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The Bad Sister
This novel opens with an account of the extraordinary events surrounding the life and death of Michael Dalzell, a wealthy Scottish landowner. Unsolved mysteries and strange coincidences seem inexplicable until the diary of his illegitimate daughter, Jane Wild, comes to light. Emma Tennant has written several novels including "The Colour of Rain", "Black Marina","The Crack", "Hotel de Dream" and "The Last of the Country House Murders".
223 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Emma Tennant
96 books37 followersSince the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 11, 2014
This immaculately penned gothic thriller from 1978 is an act of homage to James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—often cited as one of the first ‘postmodern’ texts and one of the few from Scotland—and romps along with enough interest for fans of cerebral horror or psychological mysteries. Revolving around a somewhat weak revenge plot concerning a pompous laird who booted several squatting sisters from his estate, and the subsequent revenge and supernatural shenanigans of one Jane Wild, The Bad Sister retains its interest through the precise and arresting prose, failing at the level of plot and logic. Framed within an ‘Editor’s Preface,’ the central narrative is a mixture of fantasies, visions, and mental deviations, with characters real or imagined populating the first-person ‘Journal of Jane Wild’ (narrated in an elevated literary style—thus contra to the journal form), and the surreal rush of Tennant’s language keeps the reader agog for the short duration. Decent.
February 28, 2016
Very good, and I can see why Angela Carter liked it - some excellent psycho-sexual blurring of reality, and lots of that "occult power of Womanhood" that certain feminist writers in the 70s and 80s were so fond of.
March 28, 2012
Emma Tennant is a new author to me, I picked this up on a lark and I have to say I was quite pleasantly surprised by this dreamlike little novella.
The story is presented as the notes of a reporter that is writing an article on the murders of a famous British/Scottish lord and his daughter. In her research she comes across the diary of the woman who is presumed to be the killer - The Lord's illegitimate daughter. The diary itself is the meat of the story, although the reporter's notes on the events leading up to the diary and afterwards provide a nice framing to the madness of the diary.
I don't want to give too much away but I really appreciated Tennant's writing style. While the reporter's notes were easy to read and get into, the diary itself was so dense and sometimes very hard to understand, but the use is perfect in the context of a woman who we are not sure if she is descending into madness or is really overcome by supernatural events. The writing is poetic and lush, very heavy but so interesting. A few times I had to go back to read a passage over again, but didn't mind.
A sample of the writing:
"Waiting is painful because it is an eternal present. The past is frozen, the future atrophied. And objects become lifeless too: the armchair which a short time ago contained Mrs. Marten, had been an indispensable part of her maddening pose, is square and stiff as a chair in a hyper-realist painting. The Cloth on the round table goes down to the ground in folds that could never be disturbed. On the table are a half-dead geranium in a pot, a tubular straw container which was made to put a glass in, in a tropical country where sweat and heat make glasses drop from hands - it holds broken fibre-tip pens, and out-of-date postage stamps - and a pile of books and papers, all covered with a fine film of invisible, immovable dust. I sit like an object myself, one leg crossed over the other - it would be as hard to part them as to roll two tree trunks in opposite directions. My left arm is firmly down on the arm rest of the settee. My right hand holds a glass of white wine, which is from time to time raised to my mouth. In this state of permanent suspension, I wait."
I would liken this to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, a book where you are unsure if the woman is crazy, or if there is really something more, something unnatural that is happening. Definitely worth the read.
The story is presented as the notes of a reporter that is writing an article on the murders of a famous British/Scottish lord and his daughter. In her research she comes across the diary of the woman who is presumed to be the killer - The Lord's illegitimate daughter. The diary itself is the meat of the story, although the reporter's notes on the events leading up to the diary and afterwards provide a nice framing to the madness of the diary.
I don't want to give too much away but I really appreciated Tennant's writing style. While the reporter's notes were easy to read and get into, the diary itself was so dense and sometimes very hard to understand, but the use is perfect in the context of a woman who we are not sure if she is descending into madness or is really overcome by supernatural events. The writing is poetic and lush, very heavy but so interesting. A few times I had to go back to read a passage over again, but didn't mind.
A sample of the writing:
"Waiting is painful because it is an eternal present. The past is frozen, the future atrophied. And objects become lifeless too: the armchair which a short time ago contained Mrs. Marten, had been an indispensable part of her maddening pose, is square and stiff as a chair in a hyper-realist painting. The Cloth on the round table goes down to the ground in folds that could never be disturbed. On the table are a half-dead geranium in a pot, a tubular straw container which was made to put a glass in, in a tropical country where sweat and heat make glasses drop from hands - it holds broken fibre-tip pens, and out-of-date postage stamps - and a pile of books and papers, all covered with a fine film of invisible, immovable dust. I sit like an object myself, one leg crossed over the other - it would be as hard to part them as to roll two tree trunks in opposite directions. My left arm is firmly down on the arm rest of the settee. My right hand holds a glass of white wine, which is from time to time raised to my mouth. In this state of permanent suspension, I wait."
I would liken this to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, a book where you are unsure if the woman is crazy, or if there is really something more, something unnatural that is happening. Definitely worth the read.
August 7, 2013
I love this book. Deliriously haunting and indelibly spooky. The writing is both grittily specific and absolutely hallucinatory, drawing on ancient British faerie lore to spin a riveting contemporary story. I read it many years ago and still vividly recall its unique world and chilling details such as the bleeding out of green -- but not red--as one enters the supernatural world. Emma Tennant's language is gorgeous.
January 22, 2023
Fascinating, but I wish I’d known it was a rewrite of Justified Sinner because it would have made a lot more sense for me to have read that first rather than being more than a little puzzled as to what the hell was going on in this
December 30, 2020
I wanted to like this book but found the plot of it plain muddled. There were passages in it that I was sure were meant to be dream or fantasy sequences which I only realised might have been that when something more down to earth and cogent was mentioned after.
The idea of a book about how confusing but intensely real life in the 1970's was for many women was surely interesting, but the execution of that idea failed.
Good points; the book was short and easy to read.
The idea of a book about how confusing but intensely real life in the 1970's was for many women was surely interesting, but the execution of that idea failed.
Good points; the book was short and easy to read.
August 18, 2017
I keep reading the sentences but they are not sinking in. There is nothing happening in mind. Clearly, this book wasn't for me.
March 25, 2020
WTF?? Weird, so weird.
August 10, 2015
Psychological novel allusing to Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a justified sinner. The novel is deeply confusing: characters are cyphers, merge into one another and may or may not even be real. When we get on to Jane's diary time becomes distorted also and we jump seemlessly between the present and the past - showing the confusion of the narator. It also plays with themes of supernatural vs reality. Despite the confusion I did find this very readable and fascinating. Fans of things like Sarah Waters The Littlest Stranger will find this one of interest.
April 8, 2013
I got really into this book... And then vampires appeared. Wasn't expecting that one. A little too fantastical.
July 31, 2013
it was ok. got a bit lost with what was going on.
April 2, 2015
Didn't like it at all. Started skipping. It took a lot of effort to finish. In fact it is nothing more but a feminist copycat of James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews