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Jon Borage --murderer?
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Werner
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Feb 14, 2010 03:08PM

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Good idea to get a new one started Werner.



But I still think the feelinng that haunted the house was misery and despair , not guilt


It was in the window seat that she felt "like lowering oneself into a well of icy water. It wasn't just the dealthly cold, it was the awful feeling of misery and despair. (There was this same feeling outside near the porch also wasn't there?)
Also Susan the maid that felt it, and she also told Charlotte that her grandmother (I believe that would have been Olivia, ) once SAW something!
"quote:- A boy, just about to be taken with a fit. In the hall!" She said he looked so real , that she went to help him and found that he wasn't there at all!
I can't quite work out about the two distinct "feelings" One, the misery and despair, and Two the terror and dread (where did this event come from?"
There are so many little side lines and occurences in all of NLs books, that you could spend your lifetime searching and unravelling them! (If only we could have asked NL whether Jon did intend to kill his uncle, or was it accidental, or was it that he thought "It might happen" (Or maybe she left that to her reader's imagination!
I just had a thought! Could the feeling of terror and dread come from another era? Remember when Alice had the Parliament soldier's come and she said she needed to go to the kitchen, and then stole back and listened outside the door, and knew that they had found out that a delivery of boots for the King was imminent and that her husband Rawley and the team were in deadly danger?


I feel less sorry for Jon than for some others - even though I agree it is absolutely true what Mary says, that Uncle Francis ruined Jon's life, thwarting his intellect and love. But that was pretty routine for so many of the girls and woman of the era ( and is so still for many everywhere). And they - or at least NL's girls and women seemed less self dramatising and more philosophical.


" . . . I saw what was left for me. Nothing. Norhing fo rmy mind, because Uncle francy didn't hold with book learning; nothing for my heart because he didn't hold with apprentices marrying. . . . . My uncle had taken me, spoled and deformed me as surely as though he had sawn off my head, cut out my heart, and used my dead hands for hammers. . . . . I stood there and I died."
No, of course I don't really justify or condone murder for such reasons, but then we're lucky enough to live long after "the old way of apprenticing boys so that their master's will was law, the old way of making girls marry the man their father chose . . . ."


Smail was probably one of NL most despicable characters, along with Dave Glenny in R to R. Denny was the more obviously violent and had, perhaps less cause for his awfulness ( Smail had been a slave )but Smail's behaviour and attitude and willingness to ruin lives makes him someone whose death you kind of cheer at .
I think, for myself , I would like to have a clear position ( ie killing is always wrong) but in reality, the deaths , even killings, of say, child rapists and torturers leave me unmoved - even pleased. And I have enormous difficulties with the 'honour killings' of girls and women in some cultures . I cannot honestly say I would not like to see the perpetrators dead too.
I do think NL was a master at this stuff, and never actually melodramatic about it either .

Like you, I'm not as much of an absolutist in this area as I might have appeared to be above. As a Christian, I oppose murder and believe in (and try to practice) the ethic of hating the sin but loving the sinner; but I'm also human, and I can't say that the killing of a rapist or sadist evokes any tears from me, either. (When Barb and I lived in Indiana back in the 80s, that state sent a young woman to prison for killing a guy who had raped her; my comment at the time was that they should have pinned a medal on her.) And confronted with the monstrous inversion of moral order represented by the legal systems in some societies, such as the so-called "honor killings," I would agree that justice for the perpetrators ought to trump legality. So like the rest of us in this flawed world, I live with some moral ambiguity, too!

NL did indeed deal with situations like this in a very good way, and there was no unneccesary violence and sensationalism in her writings. In was just in the right way that she gave us the incentive and good reason to debate and mull over the issues of the day and those characters that have given us all food for thought!
I can recall more than one instance, when I felt the hurt that they felt, and the bitterness and anger, and joy too! Her characters were so varied and yet there were similarities in some of them, that gave us the link between the books from different eras, so we know that mankind has not really changed in all those hundreds of years!


I was so pleased to see that Amazon here in the UK were republishing them. I don't know if Amazon in the US are doing the same, but I am sure there must be more people out there ready to be amazed and thrilled by her writings!

I used to think that Jon Borage did not deliberately kill his uncle, ( I wanted to think so I believe) but have come to see that yes he did, it is that crucial word "but " as in "but at the same time, I laid my right hand on the ladder....." Then again, might it have meant , 'but unfortunately at the same time I ....
Oooh I do love NL!
Have we ever done a group read of it ?




Do you want copy of my ( admittedly rather amateurish) Rowhedge genealogy Robert? Email me at mmsbk@tpg.com.au if so .

