The Landlady (1847)

This long story (or short novel) by Fyodor Dostoevsky is probably more fairly called a novella, in the notably vaporous task of separating stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels. Like The Double and even Poor Folk it already bears the mesmerizing quasi-hysterical voice of Dostoevsky which is so familiar now. Other elements of his writing we would come to know are here as well: grinding poverty, urban squalor, disease, fever, a central character so sensitive he verges on mental illness, along with various ways of being inept about relationships. In this case his beloved—his landlady only because her father or lover is the landlord—is first seen collapsing in church, where our guy has followed her. It’s more or less a case of love at first sight, because he is out on the street looking for a place to live when he first sees her. In the inchoate way the plot of The Landlady advances, she goes for him too, after he has taken a room at her place and then fallen into a stupor for weeks with disease. She nurses him and falls in love with him. It seems to be her way. But there is the complication of Murin, who is older than her and altogether a mysterious figure. Wikipedia suggests he may be a sorcerer. He’s at least a failed businessman, failed but capable of building an operation with barges and a factory. That’s the story about him anyway. I got a little lost in this one, taking the ride on the high points of Dostoevsky’s keening voice. His internal dialogues are impeccable, or maybe I share his sense of the outrage and frustration of the marginalized. I feel like I already know a lot of his characters, especially the protagonists who rant and go mad with rage. I enjoyed watching this one fall in love in the scene in the church. The ways of this landlady are strange and inscrutable. Murin might be her abusive father or her abusive lover or even possibly her abusive trafficker. It’s not clear, but her loyalty to him is very clear. Lots of strange notes through all the sturm and drang here. I can see why it’s considered minor, but it has its points, starting with what a pleasure as usual it is to dive in and read.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Narrative of William W. Brown (1847)

This is another of the shorter slave narratives, just over 50 pages with all the hoopla of prefaces, acknowledgments, and introductions. As always, the stamp of some white person or organization is necessary to see the thing into print and generally stand up for its veracity. As the publication dates of these narratives move deeper into the century the sponsoring white is more and more often formally Abolitionist. What a terrible portrait of 19th-century America these narratives give us. In fact, both William Brown, and Frederick Douglass in his narrative, express nothing but contempt for Christianity, at least in its American version. Brown is more willing to toss away the whole thing as evil, quoting Bible passages that are approving of slavery. The Christian hypocrisy is still one of the greatest shames of slavery, after the corruption into sadism. Brown's narrative often focuses on how families were separated and torn apart, sometimes deliberately to control behavior. He reports on how many owners with limited resources would invest in a young woman to breed them for additional property. It's often, though not always, the master providing the seed, of course. So we also come down to this horrific language of slavery: breeding, training, striping. "Striping" is a term I'd never heard before, for whipping and scarring, and now I also know it's in the Bible. One more reason I'm comfortable with the wholesale rejection of American Christianity by these later narratives. Obviously Brown and Douglass are aware of the Christian roots in the Abolitionist movement itself and temper their tones somewhat to accommodate that. But their feelings are unmistakable. William Brown's story is another one of escape—two attempts, actually, as the first one fails when he is incautious in the North. He suffers terribly for this attempt, as it leads to the final break-up of his family when his mother and sister are sold separately into the Deep South, a certain doom. This narrative is set in Missouri, a more recent slavery state than the rest of the South. Brown shows how the geographical position of Missouri enabled it to be a staging area for kidnapping African-Americans from the North into slavery. Brown had good experiences and bad with whites. He took the name of one who was kind to him in Ohio. Before that he was only William, and even that was taken from him by an owner whose nephew of that name came to live with the family who owned him. Of all his indignities and suffering, this is the one that most seems to rankle Brown. It's strange to us only because most of us have never had to face that treatment in such cut-and-dried fashion—the total obliteration of identity at will.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Agnes Grey (1847)

At this late date it's not much surprise that Anne Bronte's first novel is the least of the three she and her elder sisters published in 1847 (with Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights). It's not nearly as expansive nor as capable of achieving the heights they do. But it's still engaging and charming, the story of a governess of middle-class origins and her various adventures and sorties. The upper class is skewered as neatly and devastatingly as anything else I know, with detailed scenes of hypocrisy and deplorable behavior. Governess indeed is a particularly inspired vantage—part servant, part master, it's a position that only worked in the presence of good will all around (children excepted for the obvious reasons). It offers many interesting insights into 19th-century education, not yet taken as a state responsibility, simply by the clarity of her narrative. A year with one family and two with another supply the bulk of the action—I appreciated the panorama. Also, as I say, the unflinching reportage of the upper class, shockingly barbaric at times. One boy is mad at work continually torturing and killing small animals, which, it comes out, is the influence of a sadistic uncle who beats all his animals and loves to hunt. No one bats an eye—well, except our governess heroine, the Agnes Grey of the title—and the parents are willfully blind to much of what's going on. Thus the landed gentry. At the same time that's just one thread. There are some very nice character studies here and as usual much hope is invested in the existence of the good and noble, etc. It has a bit of a fairy tale arc, but it's also a short book. Her more ambitious The Tenant of Wildfell Hall would follow the next year and then her own death at the age of 29, the youngest of them in every way. All the Bronte sister writers died so young (Emily at 30, Charlotte at 38) it's almost sad to contemplate how good the work is that they managed to get done. There are better examples of social realism (going on naturalism) and sitting-room manners and fairy tales, but they are blended in Agnes Grey so skillfully and often so penetratingly that even with all its flaws I think it's eminently worth a look.

In case it's not at the library.

Wuthering Heights (1847)

I suppose I can't recommend entirely without reservation this stone classic of British literature—last time I went through turned out to be a bit of a slog. But I certainly think it's worth at least a dip for one and all. Emily Bronte's monumental first and only novel (she otherwise focused her literary energies on poetry and died at the age of 30, the year after this was published), Wuthering Heights came out the same year as her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre and her sister Anne's Agnes Grey. I don't know Agnes Grey, but of the other two, more famous works, I think Jane Eyre is both more effective as a novel and more conventional (and it's not that conventional). Wuthering Heights is the next-best thing to full-on raving ghost/monster story, wild and howling and weird, gothic on steroids, buckled together with leather strapping and paste. Class distinctions are rendered metaphorically as stark lines between humans and beasts, and the great Byronic hero of Wuthering Heights, the remarkable Heathcliff, is of course on the wrong side of that line. Heathcliff notably has powers to compel and bend his betters to his desires, after coming to live with them originally as an orphan found on the streets of London, adopted out of the soft heart of the family patriarch. The combination of Heathcliff's ruthlessness in pursuing his ends and the family's sheltered, well-mannered naivete is the recipe for the disaster imminent from the first page. The forbidden passion between Heathcliff and the scion's daughter Catherine provides much of the dramatic tension, as Heathcliff and his will to power rise to great heights, while the rest are humiliated and torn to pieces and put into the earth one way or another, against the backdrop of gray skies and lonely barren moors. "Atmospheric" does not begin to describe it; "deranged" is closer to it in many passages. It can be a wild ride. In many ways it walks and talks and bears the trappings of the standard 19th-century novel of manners, with gentle folk gathering for fine meals and social occasions, and love interests emerging by degree. But the like of Heathcliff had never appeared in one of these before. His sheer gravitational force subverts and distorts everything around him, making a real mockery of the genteel upper class and their ways and values. It was the first time I read Wuthering Heights that I got the most out of it, taken utterly by surprise by the stunts recorded herein. I'm not sure what made the more recent reading so hard—perhaps the language, which of course is antiquated and made further eccentric with thick dialect (toned down somewhat after Emily's death by sister Charlotte in a later edition ... I can only imagine the original)—perhaps the sideways manner it crabs in and around its narrative developments. But the good news, if you haven't read it, is that you could well be in for a big treat.

In case it's not at the library.

Jane Eyre (1847)

I never got around to Charlotte Bronte's magnificent mid-19th-century novel until recently, but I'm here to tell you now that it's definitely worth getting around to. As with Jane Austen's work—and unlike, for me, Charles Dickens's—the language is pellucid and shimmering, the plot carries its own headlong momentum, and reading the thing is as easy as falling into a warm pool. Recounting the life and various hardships and triumphs of the titular character, it's a big sweeping melodrama of orphans and cruel foster parents, of privation and grit, of haunted houses and secret debts long owed, of marriage proposals made in bad faith and good, of arson and suicide and unspeakable kindness when least expected, of misperceptions and misapprehensions of character, of love found and lost and denied and found again. Some of its tricks are terribly obvious—the class conflicts, for example, or the various coincidences on which the story relies, or the symbolism of the tree where Jane and Rochester rendezvous at some of the most critical points of their relationship—but the entirety of it is carried off with such poise and confidence that it's impossible not to believe every word, and more, want to stand and cheer at them. I understand from the introduction to my ancient Rinehart edition (by one Joe Lee Davis in 1950) that, in 1846, Charlotte and her two sisters, Emily and Anne, set themselves to the task of each completing a novel. They had previously published poetry under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton, respectively; at that time Charlotte, the eldest, was barely 30. In a year's time Emily produced Wuthering Heights (which I loved the first time through, and liked much less a second time), Anne Agnes Gray (which I haven't read yet but intend to), and Charlotte Jane Eyre, taking a bit longer. That's a stupefying feat of production for a single household in such a short period of time. Emily died a year later, and though Charlotte and Anne would go on to produce other work both of them died young as well, Anne at 29 and Charlotte at 38. While we're at it, Jane Austen died pretty young too, at 41. Hard times back then, as the first-person Jane Eyre will detail for you at length in Charlotte Bronte's brilliant and essential novel.

In case it's not at the library.