Some thoughts on 'Jane Eyre' this time round

 'Victober' is a good time for reading and re-reading some Victorian Classics. It's a regular meme on bookstagram each October, and a habit I'm happy to buy into. I plucked this good old standby off my shelf, since it's been a good while since I last read it. (Here is my last review.) There are always fresh insights from each reading of an old text. Here is a list of what jumped out at me this time around. 

Beware, there may be spoilers.

1) Jane is a refreshing reverse-Cinderella. Her physical appearance is plain and her character is quite human and not saccharine sweet. The nurse, Bessie, says, 'If she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness, but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.' Whew, and Bessie is one the more sympathetic characters in young Jane's life. Charlotte Bronte was traversing new territory with a homely heroine in an era steeped with traditional fairy tales, that suggested that inner beauty surely must be reflected in outer. How liberating this book must have been for anyone whose appearance didn't live up to the social benchmarks at play around them. At last, even plain people are permitted to have lovely souls.

2) Is Helen Burns the real Cinderella persona here? Some Bronte scholars suggest that this sweet and pious girl was written as a tribute to Charlotte's sister, Maria, who died tragically at school under similar circumstances to Helen's. When severely punished for paltry offences, Helen's coping mechanism is to, 'look at what she can remember, not at what is really present.' It's a great habit that has aided many suffering souls. It's also Helen who leaves Jane with the lesson that, 'life is far too short to spend nursing animosity or registering wrongs.' 

3) Famous motifs keep repeating themselves throughout classic novels. For example, the way in which her Reed relatives treat Jane is a perfect 'snap' scenario for how the Dursleys treat Harry Potter. Jane is excluded from Christmas celebrations and receives no presents. Put a big, spoiled bullying cousin in Victorian knickerbockers and he's John Reed, yet in 21st century jeans and windcheater he becomes Dudley Dursley. It could be the same dude, in terms of nastiness, smugness, and being the recipient of their mothers' mollycoddling. There gets to be a, 'Hello, haven't I seen you before?,' quality to famous books.

And Aunt Reed's final act of tyranny to Jane is ensuring that she starts off on the wrong foot at Lowood School, similar to how David Copperfield's reputation as a 'biter' precedes him. Jane is locked in the Red Room and faints with fear, and a similar incident is repeated in early 20th century Canada when Aunt Elizabeth Murray punishes Emily of New Moon by locking her in an equally scary room in which an elderly male relative died. 

I find it credible to imagine some sort of collective unconscious phenomenon at play here across time and space, since these authors surely didn't have each other in mind when they wrote their stories. 

4) Jane is refreshingly free of name-dropping and big-noting herself. She's in no position to bung it on as we're encouraged to do in the 21st century in terms of platform building, which she's totally okay with. Her first grilling by Mr Rochester is great. Not only is Jane honest about having no family connections to boast of, but she feels no desire to 'fake it til you make it.' 

'Have you read much?' he asks, and she replies, 'Only such books as have come my way, and they have not been numerous or very learned.' 

Her refusal to bluff is one of the attributes that makes her so interesting to him, and later, she refuses to let him dress her in fine clothes and jewellery. 'You won't know me, Sir. I shall not be your Jane Eyre any more, but an ape in a harlequin's jacket, a jay in borrowed plumes.'

Her humility makes her exceptional, and it's no wonder that he deems her 'sagacious, novel and piquant.'

5) Jane exhausts her verbal eloquence pretty quickly when her cousins, Diana and Mary Rivers are around. While they're deep in discussion about whatever they're reading or studying, Jane is always first to run out of things to say. Even that's refreshing to me, since I'm just the same in class at Uni or around tables. I've often longed for the gift of the gab, but with Jane, I'm in good company. 

6) Giving somebody a piece of your mind isn't always as satisfying as it sounds. Several times in my life, I've found myself in the position to think, 'I wish I'd told her/him... (finish off with something cutting or snarky). But being quick-witted in the moment simply fans the flames of resentment and makes matters worse. As Dale Carnegie is famous for pointing out, people don't want to be cut down to size, so giving them pieces of our minds isn't the best way to win friends and influence people. 

When young Jane tells Aunt Reed what a nasty, horrible guardian she's been, it truly backfires on her. Aunt Reed now bears an even huger grudge to shape both the short term and long term future for Jane. First she establishes Jane's reputation as a troublemaker at Lowood School, and later she holds back news from Jane's wealthy uncle on the other side of her family, simply out of spite.

7) Don't get burned by people like St. John Rivers. This guy, whoa! He really is happiest when he's pushing himself to be miserable, and dealing with as much hardship as possible. A pleasant, pastoral lifestyle doesn't suit him at all, yet since he's performing acts of charity and working on God's behalf, it's so easy for him to place guilt trips on other people. I think that performing charitable acts is actually St. John's form of selfishness.

Girls, run a mile if you come across anybody as pious and manipulative, even if he does resemble a Greek god. 

8) Don't get burned by people like Rochester. I admit that in some ways, our hero seems sexier with each subsequent reading, to the extent that I found myself thinking, 'I wish Mason and Briggs wouldn't come and pull the plug on his wedding this time.' Rochester's passion-driven reasoning for his engagement to Jane does carry its own sort of weight. Since Jane has no relatives for any backlash to hurt if she lives an unwitting lifestyle as his mistress, she may well go for it. Yet the fact that she refuses to discard her solid principles makes her one of the most admirable characters of English literature. 

We must have lines we wouldn't cross, or we have nothing.

Look out for my review of Wide Sargasso Sea soon, in which Rochester's wife, Bertha, gets the understanding she arguably misses out on in Jane Eyre. Even though he clearly pictures himself as the victim in his relationship with his first wife, that's not entirely true, since he exploits her fortune, making full use of it for himself. 

'Pollyanna at Six Star Ranch' by Virginia May Moffitt

MY THOUGHTS: 

 I commend Virginia May Moffitt for choosing to do something that no other Pollyanna author did after Eleanor H Porter, and that is backtrack the story to Pollyanna's youth. Porter left no room to do so. Pollyanna 'grows up' in the second book of the series, and gets engaged at age 20 to her childhood chum, Jimmy. Ever since then, authors stick to her married life, although it was a shame to have passed over the scope for gladness in those teenage years. Moffitt evidently thought so too, because she decided to squeeze one in anyway.

Chronologically, this fits in at the halfway point of Pollyanna Grows Up. So you could stop reading that book at the end of Part 1, pick up this novel, then return to Part 2 when you finish. Here we have Pollyanna aged 16. She hasn't seen Jimmy since she was 14 and won't catch up with him again until she's 20. And Uncle Tom Chilton is resurrected from the dead for a few appearances, which is a bittersweet touch for us readers.

Having traveled for three years in Europe, Pollyanna and family are back in Beldingsville. Another young teen named Genevieve Hartley, whose father knows Uncle Tom, invites her to spend a few months at their ranch in Texas. Pollyanna will be joining Alice Jones for the train trip, a prim young school teacher who's returning to visit her Texan family. Uncle Tom is all for it, which neutralizes Aunt Polly's misgivings. So Pollyanna is off to spend time among the cactus and cowboys. 

She has grown a little self-conscious about the Glad Game, since Alice hints that it's childish, but can't help telling people all about it anyway. And there are plenty of people to benefit, like Mrs Billings, the widowed owner of a nearby ranch who envies all the perks of civilization her daughter, Susie, is missing out on. There's also old Tarby, a former quick-draw cowboy who now considers himself a has-been; and young Jack Ainsley, an amateur or 'tenderfoot' who feels he has a lot to prove. And there's also Storm, a prickly wild girl with a log-sized chip on her shoulder, who needs a bit of taming; and a family of roving Mexican workers who could really do with some friends. 

Okay, first for the good parts. It takes hard work by these characters to master the knack of the Glad Game, which gives us readers indirect lessons too. And Moffitt is great at embellishing her settings. Texas blooms beneath her pen; a spacious and breathtaking backdrop for honest and fun characters. 

Alas, now for the bad. I find some key plot points are heavy-handed and way too predictable. Folk are searching for a long-lost heir who stands to inherit half of another neighboring ranch. I think Moffitt intended to stun us with a gob-smacking revelation, but it's obvious to any canny reader from a mile off who the unwitting heir will turn out to be. Far-fetched proof plummets down like missiles. If only somebody had tipped Moffitt off that her subtlety is of the sledge hammer type. 

(She pulls the exact same move in the only other Glad book she authored, which was Pollyanna of Magic Valley. That long-lost heir's background and personality are strikingly similar to this one's. Using this tired trope once is corny, twice is almost farcical. So much for Virginia May Moffitt's contribution to this series.)

Pollyanna herself is far too good to be true this time around. She never once loses her cool, even when certain others behave in spiteful and dangerous ways. For this reason, I prefer Pollyanna's sidekick, Genevieve, who at least gets triggered as normal people do. Pollyanna's prattle about her Glad Game doesn't usually annoy me, but does in this story. There is some serious cheesiness overload. Pollyanna crosses a line to superior do-gooder, and white savior. 

It irks me, for example, when Pollyanna assumes that Refugia, the young Mexican mother, presents a grubby appearance because she knows no better. Pollyanna instinctively tries to teach her how to wash her face and comb her hair, when it turns out that in fact, Refugia simply had no access to soap and a comb for weeks. Perhaps we 21st readers are primed to wince at a certain Anglo-centric condescension. I usually try to overlook it based on the age of a text, but it was hard in this case.  

I really liked some of the characters, especially Genevieve, Jack (whose character is built up and then taken nowhere), and Alice's younger sister, Quentina. However, the drawbacks I've mentioned sadly prevent this from being a really good book.  

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Hooray, that's it, folks. I've finished reviewing every single one of the fourteen Glad Books. It's taken me longer than I anticipated, since those written by anyone other than Eleanor H Porter and Harriet Lummis Smith were lemons in their own way, making me loath to persevere. I guess the good news is that you only need to read the first six to get the best of the Pollyanna series. You can be GLAD of that, if you like. I might just hold onto Porter's and Smith's because I can't see myself ever re-reading any of the others again.  

But hey, I'm glad I collected them all and extra glad that I've finished reading them. And if you're a completist, you'll no doubt want to do the same. Regardless of the quality of the stories themselves, it is quite interesting to see how they evolve throughout the decades in which they were written, from the turn of the twentieth century and WW1 through the twenties, thirties (and WW2), forties and fifties. It's like a tour through the first half of the twentieth century. 

Now, having received requests to review other books by Eleanor H Porter herself, I might start doing that before too long. 

If you'd like to read my thoughts from the very top, you can start HERE.

The Broad Scope of Fan Fiction

What is Fan Fiction?

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as 'stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the internet.' It is sometimes abbreviated to 'fanfic.' 

I'd define it as a wealth of stories derived from other celebrated or well-known sources. When another author's work is used as a springboard for something new and original, that's fan fiction.

Why Do People Write Fan Fiction?

 a) I'll start with the reason which may first spring to the minds of many. It is easier in some ways, to craft our writing to fit a worldview we're already familiar with, rather than creating a totally fresh world with brand new characters. When we and our potential readers already know and love a cast of familiar faces and their setting, we are free to dive straight into the action, because there is already a fan base. 

Some fan fiction authors simply love the characters in pre-existing fictional worlds, feel they can't get enough of them and wish to add even more beyond the canon. Howard Pyle's 'The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood' fits this category. The legends of the heroic outlaw and his loyal band had been circulating since the Middle Ages when he decided to compile his own omnibus of stories in the late nineteenth century. 

b) Sometimes authors feel triggered by an original canon. When source material seems sadly shortsighted or lacking, they may decide it needs to be threshed out, or even totally redressed. If something in a story presses our buttons, taking steps to set it right in our own way may be a pro-active move, or skillful literary protest. This may be by re-telling the tale from the point of view of another character.

A famous example is Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys' answer to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Rhys explores Edward Rochester's doomed first marriage from the point of view of Bertha, aka the mad wife in the attic. This fan fiction, now a classic itself, brings out Bertha's vulnerability, her powerlessness and lack of advocates to stand up for her.

Another revealing example is Longbourn by Jo Baker, who decided to re-tell the story of Pride & Prejudice from the servants' perspective. When events made famous by Jane Austen play out against the lives of the Bennet family's hired help, we readers get a chance to see familiar characters in a way we've never considered before.

A very recent example is Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren. This author is a great Mark Twain fan, yet the gullibility and passivity of the appealing character Mary Jane in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn galled her. Jahren explains in her introduction how she decided, 'We can fix this!' In her mind, Twain's version left much to be desired, which she deftly expanded upon without changing his canon. This includes making Mary Jane more intrepid by giving her a set of her own adventures. 

c) Sometimes we may simply wish to draw from source material as a creative way of making some new social commentary or observation. Barbara Kingsolver's award-winning Demon Copperhead mirrors Charles Dickens' David Copperfield from start to finish. Using the framework of a famous Victorian classic to tell her own contemporary story about the deplorable foster care system and horrific opioid crisis in the Appalachian region of America is Kingsolver's ingenious way of suggesting that human nature hasn't changed.

Barbara Kingsolver certainly isn't the first author to have had the brainwave of adopting a well-established older story to mold her own take on it. The popular Broadway musical West Side Story is a mid-twentieth century re-telling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, focusing on New York city's rival gangs. And speaking of Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew became Pygmalion which morphed into the musical, My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. And not all that long ago, American author Anne Tyler did her own take on it in Vinegar Girl. 

One of the most ambitious examples of all may be C.S. Lewis' re-telling of the Christian gospels as fantasy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with his majestic lion Aslan taking on the role of our Lord and Savior. 

d) A fourth reason authors may decide to write fan fiction is to bring out more nuances or finer points from the original material which fellow fans may relish. Sometimes inspiration about book friends we all love and admire seem too good to keep to ourselves. This is the main reason why I decided to have a go.

I hope I've succeeded in showing that other important reasons for writing fan fiction exist than simple self-indulgence in prolonging our attachments to our favorite characters (although isn't the fun of that enough?) And I've hopefully proven that some quality, highly acclaimed examples may even fly under the radar of being fan fictions, although that is certainly what they are.

Introducing my own attempt.

Two side characters from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women series have become main characters in a spin-off which I've shared on Archive of Our Own, an extensive site devoted to fan fiction. I always thought my two young men (for I now consider them mine) had huge potential, but Alcott was burned out by the time she wrote their incidents in Jo's Boys. She'd written just enough to capture my imagination, so this year I indulged my passion and developed their storylines into an all consuming project I named Longing For Home. 

The first of these is Jo March's nephew, Emil, who follows his dream of going off to sea, but gets caught in a shipwreck. I've extended his couple of chapters from Jo's Boys to include a supporting cast of new characters, and a longer, slower burn of his romance with Mary, the captain's daughter. The other character is Nat Blake, a destitute former foundling who the Bhaers send overseas to study music. Nat is a talented violinist who battles anxiety and an inferiority complex from his impoverished background.    

Giving these two young men voices of their own has been an extremely satisfying writing project, especially since I set out to stick within the parameters of canon. I resolved to weave in as much from Alcott's original source material as I could without ever deviating outside of the lines. I like to think Louisa May Alcott might have been happy with my result, because it's my tribute to her writing. 

If I've stimulated your curiosity, please check out Longing for Home. You don't need to be familiar with Alcott's work to enjoy it. Archive of Our Own (AO3) is full of gifts such as this. Having spent time reading stories by many others before I ever dreamed of having a try, I now regard fan fiction authors as an extremely generous bunch of people who I'm happy to count myself among. For writing free novels and stories for fans to enjoy is surely a painstaking random act of kindness and labor of love.

And if you don't choose to commit to something so long at the moment, you might like to start with this shorter fan fiction I wrote. It's the perfect size to have with a cup of tea and slice of cake. And it features somebody we surely all know well. 

Keep your eye out for my further upcoming posts about fan fiction. I will soon share some of my initial experiences about the fan fiction site, where I initially feared to tread but am now so glad that I did. It is a venue full of pseudonyms, and the one I've chosen (Ada Sage) is combination of my grandmother's given name plus the embodiment of wisdom, which also happens to rhyme with her maiden name, which was Ada Gage.

More later. (And by the way, every fan fiction I've mentioned in this blog post, I aim to review.)      

 

'Son of Oscar Wilde' by Vyvyan Holland

During my Diploma of Creative Writing, I studied an interesting subject named 'Literature and Christian Faith.' Each week we took turns reading aloud from some formative text, beginning from ancient times. One of our modern selections was Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol.' It can hardly be called a tribute, but it was an acknowledgement of the shockingly hard two years he spent imprisoned there which contributed to his premature death. By writing this masterpiece after his release, Wilde's intent was to raise awareness of the barbaric British penal system and inhumanity of capital punishment. I was fascinated to come across this autobiography by Wilde's son, who was just a young boy when it all unfolded. It really shows how the ripple effect of one person's life may adversely shape those of others, putting in place the real life chain reaction nobody ever wants to start.    

Also see my reviews of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray

MY THOUGHTS:  

What a fascinating autobiography, and its scope even makes it something of a bildungsroman, but true instead of fictional.

Oscar Wilde's younger son, Vyvyan Holland, tells of his own baffled lifestyle as a child fugitive, following his famous father's imprisonment. Young Vyvyan (what a cool name, especially for the Victorian era) knows that his father, once feted is now hated, but his mother, Constance, conceals the details from him. So does Vyvyan's brother, Cyril, who accidentally discovers the truth but wishes to shield his little brother from the disgrace he feels. 

Poor Constance Wilde, fearing harsh public backlash on her innocent sons, rushes them across to the Continent to hide. She changes their surname from Wilde to Holland, after some of her distant relatives. This story is an excellent literary social artifact about the lifestyle of boys in the late Victorian era, and what is expected of them as they become young men in the turn into the twentieth century and Edwardian era. Vyvyan writes differently from his dad, but his detailed memory, wry humour, and interesting incident choices kept me scrolling pages. I was finding that in no time flat, another hour had passed. 

He describes the emotionally harmful burden of being forced to deny their father, compounded by their mother's sad, premature death a few years later, while they were still only 11 and 13. Cyril swings reactively to create an identity nothing like their father's, scorning anything he perceives as arty or effeminate. And Vyvyan himself develops a lifelong case of social anxiety and shyness, resulting from his fear and confusion early on. The two boys are hidden victims whose budding personalities are shaped by what happened to the previous generation. Being child pariahs takes a huge toll on them. 

Next, Cyril and Vyvyan are left at the mercy of Constance's extended family; a straitlaced bunch who were always offended by Oscar's flamboyant notoriety and hadn't wanted her to marry him in the first place. Rather than seeing their new charges as a couple of vulnerable young boys, they perceive a pair of tinder boxes who might explode in outrageous ways at any time. The brothers are forced to keep the secret of their paternity until one day when Vyvyan is nearly 21, their father's friends discover their existence. To these new faces, the boys are more like holy grails who'd been long sought.

That's one of the lasting impressions this book leaves me with. Same pair of kids, but polar opposite sentiments, depending on others' points of view. It was one of the tragedies of the early 20th century that Oscar's zealous attempts to meet up with his sons after his release from prison were met with a brick wall. Vyvyan had no idea that his father was being told, 'The boys are happier without you in their lives,' since he certainly wasn't thriving with his reluctant guardians. In fact, Vyvyan was led to believe that Oscar was dead.  

The publisher's note, in this book published in 1954, refers to Oscar Wilde's 'sexual perversion' and 'misguided way of life.' What would these early readers think, and what would Vyvyan himself think, to see how far the social tide has turned!    

Vyvyan is not afraid to call out the worst of Victorian hypocrisy, including the cruelty of some highly acclaimed folk of the time period. I fully agree when he says toward the end:

'I do not try to defend my father's behaviour but I do think that the penalties inflicted upon him were unnecessarily severe. And by that I do not only mean the prison sentence, I mean the virtual suppression of all his works and the ostracism and insults which he had to endure during the remaining years of his life.'

However, I disagree with these words written by Vyvyan in his Preface.

'This is not a very amusing and entertaining story. I think, however that it should be written as part of the whole story of Oscar Wilde.' 

He sells himself short there, because in spite of plenty of reflective and serious subject matter, I did find this book on the whole, especially some of the antics he and Cyril get up to, to be vastly amusing and entertaining indeed. I'm sure it'll be up among my ten best books of the year. 

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'Carry On, Mr Bowditch' by Jean Lee Latham

MY THOUGHTS:

 I've seen this Newbery Award winner from 1956 being recommended by decades of readers, including homeschoolers. I finally discovered I could borrow an internet archive copy. It's a fictionalized biography of Nathaniel Bowditch, the young mathematician and astronomer who noticed a dire need for a comprehensive, potentially life-saving encyclopedia of navigation, so went ahead and wrote one. 

Instead of fulfilling his dream to become a Harvard graduate, young Nat (born in 1773) is shaped by the school of hard knocks. Family hardship requires him to help in his father's cooperage business, and then he's indentured as a clerk in a chandlery. During his early twenties, Nat Bowditch sails on several merchant ships and discovers, to his horror, that Moore's Navigation, the standard resource for seafarers, is riddled with errors. 

Young Nat gets hopping mad. 'It's criminal to have mistakes in a book like this. Men's lives depend on the accuracy of the tables! When you depend on a book with mistakes, it would be safer not to depend on it.' His only viable solution is to replace it by writing a huge tome of his own, and luckily for all sailors, Nat has the brainpower to pull it off. It's a monumental feat for a young, self-taught man, which deserves far more acclaim than he possibly gets in the 21st century.

Nat Bowditch also educates other crew members in navigation, and eventually becomes a captain himself.

There is a lot to wrap our heads around. I won't even begin to delve into the historical backdrop, with America's War for Independence followed by the Napoleonic Wars, even though they're fascinating in the context of Nat's life. (Suffice to say that having won that first war, America must fight for her rights on the High Sea, which makes British vessels look like ultimate sore losers.) Rather than letting this review blow out into something huge, I'll list off the main points that struck me.

1) Who needs Harvard! Not highly motivated geniuses anyway. Study is what teenage Nat does in his downtime for fun. He teaches himself Latin so that he can understand 'Principia' by Isaac Newton. Interesting that we modern folk consider Latin to be a dead language, yet in the late 18th century it was the cutting edge language of scholars and scientists. Who killed it? Next, he teaches himself French, Spanish, and German too. 

2) Bowditch's life was incredibly tragic. Sure, this novel condenses it within 300 or so pages, but there is so often a fresh announcement of some heartbreaking death. The line, 'I'm sorry to tell you, Nat, I have some very bad news,' becomes a major motif. His second young wife, Polly Ingersoll, must have been reckless to have married him, having seen firsthand what happens to people Nathaniel Bowditch grows fond of. I see that several other reviewers decided to give this novel less than five stars solely because of all the deaths. I understand their decision, even though it's not Latham's fault. She didn't make all this crazy, sad stuff up. Maybe giving her book a lower ranking is a case of, 'Don't shoot the messenger,' yet it's still problematic having a book aimed at juvenile readers which a huge percentage of them may be too sensitive to read.

3) I appreciate Nat Bowditch's acquired patience. One of his love interests points out that his brain works so fast, he 'stumbles over other people's dumbness.' Eventually Nat makes a point of noticing the exact moment when the people he tutors twig, so that he can write his 'dumbed-down' explanations in his notebook, for they must be the most effective teaching tools. I always imagined it must be cool to be a genius, but they evidently suffer the downside of finding 99% of people have puny mental scopes, compared to their own. Small talk must get tedious. 

4) I was awed by the brilliance and dedication of Jean Lee Latham herself, for she obviously put everything she had into writing this book. The flyleaf of the version I borrowed tells us that before making a start on the story, she studied Mathematics, Astronomy, Oceanography and Seamanship to familiarize herself with Bowditch's work. Wow, that takes fandom to a whole new level, and it shows in the story. I didn't miss noticing the painstaking detail.

On the strength of that, I wish I could give this book 5 stars myself, but nope. Along with all the deaths, I thought Latham compresses so much detail and time frame within a comparatively short word count, it gets a bit bogged down at times. It's almost enough to blow the brain gaskets of readers who aren't as cluey as either Nathaniel Bowditch or herself.

Still, I've got to say it definitely encourages us to smarten up our own work ethics. Sure we might never be able to write major scientific encyclopedias or even the bios of those who do, yet we can devote ourselves to the projects which ignite our imaginations and seem worthy, even when the going gets tough. One of my favourite lines in the story is when teenage Nat learns Latin with the intent to read Isaac Newton. He says, 'First I have to figure out what it means in English, and then I have to figure out what it means.' 

I'm inspired by such painstaking and compelling enthusiasm. 

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'Peril at End House' by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot is vacationing on the Cornish coast when he meets Nick Buckley. Nick is the young and reckless mistress of End House, an imposing structure perched on the rocky cliffs of St. Loo.

Poirot quickly takes a particular interest in the young woman. Recently, she has narrowly escaped a series of life-threatening accidents. Something tells the Belgian sleuth that these so-called accidents are more than just mere coincidences or a spate of bad luck. Something like a bullet! It seems all too clear to him that someone is trying to do away with poor Nick, but who? And, what is the motive? In his quest for answers, Poirot must delve into the dark history of End House. The deeper he gets into his investigation, the more certain he is that the killer will soon strike again. And, this time, Nick may not escape with her life.

MY THOUGHTS:

We're back with Poirot at his most egotistical, never missing a chance to sing his own praises.

The story is narrated by his sidekick, Captain Hastings. The pair of them are staying at the Majestic Hotel in the Cornish seaside town of St. Loo. Poirot is adamant that he wants to retire from private investigation, yet even as he speaks, a furtive bullet is fired at a pretty girl who strolls past their verandah. She informs them it's the fourth time she's experienced a near miss within a short period of time. The young lady is Miss Nick Buckley, the owner of the ramshackle End House, which stands alone on a promontory overlooking the sea. Her plight is enough to entice Poirot to re-think his decision. 

Who could possibly want to kill this charming and bubbly young woman, whose property is worth nothing substantial? Poirot is certain that whatever the motive, it must be deeply hidden or else the crook wouldn't take such brazen risks in broad daylight. 

There are Australian characters in this book; a middle aged husband and wife duo named Bert and Milly Croft, who rent a small lodge on Nick's property. The bunging on of their Aussie colloquialisms is cringeworthy. Bert refers to Poirot as a 'bonza detective,' and says, 'I think neighbours should be matey, don't you?' And he always summons his invalid wife with a 'Cooee.' Even Poirot muses that they might be just a shade too typical for their culture. So the question becomes whether Agatha Christie is making them so overdrawn for a reason. I certainly hoped so, because that's easier to swallow than so many other international authors who overdo our Aussie persona accidentally.

Poirot often refers to Hastings' 'slightly mediocre mind,' which irritates but never outright offends his best friend, since they know each other too well. At one stage, Poirot chastises himself, asking, 'What good is it to be Hercule Poirot, with grey cells of a finer quality than other people's, if you don't manage to do what ordinary people cannot?' And Hastings simply reflects, with an inner eye roll, 'Poirot's self-abasement is astonishingly like other people's conceit.' 

There's another amusing incident in which Hastings lists Poirot's OCD qualities, such as toast that has to be made from square loaves, eggs matching in size and his objection to golf as a shapeless and haphazard game. 

My biggest problem with this mystery is that I sadly figured out the villain around the halfway point! Yep, for once I guessed the criminal and their motive before the brilliant Hercule Poirot twigged. Maybe Dame Agatha was too heavy-handed with her clues this time. Or perhaps I need to have an even longer break between reading her books. It's hard to say. It took the wind out of my sails when I noticed a glaring red flag. I prefer it by far when I don't guess, or at least not so easily, because unlike Poirot, my grey matter is not such fine calibre, so I look forward to the satisfaction of being surprised. Because I wasn't this time, and also because of the annoying Croft couple and Poirot being irritatingly smug, this one is not a three star read for me.

Dame Agatha has the occasional misses. To me, this is one of them.  

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'Longbourn' by Jo Baker

Having just finished writing a fan fiction of my own, I thought I'd like to read more fan fiction by others. 

MY THOUGHTS:

The titular setting is the legendary home in Pride and Prejudice where two radically different lifestyles orbit along together. The mismatched Bennet parents and their five daughters are, of course, well known by generations of readers. Jo Baker now decides to reveal the tale of their servants, who deal with the unmentionable but vital aspects of keeping life functioning smoothly. These five know full well that their security depends upon the caprice of their employers.   

Baker's author blurb informs us that her own forebears had been employed in service, so she knows full well that instead of attending the Netherfield ball she would have stayed home with the washing up. My ancestry is equally humble, so I found this story to be revealing and significant from the get go. 

Our main character is a young housemaid named Sarah, who works under Mrs and Mr Hill, the housekeeper, and butler. There is also Polly, a pert adolescent maid who is learning on the job. One day the Bennets hire a new young footman named James, who Sarah suspects of concealing some secret. It turns out James has far more to hide than he's even aware of himself.

Meanwhile, Sarah's fascination is stirred by a freed slave turned servant named Ptolemy, who works on Mr Bingley's estate. She's attracted to Tol's sprightliness and the wider world he represents, yet something about the mysterious and evasive behavior of James also intrigues her. I love how this romance, in all it's everyday, sometimes sordid routine, plays out against that more famous plot that we all know so well. 

The Bennets, their neighbors and all other familiar characters are totally true to canon, yet we're offered deeper, richer ways of understanding them, since we now see them as their underlings do. For example, it takes an insightful helper like Sarah to sense that Elizabeth's new married life isn't totally angst free, as she adjusts to the expectations of being mistress of such an intimidating address as Pemberley. 

After forming my own thoughts, I turned to other reviews, expecting a bit of flak, for Jane Austen's most devoted fans tend to deify her and consider her work untouchable. Yet I was stunned nonetheless by the sheer volume of cutting and unkind reviews of one and two stars on Goodreads. Holy moly! I guess Jo Baker must've known she was prodding a sacred cow. What amazed me most was the vitriolic content of some of these reviews, because these reactive people might've been reading a totally different book to me!

Some called it humorless compared to the great Jane Austen, yet to me it brimmed with wry observations that kept me grinning. How ironic that the same people who complain of no humour evidently take Pride and Prejudice extremely seriously. 

Others call Sarah a whinger, yet I considered her to be wise, astute, and far more gracious than some of those big-nobs deserved. I suspect some of the disgruntled readers resent Sarah's insights into sides of their favourite characters they refuse to acknowledge. Apparently suggesting that Darcy comes across as a granite block in the eyes of the working class, or that Lizzy is somewhat preoccupied and insensitive to her servant's priorities is a crime to some. And heaven forbid that anyone should feel sympathy for Collins (that easy-to-please young man) or Lydia (merely a child seduced by a master manipulator). 

Come on peeps, Pride and Prejudice is a novel, not a sacred text! Please don't be so blinkered about the sanctity of your favourite characters that you resist an opportunity to see how they may come across to others! I suspect those who do so might be the sort of readers who also resist real life revelations about themselves. This book is a refreshing invitation to expand our outlooks, and it's sad to see that so many diehard Janeites refuse to take it as such.

Some reviewers object to the TMI (too much information) factor in passages such as this. 

'The young ladies might behave like they were smooth and sealed as alabaster statues underneath their clothes, but then they would drop their soiled shifts on the bedchamber floor to be whisked away and cleansed, and would thus reveal themselves to be the frail, leaking, forked bodily creatures they really were. Perhaps that was why they spoke instructions at her over an embroidery hoop or over the top of a book: she had scrubbed away their sweat, their stains, their monthly blood; she knew they weren't as rarified as angels and so they just couldn't look her in the eye.' 

I get that this sort of straight talk isn't everyone's jam. Since this particular description occurs on the second page of the story, it's an early invitation for the squeamish to instantly abandon the book rather than read the whole thing and then slam it. I think stark realism like this is handy for revealing the disingenuous quality of the nineteenth century when facts of life were routinely swept beneath the carpet.

One particular plot twist (which I can't spoil here) inevitably causes some readers' hackles to rise. They insist, 'It's because Jane Austen herself didn't write it in.' Hmm, perhaps she simply didn't know about it. Even I object to the type of fan fiction that contradicts and changes canon, but Longbourn doesn't do this. The skeleton in the closet which I'm skirting around is consistent with Austen's unfolding of events. Baker never once destroys the Pride and Prejudice canvas, but merely offers us a broader vista from which to view it. 

So after my rant about the ranters, my final verdict is that I loved this story for its boldness and its beautiful imagery. As far as Pride and Prejudice spin-offs go, it's a winner in my opinion. Now, some reckless soul should write a novel depicting Wickham as the put-upon and misunderstood young man he presented himself as being. Not because I admire him, which I certainly don't, but because it would be interesting to watch the fur and feathers fly. 

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