Kay's Bookshelf

I was really unimpressed by Rachel at first, as it kept striking me as not clever at all. She did study more than anyone she knew, but she had a way of not listening to the others and sort of obsessing about her opinions that shouldn’t have existed in a really clever person. As Colin Keith once says about her, she’s “A detestable, pragmatical, domineering girl!“, that “battle[s] every suggestion with principles picked up from every catchpenny periodical, things she does not half understand, and enunciates as if no one had even heard of them before.“. Actually, Rachel’s greatest misfortune is that she did not have anyone to guide her when she was growing up, to point her in the right direction. She had only her mother and her sister, who were both thrilled with how much Rachel reads and how clever she is. Despite any of her outer faults though Rachel is a really good person, her life’s ambition being to be able to help the others. Luckily she ends up in a good company, with a husband who shows her what real cleverness is, and how little she actually knew before.

The one I really found both special and clever from the very beginning is Ermeline Williams, the invalid living in a cottage with only a girl and a frog to keep her company for most of the day, but a wonderful person and always happy, while also a well-read and a good writer too. Another character I really liked was Lady Temple, a twenty-five years old widow of a general almost forty-five years her senior that she had married at sixteen out of love. She had no less than seven children, six of them boys, and they are the center of her existence. She’s a tender woman and seems sort of fragile, allowing people around her to tell her what to do, except when her children are involved, but her good heart can be seen all through the book.

Yonge is said to be trying to imitate Jane Austen with this book, both subplots being similar to Austen ones: Rachel’s meddling in other people’s business and always thinking she knows best makes her very similar to Emma Woodhouse, while Colin and Ermeline’s resumed love story is sort of like the one in Persuasion. I have to say that though I love Jane Austen and I am familiar with both books I didn’t have any problem with the similarities and I could look at this book on its own without seeing it as a mere copy.

The story has a strong moral streak, wanting to teach people to listen to their elders and show them that merely reading books doesn’t make anyone truly clever, and the fact that a young mind has to be guided on the right track in order to truly shine.

What I liked most:
SPOILER
The part where Rachel preaches her opinions on heroism to Alick, illustrating them with a story she liked, of a young man who, while wounded in the war, on seeing that a shell had entered the tent where he and others were lying, he took it out and run with it outside, thus saving the others. She tells it in such a superior tone only to find out later how Alick was the actual person the story was about.
END SPOILER

What I liked least: There were a lot of characters named Keith, not to mention that at one time there were two colonels Keith, sometimes both together in the same place. In this context in was rather burdensome to read “colonel Keith did this” or “Keith said that” and having to stop and think which colonel Keith or which Keith in general :)

Recommend it? If you like classic literature then definitely yes.

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