There is a gentle, very English sort of nostalgia about Mariana. Monica Dickens weaves it out of all the small minutiae of daily life in Charbury: the palmolive soap; grey flannel shorts; polished wooden floors; lavender-kept old linen; the smell of brussel sprouts; cocoa; snakes and ladders; bread and butter pudding; corduroy breeches; tweed fishing hats and flowered aprons. Traces of this English nostalgia can also be found in Dusty Answer, I Capture the Castle, Rebecca and The Pursuit of Love , as Harriet Lane points out in her Persephone Preface. In Mariana, Mary is another such heroine: a young woman growing up and learning to find her way.
The book begins with nostalgia: Mary, the heroine, waits alone for news of her husband, Sam. It is a wild, desolate night in the cottage on the Essex marshes and her nostalgia is for the ‘lands of summer across the sea’, for her recent summer honeymoon in Italy with Sam but also for her childhood summers at the magical Charbury.
There is a nostalgia, too, for the old world magic of the railway during the train journey that takes Mary (and the reader) in to Charbury, with a studied attention of the other carriage occupants: the woman in the crochet hat, clearing her throat from time to time with a ‘short, dry sound, as though she were stating an uninteresting fact’: the Father Christmas-like old gentleman that Mary’s mother befriends. Then outside the window there is the mundane passing of slate roofs, lines of washing and starry clusters of primroses glimpsed as the train rushes towards its destination.
Characters in Mariana are sparkling, alive and fully-formed. Mary is a ‘shrimp of a child’ who looks like a gnome when she grins and has eyes that are ‘small and round like energetic buttons’. Her mother’s ability to ‘stir up the most sluggish atmosphere’ is captured so neatly in the reference to her waging a six month feud with a butcher in Kensington High Street, conducted entirely on postcards. The dull and earnest Mavis Ritchie is sketched wonderfully in a few lines as someone who lies at wake at night wondering whether to have her hair bobbed. Then there’s the beloved, bedridden Granny dispensing chocolates and kindly advice before bedtime. And the ‘stupendously smug’ Greta, with her fat legs, green kimono and velvet slippers.
Mary’s character is also wonderfully drawn, flaws and all. Her Manton House School report reads: ‘She is a bad mixer; being at the same time intolerant and unconfident of others and disinclined to enter into the life of the community. But her heart is right, and we feel sure that when she has overcome the difficulties of a rather reserved nature, she will mature into a fine woman.’ It is hard not to warm to her as she overcomes her difficulties and matures. The intermingling of intolerance and lack of confidence must be familiar to many. Her Uncle Geoffrey puts it even more succinctly: ‘At the moment, she’s a blister, but there’s hope.’
One feels Mary’s insecurities and discomfort partly through her own descriptions of others: classmates (the unfortunate Murial Hopkins with her ‘lumpy skin and fuzzy hair’, the angelic Avril Goss and the ‘glorious abandon’ of Angela Shaw) and teachers (the terrifying Miss Langford with her ‘paralysing lizard-like stare’ and Old Strawberry, the archetypal headmistress, an ‘old, dessicated machine of cultured joylessness.’ Then there is the disastrous evening at the Oxford ball with Denys where Mary frets about not being thin enough and the other girls are ‘terrifyingly soignee’ and eye her ‘like hostile dogs’. Then, of course, the awful Julius Rockingham at Mary’s drama school who looks like ‘a hungry crow’ and whose movements and expressions are ‘redolent of doom’.
After Denys, Mary’s first romance is with a very self-assured, flashy Frenchman Pierre which seems to be carried along on a ‘golden, sparkling stream of inexhaustible champagne’. While, for Mary, her Parisian life of boîtes and views over the rooftops of Paris from Montmartre seems gloriously romantic, she is also not entirely at ease in it. Pierre’s mother is ‘no more than a cold, unemotional peg on which to hang diamonds’. Pierre’s family’s guests leave her feeling like ‘a deaf mute in a sackcloth’. Ultimately she realises that she cannot marry Pierre because he is, well, just not English enough. Monica Dickens comes up with a particularly memorable sentence to describe Mary’s love for her home country which she feels on her return from Paris. On her first sight of England from the boat, Mary is struck by a feeling of ‘damp, fresh security… everything looks so right and so comfortably un-exotic, like a cabbage’.
But then Mary meets Sam who is ‘just incredibly right looking’ and has a ‘perfect sense of humour, which was the essence of all the things she had ever thought funny in her life.’ Who would not fall for such a man? Why Sam is just so right seems to relate to a feeling of security. After a day with him in Cornwall, Mary reflects that: ‘It would always be like this now. Secure. Never again that feeling of solitude in a crowd that made one sometimes begin to think of furtive escape.’ This is interesting, and is perhaps something which is not so fashionable to talk about these days. Somehow she becomes sure of herself only at this point.
In this sense, Mary could be seen as a product of her time. There are a few other interesting glimpses into the social conditions at the time. The two World Wars touch either end of the story (Mary doesn’t remember her father who made the ‘supreme sacrifice’ in WWI; Sam is feared lost after the sinking of a WWII submarine). Meanwhile, the character of Uncle Geoffrey adds some colour from the world of comic theatre in the 1920s and subsequently Hollywood. But mainly, Mariana gives the reader an insight into what a woman’s life might have been like at that time. Mary sees little point in her schooling and pronounces early on that she has no interest in having a job when she grows up. Her ambitions are marriage and children. Her mother, who herself ‘went to work’, suggests that there might be other benefits of education such as being able to ‘take your place among people, to be able to hold your own in conversation’. But this doesn’t seem to carry much weight with Mary. Later, her mother is keen for her to work or begin training for something but is reluctant to fund a place at drama school, partly on the basis that she suspects that Mary is likely to just go off and get married. For Mary, the time at drama school and in Paris does largely seem to be a way of whiling away time until she finds a husband, or it is at least driven by a desire to take her mind off the nagging doubt that she may not end up marrying Denys. Perhaps this is a reflection of the sorts of roles that were available for women at the time: Mary speaks scornfully of the prospect of becoming a secretary and wearing out her fingers typing and then writing letters to a problem page in a women’s magazine, asking whether her boss might mean anything by taking her out for dinner and telling her that his wife doesn’t understand him. As she waits for news of Sam, fearing him dead, she is struck by a sense of the preciousness of her life as an individual and the need to go on, whatever happens to him. So we are left wondering what she might have done afterwards with this new sense of the preciousness of that ‘trust of individuality’ which is hers alone.
19 replies on “Persephone Book No.2: Mariana by Monica Dickens”
I love the fact that you have mentioned the train journey in this piece as that is one of the scenes that I remember most vividly from the book. My own feeling about the book is that it declines a bit in the second half but the first half is excellent and a really interesting musing on the English rural idyll.
The “Englishness” of the novel is a key element of its identity but it is very much the englishness of the upper middle classes – all warm lemonade and lazing on vast lawns. This is perfectly fair enough and after all, Dickens does not claim to be writing a book which represents the whole of society but it is probably worth keeping in mind that the period that Mary is recalling – the 1930s was one of the most deprived and ghastly of the 20th century and historically was a time of dreadful unemployment and hunger marches etc. Mary’s reality was a reality but it was a narrow one – hers was a life which would have been totally unrecognisable to most of her countrymen and women….
But then Mary’s disconnection from the world around her is a crucial part of her character and one of the things which makes her (to me) both infuriating and attractive in almost equal measure. I think it also makes an important statement about how women of Mary’s generation were encouraged to think – I do not think that they were encouraged to worry about the state of the world.
I did enjoy the book though and have reviewed it on my blog here: http://hannahstoneham.blogspot.com/2010/05/mirror-to-million-teenagers-monica.html
Thanks for starting this discussion.
Hannah
First of all, I was struck by the incipience of Mariana’s & Sam’s not being quite sure when they were aware of the war on honeymoon – like William & Griselda!
Dickens is quoted as saying, “I want my readers to recognize themselves in my books” and this reader certainly did. I taught English in Paris for a time in my twenties and I loved her description of “an irresistable patisserie that nearly always saw her pushing through the tinkling swing door into the hot, sugary interior that made you feel like the jam inside a doughnut.” And I also went through “the age, when, on meeting a man one instinctively visualized oneself standing at his side in foaming white tulle and a dress designed to look well from the back.” I thought the Christmas love scenes in Cornwall paricularly touching, and also remember (for me, at Easter in Whitby) that wonderfully comfortable feeling that whatever one faced in the future would not be insurmountable because one would not be facing it alone.
I found particularly attractive Dickens’s style of telling everything with a breathless speed as if recounting the story to a dear friend and not wanting to miss anything out, contrasted with almost slow-motion passages which paid attention to minute details. This seems to me to prefigure some cinematic styles of today where speed and focus change to bring you up short and increase your empathy with the character involved.
The ending was perfect. Having been a willing spectator throught the book, I had to go back to Chapter One to re-acquaint myself with Mary’s current situation to prepare myself for Chapter 10. By the end, I was no longer a bystander, but I was Mary, going through her tumult with her. And, as with the best stories, such a simple ending, leaves the reader somewhere else to take the story after the reading’s finished.
This is the second time I have read the book and I enjoyed it even more than the first reading. I’m not English but have spent quite some time there and the story really conjured up the quintessential Englishness that I still yearn for and try to replicate in my own home. It may represent an idealised version of 1930’s England in some respects but Mary and her mother also went through more trying times as well. Having a lush life at Charbury during the holidays made up for scraping and making do at their flat in London.
I particulary love this period and it does remind me of I Capture The Castle and Love In A Cold Climate, both favourites of mine. I really liked Mary’s character and thought that she displayed very honest (and hilarious)opinions as most of us do in childhood and teenage years. I thoroughly understood when Mary said that she ought to be in love at nineteen and shared the same unfortunate phase of sizing chaps up for suitable husband material!
Monica Dicken’s captures all the tiny details of every day life so well that I could really lose myself in the story. I too was on the train to Charbury ( I do love the romance of vintage train travel ) and the characters on the train were drawn so well that I believe I have met them all before in some form!
I have done a little research into Monica Dickens and it seemed like she led a very interesting life. I discovered that she wrote for Women’s Own at one stage with Beverley Nichols who is another of my favourite authors. I would like to read more of her books and One Pair of Hands will be my next book on her list.
I’ve really enjoyed having the opportunity to read other comments about the book and am looking forward to continuing with the whole collection!
I first read this book when I was in my late teens (and not having grown up in England) and 25 years later, on rereading it, still identified completely with Mary throughout. It is absolutely part of the book’s charm that it captures so vividly the details of its time, but somehow it manages to be timeless. How many of us on revisiting a beloved childhood haunt after many years would echo Mary on going to Charbury with Sam: “”But it’s so small” she said helplessly.” Girls of Mary’s age now would not understand the boredom of waiting for a husband to materialise (think also of Linda in The Pursuit of Love counting the hours away) but she is so vividly portrayed that it doesn’t matter.
I hadn’t appreciated that Monica Dickens was only 24 when she wrote Mariana – many of us take much longer to understand that “When you were born, you were given a trust of individuality that you were bound to preserve … Nothing that ever happens in life can take away the fact that I am me. So I have to go on being me.”
I discovered Persephone through Mariana – I lent my Penguin copy to a friend’s sister at university and never got it back; searched for many years for another copy to replace it and finally when Amazon came on the scene found it – and Persephone. Thank you for starting the Forum and please do continue with it.
I read this book shortly after purchasing it at the Lamb’s Conduit Street shop last fall; and though I read Mariana sitting on a couch at home in October, I can easily see why Mariana might easily be considered a summery book–it’s full of nostalgia for childhood summers, even though mine were much different from Mary’s. I’m glad to see that i ‘m not the only one for whom the train scene was memorable!
I do think that this book is quintessentially English, and that’s one of the things i love about this novel. It’s a very simple novel, very understated, but there’s lot of hidden depth to it as well. When enough time has passed, I think I’ll give this book a re-read. It’s hard to believe that Dickens was younger than I am now when this book was published; she had such a great amount of understanding of people. In my original review of this book, I found myself not completely empathizing with Mary and her situation (after all a huge goal of her life was marriage), but there’s a lot of her personality in me at the same time. So it’s interesting to see how women’s roles have changed over the past 80 years or so.
I so looked forward to reading Mariana and thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book. Dicken’s descriptive talents and evocation of place and time (the hunt, the Oxford ball) are wonderful. There was something that nagged a little at me though.
When the ‘casual anti-Semitism’ reared its head my enjoyment died. Perhaps if such things don’t touch you directly they usually float over your head. It crystallised the nagging doubts though into a realisation that there’s a strongly misanthropic vein running through the novel, usually expressed by Mary. Why else would one of the questions above focus on how likeable she is?
It seems obvious that Mary’s prejudices, anti-Semitism, class-mistrust and homophobia, so lightly ascribed to the character in Harriet Lane’s introduction were actually the author’s. But it’s somehow more than the sum of those things that can be attributed to ingrained attitudes of the day. Even in Mary’s wedding-day memories we have the line “Sam’s sister, who had said before: ‘Let’s see a lot of each other; we’re going to be terrific friends,’ staring and staring, determined to find some fault’. What an odd line. I don’t think I’ve ever started a novel with such enjoyment and been left feeling almost upset by it. It doesn’t leave me wanting to read more Dickens, certainly.
Some interesting lines of thought in the discussion so far. Thank you for all your contributions.
I am struck by the fact that almost everyone seems to find the book evocative of time and place and to admire Monica Dickens’ descriptive powers but that there are differing views on Mary’s character: many identify strongly with her, others find her more difficult to like.
In my view, Monica Dickens does not shrink from portraying Mary as she is and the world as it seems to her. (I suspect that a modern writer writing about these times might not do this in quite the same way, because they could not but write with a sense that any prejudices that such a character might have held are indeed prejudices that – quite rightly in many cases – may be regarded as unacceptable.)
It is clear that Mary is very much shaped by the times she grows up in and her social background. This in part forms her world view. Some of her attitudes and prejudices are hard to imagine in a woman growing up today (or indeed in someone growing up in the same era in a different social milieu). But I think reading fiction like this, containing voices from other times, gives pause for thought. In our own times, we are also, of course, in part shaped by the era we grow up in, our social milieu and what we are exposed to as we grow-up. Because influences are much more diffuse in a more ‘globalised’ world, it is sometimes too easy to forget the extent that we too have a world view that may not be entirely free from prejudices of one kind or another. (One becomes acutely conscious of this if one lives overseas in a culture very different from one’s own, as I am doing at the moment). I think reading a novel in which a character’s voice comes from a different time and world view is a valuable reminder of this.
Equally, anyone’s character is always more than just an amalgam of the ingrained attitudes of their day and their social or cultural milieu. They are also an individual, experiencing life in their way and – hopefully – learning and becoming wiser as a result of their experiences. So there is, of course, a component of Mary that is more than the attitudes of the day, that is herself and a view of the world as she experiences it. Monica Dickens does not shrink from portraying this either. For much of the book, Mary is an adolescent girl. At times she is self-centred and somewhat scathing in her view of others. At times, she can seem jaded, or even perhaps misanthropic. Monica Dickens does not seem to have set out to make Mary likable: she seems to have tried to tell the truth. As a result, Mary is very believable. The way Mary sees the world in part reflects the jaded confusion of adolescence and her moving through this confusion to find a clearer sense of herself.
The extent to which Mary ‘is’ Monica Dickens is also interesting. The novel is certainly to some extent autobiographical (and Monica Dickens seems to have acknowledged that this was to some extent true of all her work). But Mariana was written when Monica Dickens was 24, so if it is her, it is her as she was in her childhood, adolescence and early 20s. One doesn’t know from Mariana what happens next: rather the reader is left wondering what Mary might have done afterwards with her new-found sense of herself. So – if Mary is indeed Monica – Mariana in fact makes me want to read more of Monica Dickens’ work in order to find out.
Although I struggled to get past the first 10 pages or so, Mariana rewarded me hugely for persevering! The structure is superb and for me actually created from scratch the feeling of recognising myself – I was swept away in each of Mary’s romances more than the last, just like her, but I was entirely familiar with the feelings that she expressed to Sam: of having held something back for him the whole time – something I as a reader had also been encouraging myself to do, since at the back of my mind I knew that she was to end up with a Naval officer. Obviously this means that the reader does know more than Mary, which lends itself to many situations of dramatic irony, but actually I found myself deliberately ‘forgetting’ about the future I knew would happen, or wishing it away, so that Mary might stay with her current man, whoever he was.
This, for me, was where Monica Dickens excelled – in fully absorbing me into Mary’s life and environment, especially by not including the hindsight which could betray ‘storm clouds gathering over Europe’ – if Mary did not know, then the reader has no reason to know. I found it truly enchanting without being vacuous.
I found that Mary’s knowing – or not knowing – what to do with herself because of course she was just waiting to get married made her both more and less likeable and interesting. She is more normal in a way, unlike Cassandra in I Capture the Castle (cant do italics), who wants to write, and loves reading and literariness. Mary isn’t really good at much, although does enjoy living, and from a modern perspective not doing anything except wait to get married seems rather odd or lazy, yet she isn’t someone with a special talent, so more identifiable with for most readers. One might wish to be Cassandra, but recognises that she is more likely to be Mary.
It is typical of this sort of book that Mary isn’t the most beautiful (or at all beautiful) yet ends up happy at the end. The reader of this style of novel does identify more with the Elizabeth than Jane Bennetts. Mary is also embarassing, to herself (& not only as a teenager) & to the reader. An essential aspect of the coming of age novel, it still makes one wish to read certain sections (especially with Denys) from behind the sofa. That these are so squirmy is a sign of the success of the writing, and that the author as well as the reader can recollect such moments in her own life and understand. One laughs at Mary, but kindly.
Rather than forms of travel, I actually found that this book was highlighted and is recalled in smells. As noted in the opening discussion, things like lavender-scented linen, and mints, and stuffy city flats are all well depicted, and I found that it was the scent of the different scenes that really stuck. The acting school, the woods, the smells of food, are all noted and help develop the setting. Even Mary’s joy at being back in England has some expression in scent.
What I like best about the book is the depiction of her love with Sam, when eventually it comes. Rather than music & stars & romance, the relationship is shown to be Right. Their comfort and stability with each other is emphasised, rather than general soppiness of a more romance-based story. The comment when they are on their honeymoon about never being lonely but being alone together is particularly sensitive. It also makes the worry from the opening chapter about Sam greater. We have followed Mary, who is a relatively solitary person, through all this, and are concerned she may end up lonely again.
I enjoyed reading, and re-reading, this book, and will undoubtedly do so again. The opportunity to sort and clarify what I think about it has been interesting, and now I shall have to check up on what Mary is doing…
A subjective comment that I hesitate to make but it concerns Monica Dickens and no other writer. So, here goes . . .
In the 40’s and 50’s Monica Dickens was my much-loved writer. In subsequent decades I had far less contact with English publications but then I read, at separate times, three of her books written in the 1980’s. They were “Dear Dr. Lily” (1988), “Enchantment” (1989) and “Closed at Dusk” (1990). I found them impossible. She was a prolific writer and courageous enough to experiment in other styles and fields. In the 80’s she was older and so was I, possibly that is all there is to it.
In the autumn Persephone will be reprinting “The Winds of Heaven”, a 1955 novel: here I feel sure I shall be back with the Monica Dickens I once knew.
Many of you have written about how you feel about Mary’s character and also the evocation of time and place through the descriptions in the book. I am also struck by the the way that some of the minor characters in the book are so swiftly but perceptively, and sometimes poignantly, sketched.
One of the most moving passages in the book relates to Mary’s Aunt Winifred. The children have been warned never, never to laugh at her but ‘it had not occurred to them to do so; they accepted her quite incuriously as a sort of hybrid – neither a grown up nor a child’. As the children prepare to rehearse Mary’s play, Aunt Winifred does not to want them to go, she seems to ‘cling to them almost humbly, as if she had lost something and thought they could help her to find it’. As the children dash off, Mary looks back and sees Aunt Winifred standing in the French windows of the nursery, gazing after the disappearing children, clasping a book she has borrowed from them, with ‘the driving rain bouncing off the stone terrace in troops of little marching men at her feet’. There is a simplicity and also a profound sadness in this scene. It also gives a vivid glimpse of the simpler, but sometimes more truthful and accepting, way that children see the world.
Another glimpse of this comes after Mary’s evening out with Uncle Geoffrey at the Cafe Royal. Mary finds herself in an adult world she doesn’t quite understand: ‘with Uncle Geoffrey’s friends, you never knew whether they were laughing at you or not’. Mary sips her ginger ale, drums her heels and waits politely in the hope that Uncle Geoffrey will take her to the cinema as he has promised. Meanwhile, Uncle Geoffrey, having had a few drinks and – to Mary – looking ‘very silly’, flirts with Wanda, a girl with ‘short, bright yellow hair’ and ‘a heavily powdered snub nose’ who laughs ‘like a neighing horse’. He ends up sending Mary to the cinema and then home alone – which she regards as a rather exciting adventure. The next day, Wanda turns up at their flat, wearing ‘an extra layer of powder over last night’s’ and when Uncle Geoffrey refuses to see her, she leaves, ‘looking as if she had been struck by a brick’. Meanwhile, Mary remains somewhat mystified by the whole situation.
These sorts of scenes give a thoughtful and perceptive tone to the book, amidst the lighter flow of the main narrative.
What a super write up of Mariana, and I have so enjoyed reading the comments that follow. I also agree Mariana is an excellent summer read. Reading this novel, I felt I slipped backwards in time. The brilliant descriptions of the places and the people, as well as their attitudes, gave a complete picture of life as a young girl at that time. Part of the huge charm of the novel for me was the description of more minor characters. Uncle Geoffrey and Mrs Shannon, like Mary, are portrayed faults and all, which makes them so very real.
Mariana reminds me of I Capture the Castle and the Pursuit of Love by being laugh out loud funny in many places. I chuckled over Mary’s exploits at drama school.
Mary is a very true character. I enjoyed witnessing her maturity and felt her to be a much more likable character by the end of the novel.
I bought ‘Mariana’ on the basis of having enjoyed other books by Monica Dickens years ago. ‘Mariana’ proved to be quite delightful and completely different from the earlier books I remembered. Yes I think it is timeless in that it captures a period, between the wars, when women’s lives were so limited, and the class system still rigidly in place. It frequently reminded me of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet quartet (‘Marking Time, The Light Years, Casting off, Confusion’). Whilst the Cazalet chronicles begin just prior to the 2nd World War, they have a very similar atmosphere – in particular the idyllic childhood holidays with cousins enjoying an innocent freedom in the family’s large country house. There are some similarities here too with Penelope Lively’s recent ‘Family Album’, and perhaps they are timeless because we enjoy the nostalgia? And yes they are essentially ‘English’. They also reflect social history very clearly.
The character of Mary was so well-drawn – irritating at times, but very credible, and she was certainly likable, someone I could identify with, whilst coming from a completely different background socially. You don’t need to have had a similar background in order to empathise with a character. Her prejudices were common at the time, we live in a very different, more liberal world in which such books serve to remind us of how things used to be – certainly with regard to the limited options then open to women. I have also just read Winifred Holtby’s ‘The Crowded Street’ – another ‘social history’ but similarly reflecting Englishness in a different part of the country in an earlier period. As social history, such novels have a great part to play, seeing life then, through the eyes of a chief character.
One of the delights of the book was that the characters were so well-drawn, I felt I knew them and could certainly picture them. (I have been known to discard books with one-dimensional characters!)
The last book I read by Monica Dickens was ‘The Room Upstairs’ – which bears little or no relationship to ‘Mariana’. It’s a long while since I read any others, (eg ‘One Pair of Hands” Feet; etc) but they reflected social history as much as ‘Mariana’.
Following my comments above, I neglected to say what a thoroughly enjoyable read it is, engrossing and laugh out loud at times – as an earlier comment says. It kept me entertained whilst waiting for a doctor’s and hospital appointments – I was the only patient giggling. Maybe there should be a ‘medical test’ for books – ie those which entertain whilst waiting for medical appointments. Medi-lit perhaps?
I love the idea of medi-lit, my life being far too many medical appointments.
I regularly take Miss Pettigrew & Miss Buncle for those horrific waits in dark, stuffy rooms. Perhaps Persephone could start a sub-set, like the hot water bottles & social history ones?
I first read this book a few months ago and was disappointed by it. I found Mary dislikeable, didn’t care what happened to her and got a bit bored! My second reading has been more satisfying, possibly because I had low expectations. The book is littered with so many clever sentences, descriptions and phrases that it is hard to believe this was MD’s first book and written at just age 24. However, her youth (along with her class and the times) probably explains why she is disparaging, intolerant and racist about so many of the people that pass through her pages.
The episode where 10 year old Mary is left to go to the cinema and get herself home late at night stood out to me in both readings, as did the drama of the ending. I wanted to know more about Mary’s mother, a character with ideas, resilience and strength. She, with her fashion and business background, and her brother with his Hollywood career seem glamorous for their time and interested me far more.
I read this book last year when I was fifteen, and I think that the best time to read ‘Mariana’ is around this time. As a coming-of-age novel, ‘Mariana’ has more relevance to people of this age, as what teenager has not experienced thoughts and feelings similar to those of Mary’s? She goes through stages of uncertainty and insecurity that have been experienced by most people growing up, and for me this is the reason why I think that overall Mary is a likeable character, despite her faults. A character with flaws is so much more interesting than a perfect one, and so Dickens provides in Mary an honestly-drawn and identifiable girl to empathise with, rather than a remote (and not entirely believable) role model to observe.
Mary’s prejudices and her views on a woman’s role in society do seem strange to me coming from a modern perspective, but these serve as a reminder of a previous social mindset. Mary’s mother seems to me to be the most modern character in the book, for it is she who goes out to work to earn money, while her daughter rejects this for the traditional view that she should simply be married. Despite the differences between Mary and a modern reader’s opinions, I think it is still possible to identify with Mary as a character, for the themes of individuality and the journey to adulthood help to overcome any barriers formed by her prejudices, by exploring ideas that link Mary and the reader in shared emotions, thoughts or experiences.
Agreed that this novel does feel like the quintessential summer read; I’ve contently <a href="http://www.buriedinprint.com/?p=1767
"ambled through it this summer, much as I remember reading her children’s books when I was a girl.
I really appreciate the thoughtful comments here and, most particularly, the segments of the forum which supplement with commentary, illustrations and photographs, and biographical information, especially for those of us who occasionally read one of the vintage editions when the lovely Persephone edition is not readily available to us.
This was such a glorious read I couldn’t put it down, and finished it in a single gulp.
Such breaths of fresh, sweet air as I can manage these days seem to come from Persephone books. Thank goodness I’ve located a real book store that carries your editions, and have 3 on the shelf devoted to Persephone.
To this BBC-loving second generation Scotch lady-of-a-certain age it was heavenly, a welcomed retreat from the so-called 21st century reality of life in the middle of a large country, in a city known as the wild west before there was a Wild West.
There is one saving grace: A very large, and very old library! In my reading pile has been an 1898-ish Marchioness, the 1964 reprint of Miss Buncle’s Book and Miss Buncle Married (together so I went directly from one to the other), a 1917 Senlis (with photos!), and several D.E. Stevenson books… and many others!
Heartfelt thank-you’s to Persephone Press and alibrariansdaughter, and every forum writer, for teaching me so much about this literature.
D Ellis