The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s

Winifred Hughes

The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton University Press, 1980)
by Winifred Hughes
USA, 1980

Whilst I probably won't be picking up another 600+ page Victorian novel anytime soon, some follow-up research on the sensation era was clearly in order after last week's The Woman in White post finally made me realize how many of my dear blog friends are absolutely enamored of literature from the land of football hooliganism! Winifred Hughes' The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (sorry, no cover image to be found) turned out to be just the ticket for understanding you lot as it's a fine literary and social history of the era that reads well and gets its point across in a third of the usual triple-decker's time.  Although Hughes is probably at her best writing about the tensions between the sensation novelists and their critics and what that has to say about their assumptions about the role of literature itself (no mean feat), I also enjoyed her thumbnail sketches of the personalities behind the pens (the eccentric Charles Reade, the devil-may-care M.E. Braddon) and her eschewing of literary theory in favor of close readings.  If I may assume a Count Fosco tone for a moment, what a rare and utter pleasure it is to encounter what an academic has to share about what she thinks for a change rather than what she thinks Foucault or Lacan would think about the same material!  (Princeton University Press, out of print)

The Woman In White

The Woman in White (Oxford World's Classics, 2008)
by Wilkie Collins
UK, 1859-60

Although British literature as a whole has to rank as one of the most overrated examples of a national literature anywhere (admit it, bloggers--how many tales about governesses and class bias do you really need?), I enjoyed The Woman in White enough that I could see adding it to old favorites like The Canterbury Tales and "Clash City Rockers" on a list of things from across the pond that don't suck. Whether or not that makes this a true classic or not is another story, but this goofball first "Sensation Novel" makes up for its lack of depth in terms of what it has to say by how it says what it does: unraveling the mystery behind "the woman in white," a story that touches on false imprisonments, poisonings, secret societies, and star-crossed lovers, via a series of courtroom-style witnesses to the prosecution.  Although Collins tries too hard to draw attention to the gender differences among his narrators (a typical howler from a female character: "I dare say it was very wrong and very discreditable to listen--but where is the woman, in the whole range of our sex, who can regulate her actions by the abstract principles of honour, when those principles point one way, and when her affections, and the interests which grow out of them, point the other?" [228]), the novel's ensemble effect is marvelous at masking how increasingly uninteresting the main character, Walter Hartright, is in comparison to the mannish Marian Halcombe and the devilish Count Fosco--a fantastic villain whose evil ways reach a comic zenith when he feeds an organ-grinder's monkey some "lunch" but "contemptuously" fails to provide any sort of a handout at all for the organ-grinder himself!  Elsewhere, Collins also gets a thumbs-up for presenting a love affair between Hartright and Laura Fairlie that rings true emotionally.  Unfortunately, I had to dock him a couple of points for throwing his hero into jail temporarily for merely jostling another man--the novel's low point--and for making us wait so long before Count Fosco's bombastic turn in the spotlight ("Youths!  I invoke your sympathy.  Maidens!  I claim your tears." [628]).  Fortunately, Fosco's maniacally unhinged written declaration near the end redeems any creaky plot elements in the 600 pages that preceded it--and might just have opened up the door for me to a possible follow-up reading of Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Dickens' Great Expectations, Wood's East Lynne, or some other guilty pleasure.  Any suggestions?  (www.oup.com/worldsclassics)

Wilkie Collins, the ladies' man

Thanks to Trish of Trish's Reading Nook, whose review of The Woman in White here made me want to read Wilkie Collins again after I'd forgotten about him for years and years somehow!

A Time to Keep Silence

A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books Classics paperback, 2007)
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
UK, 1957

Lovely little travelogue about Leigh Fermor's stay in three French monasteries and visit to the ruins of another complex in Turkey sometime in the mid-1950s. Although the author's aims were decidedly secular at the outset (he candidly admits that his journey began with a search for a cheap and quiet place to stay where he could finish writing another book), NYRB's classification of this as "literature/religion" hints at how sucessfully the work touches on matters far beyond the mundane. Of the three chapters ("The Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle," "From Solesmes to La Grand Trappe," and "The Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia," all noteworthy for their simple but graceful prose), I particularly enjoyed the first for its insightful and completely absorbing account of what it's like for a lay person to undergo the retreat from the world that Benedictine monastic life requires. Cautioning the reader that he could only immerse himself in a very small measure of St. Wandrille's routine as an outsider, Leigh Fermor's sensitivity and openness to the experience as a guest are nevertheless evident in his ability to communicate the satisfactions of abbey life to a world so removed from its own. The sections on La Grande Trappe, an extremely austere Cistercian monastery, and the Cappadocian ruins, cradle of monasticism in the days of the desert fathers, are also interesting, so I'm happy to see that Sir Patrick has several other books for me to discover eventually if not sooner. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Patrick Leigh Fermor

In lieu of a Wiki entry:
Helena Smith, Literary legend learning to type at 92 (2007)

William Dalrymple, Patrick Leigh Fermor: The man who walked (2008)

She

She (2004 paperback)
by H. Rider Haggard
UK, 1887
ISBN 0-140-43763-0

Decent but far from mindblowing fantasy/adventure "classic" from King Solomon's Mines author H. Rider Haggard. While thankfully not as overtly racist as I'd been led to believe, there's still plenty of casual misogyny, class bias, and unrepentant colonialism sprinkled throughout the novel to lend She that true period seasoning. The far-fetched main events have to do with a trio of British adventurers' discovery of a 2200-year old but still youthful-looking femme fatale/sorceress named Ayesha (a/k/a She-who-must-be-obeyed), an ill-tempered and seemingly all-powerful white empress of a black cannibalistic tribe living amid the ruins of a spectacular lost civilization in central Africa. A pretty loopy premise to be sure, but Haggard attempts to tone things down somewhat with a couple of intertwined love stories, an affectionate account of friendship under extreme duress, and some Brit-friendly nods to antiquarianism and archaeology that probably fared better with the work's original pre-post colonialist readers. All the chauvinism and goofy supernatural elements aside, I did enjoy reading about She's complex hottie of a title character (even more fetching and mysterious on the black border Penguin paperbacks than on the slightly altered illustration above) and coming across unintentionally funny moments like the one where a digression on queens and monarchy leads to an unfavorable comparison between the despotic Ayesha and Britain's own Queen Victoria, "venerated and beloved by all-right thinking people in her vast realms" (p. 254). 3 out of 5 stars for an Orbis Terrarum Challenge alternate and a guilty semi-pleasure. (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Franz von Stuck, Die Suende [Sin], 1893