Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Reader, I married him…

Isabella by Fiona Mountain, 2000, Orion Books, 310 pages, paperback.
Kate Hannigan's Girl by Catherine Cookson, 2000, Bantam Press, 288 pages, hardback.
Rebel by Cheryl Sawyer, 2000, Random House, 453 pages, paperback.

Reviewed by Margaret Brennan

Romance novels, which have historically been the mainstay of the fainthearted, are still flourishing. Read by millions in various forms - from the bodice-rippers of Mills and Boon to the raunchier versions of the same plot(s) by Harlequin - they rustle, side by side, in every airport and newsagent. Until the 1980s, these novels were left on the shelf by feminist literary criticism and some might argue, they still are. More recently, however, they have attracted the attention of those interested in popular culture generally, and popular culture designed for women, in particular.

What is it about the sighs of the women and the swarthy unattainability of the men that enchants us so? Let us see.

Isabella is a highly romanticized re-invention of Fletcher Christian as a dark Heathcliff figure who comes back to haunt the Lake District in search of his lost love, Isabella Curwen.

He and his beloved have been cruelly separated by the machinations of another. She has been persuaded that he only wants her for her money and in a climactic scene that seeks to emulate the violence of Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship, but which is in fact rather tepid, he crushes a ball of snow in his hand and tells her he hates her. His words “I am in hell” (reputedly uttered at the height of the Bounty mutiny) are, in this re-writing of history, no less than a cry of anguish for the lost beloved. In reality, Christian had been scorned by his longtime friend and patron Bligh, whose earlier partiality towards the young man has been well documented by contemporary observers. Hell hath no fury indeed.

The heroine and her childhood sweetheart, after spending an innocent but highly charged night together when she was only 15, must wait many years for their moment of passion on the earthen floor of a dilapidated cottage. It's a long wait.

As history, it is for the most part bunk. Apart from the contention that if Christian were not a tortured soul suffering for love, the Mutiny would have been dead in the water, it also portrays Bligh as an unhappily rejected suitor for the hand of Isabella's sister-in-law, a Mrs Danvers figure (tall, thin and malevolent) who stalks the halls of the stately home on the shore of Lake Windermere. In reality Bligh was a short, happily married man whose wife and children came to see him off at Portsmouth, and who slipped away while waiting for the ship to sail to spend more time with them. A scene where Bligh fires shots after the fast-disappearing-across-the-lake figure of Christian, while our heroine wrestles with the gun, stretches all bounds of credulity.

Mountain does have a flair for narrative: the novel is a mystery, and although lacking psychological depth or much insight into character, it is not lacking in drama. She evokes a sense of period with well-researched details of gowns and furniture; and of the Romantic era, with references to Wordsworth (who did write a letter in defence of Christian) and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner symbolically weaving through the tale.

The Lake District in all its seasonal moods is also invoked to help with the atmospherics, although the figures are placed in the landscape rather than being at one with nature. And her descriptive passages can sometimes become altogether too fanciful: in one scene guests at a lavish ball dance outside while snow is falling in the moonlight!

This heroine has it all: a loving husband whom she comes to love; children; great wealth; ageless beauty; a lifetime of intensity that comes of an unrealised passion, and one memories-are-made-of-this moment of sexual rapture. All this against a backdrop of a garden of Eden landscape that reflects, on cue, her state of mind.

If you feel your life is lacking one or more of these essential pre-conditions for womanly fulfilment, then this is the novel for you.

In contrast to such passion and “poetic” licence, I was looking forward to re-reading Catherine Cookson. Here was a writer who had captured the hearts and minds of millions of female readers, and I remembered as a teenager enjoying her novels at my aunt's during the long, hot East Gippsland holidays.

And the review from The Times was promising: “Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson virtues, in a world which she often depicts as cold and violent”. But I was sorely disappointed. Are there any contemporary romantic novels that have, like the detective novel, adapted to changing attitudes and values, or is there an inherent incompatibility between feminism and the romantic novel? Not only is the novel anti-feminist, it is lacking humanity: a “cold and violent” world indeed.

In Kate Hannigan's Girl, “her one hundredth book”, Cookson's own background of poverty and illegitimacy in Tyne Dock, and marrying up and out of her class is shared by the Kate Hannigan of the earlier novel. Cookson's notions of class are simplistic: one is either rich or poor. Kate has married a doctor and now lives in splendour in a house with “twelve rooms with beautiful furniture and all the ground floor covered in the same thick red carpet, and the paint all white and egg-shell blue”. The house has servants and a chauffeur, and the mandatory wooded and lawned gardens with swimming pool.

Into this idyllic setting enters a young woman who is the embodiment of evil and is out to destroy all in her path. At the age of 15 she seduces the worthy family retainer who is portrayed as the innocent victim of her wiles, and graduates to the hero who also succumbs to her charms, almost destroying not only his chance with Annie, Kate's daughter (the “girl” of the title) but Annie herself. There are two central aspects to Annie: she is extraordinarily beautiful (is the passion these heroines arouse ever based on anything else?) and she is deeply troubled by her mother's past.

Why is this novel anti-feminist, or even anti-women? For one, Annie's beauty arouses suspicion and envy in other women: “Most women looked sideways at her, or pretended not to see her at all [Now] she looked a woman, and she presented a danger and a challenge to some hidden thing within them, as her mother had before her” [my emphases]. Then, the evil woman simply is: there is no psychological rationale for her actions. In addition, the heroine seems to respond to all her trials and tribulations with hysterics, including a suicide bid in a sea cave from which she is, predictably, rescued by the hero.

The mother - hitherto presented as the ideal, loving mother - sics a potential rapist onto her daughter because of her antipathy to Catholicism and to her daughter becoming a nun: “Always she would know that she could have prevented Brian. She had seen the lust in his face; and knowing, she had let him go in search of Annie”.

Nowhere are the masculine/feminine values of the novel more clearly delineated than in the rape scene. The hero saves Annie from rape (so she can remain a virgin intacta), but he leaves her lying unconscious on the floor while he slugs it out with the villain. He is enraged because he knows that she would rather marry her would-be rapist than bring another illegitimate child into the world.

Rebel is another historical romance, set in pre-Revolutionary France. The love story parallels the intense relationship that many of the French had with America during that period.

The rebel of the title (Viviane de Cherchy) is feisty, passionate, a brilliant conversationalist, a political idealist and part of the French liberal aristocracy who supported with the American fight for independence. Only her sex prevents her from signing up, for she is certainly not lacking in courage. She stows away on an all-male ship of volunteer fighters for American independence. She sets out at night in a boat with a black American woman to warn of a planned attack by the British. She is not afraid to fire a pistol when threatened by an enemy soldier and, back in Paris, she ventures into the isolated house of a personal and political enemy when her beloved is placed under threat.

She is also a believer in freedom and dignity for women. In refusing to be presented at the Court of Versailles, and responding to the argument that the men she most admires spend time there, she is clear-headed in voicing her objections: “[Gentlemen] are expected to take an interest in the Government of France, to express their ideas at the seat of power…It is different for us. No woman, even the Queen, has the vestige of a function at court. The most we can be is decoration. I decline to go anywhere on that basis”.

With such a woman at the centre of the novel, a driving narrative and an extended cast of characters that includes a guest appearance in Paris of Benjamin Franklin, and La Fayette, the idealistic and heroic participant in two revolutions, there is much to hold the reader's interest.

Perhaps a little too much of the novel, however, is taken up with the denial, delay and deferment that is the inevitable lot of lovers in romantic fiction. The dashing Jules, Comte de Mirandol, having been adopted by her paternal grandfather, becomes her much resented guardian after their deaths. In spite of having been once in love with her mother, the last serious obstacle to their union is overcome once Viviane's doubts as to her paternity are cleared up.

The novel portrays only this narrow section of French society and there is little to indicate that France itself is on the brink of a cataclysm. Only one hot-headed young French aristocrat links American revolutionary ideals with the oppression in his own country.

Sawyer conveys a vivid sense of the war through the intensity of the participants as the battle lines are drawn, in the meticulous re-enactments of a number of key battles, and the recording of the relative strength of the armies as they alternate between defeat and victory. War is not simply glorified as adventure: there are enough images of the dead and wounded to show the terrible cost of British pride and intransigence.

The novel has certainly stimulated my interest in this turbulent period of American history. I have no doubt Sawyer could do the same for the French Revolution. If she chose.

So there it is. One is tempted to say that this is the same plot dressed up in different garb - feisty heroine who is subordinate to a rather more sexually sophisticated hero than she. They argue, they reconcile, they kiss. No doubt the cumbersome clothes in the historical novels help those chests to heave. Somehow, the plot seems too anachronistic to survive the millenium. But look in those newsagents and in those airports. If you see the big, gold letters on the cover where the author gets greater billing than the title, then you'll know that I was wrong.

Margaret Brennan is a retired High School teacher and an avid reader.

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Reader, I married him… Isabella by Fiona Mountain, 2000, Orion Books, 310 pages, paperback. Kate Hannigan's Girl by Catherine Cookson, 2000, Bantam Press, 288 pages, hardback. Rebel by Cheryl Sawyer, 2000, Random House, 453 pages, paperback. Reviewed by Margaret Brennan Romance novels, which have historically been the mainstay of the fainthearted, are still flourishing. Read by millions in various forms - from the bodice-rippers of Mills and Boon to the raunchier versions of the same plot(s) by Harlequin - they rustle, side by side, in every airport and newsagent. Until the 1980s, these novels were left on the shelf by feminist literary criticism and some might argue, they still are. More recently, however, they have attracted the attention of those interested in popular culture generally, and popular culture designed for women, in particular. What is it about the sighs of the women and the swarthy unattainability of the men that enchants us so? Let us see. Isabella is a highly romanticized re-invention of Fletcher Christian as a dark Heathcliff figure who comes back to haunt the Lake District in search of his lost love, Isabella Curwen. He and his beloved have been cruelly separated by the machinations of another. She has been persuaded that he only wants her for her money and in a climactic scene that seeks to emulate the violence of Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship, but which is in fact rather tepid, he crushes a ball of snow in his hand and tells her he hates her. His words “I am in hell” (reputedly uttered at the height of the Bounty mutiny) are, in this re-writing of history, no less than a cry of anguish for the lost beloved. In reality, Christian had been scorned by his longtime friend and patron Bligh, whose earlier partiality towards the young man has been well documented by contemporary observers. Hell hath no fury indeed. The heroine and her childhood sweetheart, after spending an innocent but highly charged night together when she was only 15, must wait many years for their moment of passion on the earthen floor of a dilapidated cottage. It's a long wait. As history, it is for the most part bunk. Apart from the contention that if Christian were not a tortured soul suffering for love, the Mutiny would have been dead in the water, it also portrays Bligh as an unhappily rejected suitor for the hand of Isabella's sister-in-law, a Mrs Danvers figure (tall, thin and malevolent) who stalks the halls of the stately home on the shore of Lake Windermere. In reality Bligh was a short, happily married man whose wife and children came to see him off at Portsmouth, and who slipped away while waiting for the ship to sail to spend more time with them. A scene where Bligh fires shots after the fast-disappearing-across-the-lake figure of Christian, while our heroine wrestles with the gun, stretches all bounds of credulity. Mountain does have a flair for narrative: the novel is a mystery, and although lacking psychological depth or much insight into character, it is not lacking in drama. She evokes a sense of period with well-researched details of gowns and furniture; and of the Romantic era, with references to Wordsworth (who did write a letter in defence of Christian) and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner symbolically weaving through the tale. The Lake District in all its seasonal moods is also invoked to help with the atmospherics, although the figures are placed in the landscape rather than being at one with nature. And her descriptive passages can sometimes become altogether too fanciful: in one scene guests at a lavish ball dance outside while snow is falling in the moonlight! This heroine has it all: a loving husband whom she comes to love; children; great wealth; ageless beauty; a lifetime of intensity that comes of an unrealised passion, and one memories-are-made-of-this moment of sexual rapture. All this against a backdrop of a garden of Eden landscape that reflects, on cue, her state of mind. If you feel your life is lacking one or more of these essential pre-conditions for womanly fulfilment, then this is the novel for you. In contrast to such passion and “poetic” licence, I was looking forward to re-reading Catherine Cookson. Here was a writer who had captured the hearts and minds of millions of female readers, and I remembered as a teenager enjoying her novels at my aunt's during the long, hot East Gippsland holidays. And the review from The Times was promising: “Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson virtues, in a world which she often depicts as cold and violent”. But I was sorely disappointed. Are there any contemporary romantic novels that have, like the detective novel, adapted to changing attitudes and values, or is there an inherent incompatibility between feminism and the romantic novel? Not only is the novel anti-feminist, it is lacking humanity: a “cold and violent” world indeed. In Kate Hannigan's Girl, “her one hundredth book”, Cookson's own background of poverty and illegitimacy in Tyne Dock, and marrying up and out of her class is shared by the Kate Hannigan of the earlier novel. Cookson's notions of class are simplistic: one is either rich or poor. Kate has married a doctor and now lives in splendour in a house with “twelve rooms with beautiful furniture and all the ground floor covered in the same thick red carpet, and the paint all white and egg-shell blue”. The house has servants and a chauffeur, and the mandatory wooded and lawned gardens with swimming pool. Into this idyllic setting enters a young woman who is the embodiment of evil and is out to destroy all in her path. At the age of 15 she seduces the worthy family retainer who is portrayed as the innocent victim of her wiles, and graduates to the hero who also succumbs to her charms, almost destroying not only his chance with Annie, Kate's daughter (the “girl” of the title) but Annie herself. There are two central aspects to Annie: she is extraordinarily beautiful (is the passion these heroines arouse ever based on anything else?) and she is deeply troubled by her mother's past. Why is this novel anti-feminist, or even anti-women? For one, Annie's beauty arouses suspicion and envy in other women: “Most women looked sideways at her, or pretended not to see her at all [Now] she looked a woman, and she presented a danger and a challenge to some hidden thing within them, as her mother had before her” [my emphases]. Then, the evil woman simply is: there is no psychological rationale for her actions. In addition, the heroine seems to respond to all her trials and tribulations with hysterics, including a suicide bid in a sea cave from which she is, predictably, rescued by the hero. The mother - hitherto presented as the ideal, loving mother - sics a potential rapist onto her daughter because of her antipathy to Catholicism and to her daughter becoming a nun: “Always she would know that she could have prevented Brian. She had seen the lust in his face; and knowing, she had let him go in search of Annie”. Nowhere are the masculine/feminine values of the novel more clearly delineated than in the rape scene. The hero saves Annie from rape (so she can remain a virgin intacta), but he leaves her lying unconscious on the floor while he slugs it out with the villain. He is enraged because he knows that she would rather marry her would-be rapist than bring another illegitimate child into the world. Rebel is another historical romance, set in pre-Revolutionary France. The love story parallels the intense relationship that many of the French had with America during that period. The rebel of the title (Viviane de Cherchy) is feisty, passionate, a brilliant conversationalist, a political idealist and part of the French liberal aristocracy who supported with the American fight for independence. Only her sex prevents her from signing up, for she is certainly not lacking in courage. She stows away on an all-male ship of volunteer fighters for American independence. She sets out at night in a boat with a black American woman to warn of a planned attack by the British. She is not afraid to fire a pistol when threatened by an enemy soldier and, back in Paris, she ventures into the isolated house of a personal and political enemy when her beloved is placed under threat. She is also a believer in freedom and dignity for women. In refusing to be presented at the Court of Versailles, and responding to the argument that the men she most admires spend time there, she is clear-headed in voicing her objections: “[Gentlemen] are expected to take an interest in the Government of France, to express their ideas at the seat of power…It is different for us. No woman, even the Queen, has the vestige of a function at court. The most we can be is decoration. I decline to go anywhere on that basis”. With such a woman at the centre of the novel, a driving narrative and an extended cast of characters that includes a guest appearance in Paris of Benjamin Franklin, and La Fayette, the idealistic and heroic participant in two revolutions, there is much to hold the reader's interest. Perhaps a little too much of the novel, however, is taken up with the denial, delay and deferment that is the inevitable lot of lovers in romantic fiction. The dashing Jules, Comte de Mirandol, having been adopted by her paternal grandfather, becomes her much resented guardian after their deaths. In spite of having been once in love with her mother, the last serious obstacle to their union is overcome once Viviane's doubts as to her paternity are cleared up. The novel portrays only this narrow section of French society and there is little to indicate that France itself is on the brink of a cataclysm. Only one hot-headed young French aristocrat links American revolutionary ideals with the oppression in his own country. Sawyer conveys a vivid sense of the war through the intensity of the participants as the battle lines are drawn, in the meticulous re-enactments of a number of key battles, and the recording of the relative strength of the armies as they alternate between defeat and victory. War is not simply glorified as adventure: there are enough images of the dead and wounded to show the terrible cost of British pride and intransigence. The novel has certainly stimulated my interest in this turbulent period of American history. I have no doubt Sawyer could do the same for the French Revolution. If she chose. So there it is. One is tempted to say that this is the same plot dressed up in different garb - feisty heroine who is subordinate to a rather more sexually sophisticated hero than she. They argue, they reconcile, they kiss. No doubt the cumbersome clothes in the historical novels help those chests to heave. Somehow, the plot seems too anachronistic to survive the millenium. But look in those newsagents and in those airports. If you see the big, gold letters on the cover where the author gets greater billing than the title, then you'll know that I was wrong. Margaret Brennan is a retired High School teacher and an avid reader.