Emma Brown

The Great Author's unfinished manuscript may be a relatively small fruit in the literary Garden of Eden, but it's a persistently appealing one.  Writers have done their best to "finish" fragments left from the pens of everyone from Jane Austen to Dorothy L. Sayers.  On a few rare occasions, the result remains readable (e.g., the Romance of the Rose), but most posthumous "collaborations" are about as entrancing as, say, Sir Walter Scott's completed version of Joseph Strutt's Queen-Hoo Hall.* 

Alas, Clare Boylan's Emma Brown is no exception to the rule.  The first two chapters of the novel have been reprinted from an unfinished novel by Charlotte Bronte, which was first published posthumously in the Cornhill; the remaining thirty-six chapters are Boylan's, with an assist from another Bronte fragment.  Bronte's original reveals that an unprepossessing young heiress, entered into a not-altogether-thriving boarding school, is not at all the wealthy girl her supposed father made her out to be.  The fragment also introduces our narrator, a widow named Mrs. Chalfont; the mysterious and suave Mr. Ellin; and the sharp-tongued Wilcox sisters, who run the boarding school.  Boylan's added chapters fill out the backstories of both Mrs. Chalfont (abused governess, thwarted in love) and Mr. Ellin (abused child, thwarted in love), but focus primarily on the urban picaresque of Emma's often-dreary existence in London.  To add Brontean texture, Boylan borrows situations from CB's Jane Eyre and Villette, EB's Wuthering Heights, and AB's Agnes Grey.   Like so many neo-Victorian novels, however, Emma Brown uses the seediest, ugliest facets of Victorian life for its reality effects: one character, clearly copied from W. T. Stead, crusades against the white slave trade; prostitutes, child thieves, and pure finders wander about; young girls carry dead babies around in lieu of dolls; and so forth. 

While the result may be pulp "Victorian," it certainly isn't Brontean.  (In fact, the dustjacket describes the novel as--brace yourselves--"Dickensian."  Under the circumstances, that would seem to be a decidedly unhappy choice of adjective.)  But even if we leave to one side this awkward fusing of Victorian and twenty-first century sensibilities, there is still an insuperable obstacle: Boylan's prose style.  CB is one of the Victorian era's most recognizable stylists, even when the prose is, as here, in unfinished form:

Mr Ellin often called on the Misses Wilcox; he sometimes took tea with them; he appeared to like tea and muffins, and not to dislike the kind of conversation which usually accompanies that refreshment; he was said to be a good shot, a good angler.  He proved himself an excellent gossip--he liked gossip well.  On the whole he liked women's society, and did not seem to be particular in requiring difficult accomplishments or rare endowments in his female acquaintances.  The Misses Wilcox, for instance, were not much less shallow than the china saucer which held their teacups; yet Mr Ellin got on perfectly well with them, and had apparently great pleasure in hearing them discuss all the details of their school.  (9)

While not an example of CB's liveliest or most polished style, this paragraph is nevertheless characteristic.  Her wry use of qualifiers, for example, cloaks Mr. Ellin's character while appearing to reveal it.   Similarly, the narrator uses passive voice in order to create a social "voice" whose values she may or may not share, much as Helen Burns does in Jane Eyre.   (Of Mr. Brocklehurst: "He is a clergyman, and is said to do a great deal of good.")  And in the sardonic quip about the Wilcoxes and their shallowness, we see something with teeth lurking behind the narrator's otherwise measured phrasing.  Note, too, CB's thoroughly Victorian pleasure in the complex sentence, with independent clause heaped upon independent clause. 

It's an unpleasant shock, then, when we move from CB's opening chapters to Boylan's contributions.  Boylan seems to associate "Victorian" prose style with oddly stilted rhythms:

Again he hesitated.  He studied my face with a wistful look.  He took my hand and squeezed it.  "Yes, tell me everything.  But first I think you ought to hear what I have to say.  As you can see, your mother is very ill.  The treatment she requires will be expensive.  That is why you are needed."  (83)

This news struck poor Mr Ellin so bitterly that he succumbed to wretched tears.  "Oh, why must God punish us so? Why must a youthful misjudgement be carved in stone? Why does He give us no second chance?"

"He does," Finch breathed.  (366)

Boylan writes almost entirely in short, simple sentences, and "antiques" her prose by eliminating contractions.  There's nothing of CB's vigor here, let alone her canny way with a clause.  Nor has Boylan paid careful attention to any of CB's tics; for example, she doesn't register CB's habit of writing long dialogue exchanges without tags.  If anything, Boylan goes to the opposite extreme: she not only loves tags, but also hates the verb "to say" with a passion bordering on the pathological.   There are no interesting turns of phrase, no subtle manipulations of tone or verb tense, no thoughtful uses of parallelism.  Moreover, Boylan doesn't have CB's knack of seamlessly knitting Biblical allusions into her narrative voice; at best, characters speak in platitudes.  What's left is the anonymous prose so familiar from mass-market paperbacks.   

*--Granted, in that instance, Scott was the immeasurably better writer.  Despite my well-earned reputation for being able to read the unspeakably unreadable, the sublime dullness of Queen-Hoo Hall nearly rendered me unconscious.  As snoring would have been highly inappropriate in the Newberry Library's reading room, I decided to cease and desist. 

Comments

[W. S. Cross]

When the protagonist of my novel was a little girl, she tried to look at the backs of photos to see if there was more to be seen there. We want to re-live the utter rapture of reader "Wuthering Heights," even if it means enduring inferior copies.