3.5 slightly confused stars.

This novel is a rarity, in that it is an American novel of the Victorian era written by a woman. It is full of New England whale-oil financed lifestyles, and paints a fascinating female perspective of the time.

In the beginning, it felt like this was destined to be just a group of vignettes of life as seen through the eyes of an upper-class girl, but it evolved into something much deeper than that. I could not shake the feeling, however, that there were too many things Stoddard wanted to say but felt she could not. Her attempts to lay things between the lines were sometimes successful and sometimes perplexing. I suffered several times from a feeling that I had missed some significant event, but a re-read of the chapter would offer no enlightenment.

I did find parallels to Jane Austen in the romantic aspects of the novel. There was so much that remained unsaid between men and women, and social standing and ancestral claims were such a huge influence on which couples and families might be allowed to form alliances. The main heroine, Cassandra Morgeson, was a bit of a maverick, which was often distressing to the ladies and always appealing to the men; her sister Veronica was much harder to fathom for me. I don’t think I have ever encountered a character (or a real person) who was quite like Veronica.

I did like Stoddard’s writing style. Her story swept me along, and even when the plot seemed a bit thin in the beginning, the writing was gorgeous and the descriptive passages were enough to keep me interested.

One passage which I found very moving was this one:

There were intervals now when all my grief for mother returned, and I sat in my darkened chamber, recalling with a sad persistence her gestures, her motions, the tones of her voice, through all my past remembrance. The places she inhabited, her opinions and her actions I commented on with a minuteness that allowed no detail to escape. When my thoughts turned from her, it seemed as if she were newly lost in the vast and wandering Universe of the Dead, which I had brought her.

I have felt similar sentiments regarding my own mother, and the words had a great deal of impact for me.

I think that, had Stoddard been allowed a freer expression of her ideas, she might have written a four or even five star book. As it is, while I liked the book, enjoyed it and am happy to have read it, it missed something essential that I could not put an exact finger on. It was, in the end, a bit too nebulous in expression to suit me well.
( )

This one just didn't do it for me. There were bits that I found funny (just the language, and imagining my own children using the sort of formal language children used early in the book), but there wasn't much that moved me or, frankly, interested me. ( )

A strange book, and one I'm surprised isn't more widely read. Not even 50 ratings on goodreads? It's definitely worthy of more attention.

I saw it compared to Bronte and Gaskell, and while it definitely has structural similarities to Jane Eyre and shares some of Gaskell's interests, it's also very American and of-Massachusetts. ( )