Review: Zoe: A History of Two Lives Geraldine Jewsbury

Trade paperback, 431 pages
Published 1989 (contents: 1845)

Acquired October 2012

Read May 2014

Zoe: A History of Two Lives
by Geraldine Jewsbury

This book has a killer premise: a father in the eighteenth century gives his daughter a classical education, like a man would receive, and as a result she ends up unable to fit into either the world of man or woman. You wouldn't know it, though, because it barely does anything with that premise; we're mostly just told that it's true, but we never really see Zoe move through society or try to find her place in the world, except when she decides to get married, and though she has her occasional regrets after that, they're not developed substantively or interestingly.

One can't help but feeling that if Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot had turned their hands to this premise, you would have got a book with keener insight. The narrator comes out with these sweeping generalizations about women, and it's like, where did you even get this from? Aren't you a woman? Be smart for a second! "A true woman always blames herself, and it is a point on which her lover, to do him justice, never contradicts her" (387)? Really? But I guess it's mean to blame Jewsbury for the fact that no one had come along and invented Realism yet. (Mary Barton was three years away, and that's where I would peg it.)

Also there is a story about a doubting priest named Everhard (the second of the subtitle's "two lives"). Like Zoe's story, this one starts interesting but soon meanders into nothingness, and then we end up pondering whether Zoe's stepdaughter Clotilde will marry the right man, which isn't really what any of us came here for. The Everhard subplot does yield, however, the book's funniest moment, an apology from the narrator:

It is very troublesome to have to deal with a hero of seventeen! A girl of seventeen, fortune favouring, may be made into a very interesting heroine; people will believe all that can be said of her beauty, wit, and wisdom, and will patiently read through three or even six volumes full of her adventures, and find themselves much edified with the perusal. But a lad of seventeen! merciful heaven! to make a hero of him would require a suspension of the laws of nature! All his graces of childhood have run to seed, and the victims of manhood have not yet replaced them; he is no longer the chubby darling [...] but an unfinished, uneasy biped, a plague to every body within his reach, and with whose doings and sufferings, nobody, not absolutely obliged, wishes to have the least concern. (40)

I think that if the whole novel had been that fun, well, it would have maintained my interest much more.

Review: The Half Sisters by Geraldine Jewsbury

Trade paperback, 409 pages
Published 1998 (originally 1848)
Acquired October 2012
Read June 2013

The Half Sisters
by Geraldine Jewsbury

I bought this book because I was lead to believe that one of the eponymous half sisters, Alice, married a scientist. This is not quite true; she marries a man who works in business vaguely depicted, but she does meet him in a town where members of the British Association are meeting. I think he's there to hear about scientific breakthroughs that will affect his work, though he's not a scientist himself. I must trace the original reference to see if the error of understanding was mine or theirs.

In any case, this is a decent novel. I've seen Jewsbury compared to Elizabeth Gaskell, which I don't think is quite right-- Gaskell is better with interiority and less prone to overt moralizing-- but The Half Sisters is still a decent read. It chronicles two half sisters, one from a conventional middle-class background who marries too hastily, the other an Italian actress who tries to make it in England. Both women find their lives constrained by social pressures. Jewsbury is pretty scathing of contemporary women's education, and she shows how it warps both men and women's perceptions of women's roles in society: "A woman is a rational being, with reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, and yet she is never educated for her own sake, to enable her to lead her own life better; her qualities and talents... are modified, like the feet of Chinese women, to meet an arbitrary taste" (219).

It's a little melodramatic at times, but Jewsbury avoids excess; I was particularly impressed with how characters who in other hands could have been simple villains (such as Alice's sometimes-thoughtless husband) were more complicated and understandable than that. This is very much a novel where social pressures and societal expectations are the villains, not individuals, not even the worst of them.

The Half Sisters sparkles with the occasional insight or witticism worthy of George Eliot, even; I liked Jewsbury's description of a "worldy" man: "his ideas about women became coarser and more rigid; and after the fashion of that style of men, he expected them to do all the virtue going in the world, in spite of their own individual efforts to thwart it in all the women they came near" (168). Or, in talking of the attempt of a man to remember his lover's suffering: "our own personality sits closer to us than any other feeling; no generosity can enable us to get rid of it; our 'self-negation' is at best but a generous fiction" (211). Ouch! But perhaps too true.