes,” Ukridge. Ukridge has almost no attractive qualities. He does not work; rather, he lives by his wits and is able to sponge off his friends and from many who scarcely know him. Another character who figures prominently in several novels is Psmith. The name is pronounced “Smith,” and its owner freely admits that he added the P to distinguish himself from the vast number of Smiths. The name is one mark of the young man’s condescending arrogance, but he is helpful toward all who seek his assistance. A Psmith novel usually ends with the marriage of a friend or simply a bit of adventure for the central figure. Psmith does not hold a regular job, and like many of the other young male protagonists in Wodehouse novels, he seems to be a textbook study in the antiwork ethic. The heroes in the Psmith series, like the central figure himself, are not ignorant or stupid men, but the novelist’s emphasis is on their old school ties and on physical excellence. They are, as one critic noted, “strong, healthy animals.” They are good at sports and they triumph over poets and other intellectual types. On occasion, they may drink heavily, but they make up for an infrequent binge by an excess of exercise. Evelyn Waugh once suggested that the clue to Wodehouse’s great success was the fact that he was unaware of the doctrine of original sin. In the Wodehouse novel, virtue is inevitably triumphant, and even vice is seldom punished with anything that might be called severity. In Wodehouse’s catalog of bad sorts, one group alone stands out: intellectual snobs. In his frequent descriptions of such types, Wodehouse may have consciously been responding to the disdain with which intellectuals have usually treated his work; in turn, the author had almost no sympathy for the group that he often described as “eggheads.” Whatever may have been his motivation, the athletes and the innocents invariably triumph over those who carry on about their own minds or some esoteric art form. It is therefore hard to agree with critics such as George Orwell who find elements of snobbery in the Wodehouse novels. It is true that the creator of Blandings Castle loved big houses and grand vistas, but the aristocrats are too obviously flawed in intellect or temper for any to assume Wodehouse was on their side. It may be, however, that Wodehouse was an inverse snob in his treatment of intellectuals, both male and female. None of them succeeds in his fiction. There is nothing like a consensus over the source or qualities of Wodehouse’s greatness as a writer. Scholars have traced Wooster and Jeeves back through English literature to authors such as Ben Jonson, but source studies do not account for Wodehouse’s genius. He has been called the laureate of the Edwardian age, but there is little resemblance between the Edwardian world and that of P. G. Wodehouse. For

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most readers, the triumph of a Wodehouse novel is in its artistry of presentation. All the aspects of fiction—good story, effective characters, and dialogue which is often brilliant—are present. Wodehouse once summed up his career as well as anyone ever has: “When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up: ‘But he did take trouble.’” Wodehouse did indeed take trouble with his work, but given the rich abundance of that work and the incredible smoothness of each volume, the reader would never know. John R. Griffin Other major works SHORT FICTION: Tales of St. Austin’s, 1903; The Man Upstairs, and Other Stories, 1914; The Man with Two Left Feet, and Other Stories, 1917; My Man Jeeves, 1919; The Clicking of Cuthbert, 1922 (also known as Golf Without Tears); Ukridge, 1924 (also known as He Rather Enjoyed It); Carry on, Jeeves! 1925; The Heart of a Goof, 1926 (also known as Divots); Meet Mr. Mulliner, 1927; Mr. Mulliner Speaking, 1929; Jeeves Omnibus, 1931 (revised as The World of Jeeves, 1967); Mulliner Nights, 1933; Blandings Castle and Elsewhere, 1935 (also known as Blandings Castle); Mulliner Omnibus, 1935 (revised as The World of Mr. Mulliner, 1972); Young Men in Spats, 1936; Lord Emsworth and Others, 1937 (also known as The Crime Wave at Blandings); Dudley Is Back to Normal, 1940; Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets, 1940; Nothing Serious, 1950; Selected Stories, 1958; A Few Quick Ones, 1959; Plum Pie, 1966; The Golf Omnibus: Thirty-one Golfing Short Stories, 1973; The World of Psmith, 1974. PLAYS: A Gentleman of Leisure, pr. 1911 (with John Stapleton); Oh, Lady! Lady!, pr. 1918; The Play’s the Thing, pr. 1926 (adaptation of Ferenc Molnár); Good Morning, Bill, pr. 1927 (adaptation of László Fodor); A Damsel in Distress, pr. 1928 (with Ian Hay); Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, pr. 1929 (with Hay); Candlelight, pr. 1929 (adaptation of Siegfried Geyer); Leave It to Psmith, pr. 1930 (adaptation with Hay); Anything Goes, pr. 1934 (with Guy Bolton and others); Carry On, Jeeves, pb. 1956 (adaptation with Bolton). NONFICTION: William Tell Told Again, 1904 (with additional fictional material); Louder and Funnier, 1932; Bring on the Girls: The Improbable Story of Our Life in Musical Comedy, with Pictures to Prove It, 1953 (with Guy Bolton); Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters, 1953 (revised as Author! Author! 1962; W. Townend, editor); America, I Like You, 1956 (revised as Over Seventy: An Autobiography with Digressions, 1957). EDITED TEXTS: A Century of Humour, 1934; The Best of Modern Humor, 1952 (with Scott Meredith); The Week-End Book of Humor, 1952 (with Meredith); A Carnival of Modern Humor, 1967 (with Meredith). Bibliography Green, Benny. P. G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography. New York: Rutledge Press, 1981. This very useful study, arranged chronologically, traces the connections between Wodehouse’s personal experiences and his fictional creations. Illustrations, a chronology, notes, a bibliography, and an index are included. Hall, Robert A., Jr. The Comic Style of P. G. Wodehouse. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974. Provides a discussion of three types of Wodehouse’s stories, including school tales and juvenilia, romances and farces, and the various sagas. The detailed analysis of Wodehouse’s narrative techniques and linguistic characteristics is indispensable for anyone interested in understanding his style. Contains an index and a bibliography.

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Phelps, Barry. P. G. Wodehouse: Man and Myth. London: Constable, 1992. Phelps has uncovered much new information in this sympathetic biography. He also provides an unusual number of useful appendices including a Wodehouse chronology, family tree, and bibliography. Sproat, Iain. Wodehouse at War. New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1981. This volume is necessary to those studying the sad war events that clouded Wodehouse’s life and to those interested in exploring the individual psychology that produced such comic delight. Sproat, a politician as well as a fan, vindicates Wodehouse’s innocence in the infamous Nazi broadcasts, which are reprinted here. Includes appendices of documents in the case. Usborne, Richard. After Hours with P. G. Wodehouse. London: Hutchinson, 1991. A collection of entertaining pieces on Wodehouse’s life and death written somewhat in the spirit of Wodehouse himself. ____________. Wodehouse at Work to the End. 1961. Rev. ed. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1976. Includes individual chapters on Wodehouse’s major series characters; very helpful appendices of lists of his books, plays, and films; and an index. For the diehard fan, each chapter is followed by a brief section called “Images,” with humorous quotations from the works. The introduction refers to other secondary sources. Voorhees, Richard J. P. G. Wodehouse. New York: Twayne, 1966. An excellent introductory volume on Wodehouse, with chapters on his life, his public school stories, his early novels, the development of his romantic and comic novels, a description of the Wodehouse world, and a discussion of the place of that world in British literature. A chronology, notes and references, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources are provided.

Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf

Born: London, England; January 25, 1882 Died: Rodmell, Sussex, England; March 28, 1941 Principal long fiction · The Voyage Out, 1915; Night and Day, 1919; Jacob’s Room, 1922; Mrs. Dalloway, 1925; To the Lighthouse, 1927; Orlando: A Biography, 1928; The Waves, 1931; Flush: A Biography, 1933; The Years, 1937; Between the Acts, 1941. Other literary forms · To say that Virginia Woolf lived to write is no exaggeration. Her output was both prodigious and varied; counting her posthumously published works, it fills more than forty volumes. Beyond her novels her fiction encompasses several short-story collections. As a writer of nonfiction, Woolf was similarly prolific, her book-length works including Roger Fry: A Biography (1940) and two influential feminist statements, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Throughout her life, Woolf also produced criticism and reviews; the best-known collections are The Common Reader: First Series (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). In 1966 and 1967, the four volumes of Collected Essays were published. Additional books of essays, reviews, and sketches continue to appear, most notably the illuminating selection of autobiographical materials, Moments of Being (1976). Her letters—3,800 of them survive—are available in six volumes; when publication was completed, her diaries stood at five. Another collection, of Woolf’s essays, also proved a massive, multivolume undertaking. Achievements · From the appearance of her first novel in 1915, Virginia Woolf’s work was received with respect—an important point, since she was extremely sensitive to criticism. Descendant of a distinguished literary family, member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group, herself an experienced critic and reviewer, she was taken seriously as an artist. Nevertheless, her early works were not financially successful; she was forty before she earned a living from her writing. From the start, the rather narrow territory of her novels precluded broad popularity, peopled as they were with sophisticated, sexually reserved, upper-middle-class characters, finely attuned to their sensibilities and relatively insulated from the demands of mundane existence. When in Jacob’s Room she first abandoned the conventional novel to experiment with the interior monologues and lyrical poetic devices which characterize her mature method, she also began to develop a reputation as a “difficult” or “high-brow” writer, though undeniably an important one. Not until the brilliant fantasy Orlando was published did she enjoy a definite commercial success. Thereafter, she received both critical and popular acclaim; The Years was even a bona fide best-seller. During the 1930’s, Woolf became the subject of critical essays and two book-length studies; some of her works were translated into French. At the same time, however, her novels began to be judged as irrelevant to a world beset by growing economic and political chaos. At her death in 1941, she was widely regarded as a pioneer of modernism but also reviewed by many as the effete, melancholic “invalid priestess of Bloomsbury,” a stereotype her friend and fellow novelist E. M. Forster dismissed at the time as wholly inaccurate; she was, he insisted, “tough, sensitive but tough.” 1019

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Over the next twenty-five years, respectful attention to Woolf’s work continued, but in the late 1960’s, critical interest accelerated dramatically and has remained strong. Two reasons for this renewed notice seem particularly apparent. First, Woolf’s feminist essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas became rallying documents in the growing women’s movement; readers who might not otherwise have discovered her novels were drawn to them via her nonfiction and tended to read them primarily as validations of her feminist thinking. Second, with the appearance of her husband Leonard Woolf’s five-volume autobiography from 1965-1969, her nephew Quentin Bell’s definitive two-volume biography of her in 1972, and the full-scale editions of her own diaries and letters commencing in the mid-1970’s, Woolf’s life has become one of the most thoroughly documented of any modern author. Marked by intellectual and sexual unconventionality, madness, and suicide, it is for today’s readers also one of the most fascinating; the steady demand for memoirs, reminiscences, and photograph collections relating to her has generated what is sometimes disparagingly labeled “the Virginia Woolf industry.” At its worst, such insatiable curiosity is morbidly voyeuristic, distracting from and trivializing Woolf’s achievement; on a more responsible level, it has led to serious, provocative reevaluations of the political and especially the feminist elements in her work, as well as to redefinitions of her role as an artist. Biography · Daughter of the eminent editor and critic Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth, both of whom had been previously widowed, Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 into a solidly late Victorian intellectual and social milieu. Her father’s first wife had been William Makepeace Thackeray’s daughter; James Russell Lowell was her godfather; visitors to the Stephens’ London household included Henry James, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. From childhood on, she had access to her father’s superb library, benefitting from his guidance and commentary on her rigorous, precocious reading. Nevertheless, unlike her brothers, she did not receive a formal university education, a lack she always regretted and that partly explains the anger in Three Guineas, where she proposes a “university of outsiders.” (Throughout her life she declined all academic honors.) In 1895, when Woolf was thirteen, her mother, just past fifty, suddenly died. Altruistic, self-sacrificing, totally devoted to her demanding husband and large family, the beautiful Julia Stephen fulfilled the Victorian ideal of womanhood and exhausted herself doing so; her daughter would movingly eulogize her as Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. The loss devastated Woolf, who experienced at that time the first of four major mental breakdowns in her life, the last of which would end in death. Leslie Stephen, twenty years his wife’s senior and thus sanguinely expecting her to pilot him comfortably through old age, was devastated in another way. Retreating histrionically into self-pitying but deeply felt grief, like that of his fictional counterpart, Mr. Ramsay, he transferred his intense demands for sympathetic attention to a succession of what could only seem to him achingly inadequate substitutes for his dead wife: first, his stepdaughter Stella Duckworth, who herself died suddenly in 1897, then, Virginia’s older sister Vanessa. The traditional feminine role would eventually have befallen Virginia had Leslie Stephen not died in 1904. Writing in her 1928 diary on what would have been her father’s ninety-sixth birthday, Woolf reflects that, had he lived, “His life would have entirely ended mine. . . . No writing, no books;—inconceivable.” On her father’s death, Woolf sustained her second incapacitating breakdown. Yet

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she also gained, as her diary suggests, something crucial: freedom, which took an immediate form. Virginia, Vanessa, and their brothers Thoby and Adrian abandoned the Stephen house in respectable Kensington to set up a home in the seedy bohemian district of London known as Bloomsbury. There, on Thursday evenings, a coterie of Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge University friends regularly gathered to talk in an atmosphere of free thought, avant-garde art, and sexual tolerance, forming the nucleus of what came to be called the Bloomsbury Group. At various stages in its evolution over the next decade, the group included such luminaries as biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E. M. Forster, art critic Roger Fry, and economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1911, they were joined by another of Thoby’s Cambridge friends, a colonial official just returned from seven years in Ceylon, Leonard Woolf; Virginia Stephen married him the following year. Scarcely twelve months after the wedding, Virginia Woolf’s third severe breakdown began, marked by a suicide attempt; her recovery took almost two years. The causes of Woolf’s madness have been much debated and the treatment she was prescribed—bed rest, milk, withdrawal of intellectual stimulation—much disputed, especially since she apparently never received psychoanalytic help, even though the Hogarth Press, founded by the Woolfs in 1917, was one of Sigmund Freud’s earliest English publishers. A history of insanity ran in the Stephen family; if Virginia were afflicted with a hereditary nervous condition, it was thought, then, that must be accepted as unalterable. On the other hand, the timing of these three breakdowns prompts speculation about more subtle causes. About her parents’ deaths she evidently felt strong guilt; of To the Lighthouse, the fictionalized account of her parents’ relationship, she would later say, “I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.” Marriage was for her a deliberately sought yet disturbing commitment, representing a potential loss of autonomy and a retreat into what her would-be novelist Terence Hewet envisions in The Voyage Out as a walled-up, firelit room. She found her own marriage sexually disappointing, perhaps in part because she had been molested as both a child and a young woman by her two Duckworth stepbrothers. In the late twentieth century, feminist scholars especially argued as a cause of Woolf’s madness the burden of being a greatly talented woman in a world hostile to feminine achievement, a situation that Woolf strikingly depicts in A Room Courtesy D.C. Public Library of One’s Own as the plight of Wil-

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liam Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister. Indeed, the young Virginia Stephen might plunder her father’s library all day, but by teatime she was expected to don the role of deferential Victorian female in a rigidly patriarchal household. Yet once she settled in Bloomsbury, she enjoyed unconventional independence and received much sympathetic encouragement of her gifts, most of all from her husband. Leonard Woolf, himself a professional writer and literary editor, connected her madness directly with her genius, saying that she concentrated more intensely on her work than any writer he had ever known. Her books passed through long, difficult gestations; her sanity was always most vulnerable immediately after a novel was finished. Expanding on his belief that the imagination in his wife’s books and the delusions of her breakdowns “all came from the same place in her mind,” some critics go so far as to claim her madness as the very source of her art, permitting her to make mystical descents into inner space from which she returned with sharpened perception. It is significant, certainly, that although Woolf’s first publication, an unsigned article for The Guardian, appeared just two months after her 1904 move to Bloomsbury, her first novel, over which she labored for seven years, was only completed shortly after her marriage; her breakdown occurred three months after its acceptance for publication. Very early, therefore, Leonard Woolf learned to keep a daily record of his wife’s health; throughout their life together, he would be alert for those signs of fatigue or erratic behavior that signaled approaching danger and the need for her customary rest cure. Rational, efficient, uncomplaining, Leonard Woolf has been condemned by some disaffected scholars as a pseudosaintly nurse who benignly badgered his patient into crippling dependency. The compelling argument against this extreme interpretation is Virginia Woolf’s astonishing productivity after she recovered from her third illness. Although there were certainly periods of instability and near disaster, the following twenty-five years were immensely fruitful as she discarded traditional fiction to move toward realizing her unique vision, all the while functioning actively and diversely as a fine critic, too. After Woolf’s ninth novel, The Years, was finished in 1936, however, she came closer to mental collapse than she had been at any time since 1913. Meanwhile, a larger pattern of breakdown was developing in the world around her as World War II became inevitable. Working at her Sussex home on her last book, Between the Acts, she could hear the Battle of Britain being fought over her head; her London house was severely damaged in the Blitz. Yet strangely, that novel was her easiest to write; Leonard Woolf, ever watchful, was struck by her tranquility during this period. The gradual symptoms of warning were absent this time; when her depression began, he would recall, it struck her “like a sudden blow.” She began to hear voices and knew what was coming. On February 26, 1941, she finished Between the Acts. Four weeks later, she went out for one of her usual walks across the Sussex downs, placed a heavy stone in her pocket, and stepped into the River Ouse. Within minutes Leonard Woolf arrived at its banks to find her walking stick and hat lying there. Her body was recovered three weeks later. Analysis · In one of her most famous pronouncements on the nature of fiction—as a practicing critic, she had much to say on the subject—Virginia Woolf insists that “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” In an ordinary day, she argues, “thousands of ideas” course through the human brain;

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“thousands of emotions” meet, collide, and disappear “in astonishing disorder.” Amid this hectic interior flux, the trivial and the vital, the past and the present, are constantly interacting; there is endless tension between the multitude of ideas and emotions rushing through one’s consciousness and the numerous impressions scoring on it from the external world. Thus, even personal identity becomes evanescent, continually reordering itself as “the atoms of experience . . . fall upon the mind.” It follows, then, that human beings must have great difficulty communicating with one another, for of this welter of perceptions that define individual personality, only a tiny fraction can ever be externalized in word or gesture. Yet, despite—in fact, because of—their frightening isolation as unknowable entities, people yearn to unite both with one another and with some larger pattern of order hidden behind the flux, to experience time standing still momentarily, to see matches struck that briefly illuminate the darkness. Given the complex phenomenon of human subjectivity, Woolf asks, “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit . . . with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?” The conventional novel form is plainly inadequate for such a purpose, she maintains. Dealing sequentially with a logical set of completed past actions that occur in a coherent, densely detailed physical and social environment, presided over by an omniscient narrator interpreting the significance of it all, the traditional novel trims and shapes experience into a rational but falsified pattern. “Is life like this?” Woolf demands rhetorically. “Must novels be like this?” In Woolf’s first two books, nevertheless, she attempted to work within conventional modes, discovering empirically that they could not convey her vision. Although in recent years some critics have defended The Voyage Out and Night and Day as artistically satisfying in their own right, both novels have generally been considered interesting mainly for what they foreshadow of Woolf’s later preoccupations and techniques. The Voyage Out · The Voyage Out is the story of Rachel Vinrace, a naïve and talented twenty-four-year-old amateur pianist who sails from England to a small resort on the South American coast, where she vacations with relatives. There, she meets a fledgling novelist, Terence Hewet; on a pleasure expedition up a jungle river, they declare their love. Shortly thereafter, Rachel falls ill with a fever and dies. The novel’s exotic locale, large cast of minor characters, elaborate scenes of social comedy, and excessive length are all atypical of Woolf’s mature work. Already, however, many of her later concerns are largely emerging. The resonance of the title itself anticipates Woolf’s poetic symbolism; the “voyage out” can be the literal trip across the Atlantic or up the South American river, but it also suggests the progression from innocence to experience, from life to death, which she later depicts using similar water imagery. Her concern with premature death and how survivors come to terms with it prefigures Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Most significant is her portrayal of a world in which characters are forever striving to overcome their isolation from one another. The ship on which Rachel “voyages out” is labeled by Woolf an “emblem of the loneliness of human life.” Terence, Rachel’s lover, might be describing his creator’s own frustration when he says he is trying “to write a novel about Silence, the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” Yet moments of unity amid seemingly unconquerable disorder do occur. On a communal level, one such transformation happens at a ball being held to celebrate the engagement of two English guests at the resort’s small hotel. When the musicians

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go home, Rachel appropriates the piano and plays Mozart, hunting songs, and hymn tunes as the guests gradually resume dancing, each in a newly expressive, uninhibited way, eventually to join hands in a gigantic round dance. When the circle breaks and each member spins away to become individual once more, Rachel modulates to Bach; her weary yet exhilarated listeners sit quietly and allow themselves to be soothed by the serene complexity of the music. As dawn breaks outside and Rachel plays on, they envision “themselves and their lives, and the whole of human life advancing nobly under the direction of the music.” They have transcended their single identities temporarily to gain a privileged glimpse of some larger pattern beyond themselves. If Rachel through her art briefly transforms the lives of a small community, she herself privately discerns fleeting stability through her growing love for Terence. Yet even love is insufficient; although in the couple’s newfound sense of union “divisions disappeared,” Terence feels that Rachel seems able “to pass away to unknown places where she had no need of him.” In the elegiac closing scenes of illness (which Woolf reworked many times and which are the most original as well as moving part of the novel), Rachel “descends into another world”; she is “curled up at the bottom of the sea.” Terence, sitting by her bedside, senses that “they seemed to be thinking together; he seemed to be Rachel as well as himself.” When she ceases breathing, he experiences “an immense feeling of peace,” a “complete union” with her that shatters when he notices an ordinary table covered with crockery and realizes in horror that in this world he will never see Rachel again. For her, stability has been achieved; for him, the isolating flux has resumed. Night and Day · Looking back on The Voyage Out, Woolf could see, she said, why readers found it “a more gallant and inspiring spectacle” than her next and least known book Night and Day. This second novel is usually regarded as her most traditional in form and subject—in its social satire, her obeisance to Jane Austen. Its dancelike plot, however, in which mismatched young couples eventually find their true loves, suggests the magical atmosphere of William Shakespeare’s romantic comedies as well. References to Shakespeare abound in the book; for example, the delightfully eccentric Mrs. Hilbery characterizes herself as one of his wise fools, and when at the end she presides over the repatterning of the couples in London, she has just arrived from a pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon. Coincidentally, Night and Day is the most conventionally dramatic of Woolf’s novels, full of dialogue, exits and entrances; characters are constantly taking omnibuses and taxis across London from one contrived scene to the next. Like The Voyage Out, Night and Day does point to Woolf’s enduring preoccupations. It is, too, a novel depicting movement from innocence to maturity and escape from the conventional world through the liberating influence of love. Ralph Denham, a London solicitor from a large, vulgar, middle-class family living in suburban Highgate, would prefer to move to a Norfolk cottage and write. Katharine Hilbery measures out her days serving tea in her wealthy family’s beautiful Chelsea home and helping her disorganized mother produce a biography of their forebear, a great nineteenth century poet. Her secret passions, however, are mathematics and astronomy. These seeming opposites, Ralph and Katharine, are alike in that both retreat at night to their rooms to pursue their private visions. The entire novel is concerned with such dualities—public selves and private selves, activity and contemplation, fact and imagination; but Woolf also depicts the unity that Ralph and Katharine can achieve, notwithstanding the social and intellectual barriers separating them. At the end, as the

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couple leaves Katharine’s elegant but constraining home to walk in the open night air, “they lapsed gently into silence, travelling the dark paths side by side towards something discerned in the distance which gradually possessed them both.” The sustained passages of subtle interior analysis by which Woolf charts the couple’s growing realization of their need for each other define her real area of fictional interest, but they are hemmed in by a tediously constrictive traditional structure. Except for her late novel, The Years, also comparatively orthodox in form, her first two books took the longest to finish and underwent the most extensive revisions, undoubtedly because she was writing against her grain. Nevertheless, they represented a necessary apprenticeship; as she would later remark of Night and Day, “You must put it all in before you can leave out.” Jacob’s Room · Woolf dared to leave out a great deal in the short experimental novel she wrote next. Described in conventional terms, Jacob’s Room is a Bildungsroman or “novel of formation” tracing its hero’s development from childhood to maturity: Jacob Flanders is first portrayed as a small boy studying a tide pool on a Cornish beach; at twenty-six, he dies fighting in World War I. In structure, style, and tone, however, Jacob’s Room defies such labeling. It does not move in steady chronological fashion but in irregular leaps. Of the fourteen chapters, two cover Jacob’s childhood, two, his college years at Cambridge, the remainder, his life as a young adult working in London and traveling abroad. In length, and hence in the complexity with which various periods of Jacob’s existence are treated, the chapters range from one to twenty-eight pages. They vary, that is, as the process of growth itself does. Individual chapters are likewise discontinuous in structure, broken into irregular segments that convey multiple, often simultaneous perspectives. The ten-page chapter 8, for example, opens with Jacob slamming the door of his London room as he starts for work in the morning; he is then glimpsed at his office desk. Meanwhile, on a table back in his room lies his mother’s unopened letter to him, placed there the previous night by his lover, Florinda; its contents and Mrs. Flanders herself are evoked. The narrator then discourses on the significance of letter-writing. Jacob is next seen leaving work for the day; in Greek Street, he spies Florinda on another man’s arm. At eight o’clock, Rose Shaw, a guest at a party Jacob attended several nights earlier, walks through Holburn, meditating bitterly on the ironies of love and death. The narrator sketches London by lamplight. Then, Jacob is back in his room reading by the fire a newspaper account of the Prime Minister’s speech on Home Rule; the night is very cold. The narrator abruptly shifts perspective from congested London to the open countryside, describing the snow that has been accumulating since mid-afternoon; an old shepherd crossing a field hears a distant clock strike. Back in London, Jacob also hears the hour chiming, rakes out his fire, and goes to bed. There is no story here in any conventional sense, no action being furthered; in the entire ten pages, only one sentence is direct dialogue. What Woolf delineates is the texture of an ordinary day in the life of Jacob and the world in which he exists. Clock time moves the chapter forward, while spatially the chapter radiates outward from the small area Jacob occupies. Simultaneously, in the brief reference to the Prime Minister, Woolf suggests the larger procession of modern history that will inexorably sweep Jacob to premature death. Such indirection and understatement characterize the whole novel: “It is no use trying to sum people up,” the narrator laments. “One must follow hints.” Thus, Jacob is described mainly from the outside, defined through the impressions he makes on

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others, from a hotel chambermaid to a Cambridge don, and by his surroundings and possessions. Even his death is conveyed obliquely: Mrs. Flanders, half asleep in her Yorkshire house, hears “dull sounds”; it cannot be guns, she thinks, it must be the sea. On the next page, she stands in her dead son’s London room, holding a pair of Jacob’s old shoes and asking his friend pathetically, “What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?” The novel ends. To construct Jacob’s ultimately unknowable biography out of such fragments, Woolf evolves not only a new structure but a new style. Long, fluid sentences contain precise physical details juxtaposed with metaphysical speculations on the evanescence of life and the impossibility of understanding another person. Lyrical descriptions of nature—waves, moths, falling snow, birds rising and settling—are interspersed to suggest life’s beauty and fragility. Images and phrases recur as unifying motifs: Jacob is repeatedly associated with Greek literature and myth and spends his last fulfilling days visiting the Parthenon. Most important, Woolf begins to move freely in and out of her characters’ minds to capture the flow of sense impressions mingling with memory, emotion, and random association, experimenting with that narrative method conveniently if imprecisely labeled “stream of consciousness.” Jacob’s Room is not a mature work, especially with its intrusive narrator, who can be excessively chatty, archly pedantic, and sententious. Woolf protests the difficulties of her task (“In short, the observer is choked with observations”) and cannot quite follow the logic of her new method; after an essay-like passage on the necessity of illusion, for example, she awkwardly concludes, “Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion. . . .” Even the lovely passages of poetic description at times seem self-indulgent. The book definitely shows its seams. Woolf’s rejection of traditional novel structure, however, and her efforts to eliminate “the alien and the external” make Jacob’s Room a dazzling advance in her ability to embody her philosophic vision: “Life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.” Mrs. Dalloway · Within three years, Woolf had resolved her technical problems superbly in Mrs. Dalloway. The intruding narrator vanishes; though the freedom with which point of view shifts among characters and settings clearly posits an omniscient intelligence, the narrator’s observations are now subtly integrated with the thoughts of her characters, and the transitions between scenes flow organically. Woolf’s subject is also better suited to her method: Whereas Jacob’s Room is a story of youthful potential tragically cut off, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of middle age, about what people have become as the result of choices made, opportunities seized or refused. Jacob Flanders had but a brief past; the characters in Mrs. Dalloway must come to terms with theirs, sifting and valuing the memories that course through their minds. The book covers one June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-two years old, an accomplished London political hostess and wife of a Member of Parliament. A recent serious illness from which she is still recovering has made her freshly appreciate the wonder of life as she prepares for the party she will give that evening. Peter Walsh, once desperately in love with her, arrives from India, where he has had an undistinguished career; he calls on her and is invited to the party, at which another friend from the past, Sally Seton, formerly a romantic and now the conventional wife of a Manchester industrialist, will also unexpectedly appear. Running parallel with Clarissa’s day is that of the mad Septimus Warren Smith, a surviving Jacob Flanders, shell-shocked in the war; his suicide in the late afternoon delays the arrival of another

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of Clarissa’s guests, the eminent nerve specialist Sir William Bradshaw. Learning of this stranger’s death, Clarissa must confront the inevitability of her own. Mrs. Dalloway is also, then, a novel about time itself (its working title at one point was The Hours). Instead of using chapters or other formal sectioning, Woolf structures the book by counterpointing clock time, signaled by the obtrusive hourly tolling of Big Ben, against the subjective flow of time in her characters’ minds as they recover the past and envision the future. Not only does she move backward and forward in time, however; she also creates an effect of simultaneity that is especially crucial in linking Septimus’s story with Clarissa’s. Thus, when Clarissa Dalloway, buying flowers that morning in a Bond Street shop, hears “a pistol shot” outside and emerges to see a large, official automobile that has backfired, Septimus is standing in the crowd blocked by the car and likewise reacting to this “violent explosion” (“The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”). Later, when Septimus’s frightened young Italian wife Rezia guides him to Regents Park to calm him before their appointment with Bradshaw, he has a terrifying hallucination of his dead friend Evans, killed just before the Armistice; Peter Walsh, passing their bench, wonders, “What awful fix had they got themselves in to look so desperate as that on a fine summer morning?” This atmosphere of intensely populated time and space, of many anonymous lives intersecting briefly, of the world resonating with unwritten novels, comic and tragic, accounts in part for the richly poignant texture of nearly all Woolf’s mature work. In her early thinking about Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to show a “world seen by the sane and the insane, side by side.” Although the novel definitely focuses on Clarissa, Septimus functions as a kind of double, representing her own responses to life carried to an untenable extreme. Both find great terror in life and also great joy; both want to withdraw from life into blissful isolation, yet both want to reach out to merge with others. Clarissa’s friends, and indeed she herself, sense a “coldness” about her, “an impenetrability”; both Peter and Sally believe she chose safety rather than adventure by marrying the unimaginative, responsible Richard Dalloway. The quiet attic room where she now convalesces is described as a tower into which she retreats nunlike to a virginal narrow bed. Yet Clarissa also loves “life; London; this moment of June”—and her parties. Though some critics condemn her partygiving as shallow, trivial, even corrupt (Peter Walsh could make her wince as a girl by predicting that she would become “the perfect hostess”), Clarissa considers her parties a form of creativity, “an offering,” “her gift” of bringing people together. For Septimus, the war has destroyed his capacity to feel; in his aloneness and withdrawal, he finds “an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know”—he can elude “human nature,” “the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils.” Yet just watching leaves quivering is for him “an exquisite joy”; he feels them “connected by millions of fibres with his own body” and wants to reveal this unity to the world because “communication is health; communication is happiness.” Desperate because of his suicide threats, Septimus’s wife takes him to see Sir William Bradshaw. At the center of the novel, in one of the most bitter scenes in all of Woolf’s writing (certainly one with strong autobiographical overtones), is Septimus’s confrontation with this “priest of science,” this man of “lightning skill” and “almost infallible accuracy” who “never spoke of ‘madness’; he called it not having a sense of proportion.” Within three minutes, he has discreetly recorded his diagnosis on a pink card (“a case of complete breakdown . . . with every symptom in an advanced stage”); Septimus will be sent to a beautiful house in the country where he will be taught to rest, to regain proportion. Rezia, agonized, understands that she has

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been failed by this obtuse, complacently cruel man whom Woolf symbolically connects with a larger system that prospers on intolerance and sends its best young men to fight futile wars. Septimus’s suicide at this point becomes inevitable. The two stories fuse when Bradshaw appears at the party. Learning of the reason for his lateness, Clarissa, deeply shaken, withdraws to a small side room, not unlike her attic tower, where she accurately imagines Septimus’s suicide: “He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. . . . So she saw it.” She also intuits the immediate cause: Bradshaw is “capable of some indescribable outrage, forcing your soul, that was it”; seeing him, this young man must have said to himself, “they make life intolerable, men like that.” Thus, she sees, “death was defiance,” a means to preserve one’s center from being violated, but “death was an attempt to communicate,” and in death, Septimus’s message that all life is connected is heard by one unlikely person, Clarissa Dalloway. Reviewing her own past as she has reconstructed it this day, and forced anew to acknowledge her own mortality, she realizes that “he had made her feel the beauty.” Spiritually regenerated, she returns to her party “to kindle and illuminate” life. To the Lighthouse · In her most moving, complexly affirmative novel, To the Lighthouse, Woolf portrays another woman whose creativity lies in uniting people, Mrs. Ramsay. For this luminous evocation of her own parents’ marriage, Woolf drew on memories of her girlhood summers at St. Ives, Cornwall (here transposed to an island in the Hebrides), to focus on her perennial themes, the difficulties and joys of human communication, especially as frustrated by time and death. The plot is absurdly simple: An expedition to a lighthouse is postponed, then completed a decade later. Woolf’s mastery, however, of the interior monologue in this novel makes such a fragile plot line quite sufficient; the real “story” of To the Lighthouse is the reader’s gradually increasing intimacy with its characters’ richly depicted inner lives; the reader’s understanding expands in concert with the characters’ own growing insights. Woolf again devises an experimental structure for her work, this time of three unequal parts. Approximately the first half of the novel, entitled “The Window,” occurs during a single day at the seaside home occupied by an eminent philosopher, Mr. Ramsay, his wife, and a melange of children, guests, and servants, including Lily Briscoe, an amateur painter in her thirties, unmarried. Mrs. Ramsay’s is the dominant consciousness in this section. A short, exquisitely beautiful center section, “Time Passes,” pictures the house succumbing to time during the family’s ten-year absence and then being rescued from decay by two old women for the Ramsays’ repossession. Periodically interrupting this natural flow of time are terse, bracketed, clock-time announcements like news bulletins, telling of the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, the eldest son Andrew (in World War I), and the eldest daughter Prue (of childbirth complications). The final third, “The Lighthouse,” also covers one day; the diminished family and several former guests having returned, the lighthouse expedition can now be completed. This section is centered almost entirely in Lily Briscoe’s consciousness. Because Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are both strong personalities, they are sometimes interpreted too simply. Particularly in some readings by feminist critics, Mr. Ramsay is seen as an insufferable patriarch, arrogantly rational in his work but almost infantile emotionally, while Mrs. Ramsay is a Victorian Earth Mother, not only submitting unquestioningly to her husband’s and children’s excessive demands but actively

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trying to impose on all the other female characters her unliberated way of life. Such readings are sound to some extent, but they undervalue the vivid way that Woolf captures in the couple’s monologues the conflicting mixture of motives and needs that characterize human beings of either sex. For example, Mrs. Ramsay is infuriated that her husband blights their youngest son James’s anticipation of the lighthouse visit by announcing that it will storm tomorrow, yet his unflinching pursuit of truth is also something she most admires in him. Mr. Ramsay finds his wife’s irrational habit of exaggeration maddening, but as she sits alone in a reverie, he respects her integrity and will not interrupt, “though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her.” Lily, a shrewd observer who simultaneously adores and resists Mrs. Ramsay, perceives that “it would be a mistake . . . to simplify their relationship.” Amid these typical contradictions and mundane demands, however, “little daily miracles” may be achieved. One of Woolf’s finest scenes, Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner, provides a paradigm (though a summary can scarcely convey the richness of these forty pages). As she mechanically seats her guests at the huge table, Mrs. Ramsay glimpses her husband at the other end, “all in a heap, frowning”: “She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion of affection for him.” Gloomily, she perceives that not just the two of them but everyone is separate and out of sorts. For example, Charles Tansley, Mr. Ramsay’s disciple, who feels the whole family despises him, fidgets angrily; Lily, annoyed that Tansley is always telling her “women can’t paint,” purposely tries to irritate him; William Bankes would rather be home dining alone and fears that Mrs. Ramsay will read his mind. They all sense that “something [is] lacking”—they are divided from one another, sunk in their “treacherous” thoughts. Mrs. Ramsay wearily recognizes that “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.” She instructs two of her children to light the candles and set them around a beautiful fruit centerpiece that her daughter Rose has arranged for the table. This is Mrs. Ramsay’s first stroke of artistry; the candles and fruit compose the table and the faces around it into an island, a sheltering haven: “Here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.” All the guests feel this change and have a sudden sense of making “common cause against that fluidity out there.” Then the maid brings in a great steaming dish of boeuf en daube that even the finicky widower Bankes considers “a triumph.” As the guests relish the succulent food and their camaraderie grows, Mrs. Ramsay, serving the last helpings from the depths of the pot, experiences a moment of perfect insight: “There it was, all around them. It partook . . . of eternity.” She affirms to herself that “there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, that is immune from change, and shines out . . . in the face of the flowing, the fleeting.” As is true of so much of Woolf’s sparse dialogue, the ordinary words Mrs. Ramsay then speaks aloud can be read both literally and symbolically: “Yes, there is plenty for everybody.” As the dinner ends and she passes out of the room triumphantly—the inscrutable poet Augustus Carmichael, who usually resists her magic, actually bows in homage—she looks back on the scene and sees that “it had become, she knew . . . already the past.” The burden of the past and the coming to terms with it are the focus of part 3. Just as “a sort of disintegration” sets in as soon as Mrs. Ramsay sweeps out of the dining room, so her death has left a larger kind of wreckage. Without her unifying artistry, all is disorder, as it was at the beginning of the dinner. In a gesture of belated

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atonement for quarreling with his wife over the original lighthouse trip, the melodramatically despairing Mr. Ramsay insists on making the expedition now with his children James and Cam, although both hate his tyranny and neither wants to go. As they set out, Lily remains behind to paint. Surely mirroring the creative anxiety of Woolf herself, she feels “a painful but exciting ecstasy” before her blank canvas, knowing how ideas that seem simple become “in practice immediately complex.” As she starts making rhythmic strokes across the canvas, she loses “consciousness of outer things” and begins to meditate on the past, from which she gradually retrieves a vision of Mrs. Ramsay that will permit her to reconstruct and complete the painting she left unfinished a decade ago, one in which Mrs. Ramsay would have been, and will become again, a triangular shadow on a step (symbolically echoing the invisible ”wedge-shaped core of darkness” to which Mrs. Ramsay feels herself shrinking during her moments of reverie). Through the unexpectedly intense pain of recalling her, Lily also comprehends Mrs. Ramsay’s significance, her ability “to make the moment something permanent,” as art does, to strike “this eternal passing and flowing . . . into stability.” Mrs. Ramsay is able to make “life stand still here.” Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay and his children are also voyaging into the past; Cam, dreamily drifting her hand in the water, begins, as her mother did, to see her father as bravely pursuing truth like a tragic hero. James bitterly relives the childhood scene when his father thoughtlessly dashed his hopes for the lighthouse visit, but as they near the lighthouse in the present and Mr. Ramsay offers his son rare praise, James too is reconciled. When they land, Mr. Ramsay himself, standing in the bow “very straight and tall,” springs “lightly like a young man . . . on to the rock,” renewed. Simultaneously, though the boat has long since disappeared from her sight and even the lighthouse itself seems blurred, Lily intuits that they have reached their goal and she completes her painting. All of them have reclaimed Mrs. Ramsay from death, and she has unified them; memory can defeat time. “Yes,” Lily thinks, “I have had my vision.” Clearly, Woolf had achieved hers too and transmuted the materials of a painful past into this radiant novel. Although Woolf denied intending any specific symbolism for the lighthouse, it resonates with almost infinite possibilities, both within the book and in a larger way as an emblem of her work. Like the candles at the dinner party, it can be a symbol of safety and stability amid darkness and watery flux, its beams those rhythmically occurring moments of illumination that sustain Mrs. Ramsay and by extension everyone. Perhaps, however, it can also serve as a metaphor for human beings themselves as Woolf portrays them. The lighthouse signifies what can be objectively perceived of an individual—in Mrs. Ramsay’s words, “our apparitions, the things you know us by”; but it also signals invisible, possibly tragic depths, for, as Mrs. Ramsay knew, “beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep.” The Waves ·In The Waves, widely considered her masterpiece, Woolf most resolutely overcomes the limits of the traditional novel. Entirely unique in form, The Waves cannot perhaps be called a novel at all; Woolf herself first projected a work of “prose yet poetry; a novel and a play.” The book is a series of grouped soliloquies in varying combinations spoken by six friends, three men and three women, at successive stages in their lives from childhood to late middle age. Each grouping is preceded by a brief, lyrical “interlude” (Woolf’s own term), set off in italic type, that describes an empty house by the sea as the sun moves across the sky in a single day. The texture of these soliloquies is extremely difficult to convey; the term “solilo-

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quy,” in fact, is merely a critical convenience. Although each is introduced in the same straightforward way (“Neville said,” “Jinny said”), they obviously are unspoken, representing each character’s private vision. Their style is also unvarying—solemn, formal, almost stilted, like that of choral figures. The author has deliberately translated into a rigorously neutral, dignified idiom the conscious and subconscious reality her characters perceive but cannot articulate on their own. This method represents Woolf’s most ambitious attempt to capture the unfathomable depths of separate human personalities which defy communication in ordinary life, and in ordinary novels. The abstraction of the device, however, especially in combination with the flow of cosmic time in the interludes, shows that she is also concerned with depicting a universal pattern which transcends mere individuals. Thus, once more Woolf treats her theme of human beings’ attempts to overcome their isolation and to become part of a larger stabilizing pattern; this time, however, the theme is embodied in the very form of her work. It would be inaccurate, though, to say that the characters exist only as symbols. Each has definable qualities and unique imagery; Susan, as an example, farm-bred and almost belligerently maternal, speaks in elemental images of wood smoke, grassy paths, flowers thick with pollen. Further, the characters often evoke one another’s imagery; the other figures, for example, even in maturity picture the fearful, solitary Rhoda as a child rocking white petals in a brown basin of water. They are linked by intricately woven threads of common experience, above all by their shared admiration for a shadowy seventh character, Percival. Their gathering with him at a farewell dinner before he embarks on a career in India is one of the few actual events recorded in the soliloquies and also becomes one of those miraculous moments of unity comparable to that achieved by Mrs. Ramsay for her dinner guests; as they rise to leave the restaurant, all the characters are thinking as Louis does: “We pray, holding in our hands this common feeling, ‘Do not move, do not let the swing-door cut to pieces this thing that we have made, that globes itself here. . . .’” Such union, however, is cruelly impermanent; two pages later, a telegram announces Percival’s death in a riding accident. Bernard, trying to make sense of this absurdity, echoes the imagery of encircling unity that characterized their thoughts at the dinner: “Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire.” It is Bernard—identified, significantly, throughout the book as a storyteller—who is given the long final section of The Waves in which “to sum up,” becoming perhaps a surrogate for the author herself. (As a young man at school, worrying out “my novel,” he discovers how “stories that follow people into their private rooms are difficult.”) It is he who recognizes that “I am not one person; I am many people,” part of his friends as they are part of him, all of them incomplete in themselves; he is “a man without a self.” Yet it is also he who on the novel’s final page, using the wave imagery of the universalizing interludes, passionately asserts his individuality: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” Life, however obdurate and fragmented, must be affirmed. The Waves is without doubt Woolf’s most demanding and original novel, her most daring experiment in eliminating the alien and the external. When she vowed to cast out “all waste, deadness, and superfluity,” however, she also ascetically renounced some of her greatest strengths as a novelist: her wit and humor, her delight in the daily beauty, variety, and muddle of material existence. This “abstract mystical eyeless book,” as she at one point envisioned it, is a work to admire greatly, but not to love. The six years following The Waves were a difficult period for Woolf both personally

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and artistically. Deeply depressed by the deaths of Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, two of her oldest, most respected friends, she was at work on an “essay-novel,” as she first conceived of it, which despite her initial enthusiasm became her most painfully frustrating effort—even though it proved, ironically, to be her greatest commercial success. The Years · In The Years, Woolf returned to the conventional novel that she had rejected after Night and Day; she planned “to take in everything” and found herself “infinitely delighting in facts for a change.” Whereas The Waves had represented the extreme of leaving out, The Years suggests the opposite one of almost indiscriminate putting in. Its very subject, a history of the Pargiter clan spanning fifty years and three generations, links it with the diffuse family sagas of John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, whose books Woolf was expressly deriding when she demanded, “Must novels be like this?” Nevertheless, The Years is more original than it may appear; Woolf made fresh use of her experimental methods in her effort to reanimate traditional form. The novel contains eleven unequal segments, each standing for a year; the longest ones, the opening “1880” section and the closing “Present Day” (the 1930’s), anchor the book; the nine intermediate sections cover the years between 1891 and 1918. Echoing The Waves, Woolf begins each chapter with a short panoramic passage describing both London and the countryside. Within the chapters, instead of continuous narrative, there are collections of vignettes, somewhat reminiscent of Jacob’s Room, depicting various Pargiters going about their daily lives. Running parallel with the family’s history are larger historical events, including Edward VII’s death, the suffrage movement, the Irish troubles, and especially World War I. These events are usually treated indirectly, however; for example, the “1917” section takes place mainly in a cellar to which the characters have retreated, dinner plates in hand, during an air raid. It is here that Eleanor Pargiter asks, setting a theme that suffuses the rest of the novel, “When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?” The most pervasive effect of the war is felt in the lengthy “Present Day” segment, which culminates in a family reunion, where the youngest generation of Pargiters, Peggy and North, are lonely, cynical, and misanthropic, and their faltering elders are compromised by either complacency or failed hopes. Symbolically, Delia Pargiter gives the party in a rented office, not a home, underscoring the uprooting caused by the war. Yet the balancing “1880” section is almost equally dreary: The Pargiters’ solid Victorian house shelters a chronically ailing mother whose children wish she would die, a father whose vulgar mistress greets him in hair curlers and frets over her dog’s eczema, and a young daughter traumatized by an exhibitionist in the street outside. One oppressive way of life seems only to have been superseded by another, albeit a more universally menacing one. The overall imagery of the novel is likewise unlovely: Children recall being scrubbed with slimy washcloths; a revolting dinner of underdone mutton served by Sara Pargiter includes a bowl of rotting, flyblown fruit, grotesquely parodying Mrs. Ramsay’s boeuf en daube and Rose’s centerpiece; London is populated with deformed violet-sellers and old men eating cold sausages on buses. Communication in such a world is even more difficult than in Woolf’s earlier books; the dialogue throughout is full of incomplete sentences, and a central vignette in the “Present Day” section turns on one guest’s abortive efforts to deliver a speech toasting the human race. Despite these circumstances, the characters still grope toward some kind of trans-

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forming unity; Eleanor, the eldest surviving Pargiter and the most sympathetic character in the novel, comes closest to achieving such vision on the scale that Lily Briscoe and Clarissa Dalloway do. At the reunion, looking back over her life, she wonders if there is “a pattern; a theme recurring like music . . . momentarily perceptible?” Casting about her, trying to connect with her relatives and friends but dozing in the process, she suddenly wakes, proclaiming that “it’s been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.” Answering by implication her question posed fifteen years earlier during the air raid, she perceives that “we’re only just beginning . . . to understand, here and there.” That prospect is enough, however; she wants “to enclose the present moment . . . to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.” Even this glowing dream of eventual unity is muted, though, when one recalls how Eleanor’s embittered niece Peggy half pities, half admires her as a person who “still believed with passion . . . in the things man had destroyed,” and how her nephew North, a captain in the trenches of World War I, thinks, “We cannot help each other, we are all deformed.” It is difficult not to read the final lines of this profoundly somber novel ironically: “The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace.” Between the Acts · Woolf’s final work, Between the Acts, also deals with individual lives unfolding against the screen of history, but her vision and the methods by which she conveys it are more inventive, complex, and successful than in The Years. Covering the space of a single day in June, 1939, as world war threatens on the Continent, Between the Acts depicts the events surrounding a village pageant about the history of England, performed on the grounds of Pointz Hall, a country house occupied by the unhappily married Giles and Isa Oliver. The Olivers’ story frames the presentation of the pageant, scenes of which are directly reproduced in the novel and alternate with glimpses of the audience’s lives during the intervals between the acts. The novel’s title is hence richly metaphorical: The acts of the drama itself are bracketed by the scenes of real life, which in turn can be viewed as brief episodes in the long pageant of human history. Equally ambiguous, then, is the meaning of “parts,” connoting clearly defined roles within a drama but also the fragmentation and incompleteness of the individuals who play them, that pervasive theme in Woolf’s work. In The Years, Woolf had focused on the personal histories of her characters; history in the larger sense made itself felt as it impinged on private lives. This emphasis is reversed in Between the Acts. Though the novel has interesting characters, Woolf provides scant information about their backgrounds, nor does she plumb individual memory in her usual manner. Instead, the characters possess a national, cultural, communal past—finally that of the whole human race from the Stone Age to the present. That Woolf intends her characters to be seen as part of this universal progression is clear from myriad references in the early pages to historical time. For example, from the air, the “scars” made by the Britons and the Romans can be seen around the village as can the Elizabethan manor house; graves in the churchyard attest that Mrs. Haines’s family has lived in the area “for many centuries,” whereas the Oliver family has inhabited Pointz Hall for “only something over a hundred and twenty years”; Lucy Swithin, Giles’s endearing aunt, enjoys reading about history and imagining Piccadilly when it was a rhododendron forest populated by mastodons, “from whom, presumably, she thought . . . we descend.” The pageant itself, therefore, functions in the novel as more than simply a church

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fund-raising ritual, the product of well-meaning but hapless amateurs (though it exists amusingly on that level too). It is a heroic attempt by its author-director, the formidable Miss La Trobe, to make people see themselves playing parts in the continuum of British history. Thus, the audience has an integral role that blurs the lines “between the acts”; “Our part,” says Giles’s father, Bartholomew, “is to be the audience. And a very important part too.” Their increasing interest in the pageant as they return from the successive intermissions signals their growing sense of a shared past and hence of an identity that both binds and transcends them as individuals. The scenes of the pageant proceed from bathos to unnerving profundity. The first player, a small girl in pink, announces, “England am I,” then promptly forgets her lines, while the wind blows away half the words of the singers behind her. Queen Elizabeth, splendidly decorated with six-penny brooches and a cape made of silvery scouring pads, turns out to be Mrs. Clark, the village tobacconist; the combined applause and laughter of delighted recognition muffle her opening speech. As the pageant progresses from a wicked though overlong parody of Restoration comedy to a satiric scene at a Victorian picnic, however, the audience becomes more reflective; the past is now close enough to be familiar, triggering their own memories and priming them for the last scene, Miss La Trobe’s inspired experiment in expressionism, “The Present Time. Ourselves.” The uncomprehending audience fidgets as the stage remains empty, refusing to understand that they are supposed to contemplate their own significance. “Reality too strong,” Miss La Trobe mutters angrily from behind the bushes, “Curse ’em!” Then, “sudden and universal,” a summer shower fortuitously begins. “Down it rained like all the people in the world weeping.” Nature has provided the bridge of meaning Miss La Trobe required. As the rain ends, all the players from all the periods reappear, still in costume and declaiming fragments of their parts while flashing mirrors in the faces of the discomfited audience. An offstage voice asks how civilization is “to be built by orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves,” then dies away. The Reverend Streatfield, disconcerted like the rest of the audience, is assigned the embarrassing role of summing up the play’s meaning. Tentatively, self-consciously, he ventures, “To me at least it was indicated that we are members of one another. . . . We act different parts; but are the same. . . . Surely, we should unite?” Then he abruptly shifts into a fund-raising appeal that is drowned out by a formation of war planes passing overhead. As the audience departs, a gramophone plays a valedictory: “Dispersed are we; we who have come together. But let us retain whatever made that harmony.” The audience responds, thinking “There is joy, sweet joy, in company.” The qualified optimism of the pageant’s close, however, is darkened by the bleak, perhaps apocalyptic postscript of the framing story. After the group disperses, the characters resume their usual roles. Lucy Swithin, identified earlier as a “unifier,” experiences a typically Woolfian epiphany as she gazes on a fishpond, glimpsing the silver of the great carp below the surface and “seeing in that vision beauty, power and glory in ourselves.” Her staunchly rational brother Bartholomew, a “separatist,” goes into the house. Miss La Trobe, convinced that she has failed again, heads for the local pub to drink alone and plan her next play; it will be set at midnight with two figures half hidden by a rock as the curtain rises. “What would the first words be?” It is the disaffected Giles and Isa, loving and hating each other, who begin the new play. In a remarkable ending, Woolf portrays the couple sitting silently in the dark before going to bed: “Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought they would embrace.” From that embrace, they may create another life, but “first they must

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fight, as the dog fox fights the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.” The “great hooded chairs” in which they sit grow enormous, like Miss La Trobe’s rock. The house fades, no longer sheltering them; they are like “dwellers in caves,” watching “from some high place.” The last lines of the novel are, “Then the curtain rose. They spoke.” This indeterminate conclusion implies that love and hate are elemental and reciprocal, and that such oppositions on a personal level are also the polarities that drive human history. Does Woolf read, then, in the gathering European storm, a cataclysm that will bring the pageant of history full circle, back to the primitive stage of prehistory? Or, like W. B. Yeats in “The Second Coming,” does she envision a new cycle even more terrifying than the old? Or, as the faithful Lucy Swithin does, perhaps she hopes that “all is harmony could we hear it. And we shall.” Eight years earlier, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain.” Miss La Trobe, a crude alter ego for the author, is obsessed by failure but always driven to create anew because “a vision imparted was relief from agony . . . for one moment.” In her brilliant experimental attempts to impart her own view of fragmented human beings achieving momentary harmony, discovering unity and stability behind the flux of daily life, Woolf repeatedly endured such anguish, but after Between the Acts was done, the strain of beginning again was too great. Perhaps the questions Virginia Woolf posed in this final haunting novel, published posthumously and unrevised, were answered for her in death. Kristine Ottesen Garrigan Other major works SHORT FICTION: Monday or Tuesday, 1921; A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, 1943; Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, 1973 (Stella McNichol, editor); The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 1985. NONFICTION: The Common Reader: First Series, 1925; A Room of One’s Own, 1929; The Common Reader: Second Series, 1932; Three Guineas, 1938; Roger Fry: A Biography, 1940; The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, 1942; The Moment and Other Essays, 1947; The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays, 1950; A Writer’s Diary, 1953; Granite and Rainbow, 1958; Contemporary Writers, 1965; Collected Essays, Volumes 1-2, 1966; Collected Essays, Volumes 3-4, 1967; The London Scene: Five Essays, 1975; The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, 1888-1912, 1975 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1888-1912, 1975; Nigel Nicolson, editor); The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, 1912-1922, 1976 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II: 1912-1922, 1976; Nicolson, editor); Moments of Being, 1976 ( Jeanne Schulkind, editor); Books and Portraits, 1977; The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1977-1984 (5 volumes; Anne Olivier Bell, editor); A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1923-1928, 1977 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III: 1923-1928, 1978; Nicolson, editor); A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV, 1929-1931, 1978 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV: 1929-1931, 1979; Nicolson, editor); The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, 1932-1935, 1979 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V: 1932-1935, 1979; Nicolson, editor); Leave the Letters Til We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI, 1936-1941, 1980 (Nicolson, editor); The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1987-1994 (4 volumes).

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Bibliography Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. With a focus upon symbolism and stylistic devices, this book comprehensively delineates the psychoanalytic connections between Woolf’s fiction and Sigmund Freud’s and Melanie Klein’s theories. Sometimes difficult to follow, however, given Abel’s reliance on excellent but extensive endnotes. Baldwin, Dean R. Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Baldwin’s lucid parallels between Woolf’s life experiences and her innovative short-story techniques contribute significantly to an understanding of both the author and her creative process. The book also presents the opportunity for a comparative critical study by furnishing a collection of additional points of view in the final section. A chronology, a bibliography, and an index supplement the work. Beja, Morris. Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. In an excellent composite of literary analyses, Beja directs attention to both reviews and critical essays on Woolf’s writings in order to demonstrate her universal and ageless appeal. Several critical disciplines are represented. Includes essay endnotes and an index. Dowling, David. Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Divided into sections on literary and historical context and interpretations of the novel. Dowling explores the world of Bloomsbury, war, and modernism; the critical reception of the novel and how it was composed; Woolf’s style, theory of fiction, handling of stream of consciousness, structure, characters, and themes. Includes a chronology and concordance to the novel. Ginsberg, Elaine K., and L. M. Gottlieb, eds. Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1983. Sixteen papers cover, among other topics, Woolf’s style, gender consciousness, and feminist inclinations. Style, approach, and interpretation vary widely by presenter, and the text as a whole requires some familiarity with Woolf’s writings. Notes on contributors, endnotes following each paper, and an index are provided. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. This volume discusses George Eliot, Woolf, Willa Cather, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Focuses on the female view and feminism in literature. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1997. The most complete biography of Woolf so far, drawing on the latest scholarship and on primary sources. Includes family tree, notes, and bibliography. Warner, Eric, ed. Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. With a nonpartisan approach, this text offers seven papers and two panel discussions from Fitzwilliam College’s Virginia Woolf Centenary Conference in Cambridge, England. Notes at the end of each presentation, notes on the contributors, and an index are provided.

TERM S AN D TECH N IQUES Terms and Techniques

Absurdism: A philosophical attitude pervading much of modern drama and fiction, which underlines the isolation and alienation that humans experience, having been thrown into what absurdists see as a godless universe devoid of religious, spiritual, or metaphysical meaning. Conspicuous in its lack of logic, consistency, coherence, intelligibility, and realism, the literature of the absurd depicts the anguish, forlornness, and despair inherent in the human condition. Counter to the rationalist assumptions of traditional humanism, absurdism denies the existence of universal truth or value. Allegory: A literary mode in which a second level of meaning, wherein characters, events, and settings represent abstractions, is encoded within the surface narrative. The allegorical mode may dominate the entire work, in which case the encoded message is the work’s primary excuse for being, or it may be an element in a work otherwise interesting and meaningful for its surface story alone. Elements of allegory may be found in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). Anatomy: Literally the term means the “cutting up” or “dissection” of a subject into its constituent parts for closer examination. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), uses the term to refer to a narrative that deals with mental attitudes rather than people. As opposed to the novel, the anatomy features stylized figures who are mouthpieces for the ideas they represent. Antagonist: The character in fiction who stands as a rival or opponent to the protagonist. Antihero: Defined by Seán O’Faoláin as a fictional figure who, deprived of social sanctions and definitions, is always trying to define himself and to establish his own codes. Ahab may be seen as the antihero of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Archetype: The term “archetype” entered literary criticism from the psychology of Carl G. Jung, who defined archetypes as “primordial images” from the “collective unconscious” of humankind. Jung believed that works of art derived much of their power from the unconscious appeal of these images to ancestral memories. In his extremely influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye gave another sense of the term wide currency, defining the archetype as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a whole.” Atmosphere: The general mood or tone of a work; it is often associated with setting but can also be established by action or dialogue. A classic example of atmosphere is the primitive, fatalistic tone created in the opening description of Egdon Heath in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). Bildungsroman: Sometimes called the “novel of education,” the Bildungsroman focuses on the growth of a young protagonist who is learning about the world and finding his or her place in life; typical examples are James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Biographical criticism: Criticism that attempts to determine how the events and experiences of an author’s life influence his work. Bourgeois novel: A novel in which the values, preoccupations, and accoutrements of 1037

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middle-class or bourgeois life are given particular prominence. The heyday of the bourgeois novel was the nineteenth century, when novelists as varied as Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, and Anthony Trollope both criticized and unreflectingly transmitted the assumptions of the rising middle class. Canon: An authorized or accepted list of books. In modern parlance, the literary canon comprehends the privileged texts, classics, or great books that are thought to belong permanently on university reading lists. Recent theory, especially feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist, critically examines the process of canon formation and questions the hegemony of white male writers. Such theory sees canon formation as the ideological act of a dominant institution and seeks to undermine the notion of canonicity itself, thereby preventing the exclusion of works by women, minorities, and oppressed peoples. Character: Characters in fiction can be presented as if they were real people or as stylized functions of the plot. Usually characters are a combination of both factors. Classicism: A literary stance or value system consciously based on the example of classical Greek and Roman literature. While the term is applied to an enormous diversity of artists in many different periods and in many different national literatures, “classicism” generally denotes a cluster of values including formal discipline, restrained expression, reverence for tradition, and an objective rather than a subjective orientation. As a literary tendency, classicism is often opposed to Romanticism, although many writers combine classical and romantic elements. Climax/Crisis: Whereas climax refers to the moment of the reader’s highest emotional response, crisis refers to a structural element of plot. Crisis refers to a turning point in fiction, a point when a resolution must take place. Complication: The point in a novel when the conflict is developed or when the already existing conflict is further intensified. Conflict: The struggle that develops as a result of the opposition between the protagonist and another person, the natural world, society, or some force within the self. Conventions: All those devices of stylization, compression, and selection that constitute the necessary differences between art and life. According to the Russian Formalists, these conventions constitute the “literariness” of literature and are the only proper concern of the literary critic. Deconstruction: An extremely influential contemporary school of criticism based on the works of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction treats literary works as unconscious reflections of the reigning myths of Western culture. The primary myth is that there is a meaningful world that language signifies or represents. The deconstructionist critic is most often concerned with showing how a literary text tacitly subverts the very assumptions or myths on which it ostensibly rests. Detective story: The so-called classic detective story (or mystery) is a highly formalized and logically structured mode of fiction in which the focus is on a crime solved by a detective through interpretation of evidence and ratiocination; the most famous detective in this mode is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Many modern practitioners of the genre, however, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, have deemphasized the puzzlelike qualities of the detective story, stressing instead characterization, theme, and other elements of mainstream fiction. Determinism: The belief that an individual’s actions are essentially determined by

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biological and environmental factors, with free will playing a negligible role. (See Naturalism.) Dialogue: The similitude of conversation in fiction, dialogue serves to characterize, to further the plot, to establish conflict, and to express thematic ideas. Displacement: Popularized in criticism by Northrop Frye, the term refers to the author’s attempt to make his or her story psychologically motivated and realistic, even as the latent structure of the mythical motivation moves relentlessly forward. Dominant: A term coined by Roman Jakobson to refer to that which “rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components in the work of a single artist, in a poetic canon, or in the work of an epoch.” The shifting of the dominant in a genre accounts for the creation of new generic forms and new poetic epochs. For example, the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth century indicates realistic conventions becoming dominant and romance or fantasy conventions becoming secondary. Doppelgänger: A double or counterpart of a person, sometimes endowed with ghostly qualities. A fictional character’s Doppelgänger often reflects a suppressed side of his or her personality. One of the classic examples of the Doppelgänger motif is found in Fyodor Dostoevski’s novella The Double (1846); Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jorge Luis Borges, among others, offer striking modern treatments of the Doppelgänger. Epic: Although this term usually refers to a long narrative poem that presents the exploits of a central figure of high position, the term is also used to designate a long novel that has the style or structure usually associated with an epic. In this sense, for example, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) may be called epic. Episodic narrative: A work that is held together primarily by a loose connection of self-sufficient episodes. Picaresque novels often have an episodic structure. Epistolary novel: A novel made up of letters by one or more fictional characters. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740-1741) is a well-known eighteenth century example. In the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is largely epistolary. The technique allows for several different points of view to be presented. Euphuism: A style of writing characterized by ornate language that is highly contrived, alliterative, and repetitious. Euphuism was developed by John Lyly in his Euphues, an Anatomy of Wit (1578) and was emulated frequently by writers of the Elizabethan Age. Existentialism: A philosophical, religious, and literary term, emerging from World War II, for a group of attitudes surrounding the pivotal notion that existence precedes essence. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, “man is nothing else but what he makes himself.” Forlornness arises from the death of God and the concomitant death of universal values, of any source of ultimate or a priori standards. Despair arises from the fact that an individual can reckon only with what depends on his or her will, and the sphere of that will is severely limited; the number of things on which he or she can have an impact is pathetically small. Existentialist literature is antideterministic in the extreme and rejects the idea that heredity and environment shape and determine human motivation and behavior. Exposition: The part or parts of a fiction that provide necessary background information. Exposition not only provides the time and place of the action but also introduces readers to the fictive world of the story, acquainting them with the ground rules of the work. Fantastic: In his study The Fantastic (1970), Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as a

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genre that lies between the “uncanny” and the “marvelous.” All three genres embody the familiar world but present an event that cannot be explained by the laws of the familiar world. Todorov says that the fantastic occupies a twilight zone between the uncanny, when the reader knows that the peculiar event is merely the result of an illusion, and the marvelous, when the reader understands that the event is supposed to take place in a realm controlled by laws unknown to humankind. Thus, the fantastic is essentially unsettling, provocative, even subversive. Feminist criticism: A criticism advocating equal rights for women in a political, economic, social, psychological, personal, and aesthetic sense. On the thematic level, the feminist reader should identify with female characters and their concerns. The object is to provide a critique of phallocentric assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal ideologies inscribed in a literature that is male-centered and maledominated. On the ideological level, feminist critics see gender, as well as the stereotypes that go along with it, as a cultural construct. They strive to define a particularly feminine content and to extend the canon so that it might include works by lesbians, feminists, and female writers in general. Flashback: A scene in a fiction that depicts an earlier event; it can be presented as a reminiscence by a character in the story or it can simply be inserted into the narrative. Foreshadowing: A device to create suspense or dramatic irony by indicating through suggestion what will take place in the future. Genre: In its most general sense, the term “genre” refers to a group of literary works defined by a common form, style, or purpose. In practice, the term is used in a wide variety of overlapping and, to a degree, contradictory senses. Thus, tragedy and comedy are described as distinct genres; the novel (a form that includes both tragic and comic works) is a genre; and various subspecies of the novel, such as the gothic and the picaresque, are themselves frequently treated as distinct genres. Finally, the term genre fiction refers to forms of popular fiction in which the writer is bound by more or less rigid conventions. Indeed, all these diverse usages have in common an emphasis on the manner in which individual literary works are shaped by the expectations and conventions of a particular genre: this is the subject of genre criticism. Genre fiction: Categories of popular fiction such as the mystery, the romance, and the Western. Although the term can be used in a neutral sense, “genre fiction” is often pejorative, used dismissively to refer to fiction in which the writer is bound by more or less rigid conventions. Gothic novel: A form of fiction developed in the eighteenth century that focuses on horror and the supernatural. In his preface to The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first gothic novel in English, Horace Walpole claimed that he was trying to combine two kinds of fiction, with events and story typical of the medieval romance and character delineation typical of the realistic novel. Other examples of the form are Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Grotesque: According to Wolfgang Kayser (The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 1963), the grotesque is an embodiment in literature of the estranged world. Characterized by a breakup of the everyday world by mysterious forces, the form differs from fantasy in that the reader is not sure whether to react with humor or with horror and in that the exaggeration manifested exists in the familiar world rather than in a purely imaginative world.

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Hebraic/Homeric styles: Terms coined by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) to designate two basic fictional styles: the Hebraic, which focuses only on the decisive points of narrative and leaves all else obscure, mysterious, and “fraught with background,” and the Homeric, which places the narrative in a definite time and place and externalizes everything in a perpetual foreground. Historical novel: A novel that depicts past historical events, usually public in nature, and features real as well as fictional people. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels established the basic type, but the relationship between fiction and history in the form varies greatly depending on the practitioner. Implied author: According to Wayne Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), the novel often creates a kind of second self who tells the story, a self who is wiser, more sensitive, and more perceptive than any real person could be. Interior monologue: Defined by Édouard Dujardin as the speech of a character designed to introduce the reader directly to the character’s internal life, the form differs from other monologues in that it attempts to reproduce thought before any logical organization is imposed upon it. See, for example, Molly Bloom’s long interior monologue at the conclusion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Irrealism: A term often used to refer to modern or postmodern fiction that is presented self-consciously as a fiction or a fabulation rather than a mimesis of external reality. The best-known practitioners of irrealism are John Barth, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme. Marxist criticism: Based on the nineteenth century writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marxist criticism views literature as a product of ideological forces determined by the dominant class. However, many Marxists believe that literature operates according to its own autonomous standards of production and reception: It is both a product of ideology and able to determine ideology. As such, literature may overcome the dominant paradigms of its age and play a revolutionary role in society. Metafiction: The term refers to fiction that manifests a reflexive tendency, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). The emphasis is on the loosening of the work’s illusion of reality to expose the reality of its illusion. Such terms as irrealism, postmodernist fiction, “antifiction,” and “surfiction” are also used to refer to this type of fiction. Modernism: An international movement in the arts that began in the early years of the twentieth century. Although the term is used to describe artists of widely varying persuasions, modernism in general was characterized by its international idiom, by its interest in cultures distant in space or time, by its emphasis on formal experimentation, and by its sense of dislocation and radical change. Motif: A conventional incident or situation in a fiction that may serve as the basis for the structure of the narrative itself. The Russian Formalist critic Boris Tomashevsky uses the term to refer to the smallest particle of thematic material in a work. Motivation: Although this term is usually used in reference to the convention of justifying the action of a character from his or her psychological makeup, the Russian Formalists use the term to refer to the network of devices that justify the introduction of individual motifs or groups of motifs in a work. For example, compositional motivation refers to the principle that every single property in a work contributes to its overall effect; realistic motivation refers to the realistic devices used to make the work plausible and lifelike.

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Multiculturalism: The tendency to recognize the perspectives of those traditionally excluded from the canon of Western art and literature. In order to promote multiculturalism, publishers and educators have revised textbooks and school curricula to incorporate material by and about women, minorities, non-Western cultures, and homosexuals. Myth: Anonymous traditional stories dealing with basic human concepts and antinomies. Claude Lévi-Strauss says that myth is that part of language where the “formula tradutore, tradittore reaches its lowest truth value. . . . Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells.” Myth criticism: Northrop Frye says that in myth, “we see the structural principles of literature isolated.” Myth criticism is concerned with these basic principles of literature; it is not to be confused with mythological criticism, which is primarily concerned with finding mythological parallels in the surface action of the narrative. Narrative: Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, in The Nature of Narrative (1966), say that by narrative they mean literary works that include both a story and a storyteller. Narrative usually implies a contrast to “enacted” fiction such as drama. Narratology: The study of the form and functioning of narratives; it attempts to examine what all narratives have in common and what makes individual narratives different from one another. Narrator: The character who recounts the narrative, or story. Wayne Booth describes various dramatized narrators in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): unacknowledged centers of consciousness, observers, narrator-agents, and self-conscious narrators. Booth suggests that the important elements to consider in narration are the relationships among the narrator, the author, the characters, and the reader. Naturalism: As developed by Émile Zola in the late nineteenth century, naturalism is the application of the principles of scientific determinism to fiction. Although it usually refers more to the choice of subject matter than to technical conventions, those conventions associated with the movement center on the author’s attempt to be precise and scientifically objective in description and detail, regardless of whether the events described are sordid or shocking. Novel: Perhaps the most difficult of all fictional forms to define because of its multiplicity of modes. Edouard, in André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (1926), says the novel is the freest and most lawless of all genres: he wonders if fear of that liberty is not the reason the novel has so timidly clung to reality. Most critics seem to agree that the novel’s primary area of concern is the social world. Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel, 1957) says that the novel can be distinguished from other fictional forms by the attention it pays to individual characterization and detailed presentation of the environment. Moreover, says Watt, the novel, more than any other fictional form, is interested in the “development of its characters in the course of time.” Novel of manners: The classic example of the form might be the novels of Jane Austen, wherein the customs and conventions of a social group of a particular time and place are realistically, and often satirically, portrayed. Novella, novelle, nouvelle, novelette, novela: Although these terms often refer to the short European tale, especially the Renaissance form employed by Giovanni Boccaccio, the terms often refer to that form of fiction that is said to be longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. “Novelette” is the term usually preferred by the British, whereas “novella” is the term usually used to refer to American works in this genre. Henry James claimed that the main merit of the form was the “effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity.”

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Phenomenological criticism: Although best known as a European school of criticism practiced by Georges Poulet and others, this so-called criticism of consciousness is also propounded in America by such critics as J. Hillis Miller. The focus is less on individual works and genres than it is on literature as an act; the work is not seen as an object, but rather as part of a strand of latent impulses in the work of a single author or an epoch. Picaresque novel: A form of fiction that centers on a central rogue figure or picaro who usually tells his or her own story. The plot structure is normally episodic, and the episodes usually focus on how the picaro lives by his or her wits. Classic examples of the mode are Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Plot/Story: Story is a term referring to the full narrative of character and action, whereas plot generally refers to action with little reference to character. A more precise and helpful distinction is made by the Russian Formalists, who suggest that plot refers to the events of a narrative as they have been artfully arranged in the literary work, subject to chronological displacement, ellipses, and other devices, while story refers to the sum of the same events arranged in simple, causal-chronological order. Thus, story is the raw material for plot. By comparing the two in a given work, the reader is encouraged to see the narrative as an artifact. Point of view: The means by which the story is presented to the reader, or, as Percy Lubbock says in The Craft of Fiction (1921), “the relation in which the narrator stands to the story,” a relation that Lubbock claims governs the craft of fiction. Some of the questions the critical reader should ask concerning point of view are Who talks to the reader? From what position does the narrator tell the story? At what distance does he or she place the reader from the story? What kind of person is he or she? How fully is he or she characterized? How reliable is he or she? For further discussion, see Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Postcolonialism: Postcolonial literature emerged in the mid-twentieth century when colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean began gaining their independence from the European nations that had long controlled them. Postcolonial authors, such as Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, tend to focus on both the freedom and the conflict inherent in living in a postcolonial state. Postmodernism: A ubiquitous but elusive term in contempory criticism, “postmodernism” is loosely applied to the various artistic movements that followed the era of so-called high modernism, represented by such giants as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso. In critical discussions of contemporary fiction, the term “postmodernism” is frequently applied to the works of writers such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Donald Barthelme, who exhibit a self- conscious awareness of their modernist predecessors as well as a reflexive treatment of fictional form. Protagonist: The central character in a fiction, the character whose fortunes most concern the reader. Psychological criticism: While much modern literary criticism reflects to some degree the impact of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and other psychological theorists, the term “psychological criticism” suggests a strong emphasis on a causal relation between the writer’s psychological state, variously interpreted, and his or her works. A notable example of psychological criticism is Norman Fruman’s Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (1971). Psychological novel: A form of fiction in which character, especially the inner life of characters, is the primary focus. The form has been of primary importance, at least

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since Henry James, and it characterizes much of the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. For a detailed discussion, see The Modern Psychological Novel (1955) by Leon Edel. Realism: A literary technique in which the primary convention is to render an illusion of fidelity to external reality. Realism is often identified as the primary method of the novel form: It focuses on surface details, maintains a fidelity to the everyday experiences of middle-class society, and strives for a one-to-one relationship between the fiction and the action imitated. The realist movement in the late nineteenth century coincides with the full development of the novel form. Reception aesthetics: The best-known American practitioner of reception aesthetics is Stanley Fish. For the reception critic, meaning is an event or process; rather than being embedded in the work, it is created through particular acts of reading. The best-known European practitioner of this criticism, Wolfgang Iser, says indeterminacy is the basic characteristic of literary texts; the reader must “normalize” the text either by projecting his or her standards into it or by revising his or her standards to “fit” the text. Rhetorical criticism: The rhetorical critic is concerned with the literary work as a means of communicating ideas and the means by which the work affects or controls the reader. Such criticism seems best suited to didactic works such as satire. Roman à clef: A fiction wherein actual people, often celebrities of some sort, are thinly disguised. Romance: The romance usually differs from the novel form in that the focus is on symbolic events and representational characters rather than on “as-if-real” characters and events. Richard Chase says that in the romance, character is depicted as highly stylized, a function of the plot rather than as someone complexly related to society. The romancer is more likely to be concerned with dreamworlds than with the familiar world, believing that reality cannot be grasped by the traditional novel. Romanticism: A widespread cultural movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the influence of which is still felt. As a general literary tendency, Romanticism is frequently contrasted with classicism. Although there were many varieties of Romanticism indigenous to various national literatures, the term generally suggests an assertion of the preeminence of the imagination. Other values associated with various schools of Romanticism include primitivism, an interest in folklore, a reverence for nature, and a fascination with the demoniac and the macabre. Scene: The central element of narration; specific actions are narrated or depicted that make the reader feel he or she is participating directly in the action. Science fiction: Fiction in which certain givens (physical laws, psychological principles, social conditions: any one or all of these) form the basis of an imaginative projection into the future or, less commonly, an extrapolation in the present or even into the past. Semiotics: The science of signs and sign systems in communication. Roman Jakobson says that semiotics deals with the principles that underlie the structure of signs, their use in language of all kinds, and the specific nature of various sign systems. Sentimental novel: A form of fiction popular in the eighteenth century in which emotionalism and optimism are the primary characteristics. The best-known examples are Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740-1741) and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).

Terms and Techniques

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Setting: Setting refers to the circumstances and environment, both temporal and spatial, of a narrative. Spatial form: An author’s attempt to make the reader apprehend the work spatially in a moment of time rather than sequentially. To achieve this effect, the author breaks up the narrative into interspersed fragments. Beginning with James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Djuna Barnes, the movement toward spatial form is concomitant with the modernist effort to supplant historical time in fiction with mythic time. For the seminal discussion of this technique, see Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (1963). Stream of consciousness: The depiction of the thought processes of a character, insofar as this is possible, without any mediating structures. The metaphor of consciousness as a “stream” suggests a rush of thoughts and images governed by free association rather than by strictly rational development. The term “stream of consciousness” is often used loosely as a synonym for interior monologue. The most celebrated example of stream of consciousness in fiction is the monologue of Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922); other notable practitioners of the stream-ofconsciousness technique include Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Structuralism: As a movement of thought, structuralism is based on the idea of intrinsic, self-sufficient structures that do not require reference to external elements. A structure is a system of transformations that involves the interplay of laws inherent in the system itself. The study of language is the primary model for contemporary structuralism. The structuralist literary critic attempts to define structural principles that operate intertextually throughout the whole of literature as well as principles that operate in genres and in individual works. The most accessible survey of structuralism and literature is Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975). Summary: Those parts of a fiction that do not need to be detailed. In Tom Jones (1749), Henry Fielding says “If whole years should pass without producing anything worthy of . . . notice . . . we shall hasten on to matters of consequence.” Thematics: Northrup Frye says that when a work of fiction is written or interpreted thematically, it becomes an illustrative fable. Murray Krieger defines thematics as “the study of the experiential tensions which, dramatically entangled in the literary work, become an existential reflection of that work’s aesthetic complexity.” See Krieger’s The Tragic Vision (1960). Tone: Tone usually refers to the dominant mood of the work. (See Atmosphere.) Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account of the events of the story cannot be trusted, obliging readers to reconstruct, if possible, the true state of affairs themselves. Once an innovative technique, the use of the unreliable narrator has become commonplace among contemporary writers who wish to suggest the impossibility of a truly “reliable” account of any event. Notable examples of the unreliable narrator can be found in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1958). Victorian novel: Although the Victorian period extended from 1837 to 1901, the term “Victorian novel” does not include the later decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. The term loosely refers to the sprawling works of novelists such as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, works that frequently appeared first in serial form and are characterized by a broad social canvas. Vraisemblance/Verisimilitude: Tzvetan Todorov defines vraisemblance as “the mask which conceals the text’s own laws, but which we are supposed to take for a relation

1046

Notable British Novelists

to reality.” When one speaks of vraisemblance, one refers to the work’s attempts to make the reader believe that it conforms to reality rather than to its own laws.

Charles E. May

Time Line Time Line

Date and place of birth

Name

Early 15th cent.: Warwickshire (?), England

Sir Thomas Malory

Nov. 1628: Elstow, England

John Bunyan

July (?), 1640: England

Aphra Behn

1660: London, England

Daniel Defoe

Nov. 30, 1667: Dublin, Ireland

Jonathan Swift

July 31 (?), 1689: Derbyshire, England

Samuel Richardson

Apr. 22, 1707: Sharpham Park, Somersetshire, England

Henry Fielding

Sept. 18, 1709: Lichfield, Staffordshire, England

Samuel Johnson

Nov. 24, 1713: Clonmel, Ireland

Laurence Sterne

Mar. 19, 1721 (baptized): Dalquhurn, Scotland

Tobias Smollett

Nov. 10, 1728 or 1730: Pallas, County Longford(?), Oliver Goldsmith Ireland June 13, 1752: King’s Lynn, England

Fanny Burney

1762: Portsmouth, England

Susanna Rowson

July 9, 1764: London, England

Ann Radcliffe

Jan. 1, 1767: Black Bourton, England

Maria Edgeworth

Aug. 15, 1771: Edinburgh, Scotland

Sir Walter Scott

July 9, 1775: London, England

Matthew Gregory Lewis

Dec. 16, 1775: Steventon, England

Jane Austen

Sept. 25, 1780: Dublin, Ireland

Charles Robert Maturin

Oct. 18, 1785: Weymouth, England

Thomas Love Peacock

Aug. 30, 1797: London, England

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Sept. 29, 1810: Chelsea, London, England

Elizabeth Gaskell

July 18, 1811: Calcutta, India

William Makepeace Thackeray

Feb. 7, 1812: Portsmouth, England

Charles Dickens

Aug. 28, 1814: Dublin, Ireland

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Apr. 24, 1815: London, England

Anthony Trollope

Apr. 21, 1816: Thornton, Yorkshire, England

Charlotte Brontë

July 30, 1818: Thornton, Yorkshire, England

Emily Brontë

Nov. 22, 1819: Chilvers Coton, England

George Eliot

Jan. 8, 1824: London, England

Wilkie Collins

Feb. 12, 1828: Portsmouth, England

George Meredith

Jan. 27, 1832: Daresbury, Cheshire, England

Lewis Carroll

1047

1048

Notable British Novelists

Date and place of birth Dec. 4, 1835: Langar Rectory, England

Name Samuel Butler

Aug. 4, 1839: London, England

Walter Pater

June 2, 1840: Higher Bockhampton, England

Thomas Hardy

Nov. 13, 1850: Edinburgh, Scotland

Robert Louis Stevenson

Oct. 16, 1854: Dublin, Ireland

Oscar Wilde

Nov. 22, 1857: Wakefield, England

George Gissing

Dec. 3, 1857: Near Berdyczów, Poland

Joseph Conrad

May 22, 1859: Edinburgh, Scotland

Arthur Conan Doyle

Dec. 30, 1865: Bombay, India

Rudyard Kipling

Sept. 21, 1866: Bromley, Kent, England

H. G. Wells

May 27, 1867: Shelton, near Hanley, England

Arnold Bennett

Aug. 14, 1867: Kingston Hill, England

John Galsworthy

Apr. 25, 1873: Charlton, Kent, England

Walter de la Mare

May 17, 1873: Berkshire, England

Dorothy Richardson

Dec. 17, 1873: Merton, England

Ford Madox Ford

Jan. 25, 1874: Paris, France

W. Somerset Maugham

May 29, 1874: London, England

G. K. Chesterton

Jan. 1, 1879: London, England

E. M. Forster

Aug. 1, 1881: Rugby, England

Rose Macaulay

Oct. 15, 1881: Guildford, Surrey, England

P. G. Wodehouse

Jan. 25, 1882: London, England

Virginia Woolf

June 5, 1884: Pinner, England

Ivy Compton-Burnett

Sept. 11, 1885: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England

D. H. Lawrence

Dec. 7, 1888: Londonderry, Ireland

Joyce Cary

Sept. 15, 1890: Torquay, England

Agatha Christie

Jan. 3, 1892: Bloemfontein, South Africa

J. R. R. Tolkien

June 13, 1893: Oxford, England

Dorothy L. Sayers

July 26, 1894: Laleham, near Godalming, Surrey, England

Aldous Huxley

Aug. 24, 1894: Roseau, Dominica Island, West Indies

Jean Rhys

Sept. 13, 1894: Bradford, England

J. B. Priestley

July 24, 1895: Wimbledon, England

Robert Graves

Dec. 30, 1895: Whittlesea, England

L. P. Hartley

July 19, 1896: Cardross, Scotland

A. J. Cronin

Nov. 29, 1898: Belfast, Northern Ireland

C. S. Lewis

June 7, 1899: Dublin, Ireland

Elizabeth Bowen

June 25, 1903: Motihari, India

George Orwell

Time Line

1049

Date and place of birth Oct. 28, 1903: London, England

Name Evelyn Waugh

Oct. 2, 1904: Berkhamsted, England

Graham Greene

Sept. 4, 1905: London, England

Mary Renault

Sept. 5, 1905: Budapest, Hungary Oct. 15, 1905: Leicester, England

Arthur Koestler C. P. Snow

Dec. 21, 1905: London, England May 29, 1906: Bombay, India

Anthony Powell T. H. White

May 13, 1907: London, England

Daphne Du Maurier

July 28, 1909: Liscard, England Sept. 19, 1911: St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England Feb. 27, 1912: Julundur, India

Malcolm Lowry William Golding Lawrence Durrell

June 2, 1913: Oswestry, England

Barbara Pym

Aug. 11, 1913: Bexhill, East Sussex, England

Angus Wilson

Feb. 25, 1917: Manchester, England

Anthony Burgess

Dec. 16, 1917: Minehead, Somerset, England Feb. 1, 1918: Edinburgh, Scotland

Arthur C. Clarke Muriel Spark

July 15, 1919: Dublin, Ireland

Iris Murdoch

Oct. 22, 1919: Kermanshah, Persia

Doris Lessing

May 9, 1920: Newbury, England Aug. 3, 1920: Oxford, England

Richard Adams P. D. James

Apr. 16, 1922: London, England June 4, 1923: Birmingham, England

Kingsley Amis Elizabeth Jolley

Mar. 14, 1925: Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England Mar. 31, 1926: Leigh-on-Sea, England

John Wain John Fowles

May 7, 1927: Cologne, Germany July 16, 1928: London, England

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Anita Brookner

Feb. 23, 1930: Eckington, England

Paul West

Nov. 15, 1930: Shanghai, China

J. G. Ballard

Sept. 22, 1931: Alvechurch, England

Fay Weldon

Oct. 19, 1931: Poole, England Mar. 17, 1933: Cairo, Egypt

John le Carré Penelope Lively

June 5, 1939: Sheffield, England

Margaret Drabble

May 7, 1940: Eastbourne, Sussex, England

Angela Carter

Jan. 19, 1946: Leicester, England Aug. 25, 1949: Oxford, England

Julian Barnes Martin Amis

Oct. 27, 1950: Stone, England

A. N. Wilson

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Index Absentee, The (Edgeworth), 312 Absurdism, 139, 1037 Acceptance World, The (Powell), 723 Accidental Man, An (Murdoch), 677 According to Mark (Lively), 611 Adam Bede (Eliot), 321 Adams, Richard, 1-5 Adolphe (Constant), 101 Adventure novel, 134; and Richard Adams, 1; and John Bunyan, 111; and Lewis Carroll, 141; and J. B. Priestley, 732 Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, The. See Ferdinand, Count Fathom Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, The. See Peregrine Pickle Adventures of Roderick Random, The. See Roderick Random Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. See Sir Launcelot Greaves Affair, The. See Strangers and Brothers series African Witch, The (Cary), 156 After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Huxley), 476 Afternoon Men (Powell), 721 Against the Fall of Night (Clarke), 181 Age of Longing, The (Koestler), 530 Agents and Patients (Powell), 722 Agnes de Castro (Behn), 62 Aissa Saved (Cary), 156 Albigenses, The (Maturin), 647 Alexandria Quartet, The (Durrell), 299 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 141 Allegory, 61, 232, 1037; and John Bunyan, 110; and G. K. Chesterton, 167; and William Golding, 409 Alley Jaggers (West), 975 Altered States (Brookner), 105 Ambrosio. See Monk, The American Visitor, An (Cary), 156 Amis, Kingsley, 6-20

Amis, Martin, 21-28 Amrita ( Jhabvala), 492 Anatomy, 1037 . . . And the Wife Ran Away (Weldon), 961 Angel Pavement (Priestley), 733 Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (Wilson, Angus), 1004 Angry Young Men, 7, 939 Animal Farm (Orwell), 691 Ann Veronica (Wells), 969 Anna of the Five Towns (Bennett), 69 Antagonist, 1037 Antic Hay (Huxley), 471 Anti-Death League, The (Amis, K.), 14 Antigua, Penny, Puce. See Antigua Stamp, The Antigua Stamp, The (Graves), 426 Antihero, 1037 Ape and Essence (Huxley), 477 Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, An. See Shamela Archetype, 1037 Arrival and Departure (Koestler), 529 As If by Magic (Wilson, Angus), 1007 Aston, James. See White, T. H. At Lady Molly’s (Powell), 723 Atmosphere, 1037 Austen, Jane, 29-40, 707, 960 Autocracy of Mr. Parham, The (Wells), 970 Avignon Quintet, The (Durrell), 302 Backward Place, A ( Jhabvala), 494 Backwater. See Pilgrimage Ball and the Cross, The (Chesterton), 168 Ballard, J. G., 41-50 Balthazar. See Alexandria Quartet, The Balzac, Honoré de, 100 Barchester Towers (Trollope), 929 Barnes, Julian, 51-57 Beauchamp’s Career (Meredith), 662 Before She Met Me (Barnes), 53 Behn, Aphra, 58-64 1051

Notable British Novelists Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas (West), 976 Bennett, Arnold, 65-75 Between the Acts (Woolf), 1033 Bildungsroman, 414, 1037 Biographical criticism, 1037 Black Arrow, The (Stevenson), 886 Black Book, The (Durrell), 299 Blair, Eric Arthur. See Orwell, George Blandings novels, The (Wodehouse), 1013 Boat, The (Hartley), 464 Body in the Library, The (Christie), 176 Book and the Brotherhood, The (Murdoch), 684 Books Do Furnish a Room (Powell), 725 Born in Captivity. See Hurry on Down Bottle in the Smoke, A. See Lampitt Chronicles Bourgeois novel, 1037 Bowen, Elizabeth, 76-82 Brave New World (Huxley), 474 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 952 Briefing for a Descent into Hell (Lessing), 584 Bright Day (Priestley), 733 Brighton Rock (Greene), 438 Brontë, Charlotte, 83-91, 93, 392 Brontë, Emily, 84, 92-97 Brookner, Anita, 98-106 Brothers and Sisters (Compton-Burnett), 197 Bull from the Sea, The (Renault), 758 Bullivant and the Lambs. See Manservant and Maidservant Bunyan, John, 107-113 Burgess, Anthony, 114-122 Burmese Days (Orwell), 688 Burney, Fanny, 123-131 Burning World, The. See Drought, The Busman’s Honeymoon (Sayers), 804 Butler, Samuel, 132-138 Buyer’s Market, A (Powell), 723 Cakes and Ale (Maugham), 653 Caliban’s Filibuster (West), 977 Call for the Dead (le Carré), 563 Call Girls, The (Koestler), 531 Camilla (Burney), 129 Can You Forgive Her? (Trollope), 931

Candide (Voltaire), 950 Candle in the Wind, The. See Once and Future King, The Canetti, Elias, 673 Canon, 1038 Canopus in Argos series (Lessing), 585 Captains Courageous (Kipling), 521 Carroll, Lewis, 139-144 Carter, Angela, 145-151 Cary, Joyce, 152-163 Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (Powell), 724 Castle Corner (Cary), 156 Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth), 310 Cecilia (Burney), 128 Cefalû. See Dark Labyrinth, The Certain Justice, A ( James), 487 Challans, Mary. See Renault, Mary Character, 1038 Charioteer, The (Renault), 756 Charley Is My Darling (Cary), 157 Charlotte (Rowson), 790 Charlotte Temple. See Charlotte Chesterton, G. K., 164-170 Childhood’s End (Clarke), 182 Children of Violence series, The (Lessing), 583 Christie, Agatha, 171-179 Chronicles of Narnia, The (Lewis, C.), 595 Citadel, The (Cronin), 225 Citizen of the World, The (Goldsmith), 420 City and the Stars, The. See Against the Fall of Night City of the Mind (Lively), 612 Clarissa (Richardson, S.), 782 Clarke, Arthur C., 180-185 Classicism, 1038 Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina (Graves), 431 Clayhanger (Bennett), 71 Clea. See Alexandria Quartet, The Clear Horizon. See Pilgrimage Cleopatra’s Sister (Lively), 612 Climax, 1038 Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess), 120 Clockwork Testament, The (Burgess), 119 Close Quarters (Golding), 414 1052

Index Coat of Varnish, A (Snow), 853 Cocaine Nights (Ballard), 49 Cock and Anchor, The (Le Fanu), 574 Cock Jarvis (Cary), 155 Collector, The (Fowles), 371 Collins, Wilkie, 186-194 Colonel Jack (Defoe), 239 Colonel Mint (West), 977 Comedies. See Oxford Trilogy Comforters, The (Spark), 859 Coming Up for Air (Orwell), 689 Complication, 1038 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 195-203 Concrete Island (Ballard), 46 Conflict, 1038 Conrad, Joseph, 204-218, 765 Conscience of the Rich, The. See Strangers and Brothers series Constance. See Avignon Quintet, The Conventions, 1038 Coral Island, The (Ballantyne), 409 Corridors of Power (Snow), 851 Count Belisarius (Graves), 429 Crampton, Mary. See Pym, Barbara Crash (Ballard), 45 Crisis, 1038 Crome Yellow (Huxley), 470 Cronin, A. J., 219-230 Crotchet Castle (Peacock), 713 Crystal World, The (Ballard), 44 Dance to the Music of Time, A (Powell), 720 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 327 Daniel Martin (Fowles), 376 Dark Flower, The (Galsworthy), 384 Dark Labyrinth, The (Durrell), 299 Dark Secrets. See Dead Babies Darkness at Noon (Koestler), 528 Darkness Visible (Golding), 413 Darwinism, 134 Daughters of Albion. See Lampitt Chronicles Dawn’s Left Hand (Richardson, D.), 775 Day of Creation, The (Ballard), 47 Dead Babies (Amis, M.), 23 Deadlock (Richardson, D.), 774 Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and

Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation. See Dombey and Son Death Comes in the End (Christie), 175 Death of an Expert Witness ( James), 484 Death of the Heart, The (Bowen), 80 Death Under Sail (Snow), 847 Debut, The (Brookner), 100 Decline and Fall (Waugh), 950 Deconstruction, 1038 Defoe, Daniel, 231-244 De la Mare, Walter, 245-250 Detective and mystery novel, 164, 1038; and Agatha Christie, 171-179; and Wilkie Collins, 186; and Arthur Conan Doyle, 272; and P. D. James, 481-489; and Dorothy L. Sayers, 799 Determinism, 1038 Devices and Desires ( James), 486 Dialogue, 1039 Diana of the Crossways (Meredith), 664 Diaries of Jane Somers, The (Lessing), 586 Dickens, Charles, 187, 251-263 Didacticism; and John Bunyan, 107-113 Dimple Hill. See Pilgrimage Displacement, 1039 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 258 Domestic realism; and Jane Austen, 29-40; and Fanny Burney, 123-131; and Ivy Compton-Burnett, 195-203 Dominant, 1039 Doppelgänger, 1039 Double Tongue, The (Golding), 415 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 264-276 Drabble, Margaret, 277-290 Driver’s Seat, The (Spark), 862 Drought, The (Ballard), 44 Drowned World, The (Ballard), 44 Du Maurier, Daphne, 291-295 Durrell, Lawrence, 296-304 Earth Stopped (White), 984 Earthly Powers (Burgess), 119 Ebony Tower, The (Fowles), 374 Edgeworth, Maria, 305-316 Egoist, The (Meredith), 663 Elephant and the Kangaroo, The (White), 986 Eliot, George, 317-329, 1006 Emma (Austen), 35 1053

Notable British Novelists Empire of the Sun (Ballard), 47 End of the Battle, The (Waugh), 956 Enderby (Burgess), 118 Enderby’s Dark Lady (Burgess), 119 England, England (Barnes), 56 Epic, 1039 Episodic narrative, 1039 Epistolary novel, 333, 778, 840, 1039 Erewhon (Butler), 134 Erewhon Revisited (Butler), 135 Eroticism; and D. H. Lawrence, 534-558 Esmond in India ( Jhabvala), 493 Eulalie Soeurs (Wodehouse), 1015 Euphuism, 1039 Eustace and Hilda. See Eustace and Hilda trilogy Eustace and Hilda trilogy (Hartley), 463 Eustace Diamonds, The (Trollope), 932 Eva Trout (Bowen), 81 Evans, Mary Ann. See Eliot, George Evelina (Burney), 127 Excellent Women (Pym), 740 Except the Lord (Cary), 161 Existentialism, 668, 1039 Expedition of Humphry Clinker, The. See Humphry Clinker Exposition, 1039 Eyeless in Gaza (Huxley), 475 Fair Haven, The (Butler), 136 Fair Jilt, The (Behn), 62 Fairly Honourable Defeat, A (Murdoch), 674 Falkner (Shelley), 832 Fall, The (Camus), 411 Family and a Fortune, A (Compton-Burnett), 199 Family and Friends (Brookner), 104 Fantastic, 1039 Fantasy novel; and Richard Adams, 2; and J. G. Ballard, 41-50; and Lewis Carroll, 139-144; and C. S. Lewis, 591-600; and J. R. R. Tolkien, 912-924; and H. G. Wells, 966-972 Far Cry from Kensington, A (Spark), 866 Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy), 449

Farina (Meredith), 660 Fat Woman’s Joke, The. See . . . And the Wife Ran Away Fatal Revenge (Maturin), 644 Fearful Joy, A (Cary), 158 Fellowship of the Ring, The. See Lord of the Rings, The Feminist criticism, 1040 Feminist novel, 1020; and Dorothy Richardson, 769-776; and Fay Weldon, 959-965; and Virginia Woolf, 1019-1036 Ferdinand, Count Fathom (Smollett), 840 Fielding, Henry, 330-342 Fifth Child, The (Lessing), 587 Fire Down Below (Golding), 414 Fire from Heaven (Renault), 759 First Men in the Moon, The (Wells), 968 Fisher King, The (Powell), 726 Flashback, 1040 Flaubert, Gustave, 53 Flaubert’s Parrot (Barnes), 53 Folks That Live on the Hill, The (Amis, K.), 18 Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth, The (Wells), 968 Ford, Ford Madox, 343-350, 763, 765 Foreshadowing, 1040 Forster, E. M., 351-365 Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Written from Her Own Memorandums, The. See Moll Flanders Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, The (Shelley), 830 Fowles, John, 366-379 Foxybaby ( Jolley), 512 Frankenstein (Shelley), 827 Fraternity (Galsworthy), 383 Free Fall (Golding), 411 Free Zone Starts Here, The. See Young Shoulders French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (Fowles), 372 Freudianism, 541; and William Golding, 412 From a View to a Death (Powell), 722 Full Moon (Wodehouse), 1013 Funeral Games (Renault), 760 1054

Index Gala (West), 978 Galsworthy, John, 380-388 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 389-398 Gaston de Latour (Pater), 704 Gaudy Night (Sayers), 803 Genius and the Goddess, The (Huxley), 477 Genre, 1040 Genre fiction, 1040 Gentlemen in England (Wilson, A. N.), 997 George Passant. See Strangers and Brothers series Georges’ Wife, The ( Jolley), 513 Get Ready for Battle ( Jhabvala), 494 Girl in a Swing, The (Adams), 3 Gissing, George, 399-406 Gladiators, The (Koestler), 528 Glass of Blessings, A (Pym), 741 Go-Between, The (Hartley), 465 God and His Gifts, A (Compton-Burnett), 202 Going Abroad (Macaulay), 629 Golden Fleece, The. See Hercules, My Shipmate Golden Notebook, The (Lessing), 583 Golding, William, 407-417 Goldsmith, Oliver, 418-422 Gone to Ground (White), 984 Good Apprentice, The (Murdoch), 683 Good Companions, The (Priestley), 732 Good Soldier, The (Ford), 346 Good Terrorist, The (Lessing), 587 Gothic novel, 37, 601, 641, 745, 827, 1040; and Charlotte Brontë, 83-97; and Daphne Du Maurier, 293; and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 572-579; and Matthew Gregory Lewis, 601-608; and Charles Robert Maturin, 641-648; and Ann Radcliffe, 748; and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 824-834 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Bunyan), 110 Grass Is Singing, The (Lessing), 582 Graves, Robert, 423-434 Green Knight, The (Murdoch), 685 Green Man, The (Amis, K.), 15 Green Years, The (Cronin), 228

Greene, Graham, 408, 435-444 Grotesque, 1040 Gryll Grange (Peacock), 713 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 134, 895, 986 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 81 Handful of Dust, A (Waugh), 951 Hardy, Thomas, 445-460 Hartley, L. P., 461-467 Hatter’s Castle (Cronin), 222 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 463 Headlong Hall (Peacock), 709 Healing Art, The (Wilson, A. N.), 996 Hearing Secret Harmonies (Powell), 726 Hearing Voices. See Lampitt Chronicles Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 208 Heart of Midlothian, The (Scott), 818 Heart of the Matter, The (Greene), 440 Heat and Dust ( Jhabvala), 495 Heat of the Day, The (Bowen), 81 Hebraic style, 1041 Hello America (Ballard), 47 Hemlock and After (Wilson, Angus), 1004 Henry Brocken (de la Mare), 246 Henry Esmond (Thackeray), 906 Hercules, My Shipmate (Graves), 431 Heroes and Villains (Carter), 148 Herself Surprised (Cary), 158 High Rise (Ballard), 46 Hilda Lessways (Bennett), 72 Historical novel, 425, 1041; and Arthur Conan Doyle, 264-276; and Robert Graves, 423-434; and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 574; and Sir Walter Scott, 807-823 History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col Jack, The. See Colonel Jack History of Henry Esmond, Esquire, A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne, The. See Henry Esmond History of Middle-Earth, The (Tolkien), 922 History of Pendennis, The (Thackeray), 905 History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, The. See Joseph Andrews 1055

Notable British Novelists History of the Great Plague in London, The. See Journal of the Plague Year, A History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, The. See Jonathan Wild History of the Nun, The (Behn), 61 History of the World in 10½ Chapters, A (Barnes), 55 History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, The. See Tom Jones Hobbit, The (Tolkien), 920 Holmes, Sherlock, 272 Homecoming. See Strangers and Brothers series Homecomings. See Strangers and Brothers series Homeric style, 1041 Homer’s Daughter (Graves), 432 Honeycomb. See Pilgrimage Honourable Schoolboy, The (le Carré), 567 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 698 Horror novel; and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 572-579 Horse and His Boy, The. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Horse’s Mouth, The (Cary), 159 Hotel, The (Bowen), 78 Hotel du Lac (Brookner), 103 House by the Churchyard, The (Le Fanu), 575 House in Paris, The (Bowen), 79 House of Children, A (Cary), 158 House on the Strand, The (du Maurier), 294 Householder, The ( Jhabvala), 493 Howards End (Forster), 359 Hueffer, Ford Madox. See Ford, Ford Madox Human Factor, The (Greene), 440 Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 840 Hungry Generations. See Oxford Trilogy Hurry on Down (Wain), 940 Huxley, Aldous, 299, 468-480 I, Claudius (Graves), 430 Ice Age, The (Drabble), 286 Ill-Made Knight, The. See Once and Future King, The

I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon (West), 976 Implied author, 1041 Impressionism, 345, 766; and L. P. Hartley, 462; and Jean Rhys, 762-768 In Chancery (Galsworthy), 386 In Search of Love and Beauty ( Jhabvala), 495 In the Days of the Comet (Wells), 968 In Their Wisdom (Snow), 852 Incline Our Hearts. See Lampitt Chronicles Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The (Carter), 148 Information, The (Amis, M.), 26 Inheritors, The (Golding), 410 Innocent Blood ( James), 484 Interim. See Pilgrimage Interior monologue, 1041 Irrealism, 1041 Island (Huxley), 478 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (Wells), 967 Islands of Unwisdom, The (Graves), 428 Isles of Unwisdom, The. See Islands of Unwisdom, The Italian, The (Radcliffe), 751 Jacob’s Room (Woolf), 1025 Jamaica Inn (du Maurier), 293 James, P. D., 481-489 Jane Eyre (Brontë, C.), 87, 764 Jeeves and Wooster novels, The (Wodehouse), 1014 Jerusalem the Golden (Drabble), 280 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 490-498 Johnson, Samuel, 499-508 Jolley, Elizabeth, 509-515 Jonathan Wild (Fielding), 339 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 338 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe), 235 Joyce, James, 116 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 458 Justine. See Alexandria Quartet, The Kavanagh, Dan. See Barnes, Julian Kell, Joseph. See Burgess, Anthony Keys of the Kingdom, The (Cronin), 226 Kidnapped (Stevenson), 888 1056

Index Kim (Kipling), 521 Kindly Light (Wilson, A. N.), 996 Kindly Ones, The (Powell), 724 Kindness of Women, The (Ballard), 48 King Jesus (Graves), 432 King Must Die, The (Renault), 758 Kipling, Rudyard, 516-524 Kipps (Wells), 968 Koestler, Arthur, 525-533 Korzeniowski, Jósef Teodor Konrad Nalfcz. See Conrad, Joseph Labyrinthine Ways, The. See Power and the Glory, The Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 553 Lampitt Chronicles (Wilson, A. N.), 998 Last Battle, The. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Man, The (Shelley), 829 Last of the Wine, The (Renault), 757 Last Post, The. See Parade’s End Last September, The (Bowen), 78 Last Things. See Strangers and Brothers series Lawrence, D. H., 534-558 Le Carré, John, 559-571 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 572-579 Lessing, Doris, 580-590 Lewis, C. S., 591-600, 915 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 601-608 Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, The. See Martin Chuzzlewit Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The. See Nicholas Nickleby Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The (Bunyan), 111 Life and Loves of a She-Devil, The (Weldon), 961 Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., The. See Tristram Shandy Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, Written by Himself, The. See Robinson Crusoe Life Force (Weldon), 963 Life with Swan (West), 980 Light and the Dark, The. See Strangers and Brothers series

Light That Failed, The (Kipling), 520 Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Little Dorrit (Dickens), 259 Little Drummer Girl, The (le Carré), 569 Little Novels (Collins), 191 Lively, Penelope, 609-613 Livia. See Avignon Quintet, The Liza of Lambeth (Maugham), 651 Lodore (Shelley), 831 Loitering with Intent (Spark), 864 London Fields (Amis, M.), 24 Longest Journey, The (Forster), 356 Look at Me (Brookner), 102 Looking-Glass War, The (le Carré), 565 Lord Jim (Conrad), 212 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 409 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 921 Lost Empires (Priestley), 734 Lost World, The (Doyle), 272 Love, Again (Lessing), 587 Loved One, The (Waugh), 953 Lovesong ( Jolley), 514 Lowry, Malcolm, 614-625 Lucky Jim (Amis, K.), 12 Macaulay, Rose, 626-631 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 54 Maggot, A (Fowles), 377 Magic Toyshop, The (Carter), 147 Magician’s Nephew, The. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Magus, The (Fowles), 369 Maia (Adams), 4 Maid Marian (Peacock), 712 Malcontents, The (Snow), 852 Malory, Sir Thomas, 632-640 Man Could Stand Up, A. See Parade’s End Man from the North, A (Bennett), 69 Man of Property, The (Galsworthy), 385 Man Who Was Thursday, The (Chesterton), 167 Manservant and Maidservant (Compton-Burnett), 200 Mansfield Park (Austen), 33 Mara and Dann (Lessing), 588 March Moonlight (Richardson, D.), 775 Marius the Epicurean (Pater), 699 Markham, Robert. See Amis, Kingsley 1057

Notable British Novelists Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens), 257 Marxist criticism, 1041 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 394 Mask of Apollo, The (Renault), 758 Master, The (White), 986 Master of Ballantrae, The (Stevenson), 888 Masters, The (Snow), 851 Maturin, Charles Robert, 641-648 Maugham, W. Somerset, 649-657 Maurice (Forster), 361 Mayor of Casterbridge, The (Hardy), 454 Melincourt (Peacock), 710 Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 646 Melville, Herman, 618 Memoirs of a Midget (de la Mare), 248 Memoirs of a Survivor, The (Lessing), 585 Men at Arms (Waugh), 954 Mentoria (Rowson), 792 Meredith, George, 658-666 Metafiction, 1041 Metroland (Barnes), 52 Micah Clarke (Doyle), 270 Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, The (Wilson, Angus), 1005 Middlemarch (Eliot), 324 Milesian Chief, The (Maturin), 645 Military Philosophers, The (Powell), 725 Milk and Honey ( Jolley), 511 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 322 Miller, Henry, 297, 299 Misfortunes of Elphin, The (Peacock), 712 Miss Peabody’s Inheritance ( Jolley), 511 Mister Johnson (Cary), 157 Mistress Masham’s Repose (White), 986 Modern Comedy, A (Galsworthy), 387 Modernism, 1041; and Joyce Cary, 152; and Ford Madox Ford, 344; and Virginia Woolf, 1019-1036 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 239 Money (Amis, M.), 24 Monk, The (Lewis, M.), 603 Monsieur. See Avignon Quintet, The Moon and Sixpence, The (Maugham), 653 Moon Tiger (Lively), 611 Moonlight, The (Cary), 158 Moonstone, The (Collins), 192 More Women than Men (Compton-Burnett), 199

Morte d’Arthur, Le (Malory), 636 Motif, 1041 Motivation, 1041 Mountolive. See Alexandria Quartet, The Movement poetry, 7 Mr. Scobie’s Riddle ( Jolley), 511 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 1026 Multiculturalism, 1042 Murder of Quality, A (le Carré), 564 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The (Christie), 176 Murdoch, Iris, 667-686, 997 My Head! My Head! (Graves), 425 Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe), 750 Mysterious Affair at Styles, The (Christie), 176 Myth, 1042 Myth criticism, 1042 N or M? The New Mystery (Christie), 177 Napoleon of Notting Hill, The (Chesterton), 167 Narrative, 1042 Narratology, 1042 Narrator, 1042 Natural Curiosity, A (Drabble), 288 Naturalism, 401, 651, 1042 Nature of Passion, The ( Jhabvala), 492 Naulahka, The (Kipling), 521 Needle’s Eye, The (Drabble), 283 New Grub Street (Gissing), 403 New Lives for Old (Snow), 848 New Men, The. See Strangers and Brothers series New Novel, 862 Newcomes, The (Thackeray), 907 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 256 Night and Day (Woolf), 1024 Night Manager, The (le Carré), 570 Nightmare Abbey (Peacock), 711 Nights at the Circus (Carter), 149 Nine Tailors, The (Sayers), 801 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 692 No Decency Left (Graves), 426 No Laughing Matter (Wilson, Angus), 1007 No More Parades. See Parade’s End North and South (Gaskell), 395 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 37 1058

Index Not Honour More (Cary), 161 Nothing Like the Sun (Burgess), 118 Nouvelle, 1042 Novel, 1042 Novel of manners, 1042 Novela, 1042 Novelette, 1042 Novella, 1042 Novelle, 1042 Nun, The (Behn), 61 Nunquam (Durrell), 301 Oberland. See Pilgrimage Odyssey (Homer), 432 Of Human Bondage (Maugham), 651 Officers and Gentlemen (Waugh), 955 Old Devils, The (Amis, K.), 16 Old Men at the Zoo, The (Wilson, Angus), 1006 Old Mortality (Scott), 813 Old Wives’ Tale, The (Bennett), 69 Once and Future King, The (White), 985 Only Problem, The (Spark), 866 Orchard Thieves, The ( Jolley), 513 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The (Meredith), 660 Original Sin ( James), 487 Orley Farm (Trollope), 930 Ormond (Edgeworth), 313 Oroonoko (Behn), 62 Orphan Island (Macaulay), 628 Orwell, George, 687-695 Other People (Amis, M.), 23 Our Game (le Carré), 570 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 260 Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis, C.), 593 Outline of History (Wells), 410 Oxford Trilogy (Wain), 945 Palomino ( Jolley), 510 Pamela (Richardson, S.), 334, 336, 781 Paper Men, The (Golding), 414 Parade’s End (Ford), 348 Pardoner’s Tale, The (Wain), 941, 943 Parody, 336 Passage to India, A (Forster), 362 Passion of New Eve, The (Carter), 148 Pastoral novel, 449 Pater, Walter, 696-706

Peacock, Thomas Love, 660, 707-715 Peregrine Pickle (Smollett), 839 Perelandra (Lewis, C.), 593 Perfect Spy, A (le Carré), 569 Persian Boy, The (Renault), 759 Persuasion (Austen), 38 Phenomenological criticism, 1043 Picaresque novel, 940, 1043; and Tobias Smollett, 839 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 990 Pilgrimage (Richardson, D.), 773 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 111 Pincher Martin (Golding), 410 Plague Dogs, The (Adams), 3 Plot, 1043 Plumed Serpent, The (Lawrence), 550 Poet and Dancer ( Jhabvala), 496 Point Counter Point (Huxley), 472 Point of view, 1043 Pointed Roofs (Richardson, D.), 773 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ( Joyce), 541 Possessed, The (Dostoevski), 530 Postcolonialism, 1043 Postmodernism, 1043; and Anthony Burgess, 114-122; and Penelope Lively, 610 Powell, Anthony, 716-728 Power and the Glory, The (Greene), 441 Powys, John Cowper, 986 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 33 Priestley, J. B., 729-736 Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The (Spark), 861 Prince Caspian. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Prisoner of Grace (Cary), 160 Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, The (Gissing), 404 Professor, The (Brontë, C.), 86 Protagonist, 1043 Providence (Brookner), 101 Psmith novels, The (Wodehouse), 1016 Psychological criticism, 1043 Psychological novel, 1044; and J. G. Ballard, 43; and George Orwell, 689; and Ann Radcliffe, 747; and Anthony Trollope, 928 Pym, Barbara, 737-744 Pyramid, The (Golding), 413 1059

Notable British Novelists Quality of Mercy, A (West), 974 Quartet in Autumn (Pym), 742 Question of Upbringing, A (Powell), 722 Quiet American, The (Greene), 442 Quinx. See Avignon Quintet, The Rachel Papers, The (Amis, M.), 22 Radcliffe, Ann, 644, 745-753 Radiant Way, The (Drabble), 287 Rainbow, The (Lawrence), 544 Rasselas ( Johnson, S.), 134, 504 Rat Man of Paris (West), 979 Razor’s Edge, The (Maugham), 654 Realism, 65, 152, 902, 1044 Realms of Gold, The (Drabble), 285 Rebecca (du Maurier), 293 Reception aesthetics, 1044 Religious novel; and Graham Greene, 437 Renault, Mary, 754-761 Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke), 183 Return, The (de la Mare), 247 Return of the King, The. See Lord of the Rings, The Return of the Native, The (Hardy), 453 Revolving Lights. See Pilgrimage Rhetorical criticism, 1044 Rhys, Jean, 762-768 Riceyman Steps (Bennett), 73 Rich, Barbara. See Graves, Robert Richardson, Dorothy, 769-776 Richardson, Samuel, 331, 777-786 Right to an Answer, The (Burgess), 117 Rites of Passage (Golding), 413 Road to Lichfield, The (Lively), 611 Rob Roy (Scott), 815 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 237, 410 Roderick Random (Smollett), 838 Roman à clef, 1044 Romance, 1044 Romance of the Forest, The (Radcliffe), 749 Romanticism, 603, 731, 1044; and J. B. Priestley, 729-736; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 883-890 Room with a View, A (Forster), 358 Rowson, Susanna, 787-795 Roxana (Defoe), 239 Running Wild (Ballard), 48

Rushing to Paradise (Ballard), 48 Russia House, The (le Carré), 569 Russian Girl, The (Amis, K.), 18 Ruth (Gaskell), 394 Sade, Marquis de, 146 Satire, 251, 688, 708, 838, 891, 900, 939, 967, 969; and Martin Amis, 21-28; and Samuel Butler, 132-138; and Oliver Goldsmith, 418-422; and George Orwell, 687-695; and Tobias Smollett, 835-842; and Laurence Sterne, 870-882; and Jonathan Swift, 891-898; and Evelyn Waugh, 948-958; and A. N. Wilson, 994-1000 Sayers, Dorothy L., 796-806 Scene, 1044 Science fiction, 1044; and Arthur C. Clarke, 180-185; and C. S. Lewis, 591-600; and J. R. R. Tolkien, 912-924; and H. G. Wells, 966-972 Scott, Sir Walter, 572, 643, 807-823 Sea, the Sea, The (Murdoch), 680 Search, The (Snow), 848 Sebastian. See Avignon Quintet, The Secret Adversary, The (Christie), 177 Secret Pilgrim, The (le Carré), 570 Semiotics, 1044 Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 31 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 879 Sentimental novel, 1044 Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth. See Sergeant Lamb’s America Sergeant Lamb’s America (Graves), 427 Setting, 1045 Setting the World on Fire (Wilson, Angus), 1008 Seven Days in New Crete. See Watch the North Wind Rise Several Perceptions (Carter), 147 Shadow Flies, The. See They Were Defeated Shamela (Fielding), 336 Shardik (Adams), 3 Shards of Memory ( Jhabvala), 496 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 824-834 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 709, 711, 826 Shirley (Brontë, C.), 88 1060

Index Shrapnel Academy, The (Weldon), 962 Shrimp and the Anemone, The. See Eustace and Hilda trilogy Shroud for a Nightingale ( James), 483 Sicilian Romance, A (Radcliffe), 749 Silas Marner (Eliot), 323 Silmarillion, The (Tolkien), 918 Silver Chair, The. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Silver Spoon, The. See Modern Comedy, A Sinjohn, John. See Galsworthy, John Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson, S.), 783 Sir Launcelot Greaves (Smollett), 840 Sixth Heaven, The. See Eustace and Hilda trilogy Sleep of Reason. See Strangers and Brothers series Sleeping Murder (Christie), 178 Small Town in Germany, A (le Carré), 566 Smiley’s People (le Carré), 568 Smollett, Tobias, 835-842, 875 Snow, C. P., 843-854 Soldier’s Art, The (Powell), 725 Solomons, Ikey, Jr. See Thackeray, William Makepeace Some Do Not . . . . See Parade’s End Somers, Jane. See Lessing, Doris Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), 541 Spark, Muriel, 855-869 Spatial form, 1045 Spire, The (Golding), 412 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (le Carré), 564 Staring at the Sun (Barnes), 54 Stars Look Down, The (Cronin), 224 Start in Life, A. See Debut, The Steinbeck, John, 633 Sterne, Laurence, 870-882 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 883-890 Story, 1043 Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton, The (Graves), 428 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 887 Strangers and Brothers series (Snow), 849 Stream of consciousness, 1045 Strike the Father Dead (Wain), 941

Structuralism, 1045 Success (Amis, M.), 23 Summary, 1045 Summer Before the Dark, The (Lessing), 584 Summer Bird-Cage, A (Drabble), 280 Surrealism; and J. G. Ballard, 41 Suspense novel; and John le Carré, 559-571 Swan Song. See Modern Comedy, A Sweets of Pimlico, The (Wilson, A. N.), 995 Swift, Jonathan, 146, 891-898 Sword in the Stone, The. See Once and Future King, The Sword of Honour (Waugh), 954 Sylvie and Bruno (Carroll), 142 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (Carroll), 143 Symbolism, 205 Symposium (Spark), 867 Tailor of Panama, The (le Carré), 570 Take a Girl Like You (Amis, K.), 13 Tale of a Tub, A (Swift), 893 Talking It Over (Barnes), 56 Taste for Death, A ( James), 485 Temporary Kings (Powell), 726 Tenement of Clay (West), 974 Terrestrials (West), 979 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 456 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 899-911 The Fountains of Paradise (Clarke), 184 Thematics, 1045 These Twain (Bennett), 72 They Hanged My Saintly Billy (Graves), 427 They Were Defeated (Macaulay), 629 Thieves in the Night (Koestler), 530 Those Barren Leaves (Huxley), 472 Three Continents ( Jhabvala), 495 Three Mulla-Mulgars, The (de la Mare), 247 Three Royal Monkeys, The. See Three Mulla-Mulgars, The 3001 (Clarke), 183 Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Carroll), 142 Till We Have Faces (Lewis, C.), 415, 597 1061

Notable British Novelists Time Machine, The (Wells), 967 Time Must Have a Stop (Huxley), 476 Time of Hope (Snow), 850 Time’s Arrrow (Amis, M.), 26 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (le Carré), 566 Titmarsh, M. A. See Thackeray, William Makepeace To Be a Pilgrim (Cary), 159 To Let (Galsworthy), 386 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 1028 To the North (Bowen), 79 To Whom She Will. See Amrita Told by an Idiot (Macaulay), 628 Tolkien, J. R. R., 912-924, 986 Tom Jones (Fielding), 340 Tone, 1045 Torlogh O’Brien (Le Fanu), 575 Towers of Trebizond, The (Macaulay), 630 Trap, The. See Pilgrimage Travelers ( Jhabvala), 495 Traveller (Adams), 4 Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Capt. See Gulliver’s Travels Treasure Island (Stevenson), 885 Tremor of Intent (Burgess), 117 Trials of the Human Heart (Rowson), 792 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 876 Trollope, Anthony, 846, 925-935 Trouble (Weldon), 963 Tunc (Durrell), 301 Tunnel, The. See Pilgrimage Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, The. See Pincher Martin Two Forsyte Interludes. See Modern Comedy, A 2001 (Clarke), 183 2010 (Clarke), 183 2061 (Clarke), 183 Two Towers, The. See Lord of the Rings, The Unclassed, The (Gissing), 402 Uncle Silas (Le Fanu), 577 Unconditional Surrender. See End of the Battle, The Under the Net (Murdoch), 672

Under the Volcano (Lowry), 618 Unguarded Hours (Wilson, A. N.), 996 Unlimited Dream Company, The (Ballard), 46 Unreliable narrator, 1045 Unsuitable Job for a Woman, An ( James), 483 Valley of Bones, The (Powell), 725 Valperga (Shelley), 828 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 903 Venusberg (Powell), 722 Verisimilitude, 1046 Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, The (West), 978 Vicar of Wakefield, The (Goldsmith), 421 Victorian novel, 65, 305, 1045; and Charles Dickens, 251-263; and John Fowles, 373; and John Galsworthy, 381; and Elizabeth Gaskell, 389; and George Gissing, 401; and Thomas Hardy, 445; and William Makepeace Thackeray, 899-911 Victory (Conrad), 215 Villette (Brontë, C.), 89 Virginians, The (Thackeray), 908 Visitors (Brookner), 105 Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The. See Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage Out, The (Woolf), 1023 Vraisemblance, 1046 Wain, John, 936-947 Wanderer, The (Burney), 129 War of Dreams, The. See Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The Watch in the Night, A. See Lampitt Chronicles Watch the North Wind Rise (Graves), 432 Waterfall, The (Drabble), 282 Watership Down (Adams), 2 Waugh, Evelyn, 948-958, 995 Waverley (Scott), 809, 815 Waves, The (Woolf), 1030 Way of All Flesh, The (Butler), 136 Weldon, Fay, 959-965 Wells, H. G., 43, 770, 966-972 West, Paul, 973-982 Westmacott, Mary. See Christie, Agatha 1062

Index What’s Become of Waring (Powell), 722 Where Angels Fear to Tread (Forster), 355 Where the Rivers Meet. See Oxford Trilogy White, T. H., 983-987 White Company, The (Doyle), 271 White Monkey, The. See Modern Comedy, A Who Was Oswald Fish? (Wilson, A. N.), 996 Whose Body? (Sayers), 800 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 764 Wife to Mr. Milton, the Story of Marie Powell. See Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton Wild Irish Boy, The (Maturin), 645 Wilde, Oscar, 988-993 Williams, Ella Gwendolen Rees. See Rhys, Jean Willing to Die (Le Fanu), 578 Wilson, A. N., 994-1000 Wilson, Angus, 1001-1009 Wilson, John Anthony Burgess. See Burgess, Anthony

Wind from Nowhere, The (Ballard), 43 Winter in the Hills, A (Wain), 941, 943 Wise Children (Carter), 149 Wise Virgin (Wilson, A. N.), 997 Witch in the Wood, The. See Once and Future King, The Wives and Daughters (Gaskell), 396 Wodehouse, P. G., 1010-1018 Woman in White, The (Collins), 192 Women in Love (Lawrence), 545 Women: Or, Pour et Contre (Maturin), 646 Woodlanders, The (Hardy), 451 Woolf, Virginia, 1019-1036 Workers in the Dawn (Gissing), 402 World My Wilderness, The (Macaulay), 629 Wuthering Heights (Brontë, E.), 4, 94 Wylder’s Hand (Le Fanu), 576 Years, The (Woolf), 1032 Young Shoulders (Wain), 945

1063