REVIEW: On Windycross Moor
Oct. 9th, 2021 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllOn Windycross Moor: Mabel Quiller-Couch. Collins, inscribed 1936
I probably wouldn’t have posted about this book, although it features a minor character with a remarkable name Angela Brazil would have envied, Thirza, if it hadn’t been a while since I posted a book review. I haven’t read a lot of girls own books recently.
This is about ‘early Edwardian’ Alberta Jane Penlee, who, very understandably, goes by the name Jane. It has a lot of elements from the story of Cinderella, but not always told in the order you would expect. Windycross Moor doesn’t come into it until halfway through, and, in fact, the title is a misnomer, because the moor is named Rux Moor, and Windycross is the nearest town/village to Jane’s home.
Anyhow, we first meet a disconsolate Jane, left behind at Turret House School for the summer holidays. Her father is an explorer somewhere abroad. She and her mother came to England a few years back, whereupon Jane’s mother, who she inherited her ashen hair from, died suddenly, leaving Jane in the care of her uncle, a scholar who isn’t fit to look after a child. He bundled Jane off to a boarding school, and let the headmistress be in charge of selecting her clothes. Quiller-Couch is very good at conveying social embarrassment, how mortifying it feels not to have the right clothes.
Jane’s life is transformed when her mother’s old schoolfriend, Mrs Garth, hunts her up, and, for her mother’s sake, offers to take Jane away to stay with her for a holiday with the uncle’s permission. She soon becomes ‘Aunt Helen’, explicitly referred to as Jane’s fairy godmother. Jane fills a gap in her life too, for she not only lost her husband but her son, and Aunt Helen is there for Jane when she is badly disappointed that her father will not be returning home as planned.
His return is much delayed, so Jane is about thirteen when he finally comes to see her, and informs her that he has remarried and is now stepfather to twins. He then had the gall to be hurt that Jane thought that he had forgotten the memory of her dead mother. What was she meant to think when he’d been absent all these years, leaving Jane to the mercies of an uncle who didn’t know what to do with her (and who disappears from the story even when you’d think he’d return), oh, and he acquires a second wife?
Worse, I thought, he then emotionally blackmailed his daughter into calling her new stepmother, whom she hadn’t met yet, her mother and into promising that she’d love her on the spot. Errr. Judging you from a century on, mate. Not only that, but because of his new responsibilities, Jane is going to have to leave school and come live with these total strangers as part of an expanded blended family unit.
The new Mrs Penlee is something of a cipher, so I felt quite justified in thinking of her as an idler who let Jane play skivvy and unpaid nursery nurse to seven-year-old twins Billy (William) and Bennie (Benedicta). It seems as if she put all her energies into nursing Mr Penlee when he was too sick to come home, snagged him and then…just stayed in bed, an ‘invalid’. As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that the author’s intent was for Mrs Penlee to genuinely be an invalid (although continually writing that she was too ill to leave her bed would have more force if there was a single scene where she did in fact leave her bedroom and come downstairs.) Towards the end of the book, we suddenly learn that she’s French, which leads to a convenient solution to give Jane her happy ending.
In fact, I know they didn’t have word processors then, and it was a tougher job to redraft a book, but there were such a lot of developments that I felt would have worked better if they’d been seeded in earlier chapters, but the lack of planning and forethought may say something about how the author thought of writing a children’s book.
So, Jane leaves her school at the end of term, where, after Aunt Helen’s informal adoption got her a swankier wardrobe and the headmistress underwent a personality change after getting engaged, Jane had become quite the star pupil. She moves to the desolate moor and meets the unruly twins, who Mrs Penlee seems to believe are everyone else’s responsibility. They live in ‘the Three Firs’, which used to be a travellers’ hostelry, but is now mainly staffed by rough and ready Patience and Griffin, who looks after Firebrand the donkey. This is set at a time when motorcars were starting to share roads with horse or donkey-drawn carriages. Jane has to try to influence the twins and occasionally light fires.
Obviously, some elements of the Cinderella story arise, but there’s no Prince Charming, and the fairy godmother plays a much bigger role. Jane has to learn to take the ups and downs in her economic fortunes, and makes friends with Enid Rose, a vicar’s daughter who hasn’t known many luxuries, while also influencing snobbish, spoilt and dissatisfied Alice Millward, who also undergoes a change in fortunes. Will Jane have to sacrifice her education, her wellbeing and future for the family that her father acquired for her? Well, there are a few melodramatic twists in the resolution.
The writing, apart from the plot issues I mentioned, is not brilliant. Everyone’s eyes are filling up with tears every three or four chapters, and the phrase ‘Oh-oh’ is overused. Quiller-Couch could have tried to use a greater variety of adjectives, and sometimes less repetition (it’s a long book.) I took particular issue with the adjective ‘brave’. She applied it a lot to Jane’s father ‘exploring’ somewhere where there were ‘natives’, which leads to a few mental queries, or when he applied it to Jane, when, as I observed earlier, I pretty much thought him guilty of emotional blackmail. The moral of adversity bringing out strength of character isn’t a bad one, but the story could have been a lot less melodramatic.
I probably wouldn’t have posted about this book, although it features a minor character with a remarkable name Angela Brazil would have envied, Thirza, if it hadn’t been a while since I posted a book review. I haven’t read a lot of girls own books recently.
This is about ‘early Edwardian’ Alberta Jane Penlee, who, very understandably, goes by the name Jane. It has a lot of elements from the story of Cinderella, but not always told in the order you would expect. Windycross Moor doesn’t come into it until halfway through, and, in fact, the title is a misnomer, because the moor is named Rux Moor, and Windycross is the nearest town/village to Jane’s home.
Anyhow, we first meet a disconsolate Jane, left behind at Turret House School for the summer holidays. Her father is an explorer somewhere abroad. She and her mother came to England a few years back, whereupon Jane’s mother, who she inherited her ashen hair from, died suddenly, leaving Jane in the care of her uncle, a scholar who isn’t fit to look after a child. He bundled Jane off to a boarding school, and let the headmistress be in charge of selecting her clothes. Quiller-Couch is very good at conveying social embarrassment, how mortifying it feels not to have the right clothes.
Jane’s life is transformed when her mother’s old schoolfriend, Mrs Garth, hunts her up, and, for her mother’s sake, offers to take Jane away to stay with her for a holiday with the uncle’s permission. She soon becomes ‘Aunt Helen’, explicitly referred to as Jane’s fairy godmother. Jane fills a gap in her life too, for she not only lost her husband but her son, and Aunt Helen is there for Jane when she is badly disappointed that her father will not be returning home as planned.
His return is much delayed, so Jane is about thirteen when he finally comes to see her, and informs her that he has remarried and is now stepfather to twins. He then had the gall to be hurt that Jane thought that he had forgotten the memory of her dead mother. What was she meant to think when he’d been absent all these years, leaving Jane to the mercies of an uncle who didn’t know what to do with her (and who disappears from the story even when you’d think he’d return), oh, and he acquires a second wife?
Worse, I thought, he then emotionally blackmailed his daughter into calling her new stepmother, whom she hadn’t met yet, her mother and into promising that she’d love her on the spot. Errr. Judging you from a century on, mate. Not only that, but because of his new responsibilities, Jane is going to have to leave school and come live with these total strangers as part of an expanded blended family unit.
The new Mrs Penlee is something of a cipher, so I felt quite justified in thinking of her as an idler who let Jane play skivvy and unpaid nursery nurse to seven-year-old twins Billy (William) and Bennie (Benedicta). It seems as if she put all her energies into nursing Mr Penlee when he was too sick to come home, snagged him and then…just stayed in bed, an ‘invalid’. As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that the author’s intent was for Mrs Penlee to genuinely be an invalid (although continually writing that she was too ill to leave her bed would have more force if there was a single scene where she did in fact leave her bedroom and come downstairs.) Towards the end of the book, we suddenly learn that she’s French, which leads to a convenient solution to give Jane her happy ending.
In fact, I know they didn’t have word processors then, and it was a tougher job to redraft a book, but there were such a lot of developments that I felt would have worked better if they’d been seeded in earlier chapters, but the lack of planning and forethought may say something about how the author thought of writing a children’s book.
So, Jane leaves her school at the end of term, where, after Aunt Helen’s informal adoption got her a swankier wardrobe and the headmistress underwent a personality change after getting engaged, Jane had become quite the star pupil. She moves to the desolate moor and meets the unruly twins, who Mrs Penlee seems to believe are everyone else’s responsibility. They live in ‘the Three Firs’, which used to be a travellers’ hostelry, but is now mainly staffed by rough and ready Patience and Griffin, who looks after Firebrand the donkey. This is set at a time when motorcars were starting to share roads with horse or donkey-drawn carriages. Jane has to try to influence the twins and occasionally light fires.
Obviously, some elements of the Cinderella story arise, but there’s no Prince Charming, and the fairy godmother plays a much bigger role. Jane has to learn to take the ups and downs in her economic fortunes, and makes friends with Enid Rose, a vicar’s daughter who hasn’t known many luxuries, while also influencing snobbish, spoilt and dissatisfied Alice Millward, who also undergoes a change in fortunes. Will Jane have to sacrifice her education, her wellbeing and future for the family that her father acquired for her? Well, there are a few melodramatic twists in the resolution.
The writing, apart from the plot issues I mentioned, is not brilliant. Everyone’s eyes are filling up with tears every three or four chapters, and the phrase ‘Oh-oh’ is overused. Quiller-Couch could have tried to use a greater variety of adjectives, and sometimes less repetition (it’s a long book.) I took particular issue with the adjective ‘brave’. She applied it a lot to Jane’s father ‘exploring’ somewhere where there were ‘natives’, which leads to a few mental queries, or when he applied it to Jane, when, as I observed earlier, I pretty much thought him guilty of emotional blackmail. The moral of adversity bringing out strength of character isn’t a bad one, but the story could have been a lot less melodramatic.
