Goddesses in the Pages

Lately, I've had a pretty good run with finding entertaining books at the library. I seem to have a theme going--I've read three books in a row about women in difficult circumstances finding their way in the world. At least, two of them were on that theme, and I suppose you could count the last one, too. Although it was what I think is called a Regency romance and considerably more light-hearted than the other two, its heroine did bump up against a very rigid social structure; the humor in the story came from the way in which she consistently ignored attempts to bring her to account.

I found Maeve Binchy's A Week in Winter on a St. Patrick's Day display shelf celebrating Irish writers. I liked the only other book of hers that I've read, Nights of Rain and Stars, a story about a group of people vacationing in Greece, and the premise of A Week in Winter--a woman setting up a hotel on the west coast of Ireland--sounded promising. No War and Peace grand strokes, just a domestic drama about relationships, starting over, and figuring out how to make things work. The characters included several capable women whose disarming ability to overcome obstacles provided much of the impetus of the story. My only quarrel with the book was its structure, for having gotten to know the main characters, I was thrown off by the introduction of a whole new set of people, the first week's guests at the hotel, whose stories made up the last part of the novel. Do hotels like this really exist in the west of Ireland? If so, I'd love to go to one.

The second book I read was Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I believe I saw the first part of a PBS series based on this book some years ago, and I somehow had the impression that it was a more staid tale than either Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, but I didn't really have that right. It's the story of a woman escaping an abusive husband in a time and place that didn't make it easy for a woman to assert her rights. While it includes some harrowing episodes and many instances of the restrictions placed on women (and men) by Victorian society, it's surprisingly fresh and contemporary in its treatment of characters and relationships. Overall, it's a little less dark than either of the more famous works by Miss Bronte's sisters, having a more optimistic and even (at times) humorous outlook despite the seriousness of its theme. This novel should be better known than it is, I think.

Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy is much like the other two books I've read by this author: light, frothy, and entertaining, with an engaging heroine who does pretty much as she pleases just about all the time. Reading it so soon after the Bronte book was a study in contrasts as I thought about the nearly insurmountable difficulties faced by Helen Huntingdon in the latter compared with the ease with which Sophy Stanton-Lacy sails through life, driving her phaeton at a blistering clip through Hyde Park and rearranging the lives of everyone she comes in contact with. Well, they say it takes all kinds, and I believe it.

Heyer's book did have some ground to it: there's an affecting account of the illness of one Sophy's young cousins that brings the story down to earth a bit and an episode in which another cousin nearly comes to grief at the hands of a moneylender. I was surprised at the anti-Semitism expressed in the book. It may have been historically accurate, but it was jarring to see it so unabashedly displayed and was at rather at odds with the light-hearted tone of the story. And while there were some delightfully comical passages in the early part of the book (and some very droll characters), I will admit to liking Sophy better before she grazed her friend Lord Charlbury with a bullet, however good her intentions may have been. Also, the effect of a headstrong heroine is somewhat spoiled when she ends up being bossed around by her fiance. All of that strategizing and larking about, merely to end up a submissive wife? It was much more fun to watch her boss him around.

If I had to name presiding goddesses for each of these books, I would mention Hestia and Demeter for A Week in Winter (lots of descriptions of food and domestic comforts), Demeter and Persephone in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Helen embodies both of them), and Aphrodite (in a particularly mischievous bent) in The Grand Sophy. I'd gladly read more books by any of these authors and only wish Miss Bronte had been more prolific.