Lovers of Victorian Gothic mysteries will have loads of fun with this one, quite different in tone from the norm, and lovers of literary fiction will admire the author’s ability to describe and bring the period to life, while also dealing with important sociological and religious issues. Written by Alastair Sim, great-nephew of the famed actor of the same name, while he was still a student at the University of Glasgow, the novel takes the Victorian police procedural in new directions. Inspector Archibald Allerdyce, an emotionally damaged man who no longer believes in God, and Sergeant Hector McGillivray, even more damaged from his army experiences during the colonial rebellion in India, have been ordered by the highest levels of government to solve the disappearance of William Bothwell-Scott, the Duke of Dornoch, wealthiest man in Scotland. When he is discovered shot dead and pitched into a well, formerly a mine, on his estate, the number of potential suspects is so long that the government decides, for political reasons, to announce his death as accidental. Where this novel differs from most other novels of its genre is in its mood—the customary happy ending, with all details resolved, is omitted. Instead, the reader is left to ponder the social and religious issues that the author has raised as his themes.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Todd Lincoln, Edvard Munch, and even, reportedly, Mae West were only a few of the famous adherents of Spiritualism, a movement which swept the country from around 1850 through the 1920s. In CAPTIVITY, author Deborah Noyes recreates the story of this movement from its inauspicious start by two children—Margaret “Maggie” Fox, age fourteen, and her younger sister “Kate,” age eleven. These children, just by appearing in the small houses in their neighborhood near Rochester, New York, could inspire rappings by “other-worldly presences” on the walls, tables, and ceilings. Alternating with the story of the Fox children is a parallel narrative beginning in London in 1835. Clara Gill, a shy nineteen-year-old painter of animals, falls for an assistant zookeeper who is way below her “station.” The novel succeeds in creating the mood of the times and the circumstances which made Spiritualism such an attractive alternative to the traditional beliefs of the day, and the characters’ personalities often give life to these alternative points of view.
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July, an elderly former slave, is writing her story for her son Thomas, who grew up away from his birthplace and became educated and trained as a printer in England. July wants him to understand the story of her life–her slavery in Jamaica–a life her son has never known. What follows is a family history, one irrevocably tied to Amity Plantation, where July, the mulatto daughter of Kitty, a slave, and a Scottish overseer, has lived with her mother, accompanying her as she works the plantation in the 1820s. July, while still a child, soon catches the eye of Caroline Mortimer, the widowed sister of John Howarth, owner of Amity, and she decides to train July as her maid. Wresting her without warning from Kitty, who does not “own” her own child, Caroline renames the child “Marguerite” and sets about training her. As July grows and learns to manipulate the self-centered Caroline, Caroline herself becomes less “English,” less “civilized,” and even more autocratic, until she resembles the plantation owners themselves, who regard their workers as property, not human. The Great Slave Rebellion in 1831 is inevitable.
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Middlemarch, originally published in eight separate volumes, is an enormous novel with a scope as epic as its length, often considered Eliot’s masterwork. While developing characters and complex romances, however, she also illustrates a variety of themes related to the social milieu of the early 1830s. Three or four main plots keep the reader enthralled for the nearly one thousand pages of this epic novel.
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Anne Elliot, age twenty-seven as the book opens, is an older than usual heroine for Austen. As a very young woman, she had been deeply in love with Frederick Wentworth, a handsome young naval officer of no fortune and uncertain prospects who loved her deeply. The two became engaged, but Lady Russell, acting on behalf of Anne’s deceased mother, persuaded Anne to break off her engagement, convincing her that Wentworth could never be happy within their elegant family or make her happy, since she would an outcast from the family and from the society she had always known. Anne has forever regretted the fact that she allowed herself to be persuaded, and for the past eight years has not been attracted to anyone else, turning down a marriage proposal which had been regarded as ideal. When Sir Walter, in dire financial straits, decides to lease Kellynch Hall, the family estate, to Admiral Croft and remove the family to the town of Bath, Anne has no idea that this will bring Frederick Wentworth back into her life. Jane Austen’s final novel, freer than most of her others from the rigid behavior expected of heroines.
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