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Lesbia Brandon
New Pocketbook Edition of Victorian poet Swinburne's "Lesbia Brandon", the name attributed to his lifelong failed novel-in-progress with a new introduction by Zachary Tanner.
- GenresFiction
341 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
77 people want to read
About the author
Algernon Charles Swinburne
1,215 books142 followersIn musical, often erotic verse, British poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote and attacked the conventions of Victorian morality.
This controversial Englishman in his own day invented the roundel form and some novels and contributed to the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerno...
This controversial Englishman in his own day invented the roundel form and some novels and contributed to the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerno...
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 26, 2021
This book we have published is largely Swinburnes classic, but what sets it apart from the rest is Zachary Tanner's cover art and his introduction, along with this cover. This is a 10€ treasure by one of the least understood and most underestimated writers of the past two centuries. Rise Algernon, rise!
October 26, 2021
Replete with “a loveliness that wavers and hovers between female and male; dark and soft, rounded and radiant.” (P. 110 of the Falcon Press edition)
Something thoughtful soon. Back to the library.
Update, October 26, 2021***********************************
"The absurd prose style of his later period requires no comment beyond Edward Thomas’s observation that if De Quincey and Dr. Johnson had “collaborated in imitating Lyly they must have produced Swinburne’s prose.”
-C. Y. Lang1
When The Falcon Press posthumously published Lesbia Brandon in 1952, the novel was sandwiched between an irate foreword and hundreds of pages of commentary from Randolph Hughes2 that vacillate between elegant analysis of Swinburne's two English-language novels, imprecise attempts to critically situate Swinburne in the canon of Major Novelists while rejecting the traditional categorization of the novel ("I venture to claim that I have at least shown that the most generally accepted canon of the novel, that formulated by Stevenson, Hardy and Arnold Bennett, for instance, and by the most influential French critics, and regarded by them as the one and only ideal, a supreme form after which all good novelistic work must aspire, has not universal validity, and is not the only nor necessarily the highest norm for the evaluation of success.")3, exhaustively-researched finger-point-ing at the shady figures and dealers who have clung to, hindered, and obfuscated the Work of Swinburne, most singularly Algernon's "friend" and solicitor, Theodore Watts-Dunton (of whom Hughes writes: "There are at least two crimes from which Watts-Dunton can never be absolved: the sale of his dead friend's manuscripts to the unlettered pedlar and the forger Wise, and the frustration of a work that had in it the makings of a masterpiece."), and finally a section of scholarly justification on the Text as constituted and compiled from the typeset drafts and manuscripts forty-three years after the death of the author. "The general reader will no doubt not bother about this last section; but scholars will expect it in the case of a new book of this sort of which the sources of the text present a large number of problems; and it is essential in order to justify my own arrangement of the text, which differs considerably from that of Wise, and also from that of the galley-proofs."4
Though riddled with the errors, inconsist-encies, and misprints pointed out in C. Y. Lang's letter to the Times Literary Supplement,5 the Hughes edition was the same chapter arrangement and text to appear in a slightly corrected form in The Novels of A. C. Swinburne (1962). The corona\samizdat edition has been based off of the Hughes, altered only by basic copy editing for grammar and sense to correct obvious misprints in the original.
Hughes's telling of the missing chapters of Lesbia Brandon is where I found the sad, pleading letter from Swinburne that has been reproduced on the back of this book, and this section of the Commentary makes wonderful reading for those with the bitter taste for Victorian-era gossip. Though Hughes's bombastic rhetoric at times is not but outright mud-slinging, there is much of import to be found, and the whole amounts to one of the most anally ambitious novel studies I've had the pleasure of reading, though as Lang has shown, for all his diligence it may not be infallible, and in no phoneme is it unbiased.
Hughes's foreword, though, is a great essay on Swinburne (one wonders that it couldn't have been enough to settle his hard feelings), and the entire edition represents a monumental event in the history of publishing, Hughes's decade of work to restore the unpublished prose and naughty poems of Swinburne. Therein we will learn from Hughes that Lesbia Brandon, however fantastic, is a false title that "has acquired a standing through its present in Wise's Catalogues, and has been used of the work whenever the latter was mentioned in all publications relating to Swinburne printed in the last forty years or so, it has seemed best not to seek to alter it."6 If I could recommend only two essays for the general reader on the fiction of Swinburne, I'd recomm-end the Hughes foreword and Edmund Wilson's introduction to The Novels of A. C. Swinburne, aka "Swinburne of Capheaton and Eton"7, 67 pages of buried criticism readily accessible in virtually any English-language university library offering clarity to the story of this story, and its (lack of) reception for a century and a half and then some.
Scholarship of this sort becomes very important in understanding a poet-novelist like Swinburne, for I know no one by face and name alive today who would be able to read ILLA RUDEM CURSA PRIMA INTUIT AMPHI-TRITEN and immediately peg the reference to Catullus, personal poet such as Swinburne, perhaps best known for a series of poems about a lover named Lesbia—eureka!—which brought me to the computer, where I found a faithful reproduction of the image by Weguelin of Lesbia from Catullus, used in this edition as a frontispiece, which seemed appropriate because it was another telling of Catullus painted in the year after Swinburne had portions of this novel typeset, and I also think it goes pretty well with the portrait of Ophelia on the cover by Burthe, which is appropriate in its own right because Swinburne mentions honest Iago in both of his novels. To the post-modern reader whose cyborg scholarship of text and image in the library and on the internet often offers such vertiginously labyrinthian synchronicities, Swinburne's poly-lingual novels and letters are more accessible than ever, for what reason, these days, has one to fear for Hungarian in Gaddis when we can understand the Latin in Sterne with a wi-fi connection? The corona\samizdat reprint rep-resents the first time this novel will appear simply bound in an accessible pocket paperback form, to stand on its own, without the dressings and euphemisms of biased scholarship holding its hand, to let readers decide for themselves whether the allusions are worth the scholarship to understand them after all this time.
On the other hand, I, for one, have no trouble reading this book simply for my pleasure. We have in hand an unfinished "masterpiece" such as The Pale King or Jean Santeuil. Let us not confuse these sketches, nor Lesbia Brandon, with such Unfinished Masterpieces as À la recherche du temps perdu or Bouvard et Pécuchet. However, "There is always something attractive in failure after a time, as strong as there is for the minute in success." (p.126)
Every time I resurface from a dip in this novel, I feel like Herbert at the waves: "His face trembled and changed, his eyelids tingled, his limbs yearned all over: the colours and savours of the sea seemed to pass in at his eyes and mouth; all his nerves desired the divine touch of it, all his soul saluted it through the senses." (p.10) For good fiction gives me the satisfaction our debutante Herbert seeks in the world: "To retain his own eyes and see also with another man's—to retain his own sense and acquire another man's…" (p.36)
Swinburne began writing Lesbia Brandon in the 1860s, and in 1877, the same year his other novel Love's Cross-Currents originally appeared in The Tatler as A Year's Letters by "Mrs. Horace Manners," had several chapters set into type. A quick glance at my ALSO BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE printed on the back of the book's front flyleaf is a wonderful place to appreciate at a glance how many incredible, whole pieces of art Swinburne created during his long tenure as novelist manqué, but for the fan it is worthwhile to visit three readily available Chronologies: Erhsam's in Bibliographies of Twelve Victorian Authors, Welby's in A Study of Swinburne, and Nicolson's in Swinburne.
Though Lesbia Brandon was never finished, what remains between covers certainly contains a spark of what Swinburne so admired in the Brontë sisters: "a quality as hard to define as impossible to mistake; even the static and dynamic terms of definition so freely and scientifically misused in the latest school of feminine romance would scarcely help us much towards an adequate apprehension or expression of it. But its absence or its presence is or should be anywhere and always recognizable at a glance, whether dynamic or merely static, of a skilful or unskilful eye to discern the style from the diastole of human companionship—or even inhuman jargon. The crudest as the most refined pedantry of semi-science, tricked out at second hand in the freshest or the stalest phrases of archaic school-men or neologic lecturers that may be swept up from the dustiest boards or picked up under the daintiest platforms irradiated or obfuscated by new lamps or old, will avail nothing to guide any possible seeker on the path towards an exploration by physical analysis or metaphysical synthesis of the source of the process, the fountain or the channel or the issue, of this subtle and infallible force of nature—the progress from the root into the fruit of this direct creative instinct.”8
Contemporary readers educated in North American Creative Writing Workshops or reading this introduction at a pay-by-the-week retreat may find themselves cringing at double adjectives, rhymed prose, and, heaven forbid, several descriptions of eyes and faces, but in the most beautiful way I see Lesbia Brandon like Lady Midhurst sees Nature: "I do think, if she had her own way, would grow nothing but turnips; only the force that fights her, for which we have no name, now and then revolts; and the dull soil here and there rebels into a rose." (p.200)
Let scholars seek out scholarly editions. For the rest of us, we sensualists, the readers who read to live the lives of others and develop a complex taste for diversity, let's drop a needle on Schoolboys in Disgrace and take this Lesbia-Brandon-without-training-wheels in hand as we roam the Earth in search of the vastness of the sea to be found in another's eyes by the power of the heart.
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.
NOTES
1Page xvii of Lang's Introduction to Volume 1 of The Swinburne Letters, which covers 1854-1869. “About two thousand letters will be printed in these volumes. The manuscripts have been assembled from nearly three dozen libraries and about fifty private collections, and in addition I have reprinted letters, of which the holographs have not been found, from several dozen books and periodicals.”
2Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lesbia Brandon (The Falcon Press, 1952), from which I have pulled for the sake of these notes several portions of the manuscript that were deleted, to retain some sense of the manuscript as Swinburne envisioned it as it may have been handed down had it been published in the 1870s (around the time author had the majority of the manuscript set into type) by the London pornographer Hotten under a pseudonym abreast such classics as Flagellation and the Flagellants, a History of the Rod in all Countries, Lady Bumtickler's Revel, or A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs. Here are a few of my favorites:
i)"When after some months he took hold of his courage with both hands, heaved his heart into his mouth and begged [with moist eyes and fiery cheeks that he might not be] [hoisted or held down by a servant, promising: : hoist across the whipping-block by a servant, promising] to be no longer hoisted, promising to keep quiet and take his due allowance of cuts without wincing, Denham acceded with a sharp laugh, and thus [thenceforth] chair or sofa [became substituted for the wooden horse] served the purpose of a school block, and every flogging."
ii)"The sting was doubled or trebled; and he was not release still blood had been drawn from his wet skin, soaked as it was in salt at every pore: and came home at once red and white, drenched and dry. Nothing in his life had ever hurt him so much as these."
iii)"Feverish hands, he knew, would deal but inadequate strokes: and he was on all accounts inclined to give Herbert something to remember for life."
iv)"A few words or warning menace and sharp reproach were intermixed between the stripes; and after each pause of the kind a long switching cut was laid on which left deeper marks on the boy's smooth skin [which made the room echo, answering upon]."
v)"Noticed the print of his knees on the couch, the tumbled cushion, and among other significant minor indications sundry broken twigs of birch lying about, bruised buds and frayed fragments of a very sufficient stout rod. That well-worn implement, no longer fresh and supple, with tough knots and expanding sprays, but ragged, unsightly, deformed and used up, lay across a chair close at hand, not without [specks] marks of blood [about] on it."
vi)"This sentence was sportively enforced by a sharp stroke with a flat hand which made the boy cry out and catch his breath: the secret pinch that followed brought the tears full into his eyes, and his teeth pressed his underlip hard: these caresses had literally enough touched a tender part."
vii)"He had found out by means of a fresh blow with the hand, which brought such exquisite pain into Herbert's face as could not be mistaken or controlled: the cheeks were contracted and the whole body quivered."
3Ibid, p. xxvii.
4Ibid, p. iii.
5See essay by Edmund Wilson mentioned shortly.
6Falcon Press edition, p. xxviii.
7This introduction originally appeared in The New Yorker in somewhat different form in 1962.
8Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (New York: Russel & Russel, 1968), "A Note on Charlotte Bronte," p. 4-5. This edition is a reissue of the 1925 Bonchurch Edition of The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Something thoughtful soon. Back to the library.
Update, October 26, 2021***********************************
"The absurd prose style of his later period requires no comment beyond Edward Thomas’s observation that if De Quincey and Dr. Johnson had “collaborated in imitating Lyly they must have produced Swinburne’s prose.”
-C. Y. Lang1
When The Falcon Press posthumously published Lesbia Brandon in 1952, the novel was sandwiched between an irate foreword and hundreds of pages of commentary from Randolph Hughes2 that vacillate between elegant analysis of Swinburne's two English-language novels, imprecise attempts to critically situate Swinburne in the canon of Major Novelists while rejecting the traditional categorization of the novel ("I venture to claim that I have at least shown that the most generally accepted canon of the novel, that formulated by Stevenson, Hardy and Arnold Bennett, for instance, and by the most influential French critics, and regarded by them as the one and only ideal, a supreme form after which all good novelistic work must aspire, has not universal validity, and is not the only nor necessarily the highest norm for the evaluation of success.")3, exhaustively-researched finger-point-ing at the shady figures and dealers who have clung to, hindered, and obfuscated the Work of Swinburne, most singularly Algernon's "friend" and solicitor, Theodore Watts-Dunton (of whom Hughes writes: "There are at least two crimes from which Watts-Dunton can never be absolved: the sale of his dead friend's manuscripts to the unlettered pedlar and the forger Wise, and the frustration of a work that had in it the makings of a masterpiece."), and finally a section of scholarly justification on the Text as constituted and compiled from the typeset drafts and manuscripts forty-three years after the death of the author. "The general reader will no doubt not bother about this last section; but scholars will expect it in the case of a new book of this sort of which the sources of the text present a large number of problems; and it is essential in order to justify my own arrangement of the text, which differs considerably from that of Wise, and also from that of the galley-proofs."4
Though riddled with the errors, inconsist-encies, and misprints pointed out in C. Y. Lang's letter to the Times Literary Supplement,5 the Hughes edition was the same chapter arrangement and text to appear in a slightly corrected form in The Novels of A. C. Swinburne (1962). The corona\samizdat edition has been based off of the Hughes, altered only by basic copy editing for grammar and sense to correct obvious misprints in the original.
Hughes's telling of the missing chapters of Lesbia Brandon is where I found the sad, pleading letter from Swinburne that has been reproduced on the back of this book, and this section of the Commentary makes wonderful reading for those with the bitter taste for Victorian-era gossip. Though Hughes's bombastic rhetoric at times is not but outright mud-slinging, there is much of import to be found, and the whole amounts to one of the most anally ambitious novel studies I've had the pleasure of reading, though as Lang has shown, for all his diligence it may not be infallible, and in no phoneme is it unbiased.
Hughes's foreword, though, is a great essay on Swinburne (one wonders that it couldn't have been enough to settle his hard feelings), and the entire edition represents a monumental event in the history of publishing, Hughes's decade of work to restore the unpublished prose and naughty poems of Swinburne. Therein we will learn from Hughes that Lesbia Brandon, however fantastic, is a false title that "has acquired a standing through its present in Wise's Catalogues, and has been used of the work whenever the latter was mentioned in all publications relating to Swinburne printed in the last forty years or so, it has seemed best not to seek to alter it."6 If I could recommend only two essays for the general reader on the fiction of Swinburne, I'd recomm-end the Hughes foreword and Edmund Wilson's introduction to The Novels of A. C. Swinburne, aka "Swinburne of Capheaton and Eton"7, 67 pages of buried criticism readily accessible in virtually any English-language university library offering clarity to the story of this story, and its (lack of) reception for a century and a half and then some.
Scholarship of this sort becomes very important in understanding a poet-novelist like Swinburne, for I know no one by face and name alive today who would be able to read ILLA RUDEM CURSA PRIMA INTUIT AMPHI-TRITEN and immediately peg the reference to Catullus, personal poet such as Swinburne, perhaps best known for a series of poems about a lover named Lesbia—eureka!—which brought me to the computer, where I found a faithful reproduction of the image by Weguelin of Lesbia from Catullus, used in this edition as a frontispiece, which seemed appropriate because it was another telling of Catullus painted in the year after Swinburne had portions of this novel typeset, and I also think it goes pretty well with the portrait of Ophelia on the cover by Burthe, which is appropriate in its own right because Swinburne mentions honest Iago in both of his novels. To the post-modern reader whose cyborg scholarship of text and image in the library and on the internet often offers such vertiginously labyrinthian synchronicities, Swinburne's poly-lingual novels and letters are more accessible than ever, for what reason, these days, has one to fear for Hungarian in Gaddis when we can understand the Latin in Sterne with a wi-fi connection? The corona\samizdat reprint rep-resents the first time this novel will appear simply bound in an accessible pocket paperback form, to stand on its own, without the dressings and euphemisms of biased scholarship holding its hand, to let readers decide for themselves whether the allusions are worth the scholarship to understand them after all this time.
On the other hand, I, for one, have no trouble reading this book simply for my pleasure. We have in hand an unfinished "masterpiece" such as The Pale King or Jean Santeuil. Let us not confuse these sketches, nor Lesbia Brandon, with such Unfinished Masterpieces as À la recherche du temps perdu or Bouvard et Pécuchet. However, "There is always something attractive in failure after a time, as strong as there is for the minute in success." (p.126)
Every time I resurface from a dip in this novel, I feel like Herbert at the waves: "His face trembled and changed, his eyelids tingled, his limbs yearned all over: the colours and savours of the sea seemed to pass in at his eyes and mouth; all his nerves desired the divine touch of it, all his soul saluted it through the senses." (p.10) For good fiction gives me the satisfaction our debutante Herbert seeks in the world: "To retain his own eyes and see also with another man's—to retain his own sense and acquire another man's…" (p.36)
Swinburne began writing Lesbia Brandon in the 1860s, and in 1877, the same year his other novel Love's Cross-Currents originally appeared in The Tatler as A Year's Letters by "Mrs. Horace Manners," had several chapters set into type. A quick glance at my ALSO BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE printed on the back of the book's front flyleaf is a wonderful place to appreciate at a glance how many incredible, whole pieces of art Swinburne created during his long tenure as novelist manqué, but for the fan it is worthwhile to visit three readily available Chronologies: Erhsam's in Bibliographies of Twelve Victorian Authors, Welby's in A Study of Swinburne, and Nicolson's in Swinburne.
Though Lesbia Brandon was never finished, what remains between covers certainly contains a spark of what Swinburne so admired in the Brontë sisters: "a quality as hard to define as impossible to mistake; even the static and dynamic terms of definition so freely and scientifically misused in the latest school of feminine romance would scarcely help us much towards an adequate apprehension or expression of it. But its absence or its presence is or should be anywhere and always recognizable at a glance, whether dynamic or merely static, of a skilful or unskilful eye to discern the style from the diastole of human companionship—or even inhuman jargon. The crudest as the most refined pedantry of semi-science, tricked out at second hand in the freshest or the stalest phrases of archaic school-men or neologic lecturers that may be swept up from the dustiest boards or picked up under the daintiest platforms irradiated or obfuscated by new lamps or old, will avail nothing to guide any possible seeker on the path towards an exploration by physical analysis or metaphysical synthesis of the source of the process, the fountain or the channel or the issue, of this subtle and infallible force of nature—the progress from the root into the fruit of this direct creative instinct.”8
Contemporary readers educated in North American Creative Writing Workshops or reading this introduction at a pay-by-the-week retreat may find themselves cringing at double adjectives, rhymed prose, and, heaven forbid, several descriptions of eyes and faces, but in the most beautiful way I see Lesbia Brandon like Lady Midhurst sees Nature: "I do think, if she had her own way, would grow nothing but turnips; only the force that fights her, for which we have no name, now and then revolts; and the dull soil here and there rebels into a rose." (p.200)
Let scholars seek out scholarly editions. For the rest of us, we sensualists, the readers who read to live the lives of others and develop a complex taste for diversity, let's drop a needle on Schoolboys in Disgrace and take this Lesbia-Brandon-without-training-wheels in hand as we roam the Earth in search of the vastness of the sea to be found in another's eyes by the power of the heart.
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.
NOTES
1Page xvii of Lang's Introduction to Volume 1 of The Swinburne Letters, which covers 1854-1869. “About two thousand letters will be printed in these volumes. The manuscripts have been assembled from nearly three dozen libraries and about fifty private collections, and in addition I have reprinted letters, of which the holographs have not been found, from several dozen books and periodicals.”
2Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lesbia Brandon (The Falcon Press, 1952), from which I have pulled for the sake of these notes several portions of the manuscript that were deleted, to retain some sense of the manuscript as Swinburne envisioned it as it may have been handed down had it been published in the 1870s (around the time author had the majority of the manuscript set into type) by the London pornographer Hotten under a pseudonym abreast such classics as Flagellation and the Flagellants, a History of the Rod in all Countries, Lady Bumtickler's Revel, or A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs. Here are a few of my favorites:
i)"When after some months he took hold of his courage with both hands, heaved his heart into his mouth and begged [with moist eyes and fiery cheeks that he might not be] [hoisted or held down by a servant, promising: : hoist across the whipping-block by a servant, promising] to be no longer hoisted, promising to keep quiet and take his due allowance of cuts without wincing, Denham acceded with a sharp laugh, and thus [thenceforth] chair or sofa [became substituted for the wooden horse] served the purpose of a school block, and every flogging."
ii)"The sting was doubled or trebled; and he was not release still blood had been drawn from his wet skin, soaked as it was in salt at every pore: and came home at once red and white, drenched and dry. Nothing in his life had ever hurt him so much as these."
iii)"Feverish hands, he knew, would deal but inadequate strokes: and he was on all accounts inclined to give Herbert something to remember for life."
iv)"A few words or warning menace and sharp reproach were intermixed between the stripes; and after each pause of the kind a long switching cut was laid on which left deeper marks on the boy's smooth skin [which made the room echo, answering upon]."
v)"Noticed the print of his knees on the couch, the tumbled cushion, and among other significant minor indications sundry broken twigs of birch lying about, bruised buds and frayed fragments of a very sufficient stout rod. That well-worn implement, no longer fresh and supple, with tough knots and expanding sprays, but ragged, unsightly, deformed and used up, lay across a chair close at hand, not without [specks] marks of blood [about] on it."
vi)"This sentence was sportively enforced by a sharp stroke with a flat hand which made the boy cry out and catch his breath: the secret pinch that followed brought the tears full into his eyes, and his teeth pressed his underlip hard: these caresses had literally enough touched a tender part."
vii)"He had found out by means of a fresh blow with the hand, which brought such exquisite pain into Herbert's face as could not be mistaken or controlled: the cheeks were contracted and the whole body quivered."
3Ibid, p. xxvii.
4Ibid, p. iii.
5See essay by Edmund Wilson mentioned shortly.
6Falcon Press edition, p. xxviii.
7This introduction originally appeared in The New Yorker in somewhat different form in 1962.
8Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (New York: Russel & Russel, 1968), "A Note on Charlotte Bronte," p. 4-5. This edition is a reissue of the 1925 Bonchurch Edition of The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne.
May 18, 2024
Swinburne, Algernon - Lesbia Brandon
A messy novel, and an exasperating read.
Unpublished for being deemed pornographic, what remains appears to be a fragmentary rough draft.
The subject of the book is not Lesbia, but Herbert. Lesbia is hardly in the book; Swinburne never gave the novel a title. One was applied later, doubtless to provoke middle-class sensibilities.
Initial chapters pertain to Herbert’s private education and discipline from an exacting tutor. Swinburne relishes the switching, flogging, birching of the young lad, at length, more to break his spirit, akin to breaking a horse.
Instead of a caning, this section needs a severe editorial pruning. It comes across as excessive and self-indulgent.
Another lengthy traipse involves a dinner party with young Herbert, his sister, her husband, and their gentry friends and neighbors. Conversations spiral about, heavily sprinkled with French and Latin, and fail to serve the narrative.
Point is, there is scant narrative at all. Swinburne marshals ideas, descriptions and dialogue, but is unable to harness these, let alone array into a cohesive whole.
Mind you, so much of this is gloriously written. “Turris Eburnea” is a deliriously scathing chapter on Leonora Harley, sensuous and beautiful, who could neither spell nor think, and who deserved more pages than she was allotted.
Near the book's end, there is a haunting death of another character, one who should have received far, far more of Swinburne’s prodigious imagination.
Fans of the author, and of florid Victorian literature, should throw caution to the wind and get a copy of the latest edition.
A messy novel, and an exasperating read.
Unpublished for being deemed pornographic, what remains appears to be a fragmentary rough draft.
The subject of the book is not Lesbia, but Herbert. Lesbia is hardly in the book; Swinburne never gave the novel a title. One was applied later, doubtless to provoke middle-class sensibilities.
Initial chapters pertain to Herbert’s private education and discipline from an exacting tutor. Swinburne relishes the switching, flogging, birching of the young lad, at length, more to break his spirit, akin to breaking a horse.
Instead of a caning, this section needs a severe editorial pruning. It comes across as excessive and self-indulgent.
Another lengthy traipse involves a dinner party with young Herbert, his sister, her husband, and their gentry friends and neighbors. Conversations spiral about, heavily sprinkled with French and Latin, and fail to serve the narrative.
Point is, there is scant narrative at all. Swinburne marshals ideas, descriptions and dialogue, but is unable to harness these, let alone array into a cohesive whole.
Mind you, so much of this is gloriously written. “Turris Eburnea” is a deliriously scathing chapter on Leonora Harley, sensuous and beautiful, who could neither spell nor think, and who deserved more pages than she was allotted.
Near the book's end, there is a haunting death of another character, one who should have received far, far more of Swinburne’s prodigious imagination.
Fans of the author, and of florid Victorian literature, should throw caution to the wind and get a copy of the latest edition.
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December 31, 2016Read 101 of 188 pages.
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