Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

I've just finished Agnes Grey, and I'm a little confused or bemused or both. 

The first part of this book seems to be an expose of the social status of governesses and the second part a departure, a rather conventional romance. 

I find myself wondering at Charlotte Bronte's rejection of Austen: Agnes Grey seems to embrace romance, like Austen, and more so than either Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. 

I'm struck by how absolutely without redeeming qualities Rosalie seems to be; and, especially, how cruel she is to take up seducing Mr. Weston and preventing Agnes from seeing him; it seems completely obvious to me that she intends to hurt Agnes. And Agnes is so demure. Perhaps a little too demure for my taste. Her anxiety about the things she says to Mr. Weston is very touching and relatable. 

There is a passage, which I failed to note, where Agnes says that she is touched and delighted by Mr. Weston speaking to her as an equal, and this passage seems to me to echo that famous passage in Jane Eyre - which was, presumably, written later. 

I enjoyed the dramatic tension as Agnes longed for Mr. Weston to propose. I was relieved when it ended. I wondered why he waited so long. And, I enjoyed the novel as a whole and continue to marvel at Anne Bronte's mastery of the form. It amazes me that each of the sisters was so very accomplished in their debut novels. I haven't read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but I assume that it expresses more of Anne's true feelings.

Garnethill by Denise Mina

I really enjoyed Garnethill by Denise Mina. The thing I enjoyed most about it was the local color, the descriptions of streets and neighborhoods in Glasgow. The other thing that really impressed me was the sheer originality of the plot. And the sense I had that Mina had used the format of the mystery novel to convey something she felt she'd learned about mental illness, sexual assualt, and both the mental health care system and society's attitudes toward mental health.

Maureen O'Donnell has only been out of an asylum, where she was treated for severe depression, for four months. She's dating a counselor from the outpatient clinic where she's having therapy - although he's not her therapist. She's just reached the point where she feels this relationship has run its course. The next night, she goes out for drinks with an old friend, and, having had too much to drink, comes home and goes straight to bed. In the morning, she is deeply shocked to discover that her lover has been murdered in the living room of her apartment. She didn't notice when she came in the night before because she went straight to bed and didn't enter that room.

Everything about this is terrible. The sensational nature of the crime has attracted the interest of the newspapers and reporters besiege her at work. She found the body and she's being treated for mental illness, so she's the police's first idea about a suspect for the murders. Her own mother and her lover's mother, a politician, also think she's the culprit. She sets out to do what seems impossible: conduct her own investigation and find the real culprit.

It starts with a rumor but she begins to gather evidence that there are a number of vulnerable mental health patients that may have sexually assaulted by a staff member. She speculates that this situation may be the cause of her lover's murder; perhaps he was killed to prevent him from revealing the identity of the attacker.

A scene I really enjoyed was a meeting Maureen has with her brother in a chipper. The chipper is so perfectly described that you can not only picture it but feel the whole atmosphere of discussing a difficult topic in the least conducive environment.

Garnethill is the first novel in a trilogy. Garnethill earned the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Dagger Award for best first crime novel. I think it was deserved.

 

11/19/2020: If you're interested in Denise Mina, or think you might be, I recommend this clip of Mina in conversation with Jane Casey at this year's Dublin Book Festival, talking about Tartan Noir, describing Glasgow, writing crime fiction vs. writing true crime, society's construct of women's mental illness, the value of awards, writing crime fiction as a feminist act, and Mina's latest novel, The Less Dead.

The MurderOne Festival @ DBF Denise Mina in conversation with Jane Casey

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqQEeF--vMA

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

I recently read Northanger Abbey with an online book group that's part of the Bonnets at Dawn Facebook page.

I read all the Austen novels when I was in college, but I've very much enjoyed rereading Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Rereading Northanger Abbey was kind of a revelation. The thing that I enjoyed the most was also the thing that surprised me most: Northanger Abbey is a comedy. All the novels are comedies, but this one is among the most light-hearted. Austen presents its heroine as an average woman of marriageable age, which means that she, like her peers, is mad for Gothic novels. The tone of the novel throughout is satirical but in a kind-hearted way, and funny. Although I really disliked the character of John Thorpe and found his company oppressive, a lot about him was funny. His love of gossip is the device by which the plot turns.

 

 Austen wrote Northanger Abbey at a time when the novels of Ann Radcliffe, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, were wildly popular. In fact, in Austen's novel, the heroine, Catherine Morland, and her friend, Isabella Thorpe, are both readers of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Monk, published in 1796, is also discussed by John Thorpe in the novel. John Thorpe is Catherine Morland's false suitor, the man who is interested in her but in whom she has not interest, who is less attractive than the hero, possibly morally deficient, and who is not destined to win the heroine. The fact that he is enthusiastic about The Monk and recommends it to Catherine is a sign that Austen does not hold The Monk in high regard.

Northanger Abbey is a satire on the Gothic novel. There's nothing sensational (except Catherine's youthful imaginings) in the novel; in fact, when Henry Tilney, Catherine's host and chief romantic interest, attempts to convince her that her Gothic novel-inspired suspicions of his father are fantasy, he asks her to consider that she is living in England (rather than the Italy of the Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk) where, Tilney presumes, the rule of law and difficulty of keeping anything secret in the small towns of the English countryside make it unlikely that a murder could be kept secret for years.

Northanger Abbey opens in Bath, where Catherine is visiting as a guest of her well-to-do neighbors, the Allens. She meets Henry Tilney at the Assembly Rooms, a Bath institution that offered programming: dances, concerts, educational lectures, and concerts. The real purpose of the Assembly Rooms was, like the opera, to provide a place where one could see and be seen, where young women could display themselves and young men could meet them.

When Catherine meets Henry Tilney, she finds him charming. He certainly has plenty of conversation! In a world without raves and 501 jeans, conversation was a very important part of the courting process, so no little thing. But to modern sensibilities, Henry Tilney seems like a mansplainer, a patronizing, condescending, know-it-all.

What was so lovely about this "read-along" and discussion was that it was the consensus of most readers that while Henry started out as a rather predictable and annoying mansplainer, he grew to respect Catherine's values, intelligence, and sincerity. This new view of Henry Tilney catapulted him from being low in my estimation amongst Austen romantic heroes to exceeding Captain Wentworth to take the crown.

As a fan of Fanny Burney's Evelina, I'd like to point out that while Northanger Abbey is very different from Evelina, it share the same essential plot: a young, innocent girl enters society and has a number of misadventures where she makes a number of socially awkward mistakes and violates the rules of polite society with which she is unfamiliar. In both tales, virtue triumphs.

 

A Completing of the Watsons by Rose Servitova

I loved this "feel-good" novel and recommend it highly. I read it by flashlight during a power outage and was grateful for the way its lively plot, dialogue and humor held my interest.

As I read it, I found myself ruminating on what it is that I love about Jane Austen's work. It's the humor and satire, the elegance of her style, the values and yes, the happy endings.

A Completing of the Watsons supplies all these things.

The Watsons, a fragment begun and abandoned by Jane Austen while she was living in Bath, has a real humdinger of a plot. Like Mansfield Park, there's more than a little edge to it as Emma, a young woman raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle, suffers a reversal in fortune and must return to the family home. There her three sisters are engaged in a hunt for husbands as their dying father has no money or property to leave them - and they talk about it constantly, adding to the atmosphere of gloom.

Emma's change in fortune has occurred because when her mother died when Emma was just six, she was given to her aunt and uncle to raise and was presumed by her family to be the intended heiress of her uncle's estate, Claperton Park. Her uncle has recently died, however, without making any financial provision for her and her aunt has remarried to an Irish captain who did not want Emma to continue living with them.

Given a good education, she's a little bit too refined for the modest situation in which she finds herself now living. As the book opens, she is meeting the eldest of her sisters, Elizabeth, for the first time in 14 years.

At the first ball she attends after moving to Stanton, she meets a man she is immediately drawn to, Mr. Howard, a vicar. But she is also spotted by the stand-offish and socially awkward Lord Osborne. Lord Osborne never dances; his disdain for balls and dancing reminds me of Mr. Darcy. Lord Osborne immediately wishes to be introduced to her, and while that does not happen, he begins a campaign of courtship of Emma which she finds, while not welcome, certainly makes her life more eventful.

What I love about Rose Servitova's writing is her humor, her writing style, her delight in the foibles of human beings, and her fidelity to the language, manners and concerns of the Regency period.

I find myself wondering if Austen abandoned The Watsons because the dilemma Emma faces was just too close to Austen's own.

There are many elements here which remind me of other novels. Of course, Lord Osborne reminds me of Mr. Darcy. The discussion of lady novelists reminds me of the many discussions of books and reading in Northanger Abbey. Emma's status as a dependent, with an uncertain future, reminds me of Fanny in Mansfield Park. There is a passing reference to Box Hill, which, of course, reminded me of Emma - not to mention the sad hypochondria of Mr. Watson, reminiscent of Mr. Woodhouse in Emma and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The close friendship Emma and Elizabeth form in this novel reminds of Lizzie and Jane in Pride and Prejudice. The somewhat frosty relationship Emma and Elizabeth have with their other two sisters, Penelope and Margaret, also reminds of Kitty and Lydia from the same novel.

The Killing of the Tinkers by Ken Bruen

The Killing of the Tinkers fulfilled and confounded my expectations all at once. As I expected, it was so funny, charming and satisfying. On the other hand, I kept finding myself surprised: surprised that Jack has returned from London and his experience there earns about a paragraph. (After all, he ended up in Ladbroke Grove, not Battersea.)

Jack Taylor is surprising in so many ways. His greatest aspiration is to drink as much as he wants and just keep reading. His wife unexpectedly turns up (A wife? Did you know he had a wife? I didn't know he had a wife) and disappears again before the end of the chapter, leaving behind beautiful boots so exceptional that their virtues must be extolled at regular intervals.

Jack's perfected hedonism, and his reading connoiseurship, does not seem to interfere with his detective work (or perhaps it does). He's been approached by the head of clans, Sweeper, to find out who has been killing young tinker men. His search for the culprit finally ends in a way that I found surprising -- and it's nagged at me ever since finishing the novel. That's the kind of guy Jack Taylor is - surprising, offering you the truly unexpected, some might say, shocking.

Jack's reading diary alone is worth the price of admission. Jack's the kind of detective who believes that when his powers of deduction lag, it's time to read the greats: Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, George Pelecanos, believing that they inspire his mystery-solving powers to come forth.. 

This book is short, snappily written, and hugely entertaining.