Women Who Marry Older Men 100% Likely to Be Unhappy, Study Finds

Older husbands are much more likely to become jealous of younger, more artistic, politically aware and physically attractive men who are their wives’ friends, the study finds.

A new study released today finds that women who marry men considerably older than themselves are radically more likely to be unhappy. This raises troubling concerns for many women, whose age on average at the time of first marriage currently hovers around 27 years in the United States and who in recent years have been advised by a number of self-help experts to “settle” for any available man.

“We have found that a young woman who marries an older man is as much as 100 percent likely to be unhappy,” said head researcher Lewis Henry George of the Institute for Marriage Research and Statistics (I-MRS) in London.

The study, entitled The Key to All Relationships, is based on a random sampling of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent, depending on how much older Sir James Chettam is than Celia Brooke. However, George said, the cases of Dorothea Brooke, Rosamond Vincy, and Isabel Archer leave little room for doubt.

Even a slight difference in age can pose risks. In some extreme cases, one or both spouses turn violent.

“Forget about your biological clock — the possibility of childbearing is virtually nil,” George said in a press conference this afternoon. “Moreover, again and again, we see that an older husband is more demanding, less forgiving, often manipulative. He will use money to impose his will on his younger wife, and what prior to marriage seemed like an admirable interest in art and culture will generally turn out to be an unhealthy obsession.

“Simply put, a young woman who marries an older man is doomed,” George added. “It is for this reason that I must regretfully announce the termination of my offer of marriage to my assistant, Miss Bosanquet.”

I-MRS, one of Britain’s oldest polling organizations, first came to international attention in 1813, when it concluded that a single man in possession of a good fortune is 100% likely to be in want of a wife. The margin of error in that study was zero percentage points; in nearly 200 years, that study’s findings have never been seriously challenged.

Isabel Archer, among the cases studied, was extremely unhappy (albeit terrifically photogenic) in her marriage.

The photographs show Patrick Malahide as Casaubon, Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea, Rufus Sewell as Ladislaw, Trevyn McDowell as Rosamond, and Douglas Hodge as Lydgate in the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch (1994); and Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer in Jane Campion’s film adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady (1996).

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In Praise of the Avid Dilettante

Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, in one of the greatest performances
I have ever seen on television.

In reflecting further on Susanne Mentzer’s Huffington Post column and my essay from yesterday, I returned to an observation I’ve been mulling over for some time: namely, there is a diametrical opposite to the sort of people who never go to galleries or concerts. And I have come up with a gang of unlikely role models.

Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp are the central characters in a series of comic novels by E.F. Benson. Ordinarily I wouldn’t suggest them as role models to anybody, because they’re truly awful people — deliciously so, I hasten to add — backstabbing busybodies who plot against one another in order to achieve and maintain social dominance in the tiny seaside village where they live.*

Prunella Scales (at left, fondly remembered as Sibyl Fawlty)
played Elizabeth Mapp in the TV adaptation.
She’s seen here with Geraldine McEwan as Lucia.

Naturally, then, these characters don’t seek out art for the right reasons. If they sketch or paint watercolors, it is primarily to win prizes and to defeat rivals. If they play piano, it is primarily to monopolize the attention of dinner guests. If they attend an opera, it is primarily to enjoy the company of a famous singer, after the show, and if they speak Italian, it is entirely to show off.

Art for Mapp and Lucia is a weapon to be used in their constant social warfare. They’re both intelligent, upper-class women with no more productive use of their time, and who knows whether, if they had jobs of some sort, they’d be quite so avid in their pursuit of culture. They’re cheats, too. For example, when Lucia reads Ancient Greek, she resorts to dual-language editions, and her Italian is mostly sham (leading to one of the novels’ most famous episodes).

Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie Pillson, Lucia’s closest
(and most effeminate) friend.

And yet these characters do have cultivation. Whether they practice the arts well or poorly is — for the purposes of this discussion — almost irrelevant. They do sketch. They do play piano. They put on theatricals and recite poetry. They do speak at least a bit of a few foreign languages. And they do expose themselves to other people’s art, as well, even if they don’t quite understand (or even like) modern music and painting.

Which is to say that Mapp, Lucia, and their friends are doing exactly what the rest of us ought to be doing. Yes, they’re doing these things for the wrong reasons, but how many of the rest of us, lo these decades later, could do as much? Maybe they’re not great artists, but they keep the engines humming for themselves and for everyone else.

Benson’s characters become quite admirable, when viewed in this context. You wouldn’t have to force Mapp or Lucia to go to a museum or attend a concert; you wouldn’t have to explain why art is important or cajole them into supporting arts programs. I’d probably hate to know them, and yet I’m sorry I’m not more like them.



*NOTE: The fictional village of Tilling, where Mapp and Lucia live, is based on the town of Rye. Henry James spent his last years there — and Benson was the subsequent occupant of James’ house. In the Mapp and Lucia novels, Benson describes the house in detail, particularly a window ideally situated for spying on the main street; at various points in the story first Mapp and then Lucia live there. The house was destroyed in World War II, so this is as close as we’ll get to it — and thanks to Benson, we have a pretty terrific image now of Henry James sitting in that very window and snooping on his neighbors as he almost certainly must have done.

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Reading Eliot’s ‘Adam Bede’ on a Kindle

Compare and Contrast

“Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now — eager for amusement: prone to excursion trains, art-museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels….”

George Eliot wrote Adam Bede (from which the quotation above is taken) in 1859, but set the novel in the era of her readers’ fathers and grandfathers, at the turn of the century. Read nowadays, when machines far more complex than the steam engine have created ever-more frenetic forms of leisure for us all, this little passage from Adam Bede is quaint and amusing. I suspect that Eliot meant for it to be so — though surely she didn’t anticipate the Kindle.

Gorgeous George, the Mary Anne Kind

My well-meaning friends Kara and Konrad bought me a Kindle for my birthday, in another of their periodic attempts to shove me deeper into the 21st century. Naturally, I loaded with the complete works of long-dead writers: Shakespeare, Twain, Wharton, Henry James, and George Eliot. This reflects not only my tastes but also the bargain prices for works in the public domain: current releases by the living cost about $10.

Eliot was a timely choice, too, because, having read her Middlemarch years ago and loved it, I’d never read anything else by her. When I stumbled across an incredibly cheap paperback copy of Adam Bede for only a dollar, I snatched it up — then left it on a train, just as I was warming to the story. Although I replaced the paperback with a bargain hardback, the Kindle offered an opportunity to resume my reading most efficiently, while also experimenting with the new technology.

And as a reading experience, it’s not bad. I’m still getting accustomed to navigating, and I do miss certain features, such as italics, and the copious annotations of the Penguin paperback and the less-extensive notes of the Könemann hardback. Typographical errors are rife in both the Könemann and the Kindle texts, but such is the nature of modern life, I think, when I can hardly turn to the electronic edition of The New York Times without finding errors of grammar, usage, and spelling on the front page. (Errors of fact, sometimes, too.)

Oy, such a headache: Hapless Hetty Sorrel,
as seen by English artist John Collier (1850–1934)

But there’s an undeniable ease to clicking a little button to turn the page, to moving the cursor over a word in order to look it up (a dictionary comes with the Kindle, though some of Eliot’s archaisms are too arcane to be included), and above all to storing the entire library of Eliot’s work in a single, lightweight and eminently portable device — which also stores all of the other collected works of dead white people I’d downloaded, for a few bucks. The logistics of transportation and storage that have beset me since I moved to France, wouldn’t even have come up, if I’d had a Kindle years ago.

As for the novel itself, I found it another unlikely page-turner, as Middlemarch is, though not quite so compelling or meaningful. Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede attempts to capitalize on the success of her short stories, Scenes of Clerical Life, in its small-town ambiance and its interest in the tensions between a notably laid-back, old-fashioned country Anglicanism and newfangled Methodism. Some of the dialects and a cutesy-pie baby character, Totty, nearly provoked me to hurl the (paperback still, at this point) book against a wall, for much the same reason that I could never get past the opening pages of The Mill on the Floss.

But it soon becomes clear that Adam Bede contains the germ of what I liked best about Middlemarch: it’s a story in which several well-meaning characters are brought together in one location, and tested there. The moral complexity of Eliot’s universe is as broad as her writing is compassionate: even when a character is truly awful, as Middlemarch’s Edward Casaubon and Rosamund Lydgate are, we understand why they do what they do, and Eliot tries to make it difficult for her readers to deny that we would do any better, in like circumstances.*

Eliot’s gifts aren’t quite in full flower here, and she sets up the principal counterparts — the sober and responsible (Adam, Dinah) versus the flighty and irresponsible (Arthur, Hetty) — too neatly. Minor characters tend to be rustic “types,” resolutely two-dimensional, of a kind that Dickens did much better; several (the woman-hating schoolteacher, Bartle Massey; Lisbeth Bede; Mrs. Poyser) are hard to take.

When one of these supporting players, the rector Mr. Irwine, ceases to be flat, Eliot feels compelled to offer a chapter-long apology for him. He remains rounded for the rest of the book and winds up a satisfying character, though you’re never sure why Eliot didn’t show more confidence in him.

Dinah Morris, inspired by Eliot’s own aunt, comes off quite well by the end of the novel — though to begin with she seems in her exasperating selflessness the perfect forerunner of Mitchell’s Melanie Hamilton, too good to be true. Dinah’s so devout that you start to wonder whether she’s quite sane, with that self-martyring impulse that must have driven Joan of Arc, refusing to follow any path which the Lord hasn’t shown to her in a vision. Least of all any path toward happiness or prosperity.

Patsy Kensit as Hetty, and Iain Glen as Adam,
in a BBC adaptation from 1991.
She looks too trampy; he, too dorky.
Evidently Rufus Sewell was unavailable.

This in turn leads a reader to wonder what’s wrong with Adam Bede, and whether there’s a pattern to his interest in women who don’t care for him or who are unattainable — one may even wonder (briefly) whether there’s more to his relationship with Bartle Massey.** In short, Eliot takes Adam and Dinah, two stalwart, thoroughly irreproachable characters, and makes them intriguing: and to make goodness interesting is perhaps the most difficult feat in any form of art.

The art to which Eliot aspires, she suggests, is that of Northern European genre painting, realistic scenes of country-village life, in which we are supposed to get closer to the essence of human nature. But how “realistic” is the pregnancy of one major character, concealed not only from everybody in the book but from the reader, as well, until it suits Eliot to reveal it? (Namely, after the baby is born.) She indulges in a broad streak of melodrama, too, and her pairings are pretty contrived: those perfectly matched sets of heirs apparent (working-class Adam, upper-class Arthur), orphaned nieces (Hetty and Dinah), benevolent tutors (Irwine and Massey), etc.

Adam Bede is the work of a master, but not a masterwork, an engaging but not an urgent read. I’m looking forward to continuing my too-long-delayed return to Eliot — with perhaps a return to Middlemarch, too. That’s a book I can’t praise enough. And happily, it’s on my Kindle already.

Rufus Sewell did show up for the BBC’s excellent adaptation of Middlemarch, in 1994. He plays Will Ladislaw, seen here with Dorothea (Juliet Aubrey) and Mr. Brooke (a peerless Robert Hardy).

*NOTE: Reading Middlemarch while working at CBS, I immediately began to perceive the newsroom as a mini-Middlemarch, where each of us was similarly tested. This led at times to a not-always flattering (to either of us) tendency to view myself as Will Ladislaw and Dan as Mr. Brooke, but otherwise no harm was done, and I found my patience growing toward certain of my colleagues.

**Most of Eliot’s earliest readers would have believed the author to be a man, and presumably she includes Bartle Massey’s tirades as part of her energetic tweaking of chauvinist attitudes. But I’d be willing to bet that there are plentiful modern-day exegeses out there, detecting homoerotic tensions between Adam and Mr. Massey, and between Arthur Donnithorne and Mr. Irwine, to say nothing of copious essays on the latent homosexual tendencies of Adam’s brother, Seth. But I don’t mean to dwell on country matters.

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Anglo-Saxon Attitudes BONUS: A Forgotten Fragment

My exhaustive research on Scott’s Ivanhoe has uncovered the following fragment. Although the author ultimately chose to excise this passage from his text, it gives a clear idea of his singular sense of dramatic pacing and characterful suspense.

Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the morally conflicted Templar, has taken Rebecca hostage, with the intention to rape her. At first, however, he is so struck by her intelligence and beauty that he offers to take her as a mistress, making a comparatively honest woman of her (as a Templar, he’s a Catholic priest), if only she’ll convert. In a series of interviews, Rebecca pleads eloquently for her honor and shows Bois-Guilbert the hypocrisy of his behavior.

He never gets around to raping her, and the following passage may help a reader to understand why.


[Brian de Bois-Guilbert is speaking.]

“Enough, wretched she-dog, I’ll discourse with thee no more, for the generosity of my patience is bounded as this isle of Britain is girt by the sea, and with thy peevish repulsion of my advances, thou art come at last to the Sleeve that wraps itself ’twixt England and France, and the noyade of thy liberty is due. Nay, though the sands drop in the hourglass of my gentle humour, it were not the limitless sands of Palestine but a lesser number, and thou hast marked the fall of the last grain, Jewess.

“Understand me well: I am decided to take thee in concubinage, and were thy words like unto arrows, they would not turn me back, nor would they pierce the armour of my resolve. I shall have that which I must have, if not by sweet argument of reason, then by force of these my arms, that have seen combat with infidels mightier than thou. No more words, Rebecca, but deeds shall henceforth distinguish our intercourse, and the hour of thy submission is at hand. I shall be swift but not hasty; yea, as the falcon doth seize the sparrow in the welkin, so shall I seize thee, roughly and never to let thee go ’til I have torn at thy flesh with my talons and supped ’til I am satiate.

“Think not to cry out, for this citadel is remote from any who might aid thee, and for that thou art a Jewess and I a Templar, there is no Christian would defend thee against the claim of my desire. Mine own ears shall be as stones, insensible to all thine entreaty, and the blows of thy fair hands in protest shall but goad me as spurs to the palfrey on my terrible course. I’ll tilt with thee no more, I say, but trade my tongue for another force, and though my charger is mounted and my lance at the ready, I command the lists to challenge thee in combat main à main and at close quarters, ’til thou dost fall to me.

“Hear me, Jewess? I see thy sweet face doth blench; the black gems of thine eyes shine not, but hide themselves ’neath heavy veils berimmed with sable; a gentle snore escapes thy ruby lips. No matter: I’ll come back tomorrow.”

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Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, or Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe’

Rebecca (Elizabeth Taylor) and Rowena (Joan Fontaine)

A reference in the notes to Trollope’s Barchester Towers prompted the realization that I had never read Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, nor indeed any of Scott’s books since a youthful attempt to decode Donizetti’s Lucia by reading Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. That attempt ended in frustration: the novel struck me as deeply dull, and Lucy’s mad scene is dismissed in a couple of lines, perhaps the only instance of verbal economy to be found anywhere in the book. Now the editors of Trollope gave me to understand that Ivanhoe (first published in 1819) inspired a national craze for all things Anglo-Saxon, including in the present case the perspectives of the Thorpes and the fête hosted by Miss Thorpe. While many critics credit Ivanhoe with the rise of historical fiction, Gothic architecture, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and notions of chivalry persistent in 19th-century Britain, the book seems at the very least to be responsible for the otherwise largely inscrutable “Anglo-Saxon attitudes” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (published in 1871).

Scott’s novel inspired all kinds of 19th-century notions.
Here, Ivanhoe pays tribute to Rowena.

In short, Ivanhoe is a seminal work by a seminal author, but my knowledge of it was almost entirely derived from the MGM Technicolor extravaganza starring Robert and Elizabeth Taylor; and from Edward Eager’s delightful children’s story, Knight’s Castle, which is itself inspired more by the movie than by the book. I determined to return to the source, and what I found is one of the most curious pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.

Taylor-made: Robert and Liz, in the MGM movie.

Start with the title character, whose role in the plot is minimal and whose appearances are sporadic: Scott might just as easily, and more justifiably, have called the book Richard the Lion-Hearted or Brian the Templar — or, most aptly of all, Rebecca the Jewess. Even Wamba, the Saxon jester, has more to do than does Ivanhoe himself.

The plot that thrilled generations of readers is in constant struggle with Scott’s prose, which is verbose in the extreme. A character may typically take a long paragraph just to tell another to make haste, and my second-hand paperback edition provided very few notes (mostly Scott’s own, along with a thin glossary) to explain obscure terminology. (No attempt was made to explain the constant misuse of participles for past tense: “He sprung forth,” e.g.) Scott lards the story with “poetic” descriptions and song lyrics, and toward the end of the book, when poor Rebecca awaits her doom, Scott meanders off for several scarcely relevant chapters, sabotaging his own suspense. The resolution of the plot, hitherto relatively plausible, depends on one improbable death and an even more outlandish resurrection.

All-singing! All-jousting!
(Well, almost.)

In short, modern readers will find the odds stacked against them. And yet the damned thing does work. Almost against my will, I found myself caught up in the story, and this is largely due to Scott’s characterization, which in a couple of cases — notably the Jews, Isaac of York and his daughter — proves quite compelling. We feel so strongly the injustices they suffer that we care about what happens to them.*

Having lived so long among Christians, for whom the height of courtesy is to address him as “dog” and not to kill him on the spot, Isaac has got something very nearly like a split personality. He’s timorous and groveling among Christians, but wily and proud among his own people. Rebecca has inherited only her father’s intelligence, not his fear; to this she adds a keen awareness of the world in which she lives. Illustrating this, her debates with the villain Bois-Guilbert are wise and well-spoken.**

Rebecca is also active, in a way that her foil, Rowena, is not: both are held captive, both are victims and the objects of unwanted passions, but at least Rebecca does something: she heals the wounded Ivanhoe, using means Rowena doesn’t possess. Presaging and reinforcing the ideal of womanhood that would be held up by subsequent generations, Rowena prays and suffers nobly, but mostly she just sits around and looks pretty.

The real heroine: Taylor as Rebecca
Scott suggests that Rowena is even prettier, but MGM won’t let us think so.

Indeed, the novel’s ostensible hero and heroine, Ivanhoe and Rowena, are also the least interesting characters, without even the broad brushstrokes Scott uses to paint Friar Tuck, for example, or the oafish Athelstane: those characters are unsubtle, but at least they’re entertaining. Not so our Saxon paragons, and it’s a testament to the Victorian reader’s stubbornness that these two, with only dull virtues to recommend them, were so exalted in the popular imagination. (That said, Scott himself notes that, when the novel originally appeared, readers already complained that Rebecca should have ridden off with Ivanhoe at the end.)

One leaves Ivanhoe amused by the quaint literary tastes of those who came before us, and we may wonder why 19th-century readers were inspired to emulate any part of this singularly violent society, in which robbery and hostage-taking are not only commonplace but the foundation of much of the economy. Scott depicts a failed government, a corrupt and oppressive church, and general lawlessness and injustice. Why did this look like fun to anyone? (Least of all women readers.)

Felix Aylmer as Isaac, with Taylor as Rebecca

In most respects, I don’t think Scott intended Ivanhoe as a blueprint, but it is clear he sought to combat anti-Semitism; his sympathy for his Jewish characters is impressively far ahead of his time, and he surely understood that Isaac and Rebecca are oppressed by the same kinds of prejudices that afflicted many (most?) Jews in his own day. If Ivanhoe was indeed as influential as some critics claim, then it’s striking that so many readers ignored the theme that was so important to Scott — since far worse oppression of the Jews was still to come, a century after his death.

And yet Scott’s tale did resonate in later years, and I wind up where I started: remembering MGM’s lavish post-war spectacle. Only a few years after the Shoah, Ivanhoe was dusted off, illustrating once again the nobility of the Jews, and demonstrating that the superior Christian isn’t he who oppresses a non-believer but he who defends her — as Ivanhoe defends Rebecca. This message might have done more good in the early 1930s, when Nazi policies began to take effect, and it might have been more useful still if Isaac had led an armed uprising. But as an after-the-fact affirmation — as if to say, to those who needed to hear it, “We did the right thing in fighting the Nazis” — Ivanhoe isn’t bad. Scott might well have been pleased.


*NOTE: To the extent that Scott intended the conquering Normans’ oppression of native Saxons to reflect Scotland’s politics in his own day, his point is largely lost to a modern American reader.

**It’s anyone’s guess why Bois-Guilbert indulges Rebecca’s taste for debate when he could be raping her. This long-lost fragment may help to explain matters, however.

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Victorian Nightmares, or Women out of Control!!

Reflecting further on Trollope’s Barchester Towers, I recognize that there’s a good deal more to be said about two of the novel’s principal intriguers. After all, they share a number of traits: for starters, they both are intelligent, under-challenged by the roles society accords to them. Both refuse to be controlled by others; what’s more, both use sex to gain power over men, many of whom find them disruptive or contemptible as a consequence. Trollope treats both characters with scorn, though they are more entertaining than any of the characters the author professes to admire. And most importantly — both the bishop’s wife, Mrs. Proudie, and the cleric Dr. Stanhope’s daughter, who styles herself the Signora Vesey Neroni, are women.

The modern reader — even while enjoying the characterizations of Mrs. Proudie and the Signora — is liable to take an entirely different attitude, especially when one bothers to put oneself in either lady’s shoes. The men in Barchester Towers, and particularly those to be found in the Proudie and Stanhope homes, are hardly paragons of competence, and the women are easily as clever as the best of them. Yet neither has any possibility of exercising her intelligence and talents, or of advancing beyond a constrictive paradigm of the societal norms.

Stop using sex as a weapon! The sublime Geraldine McEwan
as Mrs. Proudie, with Clive Swift as her husband.

The activities pursued by other female characters in the book — rearing children (and talking baby-talk), teaching Sunday school, blandly echoing their husband’s opinions, throwing “Anglo-Saxon” fêtes — are clearly inadequate to the ambitions of anyone as capable as Mrs. Proudie or the Signora.

Although a priest’s wife is described generically in the novel as a “priestess,” there’s no chance of her wielding much authority, and the male characters (and Trollope himself) register disgust when Mrs. Proudie makes the attempt. For her part, the Signora, already an outcast from much of society due to a dubious early marriage, is crippled, too. Unable to walk, her chances of finding any useful outlet for her talents is practically nil, something of which Trollope reminds us repeatedly.

Susan Hampshire, who played the Signora on TV, also played
Trollope’s more conventional Glencora Palliser.

What’s left but intrigue? Both characters dominate the men who find them attractive, and in various political and romantic schemes, both avidly build up and bring down several men. As seduced as a modern reader may be by Trollope’s prose, we can’t bring ourselves to consider these women horrifying. The prospect of a woman in power may still be threatening to some men today — but we’ve come a long way, baby.

Writing three decades after Trollope published Barchester Towers, adventure-writer H. Rider Haggard dares to depict a woman who doesn’t play for power: she possesses it, ruling her remote African nation through fear and magic. Though she resembles Queen Victoria on a couple of points (particularly her extended mourning for her late consort), Ayesha is a freak, a pagan Egyptian who merrily blasphemes against the Christian god, who credibly claims to have lived for two thousand years, and whose beauty is so irresistible that the narrator, a repressed homosexual, falls in love with her.

What’s more, she lives in Africa, which is, as every Englishman would know, a totally barbaric place (stranger even than the Signora’s Italy), where nobody does anything right until an Englishman shows him how.

Super Freak: Ursula Andress as Ayesha.
Although Andress looks absolutely nothing like the character described
in the novel, you can understand that men might find her power
impossible to resist.

While Haggard uses Ayesha to express some pretty outré opinions on religion and the role of the male in society, it’s clear that he can’t let her prevail — any more than Trollope could let Mrs. Proudie prevail in Barchester. Ayesha, called “She who must be obeyed,” must also be destroyed.

The impression one gets upon reading these books in quick succession, as I did, is that the male hegemony of the Victorian era was far from monolithic or serene. The possibility of female power is a constant anxiety that must be ridiculed or demolished almost as soon as it’s acknowledged. That these male authors were nominally ruled over by a woman — with negligible cost to their hegemony — only makes their shared anxiety more curious, even quaint, to a modern reader.

How much nicer it is, not to live back then!

She who must not be amused.

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Smack in the Middle of Barsetshire

The odious Mrs. Proudie and the unctuous Mr. Slope,
as portrayed by Geraldine McEwan and Alan Rickman.
In looking for pictures to illustrate this essay, I’ve discovered that several of my favorite actors took part in a TV adaptation of the novel.
Now I’ll have to find it on DVD.

Anthony Trollope set Barchester Towers in the time in which he wrote, almost to the day, with important thematic developments almost literally ripped from the headlines — which must have made the task of research quite a bit easier for the old boy. Coming to the novel more than 150 years later, I was impressed with but not much interested by the minutiae of Anglican Church politics, and it’s for this reason that my next Trollope novel is unlikely to be a Barchester chronicle. However, my reading experience has been in every way happier than previous (and very limited) samplings of Trollope’s work, and it’s a safe bet that I’ll venture in once again.

Shameless! (Sometimes)

Long hours spent in the subway necessitated some sort of reading material, and sent me to the used-book store; I’m not sure what steered me toward Barchester Towers, excepting its low, low price and a paperback edition of a comfortable size (not easy to find in Trollope Land). Let us say that the novel fit the dimensions of my pocket, in two different ways.

But I hadn’t read The Warden, the first in a series that, given the opportunity, runs to six novels altogether. Barchester Towers is a sequel, the second book in the series, and Trollope devotes so much of the early chapters to reference to The Warden that for a long time I didn’t think I’d last — any more than I did with the Palliser novels, when I was 16.* A few years later, I managed better with The Way We Live Now, finishing it and admiring it. But really, the odds were against me this time: picking up in medias res the multi-volume work of an author whose prose has always quite reliably put me to sleep.

Septimus Harding, the sometime Warden,
as portrayed by Donald Pleasance

The pleasure of Barchester Towers for this reader is the keenness of the satire. As his country clerics vie for power, they are every bit as cunning and as ruthless as the great British generals who were busily conquering a global empire even as Trollope wrote. Here, as in E.F. Benson’s Lucia novels**, I have the sense that Britain’s glory is entirely predicated upon a shared national desire for conquest and domination, whether it’s the playing fields of Eton and Harrow, or the jungles of Africa and Asia, or the dinner tables of Riseholme and Tilling — or the churches of Barsetshire.

The two wiliest characters in Barchester Towers are also the most power-hungry — the most shocking to other characters and the most entertaining to the reader. Mrs. Proudie, wife of the new bishop, and her favorite (but soon-to-be adversary), Mr. Slope, the bishop’s chaplain, are exaggerated, improbable, but thoroughly delicious. Their nearest rival in cunning is an English cleric’s daughter with a shady past, who has dubbed herself the Signora Vesey Neroni. (As ever, the contrast between English and Italian mores yields high comedy.) Among them, a remarkable triangle is formed, in which sexual desire is at least as important a motivator as social power or church doctrine. French novelists of the same period would have spelled this out more explicitly, but there’s a genuine satisfaction to the reader who discovers for himself what moves these characters.

The Signora (Susan Hampshire) entertains her admirers.

Arrayed against these three are the forces of good, who prevail primarily because the novelist decides that they should, and he does so, one suspects, because he lived in Victorian England. The nicer characters are not surprisingly less interesting and at times less sympathetic than their machinating antagonists. If we feel charitably toward Eleanor Bold, the headstrong, widowed daughter of the eponymous Warden, it’s mostly because her priggish friends unfairly malign her; we’re quite happy when things turn out well for her.

This is Trollope’s intention, and he announces it early — and so audaciously that this reader’s singularly un-Victorian reaction was a loud WTF? Eleanor’s hand will not be won by either of two unsuitable suitors, the author tells us, smashing every bit of suspense except the lingering question of how she’ll escape their clutches. (Once it becomes clear that a third suitor exists, some suspense is restored.)

The Good Guys: Nigel Hawthorne as the disapproving Dr. Grantly,
with Pleasance as Harding

In many ways, Trollope shows himself to be a remarkably clumsy novelist — he’s terrible at character names, too — and yet he sprinkles enough wit and just enough action that one keeps reading quite happily. And he’s quite good at set-piece parties, such as Mrs. Proudie’s ill-fated reception, or Miss Thorne’s only slightly more successful fête, when many characters come together, clash, and send the plot spinning off in new directions.

Nowadays the market is limited for old-fashioned fiction such as Trollope’s, and yet there’s no denying how well it works. Moreover, it’s exceptionally good reading on a long subway ride.

The corner mailbox, Trollope’s most practical — and arguably most enduring — contribution to his time and to ours.

*NOTE: Forced by my travel plans to miss the conclusion of the television adaptation, I carried the first of the Palliser novels with me on my maiden voyage to Europe. The Continent provided far too many distractions, and I set the book aside, never to pick it up again. Can you forgive me?

**Speaking of adaptations, it’s vital to remember that the sublime Geraldine McEwan is the incarnation of Benson’s Lucia in a memorable TV adaptation, opposite Nigel Hawthorne as her Georgie. Surely no two actors are better-equipped to prevail in any tea-party arena. And Susan Hampshire is a shining paragon of Trollope, having portrayed Glencora Palliser.

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Pater’s Nostrums

A subject fit for criticism

I’ve spent several pleasant hours reading The Renaissance, a collection of essays by Walter Pater (1839–1894). This eminent Victorian inspired a couple of generations of art historians, as well as the “Art for Art’s Sake” movement and Oscar Wilde. My direct contact with Pater’s work is overdue, and yet as I read, I’ve felt very strongly that most of my professors, starting with Sears Jayne, must have read quite a lot of Pater. The sense of recognition emanates from every page.

I was taught to be Pater-esque, if you will: to be unashamed of a thirst for beauty, to seek to harness that thirst, and to share with others. Pater concentrates on the fine arts, but in doing so he considers literature and history, too: when he turns his attentions to Michelangelo, he writes not of his painting or sculpture but of his poetry. My professors taught me to cast my net wide, too, when studying a subject, in order to capture its details.

Pater

Yet the most startling recognition came as I read Pater’s excuse for writing about Sandro Botticelli — for in those days, apparently, one needed an excuse. (After all, why bother with an unknown artist — as Botticelli was at the time — when there was so much yet to be written about the holy trinity of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo?)

Suddenly I understood my own impulses, especially with regard to music. I had been chasing after several of my favorite singers, and writing about them (as you will have noticed in recent entries), though I have but scant qualification to do so, and though I’m writing for a general readership that, in many cases, probably knows even less than I do. And yet I was doing the right thing. Walter Pater told me so.

Susan Graham in recital

“There are a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo,” Pater writes, “whose work has become a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli…. But, besides those great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charms strongly, and [these artists] are often the object of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and authority.”

I hope my singer-friends won’t take it amiss that, for this present discussion, I relegate them to the status of a mere Botticelli. For it’s true that I have found in their work pleasures I can’t find elsewhere; indeed, I have felt their charms so strongly that I must seek them out, and sometimes, I must write about them.

Georgia Jarman & Lawrence Brownlee:
L’Elisir d’Amore at Caramoor

Music differs from painting in its transience: you can return to the Uffizi to see Botticelli’s Venus (which Pater describes quite beautifully), and the work will be more or less the same, even many years later. (You will be different, and so will the Uffizi, but those are different matters.) Music doesn’t work that way. It soars into the air and is gone. It will never sound the same twice. Probably this, too, is part of the reason I feel compelled to write: I’m seeking to capture by describing an individual, unrepeatable instant.

Toward that end, it’s futile to write, “She sang this note, then that one,” because that’s the sort of “technical or antiquarian” criticism that Pater assures us is reserved for lesser artists — and besides, since music is notated, one can always go back to look at the score, after a performance. (Or during, if you’re a jerk.)

Yet is it really illuminating to know that a singer transposed, or flatted, or missed a note, or nailed some other one? Not for most listeners, I think, and fewer readers. In any case, these things aren’t the true measure of a singer’s artistry, and they answer only with statistics the question of how she sang. And they do nothing to explain why we responded to her as we did.

Joyce Castle in Heggie’s End of the Affair

Pater will tell us something of a painter’s brushwork, but he doesn’t break down the paint by its chemical components; when he fixates on a small area of a painting, he does so in order to tell us how it fits with the whole, to describe the entire work so that we can share in its “peculiar quality of pleasure” — or, to use another of Pater’s favorite words, its “sweetness.”

This is surely what I was taught to do. What is unanswerable is whether I would have tried to do it, had I never been taught, or never picked up Walter Pater’s The Renaissance.

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Quantum & Quality

Being an Excerpt from an Unpublished Spy Novel
by an Anonymous Author

It was widely said of Jane Bond that the benefits of her otherwise admirable measure of beauty were useless to her, as she was nearly thirty, and her dowry much less than one hundred pounds, along with a large ball of string, which it had been her late father’s habit to collect, and to study, and which was much praised throughout the county. In her youth, long ago, Miss Bond had acquired such skills of sewing, painting, and dancing that might have won her a match, had her father not burdened her with considerable debts, a ready wit, and an instruction in French grammar, and ‘No man will take a bride who speaks her mind, particularly if he does not understand her when she speaks it,’ Mrs. Bond had warned them both, from the outset, to no avail. Among the other, gossiping ladies of Maidsworth, it was said further that Miss Bond had once enjoyed a round of whist with a man who was known to be in trade, the shame of which nearly exceeded its whispering report. Her reputation thus compromised, it seemed likely she must perforce remain unmarried; having failed to exact a promise from Mr. Woodcock, the new curate in Maidsworth, and having no other expectation but the management of her widowed mother and fourteen younger sisters, Miss Bond saw no recourse but to seek employment, suitable to a lady of good family and no property; either as governess to a country household, or as agent in His Majesty’s Secret Service.

‘Might we stroll a moment about the garden?’ Mr. Smallwood inquired; ‘for the closeness of the ballroom and the exertion of our last quadrille have made of cooler air a necessity for me, and perhaps for you, as well, I may venture.’

‘How I regret your words, sir, for I should have been content to take a glass of punch and to sit for a moment here, by the open window, though I am usually susceptible to any draught,’ Jane replied; ‘but I cannot accept even that engagement, nor any future one, in your company, Mr. Smallwood, now that you have spoken. It would be in any case improper for a gentleman to pose such a question, to an unmarried woman, with neither prospects nor chaperone. Yet more pressingly, I am no longer unaware of your true identity, and of the jeopardy in which your roguish impertinence must place me, not only to my reputation, but to my very life. For, in making this proposal, you have revealed yourself at last to be the greatest scoundrel of them all, Napoléon Bonaparte, on a reconnaissance mission in Britain, with a view to conquest of these shores. Confess yourself, sir!’

‘I fear I fail to apprehend how a single question of remarkable innocence can have led you to so astonishing a conclusion,’ Mr. Smallwood replied.

‘I have for no small time observed you, sir,’ Jane said, ‘and it has not escaped my attention that you are short of stature, as Mr. Bonaparte is known to be; and although you profess yourself to be a major in the Highland Guards, your uniform bears buttons of the Royal Navy; and whenever the ranks of corporal and general are mentioned in conversation, you answer. These are ranks, sir, that you have held in the French Army, under the name, I repeat, not of Smallwood but of Bonaparte.’

‘There are, I assure you, Miss Jane, explanations of a perfectly simple nature for each of the anomalies that you perceive, and these explanations I shall most happily supply,’ Mr. Smallwood said, ‘at your earliest convenience, of which you may inform me by letter.’

‘I shall be most interested to receive such explanations,’ Jane said; ‘and perhaps, too, you can explain how it is that you persist in addressing me as “Miss Jane,” when, as the eldest daughter of my father, I am properly addressed only as “Miss Bond,” which any true Englishman would know, but a Corsican would not; and why it is that you keep one hand always in the breast of your waistcoat, precisely as Mr. Bonaparte is known to do, from the many paintings of him that have been much on public view.’

At this, Mr. Smallwood smiled. ‘No such portrait has been circulated publicly on England’s shores, Miss Bond; for it is only in France that Napoléon is recognized as a great man,’ he said. ‘How is it possible that you, a simple country governess, may have observed such a painting? It is universally spoken of you that you are a keen observer, and yet your eyesight must be very good indeed, to see from a vantage in Maidsworth a painting that hangs in Paris.’

The colour mounted in Jane’s cheeks. ‘As I am obliged to provide instruction in French to my charges,’ she said, ‘it has long been my custom to consult any journal or newspaper in that language that should come my way, from the hand of a man who has travelled; and in such a publication, it is only natural that an engraving should — ’

‘I put it to you roundly that you are a member of His Majesty’s Secret Service,’ Mr. Smallwood responded; ‘or else you are a silly girl, given to elaborate fancies, and most especially when in the company of a handsome single man of six thousand a year; which fancies and, indeed, hysteria a Frenchman might observe are typical of the puritanical English virgins when confronted with the virile Latin sex; whereas any French girl would have surrendered herself to me already without a care; though as an English gentleman I shall of course let the matter lie unspoken. Nevertheless, you are either a spy or a fool. Which is it to be, Miss Bond?’

‘I would advise you to invade Egypt instead of Britain, sir,’ Jane said, ‘for you will find it an easier conquest, having few defenses and no Christian as its sovereign; and to decline the Directoire’s heedless strategy for my country, which has brought you to these shores.’

‘You cannot think that Napoléon Bonaparte would undertake such a mission of reconnaissance alone and unaided,’ Mr. Smallwood said; ‘and — if I were he — I would therefore be surrounded by stout arms, ready to leap to my aid at but a signal.’

‘Arms do not leap,’ said Jane; ‘your phrase is inelegant. This is further proof that you are a Frenchman; I am never mistaken in my impressions. But I hope that I may answer you, sir, in a tone of becoming modesty, by allowing that, if I were an English spy, at a country dancing party which I suspected to be attended by foreign persons of questionable intention, I would not do so without carrying a weapon; and that a pistol of discreet proportions, but no less deadly, must therefore be concealed somewhere about my person.’

‘A pistol carries but a single bullet, Miss Bond,’ said Mr. Smallwood.

‘Even a very small bullet may suffice to bring about the death of a man, whether he be English with an annual income of six thousand, or French with a battery of henchmen,’ Jane replied; ‘and if I were to remove from this earth so odious a menace to my Crown, and to die for it, I should nonetheless count myself happy.’

‘See here, Miss Bond, about the bush let us beat no more. You are outnumbered,’ Mr. Smallwood said; ‘and if I may say so, outwitted. I am indeed Napoléon Bonaparte, and though I find myself on hostile shores, my prospects are happier than yours. For you, Miss Bond, are my prisoner.’

Jane smiled now, and touched Mr. Smallwood lightly with her fan. ‘It is therefore incumbent upon you, Mr. Bonaparte,’ she said, ‘to do your worst.’

‘I shall, and with alacrity, Miss Bond,’ the imposter replied; ‘but prior to subjecting you to manifold tortures, of a violence and invention unthinkable to anyone but a Frenchman, I hope you will allow me to enlighten you on certain points of my plan for world domination.’

‘I can think of no more desirable an entertainment, sir, nor one more likely to improve the evening hours,’ Jane replied; ‘let us make haste to your carriage, and away.’

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