Lucas Malet (1852–1931)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1068131.html

I got hold of this via Project Gutenberg largely because it is supposed to be based on the life of Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh; I had no idea that I would be so completely captivated by it. The author was the daughter of Charles "Water Babies" Kingsley, and carved out a significant reputation at the end of the nineteenth century. Richard Calmady was one of her major literary successes, a controversial novel which deals frankly with sex, disability and religion, condemned as "vicious" by no less a critic than Charles Francis Adams in the columns of the New York Times. It is one of the best books I have read this year, and I am simply stunned that I had never heard of the author before, and that Richard Calmady never made it into the canon (and is not easily available in dead tree format either). It would make the basis of a great film or TV series.

Richard Calmady is born to a landowning family in the 1860s, with only vestigial legs (differing from his model, Arthur Kavanagh, in that he is English, not Irish, and has full use of his arms). The book traces his psychological journey and his relationships with his mother and three other women; the characters are vividly sketched (as indeed are numerous male foils to the action) and there are numerous beautiful descriptive passages - mostly of the English countryside around the Calmady estate, but also with a memorable section set in and around Naples.

The author's sympathies are clearly with both the spiritually inclined mother and the feminist Honoria St Quentin (who describes herself in one memorable passage as "not what you call a marrying man"). There is also a surprisingly profound undercurrent of spirituality (tarnished, unfortunately, by a slightly naff ancient curse), which would probably be the biggest block to the book's success in today's market - that, and the rather ostentatious wealth of the Calmady family and their friends, the twittish Lord Fallowfeild and his children. It is also a very long book, but it really carried me along. Strongly recommended.… (altro)

This was very enjoyable to read, though the density of the late Victorian style was occasionally a little taxing. It combines the romantic and the supernatural in a charming story about a man who, at a safe distance from his American wife, in the English country house he is about to inherit from his eccentric dying uncle, falls in love with a ghost, and finds his memories bound up with those of a relative who died young at Trafalgar. The Gateless Barrier has been compared to Henry James's The Sense of the Past (which I have not read); certainly the Anglo-American contrast is a present theme, and they share an element of time-travel, or at least time-overlap. But as I neared the end of the book, as the hero wrestles with conflicting desires and duties, I was suddenly and powerfully reminded of the fantasy novels of George MacDonald, Lilith and Phantastes, with their romantically unwise heroes and their part-theological, part-psychological plots. The strong undercurrent of Christian moral and spiritual values is hardly surprising in a Victorian clergyman's wife and daughter ('Lucas Malet' being a pseudonym of Mary, daughter of the writer and clergyman Charles Kingsley and estranged wife of the vicar of Clovelly), but it does rather distance her from the Aesthetic Movement with which she is sometimes associated. It is a pity that this book is not better known. MB 4-ix-2007… (altro)