rowyn

First of all, important book news via Tumblr: Susanna Clarke's 'The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City' is being published properly in October!

The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott (1819). This book is set in Scotland around the turn of the eighteenth century—Scott actually changed his mind between editions about whether it's before or after the Act of Union, and the Oxford World's Classics edition I read contains a lot of interesting notes about the revisions he made to reflect the change, among other things—and while it only tangentially involves actual Jacobitism, the view it takes of the pattern of history more generally is familiar from the author of Waverley. The proud, ancient family of Ravenswood have come down in the world, ruined at last by an astute, politically ambitious and upwardly-mobile lawyer who buys their grand old house when they're forced to sell it; Edgar Ravenswood, the last heir of the family, then goes and falls in love with the lawyer's daughter, and the romance is about as doomed as you might expect. I found it a frustrating book because it never really fully commits to the drama of its premise: there are some impressive and significant moments, but the narrative keeps pulling back from them to wander off into episodes of farcical comedy, and throughout Scott's ambivalence about how Wrong but Wromantic the Wravenwoods are seems to keep him from making the most of the Ancient Significant Doom that naturally attaches to them. It does at least avoid the boring protagonist problem that Scott otherwise often has. Also there are actual witches, possibly?—among other instances of bad ideas about women.

Wood Leighton by Mary Howitt (1836). But if it hadn't been for the date on the copyright page and a brief reference to the coming of the railways, I would never have guessed 1836; in style, structure and sensibilities this book feels completely eighteenth-century, never mind that most of the plot (in the bit of the book that has one) takes place then. It's a very odd book structurally: the premise is that the unnamed narrator and her family move to the small Derbyshire town of Wood Leighton when they inherit a house there from a distant relation, and she then describes the town, its inhabitats, the new friends she makes there, the surrounding country scenery &c. &c.; the thing is, this includes relating a couple of local stories told to her by those new friends, and one of those stories takes up about three-quarters of the book, so the overall effect is a dramatic eighteenth-century Gothic novel that just happens to be bookended by a few chapters describing a nearby town fifty-odd years later. (The plot of the novel isn't directly relevant to the descriptive parts, or even set actually in the same place.) Anyway, I did enjoy both parts: the Gothic novel is lots of dramatic fun (although frustratingly vague: why do we never find out anything about the origin of that curse??) and the descriptions are lovely, especially in the specificity of their natural history towards the end. The author is most famous for the poem that begins 'Won't you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly...', which must be one of the most referenced things in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, and it was interesting to learn a bit more about its origin! I must also admire Howitt for arguing, against the usual literary convention, that actually the Midlands are the most quintessentially English of all.