30. William S. Gilbert - 'Angela: An Inverted Love Story' (1890)

'When I first occupied my room, about six years ago, my attention was
directed to the reflection of a little girl of thirteen or so (as nearly
as I could judge), who passed every day on a balcony just above the
upward range of my limited field of view.'

(Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Courtship, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15381)

This one engages me much more than the Trollope, perhaps because it is so of its time in a more radical sense. Gilbert, of course, admits to desire and the whole state of mind that that entails. Vestiges of propriety may be maintained but like in Wilde, there is a sense of conventional assumptions being overturned and confounded. It was published in September 1890 in the Century Magazine, as a new cultural era was taking root.

As with the Trollope, this presents a rather curious picture of 'Victorian Romance' - but this time with the emphasis on love in signs and interpretations of what love is. It takes a while for the 'poor paralysed fellow' who is the main focus and narrator of the story, to be revealed as definitively English - but it certainly makes sense that he is: 'she threw up her hands in a pretty affectation of despair, which I tried to imitate but in an English and unsuccessful fashion.'

There is a rather poetic conceit, suitably visual coming from this man of the theatre (noted for burlesques, melodramas and operas, of course): that the would-be suitor only sees his paramour in reflection in the canal water; a mirror image which one cannot rely on. Gilbert shows that his narrator's interpretation of her basic friendliness as love is down to his loneliness and wishful thinking - it could almost make an early Pulp song, this scenario!

It is all chaste in explicit terms; as this girl becomes mature, possibly sixteen or seventeen he ardour becomes manifest - though one is entirely unsure how she regards him. This brief vignette is so determinedly fixed from one vantage point that it resembles an unlikely precursor to Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), one of the greatest of films. Flowers seem to be a token of love, but are they? 'Tis a rather profound question raised by this story; our narrator interprets them as he will:

'But I soon took heart of grace, for as soon as he was out of sight, the little maid
threw two flowers growing on the same stem--an allegory of which I could make nothing, until it broke upon me that she meant to convey to me that he and she were brother and sister, and that I had no cause to be sad.'

It is rather 1890s in its revealing of the feelings and complexities beyond mere virtue and evil; in its small way, 'Angela: An Inverted Love Story' contributes to the Wilde-Shaw-Pinero destabilising of melodramatic conventions. What makes it all the more interesting is how Gilbert may be adding greater depth to the previous, rather roseate view of romance in some of his Operas (whilst slyly referencing The Gondoliers, which opened at the Savoy in the previous December); he is clearly coming to terms with stories like 'A Sphinx Without a Secret'. As in that story, male desire is satirised and the female character is unknowable, impossible to pin down in the standard ways their narrators demand.

8/10

7. Katherine Mansfield - 'The Singing Lesson' (1922)

'Oh if I now say that I love you

How will that seem in your eyes?

Oh may my voice fall into silence
If my words

Turn out to be lies'

(Peter Hammill, 'If I Could', 1978)

"I must say I don't approve of my teachers having telegrams sent to hem in school hours, unless in case of very bad news, such as death"

(Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories, Penguin Classics, 2007)

To draw the first week of this undertaking to a close is a short from one of the writers most famed for excelling at writing these things. In her extensive introduction, Ali Smith makes great claims for Mansfield as a key figure in modernism, bridging the contrasting literary camps of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence - aestheticism and utilitarianism fused by this 'gifted social and literary chameleon'. She brought the influence of Chekhov to bear on English prose writing, was a major influence on the feminism of de Beauvoir, Brigid Brophy and others and a chief source for Gudrun in Women in Love (1920) and stories of her youth she told DHL are reflected in 'the more sapphic episodes' of The Rainbow (1915).

Where did the modern world, and modern literature begin? It is a question this venture might seek to answer in time. Was it that crucial decade of the 1890s (the coming of cinema, The New Woman, Jude the Obscure, Pinero, all things Shavian, Wildean and Wellsian), the passing of the Edwardian age, the influence of WW1 or the full flowering of literary, political and cinematic avant-gardism during the 1920s (as entertainingly sent up by Evelyn Waugh in his debut novel, Decline and Fall, 1928)? Or was it even all down to Jack the Ripper? Had it all been instigated long before in France?

This site takes its URL from the sublime slap in the face of a 1887 story from Oscar Wilde; Katherine Mansfield was born as Kathleen Beauchamp a year later and grew up in Karon, near Wellington, New Zealand. Like that Wildean grenade, Mansfield's 'The Singing Lesson' both revels in and incinerates the state of infatuation, of being in love.

The teacher, Miss Meadow, stands in a line of amorous schoolmistresses including Thomas Hardy's Fancy Day (Under the Greenwood Tree, 1872) and Dennis Potter's Eileen (Pennies from Heaven, BBC, 1978). Mansfield expertly introduces the romance after we have been confronted with her at the start - painted as an impatient, tyrannical seeming dictator of her class of young girls. Details are gradually revealed, indeed to flesh out the character as terribly sympathetic; aged thirty, a 'miracle' that she had got engaged to the handsome, moustache-sporting Basil, a man of twenty-five. A tyranny wrought by being rejected for marriage by Basil, which has been disclosed through a letter. Mansfield plays remorselessly with the convention of epistolary as an aid to love's passage, with Basil's crossing out but hardly complete erasing of the word 'disgust', in his estimation of the prospect of settling down to marry.

This story is melancholic, absurd and strangely warming in equal measure, everything hinging in the intangible emotions conveyed through letters and telegrams. Miss Meadow's personal life thoroughly inflects her lesson, and her state of wild despair infects the children, as conveyed in this evocative passage: 'The older girls were crimson; some of the younger ones began to cry. Big spots of rain blew against the windows, and one could hear the willows whispering, '... not that I do not love you....' (p.348) Meadow selects a doleful lament for the girls to sing, and the words and delivery are used as a Greek Chorus-like public commentary on the teacher's private feelings. For me, it anticipates Dennis Potter's use of song - the banalities of the lyrics somehow getting to the truth of matters, which the characters are quite unable to articulate in spoken communication with others.

I will not give away any of the detail about how the story resolves itself - go and read it now! This is a miniature fire-cracker - so bloody much conveyed in a mere seven pages of prose - and a great introduction to Ms. Mansfield's infinitely subtle wiles. I won't be able to stop myself reading more of hers, afterhours.

Whilst it has at times been a struggle to keep up the writing side of this, I have read one short story a day, and due to time off over the next two weeks for the Easter break, there will be no such problems in the coming weeks. Many thanks to the fine folk who recommended these first seven writers; while you may be able to discern some particular favourites, I have greatly enjoyed reading of all these writers - four of them being my first, brief encounters. And none will be the last.

10/10