Frances Burney's Evelina

I'm listening to Evelina on Librivox and it's making my really happy. The reader has a weird fake British accent which I don't understand (I don't understand why she's doing it, anyway—when she announces her name and the Librivox stuff at the beginning, she does it in a convincingly American accent), but other than that it's really fun. Evelina is kind of a total bitch—smart, critical, funny—but also scared and shy and making enough mistakes that her judgments don't strike me as bitchy so much as really, really fun. That is, Evelina doesn't know how out of place she is, which means that her criticisms aren't nearly as nasty as they really should register. And Burney's SO GOOD at putting in really appalling characters—Evelina's embarrassing French grandmother Mme Duval, Captain Mervin, Clement Willoughby are all terrible, terrible people who say ridiculous petty shit ALL THE TIME and behave badly and pick fights really appalling fights with each other. And then, the best part, Evelina's describing all this shit in letters to her guardian, who's even more socially clueless than she is (that is, more out of the loop of fashion—he's a much better judge of character than she is, but his letters haven't been in the narrative a while, so I tend to forget it), so it never feels as gossippy and bitchy as it properly is. Good job, Burney. She's created the perfect critical epistolary narrator without making her vulnerable to being called rude or impertinent.

Why the 19th C. Makes Me Sad

People keep disappearing in Copperfield.   First DC the elder dies, then DC is sent away from home, which he's young enough to experience as everyone he loves disappearing from his life.  When he comes home again, he sees his mother and baby brother briefly, but then they die, and he only sees them again lying in state in the parlor.  (By dying, they finally stop disappearing—they come to rest in the graveyard next to the church next to DC's father.  He always knows where to find them after that.)  

DC goes to school and sees Mr. Mell fired.  He leaves school, and doesn't see anyone from there for a long time.  He works, and seems to disappear from his own life; eventually, he runs away and really does disappear from it.  He finds his Aunt, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone come find him, but finally they leave again and he's glad, for the first time in the novel, to see anyone who leaves gone.  Later he sees Mr. Wickfield slowly losing his mind.  

The worst kinds of leaving for DC, though, seems to be committed by women.  When Emily Peggotty runs away from home with Steerforth, it's a HUGE problem.  Everyone is worried that Em'ly will become a whore in London, but no one will say this directly.  (Earlier, a woman--her friend Martha--ran away from home and seems to have become a whore in London, but she's also a very crazy and apparently unattractive whore, so it's hard to tell.) Pages and pages and pages are spent mourning Em'ly and worrying about her and wondering if she'll ever come back.   (Meanwhile, Mr. Spenlow and Mr. Barkis have both died, but their disappearances weren't nearly so hard.  DC seems more worried that Agnes is going to marry Uriah Heep and so disappear from his life, even though Agnes swears she'll never marry Uriah.)  Likewise, Dora is now about to die, too, which DC has to keep worrying over, hinting at it and alluding to it and anticipating it--then he takes a couple chapters to talk about other people, so that the narrative is left dreading her death.  

All the women are going away.  Men like Mr. Peggotty have to follow women around, to make sure they don't disappear, because leaving home, in any way, means becoming a whore.  (Whores are TERRIBLE, although the novel won't talk about this clearly enough for me to tell why.)   Death is probably whores too.  

Persuasion—the beginning and the end

Here's what Jane Austen's Persuasion is about:

Girl—smart, sensible, aristocratic, loving—marries silly, pretty aristocrat with a gambling problem. They have three daughters and then she dies. Middle daughter is the only one who inherited her character. Best friend looks out for middle daughter (because widower is completely incapable of being a good patriarch), but fails when daughter falls in love with a sea-captain. She loves him, in part, because he reminds her of her dead mother. They want to marry, but best friend thinks it's a bad idea and convinces widower-father to also disagree.

Eight years pass. Middle daughter learns to think for herself; refuses to marry eldest son of local squire, although best friend was in favor; youngest daughter marries him instead. Youngest and eldest daughters both never quite grew up, but seem not to feel the loss of their mother as middle daughter does.

Middle daughter gets older and—she thinks—uglier. She tries mothering her father and sisters, but ends up mostly being abused by them in subtle ways instead. Father becomes too poor to support the country estate, and ends up renting it out to the sister and brother-in-law of middle daughter's old suitor. Older sister and father take off for Bath; middle daughter stays with her mother's best friend and then her younger sister for a couple months.

Old suitor comes to visit his sister; seems to be courting one of youngest daughters' sisters-in-law. Middle daughter can't breathe when they're in the same room together. Her nephew falls out of a tree but isn't hurt; she mothers him because his mother won't, and the nursemaid is also irresponsible. She thinks her old suitor has forgotten her, but hears him perhaps alluding to her in his conversations with one of the women he's courting. Great anxiety and self-criticism and awkwardness ensues.

They go on a group trip to the seashore to visit his old Navy friends. She talks about Byron and Scott with his injured friend; sister-in-law jumps from a wall and hits her head; she's okay, but during her long convalescence, the in-laws and the Navy friends become close. Middle daughter observes all kinds of motherliness on the part of those families, is praised indirectly by old suitor for being a good care-giver herself. Extremely pleased.

Old suitor ends up not marrying either one of the girls, who are both otherwise affianced. He and she must admit to themselves that they're still in love; awkwardness and anxiety again ensue; they hardly speak to each other. He suspects she's going to marry her cousin who's also in Bath; she is pleased at the cousin's flirtation, but disapproves of his character. Father and older sister reveal themselves to be superficial children; mother's best friend's influence reaches an all-time low as she almost disappears into other concerns in Bath society. Middle daughter hangs out a lot with an old school friend (slightly older than herself) who is now ill and poor but had been a great comfort to her when they were young—now middle daughter comforts the friend. Suitor's sister and brother-in-law (the tenants) also come to Bath and prove acceptable parent-substitutes to middle daughter, who begins to identify with what she sees as their more sensible, compassionate bourgeois worldview. Her younger sister's mother-in-law also proves a strong source of comfort and approval.

She and old suitor are accidentally forced to speak to each other in various situations; finally he blurts out that he's afraid she's in love with her cousin, and that he loves her; she tells him she has no intentions of marrying that man, and that she's loved him since before they broke off their first engagement, but that she feels it was her duty to take her mother's best friend's advice then. (Now, though, he's quite rich—there will be no objections this time.) They marry.