"I think sometimes that no girl would be married at all if there were anything else possible."
"What she was feeling might be right or wrong, decorous or indecorous; that was not the point."
- Jessamine Halliday has a few revelations in A Superfluous Woman (47, 85)
Spoilers ahead!
A doctor with unconventionally psychological ideas is called upon to treat the ailing beauty of the London season, whom he finds literally dying of boredom. Following his advice, which is basically to get over herself and be useful, she runs away to a remote Scottish farm, where she learns to do everyday household chores and revel in the beauty of nature. The latter includes Colin, her handsome neighbor, and a relationship develops that's equal parts "opposites attract" and the inevitable hook-up of the two most attractive people in the area.
As they grow closer, "Jessie" realizes that she isn't cut out for a lifetime of toil as a farmer's wife, especially after she visits the squalid hovel her beloved shares with his elderly parents, and she sees that "all the best gifts he had to offer seemed to her as fetters and a dungeon" (169). She's perfectly willing to sleep with him, even to have his baby, but unfortunately, his intentions are purely honorable, which brings their romance to a crisis point.
After the opening with the sardonic Dr. Cornerstone, this 1894 novel by the socialist reformer Emma Frances Brooke is split into two sections, with very different tones. The first is a pastoral love story, very much in the heroine's point of view. The second, a more objective denunciation of a society that will take a syphilitic creep and turn him into its most eligible bachelor, just because of his title and his money, reads like the "realistic" fictions of social reform.
Brooke's strong suit is mostly her philosophical bent, with a lot of quotable doozies: for example, "By my 'manners' I mean the woman's way of being soft and sweet and smiling when she is really eaten up with fury and hate" (46). Or, when pondering her conundrum, Jessamine muses on "the inadequacy of all she had been taught ... goodness to her was synonymous with prim negation, and she glowed with life. It made her bitter to think with what a defenceless heart and ill-furnished mind she had set out on her quest for reality" (117).
This might be a bit didactic for some tastes, since while the story illustrates Brooke's ideas in a readable way, the characters don't come alive so much on their own terms; certainly, neither of the lovers are particularly vivid. Among other things, however, I did appreciate its early depiction of existential despair, which seems very contemporary: "There was a hollow place where my heart ought to be, a burning confusion where my thoughts should have been. There was nothing to which I cared to put my life. ... On looking back, I cannot see what path was meant for me ... I have been perishing ever since I began to exist. There has never been a way for me at all" (196, 220, 221). In line with that, I appreciate that the novel doesn't blame people for doing the best they could, even if it falls short.
You can read this at the Internet Archive, but I picked up a copy from the newest edition to my "favorite publishers" list: Victorian Secrets, based out of Brighton in the U.K. Adding their recent increase in output to what's coming out from Broadview, and Valancourt, my to-read list has just exploded!
"What she was feeling might be right or wrong, decorous or indecorous; that was not the point."
- Jessamine Halliday has a few revelations in A Superfluous Woman (47, 85)
Spoilers ahead!
A doctor with unconventionally psychological ideas is called upon to treat the ailing beauty of the London season, whom he finds literally dying of boredom. Following his advice, which is basically to get over herself and be useful, she runs away to a remote Scottish farm, where she learns to do everyday household chores and revel in the beauty of nature. The latter includes Colin, her handsome neighbor, and a relationship develops that's equal parts "opposites attract" and the inevitable hook-up of the two most attractive people in the area.
As they grow closer, "Jessie" realizes that she isn't cut out for a lifetime of toil as a farmer's wife, especially after she visits the squalid hovel her beloved shares with his elderly parents, and she sees that "all the best gifts he had to offer seemed to her as fetters and a dungeon" (169). She's perfectly willing to sleep with him, even to have his baby, but unfortunately, his intentions are purely honorable, which brings their romance to a crisis point.
After the opening with the sardonic Dr. Cornerstone, this 1894 novel by the socialist reformer Emma Frances Brooke is split into two sections, with very different tones. The first is a pastoral love story, very much in the heroine's point of view. The second, a more objective denunciation of a society that will take a syphilitic creep and turn him into its most eligible bachelor, just because of his title and his money, reads like the "realistic" fictions of social reform.
Brooke's strong suit is mostly her philosophical bent, with a lot of quotable doozies: for example, "By my 'manners' I mean the woman's way of being soft and sweet and smiling when she is really eaten up with fury and hate" (46). Or, when pondering her conundrum, Jessamine muses on "the inadequacy of all she had been taught ... goodness to her was synonymous with prim negation, and she glowed with life. It made her bitter to think with what a defenceless heart and ill-furnished mind she had set out on her quest for reality" (117).
This might be a bit didactic for some tastes, since while the story illustrates Brooke's ideas in a readable way, the characters don't come alive so much on their own terms; certainly, neither of the lovers are particularly vivid. Among other things, however, I did appreciate its early depiction of existential despair, which seems very contemporary: "There was a hollow place where my heart ought to be, a burning confusion where my thoughts should have been. There was nothing to which I cared to put my life. ... On looking back, I cannot see what path was meant for me ... I have been perishing ever since I began to exist. There has never been a way for me at all" (196, 220, 221). In line with that, I appreciate that the novel doesn't blame people for doing the best they could, even if it falls short.
You can read this at the Internet Archive, but I picked up a copy from the newest edition to my "favorite publishers" list: Victorian Secrets, based out of Brighton in the U.K. Adding their recent increase in output to what's coming out from Broadview, and Valancourt, my to-read list has just exploded!
Brooke, Emma, and Barbara Tilley. A Superfluous Woman. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2015.
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