Warp and weft

     I started reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle weeks ago and had to keep putting it aside when other books took precedence. The fragmented approach hasn't harmed it, (that is how it was written after all, over a period of seven years with work on it stopping for other books such as A Little Princess and The Making of a Marchioness) but with a clear run at the last hundred or so pages yesterday, I raced on to the end.

    Thanks are due to Elaine at Random Jottings who was largely responsible for getting this book back into print (it was first published in 1907). I could call it melodrama of the highest order - which it is - but there's more to it than that. Yes, we have the dastardly villain, Sir Nigel Anstruthers, all cruelty and dissolute ways, the wonderful heroine, Bettina Vanderpoel, an heiress with brains as well as beauty and a strength of character unusual, perhaps, in books of this type, and the romantic hero, Lord Mount Dunstan, distant, brooding and silent, but the way these three are portrayed and connected is more subtle and cleverer than the melodramatic tag suggests.

     However, there are one or two lines I must quote: "He lifted her in his arms and carried her into the cottage. Her cheek felt the enrapturing roughness of his tweed shoulder as he did it. He laid her down on the couch of hay and turned away." "He caught her out-thrown hands and looked down into the beautiful passionate soul of her. The moment had come, and the tidal wave rising to its height swept all the common earth away when, with a savage sob, he caught and held her close and hard against that which thudded racing in his breast."

     Be still my beating heart! That gives a flavour of the novel which follows - after around a hundred introductory pages - the efforts of Bettina to save her sister Rosalie from her disastrous marriage to the loathsome Sir Nigel. There is no actual swagger of the cane or twirl of the moustache in the book - Sir Nigel is far more complex than the stock villain, and Mount Dunstan has more to him than any matinee idol. There's an unlikely deus ex machina in the form of plucky American typewriter salesman G. Selden, but after some anxious moments, all is resolved as the reader would wish. A line from another book sums up this one very well: "Joy and woe make a nice tight weave."

Comments

[Peg]

I love the closing line! When you read some of the older books and realize how they wrote about sexual tension, it makes you wonder why more recent books have to be so explicit and often coarse!
I like it when a book still holds together, even if you only can read it in spurts and starts.

[rosie]

Sounds wonderful, I must look out for it. Have you read "That Lass O' Lowrie's" by FHB? All in dialect (Lancashire, if memory serves aright).

[Danielle]

I'm about halfway through. I also pick it up, read a few chapters and then work on something else, but I will get to the end eventually. I don't have a lovely persephone edition, though, I just checked out an old copy from my library.

[tara]

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed The Shuttle. I also thought it quite melodramatic, in the best possible way. Have you read any of Burnett's other adult works?

[Elaine]

So glad you like this book it is one of my favourites. Do try Through One Administration if you can get hold of it and then Head of the House of Coombe and its sequal, Robin. I simply adore FHB's adult novels.

[Jill]

While there are problems with The Shuttle, I do consider it one of my favorites of hers. It holds up in subsequent readings, even when you know how it will end!