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AURORA FLOYD by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Jul. 31st, 2013 10:55 pmIn which Braddon breaks one of her standard tropes with the idea that True Love may happen more than once to a woman, and that it is actually acceptable for a woman to love multiple times in her life! This is the only novel of Braddon's that comes to my mind where a female protagonist is allowed to have more than one lover without being condemned for it; generally the rule is that if you're a woman you must love and be faithful to the one you're with, and especially if you married the first one for money reasons, you'll be too old and second-hand to earn a second love if the first dies. This 1863 novel is actually one of Braddon's earlier ones, so it's not a case of her becoming more liberal in views as the general age advanced.
Braddon herself lived with a man to whom she wasn't married; when his mentally ill wife died in an asylum, they were free to formally tie the knot. Her fiction is generally condemnatory of similar behaviour.
Devastatingly beautiful ladies, dark secrets, love rivalries, hidden loves, blackmail, conveniently dramatic illnesses, plenty of swooning, murder...it's Braddon in somewhat substandard form, making sure to attempt to poke fun at the sort of novels she herself has written a fair few times. There were too few murders this time for my taste; the pacing was not what it could have been. And Braddon is generally rotten at character studies: she's apt to draw from stereotype, her heroines are invariably beautiful and virtuous and terrifically impractical, and shallowly exaggerated figures simply don't work well as psychological studies. Her form of art depends on sensational events to sustain it rather than for the reader to sit waiting for something to happen--as was the case in this book before the unhappy secret (that was not especially secret to the reader) finally ripped apart the contented couple.
(The CHARLOTTE'S INHERITANCE books are probably Braddon's best character studies, because she keeps to a relatively moderate setting rather than trying to bring in bouquets of baronets and knolls full of knights.)
There's this surprisingly modern line:
Heaven help the man whose heart is caught at the rebound by a fair-haired divinity, with dovelike eyes, and a low tremulous voice softly attuned to his grief.
Braddon herself lived with a man to whom she wasn't married; when his mentally ill wife died in an asylum, they were free to formally tie the knot. Her fiction is generally condemnatory of similar behaviour.
Devastatingly beautiful ladies, dark secrets, love rivalries, hidden loves, blackmail, conveniently dramatic illnesses, plenty of swooning, murder...it's Braddon in somewhat substandard form, making sure to attempt to poke fun at the sort of novels she herself has written a fair few times. There were too few murders this time for my taste; the pacing was not what it could have been. And Braddon is generally rotten at character studies: she's apt to draw from stereotype, her heroines are invariably beautiful and virtuous and terrifically impractical, and shallowly exaggerated figures simply don't work well as psychological studies. Her form of art depends on sensational events to sustain it rather than for the reader to sit waiting for something to happen--as was the case in this book before the unhappy secret (that was not especially secret to the reader) finally ripped apart the contented couple.
(The CHARLOTTE'S INHERITANCE books are probably Braddon's best character studies, because she keeps to a relatively moderate setting rather than trying to bring in bouquets of baronets and knolls full of knights.)
There's this surprisingly modern line:
Heaven help the man whose heart is caught at the rebound by a fair-haired divinity, with dovelike eyes, and a low tremulous voice softly attuned to his grief.
