The novel Archives

A Handful of Dust

February 23, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, and further reading

A Handful of Dust (1934) was Evelyn Waugh’s fourth novel. It was very well received on first publication, and he followed it up with similar acerbic satires such as Scoop (1938) and Put Out More Flags (1942). After the war his novels became more serious. Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961) explore similar themes in a more sober fashion, though there are still brilliant flashes of humour in all his work.

A Handful of Dust – critical commentary

Social decline

Evelyn Waugh’s essential subject matter is the study of upper-class decline and its causes. He is powerfully attracted to a nostalgic view of traditional aristocratic life in grand country houses and estates, together with all their culture of inherited wealth and property. This includes the architecture of previous centuries, and the social life of weekend parties, plentiful servants, and an existence divided between London and a house in the country.

But he knew it was a social system that was coming to an end. It was a privileged economy which could not be sustained. And he knew that the principal characters caught up in this decline were conspiring in their own downfall – by over-indulgence, wilful excess, and moral blindness to the changing world in which they lived.

The middle class characters in his novels are largely endeavouring to claw their way into this decadent echelon, and their tastes and habits are generally presented as inferior, awkward, and doomed to failure. The lower orders hardly feature at all, except as occasional servants. Waugh does not have a simplistic hope that any working class people are going to be the saviours of this decline.

Humour

Waugh’s early novels were once regarded as the last thing in barbed humour and rib-tickling satire. They don’t seem quite so humorously pointed now, but there remain traces of comic characterisation, and he does have the distinction of introducing an element of black comedy into the modern novel.

Mrs Beaver’s greed and relentless opportunism are funny because they are linked to the main theme of downward social mobility. She has come from the upper echelons of society but has fallen on hard times as a widow with a socially useless son. She lives in Sussex Gardens – then a downmarket region of Bayswater- but she misses no opportunity to sell people what we would now call fashionable junk or tat from her shop

She has also devised the entrepreneurial scheme of splitting up houses into smaller flats to rent. Her clients are people who have dubious purposes, as does Brenda, and those who are downwardly socially mobile such as ‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar. Mrs Beaver simultaneously promotes her services to these people as a so-called interior designer.

She also embodies all that Waugh finds offensive in modernism and a lack of sensitivity to tradition. In the middle of the novel she is converting one of the rooms in Tony Last’s old Tudor home Hetton Abbey by lining the walls with chromium plate.

It is interesting that Waugh sees the issue of social decline in architectural terms – from the draughty grandeur of Hetton Abbey to these ‘service flats’ carved out of the Victorian splendour of London’s Belgravia.

Another marvellously comic character is Mr Tendril the local preacher at Hetton. He is a hopelessly indurate creation who goes on preaching sermons he has written years before for troops in British expeditionary wars in India. His speeches contain references to the pitiless sun, threats from tigers, and loved ones back at home – when he is addressing a congregation in what seems to be rural Warwickshire.

How difficult it is for us to realise that this is indeed Chhristmas. Instead of the glowing log fire and widows tight shuttered against the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of an alien sun; instead of the happy circle of loved faces, of home and family, we have the uncomprehending stares of the subjugated, though no doubt grateful, heathen. Instead of the placid ox and ass of Bethlehem, we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant.

And of course the most memorable scene in this novel is the black comedy of Mr Todd forcing Tony to read the works of Charles Dickens. The mad settler Todd cannot read himself, but enjoys their entertainment value, and uses that as an excuse to keep Tony prisoner.

The two endings

There is interpretive difficulty and even a possible dilemma concerning the end to A Handful of Dust. This is not surprising, because Waugh wrote the most reprinted version of the conclusion before he wrote the novel. On a visit to South America in 1933, whilst he was stranded in Boa Vista (‘Good View’) in northern Brazil, Waugh spent his time writing a story called The Man Who Liked Dickens, based on an eccentric character he had met. The story was published in Hearst’s International in the United States and reprinted in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine in the UK.

It was ten months later before he began work on what was to become A Handful of Dust – and he did not have any clear plan for how it was to end. This problem of two endings was created because the novel was issued as a serial in America as well as a stand-alone one-volume publication in England. His story The Man Who Liked Dickens had already been published in America, so Waugh produced the alternative ending for serial publication.

The two endings are completely different, and they also create quite different meanings for the novel as a whole. Tony’s imprisonment by the quasi-madman Mr Todd is the more dramatic, and the more frequently reprinted. It continues the theme of downward social mobility that Waugh had explored earlier in Decline and Fall (1928) and it takes it to a new extreme.

Tony is the upholder of traditional aristocratic values and he cherishes the house and the country estate he has inherited. But he is betrayed by his adulterous wife, and when he seeks solace in foreign travel, he encounters only misery, discomfort, and finally a sort of living death. Mr Todd’s final thwarting of Tony’s hopes for rescue is truly black humour at its most grim. Tony’s relatives inherit Hetton Abbey, his wife marries one of his friends, and his existence is reduced to a memorial plaque in the chapel.

The problem with this ending is that there is an abrupt shift in tone, mise en scene, subject matter, and geographic location between the first three-quarters of the novel and its conclusion. The principal events and characters have been established at Hetton Abbey and in fashionable London. The sudden switch to an equatorial jungle and deranged explorers such as Doctor Messinger and Mr Todd is too much. It disrupts the coherence of the narrative. Waugh’s friend the novelist Henry Yorke wrote to him: “the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion”.

The serial version of the ending is far more logical and coherent – but it is much shorter, not so dramatic, and it is not funny. In the alternative ending Tony merely returns from what has been a therapeutic cruise, and he ruefully drifts into a reconciliation with Brenda. It is a downbeat, not a catastrophic ending to events.

The setting, the characters, and the subject matter remain the same, as does the tone of the narrative. But there are important ramifications to this version of the novel’s conclusion. Tony returns to his estate as its living inheritor. He has also commissioned renovations to Hetton Abbey during his absence on the Caribbean cruise – and these works reverse the absurd ‘improvements’ Brenda has made at the suggestion of Mrs Beaver (the chromium-plated walls). Moreover, Tony secretly retains ownership of the flat in Belgravia, and he lies to Brenda about having got rid of it.

This alternative ending leaves Tony a little bruised, but intact. He has lost nothing – except his son – and Brenda is pregnant again. Hetton Abbey will have its new bathrooms, and he obviously has plans for a little ‘private life’ in the Belgravia flat. This is altogether a different ending – which in turn creates a different novel. It forces the reader to regard the preceding events in a more light-hearted manner. What was previously a downhill plunge into disaster and destruction suddenly becomes no more than a series of minor comic setbacks from which the protagonist emerges unscathed.

A Handful of Dust – study resources

A Handful of Dust – Penguin – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust – Penguin – Amazon US

A Handful of Dust – Study Guide – Paperback – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust – DVD film – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

A Handful of Dust – plot summary

Chapter One — John Beaver lives with his mother in the unfashionable district of Bayswater in reduced circumstances. She has an antiques shop: he is twenty-five, unpopular, and has no occupation.

Chapter Two — Tony Last and his wife Brenda live at Hetton Abbey – a cold Gothic country house. John Beaver arrives for the weekend as their largely uninvited guest. Everyone feels uncomfortable, but Brenda tries to be hospitable to Beaver.

Brenda thinks to have a pied-a-terre for her trips into London, and Mrs Beaver can supply rooms in Belgravia. John Beaver takes Brenda to dinner and they make the opening moves of a flirtation.

Their relationship develops into an adulterous affair, and it becomes the subject of social gossip in London, even though people wonder what she sees in him. Brenda moves into the flat then announces to her husband that she is going to take up some sort of study courses.

Chapter Three — Tony and Jock Grant-Menzies get drunk at their club and threaten to call on Brenda, who is at the flat with Beaver. They go to a nightclub instead. Brenda stays at the flat during the week and only goes home at weekends. She hopes to distract her husband with her pushy neighbour ‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar, but Tony does not like her. Jock brings to Hetton his ‘shameless blonde’ friend Mrs Rattery, who arrives by aeroplane.

There is a hunt meeting at which young John Last is killed by a frightened horse. Brenda is brought back from London, but she feels it is all over for her with Tony, and she asks him for a divorce.

Chapter Four — Tony arranges to take a prostitute from the nightclub to Brighton for the weekend to provide evidence for a divorce. Milly the prostitute insists on bringing her awkward young daughter along. Brenda’s family reveal that Beaver will not marry her unless she receives a large settlement as alimony. This means Tony would be forced to sell his house, so instead he refuses to proceed with the divorce.

Chapter Five — Tony embarks on an expedition to South America with the very dubious Doctor Messinger in search of a ‘lost city’. En route via the West Indies he has a brief on-board flirtation with an eighteen year old girl. When he reaches the jungle he is tormented by insect bites and thinks wistfully of home. Native bearers desert the expedition, so Tony and Messinger are stranded. Messinger is clearly lost and incompetent. Tony catches a fever and becomes delirious. Messinger goes to seek help, but he drowns in river rapids.

Meanwhile back in London John Beaver and Brenda cannot move on because there has been no divorce. His mother, sensing that the marriage might not happen, plans to take him to America. Brenda tries to get money from the family solicitor, but Tony has tied up their finances to restore Hetton – and he has made a new will.

Chapter Six — Tony is rescued and cured by an eccentric settler Mr Todd, who forces him to read aloud the works of Charles Dickens. As the months go by Todd thwarts Tony’s attempts to leave the jungle. A previous prisoner tried to escape, but died at the encampment. When a passing traveller calls, Tony secretly gives him a note begging for help. But some time later, when Tony is unconscious for two days from the effects of a local drink, rescuers arrive from Europe. Mr Todd gives them Tony’s watch, shows them a cross on a grave, and sends them away.

Chapter Seven — Hetton is inherited and taken over by Tony’s cousin Richard Last and his family. Brenda marries Jock Grant-Menzies. A commemorative plaque is unveiled in the Hetton chapel to record Tony’s death as an ‘explorer’.

The alternative ending — Tony returns from a sea cruise in the West Indies and is met by Brenda, who has been ditched by John Beaver. They re-unite faux de mieux, Tony returns to Hetton Abbey, and he secretly takes over Brenda’s flat in Belgravia.

A Handful of Dust – principal characters

Mrs Beaver	an aggressively commercial antique shop owner
John Beaver	her lacklustre and talentless son
Tony Last	the owner of Hetton Abbey and estate
Brenda Last	Tony’s adulterous wife
John Andrew Last	their young son
Marjorie	Brenda’s sister
Jock Grant-Menzies	Tony’s friend
‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar	Brenda’s next door neighbour in Belgravia
Mrs Rafferty	the ‘shameless blonde’, an aviatrix
The Revered Tendril	the eccentric vicar attached to Hetton
Mr Todd	a mad explorer and settler
Doctor Messinger	an incompetent explorer

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A Laodicean

October 19, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading, web links

A Laodicean (1860-1861) was first published as a serial in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and subsequently in novel form by Sampson Low in 1881. It bears two sub-titles – The Castle of the de Stancys and A Story of To-Day. It is one of Thomas Hardy’s lesser-known novels, but it incorporates many of his personal interests – particularly architecture and the effects of modern technology. It is one of the earliest novels you are likely to come across that features electrical telegraphy (the telegram) as part of the plot.

A Laodicean – commentary

The sensation novel

Hardy wrote in the wake of the ‘sensation novel’ that had been popularised by writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hardy never exploited to a similar extent the sensationalist elements of plotting that they had developed – but neither was he averse to including them as an obvious encouragement to gain readers and popular acclaim.

These elements show up more obviously in his weaker novels that do not have the compensating powerful psychological insights and credible dramas that pervade his greatest works.

A Laodicean includes the following typical elements of the sensation novel in its plotting:

sex outside marriage
illegitimacy
personation
theft
blackmail
forgery

William de Stancy has had an illicit sexual relationship in his earlier life. This has led to the birth of his son, who is therefore illegitimate. But the son goes under the name of William Dare (with ‘De Stancy’ tattooed on his chest) which is a form of ‘personation’ – someone masquerading under a false identity.

Dare steals George Somerset’s correspondence in order to become his assistant on the castle restoration project. He then steals the plans to form an alliance with the rival architect Havill. Meanwhile he is blackmailing his own father. He not only drains de Stancy of money to fund his self-indulgent life style, but he threatens to reveal the truth of their relationship, which would ruin Captain de Stancy’s social reputation and marriage prospects (which is eventually what happens).

On top of all that, Dare is guilty of forgery on two counts. He sends a telegram to Paula Power demanding money which purports to come from George Somerset. Then he forges a photograph that is constructed to show Somerset in a state of intoxication.

These are the stock-in-trade elements of the sensation novel, and it is interesting to note that Hardy relies on them more extensively than he does in his more serious novels, for which he is quite rightly better known.

Plotting

There are a number of issues and details in the narrative that are either unexplained or not followed up, once having been introduced. For instance there are two related issues at opposite ends of the novel.

In the first, George Somerset falls into the tower pit on one of his early visits to the castle. Whilst there he notices carvings in the wall:

Among these antique inscriptions he observed two bright and clean ones, consisting of the words ‘De Stancy’ and ‘W. Dare’ crossing each other at right angles. From the state of the stone they could not have been cut more than a month before

There are only two people in the novel who know the relationship between De Stancy and Dare, and those are the two individuals themselves. At that point neither of them have had access to the castle. Hardy clearly inserts George’s observation into the text to create a little mystery, but no subsequent explanation is given for how the names got there. Moreover, the incident and its implications are never mentioned again throughout the whole of the novel.

We know that as a result of an illness, Hardy was forced to complete the novel by dictation rather than longhand composition, and he may have simply forgotten this detail.

But in the second example at the other end of the novel Abner Power threatens to expose William Dare and his creation of a bogus telegram and a faked photograph to smear the reputation of George Somerset. Dare counters this attack by saying he will reveal Power’s role in the fabrication of an explosive device for a group of revolutionaries.

The result of this confrontation is a stalemate which does not affect the plot in any way. More importantly however, no explanation is given for how either of these characters came to have detailed knowledge of the other’s doings.

There are also ambiguities or elisions in the plot that seem to suggest that Hardy himself was not sure about the logic and coherence of his story. The destruction by fire of the castle contents at the close of the novel are the work of an arsonist described as a ‘flitting’ figure, who is not named.

This term ‘flitting’ immediately suggests a female – who might be Charlotte, putting an end to the burden of family history before she retires into a convent. But this would be uncharacteristic of such an honest, principled, and self-effacing young woman.

The other suspect – with a powerful motive of resentment – would be Dare, who we know has been denied his ambition to become a genuine de Stancy, and is still in the vicinity at the time. But it is hard to believe that a penniless and unscrupulous confidence trickster would burn paintings by Vandyck, Kneller, Tintoretto, Titian, and Giorgione when he could just easily steal and sell them.

Hardy does not seem to have made up his mind on this issue, and is content to leave an ambiguous, unresolved mystery hovering over the uncharacteristically ‘happy ending’ to the novel.

The basic plot is quite reasonable. An indecisive young woman is caught between competing interests – her instinct for love and a desire for social advancement. But the events of the narrative are stretched out to aesthetically unacceptable lengths. Perhaps this is a case where serial magazine publication worked against the best interests of the author. Hardy met his monthly quotas, but the net result is a novel that very few people bother to read – and one cannot blame them.

Wessex

Hardy makes very little effort to root the events of A Laodicean in a realistic manner. It seems that the location of de Stancy castle might be anywhere in southern England. It is certainly within easy reach of London by train.

But the local town of Markton in the novel is not mentioned in any of the other ‘Wessex’ works that constitute his essential oeuvre. Hardy was of course at liberty to produce fiction which stood independently of his other major productions. But the fictional world of ‘Wessex’ that he created in novels stretching from Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) to Jude the Obscure (1895) is of such power and is so vividly realised that it forms a gravitational field of an enduring intensity that affects judgements of all his works.

Structure

There are at least three major structural weaknesses in the narrative. The first is that the sub-plot of the villainous William Dare is set up successfully enough in the opening part of the story. Dare infiltrates George Somerset’s professional and romantic endeavours; he steals his designs for the rival architect Havill; and he has a secret desire to become a legitimate de Stancy. Indeed, he even has the name tattooed on his chest.

Yet in the middle sections of the novel, this Dare sub-plot disappears completely. The story switches to Somerset’s frustrations in trying to wring an emotional response out of the seemingly coquettish Paula Power. This section of the novel also embodies another subsidiary plot weakness – the over-elaborated passages of the theatricals and George’s adolescent torments of jealousy.

But these weaknesses pale into insignificance compared with the endlessly repetitive will-she-won’t-she pursuit of Paula by de Stancy during their excursion around Europe.

It is clear that Hardy wishes to show Paula under enormous pressure. George Somerset has been maligned by both Dare’s bogus telegram asking for money and the faked photograph apparently showing him in a state of intoxication. Paula is also being offered marriage into a family of pedigree. She will become Lady de Stancy if only she says “Yes”.

Dramatically, this is a credible plot, but de Stancy’s pursuit of Paula and her refusal to yield to his entreaties goes on and on, from one town to another, with no change, no development, and no new arguments – until the reader could be excused for losing the will to live.

It is astonishing to realise that only a few years before, Hardy had written a work as psychologically insightful as The Return of the Native (1878) and only a few years hence he was to produce his all-inclusive masterpiece The Mayor of Castebridge (1886) which bears fruitful comparison with King Lear in terms of universal scope and tragic intensity.

A Laodicean – study resources

A Laodicean – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Laodicean – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Laodicean – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

A Laodicean – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

A Laodicean – plot summary

Book the First. George Somerset

I. George Somerset is refreshing his studies of English Gothic architecture under pressure from his father, a painter and academician.

II. George comes across a modern chapel built in an ugly style. A baptism ceremony is taking place, but the attractive young celebrant refuses to go into the pool. He follows a telegraph wire that leads him to an old castle.

III . Next day he looks over Castle de Stancy and its ancient contents. The ancestral portraits are decaying.

IV. Charlotte de Stancy shows him round the castle and relates its history. It was bought by engineer John Power and is now being restored by his daughter. Paula Power has had a telegraph line installed and has contact with contemporary culture. The two young women are close friends.

V . Next day George is invited to lunch with Sir William de Stancy (the previous owner) in his modern suburban villa. Sir William is obsessed with frugality and ‘luck’ He has lost all his money by extravagance and bad investments.

VI. The following day George meets William Dare who wishes to photograph the castle. He then encounters the Baptist minister who is berating Paula theologically.

VII . George debates biblical niceties with the minister, who gives up the argument. Paula speaks positively on Mr Woodwell’s behalf, and afterwards the two men are reconciled.

VIII. George has lunch at the castle. He gets into an argument with fellow architect Mr Havill. There is general agreement that Mr Dare is an unreliable entity.

IX. George falls into a pit in the castle turret, where he sees Dare’s name recently carved into the wall. Paula asks him to supervise the castle restoration. He proposes a competition with Mr Havill.

X. Paula takes him round the castle whilst they discuss plans – without Havill. George moves to lodge in local village Markton.

XI. Paula creates a studio for George in the castle. He feels more powerfully drawn to her – even though she appears enigmatic and even contradictory.

XII. George goes to inspect Mr Power’s famous railway tunnel. He meets Paula there, and they are frightened by trains travelling up and down the line. Dare steals George’s correspondence and puts himself forward as his assistant.

XIII. Paula holds a dinner party which George does not attend. She changes her mind about creating a Greek courtyard – then invites him to a garden party.

XIV. An anonymous newspaper article appears, accusing Paula of desecrating the castle and its historic value. She tells George she wishes she were a de Stancy. They are spied on by Dare.

XV. At the garden party George sacks Dare for idleness, then shelters from a rainstorm in a hut with Paula, to whom he declares his love.

Book the Second. Dare and Havill

I. Dare finds Havill’s notebook containing the draft of the newspaper article. They then spy on George and Paula in the hut. Dare proposes a pact between them to steal George’s designs and cause trouble between George and Paula..

II. Dare calls at Havill’s office and helps to bamboozle one of his creditors. Dare and Havill copy George’s designs in his studio. They then dine together, staying overnight at an inn.

III. Havill wakes in the night and discovers Dare is carrying a gun. Dare then takes a close interest in an army brigade that arrives in the town.

IV. George meets Charlotte with her brother Captain de Stancy and gives him Dare’s photo to show to the police. De Stancy is shocked on recognising Dare, and burns the photo.

V. Captain de Stancy meets Dare, his illegitimate son, who is blackmailing him. Dare proposes that de Stancy should marry Paula and reclaim the castle and estates for the de Stancy family – of which he considers himself a member. However, de Stancy has taken a vow of adult celibacy.

VI . The architecture competition is a tie. Dare explains to Havill his plan to bring Paula and de Stancy together. He discovers that Paula will look her most attractive when taking morning exercises in her private gymnasium.

VII. Dare takes de Stancy to the gymnasium, where he is enchanted by the sight of Paula exercising.

Book the Third. De Stancy

I. William de Stancy immediately becomes a changed man. He abandons his vows of teetotalism and avoiding women. He wants his sister Charlotte to help him in his pursuit of Paula, and he takes a sudden interest in the family history.

II. William visits the castle and shows off his (very recently acquired) knowledge of the de Stancy family to Paula. Dare arrives, and they plan to make copies of all the family portraits.

III. The copying begins, but William wants a portrait of Paula herself, which she refuses. Havill goes bankrupt and his wife dies. Paula is persuaded to split the project into two parts out of sympathy for Havill.

IV. Havill has pangs of conscience and resigns from the project. Dare and de Stancy fear that the return of Somerset will spoil their plans.

V. George wonders if his own family has a ‘pedigree’. When he goes to recover a genealogical document from the bank he sees Paula collecting a jewelled necklace.

VI. George follows Paula to the Markton Hunt Ball. Charlotte is taken home in a faint when she sees Somerset. George learns that there are to be theatricals (Love’s Labour’s Lost) for which he designed the costumes.

VII. George returns to the castle, but he jealously objects to Paula taking an active part in the theatricals.

VII. He is further distressed when parts are changed and romantic scenes from Romeo and Juliet are interpolated.

IX. A mysterious stranger enters, makes enquiries about Paula and de Stancy, then pays people to applaud them. George reproaches Paula for taking part in the final love scene in the play.

X. Next day Paula hires a professional actress to take her part. After the performance she introduces the mysterious stranger as her uncle Abner Power – which gives George further cause for jealous worry.

XI. Paula’s engagement is announced in a newspaper – but she denies it to George. She plans a trip to Nice. George discovers that the newspaper announcement was placed there by her uncle Abner.

Book the Fourth. Somerset, Dare, and de Stancy

I. George and Paula exchange telegraph messages and letters. He continues to plead for signs of affection, and she continues to refuse.

II. Abner Power wishes to influence his niece. George wants to visit her in Nice. She eventually stops writing to him – so he sends a message demanding to know what is happening.

III. When he learns that de Stancy is also visiting Nice, George is inflamed with jealousy and immediately sets off to join them. The party has moved on to Monte Carlo, so he follows them there.

IV. In the Casino George meets William Dare who tries to borrow money from him, which he refuses to do. Dare despatches a bogus telegram to Paula, claiming to be from Somerset and asking for money to pay a gambling debt.

V. Paula despatches de Stancy with the money for Somerset. Dare turns up to collect it, but de Stancy refuses to hand it over.

Book the Fifth. De Stancy and Paula

I. De Stancy joins Paula in Strazbourg where he returns the money. He declares his passion for her.

II. They move on to Baden where de Stancy pesters Paula for attention and the reciprocation of his feelings. She refuses him, but he is supported by her uncle Abner.

III. Dare catches up with de Stancy in Karlsruhe, flush with a recent gambling success. De Stancy advises him to return to England.

IV. Paula asks to see Dare, who smears Somerset by implication then produces the doctored photograph apparently showing Somerset drunk.

V. Somerset arrives and is treated coldly by Paula, who now accepts de Stancy as a potential suitor instead. Dare departs for England.

VI. Somerset and Paula meet again by accident in Heidelberg, and they part with cold misunderstanding of each other.

VII. Paula chooses to walk up a long hill with de Stancy, who continues to harass her with emotional demands. She continues to equivocate.

VIII. The party sail down the Rhein on a pleasure boat. Paula and de Stancy discuss their relationship, and there are further supplications and equivocations.

IX. De Stancy continues to court Paula as they journey through northern Europe. Somerset writes to say that he wishes to resign from the castle restoration project.

X. Charlotte becomes ill in Amiens. Abner Power arrives from Paris saying that the proposed marriage must not go ahead. De Stancy harasses Paula yet again, then receives notice of his father’s death. Paula finally accepts him.

XI. Dare checks on the marriage preparations and makes veiled blackmail threats. Abner Power arrives to expose the truth about Dare. But Dare counter-attacks with a history of Power’s making an explosive device for revolutionaries. They threaten each other with guns, then agree to call it quits. Abner Power disappears again.

XII. Somerset meets Charlotte, who tells him about about the fake telegram. He goes next day to challenge Dare, but en route hears that the marriage has just taken place. He goes on holiday to Normandy.

XIII. Charlotte is suspicious regarding Dare and uncovers the truth about the bogus photograph. Although she is in love with Somerset herself, she feels she ought to give the information to Paula.

XIV. Charlotte reveals the truth to Paula on her wedding day. Paula threatens to have Dare arrested. When. De Stancy protests he is forced to admit that Dare is his son. The marriage is called off.

Book the Sixth. Paula

I. Paula sets off for Normandy in search of Somerset. She traces him to Lisieux, where she just misses his departure for Caen.

II. In the next town she meets Somerset’s father. When they move on to Etretat, George is seen in a dance hall. Paula feels she has been humiliating herself, and vows to go back home.

III. Next day the two parties meet by accident. Paula re-appoints Somerset as architect, but does not reveal what she knows. George becomes ill. Paula visits him they are reconciled, and agree to marry.

IV. A few weeks later Paula and Somerset return to Markton. De Stancy meets Dare, and they bemoan their separate lots.

V. Charlotte retreats to a nunnery, and a fire consumes the contents of the castle. Paula and Somerset agree to build a new home alongside the ruins.

A Laodicean – characters

George Somerset	a young architect
John Power	railway engineer, who bought the de Stancy estate
Paula Power	his daughter, current owner of the estate
Captain William de Stancy	a middle-aged bachelot
Charlotte de Stancy	Paula’s friend
William Dare	de Stancy’s illegitimate son
Mr Woodwell	a local Markston minister
Mr Havill	a local Markston architect
Mrs Goodman	Paula’s aunt and chaperon
Abner Power	Paula’s uncle

More on Thomas Hardy
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A Life

April 8, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

A Life (Una vita) was the first novel written by Italo Svevo, and like all his other works it was published at his own expense. He wrote it in 1888 and originally gave it the title Un inetto (A Bungler). Svevo submitted his manuscript to the publishing house Treves, where it was turned down. Eventually it was accepted by Vram and published in 1892, with the stipulation that the title be changed and Svevo pay for the printing. Once published, it was completely ignored. Not until twenty years later did Svevo find any degree of literary success, following the support and encouragement of his English language teacher, the young James Joyce, who was living in exile in Trieste at the time.

Italo Svevo

A Life – critical commentary

Setting

Although it is not explicitly named in the text, there is no reason for thinking that the location of events is anywhere other than Trieste. Svevo set all his major novels in his native city. Characters go for walks along the Corso; the city is located on the sea; and the bank of Maller & Company has commercial relationships with Italy, Germany, and France – all of which were close geographic and political connections with Trieste, the fourth largest city of the Hapsburg Empire and its only Mediterranean sea port in the late nineteenth century.

The main theme

As its original title implies (Un inetto – An Inept One) the novel is a study in social alienation and personal failure. Alfonso is in one sense a precursor of the modern and existential anti-hero. He acts from the best motives and strives for honourable and spiritually elevated relationships with those around him, but he is defeated by petty bureaucracy on one hand and his own emotional weakness on the other.

Svevo repeatedly dwells on the ironic twists of fate that beset his protagonist. At the start of the novel Alfonso feels that he is not well regarded in his lowly position of correspondence clerk, yet his boss and head of the bank Signor Maller specifically assures him that he respects his work, and proves it by inviting him to his home.

This gives Alfonso the opportunity to meet Annetta, the attractive daughter of his boss – yet it is significant that having socially recognised Alfonso with an invitation to his own house, Signor Maller absents himself on the occasion of his visit, and Alfonso is left to the frosty reception provided by Annetta and the housekeeper Francesca (who is also Maller’s ex-mistress).

Alfonso is in an ambiguous position in terms of social position – from a lower middle-class family, with enough education to escape his rural native village and to secure a clerk’s job in the city, but not enough status or capital to mix easily with those he sees as his peers. He inherits money from the sale of his family home following the death of his mother – but he improvidently sells it for below its market value. He is yearning ambitiously for connections that are socially beyond his means. His relationship with his boss’s daughter Annetta only exposes him to suspicions of fortune hunting, as well as being emotionally calamitous.

He is noble and self-sacrificing in nursing his dying mother , and with his inheritance he provides a dowry for the unlovely daughter of his landlady – only to have his generosity misunderstood and even held against him.

Alfonso is similar to one of Kafka’s characters – Franz Kafka being a writer who Svevo clearly prefigures. Alfonso’s plight would be one of comic misunderstanding if it were not so painful and ultimately tragic. The scene where his feckless landlord Lanucci tries to sell him a personal insurance policy he neither needs nor can afford is like a passage from another tragedian of the comic grotesque – Samuel Beckett.

Pre post-modernism

There are elements of post-modern meta-fiction in the text. Annetta suggests writing a novel collaboratively with a plot which is Alfonso’s own story of a provincial boy who falls in love with a rich woman. This is also the plot of Una vita in which they are both characters. This theme is not explored or developed any further, since once Alfonso returns to his native village and his dying mother, the subjects of his literary collaboration and his relationship with Annetta are both abandoned.

Tightness of structure is not one of Svevo’s strong points as a novelist. He follows the day to day events of Alfonso’s life in an almost naturalistic manner, which renders the account tedious. Apart from the slow-moving development of Alfonso’s relationship with Annetta, there is a noticeable absence of any narrative tension or drama. Instead, the narrative comprises a detailed account of the minutiae of psychological processes – the relentless analysis of people’s conversations, their possible and actual motivations, and the cataloguing of trivial events. Svevo’s interest seems to be mainly in the shifting, contradictory, and sometimes paradoxical nature of human consciousness – something he was to explore in even further detail in Confessions of Zeno (1925).

The only evidence of formal structure to the novel is the fact that it begins and ends with two letters. The first is from Alfonso to his mother expressing his homesickness, and the second is from the bank to the family solicitor disclaiming any financial responsibility following Alfonso’s suicide.

A Life – study resources

A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

A Life – chapter summaries

1 Alfonso Nitti writes a letter to his mother back home in the countryside. He is poor, homesick, and feels inferior in his work at the bank.

2 The clerks at Maller and Company are kept late copying letters. Signor Maller knows that Alfonso has written home complaining and reassures him that he is well regarded. Alfonso has ambitions, but they are daydreams.

3 Alfonso lodges with the impoverished Lanucci family. Signor Lanucci gauchely tries to sell Alfonso life insurance that he cannot afford and does not need.

4 Alfonso is invited to Signor Maller’s house. He is impressed by his boss’s wealth, but Signor Maller leaves him with his housekeeper Francesca and daughter Annetta, who treats him very rudely. Annetta’s cousin Macario later explains that she is snobbishly disdainful towards her father’s employees.

5 Alfonso and his work colleagues are trapped in a routine of petty rivalries and bureaucratic divisions of responsibility – as a result of which Alfonso receives a promotion.

6 Alfonso finds his new work very demanding. To relieve his sense of alienation he takes up the study of philosophy and criticism.

7 Driven by romantic desire, Alfonso takes to following women in the street – but he is too timid to make any serious contact with any of them. He gives lessons in Italian grammar to Lucia Lanucci, but she is not a good student. They quarrel, and Alfonso believes Signora Lanucci is trying to snare him into a relationship with her daughter.

8 Alfonso falls ill and takes up walking every day as a cure. He also launches an ambition to write a philosophic thesis, but gets nowhere with it. He meets Macario in the library: they discuss literature and both read Balzac’s Louis Lamberrt.

9 Alfonso pays a second visit to the Maller family home, where he finds Annetta very friendly and encouraging. But Francesca is rather distant with him.

10 Francesca asks Alfonso’s mother for a room in her house, but Signor Maller countermands this request. Alfonso decides he is in love with Annetta, but when he attends her Wednesday salon he feels no desire for her.

11 When Alfonso visits Annetta on his own, she has the idea of writing a novel in collaboration, and she suggests a plot which is exactly Alfonso’s own story. They describe to each other ‘previous works’ that they haven’t actually written. But Alfonso doesn’t know how to begin writing.

12 They collaborate enthusiastically, but Annetta asks Alfonso to re-write his drafts because she claims they are dull. Writing the novel becomes as burdensome to him as working at the bank, but he suppresses his criticisms of the novel because of his rapture for Annetta. He discovers that Fumigi is also in love with Annetta and has plans to marry her. Annetta turns down Fumigi’s offer, but she reproaches Alfonso for compromising her social reputation. Fumigi later appears in an agitated state, which Prarchi diagnoses as incipient paralysis.

13 The Lanucci family become further impoverished. Alfonso is encouraged to bring friends home to pay court to Lucia. Finally, the printer Mario Gralli is prepared to marry her.

14 Francesca advises Alfonso to win Annetta by feigning coldness, but he finds it very difficult. They start work on the novel again, and eventually they spend a night together and become lovers.

15 The next day Alfonso feels disappointed. Annetta is going to tell her father, and advises Alfonso to leave Trieste for a while, before the marriage. Francesca advises him not to leave. Next day he is given a fortnight’s leave from the bank.

16 When Alfonso returns to his native village he discovers that his mother is dying. He feels ashamed of his dalliance with Annetta. A letter from Francesca tells him that all will be lost unless he returns, but the bank grant him an additional two weeks’ leave. He nurses his mother through to her death, then he himself gets typhoid fever. He sells the house for much less than its value, and returns to Trieste.

17 On return he learns that Annetta is now engaged to marry Macario, and Lucia has been jilted by Gralli. He is received in a cool manner at the bank, and the Lanucci family is beset by anxieties following Lucia’s problems.

18 Alfonso works hard at the bank and eventually finds some satisfaction from his job. There are rivalries over the appointment of a branch manager for the Venice office. Alfonso preaches stoicism to Lucia but cannot suppress the jealousy aroused by his rival Macario.

19 Lucia has been made pregnant by Gralli, who refuses to marry her. Alfonso offers to pay Lucia’s dowry, and Gralli changes his mind. The Lanucci family are reluctantly grateful, but Lucia does not love Gralli, so Alfonso’s generous gesture is wasted.

20 The bank clerks are given their annual bonuses, but Alfonso is demoted to the counting room. He protests to Maller, but to no effect. Feeling unjustly persecuted, he appeals to Annetta for a meeting. However, at the appointed hour Annetta’s brother appears and challenges him to a duel. Alfonso goes home and commits suicide.

A Life – principal characters

Alfonso Nitti	a bank correspondence clerk (22)
Signora Carolina Nitti	his widowed mother
Maller & Co	the bank where Alfonso works
Signor Maller	his austere boss
Annetta Maller	his attractive daughter
Frederico Maller	Annetta’s brother
Signor Lanucci	Alfonso’s feckless landlord, a sales representative
Signora Lucinda Lanucci	a friend of Alfonso’s mother
Gustavo Lanucci	their son (18)
Lucinda Lanucci	their unattractive daughter (16)
Signora Francesca Barrini	Maller’s housekeeper and his ex-mistress
Avvocato Macario	Maller’s nephew, and lawyer
Signor Fumigi	a maths enthusiast and inventor
Doctor Prarchi	a member of Annetta’s salon
Signor Gralli	a printer, suitor to Lucia
Signor Marotti	notary to the Nitti family

More on Italo Svevo
Twentieth century literature

A Pair of Blue Eyes

October 6, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

A Pair of Blue Eyes was Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, the first to be published under his own name, and the first to be serialised. It was published in Tinsleys’ Magazine in eleven monthly instalments between September 1872 and July 1873. Then it was produced as a novel in three volumes by Tinsley Brothers later the same year. The three-volume novel was very popular during the nineteenth century – a publishing format largely dictated by the rise of the commercial circulating libraries. It is the most heavily revised of all Hardy’s novels.

Thomas Hardy

A Pair of Blue Eyes – critical commentary

The principal features of interest in this early Hardy novel are its three main characters – Stephen Smith, Elfride Swancourt, and Henry Knight. It is fairly obvious that Hardy divided the two ‘sides’ of his own aspirations between Stephen and Knight. Stephen is the would-be architect – the profession which Hardy himself actually practised. But whilst working as a draftsman in London, Hardy also aspired to literature as a career – without knowing at first which would be successful. And interestingly enough, Henry Knight also has two occupations – as a barrister and as a literary editor, though we see precious little evidence of practical application in the first, and only vague reports of the second.

Stephen Smith

The main driving force behind Stephen is his desire for self-improvement. He comes from a humble, but reasonably respectable background. His parents are workers on the Luxellian estate. He has been educated at a National school – institutions which were established for the education of the poor in the early part of the nineteenth century. After that his learning has been conducted by correspondence with his friend Henry Knight – which leaves Stephen with no practical knowledge of how to hold chess pieces or how to pronounce words in Latin.

Although Stephen has embarked on a career in architecture, it is worth noting that he has done so as an ‘improver’ – what we would today call an ‘intern’. That is, his parents have paid for him to gain experience in the hope of future employment in the profession. This explains Stephen’s secrecy and mysterious movements in the early part of the novel. He is moving in circles well above his own class background and feels insecure about being found out. Reverend Swancourt has assumed that Stephen is a young professional, which explains the reversal in his opinions and his ban on Stephen when he discovers that he is from humble origins. It of course illustrates at the same time the arriviste snobbery of Reverend Swancourt, who goes on to marry an ugly woman he doesn’t love for the sake of her wealth.

Henry Knight

Knight is the epitome of academic book-learning with no comparable emotional development. He is university educated, presumably has qualifications in law since he practises as a barrister (theoretically) and is an editor on The Present which has the reputation of a leading intellectual journal. But emotionally he is a possessive child who cannot tolerate the idea that his chosen love object has any connection with previous admirers. He also subjects Elfride to an extensive bombardment of self-righteous emotional bullying to extract information about her ‘past’. As J.M.Barrie observed, he is “simply the most insufferable prig in fiction”.

Elfride Swancourt

Elfride is a typical Hardy heroine – and it must be said something of a fictional construct rather than a realistic piece of characterisation. She is a very talented young woman: she plays the piano (and the organ); she sings; she plays chess; she writes a novel; and she holds quasi-philosophic conversations with Henry Knight. These talents might endear her to readers (and especially critics) seeking early examples of ‘the New Woman’ in Victorian fiction – but they do not add up to an entirely credible character.

It has to be said that she is in summary rather inconstant. Within the timespan of the novel she has four lovers. First Felix Jethway, who dies of love for her, according to his mother. Then Stephen Smith, with whom she is prepared to elope – but then changes her mind at the last minute. Next comes Henry Knight, overlapping with Stephen emotionally, but who eventually wins the higher ground. But when he withdraws his attentions on an emotionally costive principle, she fairly soon switches her attentions to the untalented Lord Luxellian – then marries him. Psycho-analytic interpretations of the novel might well then observe that she is ‘punished’ by dying in childbirth.

Structure

The twinning, repetition, and parallelism in the novel should be fairly evident.

Elfride plays chess twice – first with Stephen, then with Henry Knight. She loses an ear ring when kissing Stephen on the cliff; she later accepts Knight’s gift of ear rings; and then recovers the lost ear ring when with Knight in the same location.

Elfride walks on the parapet of the church tower – and falls off it – whilst she is with Knight. He then falls off the cliff whilst he is with Elfride. She also sits on the grave of Felix Jethway when she is with Stephen, then later when she is with Knight.

Coincidence

Many of Hardy’s plots rely on coincidence to an extent that some modern readers find rather taxing to their credulity. The use of this literary device was fairly common in the fiction of the late nineteenth century (and had been since Dickens was so popular in the middle of the century).

When Stephen and Elfride return from their failed elopement to Plymouth and London, their surreptitious arrival together is witnessed by none other than Mrs Jethway. She is the one person who has a motive for exposing Elfride’s reputation to public scrutiny – since her son was Elfride’s first lover, and died because of it – according to her.

This secret knowledge creates an element of suspense in the plot until Mrs Jethway is crushed by the collapse of the church tower – but only immediately after having written the letter to Knight exposing what she knows, and enclosing proof in the form of Elfride’s letter pleading for secrecy.

The example is important because a great deal of the tension and suspense in the plot rests on the possible disclosure of this knowledge. Mrs Jethway flits in and out of events, appearing at crucial moments, but withholding her information until the last minute.

A less important example, because nothing vital in the development of events rests upon it, is the coincidence that not only do Stephen and Knight get on the same train to revisit Endelstow, but the carriage transporting Elfride’s corpse is attached to it on the journey.

Similarly, there is a tension between probability and plot symmetry when Stephen and Knight visit the crypt to pay their last respects to Elfride – only to find Lord Luxellian there mourning his dead wife. So – all three of her lovers are brought together for the final scene, and the fourth is quite near too, in the graveyard outside. This is strained plotting on Hardy’s part, but nothing further in the story depends upon the melodramatic conjunction.

Loose ends

The issue of Elfride’s novel and Knight’s subsequent review of it brings the two characters together for the second dramatic strand of the novel – but once she has rescued him from hanging on the cliff, her literary skills appear to be forgotten. They form no further part of the drama.

Henry Knight has barrister’s offices in the City and a home out in Richmond. We are led to believe that he has been a reviewer on the magazine The Present but has risen to be something like a senior editor. His offices are littered with the impedimenta of an active editor – but there isn’t the slightest scrap of evidence that he practises as a man of law anywhere in the novel. It’s almost as if Hardy conceived Knight with one profession, changed his mind, and forgot to erase traces of his first choice.

Study resources

A Pair of Blue Eyes – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

A Pair of Blue Eyes – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

A Pair of Blue Eyes – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

A Pair of Blue Eyes – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

A Pair of Blue Eyes – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

A Pair of Blue Eyes – audiobook version at LibriVox.org

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

A Pair of Blue Eyes – story synopsis

Chapter I. Elfride Swancourt is in Endelstow, nervously awaiting the arrival of Stephen Smith from London.

Chapter II. Stephen arrives at the rectory to make a survey of the church aisle and its tower for a restoration project.

Chapter III. The rector Christopher Swancourt is very enthusiastic about Stephen and thinks he must have aristocratic family connections (which is not true). Elfride sings for Stephen, and they are both very impressed with each other.

Chapter IV. Stephen surveys the church with Swancourt and his helper William Worm. Stephen promises to signal Elfride from the tower, but fails to do so.

Chapter V. Stephen receives news that he ought to be back in London, and Swancourt is asked to retrieve a document for the local landowner Lord Luxellian. Stephen, Swancourt, and Elfride go to Endelstow House, where she is the favourite of Mary and Kate, the Luxellian children. Stephen disappears briefly but mysteriously, and appears to meet a woman.

Chapter VI. Elfride is mystified by Stephen, who appears to be hiding something. She tries to extract the secret from him without success. Stephen departs, promising to return.

Chapter VII. At his next visit to the rectory, Stephen plays chess with Elfride, which he has taught himself from books. He has also learned Latin by post from his friend Mr Knight. Stephen tells Elfride that he loves her. They go together up onto the cliffs to continue their flirtations. They exchange their first kiss, she loses an ear ring, and they declare their love for each other. But Stephen suggests that there is something which will prevent their marrying.

Chapter VIII. They return to the rectory. Stephen is due to ask the reverend Swancourt for permission to marry Elfride, but he changes his mind and delays. Instead, he reveals his humble family origins: his mother and father are workers on the Luxellian estate, and his education has been via National school and his friend Henry Knight.

Chapter IX. Stephen’s father is injured in an accident at the church restoration. Whilst Stephen visits his family home, the reverend Swancourt upbraids Elfride for forming an attachment to a commoner and forbids any engagement.

Chapter X. Stephen visits his parents and spars with his mother about marriage and social class. She does not approve of Elfride. As he prepares to leave the rectory, he and Elfride hatch a plan to marry in secret.

Chapter XI. Elfride discovers that he father has been conducting a secret correspondence, and he has a plan in mind for making them rich. She leaves the rectory secretly and travels indecisively to Plymouth to be married. But Stephen has registered the marriage in London – so they travel on there.

Chapter XII. As soon as they reach London, Elfride changes her mind and they travel back to Endelstow – observed as they arrive together by Mrs Jethway. When she reaches home, Elfride is met by her father, who has married Mrs Troyton, a rich and plain widow who has bought the neighbouring estate. He claims it was done for Elfride’s sake. Mrs Troyton is old and rather flamboyant.

Chapter XIII. Two months later Stephen visits his old friend Henry Knight in his London offices and asks his advice about accepting a job offer in India in order to save up to get married. Knight thinks the decision turns on the issue of the fidelity of the individuals during such a prolonged absence. He also has Elfride’s romantic novel to review.

Chapter XIV. Some months later Elfride is living in Kensington and mixing in upper-class society because of the wealth and connections of her new step-mother. Her romantic novel is being reviewed. Mrs Troyton (now Mrs Swancourt) meets her distant relative Henry Knight in Hyde Park and invites him to visit them in Cornwall.

Chapter XV. Elfride reads Henry Knight’s review of her romantic novel, which contains some strong criticism.

Chapter XVI. Elfride writes to the journal The Present and receives a reply from Knight, who is shortly to visit Endelstow.

Chapter XVII. Henry Knight arrives at Endelstow and engages in some (rather improbable) philosophic discussions with Elfride, stemming from his review of her novel.

Chapter XVIII. Elfride shows Knight the local church and walks round the parapet of its tower, where she falls off. She then plays chess with him, and is beaten. She flirts with him and tries to extract compliments, but he refuses to flatter her and will only tell her about his preferences and the truth as he sees it.

Chapter XIX. Knight reads from the Bible in the local church service whilst Elfride plays the organ – both of them observed from the back of the congregation by Mrs Jethway. Elfride asks the rather pompous Knight for guidance on vanity and women’s nature – subjects on which he has lots of theory but no practical knowledge.

Chapter XX. Knight travels to Ireland and realises that he has fallen in love with Elfride. He buys her some ear rings, but she feels that she should refuse to accept them. Meanwhile Stephen sends her £200 he has saved towards their marriage, and is then despatched on a visit back to England to make building procurements for his work.

Chapter XXI. Elfride goes onto the cliffs to watch for Stephen’s arrival back in England. There she meets Knight, and they become trapped on the cliff top. Elfride climbs up Knight to safety, but he remains stuck on a ledge.

Chapter XXII. Knight clings to the cliff edge expecting to die, but Elfride saves him by tearing up her underclothes and making a rope with which he is hauled to safety – after which they embrace passionately with relief.

Chapter XXIII. Stephen lands ashore and walking home sees Elfride and Knight in retreat from the cliff. He arrives at his family house to be greeted by conversations amongst his family and locals about flowers and pig-killing. He feels snobbishly resentful of the company.

Chapter XXIV. Elfride fails to turn up to a planned meeting with Stephen, and she returns the £200 he has sent. Next day he travels to Birmingham to order his procurements.

Chapter XXV. On return from Birmingham Stephen sees Elfride with Knight. He is also intercepted by Mrs Jethway who warns him against Elfride. As he makes his way home in a state of desolation, he learns that Lady Luxellian has died.

Chapter XXVI. There is a discussion in the Luxellian family crypt regarding family history, questions of inheritance, and Elfride’s personal history.

Chapter XXVII. Elfride’s change of heart in choosing Knight is explained whilst they are out riding. They visit the Luxellian crypt and meet Stephen. Elfride is worried about not having told Knight about her past relationship with Stephen.

Chapter XXVIII. Elfride plans to reveal the truth about her past to Knight, but cannot face it when the time comes. They ride out to a watery glade where she now accepts his gift of the ear rings. Mrs Jethway turns up to reveal that she has damaging information – but will not use it just yet.

Chapter XXIX. The Swancourts go on holiday to Europe, returning from London to Cornwall via a boat journey in the Channel. Mrs Jethway makes an appearance, which worries Elfride. She discusses the subject of ‘previous romantic experience’ with Knight who has none and assumes she has none either.

Chapter XXX. Elfride finally reveals in discussion with Knight that she has previously had a ‘lover’. She delivers a note to Mrs Jethway, pleading with her not to reveal details of her liaison with Stephen. Knight begins to put together fragments of her previous comments, and his suspicions make him unhappy.

Chapter XXXI. Elfride and Knight go up onto the cliffs, where she finds her lost ear ring. Knight continues to harass her for information about her past and wants to know what she is keeping secret from him. He admits that he is jealous and can only accept a wife who has absolutely no previous experience. Meanwhile, the church tower collapses.

Chapter XXXII. Knight and Elfride go into the churchyard and sit on Felix Jethway’s gravestone. Knight pesters her further about her past. She first of all she hides behind an ambiguous blend of information about Stephen and Felix Jethway. Then eventually she is forced to admit that there were two former lovers. Knight badgers her into giving him the full story.

Chapter XXXIII. Stephen finds Mrs Jethway crushed in the tower ruins. Lord Luxellian turns up, and they take the body back to her house, where Stephen sees that she has been writing a warning letter to someone.

Chapter XXXIV. Next day Knight receives the latter Mrs Jethway was writing, plus Elfride’s pleading note to Mrs Jethway. He challenges Elfride again, and she admits to having been away overnight with Stephen on her journey to London. Knight immediately breaks off their engagement and goes back to his chambers in London.

Chapter XXXV. Next morning Elfride turns up at his offices, begging him not to leave her – but her father then appears and takes her away again. Knight is in deep conflict over his feelings for Elfride, but he ends up closing his offices and going abroad.

Chapter XXXVI. Some time passes. Stephen’s parents move to St Launce’s where they hear news of his architectural success in India.

Chapter XXXVII. Knight travels extensively but pointlessly in Europe. More than a year later Stephen and Knight meet by accident in London. They compare notes about the fact that neither of them is married; but they are very reserved with each other.

Chapter XXXVIII. The two men meet again in the evening, and eventually Stephen reveals the whole story of his romance with Elfride to Knight. This rekindles the interest of both men in Elfride: Stephen still loves her and thinks Knight has been rejected; Knight ‘forgives’ Elfride retrospectively and thinks Stephen is no serious rival.

Chapter XXXIX. The two men claim to have urgent business, but in fact they give each other the slip in order to get to Elfride as soon as possible. They meet on the same train, and admit that they are both en route to ask for her hand in marriage. They continue to argue about who has the more valid claim to Elfride. Meanwhile, the train has a ‘death coach’ attached to it. When they reach their destination, they are met by a hearse – and they discover it is for Elfride.

Chapter XL. They then learn after the death of Lady Luxellian, Elfride became the ‘little mother’ to the two Luxellian children, as a result of which she eventually married Lord Luxellian. But after travelling abroad she died of a miscarriage in London. Stephen and Knight decide to visit the Luxellian vault in the church, but when they get there they find Lord Luxellian grieving for his dead wife – so they both leave.

A Pair of Blue Eyes – principal characters

Reverend Swancourt	a deaf, widowed, and largely bankrupt rector
Elfride Swancourt	his pretty and clever young daughter
John Smith	a master-mason on the Luxellian estate
Stephen Smith	his young son, working in a London architect’s office
William Worm	a bumpkin, with noises in his head
Henry Knight	a barrister, literary editor, and distant relative of Mrs Troyton
Lord Spencer Hugo Luxellian	local landowner, with ‘no talent’
Mary and Kate	his two young daughters
Mrs Gertrude Jethway	a poor and embittered widow, mother of Elfride’s first lover
Felix Jethway	Elfride’s first lover
Mrs Charlotte Troyton	a rich but plain widow who buys an estate next to Swancourt
Robert Lickpan	a pig-killer
Martin Cannister	a sexton

A Pair of Blue Eyes – bibliography

Laura Green, ‘”Strange [In]difference of Sex”: Thomas Hardy, the Victorian Man of Letters and the Temptations of Androgyny’, Victorian Studies 38/4 (1995), 523-50.

John Halperin, ‘Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hardy, and A Pair of Blue Eyes‘, Modern Language Review, 75 (1980), 738-45.

Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, (London, Routledge, 1988).

Angelique Richardson, ‘”Some Science Underlies All Art”: The Dramatization of Sexual Selection and Racial Biology in A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Well-Beloved‘, Journal of Victorian Culture, 3/2 (1998), 302-38.

Mary Rimmer, ‘Club Laws: Chess and Construction of Gender in A Pair of Blue Eyes‘, in Margaret R. Higonnet (ed), The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 203-20.

Robert Schweik, ‘”Life and Death are Neighbours Nigh”: Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes and the Uses of Incongruity, Philological Quarterly, 76/1 (1997), 87-100.

Rosemary Sumner, A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1982).

Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Hardy’s WESSEX

Hardy’s study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
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The Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.
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Wessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.
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Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

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A Room with a View

February 23, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

A Room with a View (1905) is a comedy of manners and a satirical critique of English stuffiness and hypocrisy. Lucy Honeychurch must choose between cultured but emotionally frozen Cecil Vyse and the impulsive George Emerson. The Surrey stockbroker belt is contrasted with the magic of Florence, where she eventually ends up on her honeymoon. Upper middle-class English tourists in Italy are an easy target for Forster in some very amusing scenes.

E.M.Forster

E.M. Forster is a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century novel. He documents the Edwardian and Georgian periods in a witty and elegant prose, satirising the middle and upper classes he knew so well. He was a friend of Virginia Woolf, with whom he worked out some of the ground rules of literary modernism. These included the concept of ‘tea-tabling’ – making the substance of serious fiction the ordinary events of everyday life. He was also a member of The Bloomsbury Group.

His novels grew in complexity and depth, until he eventually gave up fiction in 1923. This was because he no longer felt he could write about the subject of heterosexual love which he did not know or feel. Instead, he turned to essays – which are well worth reading.

A Room with a View – plot summary

Lucy Honeychurch, a young upper middle class woman, visits Italy under the charge of her older cousin Charlotte. At their guesthouse, in Florence, they are given rooms that look into the courtyard rather than out over the river Arno. Mr. Emerson, a fellow guest, generously offers them the rooms belonging to himself and his son George. Lucy is an avid young pianist. Mr. Beebe an English clergyman guest, watches her passionate playing and predicts that someday she will live her life with as much gusto as she plays the piano.

Lucy’s visit to Italy is marked by several significant encounters with the Emersons. George explains that his father means well, but always offends everyone. Mr. Emerson tells Lucy that his son needs her in order to overcome his youthful melancholy. Later, Lucy comes in close contact with two quarreling Italian men. One man stabs the other, and she faints, to be rescued (and kissed) by George.

On a country outing in the hills, Lucy again encounters George, who is standing on a terrace covered with blue violets. George kisses her again, but this time Charlotte sees him and chastises him and leaves with Lucy for Rome the next day.

The second half of the book centers on Lucy’s home in Surrey, where she lives with her mother and her brother, Freddy. A man she met in Rome, the snobbish Cecil Vyse, proposes marriage to her for the third time, and she accepts him. He disapproves of her family and the country people she knows. There is a small, ugly villa available for rent in the town, and as a joke, Cecil offers it to the Emersons, whom he meets by chance in a museum. They take him up on the offer and move in, much to Lucy’s initial horror.

George plays tennis with the Honeychurches on a Sunday when Cecil is at his most intolerable. Cecil reads from a book by Miss Lavish, a woman who also stayed with Lucy and Charlotte in Florence. The novel records a kiss among violets, so Lucy realizes that Charlotte let the secret out. In a moment alone, George kisses her again. Lucy tells him to leave, but George insists that Cecil is not the right man for her. Lucy sees Cecil in a new light, and breaks off her engagement that night.

However, Lucy will not believe that she loves George; she wants to stay unmarried and travel to Greece with some elderly women she met in Italy. She meets old Mr. Emerson by chance, who insists that she loves George and should marry him, because it is what her soul truly wants. Lucy realizes he is right, and though she must fly against convention, she marries George, and the book ends with the happy couple staying together in the Florence pension again, in a room with a view.

Study resources

A Room with a View – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Room with a View – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Room with a View – unabridged classics Audio CD – Amazon UK

A Room with a View – BBC audio books edition – Amazon UK

A Room with a View – Merchant-Ivory film on VHS – Amazon UK

A Room with a View – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

A Room with a View – audioBook version at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to E.M.Forster – Amazon UK

E.M.Forster at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

E.M.Forster at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Principal characters

Lucy Honeychurch	a musical and spirited girl
Mrs Honeychurch	her mother, a widow
Freddy	her brother
Charlotte Bartlett	Lucy’s older, poorer cousin and an old maid
Mr Emerson	a liberal, plain-speaking widower
George Emerson	his truth-seeking son
Cecil Vyse	an over-cultivated snob
Mr Beebe	the rector in Lucy’s home town
Miss Lavish	lady novelist with strident, commonplace views
Mr Eager	self-righteous British chaplain in Florence

A Room with a View – film version

Merchant-Ivory 1985 film adaptation

This is a production which takes one or two minor liberties with the original novel. But it’s beautifully acted, with the deliciously pouting Helena Bonham Carter as the heroine Lucy, plus Denholm Eliot as Mr Emerson, Daniel Day-Lewis as a wonderfully pompous Cecil Vyse, and Maggie Smith as the poisonous hanger-on Charlotte. The settings are delightfully poised between Florentine Italy and the home counties stockbroker belt. I’ve watched it several times, and it never ceases to be visually elegant and emotionally well observed. This film was nominated for eight Academy awards when it appeared, and put the Merchant-Ivory team on the cultural map.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

A Room with a View – film interview

Daniel Day Lewis on Cecil Vyse

Other works by E.M. Forster

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1902) is Forster’s first novel and a very witty debut. A spirited middle-class English girl goes to Italy and becomes involved with a local man. The English family send out a party to ‘rescue’ her (shades of Henry James) – but they are too late; she has already married him. But when a baby is born, the family returns with renewed hostility. The clash between Mediterranean living spirit and deadly English rectitude is played out with amusing and tragic consequences.

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Howards End (1910) is a State of England novel, and possibly Forster’s greatest work – though that’s just my opinion. Two families are contrasted: the intellectual and cultivated Schlegels, and the capitalist Wilcoxes. A marriage between the two leads to spiritual rivalry over the possession of property. Following on their social coat tails is a working-class would-be intellectual who is caught between two conflicting worlds. The outcome is a mixture of tragedy and resignation, leavened by hope for the future in the young and free-spirited.

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E.M.Forster: A Life is a readable and well illustrated biography by P.N. Furbank. This book has been much praised for the sympathetic understanding Nick Furbank brings to Forster’s life and work. It is also a very scholarly book, with plenty of fascinating details of the English literary world during Forster’s surprisingly long life. It has become the ‘standard’ biography, and it is very well written too. Highly recommended.

Buy the book here

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A Study in Scarlet

August 23, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, further reading

A Study in Scarlet (1888) marks the first ever appearance in print of Sherlock Holmes, the now world-famous detective. It was Arthur Conan Doyle’s first book to be published – for which he received the meagre sum of £25 for all UK rights. The novel first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 and was then republished as a single volume by Ward Lock & Co in July 1888.

A Study in Scarlet – commentary

Structure

The first part of A Study in Scarlet follows what I have called elsewhere the classic Sherlock Holmes formula. First we are introduced to the racy and enigmatic figure of Holmes himself. He is part-Bohemian, a violin player who relaxes with cocaine, and a freelance consultant detective who outwits Scotland Yard.

Then we are given a demonstration of his amazing powers of observation and clinical analysis. The story is related from the point of view of his colleague Dr John Watson. Next, someone (or a message) arrives at 221B Baker Street with details of a crime that has stumped the police.

Holmes then works out the solution to this problem by a combination of logic, closely observed details, his encyclopedic knowledge of crime, and a process of ratiocination. He then sets out in a series of detective-like escapades to prove that his theory is correct.

It is important to note that the mystery is solved via a process of thinking, the logic of which is usually revealed later. The adventures of pursuing criminals or witnesses are only necessary to prove that his theory is correct.

That is exactly the structure of Part 1 of the narrative of A Study in Scarlet. We are introduced to Holmes; he demonstrates his skills; he is presented with almost a locked-room conundrum – a murdered body in an empty house. He then solves the crime and delivers the culprit in handcuffs.

But in this, his first published work, Conan Doyle was presenting his new hero-sleuth via the form of a novel. This is a literary genre that normally requires more substance than the Sherlock Holmes formula provides. So in Part 2, Conan Doyle switches to what is essentially the ‘back story’ that has led to the crimes being committed.

This switch requires not only a change of location and time – from urban London boroughs to the plains of Utah earlier in the century. It is also a change in narrative mode from John Watson’s first person account to an impersonal third-person history of events. This is done without any subsequent explanation of how these two parts of the narrative are related.

The new topics covered in Part 2 introduce a catastrophic rift in the coherence of A Study in Scarlet, from which the novel never really recovers. We are introduced to scene settings of what was then the American ‘Frontier’ which might have been lifted straight out of a Fenimore Cooper novel. There are lengthy explanations for the strange beliefs and behaviour of the Mormons (the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints). The story-line also includes internal rivalries amongst the religious settlers which will explain later complexities in the plot.

This back story is simply too long-winded and complex, the timescale too regressive, and the introduction of significant new characters too disruptive to produce a satisfying whole. The novel could easily have been rescued by eliminating all the back story of Part 2, and simply following the arrest of Jefferson Hope with the explication Holmes gives in the final chapter of the novel.

It seems that Conan Doyle was aware of this weakness, for at a later date he described his own production as ‘having much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition by Euclid’. Certainly he did not make the same mistake again when introducing Holmes as a character in the novel-length work The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). This work maintains its unity of characters, theme, location, and dramatic continuity.

The explanation

Most stories featuring Sherlock Holmes turn on his ability to interpret small details of evidence overlooked by others – particularly his rivals Lestrade and Gregson of the Yard. He deals with the first set of clues in A Study in Scarlet plausibly enough. The dead body in an empty room and the writing in blood on the wall provide him with clues that the muderer was tall, strong, that the blood was the murderer’s, that poison was involved, and that the word ‘RACHE’ on the wall is German.

These are all typical elements in a Holmes story. But Conan Doyle, perhaps because he was tackling a novel or perhaps because this was Holmes’s first fictional appearance, pushes these analytic processes to a level which strains credulity. We are asked to believe that Holmes can recognise and discriminate amongst the footprints of several people who have walked across a muddy pathway – not once in the same direction, but more than once in both directions.

Jefferson Hope (the murderer), Enoch Drebber (the victim), constable John Rance, and his colleague Murcher all trample across the path leading to the empty house on the night of the murder. But we are asked to believe that Holmes is able to accurately work out the sequence of their comings and goings, as well as similar movements of Hope’s horse-drawn cab.

These analyses are simply not credible – even making allowances for what is essentially a work of popular fiction. Some of the later Holmes stories have similar weaknesses, but they are piled on to an unacceptable degree in A Study in Scarlet. Together with the structural flaw examined above, they render the novel an interesting first attempt or a flawed prototype for the successful shorter fictions that were to follow.

Deduction or induction?

The most amazing thing about Holmes is the manner in which he is able to combine acute observation with an incisive system of reasoning to reach revealing insights and surprisingly deft conclusions. It is a method of ratiocination clearly modelled on Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin.

Amongst critics there is often disagreement on the question of Holmes’ methods of detection. He observes very small details of a person’s physical appearance or clothing, and from these details arrives at a general understanding of their occupation, their habits, or their recent movements. This method of detection illustrates his acute powers of observation and often reveals his encyclopedic knowledge of arcane topics – such as being able to idetify different brands of cigar from their ashes.

In Watson’s narrative, Doyle sometimes calls Holmes’ method ‘deduction’ and other times ‘analysis’. Watson (and by implication Conan Doyle) is employing the term ‘deduction’ in its everyday sense of seeing a relationship between one thing and another which doesn’t at first seem to be connected to it.

But the method, strictly speaking, is ‘induction’ – a form of reasoning which derives general principles from specific observation. This is also known as ‘bottom up’ reasoning.

Deductive reasoning works the other way round – and is known as ‘top down’ logic. This starts from a general principle then works down to a specific instance. All men are mortal; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was mortal. Another term for this process is ‘inference’. This is a minor issue – and many people accept and use the term ‘deduction’ for both forms of reasoning. Holmes eventually explains his method to Watson as one of analytic reasoning:

Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be … There are few people however, who, if you told them the result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.

A Study in Scarlet – study resources

The best current editions of the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a biographical chronology of Conan Doyle, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

A Study in Scarlet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

A Study in Scarlet – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Conan Doyle – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – plot summary

Part 1

1. Dr John Watson has retired injured from the army. He is introduced to Sherlock Holmes with a view to their sharing lodgings. Holmes is a mercurial character who dabbles in scientific experiments.

2. Holmes has a patchy grasp of general knowledge but a profound understanding of forensic science and anatomy. He has written papers on the philosophy of deduction and works as a freelance consultant detective.

3. Holmes is summoned by letter to assist in an unsolved murder in Brixton. He examines the dead body in an empty room whilst Scotland Yard detectives Lestrade and Gregson theorise about an explanation. There is rivalry between Holmes and the detectives – and between each other.

4. Holmes delivers to Watson a working explanation of the crime, devised from a minute examination of the room and its contents. They interview the policeman who discovered the body, who confirms Holmes’ description of the potential murderer.

5. Holmes advertises for the owner of a woman’s ring found at the crime scene. It is answered by an old woman who then gives them the slip when pursued.

6. The newspapers give a variety of accounts of the crime. Gregson arrives at Baker Street claiming he has arrested the murderer – the son of the murdered man’s landlady. His rival Lestrade arrives to announce the murder of Drebber’s secretary, Stargerson.

7. Lestrade describes tracking down Stargerson and finding him murdered. Holmes claims from the details now established that he has a complete answer to the mystery. He tests this by poisoning a dog. He is challenged by Lestrade and Gregson to reveal his findings, and when a cab driver is summoned, Holmes pronounces him the murderer – Jefferson Hope.

Part 2

1. Many years earlier, John Ferrier and his adopted daughter Lucy are lost in the wilderness of Utah, USA. They are dying of thirst and starvation, but are eventually rescued by a caravan of Mormons.

2. Brigham Young establishes the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City. After many years Ferrier becomes a successful and rich farmer. Lucy is courted by Jefferson Hope, a hunter and frontiersman.

3. Brigham Young insists that because she is still single, Lucy should marry one of the Four Elders. Ferrier is given a month to decide.

4. Elders Drebber and Stargerson menace Ferrier with their claims for Lucy. With only two days left, Jefferson Hope arrives and rescues Ferrier and Lucy. They set off for Carson City in Nevada.

5. When Hope goes hunting for food, he returns to find that Ferrier has been killed and Lucy abducted by the Mormons. Returning to Salt Lake City, Hope learns that Stargerson shot Ferrier and Lucy has been forcibly married to Drebber.

When Lucy dies a month later, Hope seizes her wedding ring and begins a long pursuit of Drebber and Stargerson, seeking vengeance.

6. Watson then reports the confession of the captured Hope. He followed the two Elders to London and stalked them as a cab driver. He takes Drebber as a drunken passenger and presents him with a box of pills, some of which are poisoned. Drebber takes one and dies. Hope then goes to Stangerson’s hotel and after a struggle stabs him in the heart.

7. Hope dies in prison. Holmes explains to Watson how he analysed details of the case. Lestrade and Gregson get all the credit for solving the crime.

A Study in Scarlet – characters

Dr John Watson	a retired army medical officer
Sherlock Holmes	a freelance consultant detective
Lestrade	a Scotland Yard detective
Tobias Gregson	a Scotland Yard detective
Enoch Drebber	a Mormon Elder who marries Lucy
Joseph Stargerson	a Mormon Elder, Drebber’s ‘secretary’
Jefferson Hope	an American frontiersman and hunter
John Ferrier	a frontiersman who becomes a rich farmer
Lucy Ferrier	his adopted daughter

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Alejo Carpentier further reading

November 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

novels, novellas, short stories, criticism

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was a Cuban writer who made a connection between European culture and the native history of Latin-America. His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on – music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture.

He was also the first to use the techniques of ‘magical realism’ (he coined the term, lo real maravilloso) in which the concrete, real world becomes suffused with fantasy elements, myths, dreams, and a fractured sense of time and logic.

Carpentier is generally considered one of the fathers of modern Latin American literature. His complex, baroque style has inspired such writers as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

Alejo Carpentier – novels in English

The Kingdom of this World (1949) – Amazon UK

The Kingdom of this World (1949) – Tutorial, study guide, web links

The Lost Steps (1953) – Amazon UK

The Lost Steps (1953) – Tutorial, study guide, web links

Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) – Amazon UK

Reasons of State (1974) – Amazon UK

The Consecration of Spring (1978) – Amazon UK

The Harp and the Shadow (1979) – Amazon UK

The Harp and the Shadow (1979) – Tutorial, study guide, web links

Alejo Carpentier – stories in English

The Chase (1956) – Amazon UK

The Chase (1956) – Tutorial and study guide

The War of Time (1963) – Amazon UK

Journey Back to the Source (1963) – Amazon UK

Journey Back to the Source (1963) – Tutorial and study guide

The Road to Santiago (1963) – Amazon UK

The Road to Santiago (1963) – Tutorial and study guide

Right of Sanctuary (1967) – Amazon UK

Right of Sanctuary (1967) – Tutorial and study guide

Baroque Concerto (1974) – Amazon UK

Baroque Concerto (1974) – Tutorial and study guide

Alejo Carpentier – novels in Spanish

Ecue-yamba-O! (1933) – Amazon UK

El reino de este mundo (1949) – Amazon UK

Los pasos perdidos (1953) – Amazon UK

El siglo de las luces (1962) – Amazon UK

El recurso del metodo (1974) – Amazon UK

La consegracion de la primavera (1978) – Amazon UK

El arpa y el sombra (1979) – Amazon UK

Cuentos completos (1979) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier web links

Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

More on Alejo Carpentier
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Almayer’s Folly

August 19, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Almayer’s Folly (1895) was Joseph Conrad’s first novel, It deals with events which take place around 1887 in the Malay Archipelago, where Conrad had spent some time as a seaman. Many of the characters in the story are based on real people he met around that time. Some of these people crop up again in his second novel An Outcast of the Islands which deals with events that take place earlier, in 1872. An Outcast is what might in modern media terms be called a ‘prequel’ to the first novel. There is also a third volume in the series called The Rescue that deals with events set even further back in the 1850s – but this was not published until 1920.

Joseph Conrad

Almayer’s Folly – critical commentary

Race

Despite all the local political rivalries and machinations, the temporal complexities of the plot, and the problem of tracking who is where in geographic terms – the most striking underlying theme in the novel is that of race.

Conrad’s family were Polish political refugees who had been exiled in Russia; he spoke French and English as his second and third languages; and by the time he became a writer he had travelled around the world

Almayer has agreed to marry Captain Lingard’s adopted Philippino daughter in exchange for a business partnership (a subject dealt with at greater length in An Outcast of the Islands). His wife has grown to detest him. This is partly justified by the fact that he is lazy, incompetent, and a boor. But she hates other white men too. She is very conscious that they come with kind words – and carry guns. She shares this view with Lambaka – with whom she has been having an affair.

She also conspires with the other local nationalists in their plots against Almayer and the trading post – and she is complicit in the gruesome disfigurement of the drowned corpse. This is a move designed to cover Dain Maroola’s tracks in his flight with Nina. Mrs Almayer approves of this match – partly because it has brought her money in the form of the dowry, but on racial grounds, because she feels that Nina will bring honour and dignity on herself by association with a Balinese prince.

Almayer himself, on the other hand, feels racially affronted by Nina’s attachment to Dain. He thinks of her as ‘white’ and European educated, and he feels she is lowering and demeaning herself in this relationship – even though Dain is a prince in his own society.

Nina herself undergoes a transformation of consciousness when she falls in love with Dain. She is at first torn between her western and eastern cultural heritage. But the force of her feelings is reinforced by a powerful sense of racial bonding with Dain She is proud to love Dain and devote herself to him. She too, like her mother, scorns the Europeans. She even finally rejects her own father when he demands that she obey him.

Critical approaches

A great deal of the first critical commentary on these early works is focused on their accuracy in relation to what was known of Conrad’s biography. That is, the works were assessed on the basis of the relation between their fictional representations and the real places he had visited, the real people he had met, and even the books he had read.

That is understandable given the conventions of literary criticism at the time. But now we recognise that authors are not in the least obliged to make a faithful copy of ‘reality’. They can pick and choose from the real world and from their imaginations exactly as they see fit. Our only demands as readers is that the result should be convincing.

Setting

In the first part of the novel Almayer recalls his earlier days in Macassar, a provincial capital in southern Indonesia. The remainder and majority of the events take place in the fictional town of Sambir, which is loosely based on Berau in north-east Borneo (today called Kalimantan) very close to the equator.

The river Pantai on which Sambir is based plays an important part in the story. Captain Lingard has established his prosperous trading business based on his monopoly of navigational skills on the river which is the source of much annoyance to his business rivals.

Almayer’s Folly – study resources

Almayer’s Folly – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Almayer’s Folly – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Almayer’s Folly – Kindle eBook

Almayer’s Folly – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

Almayer’s Folly – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

Almayer’s Folly – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Almayer’s Folly – plot summary

At the outset of the novel Almayer thinks back to his earliest days in Macassar when Captain Lingard offered him a partnership in exchange for marrying his adopted Philippino daughter. Since then Almayer’s fortunes have sunk, and he yearns to become wealthy and return to Europe with his half-caste daughter Nina. He now feels distinctly hostile towards his wife – a feeling which is reciprocated. He sends Nina to Singapore to be educated amongst Europeans. The experiment is not successful, and she returns home. Lingard seems to be missing somewhere in Europe.

Almayer begins to construct a large residence and reception centre for British traders and military, but jurisdiction in Sambir passes from British to Dutch hands. Local chief Abdulla offers Almayer money in exchange for his daughter who he wishes to marry to his nephew Reshid – but Almayer indignantly refuses.

Then Balinese prince Dain Maroola (masquerading as a trader) visits Almayer, and although very little trade is done he is visually impressed by Nina. He pays Mrs Almayer money (a dowry) to allow him access to Nina for courtship. Mrs Almayer is happy to do this for financial as well as racial reasons.

Almayer also has grandiose dreams of exploring for gold in the interior of the country. He prepares boats for the expedition, even though he has no idea where this gold is located. Meanwhile Dain meets Nina secretly for romantic trysts, and she feels drawn to him culturally, despite her European ‘education’.

Dain meets Lambaka to discuss policy and despite being threatened, he departs during a thunderstorm to meet Nina. He is apparently drowned during the storm, and washed up as an almost headless corpse at Almayer’s compound the next morning.

Taminah, a simple seller of cakes has secretly observed the Nina-Dain relationship and is desperately jealous because she is herself in love with Dain. She sees Nina as a ‘white’ interloper.

Meanwhile a Dutch ship arrives, the officers of which are looking for Dain, who has blown up his own ship in escaping them, causing the deaths of two Dutch seamen. Almayer temporises, and they accuse Almayer of hiding him.

The Dutch officers demand that he produce Dain. Almayer promises to do so, invites them to dinner, and gets drunk. Finally he produces the dead body. But Babalatchi arrives with the true version of events – that Dain escaped and planted his own bracelet and ring on a dead comrade who was killed during the storm.

Nina leaves home to join Dain, and her mother plans to leave Almayer, supported by the money for the dowry. Almayer is awakened from a drunken nightmare by Taminah, who tells him all that has been going on.

Dain waits in hiding, and is joined by Nina. But they are followed by Almayer, who wants his daughter back and feels racially insulted by her liaison with Dain. The two men challenge each other. Nina refuses to obey her father. Finally, Almayer offers to take them away – just as the Dutch troops arrive in pursuit of Dain.

Almayer takes Nina and Dain to an island where they are to be rescued. He parts from his daughter with great bitterness, after which he goes back to Sambir, sets fire to Lingard’s office (and his own home) then declines into opium addition and eventually dies – as news of the birth of Nina’s child is announced.

Biography

Principal characters

Tom Lingard	an experienced sea captain with a monopolistic knowledge of river navigation – ‘Rajah Laut’ (King of the Sea)
Kaspar Almayer	Lingard’s Dutch business partner, married to his adopted daughter
Mrs Almayer	his Philippino wife, who despises him
Nina	Almayer’s beautiful mixed-race child
Ali	Almayer’s Malaysian assistant
Babalatchi	a one-eyed vagabond, handman to Lakamba
Rajah Lakamba	trader-cultivator and war-lord
Said Abdulla bin Selim	great trader of Sambir
Sayed Reshid	his nephew
Sambir	trading post town in Borneo
Dain Maroola	a rich and handsome prince from Bali
Bulangi	a rice trader (who does not appear)
Taminah	Bulangi’s slave girl who sells cakes

Almayer’s Folly – first edition 1895

Other works by Joseph Conrad

An Outcast of the Islands (1896) was Conrad’s second novel, and acts as a ‘prequel’ to the first, Almayer’s Folly. English sea captain Tom Lingard rescues the corrupt Peter Willems and gives him a second chance by setting him up with a business in a commercial outpost. However, Willems lacks the moral fibre to profit from this act of generosity. He becomes obsessed with a beautiful native girl, deserts his wife and is overwhelmed by local political factions. All this takes place in southern Indonesia against a background of British and Dutch imperialist squabbling for supremacy in the region. Willems is eventually abandoned by his protector, feels desolate and isolated, then has to face the wrath of his wife who comes in search of him.
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Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

An Outcast of the Islands

August 19, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

An Outcast of the Islands (1896) is Joseph Conrad’s second novel, following closely on his first, Almayer’s Folly which was published the previous year. In fact An Outcast has a close relationship to Almayer, because it deals with some of the same characters and events.

Joseph Conrad

In fact it is part of what might be called a ‘trilogy in reverse’. An Outcast deals with events that take place in 1872, whereas Almayer’s Folly is set about 1887. An Outcast provides what might in modern media terms be called a ‘back story’ to the first novel. There is also a third volume in the series called The Rescue that deals with events set even earlier in the 1850s – but this was not published until 1920.

Conrad first conceived An Outcast as a short story called Two Vagabonds, but like many of his planned fictions it expanded as soon as he started writing it.

An Outcast of the Islands – plot summary

Peter Willems is a conceited bully who works as a ‘confidential’ clerk for Hudig & Co in Macassar in Malaysia. He has secured the job through the kindness of Tom Lingard, a sea captain who has rescued him as a youth. As the story opens, Willems is embezelling money of Hudig’s to finance a deal he hopes will make him a partner in the company.

But Willems’ illegal doings are revealed, and he is expelled by Hudig, who has only tolerated Willems because he was prepared to marry his daughter. Willems is on the point of complete despair when Lingard sails into port, bails him out financially, and recruits him to work in a commercial outpost at Sambir where he has commercial dominance. However, Willems does not get on with Almayer, the chief at the outpost. He is also unaware of a plot to cause trouble being hatched by Babalatchi, a louche character at the outpost. Willems is sinking back towards despair when he meets a young woman Aissa and is completely overwhelmed by her beauty. He leaves the outpost and goes to live with her and her blind father, Omar.

Five weeks later he returns to Almayer with the warning that plots are being hatched against the trading outpost. He asks Almayer for a loan to set up as an independent trader – a request that Almayer scornfully refuses, correctly surmising that Willems has been expelled from Hudig & Co for embezellement.

Meanwhile Babalatchi conspires with Omar against Willems, plotting to bring in outside help from rich trader Abdulla, who wishes to displace Lingard in the area. Abdulla visits Sambir, and is negatively briefed by Babalatchi Abdulla negotiates with Omar and with Willems (who he knows from Hudig & Co) and leaves with plans to return two days later.

Willems feels trapped and humiliated by his overwhelming desire for Aissa and despairs because he realises they are from completely different cultures. Aissa wish to know what has passed between Willems and Abdulla. She is conscious of her power over him but resents the trouble he brings as an outsider.

Willems has the sole objective of running away with Aissa but she refuses. Whilst they are consoling each other Omar attempts to kill Willems and it seems to Willems as if the daughter might even be helping him.

Almayer gives Captain Lingard a lengthy and somewhat confused account of Abdulla’s attack on the trading post. There is a conflict caused by both Dutch and British flags being raised over the outpost. All Almayer’s gunpowder is thrown into the river and Willems has Almayer sewn into his own hammock, before making off.

Captain Lingard has lost his ship Flash and proposes a new scheme for prospecting upriver for alluvial gold. He has brough Willems’ wife and child to Sambir, still feeling he has a responsibility for them.

Lingard is smarting from the unusually bad state of his affairs (lost ship, lost supremacy on the river). He receives notes of invitation from both Willems and Abdulla. Almayer urges him to act against their rivals.

Lingard arrives in Sambir apparently with the intention of killing Willems. He is met by Babalatchi, who urges him against Willems. Then he is intercepted by Aissa, who is distraught because Willems has become distant from her.

When Lingard confronts Willems, he punches him severely, but thinks he is not worth shooting. Willems wants Lingard to ‘rescue’ him from his plight. But Lingard does the opposite – and condemns him to remain in permanent exile with Aissa. He regards Willems as his ‘mistake’, and his ‘shame’.

Almayer feels a rancorous anxiety at what he sees as Lingard’s tolerant attitude to Willems, and he is apprehensive about his own position. He thinks of killing Willems, but then persuades Mrs Willems to ‘rescue’ her husband. He then sets off with a group of men in a boat, which through his ineptness runs aground.

Willems feels an existential dread at having been abandoned by Lingard. He thinks of himself as deracinated, cut off from all civilized help, and without any human resources to survive the ordeal – even though he has Aissa with him and Lingard is supplying him with food. Eventually his wife Joanna arrives with their son. Willems feels doubly oppressed and thinks of killing both women – but Aissa gets to the gun first and shoots him.

Study resources

An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

An Outcast of the Islands – Kindle eBook

An Outcast of the Islands – DVD film adaptation at Amazon UK

An Outcast of the Islands – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

An Outcast of the Islands – DVD film adaptation at MovieMail

An Outcast of the Islands – film details at IMD

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Principal characters

Peter Willems	a Dutch confidential clerk at Hudig & Co
Joanna da Souza	his wife – a half-caste
Louis Willems	his pasty son
Leonard da Souza	his brother-in-law
Mr Vinck	cashier at Hudig & Co
Tom Lingard	an experienced sea captain with a monopolistic knowledge of river navigation
Kaspar Almayer	Lingard’s Dutch business partner, married to his adopted daughter
Babalatchi	a one-eyed vagabond
Lakamba	trader-cultivator and war-lord
Patalolo	local leader in Sambir
Omar el Badavi	blind Arab chief
Aissa	his beautiful daughter
Sambir	trading post town in Borneo
Syed Abdulla bin Selim	prosperous Muslim trader and distant relative of Omar
Nina	Almayer’s child
Ali	Almayer’s Malaysian assistant

Biography

Setting

The first part of the novel is set in Macassar, a provincial capital in southern Indonesia. The remainder and majority of the events take place in the fictional town of Sambir, which is losely based on Berau in north-east Borneo (today called Kalimantan) very close to the equator.

The river Pantai on which it is based plays an important part in the story. Captain Lingard has established his prosperous trading business based on his monopoly of navigational skills on the river which is the source of much annoyance to his business rivals.

first edition – New York, D. Appleton, 1896

Other works by Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
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Chance is the first of Conrad’s novels to achieve a wide commercial success, and one of the few to have a happy ending. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, the abandoned daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, and her long struggle to find happiness and dignity. He takes his techniques of weaving complex narratives to a challenging level here. His narrator Marlow is piecing together the story from a mixture of personal experience and conversations with other characters in the novel. At times it is difficult to remember who is saying what to whom. This is a work for advanced Conrad fans only. Make sure you have read some of the earlier works first, before tackling this one.
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Victory (1915) is set in the legendary port of Surabaya and in an outpost of the Malayan archipelago. It is the story of Swedish recluse Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young woman from a touring orchestra and runs off to live in remote seclusion, influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of his father. But he is pursued by two lying and scheming English gamblers, who believe he is concealing ill-gotten wealth. They corner him in his retreat, and despite the efforts of Lena to shield Heyst from their plans, there is a tragic confrontation which brings destruction into their island paradise.
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Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

Analysing narratives

September 9, 2012 by Roy Johnson

understanding how stories are told

What is analysing narratives?

Analysing narratives is making a critical assessment of features in a piece of work. This activity goes from making a detailed inspection of grammar and vocabulary, to offering judgements on major issues such as structure and genre.

A narrative is the account of a sequence of events. It’s the term used to describe the whole of a story, a tale, or even a process.

The term is used mainly in literary studies when discussing major genres such as the short story, the novella, and the novel. There are also narrative poems – such as Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842).

A narrative is an account which has a discernable beginning, includes a sequence of events, and an outcome or a conclusion.

Narratives and media

The term narrative is also used for non-literary works. In such cases its used in a general and neutral sense, when the work does not have the consciously engineered structure of written works such as the short story or the novel.

For instance, any of the following can be considered narratives:

A newspaper report of a natural disaster such as a volcanic eruption
A television documentary covering the whole of a general election
The description of a manufacturing process such as car production

The analysis of narratives is a form of study which arose in literary studies, and has been continued in related cultural fields of media studies such as film, television, and even computer games.

It is even possible to have narrative paintings. The Bayeaux Tapestries for instance provide an account of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, depicting a sequence of its key events, but all presented simultaneously within one frame.

The language of narratives

The term narrative is used to described the whole of the piece of writing or the sequence of its events – as in

The narrative of Great Expectations is one in which Dickens combines all his favourite themes and unites them with a complex plot which is full of dramatic suspense.

The term story is used to describe the content of the narrative – as in

The story of Great Expectations is one of a young boy from a humble country background who becomes a London gentleman. In doing so he loses his moral sense – only to recover himself through painful scenes of redemption.

You can see that this is an extremely compressed summary of the novel which focuses only on its most important theme and excludes any of its smaller details.

The term theme is used to describe the underlying topic or issue of the narrative. This is often of a general or abstract nature, as distinct from the overt subject with which the work deals. It should be possible to express theme in a single word or short phrase such as ‘redemption through suffering’, ‘moral education’, or ‘coming of age’.

The term plot is used to describe the manner in which elements of the narrative have been arranged to create dramatic interest, suspense, and possibly surprise. This arrangement could be the withholding of certain information, rearranging the sequence in which it is revealed, or embedding mysteries which only become clear when a later piece of information is presented.

A surprising turn of events, or the unmasking of a hidden identity are well-known plot devices of traditional fiction. Contemporary readers might feel that such devices have been so over-used as to become poor clichés.

Narrative mode

It is the author who writes the story, But an author can choose to convey events using one of what are called narrative modes. The two simplest are the first person singular (‘I’) and the third person singular (‘he’).

It is also possible to have stories related by multiple narrators. This is a device often used to present events from different perspectives or points of view.

Modern writers have also introduced further complexities into their stories by using what are called unreliable narrators. These are first person accounts given by characters with a limited, distorted, or even mistaken understanding of events.

First person narrators

The author creates a character who tells the story from his or her own point of view. That character may or may not be part of the story. Charles Dickens’ famous novel David Copperfield (1867) is an example of someone telling their own life story and participating in its events as one of the characters in the novel. Dickens is the author, David Copperfield is the narrator, and he is also a character in the story.

F Scott-Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925) is largely concerned with the mysterious and very rich Jay Gatsby, but it is narrated by Nick Carraway, one of his neighbours and also a participating character in the novel.

Fyodor Dostoyevski on the other hand has a first person narrator in Notes from Underground (1864) whose name we never know. Almost the entire events of the novella consist of what’s going on in his head.

First person narrators tend to create a strong relationship with the reader, and many authors exploit this attraction to make the narrator persuasive or acceptable. The important thing to keep in mind is that the narrator does not necessarily represent the author’s own personal opinions.

Sometimes the author may act as the first person narrator, or make little attempt to create a fictional constructed character. But readers should never assume that narrators are a direct reflection of the author’s own opinions.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic. The book was written by the author of these web page guidance notes.

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Third person narrators

This is the most traditional manner of delivering narratives, in which the author creates a distance between author, character, and reader.

John Belstaff was a gentleman farmer who had lived at Aylesbury Reach ever since inheriting the property from his father twenty years previously. He had worked the land to profitable advantage during that time, and was now looking forward to a peaceful retirement.

All the information we have about such a character is presented to us by the author, and there is no intervening narrator. This gives the author an opportunity to create multiple characters in a single narrative, and to show events from their different points of view. If the author chooses to reveal the innermost thoughts and feelings of any characters, this approach is known as omniscient narrative mode.

Jane Austen uses a third person narrative mode for her novel Pride and Pejudice (1813). But part its charm is the ironic and witty authorial observations she scatters through the narrative.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Omniscient narrators

The term omniscient means ‘all-knowing’ or ‘all-seing’. It comes from the language of religion, and in this sense the author is presenting a God-like view of events in which the characters’ innermost thoughts, feelings, and aspirations are revealed.

Authors are at liberty to tell us as much or as little about their characters as they wish, but once they have chosen an omniscient mode of narration they cannot claim ignorance about any aspect of their story. Having said that, many of them sometimes do – in order to create the impression of honesty or an ordinary human intelligence at work.

Unreliable narrators

Many modern writers have created what are called unreliable narrators. In this case a story is told in the first person mode by a narrator who has flawed perceptions, a limited understanding of events, or who maybe even tells lies. In such cases the reader is given the additional task of unravelling the ‘true’ story from information some parts of which are misleading.

A very famous case in point is Henry James’ ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898). In this a governess to two children in a large country house provides a dramatic account of how they have been demonically possessed by the spirits of former servants who are now dead. The story has become famous because it can be interpreted in a number of different ways. The governess does not provide any evidence to support the claims she makes, and she invents scenes which nobody else in the story observes. However, the reader only has her account from which to make any sense of what is actually happening. It is only by comparing small details of her account that we can see that she is an unreliable narrator.

In fact this story has both a first person outer narrator, and an inner narrator who reads a copy of the written account of events created by the governess herself – making it an extremely complex thread to unravel.

Another (very amusing) example is Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962) in which his first person narrator Charles Kinbote edits a long poem in four cantos composed by an American writer who was his campus neighbour. On the surface, the poem is composed of scenes from the poet’s life and his philosophic reflections on domestic relationships.

But in a series of extended footnotes Kinbote analyses the poem in detail for hidden meanings. He reveals that it contains a subtly coded account of Kinbote’s own life, and his dramatic escape from eastern Europe which he had privately related to the poet as part of their friendship. Since the poet is dead, we only have Kinbote’s own word for the truth in any of his claims. However, Nabokov provides the reader with enough information to work out that Kinbote is a madman, and all his interpretations and literary detective work is a pack of lies.

The framed narrative

Many stories begin with a first or third person narrator who establishes the circumstances by which the story is known, In other words, somebody (named or un-named) informs the reader how the details of the story have come into being. The scene is set, or some prefatory knowledge is imparted. This takes the form of an introduction.

Then the main substance of the story is related, which constitutes the bulk of the narrative. This may be presented by the opening narrator, or it might be information from a different source – a second narrator, or a story passed on via letters or a diary from someone else.

At the end of the narrative, there is usually a return to the first narrator, who might reflect on the substance of what has been revealed. This is the ‘conclusion’ or the closing part of the overall narrative.

Such a case is called a framed narrative. An outer narrator passes the storytelling over to an inner narrator who relates the bulk of events.

A famous and much-discussed example is Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1898). The story begins on board a ship moored in the Thames estuary, where a group of experienced seamen are reminiscing about their maritime experiences. An un-named outer narrator sets the scene, and then introduces Captain Marlow, who regales the company with the story of a journey he once made into the interior of Africa.

As readers we tend to forget all about the outer narrator, and even that the main events of the story are being spoken by Marlow. But at the end, when Marlow has finished his tale, the outer narrator comes back onto the page to ‘remind’ us that we are still on a ship in the Thames. The main narrative of a journey up an African river is ‘framed’ by the setting on the Thames, and the reader is implicitly being invited to draw parallels between the two.

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A Room with a View – film version

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novels, novellas, short stories, criticism

Alejo Carpentier – novels in English

Alejo Carpentier – stories in English

Alejo Carpentier – novels in Spanish

Alejo Carpentier web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Almayer’s Folly – critical commentary

Almayer’s Folly – study resources

Almayer’s Folly – plot summary

Biography

Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

An Outcast of the Islands – plot summary

Study resources

Principal characters

Biography

Setting

Further reading

Other works by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

understanding how stories are told

What is analysing narratives?

Narratives and media

The language of narratives

Narrative mode

First person narrators

Third person narrators

Omniscient narrators

Unreliable narrators

The framed narrative

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