The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Why have Olive and her mother moved?

What do you think of the Vanbrughs?

Why does Mr. Vanbrugh say a woman cannot be a great artist?

Who was the woman that Olive and Miss Meliora visited?

The narrator of the book has very specific opinions on gender and roles. I’m assuming the narrator and author are one and the same and they are her views, but I’m not sure. What are these views, and how do they influence the story?

Well, I knew Angus was doomed, but I am very disappointed to find it wasn't a railway accident after all!

But Celia Manners is obviously his cast-off mistress. Mr Wylie knows that Angus had a secret, connected to 'a girl's name', and the packet that Olive dutifully burned contained a 'foreign ornament' and a lock of black hair. There's also something Angus wanted Olive to know after his death, but not Sybilla. And Mrs Manners utters his name on her deathbed. I'd put money on Christal being his daughter, too, in spite of what Christal believes about her parents, whose names she apparently doesn't know.

I think the faithless Sara has snuffed it too, what with Harold writing on mourning stationery and Olive assuming it was his mother who had died.
But no doubt we'll find out in due course!

The Vanbrughs are rather fun - the nearest we've got to anybody actually having a personality so far, even if the 'eccentric genius' is a bit hackneyed.

Jenny, I subscribe to all of your suspicions! ... and as usual, the hero/heroine will be the last to know.

and he had said likewise truly, that no woman can be an artist—that is, a great artist … etc. etc. etc.

This whole sermon on women’s lesser capacities is nauseating to read, even at a distance of 170 years. I would expect nothing else from a male author - but from a woman who is herself in the “creative professions”??

I felt the same way reading about women's lesser abilities-from an author!

I'm glad that Olive and her mother have a nice place to live and congenial landlords-the Vanbrughs.

Besides the insult to women, there’s a weird thing about how Olive can be good at art because she isn’t “really “ a woman.

The preachy gender stuff throughout the book really got on my nerves and is one of the reasons the book only got three stars.

Other than that, I did like the Vanbrughs and Olive's relationship with them.

Lori wrote: "The preachy gender stuff throughout the book really got on my nerves and is one of the reasons the book only got three stars. ..."

I wondered why the author felt it necessary to include it, since she writes as though these are well-known facts. Then I thought perhaps that since she was writing about a talented young woman earning her own living as an artist, she was afraid that people might take her for some kind of feminist, and forbid their daughters to read any of her books in case they put unsuitable ideas into their heads.
So she felt she had to make it quite clear that she wasn't one of these awful modern women spouting all this equality nonsense, just for the sake of future sales.

Jenny wrote: "So she felt she had to make it quite clear that she wasn't one of these awful modern women spouting all this equality nonsense, just for the sake of future sales.."

a kind of anticipatory obedience ... which begs the question whether it was necessary to be *quite* so eloquent on the subject. If she wrote against her own beliefs, couldn't she have done away with the problem in one or two sentences, instead of preaching on and on?

Jenny wrote: "So she felt she had to make it quite clear that she wasn't one of these awful modern women spouting all this equality nonsense, just for the sake of future sales."

I'm not sure how relevant this detail is, but Olive was also published 15 years before the author married (she would be nearly 40 by the time she married). Normally I would avoid making assumptions about an author's marital aspirations, but the way she really preached the gender paradigms, I can't help wondering...

Interesting thoughts on the antifeminist screed! I mentally ascribed it to the prevalence of the “angel on the hearth” myth so prevalent in Victorian culture—but maybe that’s because, a few days ago, I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s rebuttal, the short story “An Extinct Angel” (1981, in which she takes savage pleasure in killing off the species). In every age, I think, minor artists feel the need to define their place relative to the popular obsessions of the day. Their vociferousness on the subject lends their work a certain timeliness that leads their contemporaries to think more highly of it than they would several decades later, when the craze has faded.

The litany of gender stereotyping is only one of the instances of sloppy thinking with problematic implications that troubled me in this section. There was also the whole deformity-causes-shunning-causes-higher-spirituality thing, and the scary-savage-ranting-black-woman thing. Adding to the offensiveness is that Mrs. Manners is clearly created purely as a convenience to the plot and is killed off the moment she has performed her function. But I had to laugh out loud when Michael Vanbrugh suddenly broke into a pages-long quotation; it reminded me of a Monty Python sketch.

Clearly Christal is Olive’s half-sister (boy, is this author ever not subtle). As for the black-edged notepaper, I have no theories about who might have died—maybe a child born to Sara? It seems likely that Sara must come back into the story in some form. The coincidental connections among characters are a bit much, though.

Mrs. Rothesay continues to be transformed into a loving person who idolizes her daughter. Despite the suddenness of the conversion, it doesn’t seem too preposterous to me: she is a born follower who will adore anyone who tells her what to do and doesn’t expect anything from her.

One thing I do like about the repeated reaction-to-deformity-as-character-test trope in this book is that a character’s response to Olive’s very minor abnormality is not always a true test of character; the people who accept her do so for a variety of reasons, some self-serving. It’s one area in which the author seems to have thought to reasonably good purpose.

Many classic novels are full of unrealistic coincidences such as characters finding out they are related to each other. It took me a while to realize that this was considered not a flaw, but a strength. The goal was to use every character more than once and fit them together like a puzzle. Made sense when books were serialized, so readers didn’t have so many unrelated characters to keep track of. Still, some authors like Dickens do it much better than this author.

Good point. Jane Austen does it in Pride and Prejudice. But I agree that this author does it ham-handedly. Mrs. Manners was so nakedly dragged in as a plot convenience, just happening to cross Olive’s path because she just happened to model for Vanbrugh and then promptly dying having just happened to have refused to take the money Rothesay tried to give her so as to leave a paper trail.

Ugh!!!, what an unpalatable section this was.

Women are inferior and men have the right to flaunt their superiority was the inference that the author shouted loud and clear to me. And she used the puffed up Vanbrugh (joke of a name so close to other artists) as her superior male example and put him on a pedestal. I had a rather large bucket besides me whilst reading these chapters.

Olive’s artistic ambitions were laudable except for the fact that she had to serve as a drudge for the ‘adonis of art’ that was Vanbrugh (another bucket required.) Her doting on him only made it worse. If she was only painting one picture a year, removing that debt would take for ever unless she produced a masterpiece. Oh! I forgot she is not capable of that because she is a woman. Or is she a woman? The author doesn’t seem really sure.

I will soldier on to see if any other Christals suddenly appear in the squalid part of town. The Captain was away for such long periods it is quite possible he got up to all Manners of mischief. I am also interested to find out who has died in Harold’s family and why.

Trev wrote: "Olive’s artistic ambitions were laudable except for the fact that she had to serve as a drudge for the ‘adonis of art’ that was Vanbrugh (another bucket required.)"

The slavery of painters' apprentices was quite common for centuries. And we will never know how many females were among them who never painted under their own name. I see them before me: sisters, wives, daughters ... grinding pigments, cleaning brushes, and, as a special treat, allowed to paint draperies and backgrounds. We know only so few who came out of the shadow.

With all her talk about art, I do not get the impression that the author really had an idea of painting as work. We don't get much detail about what Olive actually *does*. For example, putting up her easel in the drawing room is just ridiculous. What about pots and brushes, sketches and rags, dirt and smell, let alone the nude models?

I will soldier on to see if any other Christals suddenly appear in the squalid part of town. The Captain was away for such long periods it is quite possible he got up to all Manners of mischief.

The thought is hilarious: I picture the house gradually filling up with Captain Rothesay's by-blows.

The existence of Christal does cast Rothesay’s judginess toward his wife in a new light: “You lied to me by letting me think Olive was perfect, I will never forgive you! But I have a perfect right to bring my mistress and daughter back to London and settle them there.”

I agree that Christal is Angus's daughter by Mrs. Manners. The author really telegraphs future developments in a very unsubtle manner. It was clear when Olive cleared out her father's papers that there was another child somewhere that she would meet in the future. As for Meliora and her brother, they provide a certain comic relief. Meliora is delightful and kind, while her brother is laughable only because of his huge ego (even though he is quite unsuccessful as an artist). The narrator has Mr. Vanbrugh espouse the most infuriating ideas about women but then seems to espouse them herself (even more infuriating!). I always remind myself that these books were written a long time ago, when it was common for people to consider women as the inferior sex, but it's still hard to stomach.