Brief notes #2: Reading outside the British Library

Margaret Forster, Lady's Maid.  The lady in question is Elizabeth Barrett Browning; the maid, her real lady's maid, Elizabeth Wilson.  Despite that, this biofiction is not "really" about Barrett Browning, but about Wilson's increasingly disjointed sense of identity.  "Lady's maid" is just one of many slots into which Wilson tries to fit herself, along with "daughter" (until her mother dies), "sister" (difficult, as she and her siblings are not wholly compatible), "wife" (only suits until the sexual infatuation wears off), "mother" (frequently complicated to the point of impossibility by her job), and so on.  "Friend," which Barrett Browning herself proposes, also turns out to be fraught: the connection the two develop collapses after the Brownings marry, and Barrett Browning is never willing to undertake the emotional labor that friendship entails.  These rough-edged categories are not smoothed by Wilson's intellectual and geographical displacements, as life in the Browning household accustoms her to cultural expectations unmet elsewhere, and moving around England, France, and Italy both alienates her from her working-class origin and separates her from other friends and family.  Meanwhile, Barrett Browning figures not so much as a writer than as a body--coughing, bleeding, constipated, cold, and so on; the profession of authorship turns out to depend on an extensive regime of cosseting, all of it carefully silenced.  Forster pays far more attention to Wilson's own invented missives, which (despite their drastic differences in education) Wilson crafts with as much attention to language as Barrett Browning does.  Although we never get the sense that this is a mute inglorious Milton, Wilson is clearly far cannier than the Brownings grasp; they, meanwhile, come across as both privileged (Wilson becomes increasingly cynical about Barrett Browning's political poetry) and tight-fisted.   At the end, Wilson tells herself that now that Barrett Browning is dead, "she could be herself" (534), but by this point, it is not at all clear what that could mean--and, as the afterword makes starkly clear, the real Wilson had a very hard time of it.

Rose Tremain, Merivel: A Man of His Time.  Tremain's seriocomic sequel to the equally seriocomic Restoration picks up at the other end of Charles II's career, as both he and our protagonist slide towards death.  Merivel, a confirmed schlemazel, manages to get himself into all sorts of unintentional pickles that go nowhere, whether trying to obtain a job with the Sun King (nope), rescue a bear from execution (if only the bear had been willing to remain in his paddock...), or have a passionate affair (he has it, but discovers himself appalled by the thought of marrying the woman).  About the only thing he manages successfully is negotiating a Catholic priest's presence at the King's deathbed, not that James II seems overly grateful.  As Merivel acknowledges, the one thing that has consistently drawn him outside the prison of self has been his love for Charles, "[f]or what is a human life worth, if it does not discover something greater than itself to serve? If I had not served you, if you had not roused me from my slothful Sleep, I would have been Nothing" (316).  Yet this theme resonates more darkly elsewhere in the novel, from Merivel's discovery of his ex-wife Celia, now insane, to the gay soldier (husband of Merivel's romantic fling) who commits suicide by duel rather than live without the man he adores; passionate love leads to Nothing as much as it leads to Something.  Merivel's household, meanwhile, stands in for the body politic at large, collapsing into senility and saturnalia while Charles II wastes away on his deathbed.  Despite Merivel's amusement at his own demise, the reader senses (perhaps a little too obviously) the turbulence just ahead.

Robert Edric, The Devil's Beat.  Edric again, with an even more anesthetized POV character than in The London Satyr, and an even less airtight Gothic plot. Merritt, our "hero," is an investigator who specializes in closing supposedly supernatural cases.  He has been sent to an isolated village, gone bust after a brief financial boom, where a group of girls claim to have seen some demonic figure in the woods; one of them also insists that a mysterious man invaded her bedroom and her bed.  One of four men representing the various arms of professional and state authority, Merritt seeks to classify and rationalize the testimony of both the girls and the villagers, armed with the "forms" (131) that enable them to chart everything neatly.  Although he represents a kind of urban, bureaucratic modernity, Merritt acknowledges that his co-investigator, Dr. Nash, is right to describe this happening as a weird clash between a "new age," one in which, Merritt says, "everything will have to be investigated, explained, picked apart, understood" (239), and a strange hangover from a far earlier time.  Charles Taylor's secular age runs aground on the return of enchantment.  Explanation, however, turns out to be badly divorced from power: Merritt solves the case, which turns on the banality of adolescent evil instead of supernatural forces, but he cannot bring the real wrongdoer to justice.  As in The London Satyr, the novel dissipates instead of ends.  The book's rather schematic vision of history (borrowed, as I said, from the Gothic) is echoed in its gendering of the conflict: masculine force finds itself cowed and vanquished by anarchic feminine violence, a violence that is apparently marginal (these are young, working-class girls) and yet ultimately escapes not only control, but also the state's power to even describe what has happened.