by Wendy Moore
Another book I picked up by mistake in my search for shallow chick-lit. Firmly in the genre of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and The Other Boleyn Girl, this makes shallow chick-lit look meaningless, and, surely, is crying out to be turned into a film.
I suspect this sort of book would be dismissed by the History Snobs as being about a lightweight unimportant subject. It would be ignored by the glossy mags and their airhead journalists as not being 'relevant'. It would also be dismissed by feminist academia for not containing sufficient long, made up words, interminable sentences with multiple sub clauses, and for not being hectoring enough.
It seems to be a well researched book relying heavily on primary and contemporary sources (with pages of end notes citing these sources). Unlike The Other Boleyn Girl, the author does not make any disclaimer about fictionalising, and, other than projecting thoughts and feelings, I regard it as straight account.
It is a biography of Mary Eleanor Bowes, a summary of which is available at Wikipedia. Not a new story, the 'worst husband' was the subject of Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Wendy Moore comments on how for three centuries, Mary Eleanor Bowes' story has been told and retold in a way to cast her in a poor light.
For example, only in 2006 a man published a book called The Trampled Wife: The Scandalous Life of Mary Eleanor Bowes; the publisher's blurb describes her as a 'termagant', a word whose meaning I had to look up.
I recognise that every good historian writes with a Point of View; nevertheless, I find this book to be revelatory and shocking historiographically. In other words, and in reference to the academic sisters, it's about time that history became herstory.
Twin and interlocking themes in the book: extreme domestic violence and the oppressive, tyrannical, thieving property and marriage laws - not properly (if that) amended until my lifetime, that meant that the woman was the property of her husband. That was no abstract concept. This meant that a married woman had no legal personage, so could not take legal action in her own name, had no rights to any property inherited from her father, and, on separation, had no legal rights to access her children, let alone be their caregiver. Mary Eleanor Bowes was unusual in that she was able to be an exception to this. Eventually.
If you read my review of Daughters of Shame, you will recall I wrote:
I simply don't see that rape, child marriage and imprisonment are race issues. In any case, similar oppression was typical of white European Christian society until fairly recently.
I wrote that before I had even read the cover of this book, and this book appeared next in the pile serendipitously. I found the first few pages difficult because the writing style is so very different from Jasvinder Sanghera's, but I soon settled into it, and after a few slow short sessions, read most of it yesterday.
In a perfect world, I ought to be reading weighty academic tomes, but books like this are far more useful. It's 96 in the Amazon (UK) sales rank for books, perhaps assisted by it being part of the Channel 4 TV Book Club (whatever that is...). This shows there is a market for this kind of book, possibly an insatiable market.
This reaches more people than academic tomes; those who read it are by definition literate, and, probably, well educated and already aware of the issues. Being part of a book club and - eventually, I guess, - a film, will mean that the message reaches a wider audience.
No doubt, some of that wider audience will say 'Oh didn't Kiera Knightley (or whoever) look mint; fancy coming shopping; I don't see the point of feminism" but a lot more will realise that progress has to be won, is slow and is fragile. Conversely, the reader might consider "that's history, thank goodness the only thing we have to worry about now is the emo angst and body image obsessiveness of a modern Bridget Jones".
It's a generally well-written and edited* book. My main criticism of the style is repetition. You know when you watch a Channel 4 documentary and after every ad break, they recap what's gone before, tell you what they're going to say, say it, and then recap it, before telling you what they're going to tell you after the next break. It wasn't quite that bad, but it's a habit I detest on TV and I don't want it to become the norm in books.
Like Georgiana, this is a biography of an ancestor of a future monarch. I suppose there is little documented evidence of the lives of ordinary Georgian women, but it's sad that after three centuries that the same small group of people 'matter'. There is (probably) more interest in Royal Ancestors than in people whose line died out or descended into obscurity.
A couple of years back I went to both Hever Castle and Harewood House, both of them using their tenuous Royal Connections to attract paying customers to their (admittedly extensive) grounds, indifferent gardens and overpriced gift shops.
I used to wonder why so many people were monarchists despite the overwhelming logical arguments to support a republic. But I didn't understand - still don't - the quasi-feudal system which ensures so many people are dependent on the Royalist spin-offs. It would seem inimical to their interests to kill the golden goose, although I am sure many people are happy to visit homes and gardens with no obvious current royal connection, as long as they're worthwhile in themselves.
Perhaps this won't become a film - the beatings, rapes and imprisonments are so grisly that a a faithful account might not pass uncensored; a watered down version would risk trivialising a seminal legal case and its context.
* editing matters: 2 or 3 years ago I read several books that made me want to wield the red pen to eliminate padding - I read one which said something like 'I realised I found myself entering through the door into the room', an understandable first draft, or instant-publishing flaw, but in a book that costs real cash money?
