"No, I am not your wife. I owe you nothing. You have not the shadow of a right over me. You left me to my misery, to my shame."
"Girls are not hysterical for nothing."
--from Dead Love Has Chains (117, 4)
There's a spoiler coming, but the main secret is revealed on the book jacket, so c'est la vie.
I very much think of Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a Victorian novelist, and it surprised me to see that this short novel, published in 1907, wasn't even her last book. Things really changed fast during her lifetime, and it's easy to forget that there were contemporaries of Dickens who lived to see WWI.
Devastated by her beloved son Conrad's confinement to an (impressively humane) mental hospital, Lady Mary Harling is traveling for her health -- and escaping "the impalpable invisible black devil of ennui" (1) -- when she meets a young woman on the ocean voyage. The miserable Irene borrows books (Jane Eyre and The Scarlet Letter!), and eventually confides that she's being sent home from India to relatives, to have an out-of-wedlock baby in seclusion.
Lady Harling promises to keep her new friend's secret, despite a sense of shock that caused me to write "Ha!" in the margin: "The fall of a well-born, well-bred girl was inconceivable ... a girl, educated in a respectable English school ... for such an one to fling herself into the arms of her first lover, consumed by the fire of lawless love! It was unthinkable" (18). I'm assuming that the use of the word "inconceivable" wasn't a conscious pun.
Lady Harling's promise causes trouble later on, when Irene reappears as the new love of the miraculously recovered Conrad, and his mother fears that heartbreak will lead to an even more devastating breakdown. Irene has problems besides her future mother-in-law: her long-ago seducer, now an unencumbered widower, "whose coarse mind could conceive no shame in the remembrance of sin" (104), aggressively seeks to make amends by marrying her himself.
Stuffed with acute observations about human nature, embodied in complex characters, this is a page-turny domestic thriller that really has no villain, except for the man who lives down to what's expected of him. As the story develops, the point of view shifts, and with it so does our understanding of sin and blame, so as we move more into Irene's perspective, we can see how unfair are the social judgments that come so naturally to other characters.
My only quibble with this novel is its length. I could have easily settled in for a full Victorian-length extravaganza, but only got 134 pages.
The Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association is online, and seems to be active. You can even follow their doings on Twitter, a place which would have REALLY horrified the genteel Lady Harling.
Braddon, M E, and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. Dead Love Has Chains. Richmand, VA: Valancourt Books, 2014.
"Girls are not hysterical for nothing."
--from Dead Love Has Chains (117, 4)
There's a spoiler coming, but the main secret is revealed on the book jacket, so c'est la vie.
I very much think of Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a Victorian novelist, and it surprised me to see that this short novel, published in 1907, wasn't even her last book. Things really changed fast during her lifetime, and it's easy to forget that there were contemporaries of Dickens who lived to see WWI.
Devastated by her beloved son Conrad's confinement to an (impressively humane) mental hospital, Lady Mary Harling is traveling for her health -- and escaping "the impalpable invisible black devil of ennui" (1) -- when she meets a young woman on the ocean voyage. The miserable Irene borrows books (Jane Eyre and The Scarlet Letter!), and eventually confides that she's being sent home from India to relatives, to have an out-of-wedlock baby in seclusion.
Lady Harling promises to keep her new friend's secret, despite a sense of shock that caused me to write "Ha!" in the margin: "The fall of a well-born, well-bred girl was inconceivable ... a girl, educated in a respectable English school ... for such an one to fling herself into the arms of her first lover, consumed by the fire of lawless love! It was unthinkable" (18). I'm assuming that the use of the word "inconceivable" wasn't a conscious pun.
Lady Harling's promise causes trouble later on, when Irene reappears as the new love of the miraculously recovered Conrad, and his mother fears that heartbreak will lead to an even more devastating breakdown. Irene has problems besides her future mother-in-law: her long-ago seducer, now an unencumbered widower, "whose coarse mind could conceive no shame in the remembrance of sin" (104), aggressively seeks to make amends by marrying her himself.
Stuffed with acute observations about human nature, embodied in complex characters, this is a page-turny domestic thriller that really has no villain, except for the man who lives down to what's expected of him. As the story develops, the point of view shifts, and with it so does our understanding of sin and blame, so as we move more into Irene's perspective, we can see how unfair are the social judgments that come so naturally to other characters.
My only quibble with this novel is its length. I could have easily settled in for a full Victorian-length extravaganza, but only got 134 pages.
The Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association is online, and seems to be active. You can even follow their doings on Twitter, a place which would have REALLY horrified the genteel Lady Harling.
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