It's been a very busy week on the blog: I invited readers to name books which were 'always on charity shop shelves'. The response was massive, and the comments are a joy for anyone who read books 20 + years ago: from Neville Shute to Shirley Conran, Jalna, Forever Amber.... Do take a look, and we are still accepting suggestions
Charlotte Fairlie by DE Stevenson
published 1954
After idly mentioning ‘bad parents in fiction’ on the
blog, I started to think about the topic
and realized how many there were. And that was before my lovely commenters and blogfriends
pitched in. There is an avalanche of bad parenting out there – is it just
because they make for good plots, or is it that writers all had bad parents
themselves? Of course attitudes and beliefs change over the years - - what was
good parenting a while back will be bad now – but even so, there’s a lot to
gaze at in horror. I recently read a book by Margaret Kennedy, The Oracles, and
the parenting in that is quite shocking…
Attitudes to divorce (as always, my research is based not
entirely on novels of the period) strike us as being appalling, with the
emphasis on the ‘guilty party’, and the acceptance that whichever parent left
the family home would never see their children again. This was seen as both
fair, and better all round. Children were believed to get over it all much more
quickly that way. We hope things have come on since then… There was also this
unlikely claim: ‘People don’t realise how disturbing it is for a sick child to
see his parents.’ For all we know this may be true but I feel it would be
literally impossible to find anyone who nowadays thought it was a good idea to
keep parents away from sick children.
Blogfriend Constance came up with a particularly choice list
of bad parents in fiction, and I randomly chose this one to try….
And, shoutout as ever to the Dean St Press who
have made it available to us and earn my gratitude every week, it seems.
ADDED LATER: I realized (see comments) that I hadn't given an overall verdict, and might be considered to be rather snarky about this book. I have plenty of opinions on, and criticisms of, Charlotte Fairlie, but I enjoyed reading it hugely, it was entertaining and engaging, and very much a star in its cateory.
Anyway. When I
started, I wasn’t sure what the badness would consist of (and to be fair there
are a host of examples in this one harmless romantic book) but there came a
moment where I jumped in my seat and said ‘Oh no!’ out loud, disconcerting
those around me. ‘She never saw her father again’ – in this particular case,
the mother has died, and when the father remarries he ditches his daughter at
the request of his new wife.
There’s more. We have a bullying father who drives a child
to the brink of suicide, and there is another abandonment of a child to be
brought up by someone else. This is all seen as indicative of character, but
not really very serious. As hinted above, a visiting child is dangerously ill
and an apparently responsible adult argues strongly against sending for the
father.
It is truly a very strange book. The first half follows the
title character in her life as a young and very able headteacher of a girls’
boarding school. She deals with her board of governors, and the head of the
boys’ school, and a difficult member of staff, and also becomes very friendly
with two of her pupils, and (eventually) their families.
In the next long section of the book, all the (nice) main
characters end up on the Scottish island where one girl lives, to spend the
summer holidays together. There are picnics and expeditions, everyone is lovely
and has a great time. Then there is a dramatic event, and the possibility of
romance. The character who is Lord of the Isles is shown as violent and
unpleasant, and has natural authority over everyone around him. So you can
guess what his role will be. However…
That’s all put on hold, and the headteacher goes back to her
school. At Christmas she makes no plans, decides to spend the time alone, and ends
up in an inn in a tiny village, and gets to experience the real spirit of the
season.
SPOILER
Then there is a happy
ending.
The wrenching changes in tone and setting, the very strange
structure, the trip to Denmark for an educational conference in the middle (not
even as interesting as it sounds) – Stevenson would probably be expelled from a
creative writing course, but by this time she’d sold seven million books, so
what did she care? She wrote what she felt like, and her readers obviously
loved that.
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II happens during the
course of the book (so 2nd June 1953), and Charlotte is invited to
London to watch it. You would not be predicting what happens next. The school
celebrates the coronation a week or so later with a pageant of Queens.
And from my point of view – a historical pageant, and the
chance to visit again one of my favourite photo resources: The Queens are from
the Builth Wells
Historical Pageant.
I like pageants so much that I did special entries on them here
and here
and here:
all with links to other entries.
One very minor character seizes the day of the pageant to
surprise us:
Miss Stewart was almost
unrecognisable to-day for she was wearing a very flighty hat … It slipped to
the back of her head and gave her a somewhat rakish appearance…
[she removed] the flighty hat put
it upon a chair. Immediately Queen Boadicea sat down upon it, exclaiming that
she felt a bit wonky about the knees. Charlotte gave a cry of dismay. The hat
was done for.
I note that I covered DE Stevenson’s big bestseller Miss
Buncle’s Book on the blog, with,
again, a comment on Extreme Plotting. I also note that I haven’t yet – as
threatened – done a post on the imaginary book within Miss Buncle. One
day.
The Scottish aspects of the book reminded me of the Friends
series by Jane Duncan which I covered in depth on the blog – two roundup posts,
here
and here.
‘Between 2013 and 2016 I re-read all the My Friends books, and blogged on most
of them’. They should be candidates for the books
on every charity shop shelf, but I don’t think they do turn up much.
There isn’t all that much
description of Charlotte and her clothes – apart from her wearing a terrible
hat in order to look older for the board of governors – but I thought the top
picture, from the clover tumbler, might represent her workaday looks.
Boudicca is actually someone representing liberty in a march
for suffrage, but has the
look.
Flighty hat from the Vivat tumbler.
The coronation was central to a splendid crime story by Guy
Cullingford, Conjuror’s
Coffin, and also to a Mary Stewart book, Wildfire
at Midnight, which also has a Scottish setting.
Oh, wow! Bad parenting....Yes, there are so many, many novels with that theme, Moira. This particular one sounds, as you say, a bit strange, but still interesting in its way. And now, I really need to do a post on bad parenting in crime fiction. 'Cause, wow, is it there...
ReplyDeleteoh you do, SUCH a good topic, and so ideally suited to your encyclopedic knowledge.
DeleteIs this the one where the awful father keeps calling his anxious young son “Jocko?”
ReplyDeleteNo, but see comment below! She obviously has a wide range of bad parents.
DeleteNo, that bad parent is found in The House on the Cliff, and Glen is indeed a terrible parent. Discussion has been lively among Dessies as to who is the worse parent: the Professor from Charlotte Fairlie or Glen Siddons.
ReplyDeleteThank you Susan, I know you have expertise, and how hilarious that there is a league table being established. I may have to read The House on the Cliff, so I can form my own judgement!
DeleteMaybe good parents make for dull books....If Mr and Mrs Bennet had been good parents, where would P&P's plot have come from?
ReplyDeleteYes it's a very good point. I have written before now about absent parents in children's books, essential for the children to have wild adventures, and bad parents play their role too.
DeleteAs came up recently, Jane Austen fictional parents make you wonder about her own...
I didn't read the books, but I saw the miniseries "Patrick Melrose" and there was a really bad parent in it. I assume that would have been in the book as well.
ReplyDeleteYes absolutely - a truly dreadful parent. Some scenes from the book live in my mind in an unwelcome way. He is a brilliant writer but the subject matter is sometimes difficult to cope with.
DeleteI hope you enjoyed it despite the flaws! Re dreadful parents, I was thinking of Charlotte's father and the "she never saw him again" but if I didn't mention the Professor, I should have because he is even worse (at least Charlotte had a kind uncle) because actively cruel. It is a weird mixture of plots and settings but I always appreciate a good school story and I do like the parts about the Coronation and the pageant. There's another DES I read recently where the laird wants to kill the female protagonist's first husband because he is abusive to their child and threatens to get custody, and the loyal henchman kills him so the laird won't have to! That was almost as shocking as the attempted suicide in this book.
ReplyDeleteI know I've read some other good pageants in school stories but can't think of any now. I am somewhat reminded of the recent trend to dress up like a painting: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/6966574415194208/ Maybe just a pandemic game?
Did the bad parenting topic come up re Laura Haverard? I am trying to remember.
I've always thought Frances Brandon was a pretty rotten parent and only out for herself but maybe she genuinely thought her daughter should be Queen (although she had a better claim).
I realized that I didn't give an overall verdict and might seem to be rather snarky about it, but of course I loved it, very much enjoyed reading it and v grateful for the tipoff! I should go back and add a line to that effect...
DeleteHaverards of Vipont? Now there's some books I did love to criticize while enjoying. Not sure I've gone after the parents yet. Isn't there a Dad who refuses to open the letter with the exam results in it? I can remember being utterly horrified.
I met (online) another great blogfriend, Lucy Fisher, via Vipont - I read a hilarious review she'd done on amazon and got in touch to ask if I could use it as a guestblog...
oh yes, and Lady Jane Grey - what a dreadful story.... and wholly mistrust all her family
DeleteThe ever-reliable Saki (who was aunted - even worse than being parented) on parenting, via Clovis: "my mother never bothered about bringing me up. She just saw to it that I got whacked at decent intervals and was taught the difference between right and wrong; there is some difference, you know, but I've forgotten what it is.""
ReplyDeleteA very Saki view. He does seem to have had an awful-sounding childhood.
DeleteI don't think I knew till just now, looking him up, that he was related to Dornford Yates, being discussed over in the comments on charity-shop-books.
I've never got fat with Yates: if even someone who "worships language and forgives Anyone in whom it lives" as much as I do cannot take his racism, snobbery and assumptions of superiority long enough to tell if there's anything worth reading, there's something really repellent in his attitudes.
DeleteI read a couple, many years ago now, hated them, and haven't been tempted to wonder if I might change my opinion. I think he can be left severely alone.
DeleteThere's a difference between bad parents - incompetent, selfish, stupid, theory- or fashion-swallowing etc - and evil parents as in the "Patrick Melrose" books. Melrose senior is evil all-round. It isn't only his children that suffer from him.
ReplyDeleteI think an evil person would have to be a bad parent! There's might be a difference in intention, like the difference between manslaughter and murder, but the result would be the same.
DeleteAn evil person would have to be a bad parent, true, but most bad parents aren't deliberately evil - ignorant, foolish, incompetent - all kinds of vices - but not actively malevolent.
DeleteProper philosophical discussion.
DeleteMy feeble contribution is that people can't be blamed so much for doing what they were told at the time was right. Theories on child-raising vary so much.
There's a difference between that (no matter how flatout wrong the theory was) and deliberate cruetly, sadism, violence.
Given some of the theories about child-rearing there've been, I wonder if I was over-philanthropic in my views on parents - after all, parents choose which systems to decide are right.
DeleteWith Melrose - it's a long time since I read the books - I think it's suggested that he had children just so he'd have more - and more helpless - victims.
It's hard to judge re parenting theories. And when you have children it's quite brave to challenge whichever orthodoxy holds in your group. But it's the same issue in a lot of areas isnt it? When are you being brave and different and when are you being stubborn and refusing to accept the truth.
DeleteI don't remember that about Melrose pere, but wouldn't be surprised. He makes your flesh crawl to think of him.
There are an awful lot of quite horrible parents out there. As I used to be married to a schoolteacher (we're still married, he just is no longer teaching), I was inclined to brush off some of the stories he brought home. Then I retired and began doing reading therapy a couple days each week at a some of the local schools.
ReplyDeleteHe didn't tell me the half of it.
Yes. You get a glimpse into some of those lives, and you just have to shake your head.
DeleteThe aching chasms among the homelives of different children is horrifying.
Trollope's "Mr Scarborough's Family" has a very-scheming bad father, who spends most of the book not quite dying.
ReplyDeleteMore bad parents in Noel Streatfeild's Saplings and a (I think) very bad book she wrote called When the Sirens Wailed (significantly, written long after the war). The parents in The Children who Lived in a Barn who just gaily disappear abroad and as gaily come back as though nothing had happened. Mary Lennox's parents in The Secret Garden, who ignore her while they spend their time socialising. I'd better stop listing before I depress myself. You give me ideas for posts I ought to write!
ReplyDeleteOh what a collection of titles, brilliant. I have read Saplings and found it horribly depressing, but not the next two you mention. All the views of posh family in Secret Garden are awful, with the father who doesn't want to see Colin, with only Martha and Dickon's family (lower class) to save the day.
DeleteAnother novel with an interesting twist on bad parents: Guard Your Daughters by Dorothy Tutton.
ReplyDeleteBad mothers has also inspired an impressively large category of novels.
Oh I'd forgotten that one, good call. I remember reading it with great fascination, I really wasn't sure what we were going to conclude about some of the behaviour in it. Satisfyingly clear at the end!
Delete