By a Woman Writt

1973, 1974 Penguin edition
edited by Joan Goulianos
By a Woman Writt [sic]: Literature from Six Centuries by and about Women
Original price unknown, bought used for $4.25
Worn paperback
C+

Goulianos selects women's writings in English from 14th-century Margery Kempe to modern poet Muriel Rukeyser, so this collection is understandably uneven.  I most enjoyed Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Sylvia Ashton-Warner.  In the introduction, Goulianos suggests some themes, like fear and motherhood, but I don't feel like there's enough commentary or organization here.  Also, she doesn't give dates to all the pieces, and sometimes not even birth or death dates for the authors, so my labels are limited to the wider eras and I can't include the 20th-centuries decades, other than the 1970s of course.  (Not that there aren't a lot of labels on the post anyway.)  This is a serviceable introduction to women's literature, deliberately omitting some of the better known writers (although Wollstonecraft and daughter Mary are here), without going overly obscure.

The Importance of Being Earnest

1895
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest
A-

 
Not just Wilde's best play, but my all time favorite play, this remains laugh-out-loud hilarious, whether on page or stage.  (The collection of plays averages out to C+, thanks to Salome.)  The 1952 film is also a lot of fun, although I loathe the 2002 version.  This play has only nine characters, and everybody but Merriman (Jack's butler) gets funny lines.  (Algernon's manservant Lane not only insults him politely but later says that cucumbers were unavailable, "not even for ready money.")  Nearly every line in this play is quotable, and some of the best are about economic class, like the one about the "charity sermon on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders," and the one about the middle class failing to be good role models.  Wilde's wit also weighs in on love, marriage, widowhood, and family, as well as education, literature, art, music, and fashion, among other things. 

While the first two society plays examined the double standard, Jack here defends his supposed unwed mother, Miss Prism, and demands, "Why should there be one law for men, and another for women?"  Yet, she isn't his mother, so he looks ridiculous in his earnestness.  The play is about the impotence of being earnest; it's a serious plea against seriousness. 

In the end, Jack turns out to have accidentally been telling the truth about being called Ernest and having a younger brother.  Gwendolen promises to forgive him, "for I feel that you are sure to change."  But what of poor Cecily?  She's not given any lines about her opinion of the situation.  Algernon is still Algernon.  And it's unlikely that he's going to give up Bunbury, exploded or not.

In its reversals of cliches, of both plot and phrasing, this play reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse.  As Bertie Wooster would say, "Aunts aren't gentlemen," and that's particularly true of Algy's (and Jack's) Aunt Augusta.  I also think of Alice in Wonderland, because Algy's line about not being able to eat muffins in an agitated manner, because the butter would get on his cuffs, reminds me of the argument at the tea party about butter in the watch.  The play definitely is in the proud tradition of British absurdity delivered with a straight face.

I have to say that the line I appreciate more than ever, after surviving so many long Victorian novels, is "I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us."  With the exception of a few nonfiction works, the books of the 1900s are going to be a lot shorter than Middlemarch and Anna Karenina.  Well, until we hit the 1980s anyway.  (Mists of Avalon, I'm looking at you.)  On the other hand, there are going to be a lot of 20th-century works.  So from here on out, I'll be labeling the books by decade rather than century.

We'll start with a couple books from 1900, technically the 19th century, technically the Victorian period.  (The queen died 22 January 1901.)  But since they both shaped my identity, I'm going to count them as honorary 20th-century novels.

An Ideal Husband

1895
Oscar Wilde
An Ideal Husband
B


This is the play where Wilde got the most playful with the stage directions, as in the early description, "Watteau would have loved to paint them."  My favorite of the witty lines this time is "Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are."  Along with the plot, which has a scandal that's not sex-related for once, these make for my second favorite of Wilde's works.  (I've read but don't own Dorian Gray and some of his other fiction.)  The characters are more complex than in the three earlier plays, and I thought Caversham was great as the snarky father of snarky Goring.  Also, Mabel Chiltern is charming.  The title character and his wife seem like the usual stodgy Puritans, but at least they're allowed to react in rational ways for once.

Salome

1894 for first English translation, but written in French in 1893
Oscar Wilde, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas
Salome
F+


Wretched on just about every level, it's hard to say how much of this is Lord Alfred's fault (like so much in Wilde's life), and how much of the play was bad to begin with.  I don't know French, but here's my translation--
YOUNG SIRIAN:  The princess is so pretty, with feet like silver.
PAGE:  Dude, why are you always looking at her?
JOKANAAN:  (offstage) The queen is a slut.
HERODIAS:  Honey, that preacher is insulting me!
HEROD:  Not by name.
SALOME:  The preacher is rude about my mother.  I must meet him.
HEROD:  My stepdaughter is pretty.  Her skin is as white as moonlight and fish bellies.
HERODIAS:  Dude, why are you always looking at her?
SALOME:  The preacher is as pale as I am, like diamonds and bones.  I must meet him.  (Jokanaan enters)  You're hot!  Let's snog!
JOKANAAN:  You're a slut like your mother!
SALOME:  You're disgusting.  Kiss me!
(Young Sirian kills himself.  Herod almost slips in the blood.)
HEROD:  This is a bad omen.  Minion, get a mop!  (The Jews argue about whether the Messiah has come.)  Stepdaughter, you are white like pearls and eyeballs.  Dance for me!
SALOME:  Will you give me anything I want?
HERODIAS:  Don't do it!
HEROD:  Of course.
SALOME:  OK.  (She dances.) 
HEROD:  What gift did you want, Princess?
SALOME:  Bring me the head of John the Baptist!
HEROD:  Who?
SALOME:  Jokanaan.
HEROD:  You must be jokan.
SALOME:  Please.
HERODIAS:  Do it!
HEROD:  No way.
SALOME:  Pretty please.
HEROD:  (sighing) Oh, all right.  (Jokanaan is killed.  Salome kisses his head.)  Your daughter is disgusting!
HERODIAS:  I'm so proud.
HEROD:  (to soldiers) Kill Salome!  (They do.)

THE END

Pudd'nhead Wilson

1894
Mark Twain
Pudd'nhead Wilson, A Tale
B


While there are traces of Those Extraordinary Twins, including Tom's insult of "philophena" (a nut with two kernels), Twain indeed drew an independent, and equally good, novella out of that short story.  It's a tale without a clear hero or heroine.  Wilson is probably the most admirable person in town, but he's off page for much of the story.  Roxy comes close to being the heroine, but she does some immoral things, like lying and stealing, although as Twain points out, the crimes of the slaves are minimal compared to the abomination of slavery.  Her son Tom is our anti-hero, and yet he is as much a victim as a villain.  His mother switches him with the master's baby.  (They're equally white-skinned, but "blackness" is more than skin deep in that time and place.)  She wants to save him from being sold down the river, but that's what happens after he's pardoned for the murder of his "uncle."  It is a karmic punishment (he'd already sold his mother), but it's not so much his legal punishment as payment of the debts he's run up as a spoiled white man.


This all sounds bleaker than it is.  There's the usual dry Twain humor, not just with the twins, but throughout.  In fact, even the tragedies are told humorously.  (An alternate title is The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson.)  Unlike in many switched-baby stories, the truth is revealed not by Roxy's confession but by the science of fingerprints.  Mr. Wilson turns out to not be such a pudd'nhead after all.

A Woman of No Importance

1893
Oscar Wilde
A Woman of No Importance
C+

As in Lady Windermere's Fan, a mother has a scandalous past.  This time, her former lover has unknowingly chosen their son as his protegee.  And there's a "Puritanical" young American woman mixed up in things.  I think this is Wilde's most forgettable play.  Other than "Nothing succeeds like excess," there don't seem to be any memorable quotes.  Even the part where Lord Illingworth says, "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy," and Mrs. Allonby replies, "No man does. That is his," is improved when Algernon gets both lines in The Importance of Being Earnest.  The funniest thing about this play is Lytton Strachey's 1907 interpretation, well, funny in a horrible way.  He sees Lord Illingworth's intentions towards his secretary as incestuous.  "Oh! he’s a very wicked Lord!"

The Heavenly Twins

1893, original Cassell edition
Madame Sarah Grand
The Heavenly Twins
Original and purchase price unknown
Hardcover with broken spine and worn corners
B-


I've always had mixed feelings about this novel.  Grand acts as if feminism is something completely new to her generation, who are the first women to be highly educated enough to be feminist.  It's as if she's never heard of Wollstonecraft, or known that there were women in the Renaissance who were not simply literate but scholarly.  Also, there's a snobbery in the book that's not just an aspect of its upper-class characters but seems to be the perspective of the narrator, with all the emphasis on the vulgarity and rude behaviour of the lower classses.

Additionally, I've got issues with "purity feminism," where the double standard is attacked because men's "vices" make them unworthy husbands.  Wilde takes the opposite (at)tack, believing that sex is not evil, even for women.  (Not that he's a feminist, but that's a different discussion.)  I do believe that the double standard was/is wrong, but acting as if women are (or should be) "pure" and on a pedestal, while men are (sometimes? usually?) victims of sexual urges that they should suppress, won't help matters.  Grand has a point, one Meredith made in 1859, that sowing wild oats, and probably contracting a venereal disease, and likely not telling the virginal wife, is unfair to that wife and the children.  Also, Grand doesn't believe in reformed rakes, like Tom Jones, while I think it depends on the circumstances.  I do agree that expecting said virginal wife, who in this book seems to always be 12 to 20 years younger than the husband, to reform the rake, when she's been sheltered from not just the act of but the knowledge of sex, is completely unfair.  To Grand's credit, she thinks that young women should be educated about medicine and the risks they'd be taking, although her concern is more with the moral than the physical decay.

The three main young ladies in the novel deal with the dilemma in different ways.  Nineteen-year-old Evadne, not unlike Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda, learns the truth yet goes through with the marriage.  In Gwendolen's case, she does so out of a combination of thoughtlessness and thoughtfulness.  (It will secure her mother's financial support.)  Evadne, after some pressure from her mother, agrees to the "compromise" of living platonically with her sinful husband, while keeping up appearances.  This works fairly well, until he pressures her into never speaking out politically in his lifetime.  She goes from intellectually curious and forthright to withdrawn and depressed.

Edith is more sheltered than Evadne, and she marries a "childhood friend."  (Grand has weirder math than Alcott, and somehow a 17-year-old and a 30-year-old played together as children.)  He is, however, a very unreformed rake, so he ogles women right in front of her, and their baby is sickly.  She dies of depression, and he goes unpunished, except for Angelica throwing a Bible at him.

Angelica is one of the title characters, ironically named.  (Her brother Theodore is nicknamed Diavolo.)  She's pretty awesome, except for the violent streak.  Even though her mum is the most feminist of all the "elderly" women in the book (Grand seems to define "elderly" as 40+), Angelica for some reason thinks she's got no option but to get married.  So at 17 she proposes to a neighbour: "Marry me, and let me do as I like."  (Emphasis in the original.)  He does, but she's bored because she has no outlet for her energies.  She ends up disguising herself as her absent brother and, as The Boy, befriending a man.  Of course, it ends in his death.  She becomes a better person, deciding to devote herself to the social movements her uncle and aunt are involved in, as well as to her paternal husband.  (He calls her "my dear child," and she calls him Daddy.  Even allowing for Values Dissonance, this is creepy.)

Angelica's twin meanwhile has a "cry wolf" crush on Evadne, even though he's "six or eight" years younger.  (Except when it's convenient for the author, and then he and Angelica are four, or about ten, years younger.)  Diavolo, and even more so Angelica's imitation of him, is lazy and witty, like a pure-minded version of an Oscar Wilde gentleman, if that's not a contradiction in terms.  Some of the best parts of the book are the twins going around saying the unsayable.  I also like the portrayal of Evadne's parents, like the darker side of Meredith or the lighter side of Eliot, and Grand is good at pointing out the irony that they're more scandalised by Evadne than by her husband.  I find the world of Morningquest, with its recurring chime, well done.  I would say the first third of the book, particularly Evadne's self-education, is very well done.

But as the novel goes on, I drift further and further from the author.  By the time we get to Part Six, "The Impressions of Dr. Galbraith," I'm much less invested in the story.  It's partly that I'm sort of rooting for Evadne/Diavolo after Col. Colquhoun dies, and partly that I don't want Galbraith's impressions; I want Evadne's.  Also, on this reading, the idea of a doctor as a husband is more unpalatable after The Yellow Wallpaper.  True, he does eventually make her more engaged with life, rather than less, but at first he's worried about her reading or doing anything that might upset her.

Wikipedia tells me that at 16 Sarah Grand married a vice-ridden man 21 years her senior, eventually divorcing him in 1890.  I wonder if she ever considered that part of the problem with her world was that girls in their late teens were marrying men in their 30s.

With more regret than I felt over tossing From 18 to 20, I'll be getting rid of this copy.  If I ever want to read the novel again, and I've read it a half dozen times over the years, such is the strange hold it has on me despite my mixed feelings, it's both available online and in print, since there's a 100th anniversary edition, with cross-dressing, long-haired Angelica on the cover, ironically looking like a Wildean aesthetic man.  For once, I think Madame Sarah and Oscar would agree, and chuckle together.

Lady Windermere's Fan

1892, in 1980 Penguin edition of Play: Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Lady Windermere's Fan
Original and purchase price unknown
Worn paperback
B-


This play was performed in 1892 and published in '93.  As with Wilde's other plays, I'll be going with the earliest possible date, and in any case this is his first successful stage production, as well as his first society play.  The title "character" is a prop that incriminates Lady W., until Mrs. Erlynne, a woman with a bad reputation, who's secretly Lady W.'s mother, takes the fall.  The title could also refer to Lord Darlington, who offers to be Lady W.'s darling when it looks like Lord W. is cheating on her with Mrs. E.


I find the play to be more quotable than notable.  My favorite two quotations are "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it" and "History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality," although this is where the definition of a cynic comes from: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  The plot itself is contrived, particularly Lord Windermere's behaviour.  Yes, he's in a difficult spot, financially supporting his secret mother-in-law, while his wife thinks Mummy died when she was a baby, rather than ran off with a lover.  But Lord W.'s insisting on inviting the scandalous Mrs. E. to Lady W.'s coming-of-age party seems only a device to introduce her to the audience, and a dilemma to his wife.  And then later, when he thinks that Lady W. was in a man's rooms late at night, he forbids his wife to visit her.  By the end, he's flip-flopping on whether he should reveal Mrs. E.'s identity to his wife.  The other characters make mistakes, but his annoy me the most.

I do like that a "fallen woman" is allowed to be the true heroine, making a sacrifice for her daughter, although if you look at the ending, it's not too unhappy for her, as she wins back her suitor, Lord Augustus.  His nickname is Tuppy, which kept reminding me of Bertie Wooster's chum.  Wilde definitely had an influence on P.G. Wodehouse, conscious or not.

Those Extraordinary Twins

1892, in 1986 Penguin Classics edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Mark Twain
Those Extraordinary Twins
Possibly bought new for $2.50
Slightly worn paperback
B


The best part of this short story is Twain's sporking of his own writing, both in the preface and in the interspersed notes.  He was trying to write a farce about two "Siamese" twins (well, Italian but conjoined), and Pudd'nhead Wilson and some other characters kept horning in, till finally he had to extract them and write a comitragedy.  But first he started throwing the original characters in a well.  "I was going to drown some others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway."  I haven't read Pudd'nhead Wilson in awhile (it's from 1894), but just on its own terms, this is a delightfully silly story, with Twain examining how the very different twins (one blond and good, the other dark and sort of bad) deal with everything from food and shelter to politics and religion.  We're not shown how they deal with sex of course, but Angelo (the good twin) has a bit of a romance with "Rowena the lightweight heroine."  Yes, that's probably an Ivanhoe reference, since obviously Twain likes to make fun of other writers besides himself.

As for Mr. Wilson, he defends the twins when they go to court and only one of them is guilty.  He'll keep his profession when he becomes the main character, but the twins will be separate people, rather than "a pair of scissors."

The Yellow Wallpaper

1892
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper
B+

Probably Gilman's most famous work, this holds up really well, whether as a horror story of growing insanity or as an indictment of a repressive marriage.  Not that the two are entirely separable, since the way that the narrator's doctor/husband treats her, with condescension and flat-out bad advice (avoid interesting people and activities), is horrible, perhaps all the more horrible because it's meant kindly.  Unless he's Gaslighting her?  It's hard to tell, of course, how much is real.  Does he actually faint in the end, as she goes creeping around the room, her identity merged with the imprisoned woman behind the wallpaper?  However you take it, Gilman has finally mastered endings.  And this is a much more vivid story than the previous two, so by the end, you also will hate the wallpaper.  I know I said I dislike being inside Anna Karenina's head as she goes insane, but I think the insanity is more plausible here, and the heroine more sympathetic.  Gilman knew firsthand the horrors of being forbidden to write, and that would probably be one of my own personal hells.

My Poor Aunt

1891
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My Poor Aunt
B-

A young woman realizes that she doesn't have to marry to be happy, and in fact her divorced publisher aunt is much happier than her old-before-her-time mother or her society aunt.  After Belle defies them and the sarcastic boarder, her aunt shows up and hires her as assistant editor.  (Belle has been sending "little things" off to various newspapers, including unknowingly her aunt's.)  Then the annoying boarder turns out to be on Belle's side and asks, "Aunt Kate, may I go, too?"  And he does.  I could've done without that, even if he was just playing devil's advocate.  So far Gilman has not figured out how to do a twist ending.  Still, I like Belle better than the artist in the previous story, and the way "happiness" is handled has a nice irony.  Also, is this the first sympathetic portrayal of a divorcee in my collection?  (At this point, Gilman was separated but not yet divorced from her first husband.)

The Unexpected

1890, from the Signet Classic edition of Herland and Selected Stories 1992
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Original price $5.95, bought used for $3.00
Worn paperback
This short story a C+

Speaking of unlikable main characters, the short story The Unexpected is told by a vain, sexist, Frenchified artist.  He thinks that a wife would be jealous of his models, but then he falls for a distant cousin, marries her, and becomes jealous when a handsome man keeps visiting her.  It turns out that she's an artist, too, and that's her model.  Points for pointing out his hypocrisy, as well as for the presentation of a wife with a career, points off for the "happy ending," going from the narrator in a murderous rage to an Everybody Laughs Ending (see TVTropes).

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

1889, undated but probably 1960s Signet Classic edition
Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Original price $1.75, bought used for unknown
Ratty paperback
C+

As even Edmund Reiss's afterword admits, this is an uneven book, and it works less for me than it does for him.  I like some of the social satire/commentary, like how Twain draws parallels between 6th-century serfs and 19th-century slaves.  The use of modern technology, like bicycles and telephones is cute, and tends to be what I most remember about this novel.  (I must've seen a movie adaptation or two in my youth.)   But then the Yankee uses technology to unrepentantly kill off thousands of noblemen.  He promises freedom of religion, in the sense that everyone will be Protestant.  He promises democracy, then names himself dictator after King Arthur dies.

Now, probably Twain meant Hank Morgan to be an unreliable narrator, but as with The Egoist, that doesn't mean I want to spend time with the title character.  Also, Twain and/or Morgan cheats the reader by skipping ahead three years, so that now "Sandy" (the Lady Alisandre) has gone from an annoyingly talkative woman to a loving and supportive wife.  Admittedly, we don't read Twain for the romance, but I've never seen courtship by the main character glossed over so much.

Also, the story is riddled with anachronisms and/or mythic missteps, like London being a city when it's supposed to be all about Camelot.  Twain can't make up his mind whether this is a satire of the fantasy world of knights (sort of from the opposite perspective of Don Quixote) or a criticism of the real Dark Ages.  If the latter, then he didn't do the research, because it sounds more like the Middle Ages of four or five centuries later.  Also, Morgan somehow knows the eclipses of the 500s.  Maybe we're not meant to take this too seriously, but then there are the parts that are meant seriously.

All that said, it's not a bad book.  Clarence writes the last chapter and I did enjoy his character.  It might've been a better book if Clarence had been in it more.

The Mad Gardener's Song

1889
Lewis Carroll
The Mad Gardener's Song
B-


Nifty little poem from Sylvie and Bruno.  The gardener keeps hallucinating, till he realises that a bar of mottled soap isn't an argument that proves he's the Pope.  Favorite rhyme:  chimney-piece/Sister's Husband's niece/Police.


Overall, I'd say this Carroll collection averages out to a B.

From 18 to 20

1888, original Lippincott edition
Elizabeth Jaudon Sellers
From 18 to 20
Bought used (of course) for $4.00
Amazingly good condition hardcover
D+

I remember buying this book when I was 18, partly because I thought it was cool that when I turned 20 the book would be 100.  And I remember that much more than I remembered anything about this book, other than the heroine getting lost in a cave before being rescued by her "true love."

This is not only the oldest book I own, it's probably the worst.  While Beatrice is in the cave, she burns two "seaside novels" so she'll have a fire to keep warm, and while I don't advocate book-burning, I'd have to say that if they were on the level of this one, they can't have been much loss to the world.  The characterization is remarkably shallow.  To the extent that Beatrice has any personality, it's because she's unpleasant.  She insults a neighbor just because he's not a figure from her romantic daydreams.  She makes lots of snarky comments about women and girls, including how boring and hypocritical they are. 

She's courted by two men, who for no good reason share a first name.  One is rich and too emotional, the other less rich and seemingly more aloof.  It turns out that the latter's fiancee, who conveniently dies and leaves a letter explaining everything, was in a Miss De Bourgh/Darcy situation, where the parents pressured them into the engagement.  But of course he only loves Beatrice.  Since he's the least developed character in the book (other than Beatrice's four out of six siblings that we never even get names of, after being promised to be allowed to judge them for ourselves), it's hard to care.  When he references Isaak Walton, rather than simply saying "I went fishing," at a time that he's supposed to be in the throes of emotion, he becomes less than cardboard.

And since the triangle of Charles J./Beatrice/Charles T. is more slanted than the Twilight saga, it's idiotic that the novel ends on the cliffhanger of the heroine sending two replies to her suitors, one positive, the other negative.   "Did I yield my heart, my life, my all, to Love or Riches?"  Gee, I dunno.  What do you think?

Incredibly, this book is back in print, in case you want to read it.  It's not quite so bad it's good, but it does verge on that.  You'll get a slight sense of the times, like that dance cards are by the 1880s (at least in the U.S.) completely meaningless and you don't have to worry about offending men by dancing with someone else.  Also, apparently a woman can propose to a man all through leap year, and not just on Leap Day.

Looking Backward

1888, 1960 Signet Classic edition
Edward Bellamy
Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Original price $1.95, bought used for $1.50
Frayed paperback
C+


This was one of the most influential books of its time, although it's less well known now.  I liked it less on this reading than I remembered, although I am still amused that Bellamy sort of predicted radio (including radio preachers) and some aspects of modern shopping.  In Bellamy's 21st-century world, money has been abolished and people live on credit cards, often ordering warehouse purchases that are delivered later, but this is all for very different reasons than in the real 21st century.  The introduction by Erich Fromm points out that Bellamy couldn't have predicted what would happen with both capitalism and socialism, or the dangers of a society run by managers, and of course Fromm didn't know what changes the next half century would bring.  (There's also a reference to contemporary "visions of travel to the moon" that would date itself before the end of the 1960s.) 

For my post on More's Utopia, I pointed out that that world wasn't very "utopian," and I doubt More meant it to be ideal.  Bellamy really seemed to think that his is the best possible world.  However, despite Fromm's belief that Bellamy shows "complete equality of the sexes," that's not what I see.  Women's roles are almost an after-thought, and I have no idea what Mrs. and Miss Leete's careers are.  (Dr. Leete is a retired medical doctor.)  Apparently, Bellamy addressed women's rights in the sequel, Equality (1897).


Bellamy does not at any time, however, seem to have thought it odd that this is a world without democracy.  The Presidents rise from the ranks and are chosen in a manner sort of like a republic.  Now admittedly, compared to the political corruption of his day, this might've been an improvement.  But again, I can't believe that Bellamy's imagined society is the best that anyone could come up with even at the time.  I also find the way the "bloodless revolution" happens, through common sense and inevitability, a bit sketchy.  Still, he meant well, and if you can get past these issues, and the somewhat bland characterizations, this book might be worth a read.

Jo's Boys

1886, 1957 Doubleday edition
Louisa May Alcott
Illustrated by Ruth Ives
Jo's Boys, and How They Turned Out
Bought used for $3.95
Hardcover with a bit of mold and the spine starting to break
B


If Little Women is about submission, then this "positively last appearance" of the March girls and their friends and family is about rebellion.  Other than "Mrs. Jo" herself, this is seen in the most vivid characters:  Teddy (Jo's son), Josie (her niece), and Jo's favorite boy, Dan.  Yes, they all have to learn to control their tempers and/or high spirits, but it's nothing like the breaking of Jo in the first book.

Alcott herself, two years away from death, seems to be growing restless.  She mocks her fans and herself in the chapter "Jo's Last Scrape," the one with the "moral pap" quote, as Mrs. Jo finds that fame is a great annoyance.  In the final chapter, she writes, "It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it."  This is five years before Arthur Conan Doyle unsuccessfully tosses Holmes into the Reichenbach Falls, but Alcott decides not to be that apocalyptic.  She wraps up everyone's lives in one long paragraph and then has "the curtain fall forever on the March family."

This final book of the trilogy opens ten years later than the middle book, but Alcott's math is bad as ever.  "Baby Josie" of Little Men is now 15, until a few months later, when she turns 14.  There's a reference to the set of Jo's Boys in this novel being her original dozen, and yet there's a "merry little quadroon" in the last chapter of Little Women who never appears in either sequel.

There are as many Dickensian references as ever.  (Imagine reading "Dick Swiveller" out of context, as I originally did.)  And this time we learn that Jo prefers "little Charlotte Brontë" to George Eliot, because the former was a Christian.  I wonder if Alcott had read Daniel Deronda, because the scene where Josie asks a famous actress if she has any talent herself is like a much kinder version of Herr Klesmer dismissing Gwendolen's hopes.  He tells Gwendolen that being a lady would probably be a drawback, while the class of Miss Cameron and Josie is seen as a way to uplift drama.  Josie and her artistic cousin Bess are successful in their careers, quite a contrast to Jo and particularly Amy realizing they're not going to be great creative successes.  And Nan is a happy spinster doctor.  The spirit of "Woman's Rights" is stronger than in the earlier books, although Alcott still emphasizes "womanly arts" like sewing, even for Latin & Greek scholars.

At an early point in the story, "firebrand" Dan says the word "damn."  That's pretty out there for Alcott.  And then later in the novel, he kills a man!  It's in self defense, but it's another sign of how Alcott was torn between sensation and moralizing.  She achieves a balance between them in this novel, even if it means that there's one courtship caused by a donkey and a bicycle, and another by a shipwreck.  It's definitely a flawed book, but I think it's her second best.

It certainly has the best illustrations of any Alcott books that I own.  (Even the ones that don't have illustrations throughout tend to have covers that look wrong, like Rose Campbell's hair being more 1975 than 1875.)  Ives captures the humor and pathos of every scene, and the clothing and furnishings look authentically late Victorian.  It's a shame I can't keep this edition, due to its condition.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1885, 1987 Signet Classic edition
Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer's Comrade
Probably bought new for $1.75
Very tattered paperback with back cover probably going to come off with another reading or two
B-

Not only isn't this The Great American Novel, it's not even as good as I remember.  I do appreciate the irony of Huck's situation, that he has to do "wrong" to do good, in this case not turning in Miss Watson's "property," the slave Jim.  I also enjoy the "King" and the "Duke," and how Huck reacts to their various scams.  However, I find the descriptions of steering up and down the Mississippi to be very confusing, although there are some nice descriptions of nature.  I also get annoyed with Tom Sawyer showing up in the last part of the book to "free" Jim using a very elaborate scheme, when Huck could release Jim in minutes, and it turns out that Tom knows all along that Miss Watson has already freed Jim.  And after portraying Jim in a more complex and sympathetic way than most of Twain's contemporaries, it's like a slap in a face when we get the simple-minded slave guarding Jim.

Early in the book, there's a section on "Tom Sawyer's Gang," where Tom explains how they'll embark on a life of crime, and it's very similar to the plan in Tom Sawyer, down to not killing the kidnapped women, who'll fall in love with them. Huck comes across as very chivalrous of women and girls in this book, but he does get the name of Tom's girlfriend wrong, "Bessie Thatcher."

Eligible Apartments

1885
Lewis Carroll
Eligible Apartments
C

This puzzle story was originally published in a magazine before it was published in book form.  It contains two puzzles, the second of which "The Lodgings," I've never understood, even with Carroll's explanation, so F+ for that.  The other, "The Dinner Party," is more fun as it involves drawing family trees.  If you want to try it yourself, here it is in a nutshell:  "The Governor of Kgovjni wants to give a very small dinner party, and invites his father's brother-in-law, his brother's father-in-law, his father-in-law's brother, and his brother-in-law's father. Find the number of guests."  The correct answer is one, but you have to work out how.  I'd give that puzzle a B.  And a C+ for the story itself, since the funniest thing in it is a mother-in-law joke.  This averages out to a C.

And if you want to see Carroll's answer, this is one site that has it:  http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/tangled-tale-knot2-answer.html

The Way of All Flesh

1884 (see below), undated Classics Club edition
Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh
Original price unknown, bought used for $4.75
Surprisingly good condition hardcover
B

Butler worked on this book from 1872 to 1884 but it wasn't published in his lifetime.  So I'm going with the latter date.  Like Erewhon, it's both a very Victorian book and a very anti-Victorian book.  There seem to be autobiographical elements in the tale of a young man who first gives in to and then rebels against his minister father.  The young man is named Ernest because his mother values earnestness, an attitude that Wilde would parody in guess what play.

I laughed out loud a few times during the first half of the novel, even though it was about how terrible Ernest's parents are.  Like Erewhonian parents, they see children as a burden and make their offspring feel guilty about it.  Of course, there's nothing funny about this in real life, but Butler has a way of bringing out the bitter humour.  In one passage, Butler draws conclusions about the history of British fatherhood based on fiction:  "The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson, Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly...likely to find a place in literature...but the type was much too persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely. The parents in Miss Austen's novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le pere de famille est capable de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings."

The second half of the novel focuses on Ernest's adulthood and I found it a bit less interesting and less funny.  Butler goes up to "the present," 1882, in order to show that Ernest's own "illegitimate" children, whom he's had poor but (mostly) honest strangers bring up, have turned out well.  This is ironic in light of what's going to be revealed in Erewhon Revisited....