The Vision Splendid

by D.K. Broster

Excerpt from The Vision Splendid
The broad faces of the sunflowers surveyed, with their eternal, undiscriminating smile, the nape of Horatia's white neck, and were no wiser. Her back was towards them, and they could not see what book was in her lap. But the hollyhocks further down the border were probably aware that she was not really reading anything. They swayed a little, disturbing a blundering bee; and Horatia, turning her head towards the flower-bed, glanced for a moment at those tall warriors en fete.
A gust of perfume suddenly shook out at her from the border. Certainly the summer seemed hardly within sight of its end, though on this Monday, the thirtieth of August, 1830, much of the corn was cut already.
Horatia's own summer was at the full, and it was now only old-fashioned people who thought the single woman of twenty-four in peril of the unblest autumn of perpetual maidenhood.
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Genres: Historical Fiction

508 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1913

About the author

Dorothy Kathleen Broster (1877 - 1950) produced 15 popular historical novels between 1911 and 1947.

The Yellow Poppy (1920) about the adventures of an aristocratic couple during the French Revolution, was later adapted by Broster and W. Edward Stirling for the London stage in 1922. She produced her bestseller Scottish historical novel, The Flight of the Heron, in 1925. Broster stated she had consulted eighty reference books before beginning the novel. She followed it up with two successful sequels, The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile. She wrote several other historical novels, successful and much reprinted in their day, although this Jacobite trilogy (inspired by a five-week visit to friends in Scotland), featuring the dashing hero Ewen Cameron, remains the best known.

The Flight of the Heron was adapted for BBC Radio twice, in 1944, starring Gordon Jackson as Ewen Cameron, and again in 1959, starring Bryden Murdoch as Cameron. Murdoch also starred in radio adaptations of the book's sequels, The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile.

Reviews

[Surreysmum · Rating 3 out of 5]

[These notes were made in 1985; I read the book in the 1928 Heinemann edition:]. It is a temptation (and one which requires resistance) to ascribe all the beauties of a joint-authored novel to the author one knows and admires, and all the faults to the other. Yet, from subject-matter alone, I think we can fairly ascribe the handling of Horatia's French romance to D.K. Broster, and the Puseyite concerns of Tristram and his friend Dormer to Miss Taylor. How much they overlapped is hard to tell: I think, for instance, that the splendid moment when Dormer comforts Tristram by the stagnant fountain could only have been painted by Broster - and I wonder if that stagnant fountain is her silent comment on the whole moral tendency of the novel, which is so utterly foreign in feeling to the rest of her work. The conclusion of the novel - Horatia and Tristram finding separate fulfilments through sacrifice - I find quite unsatisfactory, partly because I find the doctrine it preaches unsatisfactory, but partly, too, because the vivid personalities which started the novel have faded into suffering mouthpieces for different points of view. It is my definite impression that in this her first novel, Broster's sensibilities were put to use by and subjugated to, the overarching plan of a mind entirely different from her own. There are exquisite moments in the "French" part of the novel - Tristram's surrender of Horatia to her French lover seems at that point to be more the action of one of Broster's super-honourable heroes than the outgrowth of the almost morbidly religious motives he shows later on. Horatia's loneliness and culture shock in France are melancholy but well-painted. Armand's supreme sacrifice for Laurence - the woman he loved first - has something of real tragic inevitability about it, and Laurence herself, despite the overarching plan of the book, has somehow managed to worm her way into our sympathies. There is a fundamental tension, though, between our identification with Horatia and our involvement in Armand's sacrifice for Laurence: it's a major fault in the book. It may have been a by-product of the double authorship, but I found the shifting points of view and moral determination of the main characters - potentially another major flaw - to be quite admirably handled; indeed, they saved the characters from becoming stereotypes, and suggested tremendous possibilities of personal growth. We really do feel that Horatia has grown up between the time she meets Armand and the time she returns, a widow with a child, to her father. Perhaps it is this very potential for growth which makes the wordy, morbid, almost inhuman ending so frustrating. As for Dormer, who is to represent the pure spiritual element in the equation, there are flashes of real fire in him - and in the relationship between him and Tristram the occasional subdued hints of tasteful homoeroticism which I suspect are Broster's, given the Heron. His end, however, is pure St. John Rivers, and like him - although with more justification? (no pun intended) - Dormer gets pride of place in the last paragraph of the book. Much here which promises the future Broster: the Vendée, the soft-middled Frenchman, the symbolic landscape, the bursts of finely rendered passion. But not yet quite in her own element.

[Hyarrowen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like the previous reviewer, I can definitely see the two authors at work here, and the romance seems to me to be Broster through and through. But the life is squashed out of the characters at the end, except for the new young hero, and his bride, who we don't even get to see; perhaps one of the authors lost interest and had already mentally moved on?

I enjoyed the picture of Oxford in the first half of the nineteenth century, with so many high-minded gentlemen wrestling with their consciences, but found the juxtaposition with a Romantic storyline very jarring. Poor Horatia; I found her isolation and manipulation chillingly real, and would have liked to see her, once escaped from that situation and back in control of her life, continue on that path (surely there was something in the marriage settlement to make that possible?) Real life doesn't have to make sense but fiction does... in the end I just wanted to bang a few heads together.