A Novel of Jane Austen's England on the Eve of Waterloo

Date of Review:

11/10/2008

Published Work:

MY MOTHER BIDS ME

Reviewer:

Nanette Donohue

Source:

Historical Novels Review Online (November 2008 - February 2009 quarter)

Review Excerpt:

My Mother Bids Me - Rosy Cole, Lulu, 2007 (New edition of novel formerly published in 1984) $13.72, pb, 192pp, 9781847991287

Roisin Harcup was raised as the middle daughter in a clergyman’s family, but she feels like she’s meant for greater excitement. A secret trip to the Brighton Fair with her lady’s maid opens Roisin’s eyes to the world outside her provincial town and her betrothal to Anthony March, a kind, if dull, local gentleman. When her father’s punishment for escaping the house in pursuit of earthly pleasures proves too much, Roisin flees to Brighton where she finds a job as a seamstress—and a male admirer named Leo Penrose. Roisin soon discovers that the dressmaking shop is a front for a house of ill repute and escapes yet again, this time to work as a governess. While employed as a governess, Roisin begins to discover the truth about her heritage—that she was adopted, and that her mother went insane when she was jilted by her lover. Now Roisin fears that she could take after her mother in unexpected ways.
Cole seems to be trying to accomplish too much in this brief novel, which shifts from a gothic tale of a doomed relationship to, in the last chapter, a blow-by-blow military history of Napoleon’s final battle at Waterloo. The gothic aspects of the novel are far more successful, and Cole manages to avoid the clichés that tend to plague similar books. Roisin has pluck and spirit, and though the brevity of the book forces her relationship with Leo to develop and escalate quickly, it’s still believable enough to be entertaining.

Nanette Donohue

Synopsis:

This is the story of one community's struggle to bring New Jerusalem out of the clouds during a quarter of a millennium of radical change. The spiritual dynamism inspired by John Wesley in these parishes was multiplied throughout the British Isles and steadily contributed to the welfare and stability of the nation when Europe was in ferment and the beast of anarchy was baying at the door. King George III himself fully recognised the part played by Methodism. He even donated ships' timber for the building of Wesley's Chapel in the City of London and presented them in person.

Book Excerpt:

On Moody Bush Hill, just off the bridle path which traces a lackadaisical course to South Croxton, stands a forgotten relic of feudal times. It is neither milestone nor monolith, neither cairn nor cornerstone, a granite tooth inscribed with the words Moody Bush. No one knows how it came to be there or who was the mason who tooled its weather-hewn face. Legend claims that it marks the meeting place of the old hundreds court which debated local affairs when William the Conqueror took it into his head that the Gallic touch was needed to civilise the mongrel peasants of this island. Where the mighty emperors of Rome had failed, he would not!

It is an idyllic landscape, thickly populated with oak and ash, with elder, blackthorn and sycamore, diligently tilled for almost a thousand years since the Vikings first tamed its forests and subdued its stubborn clay with their peerless ploughshares. It rests at the heart of a heart-shaped county, about as far from any alien horizon or the cut and thrust of everything associated with seafaring as you can get.

Queniborough nestles in the valley, distinguished by the dragon's tail spire of St. Mary's church, and a mile or two to the north-west, the tower of St. Peter's Church rises foursquare in the parish of Syston. In the archaic tongue of its Anglo-Saxon settlers, the tiny hamlet was named Sithestun after the broad, blunt stone where its patriarchs gathered.

Little affects the tempo of its days. The warring factions to the north and south which contest the right of the Catholic Stuart over the Protestant Hanoverian for the nation's throne are no more than a whispered rumour. Ever since the Roman occupation, shiresfolk have preferred to cherish their roots rather than tangle with offcomers. The fact that St. Augustine, despatched by Pope Gregory I to these pagan shores, had converted Penda of Mercia's grandson, Offa, and the kingdom had grown fat and prosperous as a result, has long passed from memory. Those who work the land assume God's in his heaven and that they know how life should be lived.

But deep below their pattens and hunting-boots, nature still seethes. The middle ground is riven by an ancient fault line. Some say that, until the titanic upheavals of the Ice Age, the undulating plain which forms the backbone of Charnwood Forest was the highest range of peaks in England. Every so often the earth's core rumbles and sends forth a shuddering ripple which undermines buildings, causes lightning cracks to appear in plasterwork and stirs up a gale. Thunderstorms occur more regularly than anywhere else in the British Isles.

Today, these rocky outcrops, Breedon Hill, Beacon Hill, Burrough Hill, fortresses from the cradle of man, are stations in a chain of beacons. They might warn of advancing armies, hail a new sovereign or proclaim the birth of his heir.

So much for earthquake, wind and fire. But what of the still, small voice......?

A Blakesian vision of global unrest. Were life and death two sides of the same coin?

Synopsis:

"All that time, life kept putting its face around the door, but never came into the room."

When Angel learnt her days were numbered, she found it impossible to confide in her husband, Jude. Immersed in the precarious expansion of his business, he little suspected the true cause of her changing health and outlook. And events seemed only too ready to conspire in her silence.

Her dilemma swiftly launched them both on a course bound for disaster. It was to weave a web of misunderstanding which prompted Jude's infidelity and Angel's poignant involvement with "the bookseller of Glenfinnie", reaching a crisis where Jude's own life was imperilled.

While she fought shy of the truth, Angel did not dream that Life was to take on a magnified dimension and place everyday ritual in an ongoing context.

But before that could happen, she was to make an interior journey of discovery, seeing in her condition some analogy with the global unrest of our times and why, perhaps, in western culture, the subject of death is notoriously taboo.

Were Life and Death two sides of the same coin?

Book Excerpt:

We travelled roads cleaving thick forests, fringed with rose bay willow herb echoing the shape of the conifers, where animals could flee from the hunter and the encroachments of civilisation. The only homesteads we came across were roofed with turf and barely distinguishable from the land itself, contained in an isolation so close to the beaten track. In the background, glaciers coruscated in the sun: near at hand, copper-green waterfalls crashed down from great heights, flinging out tiers of spray tinged with rainbows. Jude told me one was called The Bridal Veil. It was said that a French honeymoon couple had approached the bend above it too fast and had gone careering over the precipice.

A shadow fell over the sunny morning; a dark premonition of what I could not have explained. The hollow roar of the water conjured up the mournful but consonant baying of wolves. Poor couple, so recklessly happy as they plunged headlong to their doom. "It won't happen to us, will it?"

Jude laughed at my childlike terror and said he could think of worse ways to go. It must be awful to lose the use of one's faculties, one's awareness of life, as his father, a ponderous man, had done at the end. No, thank you, he said. "Anyway, it's too lovely a day to be moribund."

But I had glimpsed another side of the coin. Hadn't we seen how suddenly the climate could change across the summit's scythe edge? How the graphic landscape could pass into mist and grotesque distortion so that even the clouds lost their shape and form and there was only a negative print of the world?

It was a land of impossible concepts, Norway. A land of illusions, of boats suspended on liquid air. I came to think of our sojourn there as a blueprint for our life together.