The Little Professor

Revision blues

1.  I reread what is now chapter two (in which the early British Church somehow manages to become Protestant...), and note a paragraph that really doesn't belong there anymore.

2.  I move the paragraph to the book's introduction.

3.  I note that the introduction is now twenty-five pages long, whereas the new chapter two is fifteen pages long.

4.  I detect an imbalance in the textual force.

5.  I contemplate various options, of which some are reasonable (write ten more pages for chapter two) and some are not (borrowing a  magic marker from netHack and using the #apply command). 

Book Two, Ongoing

I know it's all the rage to grumble about reader's reports, but I have to admit that one of my readers made a good point: the chapter that started off as this article really needed to be two chapters.  Having taken out my figurative axe and split the chapter in half, though, I was left with two poor things  not long enough to be chapters.  Ergo, I've been updating the Lollards.  Or, rather, nuancing them.  The Victorians were obsessed with Wycliffe (er, Wyclif, Wickliffe, Wiclif...) and  his followers, whom they regarded as the authentically native English origins of the Reformation.  (That is: look, we got there before the Germans!)  Ah, but which Victorians? The original version mostly talks about evangelicals--mostly Nonconformists--who were the great Wycliffe enthusiasts, but has little to say about the people who yelled "ack!" every time his name came up in polite company.  Because, after all, if one is of a rather Higher churchmanship, then Wycliffe and his notions about church property and hierarchy do not, perhaps, inspire overwhelming joy (as the Yonge quotation I offered a few days ago suggests).  So I'm talking about a couple of additional texts which both adhere to the "Wycliffe did the Reformation first" line, and suggest that this might not have been such a glorious thing. 

And so onward...

This Week's Acquisitions

• Sister M. F. Clare [Margaret Anna Cusack], Hornehurst Rectory (Sadlier, 1887).  Reprint of this rare 1872 Catholic conversion novel by an extremely outspoken Irish nun (the "Nun of Kenmare"), an Anglican sister who converted to Catholicism, then converted back about thirty years later.  At the time this novel was published, she was still a Poor Clare; she later went on to found the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace.  (eBay)
• W. M. H.  Popish Worship and Scripture Worship, Tracts on Christian Doctrine IV (Female Auxiliary to the Scottish Reformation Society, June 1854).  Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the religious fence, this short tract comparing Roman Catholic spectacle to Protestant spirituality.   (eBay)

Victorian critical observation of the day

I was merrily revising away at the Lollard chapter in Book Two when I stumbled over this pointed commentary in "A Conversation on Books: Historical Tales," The Monthly Packet 31 (March 1881). (Not coincidentally, the author--probably Charlotte Mary Yonge--is Anglo-Catholic; they had no brief for Lollards.)

Spider. There are a great many more tales of Lollards and Wickliffites.

Arachne. Which I don't trust. I don't think the good ladies who write them have much knowledge of what most Lollards really did wish or believe; and there is no good ground for representing them as good evangelical Christians. None of these tales are of any mark, though Miss Holt has taken much pains with the mise en scene of hers. (230)

  Probably-Yonge then proceeds to wax scathing about the subject of, er, my book (231-32):

Spider. You like Miss Manning's Household of Sir Thomas More?

Arachne. Very much. And it brings us to the whole mass of Reformation stories, which are very seldom successful. Very few people have the power of realising what the opinions on either side were; and they make huge mistakes, which I will not specify, it would be too ungracious. The Schonberg Cotta Diary is one of the best, though Luther is a poor feeble bit of lady's handiwork where he does not speak for himself out of his diary and letters. And Miss Emily Taylor's story, The Knevetts, gives some good pictures of the days of Henry VIII.; but I do not care for Miss Manning's The Fair Gospeller, or any of the others of this era. Foxe and Burnet so falsified history that anything written on their authority is sure to be untrustworthy.

Most of Book Two is spent hanging about with evangelicals (both CofE and Nonconformist), so it's nice to find such a tart assessment from a Higher point of view.

In which we track citations to their lair (or don't)

Mark Bauerlein counted citations by using Google Scholar, which he argues is the "best instrument" (9) for tracking citations in humanities fields (for which there are currently no reliable references at all).  This strikes me as not, perhaps, the best method.  To explain why, I'll use myself as an example.

Problem #1: The existence of one's articles in the MLA database. 

Four of my articles are nowhere to be found.  (You can see a full list of my main publications on this blog's "about" page.)  One of them is intended for use by acquisitions librarians (the bibliography I did for Choice), not for scholarship per se, although I've come across at least one person citing it as such.  Three others that are nowhere to be found in the database: Grace Aguilar, Emily Sarah Holt, and Anne Boleyn.  The first two are in book collections; the last is in a journal that the MLA indexes in theory, but apparently not in practice.

For obvious reasons, it's hard to cite something if you don't know it's there, although a couple of people have stumbled over Grace and Anne. All of the articles missing from the  MLA are present in other online indexes, however. 

Problem #2: Using Google Scholar to find citations.

Although Google Scholar pulled two citations of my work from Project Muse, it missed the one in JSTOR.  It also missed a citation in PQ and, more importantly, something on the order of eleven or twelve book citations.  This is a rather large margin of error.  (There are also some dissertations that don't get pulled up on Google Scholar.)  Bear in mind that I'm simply counting, not evaluating the quality of the citation, or how my work was  used. 

To track citations of my work, I have to do the following:

1) Check Project Muse, JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, Humanities International Complete, and the Taylor & Francis Archive--directly.  All of these searches pull up overlapping but different results (not all of them appearing in Google Scholar). 

2) Check Google Scholar.

3) Check GoogleBooks.

4) Check Amazon's  and Amazon.co.uk's  "search inside the book feature" (this doesn't work very well).

5) Check Google.

Moreover, if I'm tracking myself by name, I have to run the following searches:

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (I normally publish using my full name)

Miriam Burstein (because people sometimes just ignore the middle name)

M. E. Burstein (because house style occasionally mandates initials)

Miriam Burnstein or Miriam Elizabeth Burnstein (yes, there are multiple citations out there  with my last name misspelled; when I tell people that I use my middle name because "it's the only one people can spell correctly," I'm not entirely joking)

Burstein, Miriam

This is all for one person!

Moreover, all of this presumes digitization.  Many humanities journals just aren't available through either JSTOR or Project Muse, or can't be searched without a subscription.   Books are similarly subject to the vagaries of their publishers, as they may be unsearchable in GoogleBooks, and Amazon's search engine does an apparently random job of doing keyword searches in books with "search inside the book" enabled (it will pull up a handful of books in which I'm cited, but miss many others, even if the book itself can be searched once you've loaded it into the viewer). 

 

A four-year doctorate?

That's one of the recommendations from the MLA's president for "reforming doctoral programs."  It's not clear to me if he understands time-to-degree as including the MA, or not.  In any event, I finished my Ph.D. at Chicago in five years, including the MA, but my situation as a graduate student was thoroughly atypical: not only was I fully funded for the entire haul, but I also did zero independent teaching.  At the time (mid-90s), you had to be in your sixth year of a degree program to teach your own course; I led two once-per-week discussion seminars--and only got the second (students at the time were generally kept to one) because I pointed out that I was about to be let loose upon the world with no practical experience worth discussing.  Of course, once I actually finished, much to everyone's astonishment ("Wait, you're done."  "Yes, I said I was going to be done."), I turned out to be pretty much unemployable for some time, there not being any jobs for people who really haven't the slightest clue how to teach.  (Through certain backchannels, I got feedback from one committee, who thought I had given an excellent interview. They also thought I would probably explode in a pile of smoking ash if placed in front of their students.) 

This is all another way of saying that the current demand for faculty who have a basic grasp of pedagogy is probably incompatible with completing a four-year degree, which presumes a student doing not much else except coursework and dissertating.  My department's own MA, which predominantly serves teachers working on their credentials, takes two years, and teachers who are employed full-time often need to take longer to finish.  By the same token, if, as the president suggests, universities should "provide the broad professional development and skills that, while central to an academic career, can also be transferred to other paths," you will very likely also need a degree that takes more than four years to complete, unless you somehow expect to cram in two forms of job training at once--and, I suspect, do both rather badly.

Meanwhile, none of this addresses the two pink elephants in the middle of the room, wearing tutus: the lack of jobs for people who have doctorates, and the likely irrelevance of a doctorate in English for many other potential careers, aside from the usual writing-intensive suspects.  (By which I mean that Ph.Ds in English wind up in other careers on a frequent basis, but there were probably much less time-consuming and, quite frankly, much less emotionally/psychologically painful paths to get there; I don't think a four-year Ph.D. changes that.)  

 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Samuel Gordon, Sons of the Covenant: A Tale of London Jewry (JPS, 1900).  US reprint of a novel by a late Victorian Anglo-Jewish author, set mostly among the Jewish working class.  Gordon (1871-1927) wrote a range of popular Jewish novels set in England and elsewhere; see here for a brief rundown (and here for his somewhat shadowy family life).  (eBay)
• Eliza Lynn Linton, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, ed. Deborah T. Meem and Kate Holterhoff (Victorian Secrets, 2011).  New edition of one of the name-droppingest novels ever written, a barely concealed narrative of Linton's own maturation.    More on Linton at the Victorian Web and the Orlando Project.  (Amazon)
• Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles (Titan, 2011).  It's Sherlock Holmes...that is, if Moriarty and Sebastian Moran were the heroes.  (Um, "heroes.")  Newman is probably best known for the Anno Dracula series.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, 2009).  Reprint of this 1985 study, which deals with the influence of such authors as Arnold, Kingsley, and Thomas Hughes.  (Amazon)
• Doreen Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, 2nd ed. (Pickwick, 2011).  Reprint of Rosman's important 1984 history of how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British evangelicals dealt with all aspects of popular culture, from fiction to live entertainment.  (Amazon)
• Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, eds., Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006).  All aspects of angels (appearances, beliefs about, Biblical roles, etc.) in both Catholic and Protestant thought.  (eBay)

The Statue Room (Vol. II)

Once more unto the novel.  Will it turn into a hitherto unacknowledged masterpiece of English fiction, soon to be celebrated alongside the likes of Clarissa and Pride and Prejudice?

You make the call.

(II.5): Adelfrida is on the verge of "present[ing] the Duke with a pledge of their mutual love."  Or, as we postmodern degenerates would say, she's about to have a kid (soon to be dubbed "Romelia Catherine").  Amazingly, she has managed to near the delivery date without anyone at court becoming suspicious.  I suppose those dresses could hide any multitude of sins.

Incidentally, in a major instance of typesetting FAIL, page "6" has somehow become page "9."

(II.8): Noooo! One of Adelfrida's few BFFs has died while out riding! It wouldn't be a Gothic if Adelfrida were to be happy for any length of any time, after all.

(II.10): One of the remaining BFFs, the Marchioness (aka Elizabeth's girl crush), undertakes to explain the situation.  To cushion the blow, she initially tells Adelfrida that "nothing very particular" has happened--people dying suddenly in riding accidents being not very particular, one gathers.

To make matters worse, the Marchioness *gasp* lies to Adelfrida, telling her that the letter is actually from deceased BFF, now upgraded to "indisposed."  But...but...lying is bad! The novel has told us so! Repeatedly!

(II.11): Matters are not improving, as Adelfrida remains convinced that BFF is "dying."  Right verb, wrong tense.  Winning the prize for Least Tactful Observation in an Eighteenth-Century Novel, the Marchioness offers the following bit of sage advice: "'Well, my love, suppose she is, you cannot be of any service to her."

(II.12): And...it's not clear why the Marchioness bothered to lie, because Adelfrida figures it out anyway and promptly goes into "fits" and a "fever."  Telepathy, I see, is a prerequisite for being a Gothic heroine.  However, she finally has a "perfect recovery," which presumably means that we'll never hear about Dead BFF ever again.

(I.13): We are belatedly informed that the Duke loses consciousness whenever he smells roses.  This is one of those health problems one would hope to know about well before a novel's second volume.

(II.14): Needless to say, the Duke obligingly goes out like the proverbial light just as Elizabeth swans in.  Really, the novelist could have achieved the same level of plausibility by having a giant helmet fall out of the sky and clonk him on the head.

Oh, wait...

(II.18): For lack of anything else better to do, Elizabeth poisons Adelfrida with a glass of lemonade. 

It has occurred to me that the novelist seems to be mildly prejudiced against Elizabeth I.

(II.19): One must say that despite being in the throes of poison (as opposed to the throes of passion), Adelfrida remains remarkably articulate.

(II.21): Amazing. Adelfrida actually died.  And yet the novel has over one hundred and thirty pages to go. 

(II.25): We start off Book Four with yet another Mangled Motto.  This time, Edward Young's "Night Thoughts" gets the treatment.

Should Motto Mangling be considered a felony? Or a misdemeanor? Let us pause to consider this for a moment.

(II.25): Meanwhile, the Duke is dying.  For some reason, the novelist has neglected to inform us of what actually happened just before his death. 

(II.26): Yet another child to be raised in secret.  I gather this runs in the family; is there a gene for this?

(II.30): Sixteen years have passed, and Romelia Catherine feels an understandable compunction about visiting a nation "governed by the murderer of my mother."  Something tells me Elizabeth won't be too excited to see her, either. 

(II.31): Scratch that: Romelia, being a teenager, decides after all that she'd like to see the "female monster."  Kids.  What can you do?

(II.32): For some reason, the Marchioness thinks that it would be a great idea to tote Romelia along on a visit to Elizabeth, even though Romelia is now fantasizing about being a "basilisk" and murdering the queen.  This will certainly be an exceptionally warm and cheery visit, that's for sure.

(II.33): So, the Marchioness knew that bringing Romelia along would be a bad idea, and yet did it anyway? The novel's aversion to common sense reasserts itself.

(II.36): Romelia gets married; the Marchioness' daughter gets married; and now the novelist decides to change things up and make her book into an epistolary novel. 

Why anyone thinks it's a good idea for Romelia to remain in England is not, in fact, immediately obvious, but then again, given that this novel sneezes whenever introductory logic comes up, I shouldn't be surprised.

(II.38): Well, things were happy for about two pages.

(II.39): Romelia's hubby Henry has died for reasons not yet disclosed, so Romelia now takes the opportunity to do a rather bad Ophelia imitation.

(Speaking of dead people, we have indeed not heard of Deceased BFF ever again.)

(II.43): Er, wait, hang on.  Henry didn't die.  False alarm! Instead, he almost drowned during a shipwreck, but was actually cast ashore "just at Romelia's feet."  Because doesn't that always happen during violent storms?

(II.46): I'm getting a little confused about the chronology here.  First he was dead.  Then he wasn't dead.  Now he's arrested for treason.  Or was he arrested for treason before? (I think he was arrested for treason when this letter started, bringing on the Ophelia, but the writer's phrasing is awfully confused.)

The writer of this letter, Romelia's sister-in-law, has a code in the node, but that probably doesn't rank quite so highly in the traumatic scheme of things. 

On a more positive note, Romelia has recovered from her attack of Ophelia.

(II.47): I do like how after this chronicle of horrors, the writer asks the recipient to "[r]emember me kindly" to her friends.

(II.52): Romelia is off to London to beg the Queen to pardon her Henry! Elizabeth, of course, tells Matilda (the sister-in-law) that the "'image of Adelfrida constantly haunts me'"--because, after all, murderers always spout off about their guilt to everyone within reach.

(II.55): That didn't go so well, so now Romelia adopts the age-old strategy of dressing as a page boy.  But for what purpose? Only the Shadow knows.

(II.59): Of course, she doesn't do the dress-up bit particularly well, as she's called "Lady" only four pages later.

(II.60): Hey, it's the Duke's valet! For some reason, he seems to think that asking "what the heck are you doing here?" (er, my translation) falls under the heading of "impertinent questions."  I dunno--it seems like a perfectly reasonable question to me.

Oh, that's right--we don't do "perfectly reasonable" in this novel.  My bad.  Carry on.

(II.61): The valet has been living in the same house for sixteen years, and has apparently never noticed that it has a mysterious door.  I am speechless.

Luckily, I'm typing this post, so my lack of speech will have no effect.

(II.63): The door leads to a room with exterior (albeit ivy-covered) windows.  Exterior windows. 

My speechlessness continues.  Perhaps I should have waited until after tomorrow's class to read this novel?

(II.65): Uh-oh.  Has Elizabeth done something not so nice to Romelia?

(II.68): Or...not?

(II.69): OMG! We've finally found the Statue Room, only 3/4 of the way through the novel!

(II.71): Oh, look, it's Henry.  This is one of the weirder locations to stow a prisoner.

(II.73): The jailer (er, gaoler), the Earl of Shrewsbury, walks in, and of course, Romelia immediately mouths off to him.  Because that is, after all, the most intelligent thing to do when you're caught trying to break your husband out of his somewhat odd prison.  Shrewsbury seems rather unimpressed.

(II.79): Shrewsbury promptly chucks Romelia into a teensy cell.  For some reason, she's shocked by this turn of events, suggesting that her education did not involve any tutoring in cause and effect.

(II.80): In a burst of anguish, Romelia misquotes William Shirley's Edward, the Black Prince (1750).  I suppose we ought to forgive the misquotation; it's so difficult to quote from a play published well over a century after one's death, after all.

(II.82): The ghost of Adelfrida appears and asks Romelia to "avenge" her.  Real? Hallucination? Given that Romelia can quote from eighteenth-century dramas, anything is possible.

(II.83): There's an unlocked secret door in Romelia's cell.  Security in Elizabethan England seems rather subpar.

(II.84): The Earl's son, Walter, is remarkably blase about finding himself in the same garden with an escaped prisoner.  So they have a little chat.

(II.85): Romelia was in a "more secure" prison than the one before?! What, the first cell had no doors at all?

(II.88): Whee! Everyone has escaped, thanks to the help provided by the Earl's son!  (No clue as to whether or not he'll be executed for abetting a traitor, but such things are beneath the novel's notice.) Now we're going to live happily ever after, right?

Right?

(II.90): Gulp--the Earl's daughter Julia has succumbed to Throes of Passion for Henry, while Walter is equally in the Throes for Romelia! And now Romelia "must be moved" (II.91)!

This is a complication.

(II.93): Julia's confidante Adela admits to being of Ill Repute, thanks to Elizabeth's example.  At this rate, I expect Elizabeth to be making dalmatians into coats, or something.

(II.94): In yet another amazing chronological leap, Adela manages to quote from Aaron Hill's Shakespeare knockoff King Henry the Fifth (1723).  You know, I wonder--when I'm in an emotional tizzy, can I too quote from works written over a century in the future? There could be a market for this.  Philip K. Dick might get a novel out of it, even.

(II.96): Adela proceeds to utter an especially distorted version of a speech from Hannah Cowley's Albina (1779).  This flash-forward manner of quotation probably does introduce some distortions into the mix.

(II.97): I suppose there's a reason that Adela writes down the order she gives to her servant, but I cannot imagine what it could be.

In the meantime, Adela gives Julia some handy hints about how to screw up the Henry-Romelia marriage.

(II.99): Now Matilda gets into the quotation biz, coming up with a rewritten snippet from Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent (1754). If this author comes up with a quotation that's actually from the right period, I'm going to faint--first making sure not to fall on my cat, who is next to the chair.

Yes, that was a gratuitous photo of Victoria, guarding me from The Invention of Tradition. I thought we could all use a cat photo right about now. 

Where were we?

Ah, yes.  Somewhat inconveniently, Matilda applies the adoring quotation to Julia, the "angelic" and "delicate" being out to bust up her brother's marriage.  It's, like, the author wants us to note the irony, or, like, something.

(II.100): Heavens, these Throes of Passion are catching.  To recap: Henry and Romelia are in love with each other; Julia is in love with Henry; Walter is in love with Romelia; and now Matilda is in love with Walter, who she knows is in love with Romelia (although she doesn't know that Julia is in love with Henry). This seems a bit much, even for your average daytime soap opera.

(II.106): And now, to lather up the soapsuds even more, Adela has arrived, and is out for revenge on...Henry? Apparently, he's the one responsible for her Ill Repute. Or, at least, I guess he is, because there's absolutely no other reason for her to be ticked off at him.  Things are a bit confused here.

Then again, how is that news?

(II.107): Adela manipulates the "angelic" (ahem) Julia into writing fake letters incriminating Henry and Romelia.  This is actually a relatively intelligent callback to Elizabeth's botched effort with the letters in vol. I, so I will give the author marks for continuity. 

Let me stop for a second, and marvel at the fact that I paid Miss Ballin a compliment. 

I promise that it won't happen again.

(II.109): Adela proves strong with the marriage-busting force. Henry thinks he catches Romelia encouraging Walter's Grand Passion, except that Romelia thinks she's encouring Walter's Grand Passion for Matilda.  Ah, well.  It's not like Henry can be bothered to trust the woman who was willing to break him out of prison, or anything.

(II.113): Alas, Matilda now suffers from Ophelia, as Walter has gone to the great Inkwell in the Sky.

(II.115): And Julia has poisoned herself, which isn't stopping her from writing a perfectly coherent letter to Henry, 'fessing up.

(II.119): The 'fessing seems to have worked, because Henry and Romelia have reconciled.  The author seems to have believed that actually representing this get-together would exhaust her not-so-copious imaginative powers, so we'll just have to take her word for it.

Oh, and Matilda is feeling better.

(II.121): Oops, spoke too soon.  Adela returned, like an overdue interlibrary loan, and stabbed first Henry, then herself.  On a positive note, we'll soon be out of characters, meaning that the novel will have to come to an end.

(II.125): Matilda buries Henry and Adela together.  Because burying a suicide and the man she murdered together is just the most incredibly romantic thing evah. 

For people who are very different from you and me, that is. 

And now we get the backstory about Henry's relationship with Adela?! I don't suppose we could engineer some sort of timewarp-thingy and drop Miss Ballin in a modern creative writing workshop?

(II.135): Romelia has just shot at Elizabeth.  In public.  Somebody forgot to include this assassination attempt in the history books.

(II.136): After accusing Elizabeth of murder, Romelia promptly shoots herself, also in public.  As vengeance goes, this seems rather inefficient.  Also rather ineffectual. 

(II.141): It wouldn't be right for any of the main characters to survive the novel, so Matilda dies of something-or-other, once she escapes England. 

(II.144): Matilda is buried, and...uh...that's that. If Miss Ballin was aiming for Shakespearean tragedy, she kind of missed, I think. 

FINIS. 

Snacktacular

I'm generally underwhelmed by the Great Snack Scandal of 2011, but I think it's worth heading off one of the themes I've occasionally seen in the comments thereon.  Faculty, being faculty, like to grumble about students complaining, and some people are grumbling that since nobody has ever complained before, then surely there's no reason for them to complain now.  Kids these days, etc.  But in fact, it's amazing how rarely students file official, actionable complaints about faculty malfeasances.  Instead, you usually get something like the following conversation:

STUDENT: Chair X, Professor Y is [insert egregious behavior here]!

CHAIR X: Horrors! Student, please submit a written and signed complaint documenting [insert egregious behavior here], and we'll begin investigating immediately.

STUDENT: *crickets*

For any number of reasons, ranging from fear of reprisal to fear of getting the professor in trouble, students are often reluctant to write up [insert egregious behavior here], even when [insert egregious behavior here] would  make any administrator shriek in horror.  In fact, as Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt has pointed out  more than once, sometimes students won't even document these problems anonymously in teaching evaluations, even when they're perfectly willing to talk about them informally.  Ergo, no paper trail, no proof that anything is wrong.  As a result, the department chair may "know" something, but not know it in such a way that s/he can justify taking corrective action. 

The Statue Room

In order to explain why something is different, one must discuss those things it is different from.  In this case, I'm explaining why Sir Walter Scott's The Monastery and The Abbot (both 1820) are not like, say, Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783), Lady Jane Grey (1791), or Rossetta Ballin's The Statue Room (1790).  In turn, this chapter will now (thanks to reader requests) set up the rest of Book Two, which in part has to do with how my religious historical novels revise Scott. (Hooray! I'm nearly done with this chapter!)

Of course, as I mentioned before, the only one of these books that gets more than a sentence is The Recess, because we know that Scott actually took an interest in it.   Alas, one of the perils of research is that one must read a lot in order to quote a little. 

Now, The Recess is actually a reasonably good (and rather unusual) late-18th c. Gothic novel.  Lady Jane Grey is...not quite so competent, but not so bad that I fantasized about feeding it to silverfish while I was reading it. (Of course, I was reading a digitized version, so the silverfish wouldn't do much damage anyway.)   The Statue Room is...well, it's...OK, it's pretty horrifying.  And not because it's Gothic.  Silverfish may be too generous for this novel. 

(I.v): It seems to me that "unmanured by the solar beams of experience" is not quite the proper turn of phrase.  It also has certain unpleasant connotations that do not, perhaps, bode altogether well for the novel to follow.  'Moreover, the OED agrees with me that one cannot "approbiate" anything.

(I.vi): Now we're prefacing (because, says the author, one is supposed to preface, so OK).  It's Gothic, so the manuscript must have got lost somewhere, right? Oh, yes: the MS was in a private collection, but "the house and library were unfortunately consumed by fire."  Surely that was more apocalyptic than necessary?

(I.x): Ballin sighs that "forward critics will always find matter for censure in everything."  Hey, I resemble that remark.

(I.9): "Most readers are familiar with the divorce of Henry the Eighth..." Some of us are familiar with both of them, even.  The non-boding well continues apace.

As Anne Stevens points out, this  is one of several The Recess knockoffs [1].  Apparently, instead of Mary, Queen of Scots having secret kids (The Recess), Catherine of Aragon had another daughter. 

(I.11): Why, in the name of every bad historical novel known to mankind, would Catherine name her secret daughter Adelfrida?

And what does it mean to "perfect her coalescence with the King"? I was unaware that husbands and wives coalesced on a regular basis, although, as always, I am willing to be corrected on such points of marital trivia.

(I.18): Just a few pages into the novel, and poor Adelfrida (arrrgh) has lost mom, stepmom, and dad. 

In the meantime, her stepmom's son the Duke has been eyeing Adelfrida's "springing beauties."  For some reason, I have a sudden vision of protuberant body parts attached to Slinkies.

(I.19): However, now that the Duke knows that Adelfrida is Far, Far Above Him, he has luckily lapsed into "filial affection."  Glad to hear that he managed to get over his grand passion in the space of one page.

(I.21): Except that he's still suffering from love pangs, two pages later. 

(I.22): Mary I "was at length, after several wars and divisions, peaceably crowned Queen of England."  Where did Lady Jane Grey go? (Besides the other novel, I mean.) 

(I.25): Mary I is introduced to Adelfrida! And immediately accepts her! Because royalty never has any suspicions about teenage siblings who magically appear out of nowhere! Can I sell you London Bridge while I'm at it?

(More seriously, the author is revising the end of The Recess, in which James I destroys all the evidence relating to his sisters, and denies their existence.)

Meanwhile, Elizabeth dislikes Adelfrida immensely, 'cause Adelfrida is pretty and all.  Oh, and will usurp her place in the succession.  We'll see how long Mary I stays as the Good Guy.

(I.27-28): The very notion of Catherine having a secret child is "unheard of, but in fable."  Er, yes.

The poor Duke's stab at merely filial affection seems to have been rather short-lived.

(I.35): Adelfrida, however, is having none of it.  Must protect her reputation &c.  But he's so cute!

In the meantime, let us ask ourselves what spiritual and physical discipline allows the Duke to "remai[n] above half an hour in the Princess' chambers, in the same attitude that she had left him..."  Because one would think that the muscles would grow rather painfully stiff.

(I.37): First the Duke is sad because he can't say anything to Adelfrida.  Then he's sad because Adelfrida tells him to shove off.  Now he's sad because he's overreaching the bounds of acceptable sadness.

I'm feeling pretty gloomy myself, come to think of it. 

(I.46): Elizabeth continues to be a lying liar who lies.  Lies, I say! LIES!

Did I mention that Elizabeth seems not overly enamored of the truth?

(I.50): Amazing.  Mary I remains the Good Guy right up to the end.  No persecutions, no Philip II, no execution of Lady Jane.  Then again, no Lady Jane. 

(I.53): The Duke fails to get Adelfrida her rightful place in the sun.  She gets arrested! (Because, duh.)  He gets arrested! He gets released! But his head gets chopped off for reasons unknown! (Really, they're unknown.  The author just mentions the execution in passing, after setting the Duke up as the hero for most of the novel.)

Poor Adelfrida: in case you're counting, now she's out her would-be boyfriend, mother, stepmother, father, and sister.  Princess can't catch a break.

 (I.58): Elizabeth has just announced to the Duke of Alencon her desire to marry Leicester, because she is unable to tell the two of them apart while they're in costume.  These things do not reflect well upon either Elizabeth's intellect or the novel.

(I.79): Let's start off Book Two with a slight misquotation from Joseph Addison's Cato.  (To be fair, Stevens notes that this is the first historical novel to use mottoes this way [106].) 

(I.87): Leicester and Alencon, victims of an unintentional epistolary mix-up (the Queen is not such a hot plotter), now unite over the perils of Adelfrida (whom we haven't seen for a while; she's in prison).  Luckily, Leicester just happens to be toting Adelfrida's portrait around, which is exactly the sort of thing you'd do when your queen is a notoriously jealous woman who fears being deposed by her half-sister.

(I.93): And, of course, Elizabeth has now found Adelfrida's portrait, which Leicester accidentally dropped.  Because not only is Leicester short several little grey cells, he's also clumsy.

(I.97): Leicester is seized with "stupefaction" when Elizabeth indicates that she is not exactly pleased with him.  Under the circumstances, it takes real stupidity to be stupefied, not least because he has apparently forgotten everything he thought just a few pages ago about Elizabeth's likely response to his interest in Adelfrida.

(I.101-2): The Duke of Alencon, whose ego seems rather bruised, decides that it would be a really good idea to liberate Adelfrida and depose Elizabeth.  Apparently, the English people have nothing to say in the matter.

(I.102-4): Another character sensibly points out that this is a silly thing to do.  It's so reassuring to find that someone in this novel has a brain. 

Of course, this means that the Duke promptly ignores him.

(I.104): In a fit of "friendship," Elizabeth tells her girl crush,  the Marchioness of Navarre, everything.  Given the epidemic of irrationality sweeping through this novel, it's amazing that England survived into the seventeenth century.

(I.106): Oh, Adelfrida! I was wondering when we were going to see our heroine again.

(I.111): The Duke sees Adelfrida and is immediately swept up in the Throes of Passion. No explanation of how he could accidentally walk in on Elizabeth during her meeting with a prisoner, but that would be expecting a bit much of this novel. 

I suspect that this won't improve the Duke's rational decision-making any.

(I.112): You'll all be glad to know that being imprisoned (and otherwise stressed out) for a considerable length of time has had no effect whatsoever on Adelfrida's looks.

(I.113-14): Elizabeth immediately realizes that the Duke is suffering from Throes of Passion.  This because the Duke is too mindless to figure out that engaging in Throes of Passion in front of a woman worried about being deposed is not, shall we say, a particularly smart move.

Then again, the Duke does have the intellect of the proverbial box of rocks.  So there's that.

(I.117): Quoth Adelfrida: "Oh, my Anne, this day is a fatal day!"  Yes...our heroine has also been caught up in Throes of Passion, after seeing the Duke for a grand total of five minutes.  Her emotional profundity knows...quite a few bounds, actually, as it seems to be about three inches deep. 

(I.118): Mind-bogglingly, the Duke has forgotten all about the epistolary mix-up that made him ticked off with Elizabeth in the first place. Well, it would be mind-boggling, if I had any mind left to boggle at this point.

(I.121): The Duke's valet, originally the only person in this novel with signs of basic common sense, has now abandoned  it all to help the Duke extricate Adelfrida from Elizabeth's toils.   Common sense, it seems, is not highly valued here.

(I.132): Wait, I spoke too soon: Adelfrida is feeling rather cautious about the Duke's plans.  But how long will such rationality last?

(I.134-35): The Duke is informed of all Elizabeth's plans; then Elizabeth is informed  of all the Duke's plans.  Seriously, folks, read some Le Carre.

(I.136): Adelfrida is free! Woo-hoo! Of course,  the Queen means to off her at the first opportunity.

(I.141): For some reason, we now get the backstory for Elizabeth's girl crush, thirty-seven pages or so after she was introduced.

(I.143): And we start Book Three  off with another misquotation, rather worse this time, from Thomas Penrose's "Madness."  Gee, that can't be good.

(I.148): My goodness, we've finally got a reference to Lady Jane Grey.  Bit late though, what?

(I.153): For some reason, Elizabeth wants the Duke back in England, even though she knows perfectly well he wants Adelfrida on the throne.  This makes no sense whatsoever.

Then again, why would I expect it to?

(I.154): Elizabeth has the hots for the Duke again.  I...what? Consistent characterization, it's a good thing. 

(I.160): Adelfrida doesn't believe that the Duke really wants to marry her, despite just agreeing to marry him.  One would think that the former ought to come before the latter.

(I.167): Somehow, the Duke manages to secretly get into Adelfrida's bed every night for three months.  At court.  Without Elizabeth noticing. Even though Elizabeth supposedly notices everything.  (Well, except that her girl crush has repeatedly betrayed her.)

As it's not likely that Adelfrida will successfully gain the throne in the next volume--history can be such a stinker--I suspect that this will not end well...

[1] Anne Stevens, British Historical Fiction before Scott (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 51-52.