Reading Roundup, May 2026
May. 29th, 2026 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI feel like I’m establishing a pattern of posting a beast of a reading roundup at this time of year. It must be the sudden freedom of the end of the academic year and the burst of excitement for warm weather (and outdoors reading time!) that means I read a bunch of books in a short time. This is your warning that it’s a long post!
Howards End, by E. M. Forster
I finished my reread of HE just ahead of the final meeting of my book group, on May first. Reading it to run a book group was a very different experience, as might be expected. For posterity, the break points that I chose were:
This is roughly a division into thirds. The first chunk was obvious to me: Ruth forms a narrative and thematic cornerstone, and her entire life on the page is a sort of groundwork for the rest of the novel, and good to consider together. I debated the second break point, but the Jacky affair won out because it rather neatly encapsulated the portion of the novel which develops Helen’s interest in the Basts. Soon after that, she leaves for Europe, and the final chunk is the mystery and resolution of her disappearance. I would choose these divisions again!
Reading one book slowly is great for a group activity—people had time to develop their thoughts over the course of multiple meetings. No one liked Henry, as expected. But the sisters were responsible for provoking more complex reactions, something that I also felt on this second reading. As I remember my initial impressions, I liked Helen and Margaret and thought them complex, well-written characters. That hasn’t changed, per se, but I found myself cringing frequently at some stated view of poverty or class, or otherwise struggling with their contrast of professed versus lived values. In short, the girls are kind of bourgeois!
With time and my memory of how awful the Wilcoxes are, I had kind of upgraded the Schlegel sisters’ position. The reread was hard on this count—I sometimes felt nearly embarrassed by what Helen or Margaret said. Weirdly, my group didn’t comment on this. They were primarily disappointed by Margaret’s marriage and subservience to Henry, and Helen’s immaturity. Understandable! But I struggled more with the messaging about class in this go around.
Tibby remained a dear favorite. His flaws are all on the surface and so I continue to find them easy to process. Surprisingly, this was also true of Henry for me, who I do not like but I don’t resent on the page at all. I did a closer reading of his scenes this time and though he remains as sexist as ever, there were moments of true charm that I now can notice, and his appeal to Ruth and Margaret is just a bit more legible as a result.
The ending still gets to me and makes me teary. There’s something very hopeful in it, not about class or industrialization or really the future at all, but there’s some hope around a continuity of appreciation—for beauty, for place—that the sisters and their baby and Henry, denuded of his drive and career, seems to convey to me.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White
Nocturnes tells a story about a lost love—someone unappreciated in their time, whose value is only seen too late. Arranged in eight chapters, the book brings us back and forth in the narrator’s life, revisiting the relationship and experiences before and after it, all with a free-flowing style which blurs those boundaries in much the same way that the narrator’s memories have been made fuzzy, from repeated handling and reworking.
This is one of White’s earliest novels, published in 1978, before his semi-autobiographical trilogy of which I’ve read 2 ⅓ books. There are some early hallmarks of his signature style: the first person narrator is unnamed; the narrator is a gay American child of divorce who spends his adulthood in New York City and Continental Europe; specific personal anecdotes make an appearance. Edmund White essentially writes about himself—deservedly, as a man with an interesting life and good perspective on it—and though Nocturnes is a fiction, it’s a fiction which presages the turn to (semi) autobiography.
But there are differences from the later, famous books, too. The object of the narrator’s affection, the titular King of Naples, is also unnamed. He and his milieu are hazier than I’m used to in White’s characters, as he’s normally an author that I think of for keen observation of details. This book, for example, never explicitly names that the foreign country that the narrator moves to, first with the King and later on his own, is Italy. The title suggests this, of course, but I only felt that I knew this because I had read a version of these stories in The Beautiful Room is Empty.
The writing here is also more philosophical and less narrative than I’ve read from White before. Each chapter, each nocturne, is addressed to the narrator’s lost lover, and I wouldn’t call them neatly-themed but they do each uncover some new statement of sympathy and grief for the relationship that ended. As we eventually learn, the older lover has now passed away, and the narrator is no longer the young man who attracted him. The narrator contends with his own experiences of being an older lover, and the perspective this gives him on the generosity and patience extended to him in his youth. I don’t think this is a book for one’s twenties—the narrator’s melancholia seems to me to necessitate a personal relationship with time which only comes later.
White’s prose has a dreamy, ethereal quality. This ties together all of the blended decades and enables the narrator to shift between seventeen and twenty-five and forty-seven as his memories carry him to each. It’s a nighttime book, one which I never managed to open during daylight hours but which was perfect as the last thing before bed. Edmund White is a fantastic author, at the top of his generation, and still I’m impressed by how well one of his early novels holds up and makes an argument for itself in his body of work.
I would strongly recommend this book. It’s not quite like other books you might get from White, but that should only indicate his range. This is a beautiful, poetic work, well worth the time of any reader of queer classics.
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
Orlando is a boy in the late 1500s, coming of age under Queen Elizabeth. She’s a 36-year-old woman in 1928, nebulously married with at least one son. Her life between is continuous, but the telling—a ‘biography’—is disjoint, and the reader is required to make meaning from poetical ramblings in order to fully understand the story of her growth from boy to man to woman over the course of 350 years of English history.
This book has been on my shelf since late 2022, perhaps my oldest neglected TBR entry. After reading Mrs Dalloway last year, my interest was renewed. I’m glad that I finally read it, if only to experience the lesbian and genderfuck classic for myself. And it definitely is those things! One of the more remarkable sequences in the novel is the moment when Orlando wakes up as a woman, having spent her first 30 years male. The book is shockingly frank about the genderfluidity of Orlando (and some side characters). Pronoun use is discussed, clothing choices, societal expectations across cultures and eras. I really valued that. Certainly I’ve read other historical novels which delve into the gender side of queerness, but as expected of those periods, more often in the sense of ‘inversion’: a gay man is naturally effeminate, and so on. Orlando, starting as a boy and man, established in his masculinity (womanizing, sporting, writing—I make no claims of ground truth, only of the qualities presented in the book), then becomes a woman and retains most of his original traits. This just felt different to me; the inversion reading is still present and plausible, but the presentation also seems compatible with current transition narratives. It just feels fresh for the 1920s, and an incredible prescient approach to more recent thinking about gender.
Woolf’s dreamy prose complements that and other unexplained fantastical elements of the story, such as Orlando living for centuries. This was somewhat familiar from Mrs Dalloway, where stream of consciousness narration sometimes took the reader in weird places, but it was also distinct: where Mrs Dalloway expands time to fill a novel with the events of one day, Orlando contracts it so that we gallop through a century in a chapter. Time doesn’t move linearly. After a relatively straightforward progression through Orlando’s twenties for about the first half of the book, we make a hard jump forward to the 1700s. As with the gender change, there is no narrative warning for this. Overall, I think this conceit works more than it doesn’t; there’s a rolling sense of catastrophe that Orlando is barely outpacing as she runs ahead through time, until it catches up with her in the present day and she is forced to face crisis. The prose frequently dips into poetical symbolism which wields insignificant detail to elide something. The most memorable example is the multipage scrawl on nothing before the harsh, one-sentence paragraph revealing that Orlando was pregnant and has given birth. It’s trippy. I want to describe the reading experience as destabilizing, and Woolf is impressively able to evoke that feeling.
What I wish I’d known before reading is that Orlando includes a great deal of explicit and implicit racism, especially against Black and Romani people. This is widely discussed by academics, it’s on the book’s Wiki page, but as a lay reader I wasn’t aware of that reputation, only that of the book’s status as a queer classic. I’ve read that Woolf was satirizing Vita Sackville-West’s objectification of Romani culture, which, your mileage may vary on that explanation vis-a-vis the portrayal of the Romani characters in the book. But the violence against Black people and Black bodies is present from the first sentence, continues through the end, and seems a reflection of the author’s actual values.
So, I take some beautiful things from Orlando: its radical approach to queerness, and its distinctive relationship with time as expressed through prose. But I cannot shirk its racism in discussing the book, and so I can’t make—I don’t want to make—an unequivocal recommendation for it.
The Woman of Colour: A Tale, by an anonymous author
Edited by Lyndon J. Dominique
This 1808 epistolary novel, reissued in 2008 for its bicentennial, is the story of a biracial Jamaican heiress who travels to England to satisfy the conditions of her white father’s will in order to receive her dowry of sixty thousand pounds. Olivia Fairfield is smart, devout, and well-spoken—educated by a white English governess (the recipient of her letters, Mrs. Milbanke), Olivia is “more than half an English woman” and ably argues for racial equality when confronted with the prejudices of genteel England. She and her Black servant, Dido, together weather the crisis of a marriage plot, the machinations of a hostile white relative, and the trials of upper middle class society, to reach their eventual triumph.
This novel is didactic and leans on Christianity to represent moral virtue. But how could it not? Olivia, as the lead, but also Dido as her servant, must be unimpeachable in order to serve the narrative purpose of persuasively arguing that racial prejudice is unjust. Professor Dominique’s introduction contextualizes the timeframe: Britain’s participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was ended by an Act of Parliament in just 1807, and the manuscript for this book could very well have been written before then. This is one of the earliest extant novels to depict a woman of color, let alone to give her interiority—something that it accomplishes wonderfully, because even with the moral didacticism in all of those scripture quotes, Olivia shines as a funny, sharp, and independent character whose kindness endears her and whose hardships we lament.
For me, reading this provoked the same set of feelings that I hear in others’ reactions to Jane Austen novels. We set up from the start with two suitors for Olivia: her temporary traveling companion from Jamaica, Mr. Honeyduke, and her intended and first cousin, Mr. Augustus Merton. Both are white men and both are good men—though we do learn that Augustus initially recoiled from Olivia’s Blackness, and overcame that prejudice on getting to know her—and in a typical marriage plot, Olivia would have a happy marriage with either. I won’t spoil it here, because I think this is an absolute must-read, but what I’ll say is that no man overwhelms the narrative, and Olivia always remains gloriously central and gloriously herself, dedicated to her friendships and to her inherent dignity and self-worth. She’s everything I want from a Regency heroine, including the many biting moments of weaponized manners as she addresses the racism of her sister-in-law and other social relations.
I was just really bowled over by this book, which would have been valuable as an artifact even if it were bad, but it was not bad, and actually very good on its own merits. It came to be via a colleague, and I’m very lucky for that—there doesn’t seem to be a copy on Project Gutenberg, and I’ve never seen it discussed amongst other Regency era works, though it so obviously deserves to be. And the editing by Professor Dominique in the Broadview edition, whose introduction, footnotes, and appendixes make the text and its context accessible, is a strong argument for buying or borrowing that physical reissue. I put this one down for fans of Austen, independent heroines, and historical literature!
Despised and Rejected, by Rose Allatini
This 1918 novel (reissued in 2018 by Persephone Books, and otherwise difficult to access) is a strident Pacifist argument, which ultimately resulted in its censorship and the destruction of unsold copies—probably contributing to the lack of modern digitization, despite the text being out of copyright. (And I’d love a digital copy to mark up!) That alone makes it worthwhile to track down one of the reprints.
Dennis Blackwood, a 25-year-old composer, and Antoinette de Courcy, a similarly-aged Anglo-French woman, meet during a sort of family holiday in June 1914. The Blackwoods hope that eldest son Dennis might court Antoinette, and Antoinette, though focused on the intriguing, solo vacationer Hester Cawthorn, recognizes in Dennis an opportunity to follow the expected social script. They part with promises to write to each other, and that’s the last bit of a society novel in this book. On his own again, Dennis meets, falls in love with, and flees Alan Rutherford, the socialist son of a coal mine owner; on her own, Antoinette reunites with Hester, falls out of love with her, and drifts. Dennis and Antoinette meet months later in London, after the onset of WWI, and their failed sham of a romance and Dennis’ status as a conscientious objector dominate the remainder of the novel.
Right out, I found the weakest part of the novel to be the romantic relationship between Dennis and Antoinette. Rather, the weakness is the choice to write Antoinette as genuinely in love with Dennis, however you interpret that, after Dennis ends his pursuit of her hand in marriage. I separate out the courting period from her obsession afterwards, because that initial courtship is an interesting and believable tension, whereas the later format fails to persuade. Dennis initially courts Antoinette in the wake of Alan, alluring and likeminded soulmate, and during the monumental shifting of norms which was the outbreak of the war. He’s unsettled in his sense of self and is embattled on all sides by society’s pressure that he should enlist (like his brother, like his childhood neighbors). Antoinette, for her part, has just solved the “mystery” of Hester, and this taste of excitement has made the oppression of her home life seem ever more stark; she doesn’t love Dennis and repeatedly acknowledges this, but he’s a non-brutish option among men. The fact that they both make this bad decision to date, in pursuit of stability/normalcy/freedom from other oppressions is narratively satisfying! The reader wants to see this mid-book mistake as they work towards a true knowledge of self.
The problem comes after Dennis calls their end—Antoinette has, improbably, just the day before, decided that she feels real love for Dennis. On one hand, I can see some of what the author was going for: Antoinette has been established as liking the pursuit of unattainable people; she’s desperately unhappy as an unmarried adult woman trapped by restrictive parents; Antoinette seems to draw from the author herself, whose life would also head towards marriage before divorce and a female life companion. Antoinette’s choice to cling to Dennis is not narratively unmotivated. Unfortunately, it is narratively bad, and it drags down both Dennis and Antoinette as characters.
Tackling Antoinette first, the obsessive love slows her growth down to a crawl. Up to that point, she’s on the cusp of self-actualization, and chasing her crush, Hester, is a big part of that. There, she begins lying to her parents so that she can leave the house, something she continues during Dennis’ initial courtship. Hester turns out to be “boring”—there’s nothing special about her normal life—but she alludes to lesbianism in a way that’s clearly novel to Antoinette. Freed from Dennis, Antoinette could have returned to that, maybe using the Pacifist group to link up with Suffragettes or other female activists who might have given her direction and/or companionship. Instead, she mopes and hangs around Dennis at Pacifist meetups in Mrs. Mowbray’s cafe. She takes no interest in the group’s politics, nor really in their members, except for continuing to make calf eyes at Dennis, who mostly ignores her. Frustratingly, she’s at this point the primary POV character, and it’s through her eyes that we see Dennis’ C.O. hearing, or hear about the outcomes for side characters, even those whose significant relationship is with Dennis. This reduction to Antoinette’s character could be frustrating to readers who want to see in her an uncomplicated lesbian. For my part, I have sympathy for the clear confusion of her writing, though it’s definitely weak compared to the premise set up in the first third of the novel.
Now, on Dennis: if Antoinette is stuck playing the narrative role that she is, then Dennis’ character must engage with that so that she remains present and relevant—and the result is an unsupported late-book turn towards assholery. Dennis is made to keep accepting Antoinette’s advances, kissing her in tumultuous, moody scenes almost at random. He can’t explain this; at these moments, he’s only given dialogue along the lines of, “I’m horrible and you shouldn’t let me do this to you.” But because this is also the part of the book where we’re most shut out of his head, we never really learn a motivation for his actions, good or bad. His few POV scenes are spent with Alan and feel drawn from a different novel. I don’t hate Dennis for this bad behavior; I rather love him. But whether a reader likes or dislikes him at this point probably comes down to how easily that reader can dissociate his nonsensical turn to absolute cad from the character which had been established before, and that exists in scenes with Alan.
I don’t want to bag on the novel’s writing entirely. It’s extremely readable, with a fast and free-flowing energy that manages to avoid becoming hopelessly bogged down by those weaker elements. There are two distinct social crowds (that of the Blackwood family and neighbors, and the Pacifists), which are often very fun on the page and enable fun commentary. I also want to praise the plain, straightforward treatment of both queerness and pacifism in the book—it feels genuinely radical in its context, and Dennis especially delivers unequivocal, steadfast statements of support for both issues such that his position is difficult to misunderstand. I love implications and romantic friendships as much as anyone, but I deeply admire that Rose Allatini set out to write gay characters and characters who advocated against the ongoing war, and to do so without compromising their selves and values—and followed through. In fact, no gay character ends up unhappily married or dead, though Dennis and Alan are in prison as C.O.s. I don’t fault Allatini for being unwilling to fictionalize the future of such a devastating conflict in order to give them a more definitive ending, though.
So, is what she delivers a flawless classic? No, definitely not. But I greatly enjoyed it. I loved Dennis and Alan and their romance, which culminates with (explicitly stated, not on-page) sex—eat your heart out, Mary Renault. I found Antoinette interesting, if frustrating after early promise. I liked the wider cast. The unflinching look at WWI era C.O.s was new to me, and well worth experiencing from a writer of the time. For me, this is a book that absolutely deserved its rescue, and should have a wider audience among readers of WWI fiction and historical queer novels.
Howards End, by E. M. Forster
I finished my reread of HE just ahead of the final meeting of my book group, on May first. Reading it to run a book group was a very different experience, as might be expected. For posterity, the break points that I chose were:
- Thru ch. 11 (Ruth’s death/negotiation of the will)
- Thru ch. 26 (Revelation of the Henry/Jacky affair)
- Thru end
This is roughly a division into thirds. The first chunk was obvious to me: Ruth forms a narrative and thematic cornerstone, and her entire life on the page is a sort of groundwork for the rest of the novel, and good to consider together. I debated the second break point, but the Jacky affair won out because it rather neatly encapsulated the portion of the novel which develops Helen’s interest in the Basts. Soon after that, she leaves for Europe, and the final chunk is the mystery and resolution of her disappearance. I would choose these divisions again!
Reading one book slowly is great for a group activity—people had time to develop their thoughts over the course of multiple meetings. No one liked Henry, as expected. But the sisters were responsible for provoking more complex reactions, something that I also felt on this second reading. As I remember my initial impressions, I liked Helen and Margaret and thought them complex, well-written characters. That hasn’t changed, per se, but I found myself cringing frequently at some stated view of poverty or class, or otherwise struggling with their contrast of professed versus lived values. In short, the girls are kind of bourgeois!
With time and my memory of how awful the Wilcoxes are, I had kind of upgraded the Schlegel sisters’ position. The reread was hard on this count—I sometimes felt nearly embarrassed by what Helen or Margaret said. Weirdly, my group didn’t comment on this. They were primarily disappointed by Margaret’s marriage and subservience to Henry, and Helen’s immaturity. Understandable! But I struggled more with the messaging about class in this go around.
Tibby remained a dear favorite. His flaws are all on the surface and so I continue to find them easy to process. Surprisingly, this was also true of Henry for me, who I do not like but I don’t resent on the page at all. I did a closer reading of his scenes this time and though he remains as sexist as ever, there were moments of true charm that I now can notice, and his appeal to Ruth and Margaret is just a bit more legible as a result.
The ending still gets to me and makes me teary. There’s something very hopeful in it, not about class or industrialization or really the future at all, but there’s some hope around a continuity of appreciation—for beauty, for place—that the sisters and their baby and Henry, denuded of his drive and career, seems to convey to me.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White
Nocturnes tells a story about a lost love—someone unappreciated in their time, whose value is only seen too late. Arranged in eight chapters, the book brings us back and forth in the narrator’s life, revisiting the relationship and experiences before and after it, all with a free-flowing style which blurs those boundaries in much the same way that the narrator’s memories have been made fuzzy, from repeated handling and reworking.
This is one of White’s earliest novels, published in 1978, before his semi-autobiographical trilogy of which I’ve read 2 ⅓ books. There are some early hallmarks of his signature style: the first person narrator is unnamed; the narrator is a gay American child of divorce who spends his adulthood in New York City and Continental Europe; specific personal anecdotes make an appearance. Edmund White essentially writes about himself—deservedly, as a man with an interesting life and good perspective on it—and though Nocturnes is a fiction, it’s a fiction which presages the turn to (semi) autobiography.
But there are differences from the later, famous books, too. The object of the narrator’s affection, the titular King of Naples, is also unnamed. He and his milieu are hazier than I’m used to in White’s characters, as he’s normally an author that I think of for keen observation of details. This book, for example, never explicitly names that the foreign country that the narrator moves to, first with the King and later on his own, is Italy. The title suggests this, of course, but I only felt that I knew this because I had read a version of these stories in The Beautiful Room is Empty.
The writing here is also more philosophical and less narrative than I’ve read from White before. Each chapter, each nocturne, is addressed to the narrator’s lost lover, and I wouldn’t call them neatly-themed but they do each uncover some new statement of sympathy and grief for the relationship that ended. As we eventually learn, the older lover has now passed away, and the narrator is no longer the young man who attracted him. The narrator contends with his own experiences of being an older lover, and the perspective this gives him on the generosity and patience extended to him in his youth. I don’t think this is a book for one’s twenties—the narrator’s melancholia seems to me to necessitate a personal relationship with time which only comes later.
White’s prose has a dreamy, ethereal quality. This ties together all of the blended decades and enables the narrator to shift between seventeen and twenty-five and forty-seven as his memories carry him to each. It’s a nighttime book, one which I never managed to open during daylight hours but which was perfect as the last thing before bed. Edmund White is a fantastic author, at the top of his generation, and still I’m impressed by how well one of his early novels holds up and makes an argument for itself in his body of work.
I would strongly recommend this book. It’s not quite like other books you might get from White, but that should only indicate his range. This is a beautiful, poetic work, well worth the time of any reader of queer classics.
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
Orlando is a boy in the late 1500s, coming of age under Queen Elizabeth. She’s a 36-year-old woman in 1928, nebulously married with at least one son. Her life between is continuous, but the telling—a ‘biography’—is disjoint, and the reader is required to make meaning from poetical ramblings in order to fully understand the story of her growth from boy to man to woman over the course of 350 years of English history.
This book has been on my shelf since late 2022, perhaps my oldest neglected TBR entry. After reading Mrs Dalloway last year, my interest was renewed. I’m glad that I finally read it, if only to experience the lesbian and genderfuck classic for myself. And it definitely is those things! One of the more remarkable sequences in the novel is the moment when Orlando wakes up as a woman, having spent her first 30 years male. The book is shockingly frank about the genderfluidity of Orlando (and some side characters). Pronoun use is discussed, clothing choices, societal expectations across cultures and eras. I really valued that. Certainly I’ve read other historical novels which delve into the gender side of queerness, but as expected of those periods, more often in the sense of ‘inversion’: a gay man is naturally effeminate, and so on. Orlando, starting as a boy and man, established in his masculinity (womanizing, sporting, writing—I make no claims of ground truth, only of the qualities presented in the book), then becomes a woman and retains most of his original traits. This just felt different to me; the inversion reading is still present and plausible, but the presentation also seems compatible with current transition narratives. It just feels fresh for the 1920s, and an incredible prescient approach to more recent thinking about gender.
Woolf’s dreamy prose complements that and other unexplained fantastical elements of the story, such as Orlando living for centuries. This was somewhat familiar from Mrs Dalloway, where stream of consciousness narration sometimes took the reader in weird places, but it was also distinct: where Mrs Dalloway expands time to fill a novel with the events of one day, Orlando contracts it so that we gallop through a century in a chapter. Time doesn’t move linearly. After a relatively straightforward progression through Orlando’s twenties for about the first half of the book, we make a hard jump forward to the 1700s. As with the gender change, there is no narrative warning for this. Overall, I think this conceit works more than it doesn’t; there’s a rolling sense of catastrophe that Orlando is barely outpacing as she runs ahead through time, until it catches up with her in the present day and she is forced to face crisis. The prose frequently dips into poetical symbolism which wields insignificant detail to elide something. The most memorable example is the multipage scrawl on nothing before the harsh, one-sentence paragraph revealing that Orlando was pregnant and has given birth. It’s trippy. I want to describe the reading experience as destabilizing, and Woolf is impressively able to evoke that feeling.
What I wish I’d known before reading is that Orlando includes a great deal of explicit and implicit racism, especially against Black and Romani people. This is widely discussed by academics, it’s on the book’s Wiki page, but as a lay reader I wasn’t aware of that reputation, only that of the book’s status as a queer classic. I’ve read that Woolf was satirizing Vita Sackville-West’s objectification of Romani culture, which, your mileage may vary on that explanation vis-a-vis the portrayal of the Romani characters in the book. But the violence against Black people and Black bodies is present from the first sentence, continues through the end, and seems a reflection of the author’s actual values.
So, I take some beautiful things from Orlando: its radical approach to queerness, and its distinctive relationship with time as expressed through prose. But I cannot shirk its racism in discussing the book, and so I can’t make—I don’t want to make—an unequivocal recommendation for it.
The Woman of Colour: A Tale, by an anonymous author
Edited by Lyndon J. Dominique
This 1808 epistolary novel, reissued in 2008 for its bicentennial, is the story of a biracial Jamaican heiress who travels to England to satisfy the conditions of her white father’s will in order to receive her dowry of sixty thousand pounds. Olivia Fairfield is smart, devout, and well-spoken—educated by a white English governess (the recipient of her letters, Mrs. Milbanke), Olivia is “more than half an English woman” and ably argues for racial equality when confronted with the prejudices of genteel England. She and her Black servant, Dido, together weather the crisis of a marriage plot, the machinations of a hostile white relative, and the trials of upper middle class society, to reach their eventual triumph.
This novel is didactic and leans on Christianity to represent moral virtue. But how could it not? Olivia, as the lead, but also Dido as her servant, must be unimpeachable in order to serve the narrative purpose of persuasively arguing that racial prejudice is unjust. Professor Dominique’s introduction contextualizes the timeframe: Britain’s participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was ended by an Act of Parliament in just 1807, and the manuscript for this book could very well have been written before then. This is one of the earliest extant novels to depict a woman of color, let alone to give her interiority—something that it accomplishes wonderfully, because even with the moral didacticism in all of those scripture quotes, Olivia shines as a funny, sharp, and independent character whose kindness endears her and whose hardships we lament.
For me, reading this provoked the same set of feelings that I hear in others’ reactions to Jane Austen novels. We set up from the start with two suitors for Olivia: her temporary traveling companion from Jamaica, Mr. Honeyduke, and her intended and first cousin, Mr. Augustus Merton. Both are white men and both are good men—though we do learn that Augustus initially recoiled from Olivia’s Blackness, and overcame that prejudice on getting to know her—and in a typical marriage plot, Olivia would have a happy marriage with either. I won’t spoil it here, because I think this is an absolute must-read, but what I’ll say is that no man overwhelms the narrative, and Olivia always remains gloriously central and gloriously herself, dedicated to her friendships and to her inherent dignity and self-worth. She’s everything I want from a Regency heroine, including the many biting moments of weaponized manners as she addresses the racism of her sister-in-law and other social relations.
I was just really bowled over by this book, which would have been valuable as an artifact even if it were bad, but it was not bad, and actually very good on its own merits. It came to be via a colleague, and I’m very lucky for that—there doesn’t seem to be a copy on Project Gutenberg, and I’ve never seen it discussed amongst other Regency era works, though it so obviously deserves to be. And the editing by Professor Dominique in the Broadview edition, whose introduction, footnotes, and appendixes make the text and its context accessible, is a strong argument for buying or borrowing that physical reissue. I put this one down for fans of Austen, independent heroines, and historical literature!
Despised and Rejected, by Rose Allatini
This 1918 novel (reissued in 2018 by Persephone Books, and otherwise difficult to access) is a strident Pacifist argument, which ultimately resulted in its censorship and the destruction of unsold copies—probably contributing to the lack of modern digitization, despite the text being out of copyright. (And I’d love a digital copy to mark up!) That alone makes it worthwhile to track down one of the reprints.
Dennis Blackwood, a 25-year-old composer, and Antoinette de Courcy, a similarly-aged Anglo-French woman, meet during a sort of family holiday in June 1914. The Blackwoods hope that eldest son Dennis might court Antoinette, and Antoinette, though focused on the intriguing, solo vacationer Hester Cawthorn, recognizes in Dennis an opportunity to follow the expected social script. They part with promises to write to each other, and that’s the last bit of a society novel in this book. On his own again, Dennis meets, falls in love with, and flees Alan Rutherford, the socialist son of a coal mine owner; on her own, Antoinette reunites with Hester, falls out of love with her, and drifts. Dennis and Antoinette meet months later in London, after the onset of WWI, and their failed sham of a romance and Dennis’ status as a conscientious objector dominate the remainder of the novel.
Right out, I found the weakest part of the novel to be the romantic relationship between Dennis and Antoinette. Rather, the weakness is the choice to write Antoinette as genuinely in love with Dennis, however you interpret that, after Dennis ends his pursuit of her hand in marriage. I separate out the courting period from her obsession afterwards, because that initial courtship is an interesting and believable tension, whereas the later format fails to persuade. Dennis initially courts Antoinette in the wake of Alan, alluring and likeminded soulmate, and during the monumental shifting of norms which was the outbreak of the war. He’s unsettled in his sense of self and is embattled on all sides by society’s pressure that he should enlist (like his brother, like his childhood neighbors). Antoinette, for her part, has just solved the “mystery” of Hester, and this taste of excitement has made the oppression of her home life seem ever more stark; she doesn’t love Dennis and repeatedly acknowledges this, but he’s a non-brutish option among men. The fact that they both make this bad decision to date, in pursuit of stability/normalcy/freedom from other oppressions is narratively satisfying! The reader wants to see this mid-book mistake as they work towards a true knowledge of self.
The problem comes after Dennis calls their end—Antoinette has, improbably, just the day before, decided that she feels real love for Dennis. On one hand, I can see some of what the author was going for: Antoinette has been established as liking the pursuit of unattainable people; she’s desperately unhappy as an unmarried adult woman trapped by restrictive parents; Antoinette seems to draw from the author herself, whose life would also head towards marriage before divorce and a female life companion. Antoinette’s choice to cling to Dennis is not narratively unmotivated. Unfortunately, it is narratively bad, and it drags down both Dennis and Antoinette as characters.
Tackling Antoinette first, the obsessive love slows her growth down to a crawl. Up to that point, she’s on the cusp of self-actualization, and chasing her crush, Hester, is a big part of that. There, she begins lying to her parents so that she can leave the house, something she continues during Dennis’ initial courtship. Hester turns out to be “boring”—there’s nothing special about her normal life—but she alludes to lesbianism in a way that’s clearly novel to Antoinette. Freed from Dennis, Antoinette could have returned to that, maybe using the Pacifist group to link up with Suffragettes or other female activists who might have given her direction and/or companionship. Instead, she mopes and hangs around Dennis at Pacifist meetups in Mrs. Mowbray’s cafe. She takes no interest in the group’s politics, nor really in their members, except for continuing to make calf eyes at Dennis, who mostly ignores her. Frustratingly, she’s at this point the primary POV character, and it’s through her eyes that we see Dennis’ C.O. hearing, or hear about the outcomes for side characters, even those whose significant relationship is with Dennis. This reduction to Antoinette’s character could be frustrating to readers who want to see in her an uncomplicated lesbian. For my part, I have sympathy for the clear confusion of her writing, though it’s definitely weak compared to the premise set up in the first third of the novel.
Now, on Dennis: if Antoinette is stuck playing the narrative role that she is, then Dennis’ character must engage with that so that she remains present and relevant—and the result is an unsupported late-book turn towards assholery. Dennis is made to keep accepting Antoinette’s advances, kissing her in tumultuous, moody scenes almost at random. He can’t explain this; at these moments, he’s only given dialogue along the lines of, “I’m horrible and you shouldn’t let me do this to you.” But because this is also the part of the book where we’re most shut out of his head, we never really learn a motivation for his actions, good or bad. His few POV scenes are spent with Alan and feel drawn from a different novel. I don’t hate Dennis for this bad behavior; I rather love him. But whether a reader likes or dislikes him at this point probably comes down to how easily that reader can dissociate his nonsensical turn to absolute cad from the character which had been established before, and that exists in scenes with Alan.
I don’t want to bag on the novel’s writing entirely. It’s extremely readable, with a fast and free-flowing energy that manages to avoid becoming hopelessly bogged down by those weaker elements. There are two distinct social crowds (that of the Blackwood family and neighbors, and the Pacifists), which are often very fun on the page and enable fun commentary. I also want to praise the plain, straightforward treatment of both queerness and pacifism in the book—it feels genuinely radical in its context, and Dennis especially delivers unequivocal, steadfast statements of support for both issues such that his position is difficult to misunderstand. I love implications and romantic friendships as much as anyone, but I deeply admire that Rose Allatini set out to write gay characters and characters who advocated against the ongoing war, and to do so without compromising their selves and values—and followed through. In fact, no gay character ends up unhappily married or dead, though Dennis and Alan are in prison as C.O.s. I don’t fault Allatini for being unwilling to fictionalize the future of such a devastating conflict in order to give them a more definitive ending, though.
So, is what she delivers a flawless classic? No, definitely not. But I greatly enjoyed it. I loved Dennis and Alan and their romance, which culminates with (explicitly stated, not on-page) sex—eat your heart out, Mary Renault. I found Antoinette interesting, if frustrating after early promise. I liked the wider cast. The unflinching look at WWI era C.O.s was new to me, and well worth experiencing from a writer of the time. For me, this is a book that absolutely deserved its rescue, and should have a wider audience among readers of WWI fiction and historical queer novels.
