We Two

by Edna Lyall

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1886

About the author

Edna Lyall was the pseudonym used by Ada Ellen Bayley. Bayly was born in Brighton, the youngest of four children of a barrister. At an early age, she lost both her parents and she spent her youth with an uncle in Surrey and in a Brighton private school. Bayly never married and she seems to have spent her adult life living in with her two married sisters and her brother, a clergyman in Bosbury in Herefordshire. In 1879, she published her first novel, Won by Waiting, under the pen name of "Edna Lyall" (apparently derived from transposing letters from Ada Ellen Bayly). The book was not a success. Success came with We Two, based on the life of Charles Bradlaugh, a social reformer and advocate of free thought. Her historical novel In the Golden Days was the last book read to John Ruskin on his deathbed. Bayly wrote eighteen novels.

Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

According to Wikipedia, this novel is the book that made Edna Lyall a success. I cannot imagine why. I didn't think it was anywhere near as good as Donovan, a Novel, by Edna Lyall for which We Two is a sequel of sorts. It didn't have the same heart, the same character development, the same story arc. Rather, it often seemed more like a series of anecdotes in service of very little plot. The characters of Luke Raeburn and Erica Raeburn, his daughter, are established at the beginning of the novel and do very little changing along the way. Erica finds religion, much to her atheist father's chagrin, but other than that they are static. Many things happen along the way (many, many things...) but the essentials stay the same. Luke Raeburn is determined to preach the anti-gospel gospel, misguided religious zealots are determined to persecute him, Erica is determined to support and stand by him no matter what. The pattern is established in the beginning and remains unchanged until the end. I get the point Lyall was trying to make, but it didn't make for a good story. Rather it seemed like a religious tolerance lecture with the characters lives' as afterthought. Also the irony of it at times was a little comical: the reformer "who spends his whole strength in propagating his...gospel of atheism" (almost like it's his religion); or the persecuted "Raeburnites" who complain of the way society treats them because they're atheists, but who instantly turn on Erica and isolate and harass her when she becomes a Christian. Irony aside, the novel was a slog that I'm very glad to be done with.