If it had only been made into a film, I’m convinced that Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian would enjoy the same public flourishes of devotion that Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm can claim.
Both novels are so bookishly satirical that we bookish folks have to squint to see the satire.
But where Stella Gibbons was casting glances at the work of Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith, Elizabeth Taylor is looking in the direction of the Brontë sisters and Daphne du Maurier.
And once we know it’s there, we might get a chuckle at it, but chances are we will simply enjoy the novel’s bookishness and overlook the barbs therein.
The trick is that we so readily identify with the quiet governess at the heart of Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian.
Where the less-bookish reader might laugh out loud at Cassandra’s foolishness, the bookish reader is immediately sympathetic and only softly chuckles, at worst. The satirical edge is smoothed.
“She was setting out with nothing to commend her to such a profession [that of governess], beyond the fact of her school lessons being fresh still in her mind and, along with that, a very proper willingness to fall in love, the more despairingly the better, with her employer.”
Let the tongue-clicking and head-shaking ensure: we bookish folks know exactly where Cassandra is headed.
Even if she is headed for the land of “Dear Reader: I married him”, there’s a madwoman in the attic who’s going to make her life hell first.
[Poor Cassandra. She might bear the name of a princess, but the classical Cassandra was thought quite mad. While she might have had inside knowledge of what was really going on with that wooden horse, nobody believed her story. And then there was all that kurfuffle in the temple when the statue of Athena got knocked down. Watch out for tipsy statuary!]
The drama plays out for Elizabeth Taylor’s Cassandra in Cropthorne Manor. Marion Vanbrugh employs her there, as governess to the young Sophy.
It’s impossible not to think of Mr Rochester when you think of Marion Vanbrugh, but he is as unlike Charlotte Brontë’s character as he is like.
And the satire resides there, in that gap, as well, but we bookish folks who want to see more of the classic romance with Mr Rochester are likely less-inclined to focus on the differences.
We, like Cassandra, have already made our minds up about certain things; we are not about to let reality get in the way.
For the reality is, that reality is not equipped to compete with romance.
Palladian opens with a sepia print of Holiday’s Dante and Beatrice, which has long hung on Cassandra’s wall. The characters therein read Tristram Shandy, Oscar Wilde, Little Women, John Vanbrugh, Russian novels, Anne Radcliffe, and Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” (which focuses on the romance inspired by the arrival of a young tutor — rather than a governess — with the lady of the house).
Palladian‘s characters are stuffed full of expectations. Reality is bound to fall short.
Only Tom, who is the antithesis of Mr Rochester (or, at least, we are intended to think so, but, really, is he that different in essence, when you really think about it, without your rose-coloured-Jane-Eyre-glasses on?) appears to stand in contrast to this idea.
The sepia artwork on Tom’s bedroom walls? Anatomical sketches. Now that’s reality.
But even he is susceptible. He used to imagine walking in the wood with his lover like the couple in Rossetti’s “How They Met Themselves”.
Tom’s loneliness and sorrow seems to surpass that of Cassandra, and it is rooted in the gap between romance and reality.
(Or are we merely distracted by Tom’s intense unhappiness simply because we are so distracted by the Jane Eyre in Cassandra, because we are re-writing her an ending that suits us, overlooking all the portents of unhappiness that linger about her in Palladian, when we peer over top those rose-hued spectacles.)
Tom is unhappy (and the reasons for it are only revealed rather late in the novel) and the segments of the novel devoted to his character are soaked with it. But in the bulk of Palladian, the facade of the story, like the facade of the crumbling manor house, is mostly rather pleasant, or, at least, just fine.
The sharpness is glimpsed in passing. A train rips “through the sullen landscape like scissors through calico”. Sleep would “creep up stealthily, a timid little animal, would not come if it knew he was there, waiting, greedily, artfully”. Her head “became full of confusion like the snowstorm in a glass paper-weight”.
Efficient or deadly. Isolated or protected. Peaceful or pending doom. A safe place or a prison.
Palladian never crosses the line into caricature and, so, readers can draw their own lines, place the characters of Elizabeth Taylor’s novel in those gaps, as they will.
Satire viewed in the rearview mirror may be sharper than it appears.
[Note: The Read-a-long for Elizabeth Taylor’s A Game of Hide and Seek will launch here, officially, on Monday, May 7, 2012. Still time to join in!]
I remember reading this book 4 or 5 years ago, and while I liked it I never got around to writing about it at the time, possibly because it didn’t leave as strong an impression on me as some of her other books. You’ve reminded me to dig it out again for another try.
Technically this was a reread for me but I believe I read it first when I’d recently “discovered” Elizabeth Taylor and I just gobbled it up without thinking very much, simply wanting “more Taylor”. Maybe something similar happened to you when you first read Palladian. This makes me think I should not only reread all the Taylors but, also, all the Pyms (another author read-in-a-blur). Thanks for peeking at an archived post!
My ears perked up at the comparison to Cold Comfort Farm. I haven’t read any of this author or really heard much of her before.
She has been unfairly overlooked, so it’s great to see her work being brought forward to readers’ attentions once more; it’s getting easier to find her work, both new and second-hand, which is so reassuring.
Wow. I kind of need this book right now.
This morning I’ve been thinking that it’s kind of like the other side of the coin from Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went to Woolworths, which left me with a sunnier feeling overall. I remember it as having the same kind of bookish feel, but without the darkness.
This sounds delicious. Exactly the sort of thing I need after a surfeit of depressing reads.
It has its dark side for sure, but if you went into it looking for the satirical side of it, you might find that part of it more amusing than disturbing, and, anyway, there is the craft to admire. You must have SOMEthing on your shelves to take the sting out of your recent reading?
Shari Lapena’s Happiness Economics has soothed the sting. Have you read it? She’s very funny.
No! And dang, I had it in my hand in the library on Friday and then put it back on the shelf (no doubt someone smarter than I has nabbed that copy since!) because I had so many others in hand already. If I’d seen your comment, it would have been top-of-stack!
Perhaps we can do a read-along when you get it!
You enjoyed it so much that you’d be game to read it again? Or are you still reading now, thinking I could maybe catch up?