Tales for Christmas Eve by Rhoda Broughton (1873)

 This is five shorter pieces - a couple classifiable as long stories, and the others novellas, broadly speaking. They also have a thematic connection with one another in that they all bar one have a supernatural bias. Positioned as they are before what signifies this genre with most modern readers, they will appear a little tame to them. The first, The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth is constructed of an exchange of letters between two society women where a new address of one of them is slowly revealed to be haunted - Broughton suffixes this one with one line: "This is a true story". The Man with the Nose is a novella of a young couple travelling in Europe, where the wife is disturbed by the constant popping up of a stranger with a pronounced nose, and an evil feeling about him, even in her dreams. The husband doesn't happen to note him, is disbelieving and leaves her in a hotel to return to Britain on business. She begs him to stay. When he returns, she is gone, never to be found. This one is prefixed with a claim of truth. Behold, it was a Dream! is a novella of a woman's journey to stay with friends, a couple recently married, to see their new home in the country. On her first night with them she has a premonitory dream about them being murdered by a farm worker with a sickle, in a grotesque sea of blood. She is horrified and makes plans to leave, completely unsettled, though the couple laugh it off and beg her to stay. On a journey to see around the farm before she goes she is startled to see a worker in the fields who is the spitting image of the man in her dream, and points him out to the couple. Despite their disbelief of her, after she has left for home, they fire him. She learns subsequently that the gruesome events of her dream have come to pass, as the disgruntled farm worker returns to the house to exact his revenge. This one has anti-Irish commentary which make it a problem. Broughton says in a last paragraph that this story is true in every respect except where it took place. Poor Pretty Bobby is the longest novella, and slightly more subtle. A young woman's sailor sweetheart returns to her in a dream, wet through, and she later discovers that this visitation occurred on the night his ship was wrecked. This is the only piece which doesn't have a claim of underlying truth attached. Under the Cloak tells the story of a wealthy woman and her maid on a train journey in Switzerland. They share a compartment with two gentlemen reading papers. The light is dim and they're not particularly visible behind their broadsheets. One of them finally lowers his paper and offers them an unknown drink from his flask. It becomes clear that it is some sort of drug, as the maid quickly falls asleep, and the woman becomes highly drowsy. She feels them attempting to remove her case of valuables from beneath her feet, and in a highly mixed and dubious state realises that the one who has never lowered his paper is in fact a dummy with fake hands, or someone rigged up in that way, wrapped in a heavy cloak. She eventually falls completely under the drug's effect, and wakes to find the man who revealed himself and her maid gone, but the strangely garbed figure still in his position. Summoning courage, she desperately scrapes at the mask she sees it has, and pulls away all the false paraphernalia, to find underneath her maid bound and gagged. This crime, she discovers later, has been perpetrated by a disaffected former servant of her husband. Again, this is suffixed with a claim of genuineness. Though these are very entertaining, they perhaps don't fully play to Broughton's strengths - in her novels she is able to probe emotion and character in a way that these don't allow. 

Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (1873)

This novel is marked in a couple of ways. The most insistently noticeable is that it is written in the present tense. We follow Nancy Grey as one of six 'children' in a mid-Victorian family in the country. At their sizeable house, the children (who are in reality aged between 11 and the early twenties) still occupy the supplicant position in their home - they are all still regular denizens of the nursery, where their tea is taken separately, and they indulge in boisterous games. This is an excellent reminder of the very different position of young adults at that time. Whilst on the one hand they are frightened of their gruff father, and repair to their upper floor to shout and carry on, on the other the older ones are thinking about marriage and smoking freely. The unusual feel of the present tense keeps this unusual (for us, not them) situation humming. An old school friend of their despised father, Roger Tempest, who is in his late forties, is staying with them. Previously his age has kept him apart, but he has proved interesting because he doesn't appear to harbour the same bitterness as their parent. Needless to say, he shows signs of interest in Nancy, who is around 20. She is youthful, immature, noisy-but-thoughtful - and cannot wait to get away from childhood and their grim father. So, despite his incredible age, she accepts him. On their honeymoon in Germany they meet a young neighbour of Roger, Frank Musgrave, who pays Nancy a lot of attention and clearly finds her company appealing. Nancy persists, in her ignorance, in regarding him simply as a friend in these tough first times away from the only companions she has ever known. Back in England, and ensconced in her new large home, Musgrave is a regular visitor. He tells her of another neighbour, Zelphine Huntley, who he claims was Roger's fiancee in both their youths, and who abandoned him. Nancy's bounding nature jumps to jealousy, much as Musgrave may have hoped it would. Every time she sees Zelphine, she seems to be having private tete-a-tetes with Roger - at parties and balls she favours him and whisks him off for private conversations. Nancy is left reeling, and the all-but-confrontations she and Roger keep having keep amounting to nothing at the last moment. Roger is absent for a while in the West Indies on business, trying to save Zelphine's dissolute husband from making even more of a mess of his affairs. Musgrave capitalises on this to press his suit. Again and again, the same almostness pervades the scene. They keep almost coming to grips, and missing it by inches. Nancy remains apparently blissfully unaware of the deeper affections which surround her, and yet.....not completely so. One evening, in a wood between their estates, Musgrave finally blurts out his feelings directly, and Nancy is "horrified" and crying, despite there having been hints of her nascent understanding of him. She emerges from the wood, teary and flustered, only to see Zelphine driving by, and noticing her particularly with a meaning look! When Roger returns it soon becomes clear that Zelphine has mentioned it. Roger urges Nancy, in guarded terms, to come clean about what has occurred, clearly thinking that she's been unfaithful to him. Nancy is lost in her own suspicions about Zelphine and her husband, as well as shame at having seemed to lead Musgrave on and been involved in 'questionable' behaviour in public, and makes an odd decision - to lie. Nothing has happened at all, she insists to Roger, Zelphine is lying. They both go through agonies of uncertainty and non-communication with one another, and their marriage looks doomed. Musgrave, bitter and confused, seeks out Nancy's softer elder sister Barbara, and asks her to marry him, which had been the outward plan all through his secret affection for Nancy. Barbara is delighted that her seemingly terminally hesitant suitor has finally come around, and Nancy feels separation from her for the first time in her life - she can't tell her the real story for fear of breaking Barbara's heart. All this time, Nancy and Barbara's oldest brother, Algy, has been the faithful dog at Zelphine's feet, having fallen for her and developed drooping and sotted habits as his fortunes with this temptress rise and fall, and jealousy at Roger's closeness to her takes its toll. Eventually he becomes ill, and is near to dying. Barbara nurses him back from the brink of succumbing to the fever which has been decimating the district, only to feel its effects herself almost as soon as Algy is out of danger. Barbara is not so lucky as her brother, and catastrophe comes in her death. Nancy is prostrate with grief, and nothing at her new home is calling her to stay. She heads back to the family home, and to a period of intense reflection. Having decided to try to forgive Roger his love for Zelphine, and ask him for his forgiveness for her lies, she returns to the marital home, stopping in first to the churchyard where Barbara is buried. There she encounters a miserable Roger by Barbara's grave, and they finally have the honest conversation which has been in the offing for so long, clearing the air and providing the makings for a chastened new beginning. Roger and Zelphine's engagement is revealed as a gossip-originated construction of Musgrave's in order to gull Nancy, and so the road is cleared for reconciliation with Nancy's own honesty about what happened in the wood. My impatience with the consistent avoidance of these two (and Nancy and Musgrave's) coming to an understanding resides in the fact that it doesn't follow their characters as set up - they are both engagers, and Nancy is a perversely honest blurter. It makes for a feeling of trumped-upness which mars this a little. Broughton is still as charming as always, however, so it's a flaw in the crystal which is more noticeable, and yet not terminal. Here's hoping for more psychologically tenable plotting from her in future.

Commonplace Book

'He lifts his eyes again, and again their keen search investigates the depths of my soul; but no human eye can rightly read the secrets of any other human spirit: they find what they expect to find, not what is there..'

from Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXXVI)

"Good-bye, Sweetheart!" by Rhoda Broughton (1872)

If Broughton is to be repromoted, the inescapable likening would need to be Austen I think. This is not to say that they are in any way identical, but their novels live at the same magnification, there is something in the size of the scene, the centrality of the small number of female characters, usually sisters, and the underlying wit or lifeworn humour. Broughton is late nineteenth century in her embracing of more tragedy, and she is less of an obvious wit than her predecessor, preferring instead a species of what I have hitherto called cheekiness - it might better be typified as a kind of amused small-scale daring. This fourth instalment in the bibliography is again about a pair of sisters, Jemima and Lenore Herrick, with the later intrusion of their settled superficial elder sibling, Sylvia. Jemima is 28 and quite plain and sensible, has never had an admirer. Lenore is 19, and is the beautiful indulged baby of the family. She has always been able, since an early illness as a little one, to command everything she wants and not brook any interruption or opposition. On holiday in Brittany, they encounter two young Englishmen - Paul Le Mesurier is not terribly handsome, not terribly impressed with any woman, and has a cold, commanding manner; Charlie Scrope is big, blond, handsome and very easily led. Lenore is shocked by Paul's indifference - he's the first man who appears completely unmoved by her beauty, and she immediately conceives a fascination with him and the challenge he holds out. Charlie is very taken with Lenore, a circumstance which many other women might be delighted with, but his pretty amiability bores her. We follow as Paul and Lenore circle one another and gradually begin to get over their initial antagonism - which has involved them in some amusing contretemps. They fall in love, but their relationship is fraught with argument and friction as their primary natures rub and scrape at one another. Paul leaves for England, among other things in order to prepare his conservative family for the advent of Lenore. In the remainder of their holiday, a bored Lenore flirts quite strongly with Charlie to keep herself occupied. Back in Wales, at Sylvia's comfortable home in the country, Lenore and Paul prepare for marriage, but Paul's now savagely jealous nature has detected that there just might be something Lenore is hiding about what occurred after he left France. On the day of the wedding, all finally explodes as Lenore's flirting is exposed, as is her unwillingness to edit herself for genteel respectability. Paul leaves permanently. Lenore travels quickly from rage to a kind of nervous prostration. On the rebound, and pining desperately for Paul, she agrees to marry Charlie who has been unable to keep himself away. That move is quickly exposed as impossible; Lenore is not able to care for Charlie as she does for Paul. Trapped by her own pride and wilfulness, her health begins to suffer, but the family think she'll get over it if they head to warmer, clearer climes. In Switzerland, out on a solitary walk, Lenore, to her amazement, meets Paul coming in the opposite direction. As he speaks of his forthcoming marriage, all her hopes of reconciliation are dashed. There is also an embarrassing meeting with the Scropes who are staying in the same hotel. Charlie renews his courting, but Lenore will have none of it, keeping his devotedness hanging on a string as usual. Then she begins to look feebler, thinning out even more than beforehand, and it slowly becomes clear that consumption has caught up with her weakened state. The Herricks are trapped at the Swiss hotel for many weeks, unable to move Lenore. In a last desperate attempt, Charlie is sent off to fetch Paul, so that Lenore can see him one more time - but he returns alone; he has arrived on Paul's wedding day, meaning that there is no conceivable way Paul can accompany him back. This is the end for Lenore. And the novel ends there, which is not the most upbeat of endings, despite I guess being a very artistically sound one. That's not Austen - would it disturb her enthusiasts? Probably.

Commonplace Book

'It is a circumstance never to be enough deplored by the female world that marriages and drawing-rooms are broad daylight ceremonies. Mature necks and faces, that the great bold sun makes look as yellow as old law deeds or as the love letters of twenty years ago, would gleam creamily, waxily white, if illumined only by benevolent candles, that seem to see and make seen only beauties and slur over defects. Even the lilies and roses of youth - unlike the smooth perfection of their garden types - are conscious of little pits and specks and flaws when day holds his great searching lamp right into their faces. Day repudiates tulle and tarletane; they are none of his; and as he cannot rid himself of them he retaliates by behaving as glaringly and unhandsomely as he can to them...'

from "Good-Bye, Sweetheart!" by Rhoda Broughton (Part II, Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'"She is so young," says Frederic, deprecatingly. "I should hope that one might be able to mould her ---"

"Mould her!" echoes Paul, derisively. "My dear boy, it would take you all your time. She would comb your hair with a three-legged stool."'

from "Good-bye, Sweetheart!" by Rhoda Broughton (Part I, Chapter X)

Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (1870)

This is the first post beyond Broughton's inauguration, whose two books were so varied. In this, she settles for what may end up being her trademarks - a kind of youthful cheekiness, 1870s-style, which looks in the context of today like deeply conservative, almost classical elegance; and a tendency toward the celebration of the tragedy of death, a Victorian trait, which seems to act like an anchor, balancing her exuberance. Esther Craven is her young heroine here. She is spirited and intense, a poor yeoman farmer's sister, capable of being led astray minimally, but strong of mind. Her opportunities are typically limited by both her financial state and her gender. She is hounded into a partial promise to her farmer brother's friend 'next door', but feels trapped by it. On a visit to wealthy connections she meets huntin' shootin' fishin' St John Gerard, the heir to an estate, whose somewhat wily charms eventually capture her; she is also capable of refining him, to his surprise. Of course, propriety says that her prior agreement must be adhered to, but it was pretty conditional and she feels justified in herself in exploring the promise St John holds out. Unfortunately, when all is revealed, he doesn't feel the same, virtually accuses her of monstrous flirting, and she flees mortified at the pounding her reputation may suffer. The pretext for her fleeing is the illness of her beloved brother; he passes away. Esther is heartbroken, and also left without any means of support - as a typical Victorian girl, she has no means, or indeed the requisite knowledge, to continue the farm. In a slough of despond, it is sold, and Esther takes the only step she can in her situation - she becomes a companion to a wealthy, sleepy old couple on a rundown estate. The niece of these two is a former acquaintance who has had her beautiful but insipid eye on St John. On the rebound from Esther he has agreed reluctantly to marry her. Of course the niece visits her aunt and uncle and, unintentionally, Esther. Of course, St John comes to visit, too. And the rest is history, though there are some serious bumps on the road, and all is not settled until the very last chapter. Which, for Broughton, is saying something - this is her first conventionally happy ending; though she can't resist including in the last paragraphs the sad end of Esther's former affianced, who has died of a tropical fever in Bermuda with the armed forces, loyal to the last. The bounce of Broughton's cheekiness, from an 1870s point of view, is her significant charm. It will be interesting to watch what happens to it, if anything, as she ages and her career progresses.

Commonplace Book

'"...what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why - why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born - to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who would come? - who would?"

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXIII)

Commonplace Book

'...Oh, ye liars! all ye that say sleep and death are alike! what kinship is there between the pliant relaxer of soft limbs, the light brief slumber, that, at any trivial noise, a trumpeting gnat or distant calling voice, flies and is dissolved, and the grave stiff whiteness of that profoundest rest that no thousand booming cannons, no rock-rending earthquake, no earth-riving thunderbolt can break? It is an insult to that strong narcotic to liken any other repose to that he gives...'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XX)

Commonplace Book

'...Well, if every one in England wept for every one else's sorrows, the noise of tears and sobbings would drown the whirring of all the mills in Leeds and Manchester - the booming of all the cannon at Shoeburyness.'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XIX)

Commonplace Book

'...If we never slept, we should not know the joy of waking; if we never woke, we should not know the joy of sleep. How, I marvel, shall we feel the happiness of heaven, if we never lose, and consequently regain it?'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'...In youth the dining-room is not our temple, our sanctuary, our holy of holies, as it often is in riper years. In youth our souls are great, and our bodies slender; in old age our bodies are often great and our souls slender...'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter III)

Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton (1867)

This concentrated, small-scene novel stands in sharp contrast to Broughton's other work from her inaugural year. Where Not Wisely, But Too Well seems a looking forward to the sprawling, hothouse works of the sensation novelists, this charming piece has a strong element of looking back to the unity and tightness of Jane Austen, among others. And charm is its strongest point - Broughton's humour and brightness of prose guarantee that. Eleanora Le Strange and her sister Dorothea are the head and the foil. Nelly is red-haired and passionate in a slightly unruly way, where Dolly is prettier and more calculating. The love of Nelly's life comes in the form of a penniless soldier; Dolly couldn't be more horrified at the prospect of her younger sister marrying no money, and engineers quietly behind the scenes for the problem to go away. What she doesn't calculate for, and can't because it's not in her nature, is that Nelly's love is all-consuming. Nelly is pushed, heartbroken, toward an ageing wealthy lord, only to realise Dolly's perfidy too late. The mid-Victorian scheme is then realised to the full with a quite un-Austenian conclusion; the star-crossed pair are doomed. Even this sadness charms, proving Broughton to be a skilled tensioner of tone.

Commonplace Book

'...Ill-natured he friends have christened the three Miss Coxes "Free and Easy," "Freer and Easier," "Freest and Easiest;" Violet is "Freest and Easiest." Violet smokes Regalias, and calls men by their surnames to their faces. Lily smokes cigarettes, and Amaryllis does not smoke at all, because it makes her sick.'

from Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXVI)

Commonplace Book

'...I stood in speechless, loveless admiration, as Dolly daintily descended, fresh and trim, as if she had been travelling in cotton wool and silver paper in a bandbox, instead of in dusty railway and mouldy chaise.

"Well, Nell," said she, presenting her cool peach cheek to me, "how are you? Much the same as usual, I see - hair arranged with a pitchfork, and dress with a view to ventilation."'

from Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XI)

Commonplace Book

'...I have come to the conclusion that the heaviest load under which man groans is poverty. By poverty I do not mean comfortable, decent poverty, which pays ready money, which keeps a parlour-maid instead of butler and footman, which walks instead of drives, buys cotton gowns instead of silk dresses for its wife, which sends its sons to Cheltenham and Cambridge, instead of Eton and Christ Church; but the bugbear I have before me is poverty such as ours was - the poverty of living in a wide house - not with a brawling woman - but worse, with a very narrow income; the poverty which dares not look on from month to month and from day to day, before whose inner eyes bum-bailiffs are ever present; the poverty which steals away our cheerful spirits; which renders us envious, and spiteful, and sordid, which makes our days a long torture, and our nights a long vigil; which saps the springs of our life, and sometimes ends by making us cut our throats to escape it!..'

from Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter VI)

Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (1867)

This is a novel of mixed fortunes - it is over-exuberant, seeming to have been written when Broughton was particularly young. There are judgments she makes in the craft of its writing which seem quite ill-advised. The best example is a tendency to utilise quotations at far too many junctures; there is one early chapter absolutely littered with them. On the other hand it has many fine moments, and some sparkling wit, and has a brightness and resulting colour which cannot be denied. At the time of publication I believe it was regarded as quite racy, given that the heroine, Kate Chester, falls passionately for a married man, and a wicked one. Interestingly the crucial scene of their relationship is enacted in the now-destroyed Crystal Palace. Its tone now feels of course much more standard, falling somewhere between Jane Austen and Elizabeth de la Pasture - and comfortably so. It can be a damning thing to say but it's appropriate in this case: this is a novel which holds out promise. Her talent for the comedy in family is already obvious here, as is her capacity to keep a plot humming, though this element needs ensubtling (if there is such a word). The word which sums the whole book up is 'hothouse' I think - dangerous stuff in these young hands. I look forward to watching develop the ameliorations and the expansions of her growing maturity.

Commonplace Book

'All very nice, and mildly exciting for the first five or six times - nay, perhaps I may say for the first seven or eight. But all worldly joys pall, say the moralists; I cannot say myself, because I have not tried nearly all.'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXV)

Commonplace Book

'How was it that the tiny bagatelles of time present, from being held so close to the eye, obscured and shut out the huge bulk of things future? Why could not one always feel like this? Why could not one always stay in that state of mind? It was the only right state, the only wholesome state, the only sane state. All other states of mind were nothing but disease and madness. Why was one always like the dog in the fable - dropping the solid piece of meat into the water to snatch greedily at the reflection?(....)Why is it so hard to distinguish between what will grow bigger and bigger every day, and will last for ever, and what will each day wax smaller and smaller, and in a few to-morrows will be gone as if it had never been? Why do things not keep their shapes, but are always mazing and puzzling one by their shiftings and windings?'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XX)

Commonplace Book

'"Kate's friendship," strikes in Margaret, with what may be called a pleasant acid in her voice, "always reminds me of a little poem I used to learn in my youth -

"'Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly;
'Tis the prettiest little parlour that you ever did spy!'

I'm not so sure that they do always find it such a pretty little parlour, do they, Kate?"

It is sweet, saith Lucretius, to sit on a bank, and see a good ship battered to pieces by the waves under your very eyes; but it is not sweet to sit in a comfortable arm-chair and watch your younger sister putting her hook in the nose and her bridle in the jaws of any man you come in contact with.

"I deny the justness of the metaphor altogether," replies Kate, with a shadow of irritation in her clear young voice; "and anyhow, the parallel is very incomplete; for if any fly does not like my parlour, he is more than welcome to leave it with his full complement of legs and wings; you see what a character they give me" (sorrowfully to George). "'Give a dog a bad name,' you know; and such an innocent-minded dog, too!"

She looks innocence itself, as she turns her great eyes[,] wide open in a sort of aggrieved surprise, limpid as wells of water in a limestone country, upon him. Flirting is ingrained in the blood and bone and fibre of some women. One can no more blame them for it than for having a cast in the eye or a stammer. Kate would flirt with the undertaker who came to measure her for her coffin.'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XIX)