What I Learned When I Reread My Sixteen Year Old Self’s Short Story

So recently I reread a short story I wrote for English class when I was sixteen. At the time, I was crushed that it didn’t receive that all-validating A grade. Firstly, I want to apologise for my poor English teacher for every second she spent reading it. She can never get those minutes back. Hopefully she read it out loud in the staff room and got some laughs in return for her troubles. For my younger self, here are some pointers on how not to write shitty stories.

1. Let’s start with the opening quotation.
WHAT SIXTEEN YEAR OLD NEEDS TO START A STORY WITH AN OPENING QUOTATION.
Better yet, what sixteen year old needs to start a story with an opening quotation FROM AN ABBA SONG.

This was a serious story, by the way. Let us never forget that. So this was an honest to heaven, serious quotation of the ABBA song ‘Like an Angel Passing Through My Room.’

I thought I was so deep.

2. The opening sentence begins ‘It was a wild tempestuous storm that broke the peaceful night that had wound itself around the countryside.’ Not only do wild and tempestuous mean exactly the same thing, but the whole sentence is so painfully overwritten that I immediately wanted to stop reading and get black out drunk, and I can’t help but feel my English teacher had the exact same reaction.

3. You’re a sixteen year old nice girl who doesn’t smoke, drink or curse. You are not edgy in the slightest. Embrace that, instead of writing stories about aging glam rockers TURNED DETECTIVES who take drugs and live in Gothic mansions.

4. I used to think that using the word ‘said’ was for wusses who didn’t have thesauruses. Thesauruses are great, but you should only use words in them that are already in your vocabulary. I had a pretty big vocabulary at 16, which I annoyingly trotted out every other sentence, but I sure as hell did not use elucidate on a day to day basis. Example: “We’re looking for someone who can talk to us about Felicity Phillips,” he elucidated shortly. “I’m a Private Investigator.” NOOOOOOOO JUST STOP.

5. On the subject of choosing your words wisely, every single verb is followed promptly by an adjective in this story. No verb is allowed to die quickly and quietly, but rather is given a good old polish from my BFF adjectives. It gets very tiresome. Sample dialogue:

“Hey Louise,” he said casually, as he left.
“Hey,” she replaced the receiver and looked at him perplexedly. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“Home,” he smiled innocently, “Want a lift?”

Imagine this process continuing on endlessly over nine pages and you have some idea of the horror that was Blind Witness.

6. Hey! You’re not like other people! You read weird books instead of Twilight! Guess what? YOU DO NOT NEED TO RUB YOUR LITERARY REFERENCES IN EVERYONE ELSE’S FACE. Do you know what I liked to read when I was sixteen? Read this story, and trust me. You’ll know.
Example:  ‘Titus Androidicus 01 had all the airs of a country squire hosting an event in one of those good old English murder mysteries’

There are three other references to Agatha Christie over the course of the story, in case you weren’t sure which murder mysteries in particular I had been perusing.

7. Moving back to the plot, you may have noticed in the previous quote that a robot has now got involved. Mini me, please, for the love of Shakespeare and all the muses, never again decide to base a short story ‘on a dream’. Because this is the plot. I’m not making anything up:

Aging Glam Rocker turned Detective SEBASTIAN SPARKLE runs a failing business with his adopted daughter Louise. Louise is pregnant [‘One of her hands stole unconsciously to her womb.’] and wants to become an architect instead of a rubbish secretary. Or, as I put it, ‘She had gone to spin buildings out of dreams’. Sebastian, rather than letting her do this, because he has the hots for, let us not forget, his adopted daughter, KIDNAPS Louise in order to investigate the disappearance of a nurse who pumped his stomach back in the day. Well, you’re in for a treat, because wouldn’t you know the nurse was kidnapped by INCOMPLETE ROBOTS who were made by a LOBSTER. However, they have lost their creator, WHO IS A LOBSTER, and now, aided by THEIR ARMY OF SLUGS [‘It was a disciplined Romanesque rectangle of slugs’] are planning to sacrifice the nurse, in order to live. In the most protracted and pious dialogue about human life ever written, Sebastian eventually manages to convince the robots they’re better off as robots and the robots just let them go. Then, Sebastian tries to tell his adopted daughter of his disgusting old man lusts and she misunderstands, because he is her father  and is like ‘yeah I love you too Dad’ and leaves and then we’re all supposed to feel sorry for him and then the story ends, a good seven pages past its welcome. 

Notes on the plot: Do not write this plot ever again. Especially not as a serious contender for the Nobel Peace Prize for really thoughtful angsty prose with adjectives.

8. Ok, so you have your terrible story, and you have your favourite characters. Maybe your favourite character is Louise. It’s not at all obvious, because you describe in creepy and over the top detail every single action she does. Now, to be fair to me, this is partially due to Sebastian being the main character, but I feel this was just an excuse for me to wax lyrical about my BFF Louise and all the awesome things she does. Like putting on a seatbelt.

No. Seriously.

‘He watched her put on her seatbelt. She did it so swiftly, yet with a deft precision, like an artist.’

In case you were wondering, she also shrugs her shoulders like a champ.

‘She shrugged, and opened the now unpleasantly warm can of coke. She had those ideal shoulders for shrugging nonchalantly.’

And when the light catches her hair, SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ANGEL BECAUSE HER HAIR IS SO AWESOME.

9. Don’t digress from the plot. I know its hard, because this plot is poo, but try and stick to it. Don’t just stick in paragraphs about your favourite films because you have a chance to force your teacher to read your opinions on EVERYTHING.

For example, I don’t know if you know this, but I had a little bit of beef with The Wizard of Oz when I was in school.

“You also knew love…” Louise started uncertainly, lamely, inserting the cliché to try and bring a Wizard of Oz happiness to the events. Sebastian had always hated the end of it. The Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion were ultimately sold short, just as the wizard had attempted to sell them short when they killed the witch. They did not gain intelligence, bravery or a heart. They had what they had always had, and were brainwashed into acceptance.

Wow, are there any openings at Oxford for an English Literature professor, because I’m breaking the internet with these revelations.

10. Proofread. Generally this story avoids spelling errors, but I still found time to write the immortal line ‘There was a low purring of clogs deep inside the metallic torso.’ 

And to think, when I started doing a Creative Writing degree, I was outraged because I was told to use said, not to use adjectives, to keep to the point, and not to use two words if one will do. I mean, hadn’t they read Blind Witness?? If anything, I should be teaching Creative Writing, because I’m awesome at it!!

Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to read my seventeen year old self’s bid for an A, which involved two lesbian actresses in 1930s Hollywood and murder, but for now I’m going to cry myself to sleep.

And leave you with this gem, of course: ‘…Third door on your right,” he added to a man who had been impaled by a furious otter.’

Glad or Mad? ‘Unmastered’ by Katherine Angel

Over the next few months, I will be the marketing intern at Gladstone’s Library. Whilst living and working in a library, it would be a crime not to read, and so I am going to be reviewing and reading all the books I can get my hands on, and highlighting which made me Glad(stone), and which made me Mad(stone). I assume at some point I’ll have to add a category of ‘Indifferent(stone)’.

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Book the Eighth: Unmastered by Katherine Angel

(From the Library’s collection)

A non-fiction book on female desire is not exactly my cup of tea. It’s not the kind of the book that I would rush to go out and read.

However, Katherine Angel came to stay at the Library at the beginning of my internship, and she was so lovely and interesting (patiently putting up with my book rants and my need to discuss in depth philosophically Orange is the New Black) that I was all like, ‘oh I must read her book!’

And then I was presented with a 300+ non fiction book on female desire.

Very well then, I say, stiff upper lip trembling, I shall READ THIS BOOK.

Angel’s Unmastered is a book, that like its topic, seems very intimidating and hard to access, but, once you begin it, realise that it is remarkably easy, accessible and open. This is achieved by Angel’s use of no more than a few paragraphs per page, with many pages featuring but one paragraph and sentence. Between the sections there are open blank pages, which conspire to make a book that, though it is tackling issues from female sexuality to dominance, feminism, pornography and abortion, is deceptively simple to read.

The first few pages you are acutely aware that you are reading something which in any other circumstance would be extremely private, but soon it becomes the most natural thing in the world, which no doubt was Angel’s intention.

In an interview, Angel said ‘What I didn’t want to do was lecture…’and reading through the book you see just how many different voices there are, whether the voices of feminists, pornography experts, pro-life or pro-choice, that can seek to lecture women. That often we attempt to clear cut an issue, where humans are messy and intertwined. Once I remember, when I was discussing feminism with my mum, that she simply said in a weary voice ‘what I think is that people should stop telling women what to do’, and that theme runs throughout Angel’s book like a river. To theoretical vitriol, she often provides a shrugging answer of ‘but this is what I am, or feel’.

That is not to say that there are not sentences which are complicated, theoretical, and hard for me to follow. But there are not many. As I type this, I am aware that people could easily crush this book, and me for enjoying it; it has been labelled pretentious, navel-gazing; there are a couple of voices childishly complaining that it did not leave them in the slightest bit aroused (I’m not sure that’s the point of the book).

But dammit, it’s my blog, and if on my own blog I can’t say that I enjoyed a nonfiction book on female desire, when can I say it?

 

Glad or Mad? Glad.

 

Gladpebbles: Mini-Reviews of Katrina Naomi, Nick Dear’s Adaption of Persuasion, and Anthony Burgess

Sorry the blog’s been a bit sparse of late. It started because I didn’t feel I had enough to say on the books I was reading, and then the moment had passed and then you all were married with children and I was drinking alone in my telemarketing job wondering what had happened to my life.

And also I graduated*.

There are REAL (500 WORDS!) reviews of KATHERINE ANGEL’S UNMASTERED, and BRIAN AZZARELLO’S SECOND VOLUME OF WONDER WOMAN (CAAAAAAPPPPPSSS!!!) coming up, but until then, let’s catch up with where I was.

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Book the Fifth: Persuasion by Jane Austen, adapted by Nick Dear

(From the blogger’s collection)

I read Persuasion a couple of years ago, and I remembered it being short on lols and consequently I was all like ‘Jaaaaaannnnneee??? FOR WHY?’ and then I gave it back to the library and forgot about it. But I was at Jane Austen’s house recently, just you, know, stalking, and they were selling Nick Dear’s screenplay for £2 and as a wannabe playwright/Austen fan, I couldn’t pass it up. Also I’d had an argument with a friend recently about whether or not Anne dies in the end, and I wanted to know what the answer was.

*Spoilers* I was right.

Nick Dear’s screenplay clocks in at about 90 minutes, which is quite short for an Austen adaptation, so consequently what would have been subtle hints in the novel become:

THERE’S SOMETHING UP WITH ANNE AND THAT HOT DUDE WHO’S BACK

THEY’RE LOOKING AT EACH OTHER

CAN YOU GUESS WHAT WAS BETWEEN THEM YET?

NOW HE’S WALKING HER HOME

THE ANSWER WAS THEY FANCIED THE PANTS OFF EACH OTHER

But most of the screenplay is handled quite well, there are some lovely visual cues in the script, and the characterisation was pretty strong.

I still find it hard to care for Anne Elliot, but I think that’s Austen’s fault really, so Nick, you’re off the hook.

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Book the sixth: The Girl with the Cactus Handshake by Katrina Naomi

(From the Library’s collection)

Ok, the problem with The Girl with the Cactus Handshake is not anything to do with Katrina’s poetry, which is open, interesting, fun and memorable (even after all this time I still remember the poem about the Tunnel of Love vividly), but that reading it revealed to me that there is a gaping black hole where my soul should be.

I don’t like reading poetry.

I love writing poetry.

But I don’t like reading it.

I find it hard to get into, which, again, isn’t Katrina’s fault, because there is nothing pretentious or hard to grasp about this volume. It is incredibly accessible.

Which makes my inability to sit quietly and read a book of poetry without feeling tired and slightly cranky even worse.

I shouldn’t even be reviewing it. You shouldn’t even be reading my review. Me trying to read poetry and review it is a bit like asking me to read a newspaper cover to cover and review it.

If you like poetry, read Katrina’s volume. If not, join me in jumping to the next book –

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Book the seventh: Inside Mr. Enderby by Anthony Burgess

(From the blogger’s brother’s collection)

Anthony, Anthony, Anthony.

I had such high hopes for this.

I love A Clockwork Orange.

I love you, you idiot.

But I don’t love this.

I was going to read the collected novels revolving around Burgess’ flatulent alter-ego, but after the first one I realised that I had had what Judy Brown called ‘too much Burgess’ and I had to go and stare at a wall until I felt human again.

Bits of this are funny. Really, really funny and interesting. There’s a whole brilliant act when Enderby is on a hellish honeymoon. And then the novel keeps going. At only 186 pages, it managed to completely outstay its welcome.

The one thing The Complete Enderby wouldn’t do was End. Ha. Ha. NOW GO TO BED.

Burgess… for why?

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*Excuses, excuses, excuses.

Glad or Mad? ‘Loudness’ by Judy Brown

Over the next few months, I will be the marketing intern at Gladstone’s Library. Whilst living and working in a library, it would be a crime not to read, and so I am going to be reviewing and reading all the books I can get my hands on, and highlighting which made me Glad(stone), and which made me Mad(stone). I assume at some point I’ll have to add a category of ‘Indifferent(stone)’.

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Book the fourth: Loudness by Judy Brown

(from the library collection)

One of the things about my internship that I really love is the opportunity to read a book and then discuss it with the author over dinner. I’ll never get the option to quiz Gerard Manly Hopkins about ‘The Windhover’ but here I had the opportunity to pickle the brains of Judy Brown, our current writer in residence, as I read the book, and so I had to take it.

And good thing I did, because I misread ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ (which is eerie at the best of times), and absolutely terrified myself – luckily at lunchtime Judy was able to tell me that I was being an idiot and that televisions can not kill people. The poem was still haunting, but at least I could watch tv without fearing for my life.

Loudness is Judy’s first collection of poetry and is really, really good. I’m really bad at reading poetry generally, let alone poetry that doesn’t rhyme, but I was still enchanted by the collection.

Something that was always drilled into me in Creative Writing class was the use of ‘significant detail’, of finding new ways to describe things that would make us see the world afresh. Here in Judy’s poems I was provided with instance after instance of significant details, which rather than being the rather try-hard, dry examples I was used to seeing in university, were alive, well-observed and really made me think ‘aw, crikey! That is how that looks’.

Cursive orange peels, children that turn like seals; her poems are full of such beautiful and arresting images.

After careful consideration, I would have to declare ‘The Ex-Angel’ to be my favourite poem. Defiant, almost punky, but coached, as ever, in the most elegant of language, it is filled with ideas and images that are humorous, but also slightly sad.

A book of poetry that doesn’t rhyme. It’s a hard sell for an uncultured slob like myself, but I’m very glad that I got to read it.

Glad or Mad: Glad.

Glad or Mad? Northanger Abbey

Over the next few months, I will be the marketing intern at Gladstone’s Library. Whilst living and working in a library, it would be a crime not to read, and so I am going to be reviewing and reading all the books I can get my hands on, and highlighting which made me Glad(stone), and which made me Mad(stone). I assume at some point I’ll have to add a category of ‘Indifferent(stone)’.

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Book the third: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

(from the blogger’s own collection)

I love Northanger Abbey, love it, love it, love it. When I picked it up a couple of months ago to fact check something which happens in the first chapter, I had to physically restrain myself from reading the whole book.

I think the reason why Northanger Abbey is second only to Pride and Prejudice in my books is because its the most overtly comic of Austen’s work, and also its preoccupation with a genre I am equally obsessed with (Gothic lit, y’all). Catherine is also a very lovely character, her vulnerability combines with a strange robustness that means I get very emotionally involved in her decisions – my heart was in my throat when, despite immense peer pressure, she sticks to her guns and declines a daytrip to the countryside. Seriously. My heart was beating fast and everything.There is something joyful about watching Catherine engage with the Gothic, and her love of it purely because it is so ‘horrid’. She is an 18th century horror fan.

The perfect pair

Other highlights of the novel are Catherine comfort eating after a particularly bad ball (beginning of chapter nine), and Isabella’s hilarious pursuit of two young men (end of chapter six) and I mean like, actual stalking. All of this endears it to me immensely.

So, glad or mad? Glad, glad, glad!

But what’s really interesting is comparing Northanger Abbey to Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (you can read the review here).

Both books are looking at sensationalist genres that captured the imagination of their female audiences and were reviled by the literary establishment. In David Blair’s fabulous introduction to the Wordsworth edition of Northanger Abbey he points out that the gothic genre is seen as female, whereas historical and political books are seen as a masculine area. Tilney is so dominant because he is well read in both history and gothic, which gives him mastery over both genres and also over the masculine and feminine worlds.

Catherine’s amazing speech to Tilney in chapter fourteen brilliantly points out why she has so little interest in history – rather than it being because of a lack of intelligence (though she is a little dim), it is because she instinctively realises that women are marginalised by the historical accounts of the time and so she can not connect to it.

Northanger Abbey is a novel about languages, the language of the Gothic, which allows Catherine a register in which to address the fears and suspicions she would otherwise be unable to utter. For example, her wild accusation that General Tilney is a wife killer is a reaction to his bullying, horrible nature – unable to find an example of his behaviour in her own kindly, compassionate home life, she finds the language in which to describe him in her novels. The Gothic helps her overcome the inarticulate nature which makes her so attractive to Tilney.

Arabella’s transgression in confusing Romance with reality in The Female Quixote then takes on another twist. Not only is she immersing herself in the female (read: silly) world of romances, but she has given them the place of ‘histories’, thus dethroning the male literary world with a feminine one. (Dum Dum Dummm).

Both heroines are set off in a world of manners and courting that they are little equipped for by their education, and both heroines find a code of conduct not in the people they mix with (who are by and large idiots) but in the register of books. However, these largely feminine texts are not the appropriate way of doing things in their male dominated society, and at the end of the novels the women must repair and submit to male authorities, and allow themselves to be guided by them.

However, both books turn this slightly on its head – whilst Arabella accepts Glanville as her superior, we the reader have been furnished with plenty of examples of Glanville looking extremely silly. Similarly, readers of Northanger Abbey can’t help but censure Tilney for his inaction that allows Catherine’s brother to be misused by Isabella. And Catherine realises, healthily, that Tilney is flawed, but loves him anyway, which levels the playing field, as both men are painfully aware of all their partners’ faults.

Whereas Glanville is never truly master of Arabella’s world as he is unversed in romance novels, Tilney is very much the master of Catherine’s. Whereas Catherine bows to Tilney on every occasion, Arabella must encounter an agent of God (a clergyman) before she accepts her beloved romances are futile and evil and she fully accepts Glanville as her master. In a meta twist, the mastery of this part of the text is debated – some scholars believe that Samuel Johnson, rather than Lennox, wrote the crucial debate in The Female Quixote that cures Arabella of her infatuation with Romances.

I love this book almost too much.

Both books appear to be criticising fiction for distracting us from reality, but Austen is actually painting a far more affectionate portrait of fiction as way of helping us understand reality. Catherine, like so many of her contemporaries, sees in the bewildered heroines of Gothic novels her own powerlessness in the English legal system, and her lack of voice in the married home. Whereas Arabella must swap her feminine world for the masculine one, Catherine’s story is one of expansion; she continues to learn throughout the text, and her world will grow after the final page. She is more Tilney’s equal than he realises, and she has a better measure of him than I think he would like.

Glad or Mad? Zoe Pilger’s ‘Eat My Heart Out’

Book the Second: Eat My Heart Out by Zoe Pilger

(from the library collection)

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Eat My Heart Out tells the story of young Cambridge drop out Ann-Marie, who wanders around London harassing men until she winds up under the wings of slightly (or completely) crazed 70’s feminist Stephanie Haight. Ann-Marie, the voice of general indifference and post-post feminism, is put on a Hyper Femininity course, so that she can… I dunno.

OK, first things first, despite the book’s preoccupation with feminism, I think I should note that this book wasn’t really written for me – I find it impossible hard to emphasise with characters like Ann-Marie, who has not only had the opportunity of Cambridge, but who has essentially thrown it away, so that she can work as front of house in an exclusive restaurant and moan about her ex-boyfriend. The problem is that she doesn’t actually have to work; the book establishes that she lives rent-free with her excessively rich and loathsome friend Freddie, so, to quote The Devil Wears Prada, she only deigns to work front of house. She wants for neither money, brains, or relationships, as she is depicted to have more than adequate access to all three.

 

My basic reaction to everything Ann-Marie does

 

I know that Pilger is aiming to satirise the pointlessness, privilege, bullshit and general apathy of people like Ann-Marie, whilst also calling out the old guard of Feminism on some of their faults, and I really wanted to like it for all of these reasons, but it just made me want to vomit.

I think, perhaps, this might be because there was genuinely nothing at stake. No one dies, no one loses anything of significant value, no one learns, no one is punished. Ann-Marie isn’t forced to live under Stephanie’s bizarre regime, and does, in fact, run away (quite easily). The book marches along determinedly, but without any real sense of where it wants to be marching to. It wants us to know certain things; that the passive image of femininity is far more pervasive than we realise, that the youth are disenfranchised, that liberal arts is generally bullshit, and that THE LITTLE MERMAID IS SERIOUSLY DARK, YO (this one is particularly hammered home) but once it has established all of this, it is contented to wander off to inspect yet another particularly rank pile of waste, and to leave you in the middle of the woods wondering why you followed it in the first place.

Towards the end a homeless lady tells Ann-Marie that

‘You look young. You look like you could do anything. So why are you complaining?’ (pg. 292)

which, unfortunately, sums up not only the characters, but also the book, rather well.

I’m always glad to see a discussion of feminism, but this book, sadly, wasn’t really for me… and it made me mad.

Glad or Mad? Charlotte Lennox’s ‘The Female Quixote’ Review

Over the next few months, I will be the marketing intern at Gladstone’s Library. Whilst living and working in a library, it would be a crime not to read, and so I am going to be reviewing and reading all the books I can get my hands on, and highlighting which made me Glad(stone), and which made me Mad(stone). I assume at some point I’ll have to add a category of ‘Indifferent(stone)’.

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Book the First: The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox

(from the blogger’s own collection)

 

The Female Quixote is one of those books you buy for cheap because you misread the blurb and then you read it three years later and it turns out to be quite enjoyable. First published in 1752, Lennox’s novel is heavily influenced (obviously) by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and follows the young Arabella, who has lived in solitude her whole life with naught but a great deal of 17^th century French Romances for company, and convinced that she must also be a Heroine, lives her own life according to the strenuous and hysterical rules of the novels she reads.

The book, with its mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary, bears many similarities to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (which I thoroughly enjoyed and hope to re-read soon) and I read somewhere that Austen read Lennox’s novel – I assume she enjoyed it!

Many of the subtleties of Lennox’s novel were lost on me, sadly, because of the age of the book. It took me half the book to realise that Arabella spoke in a very antiquated way, and contemporary audiences would have enjoyed the juxtaposition of her overly formalised speeches with the more modern dialogue of her cousin and longsuffering lover, Mr. Glanville.

Lennox also references the Romances of Scudéry, Roger Boyle, and Gauthier de Costes de La Calprenède constantly, but because she does so rather thoroughly, by half way through you are perfectly acquainted with the sources and can follow Arabella’s conversations without having to constantly flip to the notes in the back of the book.

However, a great deal of the novel’s humour is rather in your face and farcical, so that even 21^st century audiences unfamiliar with these Romances can enjoy Arabella’s outrageous behaviour and the convoluted plans she hatches. In fact, the beginning, especially, reminded me of the manic energy of a Carry On film, and I hope any big screen adaptation will be underscored entirely by the Benny Hill theme.

Of course, this being an 18^th century novel, the no holds barred, thrilling finale takes place in the form of a debate about novels between Arabella and a clergyman as she lies on her sick bed (so exciting!). This debate was a little hard to follow, accustomed as I was by that stage to the book’s language, and lacked a little bit of a ‘wham!’, which I would have liked. But, as a writer, I enjoyed its dissection of fiction, though I did think it rather paradoxical that Lennox should chose to slam fiction as a grave source of evil (except for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa) in a novel! However, her examination of the human brain, and the lengths it will go to fit anything into its chosen paradigm, was very well handled.

Although I wouldn’t call the book feminist (women are largely depicted as silly and vain, and of the two sensible ladies, one is Arabella, who is only sensible half the time) but it does draw attention to the impossible constraints society placed on women in Romances, unable to listen to declaration of love, but expected to marry:

‘… But pray, what would you have a Lady do, whom an importunate Lover presumes to declare his passion to? You know it is not permitted us to listen to such Discourses; and you know also, whoever is guilty of such an Offence, merits a most rigorous Punishment…’ (Lennox, 1998, pp 146-147)

 

The novel owes a great deal of its humour to its lively supporting cast, including Arabella’s bitchy cousin Miss Glanville, and Arabella’s hapless servant Lucy, who has to deal with her mistress’s odd whims and requests.

Though you are entering into another time and world, it was interesting to see how human and emotive the characters are, which surely demonstrates how good a writer Lennox is.

In conclusion, a farcical look at fiction, full of interesting insights into 18^th century gender politics, that does occasionally allow its jokes to run on too long – however it generally made me glad(stone)!

Final Verdict: Glad(stone)!