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Novels and Novelists

Victorian Elegance

page 244

Victorian Elegance

A Fool in her Folly — By Rhoda Broughton

In the sympathetic short preface which Mrs. Belloc Lowndes has written for this, Miss Broughton's last novel, she tells us that Miss Broughton was ‘curiously humble about her books. It was almost as if she was content to regard her literary gift as a kind of elegant accomplishment….’ Why should this astonish Mrs. Belloc Lowndes? It is delightful to think that the author should have been so nice a judge of her talent, for that, after reading ‘A Fool in her Folly,’ is precisely what we feel it to have been—‘a kind of elegant accomplishment.’ It is far from our desire to be lacking in respect for Miss Broughton's memory; but why does Mrs. Lowndes trouble to quote the ‘acute modern critic writing for Americans’ when he declares that Miss Broughton ‘seemed to him the nearest thing [sic] in spirit to Jane Austen that we have had in recent times’?

There can be no question of comparison between them. That Miss Broughton always put the best of herself into everything she did is undoubtedly true, but that she could have, even if she would have, put all of herself into anything that she did is quite a different matter. We do not think she had any such aim. There is, in this novel at least, a kind of deliberate sustained pose which is deeper than the manner of the tale-teller. Her delicate garrulity, the angle at which she gazes at the tiny storm there, where it tosses, at the bottom of one of Mamma's delicate teacups; the quaintly flippant gesture with which she dismisses the ultimate disaster—all seem to say: ‘You see for yourself that I am not to be taken too seriously. It is only a story after all.’

If we were certain of living to be as old as Abraham there is no reason why time should not be found for ‘A Fool in her Folly.’ But whirling at the rate we go (and page 245 we seem to go faster and faster; we have had scarce time to greet the summer this year, and now the leaves are falling) it is difficult to recommend it to grown men and women. It is a girls' book. Girls of all ages, from thirteen to eighty-five, will revel in it. It will not bear looking into; it will not tolerate any questions or interruptions. It must be taken whole, just as it is or not at all.

Let us try to make our meaning clearer. ‘A Fool in her Folly’ is a story in the Victorian tradition, supposed to be related by an old lady of eighty. It tells how when she was a plump little partridge of twenty she ate of the forbidden fruits in her Papa's library, and falling into a fever, half indigestion, half curiosity, as a consequence, determined to write a novel herself. It was to be a burning and mighty story of passion, its title was to be ‘Love.’ What she wrote we are not told. The tepidity, almost bordering on idiocy, of her family circle, their politeness, forbearance, gentleness and modesty towards one another, are excellently described, as is the scene between her parents and herself when the fatal manuscript is discovered. For her crime, and to save her family from being corrupted by her very presence among them, she is sent away to a widowed Aunt, and there, meeting a real live man, who is as wicked as he is handsome, she learns to live her book over again. This time she is saved by a friend of the Aunt's and sent home—to spend the remainder of her life—i.e., sixty years—repenting. But what had she written? Either it was pestiferous balderdash or it was all nonsense. Either her parents were idiots or she was a little horror. And what happened between her and the villain thus to destroy her whole life? And was her mind a perfect sink or was she merely the victim of growing curiosity? All these questions are left dans le vague—in that dreamy, faint, dazed world where girls of thirteen and girls of eighty-five laugh and cry over the same book.

(August 20, 1920.)