blueinkedfrost

This book is beautifully written, challenging, and enticing. There are some complex theological and philosophical ideas mixed into the beautiful prose - not forced, not ponderous, naturally and nicely combined - and it's in service of ideas which aren't so common today.

The descriptions of the English countryside and English history are worth reading - Goudge had an amazing eye for detail, a love for her subject, and a grand gift. (I loved THE LITTLE WHITE HORSE and this adult novel has similar aspects that come into a full and complex bloom here.)

Lucilla Eliot is a grande dame of a grandmother with a beautiful estate in the country, Damerosehay, a tranquil and aesthetic home maintained by superhuman effort. She wants to leave it to her grandson David Eliot so the family line can continue. But if Lucilla's daughter-in-law Nadine Eliot finalises her divorce from stodgy husband George and marries her nephew by marriage David, this will tear the family apart. No more Damerosehay - no more happiness for Nadine's children - no more Eliot line.

"Keep your promises" is the ethical value given to this narrative. Don't divorce even if you're unhappy, even if you've fallen in love with someone else. Lucilla herself made this difficult moral choice: doomed to her own stodgy husband, Lucilla once had a passionate affair with a handsome doctor that could have ruined the lives of her lover, herself, and all her family. Lucilla gave up her love to keep her word. Now she expects Nadine and David to do the same thing.

"Children are the most important thing, because they are the next generation", and "Look after your aged parents", are two other key moral principles. But the responsibilities are not exactly evenly distributed. The narrative expects that women (not men) should refrain from careers in the world as a sacrifice for these values. Nadine runs an antique shop and is skilled at her work, but this achievement is considered nothing next to David's acting genius or George's public service position. And taking the sequels into account, Lucilla's family has two generations of surplus daughters - the tradition that one daughter in the family, the unattractive one, is required to never marry, never have a career, and spend her life in domestic chores and looking after her ageing parents. (I've heard anecdotes of parents who bribed suitors to stay away from the designated caretaker daughter. And this took place in the twentieth century, even.) It's pretty hypocritical that first the beautiful Lucilla has her servant do all the crappy, difficult chores of looking after her children in practice; then Lucilla's unattractive daughter becomes the spinster who does all the dirty work; and then Lucilla has a similarly unattractive granddaughter who will probably follow the same path.

In art, the artist always has the chance to load the dice. A skilled writer will seem to play fair. Goudge is very skilled. In Lucilla's story especially, the author's decisions come across as true. Because of the social stigma of divorce in Lucilla's time, Lucilla would have ruined her life and her lover's life if they had run away together. Nadine falling in love with her nephew by marriage is also an inherently troubling family situation in absolutely any time and place. Dear Abby would tell a twenty-first-century Nadine and David to be cautious and thoughtful.

Her [Lucilla's] generation had built from without inwards, had put the reality of law and tradition above the reality of personal feeling; but his built from within outwards, the truth of personal feeling must come first.

David eventually comes to decide that the second option is wrong in the story. It's certainly easy to agree that people should try not to make life-altering choices at the very moment of extreme personal feeling. It's also easy to appreciate the moral of becoming a mask: choose to behave well, even if you don't feel it, and over time it can be come a habit. The only problem is defining what consists of behaving well.

It was that declaration of Nadine's, that she wanted "to live her own life," that exasperated Lucilla beyond anything else in the whole wretched business. It was a remark frequently on the lips of the modern generation, she knew, and it annoyed her. For whose lives, in the name of heaven, could they live except their own? Everyone must look after something in this world and why were they living their own lives if they looked after antique furniture, petrol pumps or parrots, and not when they looked after husbands, children or aged parents?

There's a good point in here about the undervaluing of domestic work. But I think what it's skipping over is being human. People need interests, experiences, learning more about the world. In the novel, Lucilla Eliot and her daughter Margaret are more than housekeepers and caretakers of family - Lucilla enjoys dress and reading and chess, Margaret loves gardening. As Betty Friedan wrote, being solely confined to necessary domestic tasks would drive a lot of human beings bananas. And it's disingenuous not to notice that men in this schema clearly get to have fulfilling home as well as workplace lives with no qualms whatsoever.

Dear Sugar #77 has some fine writing on the opposite end of Goudge's theories.

But there was in me an awful thing, from almost the very beginning: a tiny clear voice that would not, not matter what I did, stop saying go.

Go, even though you love him.

Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.

Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.

Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.

Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.

Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.

Go, even though you once said you would stay.

Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.

Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.

Go, even though there is nowhere to go.

Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.

Go, because you want to.

Because wanting to leave is enough.

Speaking personally, I think my character is more like Lucilla than David. I'd be more likely to stick to promises and family than run off. This is more a statement about my personality type than my principles.

Where I think the fundamental flaw in Goudge's argument lies is this: it's just not true that one romantic relationship that ended in separation ruins a person for life and means they will never achieve a good marriage and their children will never be happy again. In the real world, there are plenty of people who have a first divorce and a long-term, fantastic second marriage - often with children, no less. Also in the real world, it's healthier for children to experience divorce than stay with two constantly quarrelling parents. (Goudge wants to believe that the parents can always patch up their relationship if they try hard enough. But again, this is not actually how the real world plays out.)

I can't possibly think that getting a divorce is a dramatic moral crime against ethics and humanity. Times change. People deserve freedom. Adults and children are more resilient than Goudge thinks. Source: a good recipe against divorce is probably to marry only once you're a mature adult.

One wants to agree with Goudge that thoughtfulness, consideration, keeping one's promises, and not making decisions that alter everyone else's lives while in a flush of emotions are all good values. The novel's intelligent and beautifully written. I enjoyed it, even as it frustrated me.

This is exactly the book I wanted to read about Livia. Studious, cautious, spinning an interesting volume out of a relative paucity of available sources.

I particularly like the anecdote that Livia's husband Augustus wrote out the arguments he wished to use with her in a notebook beforehand. The portrait Dennison gives is a politically savvy, intelligent, sophisticated, restrained, gentle woman; while she held power, records of her tend to show her on the side of offering mercy. She also seems to have been kind to her servants. If Livia had Machiavellian depths, then they were probably the sort that Machiavelli tried to promote - good government, stability, and pursuing popularity by doing nice things. Livia exercised power by promoting traditional female roles as a modest, private wife. Her favourite activities and charities included female religious cults, young girls' dowries, parents of newborn babies, and the victims of fires. She publicly wove her husband's garments herself on a loom as a traditional Roman wife, and was renowned for not wearing expensive jewellery or clothing even though she employed a pearl-setter among her servants. She enjoyed gardening. It's undeniable that Livia had power in the Roman empire, and in order to have it followed a patriarchal system to all its strictness.

The poisoning plots placed at the Empress' doorstep, Dennison argues, were probably not Livia's fault. It's true that all the relatives between Livia's son Tiberius and the throne died, but many of the deaths occurred at a geographical distance from Livia and coincided with general plague outbreaks. It was an era where life expectancy was not great. Considering that the accusations come from sources long after Livia's death, there are points in favour of reducing the melodrama and assuming that Livia was simply a keen gardener and a sensible, moderate politician. Much as there are points that Hillary Clinton probably didn't murder Vince Foster.

Livia's emotional life was probably quite troubled if one credits the assumption that she was not the sociopath from I, CLAUDIUS. Livia lost her younger son, Drusus, and a variety of other family members she would have known very well. There's a terrible poem (once attributed to Ovid) written posthumously to her death, about the loss of her younger son:

Livia, bear up that load. You draw our eyes and ears to you, we notice all your actions... Stay upright, rise above your words, keep your spirit unbroken...Our search for models of virtue, certainly, will be better when you take on the role of first lady.

Livia comes from an adventurous background, fleeing a political coup with her first husband through a flaming forest with her baby son and a future emperor in her arms - only to be later married to one on the opposite side of the politics and ascend to power with him. There was a keen passion between Livia and Octavian, not diminished by Mark Anthony's noting of certain hypocrises:

What's come over you? Is it because I go to bed with the queen?...And what about you, is Livia the only woman you go to bed with? I congratulate you, if at the time you read this letter you haven't also had Tertulla or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia or the whole lot of them. Does it really matter where you get a stand or who the woman is?

Scandal and gossip is, apprarently, still extremely interesting today.

Livia was given a series of unprecented honours, including the right to manage her own affairs without a guardian, the right of inviolability (sacrosancitas), adoption by her husband after his death (giving her an Augusta title), and eventual deification by Emperor Claudius, who was her grandson in the extremely tangled genealogical bush of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

After Livia's husband died she lived on as dowager empress, her relationship with her son Tiberius becoming strained to the point that she forwarded old private letters from Tiberius' stepfather to wound him. (He had a "sour and stubborn" character.) However, Livia died of a healthy old age - I'm very tempted to imagine her as one of those aged self-doctoring crank sorts, who brew their own herbal medicines and insist that a glass of red a day is what keeps them going - and was well remembered. Tacitius quotes a tribute:

The glory of her country they called her - the only true descendant of Augustus, the unmatched model of traditional behaviour.

If there's one criticism to make of this book it's that Dennison's timeline tends to fluctuate, but even so this is a well-researched and sensible overview that makes a good read.

There remain beautiful visual detail of Livia's garden-style personal decor, such as this:

The most fascinating material in this book, I thought, was Stephenson's pages on the undeniably dramatic side story of Constantine's wife Fausta and her stepson Crispus - who may have fallen in love with each other, or intrigued together to overthrow Constantine, or intrigued against each other, or something else entirely - and were killed for it. That particular historical episode is extremely difficult to make uninteresting, and the overview of theories behind the causes of death seemed fairly and lucidly explained. There's also a convincing impression of the scuttlebutt and rumour trails and coverups of that time - human phenomena not limited to Constantine's era.

Fausta was married to Constantine as a child bride for political reasons. Crispus was her stepson of approximately the same age. Three years after her marriage, Fausta had a possibly dramatic episode of saving Constantine's life; Stephenson quotes a primary source excerpt that makes a good tale of it. Fausta learnt of her father Maximian's plot to murder Constantine at night in her bedroom, and warned her husband. She pretended to obey her father by removing her guards, but in fact the person inside her room was a disposable eunuch. After Maximian killed the eunuch and ran out boasting of killing Constantine, Constantine revealed himself with a lot of armed men. Soon afterward, Maximian died of suicide or extremely assisted suicide.

Fausta and Crispus spent a good deal of time together. Crispus was executed by his father, even though previously he and Constantine had a close relationship. Fausta was murdered shortly afterward by suffocation in a hot bath; Stephenson finds it convincing that this can be linked to abortion methods of the time. Their memory was damned, their history erased from official documents and monuments, and the details escaped the ages.( Read more... )