REVIEW: The Clever Woman of the Family
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feather_ghyllThe Clever Woman of the Family: Charlotte M. Yonge
Virago Modern Classic 1985
I think this may be the first Yonge book that I’ve ever read, and it may have been that it was because this book was published by Virago as a Modern Classic that I bought it (second-hand, of course.) I was gripped overall by the characters and story, I even stayed up late for me one night to read it. I liked the general sympathy for most characters (although it gets increasingly judgy, and Grace Curtis is completely dropped by the wayside to what, be her mother’s support all the rest of her life?)
Having said that, the author is very much of her time (Victorian) and however popular she was in her day, if one may borrow how her characters distinguish between the upper and lower classes, not a first-rate novelist. Some of the writing is very dense; I was often confused by the badinage between Alick and Bessie Keith. I wasn’t entirely in sympathy with Yonge’s views (e.g. that ‘second rate’ people only became non-conformists because they got the hump with the vicar, not theology or social reasons or her central thesis in this novel.) I probably lost less sympathy with the heroine as her faults became more prominent than the author meant me to, for I agree that a twenty-five year old shouldn’t be treated like a seventeen year old, I sympathised with her chafing at the lack of avenues open to women. But then I’m an educated unmarried woman from non-conformist Wales, who has been influenced by men and women (educated, but from various backgrounds.)
I thought the attitude displayed towards marriages with a large age gap was confused: some of her relatives were electrified to learn that eighteen year old Fanny married a 60 year old soldier. I was stuck on the fact that young women really shouldn’t be marrying men old enough to be their biological grandfather, and the description of how Sir Stephen Temple and Fanny’s mother (who was probably a generation below him) made life easy for girlish Fanny (although he enjoyed having intercourse with her enough that she was a mother to seven by the time he died, even though repeated pregnancies and the Indian climate kept making her sick) disturbed me. But the text would have it that a genuine love grew up between Fanny and her husband, who had not married before because he'd fallen in love with someone who he couldn’t marry. Er, okay. I tended to agree with Mrs Curtis, who thought what Fanny felt was a bit more like a daughter’s devotion to her father than normal married love.
There’s another marriage between a woman in her early twenties and a man in his early fifties that turns out to be for material and social gain on her side and about getting a male heir on his, so at least it’s never promoted as a love match and a character we’re meant to respect protests a bit. The chief love stories are between near-contemporaries, thank goodness.
Ahem.
The plot revolves around Rachel Curtis, the titular ‘Clever Woman’ of her family, which comprises her fussy mother, her older sister Grace and Rachel herself. As the widest reader at the home called the Homestead, Rachel has decided that at 25 she has more than reached her majority, and so can decide matters for herself, and she is burning to do something useful. She hates conventionalities, but, we gradually learn, is generally seen as a didactic bore – she talks at people – and something of a freak, even if the family are respected as the local gentry.
The Curtises are about to welcome young widow Fanny Temple, who lost her (much older) soldier husband and managing mother soon after each other in India. She is to return to Avonmouth where she grew up with the Curtises, and Rachel and, to a lesser extent, her mother are looking forward to taking her back under their wing. But Fanny’s husband commended her and her brood to a Major Keith, who Fanny and her sons quite look up to as an authority on everything. Rachel has a prejudice against the military (a bizarre one in that she thinks they are too flighty), and decides she will teach the children, but it doesn’t go as planned, and Fanny engages a Miss Williams as a governess. This brings Fanny, Rachel and Grace into contact with the Williams family, two adult sisters, one of whom is a cripple, and their niece. As Ermine Williams, Major (now Colonel) Colin Keith, and Captain Alick (Alexander) Keith come to know Rachel, they are all, in different ways, able to show up that some of her pronouncements and prejudices are very silly. (Everyone twitches when she uses the word ‘system’.)
The novel really is about the fall of Rachel from her self-erected perch of superiority when her tenets are tested by experience and found gravely wanting. Sympathetic Ermine sees that there is good stuff in her, but she grew up unchecked by father or brother – her mother tries to press the conventions on her, but with very little effect. Colonel Keith is irritated by her, while Alick Keith constantly surprises her. It is his sister, Bessie, a popular conundrum, who brings about Rachel’s meeting with a Mr Mauleverer, who seems to her a means to bring about her ideal, an establishment that will free young girls from the tyranny of lace making, the local cottage industry for lower-class females. Rachel’s self-sufficiency and enthusiasm for this project leads to very dark days.
There is a lot of moralising here, but I thought it was very weak on the spiritual aspect. Rachel finds that in her crisis she has got very, very far away from the belief of her childhood, but the plot is more concerned with her finding a man’s protection, and spiritual solace only comes gradually, and, some verses aside, not very clearly, so that when she faces, well, death again, she sort of finds God again, after failing to offer spiritual succour to a dying child. But I found Yonge – a high Anglican of conviction – to be writing more about religiosity than true belief. There’s also a lot of guff about Rachel’s prejudices against curates and rectors, (some of her criticisms seemed fair), which are most effectively countered by meeting a godly and educated man who has suffered much but meets life with joy. (The afterword suggests that he was partly modelled on someone who was very influential on the author.) Another thing Yonge is very vague about is that it seems as if reading about evolution was part of Rachel’s spiritual decline, even if she’s more passionate about some aspects of social reform, especially as they pertain to women.
Wise Ermine is the second heroine of the book – like Rachel, when pushed, she goes all self-sacrificing over whether her would-be husband deserves better. To return to what seems like borderline sufferance of paedophile, there’s this nonsensical pseudo-joke that Ermine’s true love might be better served by waiting for her niece, who is eight, to grow up, because she’s not a cripple. Like, !?!?, he’s in his thirties, of sound mind and would like a companion now after 12 years of soldiering. Ideally the woman he always loved. It isn’t just some self-directed ableism from Ermine, snobbery was one of the things that stopped them from marrying when they were in their twenties, and her family being wrongly tainted by scandal (another subplot.)
But it was striking to me that the Curtises and the noble house of Keith had issues with a lack of heirs when so much was made of superior birth by the characters of this book, and their author. (The book is very delicate and Victorian about sex and pregnancy. Apparently nobody noticed that one character was in the late stages of pregnancy, or maybe they were pretending not to.)
The book lost me even more than ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ does by having Rachel finally transform into the wife and mother she so looked down on, humbly yielding to her husband, who knows better about everything. On the other hand, Ermine is allowed to be an equal partner with the man she loves when it comes to matters of conscience and what best to do for family members. I rolled my eyes at the conclusion, but I did like the slow reveal of what the author really meant by titling Chapter IV ‘The Hero’, and how one character’s past illness made them particularly suited to look out for other sick characters.
Silly names feature: Conrade, Leoline and Stephana are some of Fanny’s offspring. Yonge contends that ‘Ermine’ is a Welsh name (not one I’ve ever come across as someone who is capable of reading Welsh; it just seemed like a variant spelling of ‘Hermione’ to me.) There is some melodrama, as well as contrivance in all the people who end up coming to Avonmouth, a small Devonshire seaside town. I don’t think Yonge meant for two female characters’ situation by the end of the novel to come across as Sapphic, but it did. Oh well, she was certainly a storyteller and that has power beyond her day and her views.
Virago Modern Classic 1985
I think this may be the first Yonge book that I’ve ever read, and it may have been that it was because this book was published by Virago as a Modern Classic that I bought it (second-hand, of course.) I was gripped overall by the characters and story, I even stayed up late for me one night to read it. I liked the general sympathy for most characters (although it gets increasingly judgy, and Grace Curtis is completely dropped by the wayside to what, be her mother’s support all the rest of her life?)
Having said that, the author is very much of her time (Victorian) and however popular she was in her day, if one may borrow how her characters distinguish between the upper and lower classes, not a first-rate novelist. Some of the writing is very dense; I was often confused by the badinage between Alick and Bessie Keith. I wasn’t entirely in sympathy with Yonge’s views (e.g. that ‘second rate’ people only became non-conformists because they got the hump with the vicar, not theology or social reasons or her central thesis in this novel.) I probably lost less sympathy with the heroine as her faults became more prominent than the author meant me to, for I agree that a twenty-five year old shouldn’t be treated like a seventeen year old, I sympathised with her chafing at the lack of avenues open to women. But then I’m an educated unmarried woman from non-conformist Wales, who has been influenced by men and women (educated, but from various backgrounds.)
I thought the attitude displayed towards marriages with a large age gap was confused: some of her relatives were electrified to learn that eighteen year old Fanny married a 60 year old soldier. I was stuck on the fact that young women really shouldn’t be marrying men old enough to be their biological grandfather, and the description of how Sir Stephen Temple and Fanny’s mother (who was probably a generation below him) made life easy for girlish Fanny (although he enjoyed having intercourse with her enough that she was a mother to seven by the time he died, even though repeated pregnancies and the Indian climate kept making her sick) disturbed me. But the text would have it that a genuine love grew up between Fanny and her husband, who had not married before because he'd fallen in love with someone who he couldn’t marry. Er, okay. I tended to agree with Mrs Curtis, who thought what Fanny felt was a bit more like a daughter’s devotion to her father than normal married love.
There’s another marriage between a woman in her early twenties and a man in his early fifties that turns out to be for material and social gain on her side and about getting a male heir on his, so at least it’s never promoted as a love match and a character we’re meant to respect protests a bit. The chief love stories are between near-contemporaries, thank goodness.
Ahem.
The plot revolves around Rachel Curtis, the titular ‘Clever Woman’ of her family, which comprises her fussy mother, her older sister Grace and Rachel herself. As the widest reader at the home called the Homestead, Rachel has decided that at 25 she has more than reached her majority, and so can decide matters for herself, and she is burning to do something useful. She hates conventionalities, but, we gradually learn, is generally seen as a didactic bore – she talks at people – and something of a freak, even if the family are respected as the local gentry.
The Curtises are about to welcome young widow Fanny Temple, who lost her (much older) soldier husband and managing mother soon after each other in India. She is to return to Avonmouth where she grew up with the Curtises, and Rachel and, to a lesser extent, her mother are looking forward to taking her back under their wing. But Fanny’s husband commended her and her brood to a Major Keith, who Fanny and her sons quite look up to as an authority on everything. Rachel has a prejudice against the military (a bizarre one in that she thinks they are too flighty), and decides she will teach the children, but it doesn’t go as planned, and Fanny engages a Miss Williams as a governess. This brings Fanny, Rachel and Grace into contact with the Williams family, two adult sisters, one of whom is a cripple, and their niece. As Ermine Williams, Major (now Colonel) Colin Keith, and Captain Alick (Alexander) Keith come to know Rachel, they are all, in different ways, able to show up that some of her pronouncements and prejudices are very silly. (Everyone twitches when she uses the word ‘system’.)
The novel really is about the fall of Rachel from her self-erected perch of superiority when her tenets are tested by experience and found gravely wanting. Sympathetic Ermine sees that there is good stuff in her, but she grew up unchecked by father or brother – her mother tries to press the conventions on her, but with very little effect. Colonel Keith is irritated by her, while Alick Keith constantly surprises her. It is his sister, Bessie, a popular conundrum, who brings about Rachel’s meeting with a Mr Mauleverer, who seems to her a means to bring about her ideal, an establishment that will free young girls from the tyranny of lace making, the local cottage industry for lower-class females. Rachel’s self-sufficiency and enthusiasm for this project leads to very dark days.
There is a lot of moralising here, but I thought it was very weak on the spiritual aspect. Rachel finds that in her crisis she has got very, very far away from the belief of her childhood, but the plot is more concerned with her finding a man’s protection, and spiritual solace only comes gradually, and, some verses aside, not very clearly, so that when she faces, well, death again, she sort of finds God again, after failing to offer spiritual succour to a dying child. But I found Yonge – a high Anglican of conviction – to be writing more about religiosity than true belief. There’s also a lot of guff about Rachel’s prejudices against curates and rectors, (some of her criticisms seemed fair), which are most effectively countered by meeting a godly and educated man who has suffered much but meets life with joy. (The afterword suggests that he was partly modelled on someone who was very influential on the author.) Another thing Yonge is very vague about is that it seems as if reading about evolution was part of Rachel’s spiritual decline, even if she’s more passionate about some aspects of social reform, especially as they pertain to women.
Wise Ermine is the second heroine of the book – like Rachel, when pushed, she goes all self-sacrificing over whether her would-be husband deserves better. To return to what seems like borderline sufferance of paedophile, there’s this nonsensical pseudo-joke that Ermine’s true love might be better served by waiting for her niece, who is eight, to grow up, because she’s not a cripple. Like, !?!?, he’s in his thirties, of sound mind and would like a companion now after 12 years of soldiering. Ideally the woman he always loved. It isn’t just some self-directed ableism from Ermine, snobbery was one of the things that stopped them from marrying when they were in their twenties, and her family being wrongly tainted by scandal (another subplot.)
But it was striking to me that the Curtises and the noble house of Keith had issues with a lack of heirs when so much was made of superior birth by the characters of this book, and their author. (The book is very delicate and Victorian about sex and pregnancy. Apparently nobody noticed that one character was in the late stages of pregnancy, or maybe they were pretending not to.)
The book lost me even more than ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ does by having Rachel finally transform into the wife and mother she so looked down on, humbly yielding to her husband, who knows better about everything. On the other hand, Ermine is allowed to be an equal partner with the man she loves when it comes to matters of conscience and what best to do for family members. I rolled my eyes at the conclusion, but I did like the slow reveal of what the author really meant by titling Chapter IV ‘The Hero’, and how one character’s past illness made them particularly suited to look out for other sick characters.
Silly names feature: Conrade, Leoline and Stephana are some of Fanny’s offspring. Yonge contends that ‘Ermine’ is a Welsh name (not one I’ve ever come across as someone who is capable of reading Welsh; it just seemed like a variant spelling of ‘Hermione’ to me.) There is some melodrama, as well as contrivance in all the people who end up coming to Avonmouth, a small Devonshire seaside town. I don’t think Yonge meant for two female characters’ situation by the end of the novel to come across as Sapphic, but it did. Oh well, she was certainly a storyteller and that has power beyond her day and her views.
