Michelle Martin - Pembroke Park

Laura Vivanco

After the discussion of homosexual panic in Heyer's Lady of Quality, I thought it might be interesting to look at a more recent Regency romance where there's very definitely some panic caused by homosexuality. Michelle Martin's Pembroke Park (1986) is subtitled "A bit of a departure: the first lesbian Regency novel," and its dedication mentions "Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer." Martin thus openly acknowledges both her novel's differences from, and its debt to, its literary ancestors.

Joke Hermes's article on "Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction" contains a synopsis of the whole of Pembroke Park and Paulina Palmer has described the novel as "a lesbian version of Pride and Prejudice" (198). She continues by stating that Martin:

signals her debt to Austen by entitling her work Pembroke Park, which recalls the name of Darcy’s country seat Pemberley, and by choosing as the setting for her storyline the village of Heddington, a community as conservative and close-knit as Austen’s Meryton. The opening episode of her novel also displays affinities with Pride and Prejudice in that it centres on the arrival of an affluent visitor with aristocratic connections, and describes the gossip and conjecture the event generates. However, whereas in Austen’s novel the appearance of the rich and handsome Mr Bingley inspires pleasurable excitement among mothers with marriageable daughters, in Martin’s the arrival of the rich and beautiful Lady Diana March [...] generates feelings of despondency and alarm. They are scared that her money and good looks will attract the local gentry and result in her stealing their daughters’ suitors. (198)

The fact that a secondary character, Richard,

need[s] a son to carry on the Sinclair line. However unfair it may be, the estate is entailed solely to male heirs. If I have no son, Laurelwood will pass to my dreadful cousin Collins. (244)

may well recall the Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice who will inherit Longbourn since Mr Bennet lacks a son. Pembroke Park may also contain some slight verbal echoes of Pride and Prejudice: when Joanna's brother, Mr Garfield, declares that Lady Diana is "plain and unattractive" (15), his friend replies that "if she had smiled you would think her more tolerable" (15). This perhaps recalls the crucial importance of the word "tolerable" in Mr Darcy's first assessment of Elizabeth Bennet's physical charms: "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me" (Chapter 3). Joanna herself "dearly loved to be amused" (18) by the folly of her neighbours, much as Elizabeth does, for as the latter declared: ""Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at! [...] That is an uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintance. I dearly love a laugh" (Chapter 11).

The plot of Pembroke Park does not, however, much resemble that of Pride and Prejudice. It is perhaps more appropriate to think of it as a metafictional novel which includes playful references to other works of fiction.

As the novel opens, Joanna is "walking down a dusty lane" (1), "her mind spinning away to Mr. Scott's newest novel, her thoughts fastening upon knights riding noble steeds as they galloped to the rescue of damsels in distress." Upon hearing hoofbeats, "she shaded her eyes, half expecting to find Ivanhoe galloping towards her" (2). Lady Diana March is no "knight in shining armor" but she is the new owner of Waverly Manor. The allusion to Sir Walter Scott's Waverley is unmistakable.

The convention-defying Lady Hildegarde Dennison perhaps recalls Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. A "silver-haired grande dame of perhaps fifty-five years" (72) she reprimands Joanna:

"Lady Sinclair I am most disappointed in you," Lady Hildegarde said, turning to Joanna. "To have a child is bad enough. To have a child who actually goes out amongst company is worse still. But to have one that screeches is inexcusable." (86)

The sentence structure here may recall Lady Bracknell's most famous pronouncement: "To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness" (24). The suspicion that an allusion to Wilde's play is intended is perhaps strengthened by an earlier scene:

"Cruelty and propriety are often synonymous," Lady Dennison declared. Joanna stared at her in amazement.
"I must write that down in my diary tonight," Miss Hunt-Stevens exclaimed. "It sounds so very profound."
"I am always profound, Jennifer," Lady Dennison intoned. "I am surprised you have not remarked it before this."
"But I have!" Miss Hunt-Stevens hastened to assure her. "My diary is simply littered with your profundity." (79)

Wilde was known for his witty statements, which Lady Dennison's resemble, and Miss Hunt-Stevens joins Wilde's Gwendolen and Cecily in keeping a diary. Gwendolen never travels without hers because "One should always have something sensational to read in the train" (65) and Cecily "keep[s] a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget all about them" (36).

In Chapter 10 we find an allusion to Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor when Diana and Miss Hunt-Stevens

sat in the main Waverly Drawing Room laughing heartily over letters each had just received from one Mr. Peter Elliot, who seemed to fancy himself a Falstaff. He had written two passionate, and identical, love letters addressed to a Daisy and a Penny who were, apparently, serving girls in a Lancashire tavern. Mr. Elliot, however, had erred in that he had placed these billet doux in envelopes addressed to Diana and Jennifer. (96)

Mr Garfield shows his unsuitability for inclusion in Diana's witty, irreverent circle of friends when he "brought her his own copy of Milton's Paradise Lost" (101). The contrast between their tastes and the respectable, theological work he chooses is emphasised by the fact that on the same page of Pembroke Park two of Diana's female friends are "arguing over Lysistrata" (101), a comic and extremely bawdy play, though Diana's spirituality is demonstrated via her reading of the poetry of Anne Bradstreet (124). Joanna, although Mr Garfield's sister, is able to fit in with Diana's friends because she has always had a penchant for literature of which her aunt disapproves, particularly "that scandalous Mr. Fielding and his Tom Jones of which Joanna was inordinately fond" (2). Joanna is to be found reading a copy of this work later in the novel (182).

The double entendres in Lady Dennison's comment that "Diana has a passion for art and she is [...] a very passionate young woman" (107) and in Diana's own statement to Joanna that having seen the latter's drawings "You have whetted my appetite and I must be satisfied" (109) hint at the connection between Diana's appreciation of art and her sexuality. Her lesbianism is paralleled by her championship of female artists:

Anne Vallayer-Caster [...] a Frenchwoman of consummate skill. She was highly regarded in her own lifetime I'm happy to say. [...] I think her superior to Chardin but most would quarrel with me there. They're all quite wrong, of course. She is a constant source of delight to me. I've another still-life of hers in my bedroom. (25)

and "Rosalba Carriera [...] is one of my favorites. She was particularly praised in her lifetime for her pastels and her allegories, though she is virtually ignored today" (31).

Joanna is an artist whose painting "gives me great pleasure" (32) but "my brother and my aunt cannot tolerate my working on a canvas. They do not approve of my passion for painting and think that I am idling my time away" (84). Diana's outrage at this proof of their "wretched [...] disregard for your needs and desires" (84) and Joanna's response that she is "used to such disregard" draw parallels between Joanna's creative and personal life. Diana's arrival causes Joanna to fully explore both her sexuality and her creativity. It is Diana who first recognises Joanna's talent (106) and

All that Joanna had hoped to capture in paint was seen somehow by Diana and admired in a rush of words and exclamations that left Diana constantly breathless and Joanna reeling with an [sic] hitherto unknown pleasure. (215-16)

The artistic talent isn't all on one side of the relationship, however. Diana composes music and is a talented pianist:

The room swelled with the music that poured from Diana. The surprise Joanna felt was quickly supplanted by the beauty of the music which invaded Joanna's senses and left her feeling curiously exhilarated. Diana [....] was playing her soul. [...] The music revealed its creatress, and awakened its listener. (141-42)

Given the importance of the creative arts in the novel, and the roles they play in stimulating desire and revealing the "soul" of the artist, it is interesting to note that in a "biographical sketch" Martin reveals that

I discovered my first love and only profession - writing - when I was twelve years old but did not start my first novel until after leaving Mills [College]. Three novels later I fell in love again. Pembroke Park was written in celebration.

One can't help but wonder how much Pembroke Park reveals of "its creatress" and her relationships with both literature and "Lightning," one of the people to whom the novel is dedicated and and someone whom Martin describes as both "my love and muse."

-----

• Hermes, Joke. "Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction." Feminist Review 42 (1992): 49-66.
  
• Martin, Michelle. Pembroke Park. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad, 1986.
  
• Palmer, Paulina. “Girl Meets Girl: Changing Approaches to the Lesbian Romance.” Fatal Attractions: Rescripting Romance in Contemporary Literature and Film. Ed. Lynne Pearce and Gina Wisker. London: Pluto Press, 1998. 189-204.
• Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. 1895. Forgotten Books, 2008.
  

Clothing and Fashion in Romance

Continuing on from Eric's post about Hawaii, here's another forthcoming conference:

Fashion in Fiction
26-27 May 2007

An International Transdisciplinary Conference,
University of Technology, Sydney Australia

It was Roland Barthes who proposed that fashion was not an 'industry' but rather a set of fictions. By this Barthes did not wish to ignore the economic function of fashion, but rather underline fashion's mythic dimension, and suggest that fashion is a literature in itself. Fashion and fiction have long existed in close proximity; writers have been driven by their experience of fashion; fashion has been developed through and by literary tropes. What makes dress and fashion such a fascinating subject for writers? And how are fashion's mythologies constructed and disseminated through fictional texts?

There are more details here, and the deadline for submitting an abstract is the 15th of October 2006.

I've been thinking about fashion and clothing in romance for a while, ever since I read Janice Radway's comments on the topic, and as I won't be able to go to the conference, I thought I'd blog about the subject.

I'll start with a long quotation from Radway, who had observed

the genre’s careful attention to the style, color, and detail of women’s fashions. Extended descriptions of apparel figure repeatedly in all variations of the form, but they are especially prominent in gothics and long historicals. However, even the shorter Harlequins and Silhouettes make use of pared-down descriptions that still manage to evoke the aura of the female world. While relatively short, the following is a characteristic fashion vignette:

Outwardly, she must look much as they did. She had worn a simple white silk brocade of her own design, and with it the set of diamonds and sapphires on the silver filigree chain which she had completed recently. In her small ears were sapphire studs, and on one finger an immense sapphire ring. The white and silver set off her dark curly hair and luminous gray eyes. Leah, her abigail, had set her hair in a high pile with long curls to her neck. Some stray tendrils drifted about her ears, and she brushed them back nervously.

The clothes described in these passages almost never figure significantly in the developing action. Instead, the plot is momentarily, often awkwardly, delayed as the narrator accidentally notices seemingly superfluous details for the reader. The details, however, are not really superfluous at all. They are part of an essential shorthand that establishes that, like ordinary readers, fictional heroines are “naturally” preoccupied with fashion. Romantic authors draw unconsciously on cultural conventions and stereotypes that stipulate that women can always be characterized by their universal interest in clothes. However, at the same time that the fictional characterizations depend on these previously known codes, they also tacitly legitimate them through simple repetition, thereby justifying the readers’ own likely preoccupation with these indispensable features of the feminine universe. The final effect of endless attention to “pink-striped shirt waists”, “sandy-tweed jackets”, “long-sleeved dresses”, “emerald-green wrappers”, may be the celebration of the reader’s world of house-wifery. (Radway 1991: 193-194)

It's interesting that the romance novel from which Radway quotes is called Star Sapphire, a romance written by Rebecca Danton (published in 1979 by Fawcett Coventry). Even without having read the book, I'm certain that the sapphires the heroine is wearing in the quotation selected by Radway must have something to do with the Sapphire in the title of the book. And if the Star Sapphire is in the title, it's probably important to the plot. Furthermore, the colours blue and white together may suggest innocence (or a wish to appear innocent). In religious art, for example, the Virgin Mary's 'gown is white or pink whereas the cloak is always blue'.

It seems to me that while romances may sometimes use descriptions of clothes as a way to demonstrate the heroine's interest in fashion, it is very more often the case that her clothes are described because they give the reader information about her personality, or, as in the example given by Radway, because clothing is being used as a form of disguise.

Identity is often expressed through material possessions such as a person’s clothing and the way they adorn themselves (through hair-style, makeup and jewellery). This aspect of fashion seems to have been overlooked by Radway, who appears to take a very reductionist approach to descriptions of clothing. Her analysis implies that all heroines (and all readers) are interested in fashion, but she ignores the possibility that individual heroines (and many readers) will adapt fashions to suit their tastes, their lifestyle, their budget etc, and that the nuances and clues offered by these personal variations will be read and understood by the romance reader.

Jennifer Crusie responds to Radway, stating that ‘Women are preoccupied with details like clothing and environment because most of us are mistresses of unspoken communication. [...] In particular, the details of the way people present themselves are heavy with meaning.’ (Crusie 1997). Certainly it seems unwise to overlook the importance of clothing as a marker of social status, as an indicator of the wearer’s wealth, sexual availability, occupation etc. In the Middle Ages, for example, detailed sumptuary laws were often passed by monarchs in order to restrict certain items of clothing to members of particular classes. Then, as now, clothing was often an indicator of social status. Colour could also be used to indicate the emotional state of the wearer, as in literary depictions of clothing such as Nicolás Núñez’s late fifteenth-century continuation of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de Amor (on colour symbolism in late-medieval Castilian literary texts, see Goldberg 1992). Radway’s assertion that clothes are described in romances solely, or primarily, due to women’s preoccupation with fashion seems to ignore the possibility that descriptions of clothing may be read on a variety of levels.

It's not just romance heroines who show an interest in their clothes, or whose clothes are described in detail; the hero's clothing may receive considerable attention too. In Amanda Quick's Wait Until Midnight the heroine, who is an author, observes the hero, who

was attired from head to foot in tones of deepest, darkest gray. His shirt was the singular exception. It was a pristine white. The collar was turned back in the new “gates ajar” mode that appeared to be infinitely more comfortable than the usual high-standing styles. His tie was knotted in a precise four-in-hand.
No wonder she had been having so much trouble trying to decide how to dress Edmund Drake [a character in her latest novel]. She had been attempting to put him into the sort of boldly striped pants and brightly patterned shirts that she had observed on any number of fashionable gentlemen lately. Such glaringly bright attire was entirely wrong for Edmund. He needed to project menace and an aura of resolute determination. Polka dots, stripes and plaids did not suit him at all. (Quick 2004: 11-12)

For Quick, then, clothing is not merely a covering for the body. It can be read and understood by both the onlooker and the reader of the romance. Writing as Jayne Ann Krentz, in her Sweet Fortune she gives us a hero who is extremely aware of the messages that can be sent by clothing:

Hatch was very conscious of the sober, restrained elegance of his attire. He was careful about such details as the width and color of the stripes on his ties and the roll of the collars on his custom-made shirts. He did not pay attention to these things because of any natural interest in fashion, but because he did not want to accidentally screw up on something so basic. In the business world a lot of judgments were made based on a man’s clothes.
Hatch had grown up in boots and jeans and work shirts. Even though he had been functioning successfully in the corporate environment for some time now, he still did not fully trust his own instincts when it came to appropriate dress, so he erred on the side of caution. (1999: 22)

What's explicit here is that an attention to details need not reflect any 'natural interest in fashion', as suggested by Radway, but may be due to a need to project a particular image.

As suggested by the quotation from the description of the 2007 International Transdisciplinary Conference, descriptions of fashion are most certainly not limited to the romance genre. Here, for example, is an extract from Oscar Wilde's essay 'The Truth of Masks - A Note on Illusion, in which he comments on the minute details of clothing which can make such a difference to a performance of a Shakespearian play:

the climax of The Tempest is reached when Prospero, throwing off his enchanter's robes, sends Ariel for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in Hamlet changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects; and as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her out in her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare arrays
her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault 'a feasting presence full of light,' turns the tomb into a bridal chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo's speech of the triumph of Beauty over Death.

Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo's stockings, the pattern on a wife's handkerchief, the sleeve of a young soldier, and a fashionable woman's bonnets, become in
Shakespeare's hands points of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of the play in question is conditioned absolutely.

I'll stop now, before this post gets any longer, but I hope I've shown that descriptions of clothing may indicate much more than an interest in fashion for its own sake and, as the holding of this conference demonstrates, descriptions of clothing in fiction are not limited to the romance genre.
---

• Goldberg, Harriet, 1992. ‘A Reappraisal of Colour Symbolism in the Courtly Prose Fiction of Late-Medieval Castile’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 69: 221-237.
• Krentz, Jayne Ann, 1999. Sweet Fortune (London: William Heinemann).
• Quick, Amanda. 2004. Wait Until Midnight (London: Piatkus Press Limited).
• Radway, Janice A. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, With a New Introduction by the Author (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press). Original edition published in 1984.

Romance Clichés: Judging Each Book Individually?

In a recent post at Romancing the Blog, literary agent Kristin Nelson said that

I think writers assume that good writing is enough. Well, it’s not. You have to couple good writing with an original storyline–something that will stand out as fresh and original. A story never told in this way before (even if elements are similar to what is already out on the market). [...] Which is why I tell writers to read as much as you can of what’s already out there-because you don’t have the advantage of seeing the hundreds of partials and fulls like we do.

And in a not at all recent At The Back Fence column Laurie Gold speculated about whether 'readers tend to prefer the first book they read by a beloved author', and concluded that very often they did. But is it really fair to judge a book negatively because of what one knows about other books in the same genre? Agents and readers are, of course, not obliged to be fair: agents are looking for what they think will sell in a crowded market-place and readers are looking for a novel which will entertain them. But how about the academics? How should we approach the genre and its clichés?

There are plenty of them, including the virgin widow, the multi-orgasmic virgin and the Duke of Slut. Given that Dukes of Slut are so often paired with virgin heroines, it may well begin to look as though there's a very obvious sexual double-standard operating in the genre. There are also so many Dukes of marriageable age in romance-land's Regency London they had they actually existed they would have made Debrett's more than double in size. But does this mean that anyone attempting to analyse the genre should dismiss out of hand the more recent examples of novels containing a promiscuous aristocratic hero who finds love, sexual passion and monogamy with a virgin of impeccable birth and a feisty nature? My worry is that while analysis of a large number of romance novels, taken in bulk, by quantity, rather than quality, may be useful if one wishes to identify trends, it may mean that we miss out on a book which includes some of the clichéd plot elements, but which reinterprets them, or presents them in unique ways. Uniqueness with regards to plot, however, can be over-valued, and it's worth remembering that the romance genre is not unrelated to the fairy or folk tale, and, as

Folklorist Nils Ingwersen notes [...] in folk tales, you already know from the beginning what is going to happen; it is familiar to you [...] motifs are the building blocks of this literature.
For instance, one common pattern in folk literature has to do with the site of action. One always meets the protagonist at home, then sees him/her transferred into the unknown world; part of the final reward is always either a new home or a return to the original home. [...] A motif [...] is a plot element or object that may recur over and over in various folk tales. [...]
The standard index of motifs, produced by Stith Thompson at Indiana University, contains about 40,000 distinct motifs, carefully categorized for ease of reference: for example, Animals (B), Tabus (C), Ogres (G), Unnatural Cruelty (S), Sex (T). Thompson’s Motif-Index is a 6-volume guide to all the various motifs found in a variety of folk literatures, including myths, legends, tall tales, and other oral narratives, not just folk fairy tales.

(Professor Waller Hastings, Northern State University)

I do think it is legitimate to ask what the cumulative effect is on readers of repetitive reading of particular situations (e.g. the Duke of Slut). Does this reinforce sexual double standards in society? Do the frequent portrayals of the hero and heroine with their large brood of offspring emphasise a particular aspect of femininity, or suggest that procreation is the expected outcome of marriage? At the same time, I think that if we want to do literary analysis of individual books we have to examine each book on its own merits. Not every portrayal of a large family, for example, is an attempt to coerce the reader into giving their fertility free reign. A particular virgin widow might just have lost her husband before the marriage could be consummated. Lady Bracknell may state with great authority that 'To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness', but those of us engaged in close reading of literature may wish to look a little closer to discover how an individual author deals with the clichés and motifs. Is the author careless? Or does she bring these motifs to life, explore their possibilities and create a work which, while based on traditional elements, leads the reader to think about the issues anew?

Aphrodite visits Parnassus

Academic critics of romance fiction have long been preoccupied with a single question: is the genre good for women readers? This worry may be patronizing, but it has a pedigree. Doesn't Don Quixote pose the same question about chivalric romance? Certainly Plato fears that a steady diet of poetry--by which they mean fiction, made-up things, and not just verse--will rot the minds of the populace as surely as Krispy Kreme doughnuts will rot their teeth. (I know, I know, but what's the classical equivalent? Some sort of baklava?) Sir Philip Sidney's defense of poesy might then serve as a defense of romance, too, with a little judicious editing:

The lawyer saith what men have determined, the historian what men have done. The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech, and the rhetorician and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth the nature of man’s body, and the nature of things helpful or hurtful unto it. And the metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he, indeed, build upon the depth of nature.

Only the romance writer disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of her own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as she goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of nature's gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of her own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as romance writers have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; nature's world is brazen, romance writers only deliver a golden.

The debate J sparked a few days ago about why romance heroines have to be so good--not patient Griseldas, to be sure, but drawn to virtue even at their caustic best--makes new sense if we read the genre through Sidney's eyes. "Now, to that which is commonly attributed to the praise of history...as though therein a man should see virtue exalted and vice punished,—truly that commendation is peculiar to romance fiction and far off from history. For, indeed, romance ever setteth virtue so out in her best colors, making Fortune her well-waiting handmaid, that one must needs be enamored of her." Or, I suppose, we might cite Wilde: "The good end happily, and the bad end unhappily. That is what fiction means."

Recently I spent some time thinking about romance fiction and poetry in another, less high-flown context: an essay on novels with poet-protagonists for the wonderful journal Parnassus: Poetry in Review. I wasn't just being a naughty boy, smuggling a copy of Georgette Heyer up to the High Table, although I won't deny that it was fun. I also wanted to contribute, in however small a way, to the new front of academic writing about romance: that [insert preferred adjective] body of criticism which does not ask whether the books are good for their readers, but tries to read them otherwise.

Here are the opening sections, in which romance fiction appears. The piece is called "Foils and Fakers, Monsters and Makers," although I will always think of it by its original working title, "Buffy the Poetry Slayer":

Foils and Fakers, Monsters and Makers

In my twenties, newly married, eager to please my wife, I cozied up to her six best friends, the novels of Jane Austen. We didn’t get along. Maybe Elizabeth Bennett’s quip about “the efficacy of poetry in driving away love” hit a little too close to home. (Like Darcy, I preferred to consider poetry the food of love, especially on our honeymoon.) A hundred pages into Persuasion, I balked again, this time on behalf of poor Captain Benwick, “a young man of considerable taste in reading, though principally in poetry,” to whom Anne Elliot recommends “a larger allowance of prose.” What was Austen’s problem? Had I known that Charlotte Brontë once wondered, with Pride and Prejudice in mind, whether there could ever be “a great artist without poetry,” no doubt I would have quoted her in defense of my slandered art. Lucky in my ignorance, I held my tongue, and have lived to find myself, like all good husbands, properly humbled.

In the last year I have become an aficionado of the poetry-bashing or poetry-praising novel, and still more of the novel-with-a-poet-protagonist. (Der Dichtersroman, I guess this last would be.) As you might expect, such books are a disparate lot. Some authors merely lift a verse, like a champagne flute, to toast a character’s passion or aplomb:

“I like my afterglow with you in motion. I measure time by how your body sways.” He bit her earlobe and she rolled to look up at him. “Okay,” he said. “I just like my afterglow with you.”

His eyes were dark as ever, but now they were hot, too, intent on her, and he took her breath away. Good grief, she thought. Look at him. He’s beautiful.

“By how my body sways?” she said instead.

“It’s from a very hot poem,” he said. “It comes to mind whenever I watch you move.”

Poetry, she thought. He’ll be surprising me forever.

-(Jennifer Crusie, Fast Women)

Others, like Austen, use poetry to limn their own genre. Persuasion, for example, hints that the novel can offer not only the pathos of Captain Benwick’s beloved Scott and Byron and the sober moral precision that Anne Elliot prescribes in its place, but also a dose of forgiving, tender humor foreign to both.

When it comes to poets as characters, the diversity continues. If many novelists treat them lightly, as foils or poseurs, still more trade on the ancient glamour of the Poet as archetypal maker, and pour out their prose as an offering to raise that noble ghost and question it on topics that more sophisticated critics now avoid. (Sappho, Ovid, and the British Romantics get this nekuia-treatment most often, thanks to their mysterious and ever-compelling lives, but the same rite summons the confected Victorian poets of A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance.) Neither indulgent nor spellbound, a few novelists patrol the graveyard of verse like Buffy the Poetry Slayer, poised to unmask a monstrous ego or put a stake through the heart of an undying, undead reputation. “Milton!” they cry—and it is Milton, often enough—“Thou should’st not be living at this hour!” And the battle is on.

Foils and Fakers

For an introduction to the pleasures of the poet- or poetry-novel, however, you’ll probably want to start with something less fraught than Paul West’s Sporting with Amaryllis or Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America. The book that won me over was a classic Regency romance: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer, inventor of the genre. The poet here is one Augustus Fawnhope, with whom Miss Cecilia Ombersley has, unfortunately, fallen in love, despite his slim prospects. A youngest son with no inheritance to speak of, Fawnhope lacks—because he’s a poet, naturally—any inclination to take up a “humdrum” position in government. Alas, he seems just as unlikely to win fame or fortune through his verse. As Cecilia’s mother observes in the opening chapter, “though his poems are very pretty, bound up in white vellum, they don’t seem to take very well, I mean, not at all like Lord Byron’s.” The billet-doux that arrives a few pages later bears this out: “Nymph, when thy cerulean gaze Upon my restless spirit casts its beam—” Cecilia’s older brother and financial guardian, Charles Rivenhall, is outraged:

“I thank you, I have no taste for verse!” interrupted Mr. Rivenhall harshly. “Put it on the fire, ma’am, and tell Cecilia she is not to be receiving letters without your sanction!”

“Yes, but do you think I should burn it, Charles? Only think if this were the only copy of the poem! Perhaps he wants to have it printed!”

“He is not going to print such stuff about any sister of mine!” said Mr. Rivenhall grimly, holding out an imperative hand.

Heyer nicely pokes fun here not only at Augustus, whose ill-timed and wispy effusions punctuate the novel, but also at Charles, our stuffy-but-goodhearted hero. Among the many things our heroine, the freewheeling Sophy, will teach him is a lesson about poetry familiar (like so much of Regency romance) from Pride and Prejudice. Fawnhope’s work isn’t “about’ much of anything, really, except its author’s need to churn out euphony. As for his love of Cecilia, one good sonnet—or, in this case, one good verse drama—will starve it away entirely.

Although The Grand Sophy aims to melt in your mouth like the best English trifle, Heyer takes her role as dessert chef quite seriously, and her sure hand with Fawnhope shows throughout . His poetic self-involvement, for example, may be a familiar caricature, but Heyer uses it deftly to underscore the novel’s concern with “fit conversation,” in Milton’s fine old phrase, as both the proof and the embodiment of love. The more Sophy and Charles square off, like the Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn of 1816, the better they suit each other, and that suitability plays out as a shared mastery of language. Unlike Charles’s erstwhile fiancée, Eugenia Wraxton, but quite like Charles himself, Sophy can turn on a shilling from the high-society pieties of the ton—from the French bon ton, don’t you know—to boxing slang to blunt negotiation. Fawnhope, by contrast, fawns and hopes, and the more he murmurs verses, the more he proves himself, in Sophy’s words, “the kind of man whom the waiters serve last,” too lost in thought to procure a covered chair for his female companions when it starts to rain. By the time Fawnhope has failed to help Cecilia’s younger sister through an illness—he dashes off a pretty pair of verses, wistful and grateful, respectively, as the girl first fails and recovers—we know the affair is over.

It feels just, then, not malicious, that Fawnhope should be the only major character who is not engaged to anyone, in the end. Like Austen in Persuasion, albeit more comically, Heyer makes poetry seem an art of the solitary self. It may be recited, even given to others, but it’s fundamentally about its own concerns, its own artistry, and Fawnhope admits as much. “Marriage is not for such as I am,” he shrugs to Cecilia when she breaks off their engagement, echoing the words of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Reginald Bunthorne, left single at the close of Patience:

BUNTHORNE. In that case unprecedented,
Single I must live and die –
I shall have to be contented
With a tulip or lily!

Takes a lily from button-hole and gazes affectionately at it.

ALL. He will have to be contented
With a tulip or lily!
Greatly pleased with one another,
To get married we/they decide.
Each of us/them will wed the other,
Nobody be Bunthorne's Bride!

Bunthorne, of course, famously parodies Oscar Wilde, and there’s a none-too-subtle jab at his sexuality in that rhyme about his love of a “li-lie.” Does Fawnhope, too, sketch the Poet as sexual introvert? My sense is no, given his closing work-in-progress, an ode to Sophy. “I have abandoned the notion of hailing you as Vestal virgin,” he declares, moments before Charles finally proposes to her. “My opening line now reads, Goddess, whose steady hands upheld—but I must have ink!” Exit Poet, pursuing a Muse. The story may now come to its properly comic, properly marital conclusion.

As you may have guessed, I’m rather fond of Fawnhope—and so, one suspects, is his author. Effusive, abstracted, entirely silly, entirely sincere, he stands at some distance from his more devious relative Bunthorne, a fake who lets us in on the game:

Am I alone,
And unobserved? I am!
Then let me own
I’m an æsthetic sham!
This air severe
Is but a mere
Veneer!
This cynic smile
Is but a wile
Of guile!
This costume chaste
Is but good taste
Misplaced!
Let me confess!
A languid love for Lilies does not blight me!
Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me!
I do not care for dirty greens
By any means.
I do not long for all one sees
That’s Japanese.
I am not fond of uttering platitudes
In stained-glass attitudes.
In short, my mediævalism’s affectation,
Born of a morbid love of admiration!

Gilbert, throughout Patience, stages a fencing match between poetry, whether of Archibald Grosvenor’s “Idyllic” or Bunthorne’s “Fleshly” school, and the exact, exuberant wit of his libretto. The former tend to the banal and the meaningless, respectively. (“The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind,” Bunthorne observes in his patter-song.) The librettist, by contrast, is a master craftsman. Like Wilde the master of epigram, and unlike Wilde the poet, he offers sprezzatura and not overwrought Rites and Impressions. When he’s funny, it’s deliberate.

The Grand Sophy stages a rivalry between the most admired, least popular of genres and the most despised but most read, with Heyer using Fawnhope to pin down what makes a novel novelistic, at least in the limited instance of romance fiction. Or rather, Heyer restages this little debate, which was carried out in earnest back when novels were an upstart form and poems still commanded a share of the literary marketplace. Neither Captain Benwick nor Anne Elliott, you’ll remember, is an intellectual, yet both agree on “the richness of the present age” where poetry is concerned, and their conversation assumes a reader familiar, at least by name, with Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Bride of Abydos, and The Giaour, although perhaps as puzzled as Austen’s characters as to “how the Giaour was to be pronounced.” There are, to be sure, recent popular novels that take poetry seriously, but they do so as boosters, to show that it, too, can be a popular art. A Wild Pursuit, by Eloisa James, boasts several scenes where poems are put to use for seduction or courtship, and James—the nom de plume of Fordham English professor Mary Bly—observed in The New York Times that readers contacted her eagerly, afterward, to ask where they could obtain more work by her featured sixteenth-century poet, Richard Barnfield. (Here, at least, a sonnet gets to be the food of love!)

What would a contemporary novel look like that considers poetry to be an actual rival, an equal, alternative art?

***
At which point I shift to the rest of the novels--the only other romance I discuss is A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance, and I'll save my thoughts on that for another day.