Rant
Genre: Historical: Other, Romance
NB: We have a doozy of a book rant this Saturday, but after spending some quality time with family members, we might all be in need of letting out a little aggression. The Ladies of Missalonghi also sounds like a pretty good candidate for an intense hate read. This particular book rant comes from author Marian Perera.
Marian Perera lived in Sri Lanka, Dubai and Texas before settling in Toronto (for now), where she runs medical laboratory analyzers at night and writes during the day. Her most recent novel is The Beast Prince, picked as a romance of the month by the Washington Post, and she tweets as @MDPerera.
There is a trigger warning below, but in case you miss it: trigger warning for discussions of rape.
I finished Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds when I was sixteen, and quickly tried her other books. One of them, The Ladies of Missalonghi, was a pleasant romance, or at least I thought so at the time. I recently read it again.
Oh my. My inner goddess just turned into Kali.
But first, trigger warning : discussion of rape ahead. Specifically, the discussion I wish the heroine would have had with the hero, right after she punched his lights out as a favor to women everywhere.
Missy Wright lives with her widowed mother and aunt in Missalonghi, a house outside the town of Byron. The three of them are poor relations of the family which owns the town, and Missy is a plain, thirtyish spinster. Her sole pleasure is reading romance novels borrowed from her friend Una, a beautiful librarian who’s a newcomer to the town.
So far so good. Then the romance kicks in. On her way home, Missy has an attack of chest pain, but she’s saved by a stranger called John Smith who’s bought a valley nearby. Instantly falling for him and inspired by a romance Una urged her to read, she marches into his home and proposes to him.
And she’s got a compelling argument in favor of her proposal. The chest pain turned out to be only a pinched nerve, so Missy stole one of her doctor’s reports, which dealt with another patient’s terminal heart disease. She claims the report is hers, meaning John Smith will only have to endure her presence for a year or so, but he’s having none of it.
“Women,” he said, “are liars, cheaters, connivers and fools. I wouldn’t care if I never saw another woman as long as I lived.”
Ah, he’s no longer a stranger. He’s that familiar specimen of alpha-hood, Illogicus misogynus. One woman wronged me, so they’re all evil.
Missy goes away and does something productive with her life. Oh wait, no. She marches back in the next day to propose again, and makes it clear she will keep doing this until he says yes.
“You’re playing with fire, Miss Wright,” he said, lips thin and tight. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that a man might resort to violence if a woman refuses to leave him alone?”
Proving his blanket generalization correct in her case, she smiles and parrots her question, at which point he collapses like a souffle and agrees. I’m not kidding. In the space of a minute, he goes from threatening to strangle her to claiming his luck might disappear if he doesn’t marry her. I suppose the only way to advance the plot was to have him agree, and it might have been less believable if he attacked Missy, she hit him over the head with a log, he developed amnesia, and she convinced him he was her adoring husband?
Oh, and we’re still at the top of the roller-coaster here. We haven’t started the plunge into Lake Loathsome yet.
Missy says she’ll stay in his house overnight. Spotting a potential escape route, he warns her that the honeymoon might start prematurely.
She might decide she didn’t like it! After all, most women didn’t.
Most women? If the sex involved him, I’m surprised it isn’t all women and most sheep.
And he could be hard about it, not rape her exactly, just force her a little; a virgin of her age was bound to be easy to frighten.
Be still, my heart. Or is that my stomach? Of course, she turns out to be amazing in bed, not to mention in the waterfall where they take their morning bath. Afterwards, as they’re discussing wedding details, he asks for her full first name. She confesses she hates her full name, because it’s Missalonghi, the same as her house. His reply?
“You poor little bitch!”
I have no idea what to think. Does he mean this as humor? Affection? Sarcasm? The story doesn’t say, and the scene stops here without showing Missy’s reaction, though since she seems to happily accept everything he says and does, maybe she’s fine with being called a bitch, too.
But the worst is yet to come. Missy visits Una, who cheers her on in the matter of deceiving someone into marriage, and then goes to the registry office where she and John Smith are married. As they drive home, he tells her about his first wife, who’s dead. Naturally, this woman is a complete caricature who mocked him, cheated on him, and smelled of sulfur. Missy asks if he and the Evil Ex (whose name he never mentions, so wait for it) had children.
“Hell no! She might have lost her figure. And of course, that meant she was a great one for teasing, for kissing and cuddling, but to get my leg over her—it only happened when she got drunk, and afterwards she’d scream and howl and carry on in case anything came of it, then she’d pop out and visit the tame doctor they all patronised.”
Okay. Deep breath.
The book was published in 1987, so I can’t be surprised that marital rape is no big deal. What disgusts me is that Cruella made it clear she didn’t want children, yet he had unprotected sex with her at a time when she couldn’t give informed consent, with the predictable result that she had an abortion. This happened on more than one occasion.
And it’s all treated as her moral failing, another glaring sign of her selfishness. He’s innocent. He just needed sex—excuse me, to get his leg over.
Sympathetic Missy can hardly believe her predecessor was so considerate as to die in an accident. So he realizes he married the right woman this time around, except now he’s sad she’s going to die.
Maybe if he could make her happy enough, it wouldn’t happen at all.
Yes, that’s exactly how heart disease works.
They break the news of their marriage to her mother and aunt, and John Smith delivers some even better news. It turns out he was once insulted by the ladies’ rich relatives when he dared to marry into their extended family. So after his first wife’s death, he changed his name and bought up shares in the family company as revenge. Now he owns that company and he’s got some ideas for reorganizing the board of directors.
“I want women on my board, and I want to start with you two ladies… you have coped magnificently with your hardships, and you certainly don’t lack courage.”
So he went from hating all women to being their fairy godfather. Missy’s mother and aunt are routinely defrauded by their relatives, which they realize only halfway through the book, and they do nothing on their own to change this situation when the truth dawns. They aren’t qualified to manage a bake sale, but anything to get the HEAs handed out so it can all be over.
But wait, there’s one last thing! Missy’s mother asks who his first wife was.
He replies, her name was Una.
Because the story wasn’t ridiculous enough, it transforms into a paranormal in the last few pages.
Una, you see, returned as a ghost so she could atone for the horrible things she did. She hints at this in the story, saying she’s not a widow but no longer with her husband either, but these weak attempts at foreshadowing don’t make up for the biggest deus ex machina I’ve ever read. Anyway, Una makes one last appearance, giggling happily and warning Missy over and over again never to tell their mutual husband the truth because of his “terrible temper.” Then she flies off to heaven and the story comes to a merciful end.
The Ladies of Missalonghi has been criticized for ripping off L. M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle. I can’t comment on that because I haven’t read both books, but I can confirm that this is an offensive, ludicrously plotted insult to readers, whether it’s plagiarized or not. If you want to check out Colleen McCullough’s novels, read Tim, The Thorn Birds or The First Man in Rome.
Read anything except this book.
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I haven’t read this book (and am not really tempted to) but The Blue Castle is one of my favorite books. The difference is that the heroine legitimately receives information that she has a heart condition and is going to die. At no point does she deliberately deceive the hero. It sounds like a poor and disturbing knockoff. Thanks for the rant! That book sounds nutters!
I read Thorn Birds as a teenager, but I can’t think favourably of Colleen McCullough following her defence of the Pitcairn Island convicted rapists. Saying that the men should have been allowed to follow their “custom” and have sex with young girls.
Don’t bother with the Thorn Birds either. Just sayin’!
(As I haven’t read the other books mentioned in the rant, I can’t comment on them.)
Ms Perera, thank you for the phrase “illogicus misogynus”. It’s amusingly apt and I’m stealing it.
As to the book itself, great rant but I’ve never read it. Nor does this post make me inclined to do so.
@Rachel: Never heard of the Pitcairn Island rapists before today… and I could have happily continued without that knowledge (you know I Googled it, right?).
What men will say in order to do what they want to women/girls never ceases to amaze and disgust me. And that so many women end up going along with it (accepting of the societal indoctrination) just depresses me more.
Yeah, I read this review and went, “Okay, so it’s like The Blue Castle, but with assholes.” If you need a palate cleanser with a much better working of this plot line and 100% less rapiness, go for that. The hero and heroine genuinely like each other and the heroine uses the bad news to take control of her life.
I loved the Blue Castle, read this one and had trouble with the ‘hero’ being a misogynistic assbag.
As others have said, The Blue Castle is far superior to The Ladies of Missalonghi. My biggest problem with Ladies is the foundation of a relationship on an outright deception, which is endorsed at the end of the book as the only way to make the relationship work. I finally decided that McCullough must have wanted to make us feel uneasy, whereas L. M. Montgomery wanted to leave us feeling good.
A most excellent rant.
It’s so hard to go back and reread teenage favorites in the light of more mature, aware, and enlightened (at least we hope that’s the case) adulthood. It’s for that reason I never have reread THE THORN BIRDS or many other books I read in my youth. I used to reread GONE WITH THE WIND about once a year until my mind started screaming at me, Do you not see the racism (not to mention the marital rape)? You just can’t go back and reread those books with your young mind again. And that’s not a bad thing.
I’d say one small thing in McCullough’s (possible) defense here: I’m not sure what time period the book is set in, but I do know the word “bitch” once carried a much less sexual or awful connotation–especially in Britain and the colonies. There’s a character in an Angela Thirkell novel who is referred to as the “Baedeker bitch” because she writes popular novels with lots of travel in them. For those unfamiliar with Thirkell, she was a very proper mid-century British writer and she would never have used the word “bitch” in our current connotation. So I’ll give McCullough a pass there…but all the other stuff? No–just no.
McCullough’s husband was born on Pitcairn. Twelve years ago a number of men from Pitcairn (where the “Bounty” mutineers settled) were convicted of rape. Their victims were adolescent girls; the rapists’defense was it was the Polynesian custom for older men to “break in” young women. It is interesting that the mothers who brought the abuse to authorities’ attention were “outsiders” (non-Pitcairn born).
I definitely thought of The Blue Castle when I saw that plot summary. But The Blue Castle is a delightful book, L M Montgomery’s most romance-y of her books. You should all read it!
” She might decide she didn’t like it! After all, most women didn’t.
Most women? If the sex involved him, I’m surprised it isn’t all women and most sheep.”
That had me laughing so much I woke the dogs up 🙂 A most excelent rant, thank you for sharing it.
Wow. I read this book as a teen and I remembered it as vaguely crazysauce but I’d forgotten the actual plot. All I remembered was Una (maybe wearing red?) at the end saying “never tell him.” Yuck.
Blue Castle is one of my favorite books of all time, and so when I read this travesty of a book I was deeply offended… it takes a lot of plot, but lost all of the charm. Thanks for the rant!
I don’t care for the way Colleen McCullough writes although I did, of course, read the Thorn Birds and attempted a few of her other books.
Never read the Blue Castle either. Don’t think I’ve heard of it.
Hasn’t anyone else noticed that the librarian and the former wife have the same name? I am confused. Are they the same person?
@Gloriamarie – Una the librarian is actually the ghost (or something) of Una the first wife.
It’s a very odd book.
@cleo, thank you. That wasn’t clear to me. I thought they had to be the same person but never heard of a corporeal ghost before.
I loved The Blue Castle. I got it for Christmas when I was 11 and read it in one sitting. I remember reading about the controversy concerning The Ladies of Missalonghi being a rip off and read it shortly after it was released. I thought the ending was pretty bad, but didn’t find John Smith too objectionable at the time, but I cut my teeth on 70’s romances and the Angelique books, so I was probably way too tolerant of rapey misogynists.
One thing I will say for the McCullough book, however, is that, although Missy is ground down by poverty and being considered the ugly duckling in a large, attractive family, her mother and aunt do love her. Poor Valancy, in The Blue Castle, is roundly despised and ridiculed by her family except for one distant cousin.
I couldn’t finish The Thorn Birds due to the internalised misogyny of the female characters (or the author??) and the complete lack of solidarity between them. But this book sounds even worse!
What a terrific rant! It reminded me of loving “My Brilliant Career” when I was a young teen, later at college, I dragged my friends to see it at the student union. I was horrified and they couldn’t believe it! They still chide me about it 30 yrs later.
Sounds like a dreadful book. Excellent rant though.
wasn’t that a recent Nicholas Sparks movie plot? the matchmaker ghost of his widow?
@AMG, you’re right. It was his book Safe Haven.
My cousin, through a bizarre coincidence, read Ladies and Blue Castle right next to each other. She said it was total plagiarism – even some of the dialogue was basically lifted, with some verbal abuse (and a ghost, apparently) thrown in. Sounds like Ladies is the goatee-wearing evil twin of Blue Castle, which is a lovely book. It’s technically considered a kids book, but I still enjoy it very much.
My cousin, through a bizarre coincidence, read Ladies and Blue Castle right next to each other. She said it was total plagiarism – even some of the dialogue was basically lifted, with some verbal abuse (and a ghost, apparently) thrown in. Sounds like Ladies is the goatee-wearing evil twin of Blue Castle, which is a lovely book. It’s technically considered a kids book, but I still enjoy it very much.
(Oops – sorry, didn’t mean to post twice…)
Ah, the romances we loved as teens. I have been lucky in that most of what I loved as a teenager either held up fairly well, or at least did not make me shudder years later.
I was lucky in having my Nana’s Gothics and Romantic suspense collection to delve into and I loved those books. Still do for the most part even though they do feel dated.
@marion, I still love those Gothics. A few months ago, someone posted a link to a website that listed a bunch and danged if I didn’t lose it.
@Linda, what your cousin said made me wonder if whoever owns the copyright to Montgomery’s work ever sued for plagiarism.
The Thorn Birds has two major problems for me. The first is the whitewashing of Australia. The second is that Ralph, supposedly an intelligent and perceptive man, has unprotected sex multiple times with a young woman who loves him and wants children, yet he never even considers the possibility of pregnancy. Then, years later, he sees her child and leaps to the (completely unsupported) conclusion that she went back to her estranged husband. This keeps them apart until the end.
It felt extremely contrived. And although the women in Meggie’s family are strong in different ways, they’re also all self-sabotaging and don’t have positive relationships with each other. That said, The Thorn Birds is still a much better read than this book. The Cleary family’s secrets, Mary Carson’s “vengeance from beyond the grave scheme”, the incredibly vivid descriptions, all of that works very well for me.
McCollough pretty much admitted flat out that she plagiarised The Blue Castle. The heirs of LMM chose not to fight *that* battle because at the time, they were already in a battle with Kevin Sullivan over the Anne movie rights.
But yes, The Blue Castle is the far superior book and I HIGHLY recommend it.
I’m sorry. I read this book rant and went back and re-read LoM and I still like it.
What I get from it is a novel about a woman breaking free from the unrealistic expectations of her society and finding happiness for herself and those she cares about. And Colleen McCullugh evokes the time and place beautifully.
The ‘Una’ parts are a bit out there,I’ll admit, but she’s there to make reparations for the wrong things she did while she was alive. John Smith learns that not every woman is as bad as his first wife (which is not entirely his exaggeration – Una admits that she was pretty terrible). I didn’t see the sex scene as rape. I thought it was consensual, and although he had a moment where he considered using sex to scare her off, in the end he didn’t. The book is set in the early 1900s. Attitudes to sex were different then. Although frankly, it’s so briefly described that you could probably make a case either way. John’s sex life with his first wife was a power play on Una’s part – she was prepared to get him all fired up, but she wouldn’t let him actually follow through. I’m not condoning rape within marriage, but sex within marriage is a fairly reasonable expectation, surely. Even in a marriage of convenience.
Admittedly, I’m Australian, and I recognise some of the things that others object to as Australianisms (like the use of the word bitch in a sympathetic context), and I’ve never read The Blue Castle. But I WAY prefer Ladies to The Thorn Birds, where everyone was so miserable that I barely finished the first section.
The Blue Castle was Montgomery’s attempt to write a book for adults.
Yeah this sounds like a rip off.
I read a review of her Bittersweet that was ranting too.
@BellaInAus – I agree that it’s reasonable for a person to expect sex within marriage. However, if that person’s husband or wife doesn’t want to provide it, does that justify having sex anyway?
If I married a man and lived with him, I’d expect him to pay part of the bills. But if he refused to do this, and I waited till he got drunk, took his debit card, and withdrew whatever I wanted from his personal account, this would be stealing. A power play on his part wouldn’t justify a crime on my part. Likewise, I don’t agree that Una refusing to have sex meant John Smith was at all justified in having sex with her regardless.
Still, let’s say he didn’t know this was rape (since, as you said, the story’s set in the early 1900s). Did it matter to him at all that he risked making Una pregnant? His children might have been raised by a selfish vicious mother who drank and slept around, and by a father who admitted to hating that mother. So at best, he’s selfish too. Maybe living with the constant fear that his second wife will die is *his* atonement.
The atmosphere and descriptions are lively and vivid, though, and they paint a beautiful portrait of rural life. If the story had been about the ladies’ daily lives, I’d have liked it a whole lot better.