Emily EdenReseñas

A pleasant little story, with a happy ending for all of the characters involved. A Lady Chester takes a house in a suburb of London, while her husband is attending to a diplomatic assignment in Berlin. The house is semi-detached, which I picture as a kind of duplex, and the Lady is worried that her neighbors are going to be tiresome. Nothing of the sort, as they all end up getting along ever so well. There is a Baron and Baroness Sampson in the neighborhood, too, who are pretentious and cons, and they are always throwing parties, trying to get in with the best crowds. An amusing part was when the wife of one of the Baron Sampson's con friends sings a song at the baroness' parties. It goes like this:

"Yes sir! I can waltz! I can flirt! I'm out of the schoolroom at last! Pa' says I'm a romp, Ma' says I'm a pert, I say, I am fast! I am fast!
We girls love a park! It's the men who are stiff. Why that little Lord John's such a tease, If I ask him to dance, he turns off in a Tiff, Last, sir! That is ease! That is ease!
I handle the ribbons! I smoke my cigar! I polk till Aunt Jane looks aghast. I swim like a fish! Ride like young Lochinvar! In short, I am fast! I am fast!

This is a cute little story, about a bunch of rich people in Victorian England. There is Mr and Mrs Douglas and their two daughters, which family is not quite as rich as neighbors, Lord and Lady Eskdale, and their four children. Mrs Douglas is a sour grapes-sort of person, but it all comes out Happy in the end. Not a very realistic book, but still fairly enjoyable.

I don't know how I haven't heard of EE before; she's really the next best thing when accepting the tragedy of Jane Austen not writing more books.

Elizabeth Klett's Librivox recording is also VERY good.

Two 19th century novels:
My favourite was definitely the former- published 1859 but written thirty years before, and with a definite Jane Austen flavour to the story of an aristocratic newly-wed couple, struggling to get used to their new life. Watched (and constantly criticized) by their poorer, jealous neighbour Mrs Douglas; and given additional stresses in their married life by the trouble-making comments of the truly ghastly, self-aggrandizing Lady Portmore, there are moments of laugh-out-loud humour.
The Semi-Detached House is more of a typical Victorian story, as Lady Blanche Chester (reluctantly taking such a residence while her husband is away) finds her neighbours much nicer than she had anticipated, and all ends well.½

Reminded me of Trollope.
Ooh, the character of Lady Portmore - would not want someone like her in my real life, but she is a delight to read about - indefatigable in her catty comments.

Emily Eden's second attempt at a novel was made almost thirty years after her first---and this time she published her work. The success, in 1859, of The Semi-Detached House prompted her to revive her long-neglected manuscript of The Semi-Attached Couple, which finally appeared in 1860. Despite their "paired" titles, the two novels have no direct connection, and in fact make for an interesting contrast---not least in that they depict, effectively, the same society more than a generation apart, offering an intriguing, unintentional sketch of the changes that occurred in between. In particular, while The Semi-Attached Couple restricts itself to the higher levels of society, The Semi-Detached House is about the beginning of the breakdown of social barriers and friendship across the classes. With her husband away on a diplomatic mission, the young Blanche, Lady Chester, who is expecting a baby, is ordered by her doctor to remove from the bustle and pollution of London. When her relatives hire for her a semi-detached house outside of the city, by the river, Blanche is at first dismayed at the thought of having "common people" for close neighbours. She does not realise that, thanks to a misinterpreted piece of gossip in a newspaper, the "common people" in question believe her to be either an adulterous wife separated from her husband, or a kept mistress, and are even more dismayed by the prospect of a "fallen woman" next door... While it is a less serious work than The Semi-Attached Couple, The Semi-Detached House is a better-written novel: Emily Eden sustains her comedy much more successfully, and though her themes are mostly light, they are consistent. The result is a minor but charming work, depicting the new friendships available in an evolving society, and offering the encouraging thought that nice people will always find each other. As it turns out, the people next door, the Hopkinsons, are almost exactly as the over-imaginative Blanche pictured them---except that they are also kind, generous, and entirely likeable. Her own qualms set at rest, Mrs Hopkinson takes Blanche to her heart, mothering her when she needs it most. Around this warmly-drawn central friendship, several romantic relationships are lightly sketched; while when Lord Chester returns, we are offered a welcome portrait of a young married couple very much in love. There is far more comedy than romance in this novel, however, with Eden again showing her skill at depicting amusingly horrid people: this time, the Baroness Sampson, a determined social-climber who disrupts the narrative's central idyll. (The subplot featuring the Baroness's unhappy niece, Rachel, is one of the novel's serious touches.) The Semi-Detached House also offers one of the era's most unusual characters in Charles Willis, Mrs Hopkinson's son-in-law, who is at once psychologically complex and perversely funny. Not, in fact, having cared much for his late wife, Willis had nevertheless turned himself into a monument of grief, crushing everyone else's spirits at every possible opportunity and deriving enormous gratification from his own mental image of himself as inconsolable---so much so, that when he finally falls genuinely in love, he hardly knows how to let himself be happy...

    Then Arthur's fond letter came, and after that matters mended considerably. There was the house to show to Aileen, and the garden to investigate, and all sorts of red and gold barges came careering up the river, with well-dressed people, looking slightly idiotical as they danced furiously in the hot sun... Blanche had several visitors the first week, and Dulham Lane was, as Janet and Rose had hoped, much enlivened thereby.
    But Mrs Hopkinson sat with her broad back to the window, pertinaciously declining to look at all the wickedness on wheels that was rolling by her door. She had found that the plan of shutting her shutters would probably end in a fall down her narrow staircase, so she had told her girls not to look out of the window, that poor Willis had reason to believe that the people next door were not at all creditable; and as Janet and Rose were singularly innocent in the ways of the world, and were always desirous to thwart Willis, and as they were particularly anxious to know whether flounces or double skirts were the prevailing fashion, they resented this exclusion from their only point of observation. Charlie missed his airings in the garden, and altogether the advent of Lady Chester had thrown a gloom over the Hopkinson circle.
    When Sunday arrived, a fresh grievance occurred. The Hopkinsons had been allowed to make use of the pew belonging to Pleasance, and that was now occupied by Lady Chester and her sister. The slight bustle occasioned by the attempt to find a seat for Mrs Hopkinson, who was of large dimensions, caused Blanche to look up, and with natural good breeding she opened her pew door, and beckoned to that lady to come in. She did so, and what with the heat of the day, and the thought of what Willis would say when he saw her sitting next to a lady of doubtful character, who had made a "fracaw in high life," she could hardly breathe...

After a brief, ballroom-acquaintance courtship, the beautiful young Lady Helen Eskdale becomes engaged to marital prize, Lord Teviot. Almost immediately, Helen begins to have doubts; but with two older sisters happily married on equally brief acquaintance and a mother serenely making wedding-plans, she struggles to articulate them, and the marriage goes ahead. Passionately in love with Helen, Teviot is hurt by her emotional reticence, and increasingly jealous of what seems to him a preference for her family's company over her husband's; and it is not long before an estrangement develops... Written in 1830, but not published for another thirty years, Emily Eden's The Semi-Attached Couple is a social comedy with a serious point. Not surprisingly for a first attempt at a novel (moreover, it seems that Eden did not revise her manuscript before eventually publishing it), this is an uneven work, whose shifts in tone do not always meld well. There is much overt comedy, most of it involving two awful supporting characters: Mrs Douglas, whose greatest pleasure in life is being miserable; and Lady Portmore, a social manoeuvrer suffering delusions of self-importance; the clashes between the two comprise some of the novel's funniest scenes. Emily Eden was a great admirer of Jane Austen, and it shows in a series of tart conversation set-pieces, between the mutually antagonistic ladies, and between Mrs Douglas and her long-suffering husband. But at the same time, Eden takes Helen, and her situation, perfectly seriously; and while she does poke some fun at Teviot's "superior male" attitudes and self-defeating jealousy (showing that he is, in his own way, almost as naive as Helen, and much more foolish), in the end she can only resolve her central dilemma by twisting her comedy into a near-tragedy, and tacking a conventional conclusion onto what is, in many ways, an unconventional novel. Despite these flaws, The Semi-Attached Couple is an unusual and entertaining work, offering an engaging picture of society between the Regency period and the Victorian era. It is also quite psychologically acute, particularly in its depiction of the way that Teviot's jealousy creates a self-fulfilling tragedy, by driving Helen away and therefore "proving" his worst fears. Moreover, Eden shows, as plainly as was permissible at the time, that to a girl of Helen's age and innocence, Teviot's very passion for her is more frightening than gratifying. Interestingly, Eden places great weight upon the disparate family situations of her central couple: Teviot is an only child, with a poor relationship with his father, and consequently has no experience and little understanding of Helen's deep attachment to her large, happy family; while Helen, conversely, has no experience of the world beyond family life, and cannot easily give it up. By dissecting the increasing estrangement between the two, and by placing around them several contrasting relationships, Eden offers valid criticism of the way marriages were made at the time, and the unrealistic expectations placed upon young and inexperienced women.

     Helen found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy, engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him. He was always quarrelling with her---at least, so she thought; but the real truth was, that he was desperately in love, and she was not; that he was a man of strong feelings and exacting habits, and with considerable knowledge of the world; and that she was timid and gentle, unused to any violence of manner or language, and unequal to cope with it. He alarmed her, first by the eagerness with which he poured out his affection, and then by the bitterness of his reproaches because, as he averred, it was not returned.
    She tried to satisfy him; but when he had frightened away her playfulness, he had deprived her of her greatest charm, and she herself felt that her manner became daily colder and more repulsive. His prediction that she would be happier anywhere than with him seemed likely, by repetition, to insure its own fulfillment. Even their reconciliations---for what is the use of a quarrel but to bring on a reconciliation?---were unsatisfactory. She wished that he loved her less, or would say less about it; and he thought that the gentle willingness with which she met his excuses was only a fresh proof that his love or his anger were equally matters of indifference to her. No French actor with a broken voice, quivering hands, a stride, and a shrug, could have given half the emphasis to the sentiment, J'aimerais mieux être haï qu' aimé faiblement, than Lord Teviot did to the upbraidings with which he diversified the monotony of love-making...

The Semi-Detached House

Pregnant Blanche and her sister move into a semi-detached villa while Blanche's husband is away on a government mission to Berlin. Initially prejudiced against her neighbours, the Hopkinson family, Blanche gradually comes love and rely on them. In addition we meet Baron Sampson, an apparently rich businessman who has dealings with the Hopkinsons' son-in-law, the perpetually miserable Willis.

This was a warm, amusing book in which common sense and kindness were prized. It is a pity that the Jewish characters were so dastardly - even the more likeable Rachel was unable to love the man she married - but this was presumably an acceptable prejudice at the time of writing. There was quite a lot of coupling off of all the unmarried men and women, which was a little hard to keep track of, but I enjoyed Willis' transformation.

The Semi-Attached Couple

Helen marries Lord Teviot on a brief acquaintance; he loves her jealously, but she is concerned that she does not feel for him as her sisters do for their husbands. This misunderstanding/estrangement was a little tiresome, although I suppose Helen does at least have the excuse of being very young; Teviot seemed rather petulant at times. The real joy of this story for me was the awful Lady Portmore and the sublime put downs served her by Mrs Douglas. This reminded me of Anthony Trollope (one of my favourite authors - and much more than it reminded me of Jane Austen) especially with the description of the election. Again, there was a bit of pairing off of unattached young people - I think Eliza could have done better for herself.

Highly recommended.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read, a book I found through Reflections review of the same book. It's very Austen-esque in tone and wit, but the story itself starts where most others leave off: with the wedding and the aftermath: two people who do not know each other at all, trying to be husband and wife.

I knocked half a star off because I struggled quite a bit with the two main characters, Teviot and his bride Helen. The reader never meets them before the wedding as individuals and for most of the book one is left to know them only through their reactions to each other. This feels unsatisfactory, because the whole premise of the story is the misunderstandings that take place when two strangers marry and try to live with each other. Not having any idea of the normal character of each, I never quite knew who was being unreasonable or misreading signals.

This isn't the case with the rest of the cast: each of the supporting characters thoroughly came alive for me, even down to Helen's maid, who had the fewest number of scenes. Helen and Teviot aren't the only ones having a hard time with romance and interpersonal relationships either.

Helen and Teviot came together for me about 2/3s of the way through the book when circumstances force them apart and they have to deal directly with each other without interference; the story gets a bit sappy here, but by this time I was so invested in the outcome it didn't bother me.

Jane Austen fans would enjoy this one quite a bit, I think, and I plan on recommending it to a couple of RL people I know who have worn out their copies of Austen's books and would enjoy something "new".

Victorian author Emily Eden admired Jane Austen--and it shows in her astute and witty prose which delighted this Janite--but she begins her book where Jane’s stories end, with a wedding. Lovely Helen has all the ingredients for 19th century happiness. She’s beloved by her large well-off family and she’s about to marry wealthy Lord Teviot, who charmed her when they danced together. But being good Victorians they haven’t actually spent much time alone, and when she is whisked away after the ceremony she suddenly realises she doesn’t know or understand Teviot very well and she’s decidedly homesick, damaging her relationship with her proper but ardent new husband. Among other things the story becomes a post-wedding courtship with lots of twists and turns, ups and downs.

Like Austen’s novels The Semi-attached Couple is filled with amusing characters and there are at least three romances that develop during the course of the plot. It took me a little while to get all the names and characters straight--there is a Lord Beaufort and a Colonel Beaufort for instance--but somewhere along the way this book became one I couldn’t put down. First I simply found it divertingly funny, with characters to laugh at and enjoy loving or hating, but as the story went on it also became exciting, then moving, until finally at the end it was deeply satisfying.

George Eden, Lord Auckland, was appointed as British Governor-General of India in 1836. Being unmarried, he took his younger sister Emily with him to run his household, act as hostess for official functions, and generally fill the place of "first lady". She also happened to be a very competent writer, who later published a couple of moderately successful novels, and her letters and journals describing her time in India have become one of the classic first-hand sources on colonial India in the early Victorian period.

Up the country is a selection of letters (most of it a journal written as a serial letter to one of her sisters) dealing with a series of journeys around northern India she made with her brother between October 1837 and March 1840. Her voyage to India and the rest of her stay there between 1836 and 1842 (mostly in Calcutta) is described in another book, Miss Eden's Letters (1872).

Going camping with Miss Eden is a bit different from any other travel book you've ever read. The first time she mentioned that they were a party of 12,000, I assumed that the printer had stuck in a couple of zeroes too many. But they really were that many: The Governor-General went on tour not so much to see the country as to be seen: he had to "show the flag" and exchange courtesies with local rulers, and that meant travelling with a sizeable military escort (two infantry regiments plus cavalry and artillery). Communications were slow, railways and telegraphs had yet to be brought to India and even the famous Grand Trunk Road seems to have been in such poor condition that Miss Eden didn't even notice she was travelling along it. Auckland couldn't rely on sending instructions back to Calcutta, he had to take his complete administration with him. By the time you bring in all the family members of the staff, the domestic servants (one European in the party complained at being forced to limit himself to the 150 most essential servants; Miss Eden employed at least three people just to look after her pet dog), and all the pack animals and porters needed to transport the luggage and provisions, you do indeed end up with a group the size of a small town. And it's not altogether surprising that it takes them all five months to get from Calcutta to Simla. A far cry from Lady Betjeman with her two mules and one muleteer!

It's a dreadful cliché to compare every woman writer from the Georgian or early Victorian period with Jane Austen, but in Miss Eden's case it does have some justification. At least seen from this distance, there is quite some similarity in their styles (informality, intelligence, barbed wit, ...)and their range of subject-matter. Obviously, there are rather more elephants here than in Emma, and we are two or three notches further up the social hierarchy, but what Miss E seems determined to do is show us the domestic side of living in India as a privileged European woman. There is a lot about balls and charity events (fancy fairs, amateur dramatics); about formal visits and sketching excursions; about lovelorn aides-de-camp and daughters who can't marry before their elder sisters. There is also a lot about sickness, bad weather, the discomforts of travel. Her letters to her sister seem to have given her a place where she didn't need to set a good example to her underlings and could have the occasional good solid moan about how awful it all was and how she missed home.

There's a lot of politics going on in the background, but Miss E is too discrete to say much about it. We meet Ranjit Singh and his family in the Punjab, the name Dost Mohammed is dropped from time-to-time, and there are passing mentions of Kabul and Kandahar, but no-one who didn't know would realise that brother George has started what would turn out to be a spectacularly unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. Perhaps this reflects security concerns at the time: it might have been ill-advised to discuss politics in personal letters that had to travel across India carried by relays of runners. Or perhaps it is later editing to avoid people associating her brother's name with the loss of the British army in Kabul. We get quite detailed and very entertaining descriptions of the many durbars and formal meetings with rajahs and ranees, but there is never anything substantive about the nature of the discussions. What seems to occupy her a lot more is the business of formal exchange of gifts that goes with these state visits. She and George receive piles of jewellery and shawls, but they all become the property of the East India Company and are whisked away by clerks before she gets a proper look at them.

(Incidentally, fans of the Flashman stories will recall that GMF has Flashman meet Miss Eden in Calcutta in 1841. She is largely responsible for getting him posted to Kabul. He calls her an "old trout" — she must have been in her early forties at the time. But probably not as good-looking after five years in India as in the portrait from 1835. Another important Flashman character, Mrs Eliza James, later to be famous as "Lola Montez", also makes a cameo appearance in Up the country — Miss E's comment that she is likely to come to a bad end looks suspiciously like an afterthought, though.)

An irritating feature of Miss Eden's style is her habit of referring to Europeans only by initials. At first I thought this was more discretion, but it seems to be simply shorthand. The text would hardly make sense if we didn't know that G was her brother George and F and W the other Eden siblings in the party, for instance. The others are also easy to spot when you happen to know them. Where she says something really offensive about someone (which she does quite often, mostly about women), she doesn't use initials, but replaces the name by a dash. If you want to read these journals as more than a matter of passing interest, you probably need to get a decent modern edition with footnotes. (I read a facsimile of the 1867 edition from archive.org)

Miss Eden's sketches, many of which were later worked up into lithographs and published, are also very charming and attractive. There weren't any in the edition I read, but it's easy to find them on the internet.

The Semi-Detached House is a rather fluffy Victorian piece about a young Viscountess who moves into a semi-detached house for her confinement, while her husband is away in Prussia on a diplomatic mission. She's a rather flighty figure, but settles down after getting to know her neighbors, the Hopkinsons. On the other hand, the nouveau-riche Baron Sampson and family go off showing their money in a way completely unflattering, while neglecting their orphaned niece. One of those stories where all's well that ends well, unless you're the bad guy. The introduction compared Eden's works to Austen, but this one reminded me more of Elizabeth Gaskell with its focus on speculations and other less noble pursuits.

Highly recommended for those who like Victorian literature. I'm not quite sure what a semi-detached house is (one with a shared garden?), but it sure sounds like fun if you've got good neighbors.

Not the best collection of Miss Eden's letters to start with: this selection omits the letters already published in Up the Country, leaving a three-year gap, and it is rather crudely edited by "Her Niece", with most of the recipients' names and many of the other names in the letters redacted out. As a result it's often not easy to follow what's going on. On the other hand, Miss Eden is a lively and interesting commentator on colonial India in the 1830s. Her account , from the privileged viewpoint of the governor-general's sister, makes fascinating reading.½

I don't know if the author intended to write in the style of Jane Austen, but if she did, she certainly succeeded. Centering around 2 families, the Douglas household and their neighbors, the Eskdales, we're treated to little intrigues, drama and humor.

Though not quite to the standard of Austen, Emily Eden, writing thirty years later, captures that same wry humour and scathing social eye in her two novels. I enjoyed The Semi-Attached Couple far more, but both stories are filled with familiar characters and romantic devices.

The honest portrayal of marriage between the Teviots in the first half book descends into a Victorian melodrama, putting me in mind of Baroness Orczy, but the bluff Mrs Douglas and Eltonesque Lady Portmore livened up the scenes of domestic misery. (I love Mrs Douglas' honest appraisal of one woman's 'mistaken bonnet' and her droll comment that 'the Beauforts all laugh as if they thought they had good teeth'!)

The slightly patronising air of the characters in The Semi-Detached House, particularly the 'angelic' Blanche, and the farcical plot that reads like a Trollope novel written by Wodehouse, didn't hold my attention or amuse me at all, unfortunately. I actually struggled to finish, but I have yet to tackle Persuasion by the incomparable Austen, too!

Emily Eden’s name has been floating around in my literary consciousness for a while—many years ago I read a novel called One Last Look, which apparently is based on Emily Eden’s travels in India; and then a couple of years ago I read Women of the Raj, a historical overview of British women in India in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. So when I found out that her letters home to her sister were available, this became a must-read for me.

The book is a collection of letters that Emily wrote between 1837 and 1941, when Emily’s brother George, who was Governor-General, set out to tour the Upper Provinces of India; Emily and her other sister, Fanny, came with him. Historically, Emily’s travels were important because she was able to witness the beginnings of the First Afghan War, although she wasn’t aware of its importance at the time and is a bit flippant about the political goings-on.

Nonetheless, Emily’s account of British life in India at the start of Victoria’s reign is wonderful. She has a wonderful, biting sense of humor, especially when talking about the other people they traveled with (on “Mrs T”: [she wears long thick thread mittens, with black velvet bracelets over them. She may have great genius, and many good qualities, but you know, it is impossible to look for them under those mittens”). Apparently, the caravan they traveled with had about 20,000 people in it, and the atmosphere at times seems like British society on a smaller scale—complete with romantic intrigues (not for Emily; it seems that she was quite the matchmaker and confidant). I do love that Emily was well-read; Dickens seems to be her favorite author and she is continually waiting with bated breath for the next installment in The Pickwick Papers… in addition to her sister’s letters from England, which are always two or three months late.

At the time Emily Eden traveled with her brother and sister to the Upper Provinces, she was in her forties, definitely a spinster by Victorian standards; and yet she seems completely unfazed by the life she leads (quite unlike the main character in Alas, Poor Lady). Part of Emily’s independent lifestyle stems from the fact that her family was wealthy and she had opportunities available to her that others didn’t; but it also has a lot to do with Emily’s dynamic personality; she was the type of person who made things happen rather than have them happen to her. That’s part of the charm of Emily’s personality, and why her letters make such entertaining reading.

The Semi-Attached Couple is a humorous and witty look at a Victorian couple who didn't exactly marry for love. Surrounding their romance, or lack-thereof, is busybody family members, a cultural protocol for decorum, and good, old-fashioned Victorian society standards. Of course, Sarah married too young and Lord Teviot married too quick. Neither understands the other and isn't sure of themselves. There is plenty of gossip, secrets, and satire in The Semi-Attached Couple.

A charming romance, with plenty of lovers, satisfyingly nasty neighbors, a new baby, and a heap of weddings.

I definitely want a hard copy version.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eden/house/house.html½

This is a sweet romance, published in 1860. It is a light-hearted look at a new a high-society marriage, and the carnival of friends and visitors attending on the couple. There are some bitingly entertaining character studies.
Don't be put off by the publication date, this is as easy to read as a modern romance.

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eden/couple/couple.html½

recommended for those who want to read Jane Austen type literature, or pieces about the same period in time that Jane's books take place.

Virago Modern Classics