Recent reading

[luzula]

In for a Penny by Rose Lerner (2010)
Regency romance, which has been in my bookcase a while. This was very page-turney and readable: it's about the heir of an earl who, when his father dies and leaves him deep in debt, has to marry the rich daughter of a tradesman. So basically the plot of Heyer's A Civil Contract, but with a lot more sex: the reason Penny accepts Nev is that she's sexually attracted to him, even if she doesn't quite realize that at the time. The UST and eventual sex are well written, but there are still issues and self-doubt in the relationship, which I mostly enjoyed, although at some points it went too far--I'm pretty sure he doesn't just love you like a sister, when he's had passionate sex with you multiple times! There's also other plot with a villainous baronet, a mismanaged estate, and mutinous tenants--and I liked how Nev's previous mistress is also a character in the story. The main characters are uncomfortable with the class system in a way that I partly read as the author's discomfort. I see that this is her first book and she's gone on to write historical romances with lower-class protagonists, which I'll be interested to read.

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1720)
This was great! It's an engaging yarn about a woman having to make her own way in the world--my god, how she juggles husbands. Besides that, she is also at various points a kept mistress, a thief, and an inmate of Newgate. I enjoyed how much this book is of the early 18th century: Moll is definitely not Clarissa Harlowe, or the story would have ended when she was seduced in her teens. Moll clearly enjoys sex, at least when it's a man of her choosing. There's a scene in Newgate when she repents of her sins, with an amusing aside to the reader: I know you're mostly in this for Moll's adventures, but hey, you have to listen to the repentance too! But she does get a happy ending and isn't punished for her sins. I did wonder about her children: there are passages like "and then I lived with that husband for four years and had two children by him, before [insert more-or-less improbable demise of that husband]", but the children mostly don't appear again. It's not like she doesn't care at all about their welfare: there's one child she has to abandon and pays for extra-good care for. But they're just not characters in the book. The most significant other female character is another woman who helps deliver that child, and later on is Moll's partner in crime and never betrays her.

I listened to an audio version read by Georgina Sutton, which I much recommend! I see that she has also recorded Margaret Oliphant's Hester--I bet she does a great job with that, too. I get these from Naxos Audiobooks, a collection of classics to which I have access via my public library.

Comments

[selenak]

Moll Flanders is great fun, and yeah, Defoe very much is an early Georgian in his attitudes. I haven't read his other wild lady, Roxane, but I osmosed she also has a happy ending. (BTW, there's a BBC tv adaptation starring Alex "River Song" Kingston as Moll, which was the first thing I've seen her in, long before her appearance in Doctor Who, and which I thought was inspired casting.

Having just listened to an audio adaptation of Simplicius Simplicissimus, which was THE baroque novel by Grimmelshausen, I think it's also evident Defoe must have been familiar with it (and its spin-off; Grimmelshausen wrote a whole separate novel about one of the bad girls showing up in Simplicissimus, Bekenntnis der Landstörzerin Courage, and yes, that's where Brecht took the name of the (anti)heroine of his play Mother Courage from, though not the plot. The difference between these 17th century novels and the one from the later 18th century (let alone the 19th) isn't just attitude but genre: I'd classify Simplicius Simplizissimus and Moll Flanders as what we call Schelmenroman in German, whereas Clarissa Harlowe et al are Empfindsamkeitsromane. Not sure there are true English equivalents for those terms - Trickster novel for the first one? Anyway, as far as I recall from Uni, going theory is that the whole trickster novel genre is very much connected to the Thirty Years War, the juxtaposition of horrendous death - throughout all the classes and the breakdown of social rules and conventions where after thirty years reducing the population to one third, there are no good guys visible on any side. (Granted, GB did stay out of the 30 Years War, but it had a very long Civil War of its own and later post Restoration the Plague and the Great Fire, so...) Now Moll and Simplicius have their religious repentance phases as well, but even in their virtuous phases, they don't embody middle class morals in juxtaposition to the decadent aristocracy the way Clarissa and friends would in the late 18th century just a minute before the Revolution.

[luzula]

Thanks, that's interesting with the comparison to German works! There may not be an English equivalent of Schelmen, but there certainly is a Swedish one: skälm. It's an old fashioned word which immediately gives me a (hopefully accurate) sense of what you mean. Can't parse the other word in terms of Swedish, though. And that's quite interesting about the historical context of the genre. I might read Roxane at some point, too.