The Royal Pledge
May. 26th, 2012 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyIf you are married and living in genteel poverty in London in the mid-1800s and think it would be a good idea to travel to Australia and make your fortune in the goldfields, here is a piece of advice I'll just throw out: don't leave without saying anything, planning to come back in a few years and surprise your wife as a rich man. TELL HER BEFORE YOU GO.
In not unrelated news, I've just finished the first third of Lady Audley's Secret. It is shaping up to be the most splendid bit of nonsense I've read since... well, I think we all remember The Blue Wall. That sets a high bar, I know, but I think Lady Audley can meet it.
The introduction to the book promises that it is the zenith of the Victorian sensation novel: 'lurid, scandalous and melodramatic'. Sign me up! And it is off to a cracking start. There are two strands: the first concerns Lady Audley. O, she is just the sweetest thing! Everyone loves her and her flaxen curls and her girlish laugh and the way she trips lightly into a room. Just by looking at her handwriting, someone who has never met her can tell she is just the most charming young gel who ever did live. And so lucky! She was swept off her feet by the local baronet, Sir Michael, a good-hearted and rich widower of middle years. The only person who isn't charmed is Sir Michael's daughter, who is only a couple of years younger than her new stepmother, and who takes an instant dislike to her.
The book goes to some lengths at the start to paint Sir Michael's daughter as spoilt and silly and spiteful with a 'nose inclined to be retroussé', but that is unbelievable because her name is Alicia, and people named Alicia are, obviously, universally delightful. Eventually, the book relents and admits that she has a kind of 'espiègle beauty'. Also, her dog doesn't like Lady A, and animals are never wrong.
The second strand of the story concerns George Talboys, who is what my mother would call a bit of a dill. He is the man alluded to in the first paragraph, who went to Australia without telling his wife, a lovely young woman with flaxen curls and a girlish laugh, and came back wealthy three years later, to find she died the week before he landed. His best friend is Robert Audley, who just happens to be Lady A's nephew by marriage. As the first part ends, George has gone missing in MYSTERIOUS circumstances after visiting Audley Court, and Robert is going to investigate. Clearly, these two strands are related, and you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see how.
So that is the plot, but there is more goodness than that. There is a sinister portrait and a blackmailing maid and George Talboys' young son, who talks of being visited by a lovely lady in nice clothes. The book also has some excellent individual pieces of nonsense. This is Lady A herself, talking to her husband of her life before marriage, when she was but a charming young governess: 'Poverty, poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations!'
This is my favourite bit, a conversation between George and Robert (who is fab):
"I'm not a romantic man, Bob," he would say sometimes, "and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and so much jingle; but a feeling has come over me, since my wife's death, that I am like a man standing upon a long, low shore, with hideous cliffs frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising tide crawling slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon me with a great noise and a mighty impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding toward me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for the end."
Robert Audley stared at his friend in silent amazement; and, after a pause of profound deliberation, said solemnly, "George Talboys, I could understand this if you had been eating heavy suppers."
In short, I think it is not too early to call that Lady A, the person, is a wrong 'un, but Lady A, the book, is top-hole entertainment.
In not unrelated news, I've just finished the first third of Lady Audley's Secret. It is shaping up to be the most splendid bit of nonsense I've read since... well, I think we all remember The Blue Wall. That sets a high bar, I know, but I think Lady Audley can meet it.
The introduction to the book promises that it is the zenith of the Victorian sensation novel: 'lurid, scandalous and melodramatic'. Sign me up! And it is off to a cracking start. There are two strands: the first concerns Lady Audley. O, she is just the sweetest thing! Everyone loves her and her flaxen curls and her girlish laugh and the way she trips lightly into a room. Just by looking at her handwriting, someone who has never met her can tell she is just the most charming young gel who ever did live. And so lucky! She was swept off her feet by the local baronet, Sir Michael, a good-hearted and rich widower of middle years. The only person who isn't charmed is Sir Michael's daughter, who is only a couple of years younger than her new stepmother, and who takes an instant dislike to her.
The book goes to some lengths at the start to paint Sir Michael's daughter as spoilt and silly and spiteful with a 'nose inclined to be retroussé', but that is unbelievable because her name is Alicia, and people named Alicia are, obviously, universally delightful. Eventually, the book relents and admits that she has a kind of 'espiègle beauty'. Also, her dog doesn't like Lady A, and animals are never wrong.
The second strand of the story concerns George Talboys, who is what my mother would call a bit of a dill. He is the man alluded to in the first paragraph, who went to Australia without telling his wife, a lovely young woman with flaxen curls and a girlish laugh, and came back wealthy three years later, to find she died the week before he landed. His best friend is Robert Audley, who just happens to be Lady A's nephew by marriage. As the first part ends, George has gone missing in MYSTERIOUS circumstances after visiting Audley Court, and Robert is going to investigate. Clearly, these two strands are related, and you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see how.
So that is the plot, but there is more goodness than that. There is a sinister portrait and a blackmailing maid and George Talboys' young son, who talks of being visited by a lovely lady in nice clothes. The book also has some excellent individual pieces of nonsense. This is Lady A herself, talking to her husband of her life before marriage, when she was but a charming young governess: 'Poverty, poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations!'
This is my favourite bit, a conversation between George and Robert (who is fab):
"I'm not a romantic man, Bob," he would say sometimes, "and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and so much jingle; but a feeling has come over me, since my wife's death, that I am like a man standing upon a long, low shore, with hideous cliffs frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising tide crawling slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon me with a great noise and a mighty impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding toward me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for the end."
Robert Audley stared at his friend in silent amazement; and, after a pause of profound deliberation, said solemnly, "George Talboys, I could understand this if you had been eating heavy suppers."
In short, I think it is not too early to call that Lady A, the person, is a wrong 'un, but Lady A, the book, is top-hole entertainment.