I extended my time with Louisa May Alcott by picking up two new-to-me titles: Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Together, they tell the story of Rose Campbell, an orphaned girl who goes to live with her father’s estranged family. Her legal guardian is her bachelor Uncle Alec, who gets much advice and interference from an assortment of aunts and great-aunts (aside from Alec and Old Mac, the uncles are all dead or shipped offstage for the majority of both books.) Eight Cousins opens with a shy and sickly Rose arriving at the ‘Aunt Hill’ from the boarding school where she’s been parked for the year following her father’s death. The school was doing its darnedest to make a fashionable lady of Rose, and she is accordingly high-strung, tight-laced, weak and frightened. Uncle Alec, a doctor (and the author’s mouthpiece), has his own notions about child-raising, and makes a deal with the Aunts: give him one year to raise Rose as he sees fit, and at the end of that time, if she isn’t greatly improved in health and heartiness, he will turn her over to them.

Naturally, Uncle Alec’s ideas are all excellent for Rose: he takes away her corsets so she can breathe enough to take exercise in the fresh air; her forbids her coffee and sweet rolls, substituting milk and plain brown bread; he arranges her training in the domestic arts, and in medicine, when she shows an interest in his work. He encourages her to join in the boisterous adventures of her seven boy cousins–riding, skating, sailing, playing soldiers, etc. He also nurtures her inclination to generosity, allowing her to ‘adopt’ Phoebe, a housemaid her own age. This sounded like a potential disaster to me, but Rose isn’t toying with Phoebe; she genuinely regards her as a sister, and sees to her education and eventual place in society.

Rose in Bloom picks up a few years later, when Alec, Rose, and Phoebe return from an around-the-world tour. Rose is now nineteen, a beautiful young woman about to come into the fortune her father left her. The whole town expects her make the best match she can (several of those rambunctious boy cousins are lining up to be considered for the honor) and settle right down. Rose, however, has seen a bit of the world, and intends to use her good fortune to help others. She isn’t going to settle into marriage and family until she makes her mark on the community as a philanthropist–and experiences a little of the social whirl she has denied herself until now. Her experiments meet with varied success–as do the romantic suits of the Campbell boys. Only one can win the prize, after all, and there are pitfalls and heartbreaks on the way to happiness for our Rose.

If I had read these books when I first discovered Alcott’s work, they might well be as dear to me as Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl. As it is, I enjoyed them–I’m pretty much always willing to let Louisa May bend my ear with her notions of modern womanhood–but I’m not likely to revisit Rose Campbell the way I do Jo March and Polly Milton. Rose’s author did quite well by her, and I’m content to leave her ensconced in her happily-ever-after.

An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

In the first half of this book, country girl Polly Milton pays a visit to her wealthy city friend Fanny Shaw. Polly, an unsophisticated 14-year-old, is utterly out of her depths in Fan’s frivolous world, but she does her best to enjoy it while avoiding its worst snares. She is presented with temptations and dilemmas, and is usually carried through them by the strength of her good morals. She’s not perfect, and she does a few things she regrets, but she is generally a model girl. She comes through the experience fairly unscathed, and does a lot of good for the unhappy Shaw family along the way.

The second half skips ahead six years, when Polly is moving to town to set herself up as a music teacher, both to ease the financial burden at home and to help her younger brother through college. She is as self-determined as ever, and won’t accept any help from the Shaws beyond their referrals for students. She is determined to make her own way–and again, we celebrate triumphs and suffer disappointments with her. These, of course, carry much heavier consequences than those of her girlhood; Polly has to grapple with some seriously adult situations. And when the Shaws’ comfortable world comes crashing down around them, it will be sweet, sensible Polly who sees them through the crisis.

The author has a lot to say about the dissipated nature of “today’s youth” and uses Polly’s adventures to make her commentary. She delivers little lectures and morality plays on honesty, thrift, modesty, filial duty, self-sacrifice, the value of education, and so on. All of which makes it sound vile and preachy, I know, and I simply HATE to be preached to. But An Old-Fashioned Girl is the most treasured book of my childhood, the one that influenced me more than any other–more than Little Women, or Anne of Green Gables, or all the Little House books put together. Of all the bright, strong heroines in those stories, Polly Milton was the one I admired the most. I don’t know if I can say that I emulated her, but I understood her isolation in Fan’s crowd of fast girls, ostracized as I was by the mean girls at school. Her preference for reading over parties, for one true friend over several superficial acquaintances, for honesty over artifice–it all resonated with the 9-year-old me who first encountered it. Moreover, when Polly is in a quandary, she goes right to her mother for support and advice; when she’s tempted to do wrong, she has only to imagine how disappointed her mother will be to keep to her path. That, I absolutely understood: my own gentle mother was the highest authority in my young life; I never feared any punishment more than incurring her disappointment.

I can’t say how many times I read the book when I was young, but I can visualize even now the shelf it sat on at the public library, I checked it out so often. When, a few years ago, I suddenly had the urge to read it again, I looked around until I found an edition with the same illustrations as that beloved copy–and if I could find it in a green library binding just like the one our library had, I would treasure it always. I just loved the book that much. I carried its lessons with me, and I have no doubt that as I faced the challenges of a very much more modern young womanhood than Alcott could have dreamed of, Polly’s example of staying true to herself helped me do the same.

The book is quaint in many ways, as a novel written to improve the morals of young people in 1869 must be, but it’s also surprisingly modern. The scene that sent me searching it out as an adult was the one in which grown-up Polly introduces Fan to her new friends:

Polly came to know a little sisterhood of busy, happy, independent girls, who each had a purpose to execute, a talent to develop, an ambition to achieve, and brought to the work patience and perseverance, hope and courage. Here Polly found her place at once, for in this little world love and liberty prevailed; talent, energy, and character took the first rank; money, fashion and position were literally nowhere; for here, as in the big world outside, genius seemed to blossom best when poverty was head gardener.

There’s also Polly’s landlady, Miss Mills, an independently well-off spinster who uses her fortune to help others. Her rescue of tragic Little Jane is a section that makes me weep every time, despite knowing how well Jane’s story turns out. Although the book does culminate in the pairing off of “everyone I can lay my hands on”, as the author puts it, there are several examples of happy, fulfilled, unmarried women in the book.

What saves the book from preachy dullness and makes it relevant to girls born a century or more after its writing is the fullness of Polly’s character. We see inside her head and heart, and understand that she’s not Miss Polly Perfect–she suffers petty jealousies and tempers, she has her vanities–but she works to overcome them. She makes mistakes, but she owns up to them and learns from them. She fights with her friends, and she makes peace with them. She’s an excellent model for young women, even today, when mores have changed so radically, because she’s all about being true to what her own set of values tells her is right. She doesn’t give in to peer pressure; she doesn’t let society’s notions of what’s proper keep her from her doing what she wants to do; she seeks to do good in the world and improve the lives she touches. I hope she will continue to guide the development of young women for generations to come.

The Liar, by Stephen Fry

“Little girls grow up to be women. Little boys grow up to be little boys.” In his first novel, Stephen Fry explores the games played by men of a certain privileged type: spy games, mind games, sexual games, and, naturally, good old English cricket.

“You won’t cheat will you, sir?”
“Cheat? Good heavens. This is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I’m an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game man ever devised. Of course I’ll cunting well cheat.” (Apologies for the language, but I loved this exchange.)

For the sake of its author, referred to in this household as “darling Stephen”, I wanted to love this book, but in the end I could only like it–and that only after slogging through the boring, off-putting and confusing early sections. Had it been anyone else writing, I would have put this book aside after fifty pages, but I trusted Stephen Fry to pull it all together into something worthwhile. In the end, I was glad I stuck it out, but also glad I had merely borrowed the book, not purchased it.

The story follows Adrian Healey, the titular liar, from roughly age 15 to 19, but in a non-linear way. There are three or four major moments of Adrian’s adolescence braided together, and the transitions between scenes are not always clearly marked. These early chapters were confusing, and as Adrian was a pretentious little snot, I nearly abandoned him entirely. But just then, Adrian launches his plot to forge a lost (and pornographic) Dickens novel, and it got rather too funny to put down. After a while, it starts making sense why these particular moments of Adrian’s life have been chosen to tell his story; they illuminate one another and a picture begins to emerge of the vulnerable Adrian underlying the brassy exterior. We also start to see just how much Adrian has been lying to himself and everyone around him–and his lies will continue to unravel right through the very climax of the novel. The boy is frightfully mendacious, and yet, as we got glimpses of his true self, I developed sympathy for Adrian, and that made the rest of the book much easier to take.

Woven all through Adrian’s story is a thin, bright wire of international espionage–what it has to do with Adrian, or Adrian with it, is not at all clear until late in the book. Once those pieces started falling into place, the story rocketed to its conclusion, and by then, I was wholly on board and rooting for Adrian to win–which in Adrian’s case means both surviving the bloody game of spies he’s embroiled in, and finding a way of transitioning from his debauched adolescence to some kind of responsible adulthood.

As expected from an author such as Fry, the language in the book is a sparkling display of English at its most playful and polished. (Would that I commanded a vocabulary comparable to Fry’s!)

This fantasy of England that old men took with them to their death-beds, this England without factories and sewers or council houses, this England of leather and wood and flannel, this England circumscribed by a white boundary and laws that said each team shall field eleven men and each man shall bat, this England of shooting-sticks, weather-vanes and rectory teas, it was like Cartwright’s beauty, he thought, a momentary vision glimpsed for a second in an adolescent dream, the dispersed like steam into the real atmosphere of traffic-jams, serial murderers, prime ministers and Soho rent. But its spectral haze was sharper and clearer than the glare of the everyday and, against all evidence, was taken to be the only reality, its vapour trapped and distilled in the mind, its image, scents, and textures bottled and laid down against the long, lonely melancholy of adulthood.

The reader absolutely cannot help but hear both Adrian and his pedantic mentor declaiming in the plummy tones of the author himself. The wordplay is frequent, hilarious and very often filthy–as is the sexual content. (Faint of heart, be warned!) The last chapter, a sort of unidentified epilogue, makes it clear that one may put away childish things, and yet the game goes ever on. I found it oddly reassuring on both counts.