Dichroic Reflections

The Red House

Am I the only one in modern times who has read E. Nesbit's The Red House? If so, it's a pity, becaue it's a lovable story. Unlike most of her books, it's for adults, not children, though there is a cameo appearance by the Bastables. (The Red House and its inmates also appear in _The WouldBeGoods_, if you remember the scene about the Antiquities.)

I've read through it before, but for some reason this time around, Len and Chloe are reminding me of a young Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, if they had found each other in springtime instead of late summer of their lives and had not had to pass through trenches and trauma before to get to their happiness. (The Red House was written in 1902, so maybe England in general was a little more innocent - after all the Boer War and Crimea were far away from home.) There are discussions of Proper Jobs - for a woman as well as a man, in 1902! I think Nesbit may have been doing a bit of the kind of idealizing Sayers and L.M. Montgomery did with the marriages in their books - her first marriage wasn't entirely unhappy, but what I've read of it suggests that she and her husband might not have had the pure understanding of each other Len and Chloe have.

They have an omnipotent friend Yolande instead of an omnipotent Bunter, but Yolande solves the servant issue in almost exactly the same way Harriet does in Thrones, Dominations. (Maybe Sayers or Paton Walsh read The Red House?)

It's a sweet book; a story beginning soon after a wedding and continuing through a happy marriage to the birth of a daughter couldn't be otherwise, but it has bits of acerbity reminiscent of Austen. Here's a bit of the flavor of both the acid and the sweetness, when the vicar's wife has just come to call, has mistaken Chloe (who was washing her own floors) for a maid and been corrected, and who has taken pains to tell Chloe how very exclusive the local society is:

"As the dear Bishop of Selsea used to say, we ought not to associate in intimacy with persons of distinctly different social rank from our own."

"Did he say that? Do you know him, then?"

"I have stayed at the palace."

"Are you sure you didn't misunderstand him? I have often heard him say that a man should choose associates of his own intellectual rank--"

"You have often heard him say?" The vicar's wife's voice trembled unaccountably.

"Yes--I know him rather well. He is my uncle. I never heard him mention your name. Yet I seem to know your face. Were you not Miss Blake before you married?"

The vicar's wife could not deny it.

"I remember you when I was a little girl and you were my uncle's housekeeper. Well, I was saying just now, domestic service is a very honorable calling."

There was a desperate pause. The woman was indeed delivered into Chloe's hands by the long arm of coincidence. She rose.

"I think I will go now," she said, in quite a broken voice.

Chloe caught her hand impulsively.

"I am sorry," she said. "I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't thought you wanted to be horrid to me. I dare say you didn't, really, but I have a hateful temper. Please forgive me. I won't tell a soul, if you'd rather I didn't. And I like you heaps better since I've remembered that you used to work too. Do forgive me! I won't tell any one, not even my husband," she went on; and I was shocked to find she could even think of keeping a secret from me. "Say you forgive me, and let me get you some tea."

Amusingly enough, despite the book's name, The Red House actually shows less of Nesbit's Socialist politics than some of her children's books. Len and Chloe sympathize with the servants, but don't mind being served (they are radical enough to view servants as people first, though - maybe that was Socialist, then). It's a sweet book overall but not sticky, and poignant in spots - when a woman gets pregnant now, her biggest fear doesn't have to be her own death in labor. I doubt it's in print, but I wish it were.

Besides, I want that house. Twenty-nine rooms!!

Posted by dichroic at April 8, 2005 01:38 PM