It has again been a while since a post of this kind; my reading speed at the moment is slow, and I’m reading more of the books I already have. I have also got to the point in my blogging where I’ve really, truly, learned what is a good acceptance rate of books. The request-them-all phase bloggers often go through is long over and I appreciate not having to read books back to back. There’s also the fact that it gives me more time to think about what I want to say. I think back to the time a couple of years ago when I had eleven books to read in four weeks, a mix of awards, event preparation, and review copies – I finished them all in time and in fact it was quite exhilarating, but I’d rather not do it again!

Arundhati Roy: The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness – In the autumn of last year I was in a bookshop and came across two books I haven’t previously come across but found myself really wanting. This was one of them. I didn’t get either of them at that time but they kept coming to mind so I recently decided to go for it, particularly after seeing this book was on the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Edward Carey: Little – Out in October in the UK, this is a novel based on the life of Madame Tussaud. It’s done well so far. Expect a lot of interesting history but also, likely, a fair bit of gore.

Laura Pearson: Missing Pieces – A story of family secrets, out in June. I’m purposefully staying away from reviews until after I’ve read it; the last book I read that had a similar blurb required you stay away from the secret in order to really enjoy it.

Manu Joseph: Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous – A very contemporary thriller set after an election in India.

Özgür Mumcu: The Peace Machine – A Turkish novel set at the start of the last century, that questions whether violence could be put to an end.

Polly Clark: Larchfield – This was the second book I found in the bookshop; it switches between a contemporary narrative, and a story of W H Auden.

What was the last book you originally said ‘no’ to but couldn’t get out of your mind?

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

I’ve been reading fiction from the 1700s for a few months now – first Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline and then Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote – and every time the adjective ‘ardent’ is used, my mind goes back to the famous scene from Pride And Prejudice. Or, more specifically, Colin Firth’s Darcy bursting into the room to say the adverb version of the word to Jennifer Ehle’s Lizzie Bennet.

The word is used incredibly often in these books, and having never to my knowledge encountered it outside of old works of fiction, I thought I’d look into it. And perhaps add it to my vocabulary for a short time; that sort of thing can be, to use a phrase going out of fashion, jolly good fun.

The origins are 1300s and Latin (ārdent, from ārdēns, ‘to burn’). It replaced the Middle English ‘ardant’. I don’t suppose the list below is particularly needed – ‘ardent’ is one of those words where the meaning is quite obvious – but in order to fully account for it, here is the list of meanings, from Dictionary.com:

1. having, expressive of, or characterized by intense feeling; passionate; fervent: an ardent vow; ardent love.
2. intensely devoted, eager, or enthusiastic; zealous: An ardent theatergoer. An ardent student of French history.
3. vehement; fierce: They were frightened by his ardent, burning eyes.
4. burning, fiery, or hot: The ardent core of a star.

I think it’s fair to say Austen, and Firth, were looking to use them all.

To my knowledge we don’t really use ‘ardent’ any more; as I said, I’ve never heard it outside of older fiction (or adaptations of those books), but that’s a very subjective statement, so I looked it up. Using the information I had – that the word seemed to be very much in favour in the 1700s – 1750s-80s, if we look at the publishing dates of Emmeline and The Female Quixote – as well as Pride And Prejudice‘s 1813; I found a Google application that produces charts for words. Here we have ‘ardent’ used far more than ‘ardently’ (to be expected) peaking twice, in 1801 and again in 1835 before decreasing first slowly to 1850 and dropping steadily over time. The pretty fast increase from the early 1700s until that first peak aligns with the mid-1700s.

Dates to be considered: 1752 (Charlotte Lennox), 1788 (Charlotte Smith), 1813 (Jane Austen).

(Usage in the two centuries before this was very hit and miss. The graph suggested the early Tudors weren’t too keen on what appears to have been a new word, and the late Tudors and Stuarts couldn’t make up their minds whether to use it or not.)

Looking at ‘ardent’ led to only a short bout of research, as I thought it would – I was looking at something particular, after all – but it’s nevertheless been fascinating. The word itself, and the other possibilities for study I’ve picked up from these two 1700s novels are interesting, which is quite at odds with the reading experience itself – poignant but poorly executed in Smith’s case, and highly frivolous and seemingly simple in Lennox’s case.

What are your favourite rarely-now-used words?

Going back to the Hunger Games example, if you didn’t know that “Panem” came from the Latin phrase “Panem et Circenses” which means “Bread and Circuses,” would you look it up? (Marciniak, 2018)

This fact was included in a very thoughtful article about cultural literacy. We can’t know everything and we don’t know what we don’t know. This is possibly my biggest fear when reading, and particularly when reading knowing I’ll be reviewing the book, which is about 90% of the time.

The thought that we can’t know everything matches well with my previous post on reading the reference material first. (On that note I should say I chose to start The Female Quixote without looking at the Cervantes. So far, so good – knowing the basics of the earlier text, at 10% read, is all that’s needed.) Unless you have an inordinately large amount of time, and even if you do, knowing everything that is included or referred to by a book is an impossible undertaking. You’d have to find out what you needed to know. You’d need to figure this out for a potential few or several hundred pages worth of text. And you’d need to do this for the referenced books too. I’m starting to get a dizzy as I did as a child when someone told me that heaven is forever and ever (and ever and ever…)

So, we don’t know what we don’t know – my biggest literary fear has got me on occasion; it happens less the older I get and thus the more I realise it’s good to be cautious. When it comes to not getting something in contemporary literary fiction, for example (I think contemporary literary fiction is the least likely place for it) it’s not too bad – you can generally get away with saying ‘I didn’t get this book’, even if you don’t tell others. But for a lot of books it’s very difficult to get around and it can make you feel silly for not knowing. Looking silly isn’t so bad, but making a mistake in, say, a review, can be awful, or at least feel so. At least in the example mentioned in the article, it’s not such a problem. Knowing about Panem might give you a chuckle, a hint of the author’s thoughts very early on, but otherwise it won’t effect your reading too much.

Consider Shakespeare for a moment. When he wrote, he used Greek allusions as if they were pop culture references. And half of the actual pop culture references we still don’t get in Shakespeare’s plays unless we’re scholars of the time period. These are things that go over our heads. They are also things that don’t negate from our reading pleasure and understanding today. (ibid.)

Some books, and other media, if we consider Shakespeare, are written for certain audiences – you can’t expect to understand a book that is on a subject you don’t know about unless it’s a textbook and a beginner’s one at that. This, for me, is where this subject blends into the one about including pop culture in books – the way books will be outdated soon if an author uses things like social media, for example; a person in the future might know or be able to find out what it is but that distinct recognition, relation to it, won’t be there. The reader will, by no fault of their own, lack a particular sort of empathy that might impede their reading of the book. (This is why I’ve not read many books that rely on digital media to tell their story.)

It is in many ways a scary subject – far from the be all, end all, but in context it can make you think twice, and once you’ve discovered one missing link, you’ll spend the rest of the book wondering what else you’re missing.

Do you have this fear? How do you deal with it?

Online References

Marciniak, Catherine (2018), Cultural Literary: Knowing What We Don’t Know, Book Riot, accessed 16th April 2018.

Previous posts refer to the author as Charlotte Turner Smith. For this review I have left out the middle name, matching the original edition of the book.

How my poor heart aches with every step you take.

Publisher: N/A
Pages: N/A
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: N/A
First Published: 1788
Date Reviewed: 13th April 2018
Rating: 3.5/5

When orphaned Emmeline’s nursemaid dies, she moves away from the castle she called home. Her rich uncle, who has paid for her upkeep but not bothered to visit her, finally arrives with his son, Delamere, who becomes instantly infatuated with her. Angry at this, the uncle and aunt try to keep Emmeline away from him – and Emmeline would be happy if he did stay away – but he follows her in her travels and harasses her for marriage. All Emmeline wants is to return to her castle, perhaps with her new friends, but her choices are not her own.

Despite the fact of Emmeline‘s success when published and the great historical value it presents to us today, in the context of the here and now the things it includes are difficult; whilst what it shows could be said to show further evidence of why society has changed in the way it treats women, the scenes and characters in the book, particularly when added to the stereotypical fainting, literary devices, and padding, make for a book that is difficult to read.

Chief in this is the role a good half of the male characters play; Emmeline’s beauty – her personality is of little consequence to most – creates, at the instant of meeting, an obsession in the minds of many she meets and the vast majority go on to pursue her in earnest. What we would now consider harassment, narcissism, and emotional abuse, are major features of this book, with Emmeline and her friends travelling extensively in their quest to outrun various suitors, an effort which nevertheless fails to endear her to her uncle; it takes a long time for Lord Montreville to see Delamere’s entitlement and childish temper tantrums, which involve hitting his head against walls.

So the problem isn’t so much that it happens, because in fact it shows well the issue of Emmeline being controlled by her uncle; the issue is the way Emmeline’s friends handle it and how Smith – perhaps because her goal is to illustrate a woman’s lack of choice rather than any sort of commentary on how things are reached – often writes without commentary on it, leaving Emmeline to truly fend for herself. The times when the author is blunt, and these do increase about halfway through, make the novel palatable again, with Emmeline granted authorial leave to stop painting and singing for Delamere, things that give him the idea she likes him, that it seems the author has instructed her to do.

‘The regard she was sensible of for Delamere did not make her blind to his faults; and she saw, with pain, that the ungovernable violence of his temper frequently obscured all his good qualities, and gave his character an appearance of ferocity, which offered no very flattering prospect to whosoever should be his wife.’

And, later:

“His love, too ardent perhaps to last, will decline; while the inconveniences of a narrow fortune will encrease [sic]; and I, who shall be the cause of these conveniences, shall also be the victim.”

On the subject of a women’s choice to live how she wishes, comparisons can be made between Smith and Mrs Stafford. Smith’s husband lost them a lot of money and the author ended up living in jail with him for a time before they separated; Mrs Stafford, mother of a few children, spends more time with Emmeline than she does her husband but her life is necessarily entangled with his so that his lack of care for his family and career of gambling away his money means she must go back to him and try and work things out. In life, Smith left her husband, and died ill and with little money. In fiction her friendships enable her to have a happier, healthier, wealthier family despite him. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, who otherwise hated the book, liked Mrs Stafford.

Otherwise, Emmeline fits every stereotype of novels from the period. If a woman does not carry smelling salts she is very much out of luck, for a great deal of fainting and, on some occasions, actual dying, occurs for relatively minor reasons such as the appearance of one’s lover, the realisation that a person isn’t the golden perfect child they were molded to be and, in what is a particularly unsatisfying literary device, the jealousy of one for another who is also obsessed with a lady no longer available.

One unfortunate drawback to the usage of characters from the 1780s with extreme personality traits is that the hero of the book isn’t all that much of a hero. In comparison to others he is a knight in shining armour, and Smith uses him as a device in order to insert poetry that history tells us was more her sort of thing, but he himself can get quite angry on occasion, jealous, and, whilst historically considered the right thing to do, his enforcement of a woman’s estrangement from her lover when few relatives seem to care – including the woman’s husband – means that he doesn’t come across nearly as well as he perhaps should… particularly as Smith resorts to deus ex machina to continually put him in Emmeline’s path… which, given the rest of the novel, effectively becomes a pursuit.

Smith does acknowledge this:

‘…who seemed providentially to have been thrown in her way on purpose to elucidate her history.’

The lead-up to the ending promises a great future for Emmeline but Smith draws out the last few chapters with filler material before tying everything up very quickly in the last few pages. After almost 500 turns, or 500 swipes of the screen, it’s a big disappointment.

Given the way this review darts back and forth between saying that things are bad and then that they make sense and are good, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the reviewer – referring to herself in a fashion she has come to find synonymous with 1700s and 1800s writing – is utterly confused as to the merit of this book. But – and this might be an ‘alas!’ – she is not. Seen entirely in the context of its history, society at the time, and the life of the author, Emmeline is quite a feat. Thus, seen as a subject of study for whichever element it is chosen, it is rather good even if, as its declining fame aptly shows, it’s far from the best. But in terms of the reading experience for escape or pleasure, it is not a good one and the general, public, success of the novel is long gone.

Related Books

None yet

I’m preparing for my next Southampton event; having been to Cobbett Road Library – the one recently used for the Cheryl Butler talk I covered last month – and knowing now a fair bit about it, it seemed the right venue in which to go ahead. I’ve arranged for Claire Fuller to join us in May and whilst there won’t be a video recording to share, we will have photographs and I’m hoping I can get some notes down. I’m catching up on Fuller’s work and loving it; in Our Endless Numbered Days, which is about a young girl whose father takes her to a remote location to live for years in secret on the pretense that the world outside is gone, the writing is such that there’s a fantastical element to it; the shock isn’t contained by it, but the book is unique for it, almost at times evoking a children’s adventure story and very unlike other stories of the same type for it.

When you finish a book on a Kobo, you are taken back to the home screen where a selection of your newly-added books are shown, and if you turn off the device following this, the screen will often default to a picture of a book you’ve started sometime previously, whether one you’ve actively started to read or just taken a peak at. Prior to finishing Emmeline a few days ago, I’d had thoughts of beginning Aphra Behn’s work, but when the Kobo showed Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote I decided that maybe my plan wasn’t the best thing at that moment and decided to take the Kobo’s mechanical suggestion to continue reading works from the 1700s, particularly because it also meant continuing Project Charlotte – Lennox is number 4 of 5.

There is just one problem and I’m not sure yet what to do – it is entirely a parody of the Spanish book, where I had thought perhaps there would be a few references, and as such I wonder whether I ought to read Cervantes first. In another situation I might simply put the later book aside and read the first for context, but I remember the bookmark that remained stuck around 2/3s of the way through my father’s copy of Don Quixote for years and I know how big a book it is and… that’s one heck of a commitment to make. (I expect the bookmark is still there, but recently Dad culled his shelves of a lot of super classics and books that brought back fond memories and I’ve found it hard to look.)

I hope that simply by knowing the basics of the original – loss of sanity, chivalry, shooting at windmills… the 1980s Nik Kershaw song… this is the sort of book that might stand alone.

Aside from this, I’ve been reading about Lennox’s life. Well connected but yet incredibly unknown otherwise, she was friends with Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson, and likely knew, through the former, Frances Burney and other – now less well-known – female writers such as Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More, but her books were published without credit and she made little money, relying on money from the Royal Literary Fund after separating from her husband. The Female Quixote was fairly popular, and she created the first comparative study of Shakespeare’s work, but despite the fact information on her seems to eclipse that of the other female writers I’ve mentioned above (barring Burney), she’s very obscure today.

Away from literature, the defining moment of the last few weeks came last Friday when the England Ladies’ Football arrived in Southampton to play their World Cup qualifier against Wales. It was quite surreal – I’ve seen them play once before but having them in Southampton was incredible and the stadium was pretty packed. It was a 0-0 match that was surprisingly good to watch because England had 22 shots at the goal; the ball rarely passed over the halfway line. They are currently 2nd in the world.

Today’s question must be bookish:

How do you deal with reading around the subject and reading source material – do you cover the originals first?