O, Genteel Lady! by Esther Forbes

I think Esther Forbes is a name to conjure with in America, but I hadn’t heard of her when I bought O, Genteel Lady!(1926) seven years ago. I picked it up because I’m keen to read anything by women from the ’20s, and because I was beguiled by the opening paragraphs:

‘I have nothing,’ she thought, ‘but myself. No parents that count; no longer a fiancé; no home. I’m not even young any more, actually twenty-four. Ladies in novels are never out of their teens. Well, at least I’ve got myself.’

She straightened her long, slim body, straightened her bonnet, and looked about the railroad coach and the miserable cold companions of her journey.

‘Myself… and a mink pelisse,’ she added, and was sorry for the women in frayed shawls and shabby bonnets gathered close about the pot-bellied stove standing midway in the coach.

Lance Bardeen – what a name! – has left a jilted lover behind in Amherst, Mass., and is moving to Boston. It isn’t long before the reader discovers that this novel might be written in the ’20s, but it set several decades earlier. In all the talk of bonnets didn’t clue us in, then Lance’s ability to hide her bare feet under her wide-hooped skirt shows us that this is a mid-to-late Victorian woman.

All the more impressive that she has struck out on her own, refusing to marry a man who is taking her for granted. Lance is spirited, intelligent, and determined to make a better life for herself. At times, she says wonderfully feminist things – like this, to a man who says ‘I will never again believe in your sex as I did’:

‘I hope you never will. I hope you’ll see we are not made of cambric and sawdust, with porcelain heads, but of flesh and blood.’

All well and good. I could have loved this novel if Lance had stayed true to her intentions as she set out for adventure. I really enjoyed seeing her start working at a magazine, writing little stories for them while also trying to write rather better stories for rather better magazines. It’s certainly not pacy or filled with plot, but it’s good fun – and the narrative of a small-town woman discovering the big city is pretty timeless. But…

Forbes gives us one of those heroes whom you wish never to hear of again. The sort of selfish brute who apparently turned the heads of woman in the mid-Victorian period – c.f. Heathcliff, though Anthony Jones certainly isn’t in his league of cruelty. He is struck by Lance and, let’s call a spade a spade, assaults her with a kiss. She reacts angrily, somewhere between the ‘think of my virtue’ of the typical novelistic miss and the ‘how dare you disrespect my agency’ of the character we saw at the outset. And yet… she quickly falls in love with him.

Partly to distract herself, partly (I imagine) because Forbes ran out of ideas for Boston, Lance goes off on a tour of England. While she’s there, why not meet with various famous literary figures of the day? Forbes gets rather carried away, giving scenes with George Eliot, Tennyson, and a near miss with the Brownings. I’m sure it was fun to write, and it’s pretty fun to read, but it rather dispenses with the structure of the novel.

So, O, Genteel Lady! sadly doesn’t live up to the promise of the first chapter and the delightful Lance we see in those pages – in my opinion, at least. It’s all a little hotchpotch – a novelist who hasn’t quite worked out yet how to use her evident skills.