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| Trade paperback, 463 pages Published 2006 (originally 1937) Acquired and read September 2016 |
I decided to read this book after rereading The Brontës Went to Woolworths, as it is the only other one of Rachel Ferguson's books to have received a modern reprinting. The back flap of my Persephone Books edition says, "her second [novel], The Brontes went to Woolworths (1931), is her best-known; but the most interesting is ALAS, POOR LADY (1937), which was 'fuelled by her mordant social observation' (ODNB)." I disagree. The Brontës Went to Woolworths was delightfully inventive and engrossing; Alas, Poor Lady is a bit of a slog. The novel reminds me of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks or the like, those early-twentieth-century novels about the decline of a middle-class family. It's more limited in scope, however, covering just a single generation from birth to death-- a generation entirely of women (bar one son, who dies young), who find themselves trained into uselessness by the social conventions of their time, but largely unable to marry. I wanted to like it, and it had its moments, but it just never grabbed me on the whole, maybe because there were so many daughters, and I found it difficult to distinguish them from one another. Maybe also because I've read enough proto-feminist Victorian and Edwardian novels with similar takes that much of Ferguson's social critique was old hat. The first fifty pages, where we get insight into the basic setup of the family, and the last fifty pages or so, chronicling one of the daughters' time spent governessing, were the best parts. The intervening 350-ish pages got fairly monotonous. Disappointing, given how much I liked The Brontës.
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