A Lady of Quality is a romance by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1896. If the name rings a bell, it’s because Burnett also wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden. Today Burnett is remembered for her children’s books, but she also wrote a lot of romantic novels for adults, one of which is A Lady of Quality.

It features melodrama – so much melodrama. People just don’t make melodrama like they used to. I mean, sure, any telenovela or CW network show will have murder and family drama and affairs, but these days you never get speeches like this:

“But now, you called me a goddess and spoke of Olympian Heights,” she said; “I am not one – I am a woman who would show other women how to bear themselves in hours like these. Because I am a woman, why should I kneel, and weep, and rave? What have I lost-in losing you? I should have lost the same had I been twice your wife. What is it women weep and beat their breasts for-because they love a man-because they lose his love? They never had it.”

This kind of book is essentially unreviewable, so I’m just going to spill all the crazy beans and you can decide if it’s your crack or your kryptonite. The rest of this review is basically a plot synopsis. If you want to avoid spoilers, stop here. If you are cool with spoilers, buckle up!

The Victorian Era was both thrilling and sucky, so here are your trigger warnings for animal abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, lots of death and egregious overuse of hyphens. There’s also cross-dressing, so of course I personally pounced on this book like a fox on a vole, but honestly there is no way to grade this stuff. It is what it is.

The first thing that you need to know about this book is that it starts off with some really depressing shit. At the start of the story, Asshole Dad marries a much younger woman. She will henceforth be known as Martyr Mom, not because I’m victim blaming but because she represents a very specific Victorian type of female character, one who exists to be good, to be miserable, and to die. Martyr Mom gives birth to nine children in nine years. All but two of these babies die in infancy. Giving birth to Baby #10 kills her, but as she lies in her deathbed she tries to suffocate the baby, who is lying next to her, to save the baby from being raised by Asshole Dad. This is some dark shit, but also an interesting subversion of the Martyr Mom Victorian Trope in that instead of praying over the baby for angels in heaven to guide it on the moral path, she just up and tries to kill it. This sets the tone for a book in which people make some hardcore choices.

Baby #10 is given the name Clorinda, because other than the abuse and the poverty and the pollution and the medical problems ,the Victorian Age was truly a glorious time of wonders. The servants raise her, but she’s a hellcat of a kid who physically attacks everyone who stands in her way, so she grows up almost feral. When she’s six, Asshole Dad, who has avoided her because of her girl cooties, discovers her having a fit because someone else is riding her horse. He thinks being hit and cursed at by a six year old is totes adorbs and he makes a pet of her, raising her as a son from that day on. She wears boy clothes and rides astride and curses and does whatever the hell she wants, basically.

 

 

Clorinda grows up mean but she also grows up smart. She realizes that since Asshole Dad has no money, she’s going to have to marry well, which will mean revamping her image. She has a big fifteenth birthday party where she shows up dressed in formal men’s clothing, makes a speech about how now she’s a woman and no one will see her dressed like a boy again, leaves, and comes back dressed in a ballgown. Everyone oohs and ahhs.

Clorinda spends a few years knocking everyone dead with her beauty and regal bearing. Somehow she learned perfect drawing room manners but she hasn’t lost her, “I’m in charge and I give no fucks, literally or figuratively” attitude. Between that and her height (she’s quite tall) it’s no wonder that she’s described as “a goddess” about 5000 times by various characters. Her father doesn’t have the money to send her to a season in London so she’s basically a huge fish in a tiny pond, ruling over the gentry of the surrounding villages with an elegant but steely hand:

“All that I do is right—for me. I make it so by doing it. Do you think that I am conquered by the laws that other women crouch and whine before, because they dare not break them, though they long to do so? I am my own law—and the law of some others.”

 

Along the way she befriends one of her two surviving sisters. Of the sisters, Barbara is occasionally mentioned but never seen. What is the deal with Barbara? We will never know. Eventually, she marries some guy. Bye, Barbara.

Anne, however, adores Clorinda and follows her everywhere like a puppy – a very dumb puppy. Anne is described as plain, dull, and devoted. If you hate doormat characters, you will hate Anne, although I confess that I had a soft spot for Anne because I suspected early on that she was a bit of a hidden badass. More on that later.

Clorinda winds up with three primary suitors, Sir Oxon, Lord Dustonwolde, and Duke Osborne. Sir John Oxon is a player. Clorinda sets it up so that she will never be alone with him, so that he can’t try to ruin her reputation. They have an “I hate you but I want to have enraged but consensual sex with you” thing going. Anne develops a huge crush on him herself, although he’s not any more interested in her than he would be in an item of furniture.

Clorinda settles on the dull but sweet (and rich) Lord Dustenwolde. Sir Oxon is so pissed that he runs off to gamble and hang out with Men’s Right’s Activists on Victorian Reddit. Anne has a total meltdown and begs Clorinda not to marry Lord D. because Anne is convinced that Clorinda and Oxon are star-crossed lovers. Clorinda has to patiently explain to Anne that Oxon is actually a huge asshole who just wants to score and whose pride has been affronted because he thinks he deserves every hot chick in the United Kingdom.

 

There is one teeny complication. Minutes after accepting Lord D.’s proposal, Clorinda is introduced to a new character, Duke Osmonde. Wouldn’t you just know it – they are both struck with love as though by lightning the second they lay eyes on each other, but they are both super honorable and never speak of it. The transition from “Clorinda who does whatever the fuck she wants to do” to “Clorinda who is super honorable” is a mysterious one – the earlier version of Clorinda would have had sex with Osmonde on the floor, at the party. But the New Clorinda is super noble about her sudden passion.

To everyone’s astonishment, Clorinda is a great wife – respectful and affectionate to her husband and firm but generous in running the household. She moves Anne into her mansion so that Anne doesn’t have to live with Asshole Dad. Lord D., who is much older than Clorinda, dies, and she’s truly sorrowful about it. While they did not have a great passion, they had a lovely friendship, and Clorinda describes him as “the first good man that I had ever known.” After a year of mourning she is totally free to marry Osmonde and they get engaged and that’s the end NO WAIT IT ISN’T!

Oxon is back, and he’s shittier than ever! He tells Clorinda that in case she forgot, before she got engaged to Lord D., Clorinda and Oxon totally did it in the Rose Garden and he has a lock of her hair to prove it, and he’s going to show it to Osmonde and then Osmonde won’t marry her! So she should just marry Oxon instead, I guess…at some point his plan gets kind of incoherent.

 

 

OK, I just have to pause the narrative here and point a couple of things. I get that a member of the aristocracy would want to marry a woman of impeccable morals. But at this point in the story, Clorinda’s youthful past is long over. She’s not a virgin. She’s a widow. And it seems to me that if Oxon is hip enough to tolerate the fact that his fiancée used to drink brandy, smoke cigars, curse, and wear pants, then he can probably live with the fact that Clorinda had one episode of pre-marital sex years and years ago before marrying a Duke and being super respectable as a wife and then a widow.

Whether I’m right or not, Clorinda panics, and she and Oxon have a huge fight, and she hits him with a whip and accidentally kills him, and the only sad thing about this is that 1. I’m sure that by this point in the story you’ll join me in wishing she had killed him on purpose 2. SUPER SAD SPOILER

This is where the nerves of steel and hardcore choices come in. Clorinda realizes that the body fell neatly under a couch. She shoves it the rest of the way under there, and entertains callers in the room, while sitting on the couch, for TWO DAYS (days which I assume were very cool in terms of temperature or that room would get very smelly very fast). During all these social visits, she keeps sending her servants out to deliver messages to Oxon and loudly puzzling as to why he isn’t home – thus establishing in the minds of her visitors that he’s a) gone and b) she doesn’t have prior knowledge of his absence. This all happens during Clorinda’s visit to her childhood home, so after two days she tells everyone she’s off to marry her fiancée and live in his house, and by the way there’s a cellar wing that is getting all moldy and gross so could the servants just brick it off, thanks so much.

So, Clorinda gets away with killing the douchebag, and she marries Osmonde. Clorinda devotes much of her life to finding victims of Oxon and helping them. He impregnated and abandoned village girls all over England and she supports them and tries to get them respectably married off. She hopes this will help atone for her action in killing Oxon (accidentally) and hiding the body (on purpose).

Eventually, Anne dies of the Too Good for the Sinful Earth strain of Victorian Wasting Disease. Before she dies Anne reveals that all along she has been Made of Win, and to understand why, you have to know this:

1. Anne had a huge, huge crush on Oxnard. She truly loved him but she did it from afar because she knew nothing would happen, and the fact that he was uninterested in her protected her from learning all of his flaws.
2. Anne dotes on Clorinda and had told her earlier that she would stand by her even if Clorinda were ever to murder someone (hello, not-so-subtle-foreshadowing).
3. Anne is the novel’s representation of all that is good. She’s not pretty, she’s not rich, she has severe social anxiety, and she’s not clever, but she has morals and you’d never expect her to do anything other than pray a lot.

On her deathbed, Anne reveals that she always knew that Clorinda and Oxon had a physical affair – in fact, because she loved them both and wanted them to be happy, she helped them by standing guard and making sure they were never caught. Instead of moralizing, she sympathized. And then when Clorinda and Oxon had the fatal fight, Anne spied on them because she knew he was up to no good, and she wanted to be ready to help Clorinda if Clorinda needed backup. She saw Clorinda kill Oxon and didn’t know it was an accident (Clorinda had meant to hurt him but not kill him) and she kept the secret to protect Clorinda.

Clorinda is established in the book as being both tall and unusually strong, and one night she secretly carried Oxon’s body to the cellar and hid him there, so that once the cellar was blocked up the body would be hidden forever. Anne saw her do it, and before the cellar was locked, Anne, who was afraid of her own shadow, crept down to the basement and arranged Oxon more respectfully and prayed over him, because she had never stopped loving him, and she kept the secret, because she was a secret badass herself.

 

Everyone remembers Anne fondly, Clorinda goes on to have a super happy life with the duke, and Oxon rots in the cellar where he belongs. THE END.

As a romance between a man and a woman, this is totally undeveloped. Why do Clorinda and Osmonde fall in love? Because they do. They are two perfect paragons who instantly recognize each other’s perfection. The first time one of them leaves a wet towel on the bathroom floor it will be all over. There’s a second book told from Osmonde’s point of view but based on this book I really don’t care. But as a story about sisters, the book is pure gold. Frankly, this book is one close genetic tie away from being the greatest lesbian love story ever (other than the fact that if it were the greatest love story ever, Clorinda and Anne would run off together and rule a small country).

This book hasn’t aged well. For the most part, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden could have been published for the first time last week. A Lady of Quality is Late Victorian/Early Edwardian through and through, and on a first reading the characters are exceptionally cartoonish. However, on a second reading, they are filled with complexity and pathos. The one feature that should be most compelling, Clorinda’s passion for Osmonde, is completely uninteresting – but her relationships with her father, her sister, and her first husband are pretty fascinating, as are the complicated issues about agency, taking action, and gender roles.

The book is actually pretty subversive in terms of morals, with almost all of the moral judgment falling on Asshole Dad and on Oxon – there’s no suggestion that the women he knocked up were immoral, only that they were perhaps naïve and that Oxon was a manipulator and a liar. Even Anne, the voice of morality, encourages Clorinda to keep Oxon’s death a secret, and Anne never judges Clorinda for her sexual behavior or for killing Oxon. Clorinda lives with guilt, but the guilt is part of her life, not something that ruins all her happiness.

The attitudes towards agency are fascinating. Anne is celebrated largely for her passivity, yet Clorinda is adored for her ability to take action and for her refusal to be the puppet of the men in her life. Clorinda views her ability to take action as a sign of her masculine self – just as she has ‘masculine’ traits of being tall and strong, she has ‘masculine’ traits of being stubborn and outspoken and rebellious. Every time she cries, or feels very emotional, she berates herself for being ‘womanly’ and ‘weak’. Is the message that women have the capacity to take charge of their lives, and they should do so, like Clorinda? Or is the message that to be truly feminine is to be passive and emotional, like Anne? Or is the message that women are people, and therefore they can have different personalities, and all kinds of personalities have value? I’m not sure.

What I am sure about is that those wacky Victorians had a lot to sort out with regard to gender, and they could have used some lessons about birth control and hand-washing as well.