Jane Austen’s social constraints meets Dickens’ curious customers and cross country journeys in coaches and trains, with an Agatha Christie mystery but less than the sum of these parts.

You will read 75% before the question of the mystery is asked, and then unravels in gentle suspense-lessness, let out like a punctured tyre. An enjoyable, fun read. Could’ve delivered more justice to the plot at 25% the length.

The scheming chemistry-obsessed monological Count is ripped from the pages of Monte Cristo.

Unclear why the Count is assassinated, though it conveniently wraps things up. Unearned.

Walter is bland, though brave as he tells it. Can we rely on his account of things? He claims motivations of justice and love, and does by his account forgo any claim to Laura’s money, though nevertheless makes a grand deal of having her re-introduced at her home, and finishes with an aristocrat for a son. He seems quite happy to use Pesca, without further mention that his friend recovered from the grave shock Walter brought about. The narrative, he says, is strictly a legal text for the vindication of his wife, explaining why he does not contain extraneous details about his family or friend, though the book contains painful detail in other places. Is Walter less caring, and more scheming, than his dull facade allows?

An evocative depiction of the injustice done to women with the charge of insanity. Still today women are called “crazy” flippantly, to dismiss them.

There are a few seeming plot holes or omissions. For example the Count notably writes fantastically in Marian’s diary, also proving that he read it, but neither the fact that he had studied it nor his writing is ever referenced when they read back the journal, although this would surely be a shocking discovery. For another, Laura has no legal identity and they are living in hiding, but they are still able to get married. Either a pinhole in the logic of the plot, or a bizarre risk to take, another suggestion of Walter’s ulterior motives?

The book teases that the main reveal is going to be Anne’s paternal heritage, but in fact it becomes that Percival was an illegitimate child, not entitled to his nobility. At least in the modern day, Percival’s “illegitimacy” is much less interesting than the juice of Anne’s real father. In fact I’m left feeling a little sorry for Percival, forced to cover up for his parents in order that he may inherit what is his by any modern standard.

twin-sisters of chance resemblance

From the earliest suggestion that Laura & Anne share like appearance, the modern reader is led to the conclusion that they are somehow related. But this would be a scandalous thought for the Victorian character, and perhaps reader too. It’s a fascinating study of what the orthodoxy of taboo, and censorship more generally, does to us. The consequence is not that nobody will say it, nobody would think it. As strong a demonstration of thought policing, and in a more organic way, than 1984.

Only Walter, at least according to his account, already deep in scandal, is able to see & think through the situation clearly. Heretics and non-conformists are unrestrained (or choose different restraints).

Notes & Highlights

“If you choose to understand me, you can-if you don’t choose, I am not going to trouble myself to explain my meaning.”

Women can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money, but they cannot resist a man’s tongue when he knows how to talk to them.

the house-forest of London.

bore her husband’s name was not her husband’s child.

The solution to the father issue was clear well ahead. One example of the reveal being too gentle & too obvious

“The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.”

Laura, Anne, Percival