Clarissa – Samuel Richardson (progress report)

Inspired by I’ve Been Reading Lately, I’ve been reading Samuel Richardson’s great epistolary novel Clarissa on the dates the letters in the novel were written. I’m now 500 pages in, only 1,000 pages to go! So, I thought it was time for a report on my progress with Clarissa now that I’m completely in the swing of things.

I have to admit that I haven’t always been able to read the letters on the exact day. Clarissa writes so much, her letters go on for pages (& the Penguin edition is a large format paperback with quite small print) & there were times when I almost gave up in despair at the amount she could write about the smallest incidents. Turning them this way & that, looking at them from every point of view, agonising over the implications of everyone’s behaviour. This is stream of consciousness 150 years before Dorothy Richardson (is she any relation to Sam, I wonder?) & Virginia Woolf. The Penguin edition is also heavy so it’s difficult to read when either of the cats are on my lap & impossible to take to work for my lunchtime walk. Luckily I also have the Complete Works of Richardson on my Kindle thanks to Delphi Classics so I’ve been reading the eBook as well as the paperback. So, I am up to date & looking forward to the next instalment. Once I’ve finished the book, I’ll be interested to read some of the other books in the Delphi edition, especially the Remarks on Clarissa & the biography by Sir Walter Scott.

So, now that the practicalities are out of the way, here’s a summary of the plot so far. Clarissa Harlowe is a beautiful, virtuous young woman in easy circumstances. Her grandfather favours her over her sister, Arabella, & brother, James, & has left her an estate. James is incensed by this & is determined to force Clarissa to marry Mr Solmes whose property adjoins the grandfather’s estate. This will enable James to gain control over the property as Solmes is completely under his sway. Arabella has been courted by Robert Lovelace, a wealthy man but with a dubious reputation as a rake. She declines his attentions but then is furious when he turns his attention to Clarissa. Clarissa is intrigued by Lovelace but his bad reputation gives her pause for reflection.

Clarissa’s family, including her parents, uncles & aunt, imprison her & try to force her to marry Solmes. Her mother is sympathetic but completely under the sway of her husband & son. Clarissa’s faithful servant, Hannah, is dismissed, & Arabella’s saucy maid, Betty, now waits on Clarissa, spying on all she does. Clarissa has been drawn into a correspondence with Lovelace which, when discovered by the family, incenses James who has fought a duel with Lovelace in the past. Clarissa’s only resource is writing letters to her friend, Anna Howe. The letters are ingeniously hidden in a hen house (Clarissa is allowed to walk in the garden & tend her poultry) & collected by Anna’s servant. Anna is my favourite character & her letters are a relief after Clarissa’s agonising. Witty, confident & loyal, Anna would offer Clarissa refuge but her mother, influenced by the Harlowes, has turned against Clarissa & forbids the correspondence (although, of course, it carries on regardless).

Lovelace contrives to meet Clarissa in the garden several times &, eventually, tricks her into running away with him. She is now in St Albans, living in an inn with Lovelace although they pass as brother & sister. Her virtue is still intact although Lovelace has designs on this. His letters to his rackety friend, Jack, expose all his machinations & the snares he is leading Clarissa into. He is plotting to get her to London, telling her that he has respectable lodgings organised for her & that he will leave her once she’s settled there. He’s also holding out the lure of recognition from his family. However, he is manipulating everyone, including Anna Howe, behind the scenes with the help of his servants to marry Clarissa or seduce her if marriage looks unlikely. Clarissa is adamant that she will not marry Solmes but she’s unsure about Lovelace as well. Obviously attracted to him, she doesn’t altogether trust him.

I’ll end with a quote from one of Clarissa’s letters to Anna which explains Clarissa precisely. How she’s getting hold of the paper, pens & ink to do all this writing, is a question that cannot be asked. The reader willingly suspends disbelief in the rush to find out what happens next.

And indeed, my dear, I know not how to forbear writing. I have now no other employment or diversion. And I must write on, although I were not to send it to any body. You have often heard me own the advantages I have found from writing down every thing of moment that befalls me; and of all I think, and of all I do, that may be of future use to me; for, besides that this helps to form one to a style, and opens and expands the ductile m ind, every one will find that many a good thought evaporates in thinking; many a good resolution goes off, driven out of memory perhaps by some other not so good. But when I set down what I will do, or what I have done, on this or that occasion; the resolution or action is before me either to be adhered to, withdrawn or amended; and I have entered into compact with myself, as I may say; having given it under my own hand to improve, rather than to go backward, as I live longer.

Literary Ramblings

I have a complaint but I’m not sure where to direct it – the gods of the weather maybe. March has begun – where is autumn? We’re in the middle of a predicted fortnight of very warm humid weather with no rain in sight. Summer was better than expected – no extreme hot days or heatwaves, quite a bit of rain – but it should be over now! There, rant over. Unfortunately my hopeful autumn poem on Sunday has had no effect. Maybe the weather is the reason for my blogging slump. Again, instead of a considered review, I’m just going to share a couple of mini reviews & a progress report. At least Phoebe has the right idea. Maybe she’s trying to encourage me to choose one of my unread Slightly Foxed editions next? The new issue of Slightly Foxed dropped into my letter box on Friday &, as always, I’m looking forward to reading it.

I’d also just like to mention two bloggers that have recently returned to the blogosphere after a break. I’d only just discovered The Quince Tree when Sue decided to focus more on Instagram. However, she’s returned to the blog recently with posts on nut butter, marmalade & Sue Gee (posts on food & books predominate as you can see). I especially like Sue’s reading lists on Spring or just a collection of middlebrow favourites. Penny at Scottish Vegan Homemaker blogs infrequently but it’s always lovely to catch up with what she’s been reading, cooking & doing. Since her last blog post Penny has graduated with a BA (Hons) in Humanities, said goodbye to a dear pet, become an enthusiastic convert to bullet journaling, celebrated a major birthday & been reading Jan Struther.

I mentioned here that I’m reading Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. It’s an epistolary novel & I’m reading it on the dates the letters were written in the novel. The days also match up which is fun. 100 pages in & Clarissa is under immense pressure from her family to marry the odious Mr Solmes. Even her fond & sympathetic mother has been bullied into submission by her husband & son. Clarissa’s long letters to her friend, Anna Howe, record every twist & turn of the measures taken by the family to push her into this marriage. It highlights just how powerless a woman could be, even a woman like Clarissa who has inherited property from her grandfather. As ever, when reading epistolary novels, I wonder where the characters find the time to write in such detail but that’s the fun of suspending disbelief & pretending that I’m receiving these letters in the post or, as here, by the machinations of servants leaving them in a hen house to be collected by another servant.

I wanted to read some of Frederick Forsyth’s fiction after listening to his memoir, The Outsider. I chose The Odessa File, read by David Rintoul. This was Forsyth’s second novel & is a terrific thriller. Set in Germany in 1963 (it begins on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination), journalist Peter Miller attends a routine scene, the suicide of an elderly man. A police officer on the case gives Miller a diary found with the man’s possessions. Solomon Tauber was Jewish & had kept notes during his time as a prisoner in Riga during WWII which he later wrote up as a detailed diary. Miller is shocked by the diary as young Germans of his age have been told very little about the war & the crimes committed against the Jews. Reading the diary sets him off on a mission to track down Eduard Roschmann, the SS Commandant of the prison at Riga.

Miller’s search leads him to a Jewish group dedicated to tracking down the former SS officers still alive, many of them living in Germany with new identities. Miller masquerades as a former SS soldier who fears exposure to get close to Roschmann &, as he tracks down his quarry, becomes the object of interest to the men known as the Odessa, ex-SS men who help their former comrades escape justice. There are some incredibly tense scenes as Miller approaches the end of his quest & I loved the archival research he does & the steps of his investigation which take him from Germany to Switzerland & England. The pace slowed a bit in the scenes where Miller is trained in his ex-SS soldier disguise & sometimes Forsyth’s research is a bit too obvious & intrusive but overall, I enjoyed it very much &, as always, David Rintoul’s narration was excellent. I’m now back in the 4th century with Volume III of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire read by David Timson.

The 16th century was the great age of powerful women in Europe. A monstrous regiment of women according to John Knox but a diverse group of women wielding power as Regents, Queen Consorts or Queen Regnants from Spain to Scotland, France to England & the Netherlands. Sarah Gristwood’s group portrait begins with Isabella of Castille in the 1470s & ends of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603. A book like this can be incredibly confusing with so many protagonists, many with the same or similar names (several Marys, Annes, Catherines, Margarets & a Marguerite). Gristwood does a good job of keeping the stories separate while showing the connections between the women. Many of them were related or acted as mentors for younger women. I found the stories of the less familiar women the most fascinating. I’ve read many books about the Tudors & Mary, Queen of Scots but I was interested to learn more about the women who were Regents of the Netherlands through the 16th century. The Hapsburg princess Margaret of Austria was married & widowed three times by her mid twenties. She became Regent of the Spanish Netherlands for her nephew, Charles V, & continued in the role as Charles’s focus on Spain led his ambitions in other directions. Margaret raised her niece, Mary of Hungary, who eventually succeeded her as Regent.Mary then raised her niece, Margaret of Parma, who became Regent in her turn for her half-brother, Philip II, in the 1550s. Although all three women ruled in the name of a male monarch, in reality they held sway over the territory with minimal interference from Spain.

Louise of Savoy rose from obscurity to exercise power through her son who became Francois I of France after successive kings died without heirs. She had a significant influence over his early reign & her example influenced her granddaughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who inherited her father’s kingdom of Navarre, strategically positioned between Spain & France. Jeanne was attracted to the Protestant religion & would become one of the leaders of the French Huguenots in the bitter religious wars of the later 16th century which culminated in the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. The massacre took place on the occasion of the marriage of Jeanne’s son, Henri of Navarre to Margot, daughter of Catherine de Medici, the powerful Queen Mother of France.

I always enjoy Gristwood’s books. In her previous book, Blood Sisters, about the women of the Wars of the Roses, she used the metaphor of Fortune’s Wheel to describe the arc of the story. In Game of Queens, apart from the nod to Game of Thrones, chess & especially the role of the Queen in that game, is the dominant metaphor. The role of the queen in chess was changing during this period, giving the piece the power to move anywhere on the board & Gristwood sees this as a useful way to track the change from a period in which women exercised power on behalf of or in concert with a male ruler to the later 16th century when several women ruled in their own right. It was the last time when women rulers, particularly in England, could really be said to rule as well as reign. Later English queens like the Stuarts Mary II & Anne were increasingly constrained by Parliament as constitutional monarchy became the norm.

 

Literary Ramblings

Here are just a few bits & pieces that I want to share – a quick review, some publishing news (more Furrowed Middlebrow – hooray!), a blog post that had me reaching for the tissues with tears of laughter & some new bookcases with obligatory cat picture. Phoebe is not defying gravity here, she’s decided that my new bookshelf is her new favourite spot for sleeping & just generally looking out over her world. I don’t know why photos I take on my phone refuse to be rotated even when they look fine in my editing software. Anyway, you’ll just have to look sideways at this one.

The new shelves were a gift from some friends who are downsizing. I’ve used them to shelve my unread Slightly Foxed & Folio Society editions. Apart from looking lovely, this has also freed up some room on the tbr shelves in the study. Not that I’m buying books. I’ve bought only a few books since October & have no desire to buy at the moment. This is what happens. I stop buying & then, gradually, the desire to buy just fades away… I only have two preordered books  – Isabella of Castile by Giles Tremlett (due in a couple of weeks)  & Richard III by Chris Skidmore (which I ordered in August 2014 & is now due in September although I’m not holding my breath).

I also now have all my DVDs in one place & in alphabetical order. I haven’t separated the watched & unwatched, they’re just one sequence. These shelves were the exact size I was looking for, as you can see. They fit perfectly in the space beside the window.

I’ve just finished listening to a wonderful audio book, The Outsider, Frederick Forsyth’s memoir. I haven’t read any of his novels (although I’m now keen to read or listen to The Day of the Jackal & The Odessa File)but I was intrigued to listen to this after John le Carré’s The Pigeon Tunnel. It sounds a silly thing to say about an author who has sold millions of copies of his books over the last 45 years but he’s such a great storyteller. I loved hearing about his wartime evacuation as a baby to a Norland training school where the nannies practiced on him, learning French & German on holidays where he immersed himself in the languages by staying with local families, his experiences as the youngest pilot in the RAF, the years in East Berlin & Africa as a journalist & the experience of writing his early novels & seeing Jackal made into a film. Beautifully read by Robert Powell, one of my favourite narrators.

Darlene at Cosy Books has reviewed one of the latest Persephones, Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood. If this review doesn’t make you long to get hold of this book, I don’t know what will. It’s very close to the top of my tbr pile.

Speaking of Persephone, another book has leapt from the tbr shelves to the reading table after reading the latest Persephone Letter. As well as short stories & wartime letters from London, Mollie Panter-Downes also wrote this account of Ooty, one of the Indian hill stations where the English of the Raj spent the summer months. I picked this up second hand years ago in a previous fit of Panter-Downes enthusiasm. I wonder if Persephone are planning a reprint?

The most exciting publishing news I’ve heard in a while has been Scott’s announcement of the next titles in his Furrowed Middlebrow imprint (in conjunction with Dean Street Press). I’m especially excited by the Elizabeth Fair titles which sound perfect for fans of D E Stevenson, Angela Thirkell or E M Delafield. Also The Lark by E Nesbit which was enthusiastically reviewed by Simon here. They’re being published in March so I can feel a fit of preordering coming on when the books are listed at the Book Depository.

Finally, I’ve also started another long book. A group of readers (see the post here at I’ve Been Reading Lately) are going to read Clarissa by Samuel Richardson on the dates that the letters in the book were written (it’s an epistolary novel). It’s not too late to join in. The book begins on January 10th & there’s a flurry of letters until January 20th then nothing until February 20th.