The Wings of the Dove by Henry James – Stellar Authors

Anyone out there who has never read a Henry James? Is it because you believe he's inaccessible, boring, difficult, over-long, too fixated on minutiae, too exhausting for the brain? 

He is known to be a writer who takes his sweet time to tell a story. Although James writes with a deep and finely detailed eye, he moves his novels along at the pace of a growing bramble shoot. No matter – his style inveigles  you, and before you know it, you're chapters in. His writing voice gets 'into your head' and it's not hard to become involved and absorbed.

James was well known in his life as a critic and a scholar –  he was enthusiastic and exacting about the craft and theory of writing fiction. His theories work to this day – in fact, he's one of the best teachers, both through his acclaimed manual The Art of Fiction and through the example of his fiction. James is the past master of character development, plot construction, authentic dialogue, and structural timing – he places the where and when of each event and incident in their perfect place.

Above all,  his stories are dark. Each of his characters has a 'shadow side'. Through his books, he examines and exposes some of the worst traits of human nature. 

I've loved Henry James since my twenties. I'm not alone. Nigella Lawson explains, in her 1998 cookbook  How to Eat:

When I was in my teens, I loved Henry James. I read him with uncorrupted pleasure. Then, when I was eighteen or so, and had just started The Golden Bowl, someone – older, cleverer, whose opinions were offered gravely – asked me whether I didn’t find James very difficult, as she always did. Until then, I had no idea that I might, and I didn’t. From that moment, I couldn’t read him but self-consciously; from then on, I did find him difficult. I do not wish to insult by the comparison, but I had a similar, Jamesian mayonnaise experience. My mother used to make mayonnaise weekly, twice weekly; we children would help. I had no idea it was meant to be difficult, or that it was thought to be such a nerve-racking ordeal. Then someone asked how I managed to be so breezy about it, how I stopped it from curdling. From then on, I scarcely made a mayonnaise which didn’t split. It’s not surprising: when confidence is undermined or ruptured, it can be difficult to do the simplest things, or to take any enjoyment even in trying...

For my Read Classic series this time, I'm looking at The Wings of the Dove.  In lockdown, our village hall always had a box of free books in the porch and this Henry James was tucked in there, waiting for a new reader.I plucked it out because  I knew this novel would end up in Venice, a city I love. I read it over the winter, snuggling in front of roaring fires, and tucked into bed on a mound of soft pillows.  

On the first page you meet Kate, waiting for an interview with her unloved and unloving father – a wastrel who lives in poverty. Beautiful and full of style, it's fair to say that Kate is a designing young woman who does not want to end up poor like her dad, so has thrown her hand in with her Aunt, Maud Lawder, who is a rich widow able to show her niece off to polite London society. 

There's no stopping love, though; Kate has fallen so deeply for Merton Densher that she engages herself to him 'forever'. All this is kept a secret from Aunt Maud, because Merton is a poor working journalist, with nothing to recommend him as a husband – no fortune, in other words. 

Into the story steps Milly Theale, an American girl, bereaved of all her family and so in possession of a vast fortune. Milly arrives in London with her companions, young Susan Shepherd, and the more mature Mrs Stringham, who is an old school-mate of Kate's aunt. Milly strikes up a friendship with Kate, and she is already linked to Densher; she met and fell in love with him when he visited the states for his work.

Milly learns she is dying. She asks her physician 'what shall I do?' and he says…'live, live.' Milly is fatally ill, but she's not unwell; she is a vivacious, very genuine girl although of course, a little naive, so when she visits the grand estate of  Maud Lowder, she is wooed by Lord Mark, who Mrs Lowder had hoped would be a suitor to Kate. He's an unpleasantly shallow man, and gets rejected by both of them.

Kate, however, is devising a dastardly plan. She knows Milly loves Densher and encourages him to pay court to Milly. It is at this moment in the book that clever dialogue is everything. Kate wants Densher to believe her idea is primarily a ruse to cover his relationship with Kate, so the reader is not told outright that Kate's true plan is for Millie to marry Densher, before she dies, or at least, leave him an inheritance, so that they can marry in comfort. And Densher does worry about the subtextual implications Kate's not talking about. At this point in the story, the reader is no wiser than Densher – unless they have (like me!) turned to Google to check what is actually going on. Perhaps that is the 21st C equivalent of 'reading the last page', and it did colour my understanding, but not my enjoyment.

Milly goes to Venice and the sun of Northern Italy, to enjoy 'her life' with her companions, and Kate and Densher follow. Milly can afford to rent an entire waterside palace, Palazzo Leporelli. This was modelled on the real Palazzo Barbaro, which was owned by friends of Henry James. And, according to Wikipedia, Milly herself  is based on Minny Temple (1845–1870), James' beloved cousin who died from tuberculosis. In his autobiography James said that The Wings of the Dove was his attempt to wrap her memory in the 'beauty and dignity of art'. Milly's illness is never openly diagnosed. It's not tuberculosis, at least not in its final stages. James may not have cared about the nicety of a diagnosis; it was the prognosis that occupied his writing.

 Venice is a mysterious place, the heart of romanticism, a place where Densher might easily seduce Milly Thele, but James’s Venice slides away from symbols of love and passion towards corruption, destruction. Asking your fiancé to play around with another women is never a great idea, and as Kate  and Densher meet at various famous city venues, Kate reveals outright that she wants Densher to marry Milly. Densher is horrified, and their relationship begins to grow strained. Meanwhile, the rejected Lord Mark arrives and is given an audience with Milly, telling her Densher is engaged to Kate. Wth that cruel revelation, Milly's palace becomes a place of siege. Densher is visited by Susan Shepherd who describes her as 'broken-hearted'. She has 'turned her face to the wall'.  Her health deteriorates and Densher returns home to Kate.

Back in London, Kate and Densher face the fact that their relationship has been irreparably damaged by their misadventure with Milly. Milly does leave him a large amount of money, but Densher wants to believe that Kate would marry him, rich or poor. He tells Kate that they should  refuses the bequest. The book ends with this glorious exchange;

     He heard her out in stillness, watching her face, but not moving. Then he only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."        

    "As we were?”

"As we were.”

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!" 

The lovers have been over-shadowed and separated forever by the wings of the dead dove.

, 

Symbolism in Literature – The Sea

Full fathom five thy father lies;  

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.  

In literature, symbols are often settings, images or other motifs that stand in for bigger ideas.  Poets, novelists and dramatists use then to give their work meaning and resonance.

In this new occasional series, I'm going to look at some of the symbols used in this way, and ask why writers have chosen to use them. I'm starting with the sea, because it is a primal symbol of life. The ocean is of course, where we believe the beginning of life on Earth was formed.

The Sea, the Sea                                                                                                      Iris Murchoch was for a long time my favourite writer. I referenced her in my third novel Beneath the Tor. Goodness, love and freedom were lifelong philosophical concerns of Murdoch and she uses the theme of 'virtue and perception' in her Booker Prize winner The Sea, the Sea, her 18th novel.

Murdoch's  protagonist, Charles Arrowby, has bought Shruff End, a house with no electricity perched at the edge of the North Sea.  Arrowby is a pompous figure with weird tastes in food, difficult to like, but he quickly obsessed me as I got into the book. He wants to: become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. Sadly, Arrowby soon finds out just how hard it is to be good.

The Sea, the Sea  is said to be inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The irritating Arrowby echoes Prospero’s attempt to transform magic into spirit, echoed, by Ariel's Song, which opened this blogpost. Martin Amis said that Murdoch…believes in everything: true love, veridical visions, magic, monsters, pagan spirits…Arrowby imagines the sea below his house to be the home of a hideous monster, and Murdoch brilliantly depicts the distinction between imagination and fantasy, and the vital importance of negotiating these dangers. Of course, it's bound to end with a drowning – rather like…

David Copperfield                                                                                                   One of the best-known writers to use the sea regularly as a symbol was Charles Dickens. (He also loved to feature rivers, especially the Thames, in his stories, but that, as they say, is another blogpost.) As a child, he'd visit Yarmouth. Towards the end of the book, David Copperfield remembers the sea off Yarmouth as connected to the disasters of his youth, and an element that takes loved ones away. Dickens is

using the sea as an unknown and powerful force in the lives of the characters, beyond human control. Towards the end of the book he returns.to find his old schoolmate drowned; And on that part of it where she and I had looked for shells, two children--on that part of it where some lighter fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by the wind--among the ruins of the home he had wronged--I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.

The World Is Too Much With Us                                                                                  

Wordsworth's lovely sonnet uses the sea to symbolise the wild, passionate, creative force of Nature:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. 

The Life of Pi                                                                                                                                    

The Man-Booker winner in 2002, is mostly set on the ocean as Pi struggles to survive a hazardous journey. The sea symbolises one of the main themes of the book –  the will to live – while the lifeboat Pi is in with the tiger Richard Parker, would symbolise a place of both danger and safety. This is a complex novel, which uses fantasy, magical realism and meta-fiction to weave its tale.

Moby-Dick                                                                                                                     A novel set almost fully on the ocean waves of the 19th century, Moby-Dick has a myriad of themes, especially that of revenge and pursuit. But Herman Melville uses the sea to represent some very subtle ideas, including the way Ishmael's journey in the whaler is also a metaphorical voyage of understanding, Melville doesn't stop there though; the sea becomes beauty and chaos, instability and mystery. You can read more about the book here.

The Old Man and the Sea                                                                                          An epic two-day battle between man and a marlin, The Old Man and the Sea, was
one of the first adult books I read as a growing child. Its real significance was probably lost on me at the time, but  there are deeper meanings behind Hemingway's story than just a tussle with a fish. The old man is said to represent humanity, while the fish signifies achievement or purpose in life. According to Hemingway, man is most worthy in isolation because he has to work and survive on his own. The sea, in the novel, allows Hemmingway to describe the struggles all of us endure in life.

I Started Early                                                                                                           Finally there is the idea that the sea, in all its wild fierceness can represent sexuality. Look at this poem by Emily Dickinson, which starts as innocently as you like...

I started Early – Took my Dog –

And visited the Sea –

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor.  

Extended Hempen Hands –

Presuming Me to be a Mouse –

Aground –  upon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide

Went past my simple Shoe –

And past my Apron – and my Belt

And past my Boddice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –

As wholly as a Dew

Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve –

And then – I started – too –

And He – He followed – close behind –

I felt His Silver Heel

Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes

Would overflow with Pearl –

Until We met the Solid Town –

No One He seemed to know –

And bowing – with a Mighty look –

At me – The Sea withdrew –

 Mermaids in the basement? Or the subconscious perhaps? The hard, upright frigates? The sea itself might awaken sexual feelings as you watch it drive itself forward, 'past your bodice'  but for the 19th century lady, the Solid Town of social expectation would make the those desires withdraw...

On the Gallows                                                                                                        
I've used the theme of the sea in my writing, especially On the Gallows, the second of the Shaman Mysteries, in which a young girl's body is found in the sea off Bridgewater Bay... 

Ahead was a luminous sheen of grey. The Bristol Channel. 

 Like Ellen, I examined the desolation of the bay. The tide was low, and the stone causeway could be seen clearly, a formation of flattened boulders with a squiggly pattern across the far shore made up of shingle, rock and mudflat. At its far edge was a ridge where hardness fell away into sea. A cold wind blew in, but the water only rippled slightly, as if it might be on its way to freezing. 

  From the first section of deep water rose a skeletal structure, ragged with seaweed. It felt as bare as bones, and the wind moaned through it. Or was it the cooling tower that moaned, in sheer misery of its location?  

 The cooling tower could have been a gallows, a complex gallows. I could see how it might trap a victim, cling on to her. I kept staring over the bay as the light failed, desperate to get my thoughts into shape, but my heart was racing too fast, keeping in time with the wind that flapped in my ears. 

 'It’s odd,' said Ellen, 'because I didn’t think about it, when we agreed a time on the phone. But this was when I came here. The light was almost gone.'

 I nodded. I’d known that. It was how I’d wanted it. 'What were you doing,' I said, desperate to ask if she’d come in stilettos on that occasion. 'Walking the dog, something like that?'

'They didn’t tell you?'

'No, The police never pass on personal details.'

She began walking towards the beach as if it was beckoning her. When she got to the fence, she stopped, pulled her hands out of her pockets and gripped it. 

'Looking back, I can see just how crazy I’d got. But it was a day out of hell. Complete hell. Had some hell-like days in my life, but God, not many worse than that.' 

Have fun in your own ideas and try using the symbology of the sea in your  next piece of writing – let us know how you've done so by adding comments below this post.

To read more blogposts about symbolism in literature, click here

Doctor Zhivago: Novel or True Story?

Boris Pasternak 

 'Stellar Authors', an occasional 

series of posts on 

Kitchen Table Writers

For almost all my  life I’ve been under an illusion – a massive misapprehension – that I can trace back to an afternoon matinee in 1965 when we settled into our plush popcorny seats for the new David Lean Epic, a film that featured spectacular landscapes, a heartbreaking love story and brutal scenes of civil war.

Yes, Doctor Zhivago, the film.

Five years later I bought a two-volume edition of the book and started the long journey though those landscapes, that love story, that awful bloodshed. Yesterday, fifty years on, I finally came to the last page in  Pasternak’s book. As I did so, my illusion lifted. 

For all those years of faltering, stopping and restarting at the beginning of the book yet again…I understood and presumed that Doctor Zhivago was a real person. 

It was clear to me that the book was biography. I was unable to come to terms with the idea that anyone could invent such an epic tale –  starting at the time of the last Tzar and documenting the revolutions of 1905 ad 1917, finishing in the  days of the 2nd World War. Surely such an expansive boundless tale was based in some truth? Surely Pasternak had researched the real, if slightly forgotten, life of a Moscow doctor? 

Hum along as you read

I’m a novelist myself, always on the lookout for characters and ideas, but not for one moment did it occur to me that Pasternak had made those  life-sharp characters up….Yuri and his gracious wife Tonia…Lara and her idealistic, ruthless husband Pasha Antipode…the evil Viktor Komarovsky and the shadowy figure of Yuri's half-brother, General Yevgraf Zhivago. 

But of course Doctor Zhivago is a work of fiction. It’s not even Pasternak's first work of fiction, although most of his writing is poetry. Of course, he made it all up!

Or did he? 

Pasternak's sister, Anna,
wrote a book about Olga

In 1946 Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya, a 34 year old single mother, Every afternoon Boris came to her office and walked Olga home. They became lovers, despite Paternak remaining married. In 1949, while carrying Pasternak's  baby,  Olga was arrested by the KGB. Her apartment was ransacked for items connected with Pasternak and she was repeatedly interrogated. She refused to say anything incriminating about Pasternak. She was sentenced to ten years hard labour and miscarried early in her time in the GULAG. When he heard of her arrest, Pasternak said, weeping, "Everything is finished now. I'll never see her again. It's like death, even worse…Stalin is a ‘murderer.’"

Of course all novelists are inspired by the love they themselves feel – all loved ones are the most ‘special’ of people. Olga Ivinskaya was a poet, a clever and compassionate person and I like to think that their deep love, and their terrible parting, galvanised Pasternak to write his greatest work. Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Europe by an Italian journalist and published in Milan in 1957.

Boris Pasternak

Now that I know the truth, I can see that in the novel Pasternak created his own alter-ego – a poet, philosopher and physician whose life is disrupted by war and his enduring love for a charismatic, beautiful woman. Most of us have seen the film, and know the story shows the way his life brushes past Lara’s at crucial times in hers – they both witness her mother attempting suicide, and Yuri is there when she tries to shoots her abuser, Komarovsky, at a party. Pasternak sets up this yearning and almost eternal love early on in the story.

One of the most romantic aspects of the book is the way Zhivago journeys through the vast landscapes of Russia. After serving in the First World War, the Zhivago family leave communist Moscow for the Ural Mountains, where, Tonia is pregnant with their second child and Yuri begins an affair with Lara. Zhivago is forced to join a partisan army fighting the Tsarist Whites, but he escapes, walking through the snows to Yuriatin, where Lara lives. 

Pasternak’s intent was to interconnect Zhivago to as many of the Russian people as he could.  Like his inventor, Zhivago’s gentle and artistic character makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. He is unable to take control of his fate, and dies in utter poverty. leaving poems as his legacy. 

Doctor Zhivago is not an easy read, but it is a heady and rewarding one. 

Wikipedia sums it up when it says; The plot of Doctor Zhivago is long and intricate. It can be difficult to follow for two reasons. First, Pasternak employs many characters, who interact with each other throughout the book in unpredictable ways. Secondly, he frequently introduces a character by one of his/her three names, then subsequently refers to that character by another of the three names or a nickname, without expressly stating that he is referring to the same character.

Oh, ye gods, those names are sooo hard. This Wiki character map shows what that really means for the reader; 

But I do like to complete a work of classical literature every year, and 2000 was a great year to be reading this complex but breathtaking book. I started again at the beginning once more, and I kept going…until I reached the end of the story. 

I felt fantastic. I’d read this book, described as ‘the first work of genius to come out of Russia since the revolution’ (V.S. Pritchett). I'd loved every word of brilliant prose...

…But the sun sparkled on the blinding whiteness and Yury cut clean slices out of the snow, starting landslides of dry diamond fires. It reminded him of his childhood. He saw himself in their yard at home, dressed in a braided hood and black sheepskin fastened with hooks and eyes sewn into the curly fleece, cutting the same dazzling snow into cubes and pyramids and cream buns and fortresses and cave cities. Life had had a splendid taste in those far-off days, everything had been feast for the stomach!

In 1958, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Six days later,  under pressure from the Soviet Union, he sent a telegram: "Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure.” Pasternak’s poetry, plays, and translations were well known in the USSR but Stalin’s government  had threatened, suppressed, and spied on him. Doctor Zhivago was never published in the Soviet Union. 

Alec Guinness as  Yevgraf Zhivago
and Rita Tushingham as Tanya

It is the ending of the story that is most surreal and puzzling…most of which is absent from David Lean’s 1965  film version. After Yury has tricked Lara into taking her daughter and going away with her previous abuser, Komarovsky, he returns to Moscow and begins living with Marina, and they have two children. On the way to his first day’s work at a Moscow hospital, he dies of a heart attack. Lara comes to the funeral and asks Yury's half-brother if there is any way to track the location of a child given away to strangers. She stays for several days and then disappears, likely dying in a concentration camp. Years later, Misha and Nicky are fighting in World War II and encounter a laundry-girl, Tanya, who tells them her life story. They determine that she is the daughter of Lara and Yury. And that is how the story ends, except of course, there are pages of the poetry of Pasternak, writing as Zhivago. These straggling, strangely plotted final sections only consolidated my idea that all this must be true. It felt too raw, too human and, to a degree, too far a coincidence. I could see the reality of the lonely man seeking solace, already sick at heart and shameful that his wife and first two children now live in Paris. It felt painfully true.

Doctor Zhivago is mind-widening and lyrical. Beautiful prose and strange, eloquent dialogue. Descriptions of the huge landscapes of Russia, and a story that documents its turbulent twentieth century. If you've never read it, you can do so here, in an excellent translation (Pevear and Volokhonsky).

Middlemarch by George Eliot; Stellar Authors

MIDDLEMARCH by George Eliot

”

'Read Classic', an occasional series of posts on 

Kitchen Table Writers

Last year, I read Andy Miller’s hilarious best seller, The Year of Reading Dangerously. His

bonkers idea? That he should actually read all the classic novels that he daily pretended he had already read. Books like Don Quixote, Beowulf, War and Peace…fifty in all…consuming them on his long commute to work as a publisher’s editor.

Alan Bennett describes a classic novel as one that; everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.  As I chuckled my way through Miller’s entertaining book, I too, wondered if there were any classics out there I had ‘pretended’ I’d read

I came up with George Eliot's definitive, eight part, four volume masterpiece, Middlemarch. I’d started it yonks ago, and really

enjoyed the first chapter, which introduces us to two spirited and contemporary sisters, Dorothea, a quick, bright girl who has a hugely honest and socially-aware heart, and Celia, who is focused on finding a rich hubby. 

For some reason, I laid it to one side and forgot about it. When the novel was televised, some years ago, I didn’t have a TV, but did catch one episode on someone else’s screen, where I quickly worked out that we were all supposed to hate Edward Casaubon, who is cold, insecure and mean-spirited. Quite soon in the novel, Dorothea makes a disastrous error of judgement and marries this unpleasant man. She believes he is a great intellectual whom she can assist and learn from.

I knew I wasn’t alone in my fascination for the Reverend Casaubon after coming across this in an agony aunt online page; 

Masterpiece Theatre production;

Edward Casaubon played by Patrick Malahide

My boyfriend has been reading me the novel Middlemarch out loud, and the character we both find the most compelling is Dr. Casaubon. We’ve had long discussions about his foibles and the pathos of his insecurities. My boyfriend recently brought up the hypothetical idea of “solemn play”—someone who has a fetish for pretending to be like Casaubon toward Dorothea, refusing sex and making her instead do long, pointless tasks for him. In his eyes, this role-playing would be rife with erotic sublimation. At first I thought this was hilarious, but he has brought it up several times and mentioned buying a cassock…

(To read the advice given, click here )

With that scintillating image in mind, I started Middlemarch again at page one, ploughing through while bearing Miller’s words in mind…that, ‘a few hundred pages in, I realised I cared about these people. Suddenly, I couldn’t put the book down’.

It soon became clear I was reading a story that was modernistic in its plot and structure, and that Virginia Woolf was right; it is ‘written for grown-up people’. 

Eliot subtly yet penetratingly delves into the the minds of the many main characters; their hopes, their fears, their failings. I visualised this huge cast of perfectly ordinary provincial townspeople as they rode or walked its streets and byways and went in and out of town houses, cottages and the country mansions that were satellites around the town.

Soon, I fully believed that they were as real as I was. Like Miller, I couldn’t put this book down. It was heavy, yet I carried to to France in February because I couldn’t bear to leave these characters behind. I was hooked.

We focus in on three sets of lovers; the ordeal of Dorothea’s life with Edward Casaubon; the ‘too hot to not cool down’ romance between Terious Lydgate,  a progressive doctor who truly wants to do good for the health of the townspeople, and Rosamond Vincy, who’s head is full of fashion, flounces and other fancies. 

Her brother Fred is as shallow as she is. If they lived now, they’d be minor Youtube stars, letting us into their lavish lifestyle, which neither of them can afford. Fred is deeply in love with Mary Garth, the level-headed daughter of Caleb and Susan, lower-middle-class people

 who are struggling financially. Mary loves Fred, 

but refuses to marry him until he finds a steady occupation.                 

As Dorothea comes to doubt her husband’s unfinished magnum opus, she develops a friendship with Will Ladislaw, his idealistic cousin. Casaubon shows his true colours; controlling and jealous. He changes his will to make sure she never marries Ladislaw if he dies…which he then proceeds to do with more drama than he’s ever done anything before in his entire life.

Business, politics religion and society are all examined under Eliot’s, microscope, helping her further unpick the complications of human motivation. Rosamond’s expensive lifestyle has led the Lydgates into financial ruin, and Lydgate seeks a loan from Nicholas Bulstrode, a widely disliked banker. Balstrode is being blackmailed by Raffles, who knows about his unsavoury past. Raffles falls ill and Balstrode asks Lydgate to tend him. He deliberately ignores the doctors advice, and Raffles dies at Balstrode’s great house. Questions arise, and the Lydgates’ position in the town becomes untenable. Only Dorothea, has the power to help them, but Rosamond already believes that the wealthy widow is a threat to he marraige.

As I hurtled towards the final chapters, there were so many questions to answer, and so many issues to resolve. Would Terious and Rosamond stay together? Would Fred finally come good and win Mary’s hand? And what is the future for Dorothea? Could she find

the inner strength to throw over her huge inheritance, ignore 

her late husbands coercions and marry Will Ladislaw?                                                                                                        

The only way you can find out is by reading the book.

                            It’s dangerous, but I fully recommend it.

Check out the other 'Read Classic' Reviews; 

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Frontispiece illustration is 

Copyright  Eleanor Davis, 

 cartoonist and illustrator  

 3 final illustration from top down;                                         Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, 

Tertious and Rosamond Lydgate,

 Mary and Fred,

all courtesy of Wikipedia.