A review of The Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford

In 1860, Alexander Ferguson, a newly ordained vicar and amateur evolutionary scientist, takes up his new parish, a poor, isolated patch on the remote Scottish island of Harris. He hopes to uncover the truth behind the legend of the selkies—mermaids or seal people who have been sighted off the north of Scotland for centuries. He has a more personal motive, too; family legend states that Alexander is descended from seal men. As he struggles to be the good pastor he was called to be, his maid Moira faces the terrible eviction of her family by Lord Marstone, whose family owns the island. Their time on the island will irrevocably change the course of both their lives, but the white house on the edge of the dunes keeps its silence long after they are gone.

It will be more than a century before the Sea House reluctantly gives up its secrets. Ruth and Michael buy the grand but dilapidated building and begin to turn it into a home for the family they hope to have. Their dreams are marred by a shocking discovery. The tiny bones of a baby are buried beneath the house; the child's fragile legs are fused together—a mermaid child. Who buried the bones? And why? To heal her own demons, Ruth feels she must discover the secrets of her new home—but the answers to her questions may lie in her own traumatic past. 

 Hardcover, 320 pages
Expected publication: April 15th 2014 by St. Martin's Press

This debut novel takes place on the beautiful Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland where an isolated croft by the sea remains deserted; holding a dark, secret that new owners Ruth and Michael will uncover. This secret took place around 1860 when the local minister, Reverend Alexander Ferguson fell in love with his housekeeper; having an affair resulting in a baby. Was this the same newborn malformed baby found underneath the floorboards of The Sea House? What could have possibly happened here and why are these souls still trapped within unable to move on?

Two storylines parallel each other decades apart including the subtext of ‘island clearances’ evicting islanders allowing the connection to the Celtic myths of selkies and how it fits into the reverend’s storyline. He is the key to discovering the origins of The Sea House.

There is a lot of myth and folklore written throughout this debut novel and it gets confusing with the inclusion of secondary characters. The past storyline takes over the novel and focuses mainly on one part of the recent couple living in the sea house. Ruth becomes fascinated with the Reverend’s life story and against her husband’s wishes proceeds to delve into the past almost to the point of ruining her marriage!

I found The Sea House interesting in context. I understood what the author wanted to do with these two storylines but it is overcomplicated with too much detail and it is just too crowded on the island for me! Every time a character came upon an obstacle there was a too neatly fitted result. For instance, one aspect of the past storyline includes scientific clues then you discover Ruth has a degree in zoology! She very easily makes connections that should not be so easily found; especially when dealing with Celtic myth and folklore on the Outer Hebrides!

I would instead recommend another Hebredian novel with a mystery involving ‘island clearances’ Peter May’s superbly written ‘Entry Island.’ Also, a selkie-twisted love story written beautifully is Orkney by Amy Sackville. I would highly recommend it as well! 

Thank you to St. Martins Press for my free copy in exchange for my honest review. 

The U.S. Edition comes out on April 15, 2004 and will be available for purchase on Amazon. 

Mariana and The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley Reviewed!

The first time Julia Beckett saw Greywethers she was only five, but she knew at once that it was her house. Now, twenty-five years later, by some strange chance, she has just become the new owner of the sixteenth-century Wiltshire farmhouse. But Julia soon begins to suspect that more than coincidence has brought her there. 

As if Greywethers were a portal between worlds, she finds herself abruptly transported back in time. Stepping into seventeenth-century England, Julia becomes Mariana, a beautiful young woman struggling against danger and treachery, and battling a forbidden love for Richard de Mornay, handsome forebear of the present squire of Crofton Hall.

Each time Julia travels back, she becomes more enthralled with the past, falling ever deeper in love with Richard...until one day she realizes Mariana's life threatens to eclipse her own--and that she must find a way to lay the past to rest, or risk losing a chance for love in her own time.
  

The title immediately makes me think of Alfred Tennyson’s poem of the same name introducing themes of a lonely isolated heartbroken woman desperately searching for her own sense of happiness and love.  One could find these attributes within the main character of Julia Beckett if you were to look closely enough. I don't know if this was the author's intention. However,  a stanza of Tennyson's Mariana is included in the opening novel pages!

I always enjoy Susanna Kearsley’s gripping writing style and her historical descriptions in her flashback chapters. However, she uses a very calculated formula when writing her novels. For instance, there is always the lovelorn lonely single woman needing an escape from her life, discovering an unexplainable attraction to an old house, the past life connection solution providing her a romantic love relationship! Hey, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it right? This would be my one complaint. When I read her novels, the premise is always the same but I fall for it hook line and sinker…bring on the history and the romance!

 

"Whatever time we have," he said, "it will be time enough."

Eva Ward returns to the only place she truly belongs, the old house on the Cornish coast, seeking happiness in memories of childhood summers. There she finds mysterious voices and hidden pathways that sweep her not only into the past, but also into the arms of a man who is not of her time.

But Eva must confront her own ghosts, as well as those of long ago. As she begins to question her place in the present, she comes to realize that she too must decide where she really belongs.

 

In The Rose Garden we meet Eva Ward whose sister has just passed away and she has been given the task of finding a resting place for her ashes.  Eva remembers her happy childhood in Cornwall, England, and off she goes for a visit she will never forget! Of course, staying in an old cottage there evokes her imagination when she starts to see a ghostly image of a man and strange things happen. She sees a garden path that doesn’t exist and her visions begin again! Oh, and she hears voices from the past when she sees that male ghostly figure that of course she is very attracted to! Do you see where I’m going with this? Is it imaginary or is it reality?

The descriptions of Cornwall and the smell of roses coupled with the author’s beautiful descriptive writing style make this historical time travel romance not as formulaic as you would expect! Actually, the premise did remind me very much of A Cottage by the Sea by Ciji Ware which I loved so so much. I highly recommend it as well. I read it a few years ago, and some of the scenes and chapters remain in my memory still!

Spellbound The Fairy Tale and The Victorians by Molly Clark Hillard Reviewed!

In examining the relationship between fairy tales and Victorian culture, Molly Clark Hillard concludes that the Victorians were “spellbound”: novelists, poets, and playwrights were self-avowedly enchanted by the fairy tale, and, at the same time, literary genres were bound to the fairy tale, dependent upon its forms and figures to make meaning. But these “spellbound” literary artists also feared that fairy tales exuded an originative power that pervaded and precluded authored work. Victorians resolved this tension by treating the form as a nostalgic refuge from an industrial age, a quaint remnant of the pre-literacy of childhood and peasantry. However, Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians demonstrates that fairy stories, rather than operating outside of progressive modernity, significantly contributed to the language and images of industrial, material England. Hillard challenges the common critical and cultural misconception (originating with the Victorians themselves) that the fairy tale was a quaint and quiescent form.

Through close readings of the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë; the poetry of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti; the visual artistry of Burne-Jones and Punch; and the popular theatricals of dramatists like Planché and Buckingham, Spellbound opens fresh territory into well-traversed titles of the Victorian canon. Hillard reveals that these literary forms were all cross-pollinated by the fairy tale and that their authors were—however reluctantly—purveyors of disruptive fairy tale matter over which they had but imperfect control.   

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Ohio State University Press (28 Mar 2014) 

 Molly Clark Hillard is assistant professor of English at Seattle University 

Part One – Matter discusses the works of such Victorian era greats as Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Bronte’s Jane Eyre by analyzing its poetry, aspects of fiction and drama  in terms of how the Victorians used sentimentality while taking a nostalgic look at the fairy tale during the industrial age.  The works of Charles Dickens will take precedence in these chapters making up part one of Spellbound because he was the most successful nineteenth-century writer of the day! 

Part Two – Spell has to be my favorite part of Spellbound. Firstly, two of my favorite men and their works are discussed within the Victorian fairy tale and folklore context socially and culturally: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.  Each of them represented the gender status of female in regard to the fairy tale princess and the subject of Sleeping Beauty both poetry form and in painting form.  Alfred Lord Tennyson’s, ‘The Day Dream’ is analyzed in terms of how it fits into the fairy tale genre or aspect. Also, in stark contrast the reader will find The Briar Rose paintings by Burne-Jones included in images in Spellbound and The Briar Rose history both French and British fairy tales are analyzed within a refreshing aspect. I enjoyed these chapters immensely. It made me look at their works differently and form an even better perspective on the historical aspect of their works. 

As if this is not enough, the author juxtaposes Tennyson’s The Day Dream and aspects of Idylls of the King against John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes.  I always think of that gorgeous J.E. Millais painting whenever I read that Keats poem. Sadly, Mr. Millais is not brought into these chapters but you will find John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice quoted throughout Spellbound giving it another interesting perspective on the connection between the subtext of fairy tales used during the Victorian era by such brilliant Victorian men and women. 

Part Three – Produce introduces the reader to the concept of ‘fairy folk’ within the fairy tale aspect of its origins during the nineteenth century. What did the Victorians think of ‘fairy folk’ did they believe in them or dismiss the concept altogether? These chapters will discuss how fairies travelled between the human and fairy world characterizing fairy legend within the theme of Victorian literary representation. Some aspects of cultural nineteenth century events are mentioned and discussed i.e. The Great Exhibition, Crystal Palace, Punch Magazine imagery are used within the pages of Spellbound as well as Richard Doyle’s, The Fairy Tree.  I wasn’t familiar with Richard Doyle’s work so this was such a pleasant and unexpected discovery to read about. One discovery that did not surprise me included in this part was the woman’s name, Christina Rossetti and her most disturbing work, ‘Goblin Market!’  You cannot discuss fairie folk and the nineteenth-century without mentioning Christina Rossetti!   The author discusses the theme of what she terms ‘female hunger’ and its search for knowledge, labor and domestic economy within Goblin Market. The concept  of the ‘violated maiden’ found in Goblin Market is brought to light within the context of how The Victorians perceived this work written by a well-known poetess from an even more well-known family, ‘The Rossetti’s. However, when it comes to Spellbound only Christina Rossetti’s works are mentioned and included here! 

Part Four - Paraphrase as if goblins weren't scary enough up pops "Lupus in fabula" (the wolf in the tale). The wolf as a corrupt character either lurking in the forest waiting to attack an innocent young girl or the wolf used as a figure who teaches young girls self-sufficiency, chastity, restraint even mortality.

These chapters will demonstrate how "Little Red Riding Hood" taught Victorians themes of pursuit, shameful knowledge and violent ends through a fairy tale figure representing endangered virtue. For instance, Charles Perrault's Le Petit Chaperon Rouge is discussed possibly beginning the fairy tale aspect of Little Red Riding Hood. Also, The Grimms' Rotkappchen is introduced and analyzed in-depth.

Overall, Spellbound is a cultural and analytic in-depth examination of the relationship between fairy tales and Victorian culture. Were the Victorians "Spellbound" and enchanted by these tales? You will have to read it to find out.

 Thank you to The Ohio State University Press for my free copy in exchange for a fair and honest review.

To purchase Spellbound in the United Kingdom, AmazonUK  and in the United States, Amazon

William Morris Textiles and Wallpaper exhibit and other finds...

So, I came across this 'special exhibit' running at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, here in NYC and I went with a friend tonight. It is a small one room exhibit primarily showing textiles but if you love William Morris it is very much worth the trip! 

 

 William Morris Textiles and Wallpaper February 3–July 20, 2014

From the museum website, "William Morris (1834–1896) is acknowledged as the leader of the British Arts and Crafts movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. His enterprise, originally founded as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company in 1861, became Morris & Company in 1875. They produced a variety of decorative arts, with textiles and wallpapers comprising a large portion of their artistic output. In 1923, the Metropolitan acquired the institution's first examples from the oeuvre of Morris & Company, and a selection of these are shown in this installation. According to the printed company logo on the selvages, the printed textiles bought that year were produced after Morris & Company moved to Hanover Square, London, in 1917. Like the printed textiles, the wallpapers and the woven fabrics were probably produced later than their original design date, attesting to their perennial appeal.

A white card on the wall mentioned a familiar name:  "John Henry Dearle (1860-1932) was hired by Morris in 1878 and began designing for Morris & Company in the late 1880s. Like Morris, Dearle was enamored of historic textiles and carefully studied the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection in London. Two examples of his work from the early 1890s are displayed in this gallery. Upon Morris's death, Dearle became the company's chief designer. 


Walking through the museum I spied a few favorite portraits and some paintings...

"King Lear," Act I, Scene I by Edwin Austin Abbey (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1852–1911 London) Date: 1898 Medium: Oil on canvas

 John Singer Sargent's The Wyndham Sisters, 1899, Oil on Canvas, 115 x 84 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art

Queen Victoria, 1838 by Thomas Sully (American, 1783–1872), Oil on canvas; 94 x 58 in. (238.8 x 147.3 cm) Lent by Mrs. Arthur A. Houghton Jr. (L.1993.45)