Tag Archives: Lewis Carroll

The House on Fortune Street

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Four lives intersect with secrets and betrayals in Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street.  Each character has an affinity to a literary master – Keats, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Charlotte Bronte.   Their modern lives from London to Brooklyn, carry the weight of these authors’  flaws and the influence of their lives and work.

Livesey divides the book into four parts, with each character taking turns as the narrator: Abigail, the owner of the house and a young amoral actress and playwright whose childhood as a virtual orphan has trained her to fend for herself; Dara, Abigail’s friend from college days at St. Andrews, who taught her civility and loyalty; Cameron, Dara’s father who left when Dara was ten years old to protect her from his horrible secret; and Sean, the all-but-dissertation candidate at Oxford, who abandons his wife and his research on Keats to write a book on euthanasia when Abigail decides to charge him rent for living with her.

Sean quotes Keats and imagines parallels to his own life; Abigail’s early days mirror Dickens’s “boyslaughter” life – when part of his childhood was destroyed by the irresponsibility of his parents; Cameron, an avid photographer of young girls, sees himself in Lewis Carroll’s famous pictures of Alice; and Dara becomes a Jane Eyre, betrayed and vulnerable – but not as strong as Bronte’s literary heroine.

Each section ends with a cliffhanger, but the fortunes of all in the house come together in the end – tragically.  Not an uplifting tale, but Livesey’s language is witty and compelling and her literary allusions informative.  I found this author when I read her children’s book, The Flight of Gemma Harding, with lives similarly influenced by circumstances and just plain luck.

 

 

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Burning the Evidence

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Do you keep a diary?  Do you record your anger and anxieties, or keep notes reminding you of people, events, times to remember? In her article for the New York Times – Burning the Diaries  – Dominique Browning describes her cathartic experience – secure that her children will not discover her secrets.   In this year’s Man Booker Award winning The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes has his character, Victoria, burn a diary left by Adrian, who has committed suicide.  But a letter written by the main character survives to haunt him.

Although Jane Austen wrote over 3,000 letters, only 160 survive; her sister destroyed or edited most.  Lewis Carroll’s diaries from 1858 – 1862 mysteriously disappeared – effectively hiding his inspiration or notes for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written in 1862.

The second best advice a friend passed on to me – keep a journal, assigning emotions to paper as the vehicle for cleansing – sometimes better to quietly write it than say it.

The best advice:  destroy the pages so that no one could read them, and take offense at mutterings that were meant to be private.  Browning notes in her article that rereading her diaries only brought back miseries better either forgotten or retooled as Tony Webster tries in the Julian Barnes novel.

The shredder is just as effective as burning – and without the cleanup Browning dreads.

Related Review: The Sense of An Ending

What’s In A Name? “Nom de Plume” Reveals All

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Hiding a real identity sounds seductive and a little criminal, but writers have been using pseudonyms to mask their real names for a while.  Carmela Ciuraru focuses on a small group of famous writers and the reasons behind their deceit – some we already know about, but in each case, Ciuraru gives us more information than we may know, and feeds our hunger to know the person behind the name.

Why do writers use another name? In the case of the  Brontë sisters, it may have been the hope of better reviews, in a time when women were relegated to nonliterary pursuits. For Charlotte, aka Currer Bell, it worked – not so much for her sisters, Emily and Anne.

Trapped in an arranged marriage, George Sand (whose real name was Aurore) escaped to Paris.  With mentors like Balzac, Zola, Dumas, and Flaubert, she found the courage to write and publish – but under a man’s name. Her real life was bohemian for the times, living with her lover for six months and then returning to her country home to care for her child the other half of the year.  She flaunted her rebelliousness – smoking cigars, wearing sturdy boots; her disguise went beyond using another name.

Through sixteen chapters, Ciuraru explores the lives and writings of those we knew by another name, sometimes another life – from George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, and O’Henry to Pauline Réage – and more.  Her style can be academic at times, but through her careful research, the information becomes biographical.  You may not want to read about all the authors, but it is possible to pick and choose, since each chapter is a story itself and each author is clearly identified in the chapter title.

As one who has used a pseudonym, I found myself immersed in the stories of the writers.  For most, their reasons for hiding behind another name were understandable; eventually, readers discovered the real name anyway.  But, for a time, they were able to stay secluded in their own worlds – without criticism or exposure – and keeping a piece of themselves to themselves – hard to do when you write.

“Never to be yourself and yet always – that is the problem.”                        Virginia Woolf

Carmela Ciuraru wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review about pseudonyms that could be an introduction to her book – and she used her own name.

Read Ciuraru’s New York Times Article:  The Rise and Fall of Pseudonyms

Clothes Make the Queen

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When reading Alice in Wonderland, it’s easy to imagine the characters in costume, especially the Queen of Hearts.  So many visual recreations exist – from Disney to Helena Bonham Carter in Tim Burton’s movie.  Now, Lewis Carroll’s  story will be on Broadway; in this updated version, Alice gets to Wonderland by pushing a button on her elevator. And, Susan Hilferty who describes herself as “a storyteller whose medium just happens to be clothes” is the costume designer.

In Sylvanie Gold’s interview for the New York Times, Hilferty provides sketches and the thought-process behind her imagination for the costume designs in the article What Befits a Legendary Queen.  Intricate black and white costumes dress the Red Queen in Hilferty’s collection in Act One before she uses color in Act Two, but it’s how she gets to the final version that is so fascinating.  The  Red Queen lives again…

Related Post:  Alice in Wonderland