"That kind of novel"

I've been reading, so to speak, under the covers with a flashlight.  Having adored The Brontës Went to Woolworths since forever—marred as it is by thirties snobbery—I was delighted to find a lot of Rachel Ferguson coming back into print, thanks to Dean Street Press and their fabulously named, slightly wonky Furrowed Middlebrow imprint.  What set me off was re-reading bits of Monica Baldwin's I Leap Over the Wall (1949), a tried-and-true open-anywhere bedside book.  Miss Baldwin was a niece of Stanley Baldwin's and so a modest star in the great Macdonald sisters constellation:  Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, Kipling, Angela Thirkell, and all.  She entered an hermetically enclosed order of canonesses in 1914, just before the First World War, and came out in October 1941, at the height of the Second.  It's the autobiography of a time traveller.  Baldwin flung herself whole-heartedly and awkwardly into war work, encountering Life—fleas, jazz, munitions girls—and wolfing down all the fiction she could get her hands on.  She especially praised Frank Baker's Miss Hargreaves (1939) and Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931) and A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), and being fond of the second, I got my hands on the first and third, as well as Ferguson's Alas, Poor Lady (1937).

Miss Hargreaves is the invention of the narrator of Miss Hargreaves—he and a friend sketch out a mad, elderly poet in a flight of fancy, an act of unintended sorcery that summons her to his comic destruction.

The Brontës Went to Woolworths concerns an insular, eccentric, witty family—a widow and three daughters—who are co-creators of a real-time saga, a warp of their mundane life into which they weave their fantasies and fandoms:  a seaside pierrot, an elderly judge, an insufferable tin doll, the Brontës.  It's a cross between real-person fanfic and the loom of the Fates.  Slightly sinister whimsy.

A Harp in Lowndes Square is darker.  Another stage-mad quirky family—late Victorian this time—is poisoned at its roots by the monstrous Lady Vallant.  There is an appalling secret, a haunted staircase, second-sighted twins, who give the ghost-child Edward VI a flip book.  Heartbreaking and hilarious.

Her next book is mimetic and politely absolutely furious. Alas, Poor Lady follows the long downfall of four distressed gentlewomen, sisters, cheated of their lives by a halfwitted tyranny of elders.  Not a romp.  Ferguson makes up for snooting the poor governess in Brontës by turning the tables, showing Miss Scrimgeour in the thankless service of godawful households—though the author does briefly treat Scrimmie to one of her signature eccentric families, who love her dearly.

After that, for some reason, I found myself re-reading David Copperfield, still on the go.  I am not a great Dickensian.  But this one and I go back a long way.  I remember being about seven, reading it so hard I missed my homeward schoolbus.  The Murdstones are compelling.  A few years later, I wrote a satire of it, The Persecution and Assassination of Charles Dickens, &c., which was actually performed by my ninth-grade classmates.  All I can remember of it was the casting of an eerily perfect Mr. Dick.  I still don't see what David saw in that bounder Steerforth or in that squeak-toy Dora, but I'm fond of Miss Betsey Trotwood and Traddles.

The Dickens I love best is the RSC production of Nicholas Nickleby.  When I watch it, I always imagine Jo March at my elbow.

Nine