I read a review of Crossriggs (1908) by Jane and Mary Findlater back in my early days of blogging, and I now have no idea where – but I bought it in 2008, and it’s only taken me twelve years to take it off my Virago Modern Classics shelves and finally read it. And I loved it! (I have no idea how two authors go about writing a book together, so I’m going to quietly ignore that element of it. If anybody has any insight, do share.)
The novel is about the small Scottish village Crossriggs, which only has a handful of families, most of whom have known each other forever and can date back their family in the area through several generations.
We made at Crossriggs a right little society within a very small circle. True, the village was only an hour by train from a capital city; but our excursions there, and our returns, only made our independence the more marked. Crossriggs was no suburb – owed none of its life or interest to another place. Edinburgh was our shopping centre; some of us had business, and all of us had relatives there; our surgeons and our boot-makers lived there; but socially, Crossriggs hugged itself in a proud isolation from ‘town’. We didn’t want it; of course ‘town’ would never have believed that, but it is true all the same, and although the Scottish capital is at all seasons swept by sufficiently bracing airs, one of our customs was to draw a deep breath on alighting from the train at our own station, and remark with satisfaction, “How good the air tastes after being in town!”
Our heroine is Alexandra Hope, commonly Alex, who is a clever, witty, impetuous young woman living with a kind, unworldly father (‘Old Hopeful’) who is terrible at keeping money and excellent at having new interests and schemes. He is a fruitarian, and is usually to be found trying to get unsuspecting locals to try various vegetable pastes that he eats instead of proper meals. I loved him – think the kindness of Anthony Trollope’s Septimus Harding and the absent-mindedness of Mr Pim from A.A. Milne’s Mr Pim Passes By, rather than the self-centred eccentricity of Mr Woodhouse in Emma. He has a childlike wonder and delight in the world, and an equally childlike inability to manage responsibility and duty.
Alex tolerates him but has to do something to help the family finances – particularly when her widowed sister returns from living abroad, bringing five children with her. She refuses the help of Mr Maitland – a local man of some renown, who has moderate fame and riches, and a wife that nobody is particularly fond of. Some of my favourite scenes in the novel are when he is dealing bluffly with Alex, trying to educate or reason with her, while clearly very fond of her and a little in awe of her. There is something of the Emma/Knightley relationship.
Instead of his money, she starts reading for a local Admiral, whose sight is not up to reading for himself. And he has a smooth, handsome grandson in tow.
Crossriggs felt a lot like an Austen heroine in a Gaskell novel to me – all update a little for the Edwardian period. (In the writing, that is; it is set in the late-Victorian period). Alex is in the same mould as Elizabeth Bennett – very lovable and quite flawed. And not at all like the cover pic on the Virago Modern Classic, which I think is a rare poor choice from them. The story of romance is not simple, as there are a range of male candidates and none of them are quite suitable. But, like Austen’s novels, this is much more a book about the heroine’s development and dawning self-understanding than it is about romance.
I shan’t spoil the ending, but the plot develops in a way I didn’t at all expect – and very satisfyingly. I think I originally bought the novel because it was described as a comedy – well, it’s more a comedy of manners. Smiles rather than laughs, and not without sensationally tragic moments that are of their time, but a wonder set of characters and an enchantingly engaging setting. Perhaps Alex’s similarity to Austen heroines isn’t entirely accidental, but the novel succeeds in being entirely its own thing, however much it owes to a history of sister novelists.
Others who got Stuck into it:
“I could just say – find a copy, read it!” – HeavenAli
“It’s a good story, but I thought that Alex was a bit dense most of the time” – A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore
“I did love it. I can’t say that it’s a great book, but it is a lovely period piece.” – Beyond Eden Rock