This poor post has been dangling around waiting for its third book for ages now, but given the pressure on reading time at the moment, it seems more prudent to send it on its way with just two legs to its tripod.

1.
Anthony Trollope, 1869, He Knew He Was Right

This is a novel about male-female relationships, and it rapidly becomes very clear that these are determined much more by the male element than by the female one.

Some women retain their independence, but at the cost of poverty (Priscilla Stanbury) or derision (Wallachia Petrie).

Jemima Stanbury is the great exception here, as an unmarried woman who largely manages to remain mistress of her own destiny. But her life is nevertheless set about by restrictions. As Sarah Faulkner points out, "The first introduction to Jemima Stanbury highlights her position as a 'maiden lady', and there is something uncomfortable in the way Trollope notes that her garden 'added something to the reputation even of Miss Stanbury', as if an old maids status and repute is something barely supportable or improvable. She carves a space for herself in Exeter, 'thinking there was no other provincial town in England in which a maiden lady could live safely and decently'. Her strict attention to schedule, routine, and habit is an attempt to maintain control and position in a society that is both threatened by and scornful of her as a single woman of power."

The prospects of most of the novel's female characters, however, depend abjectly on men.

If you are married, your task is to stay married, and this might involve subjecting yourself to extraordinary restrictions (Emily Trevelyan) simply to allay the unfounded and ever more outrageous suspicions of your husband. At the beginning we feel that Emily could perhaps have been a little more accommodating. But as her husband's obsessions grow, any sympathy with him evaporates. The novel's title betokens considerable tragedy. "He" was not right. And in maintaining he was, he loses everything.

If you are unmarried (Dorothy Stanbury, Nora Rowley, or the ghastly French sisters), your only hope of betterment is to change that situation. But the woman needs to be largely passive, and opens herself to considerable ridicule if she is not. And if she rejects the first offer, and holds out for something more congenial (as a couple of our female protagonists do), she risks ending up with nothing.

2.
Thomas Mann, 1901, Buddenbrooks

I have no photos of Luebeck, so Bergen, which also has Hanseatic links, will have to suffice:



I loved this book. Nothing is over-emphasized or over-dramatized. No deus ex machina comes along to fix things. There are no happy coincidences; there is no neat tying-up of ends.

It's just the story of a family and a family business, as the decades inexorably roll by.

Of course, the subtitle ("the decline of a family") makes clear that this is going to be a melancholy story, and when we meet the family at the beginning, celebrating the acquisition of a grand new house (from which another family, already in "decline", has just moved), we already have the feeling that all this grandeur cannot last.

And indeed it doesn't. Bit by bit, circumstances chip away at the solidity of the family. Christian becomes ever madder, ever more irresponsible. Toni's two marriages end in failure. Thomas and Gerda wait a very long time for an heir, and when he finally arrives, he is sickly. Business doesn't always boom.

Certainly, the turning-point is more psychological than economic. Thomas simply loses confidence and energy. He carries on -- because what else could he do? -- but his heart is not in it. His health suffers; his obsessions intensify. But he cannot change. At one point he seems to regret not having much education; at another he experiences a brief religious-cum-philosophical awakening. But he knows no way to fill the former gap, and the latter he rejects almost immediately as inappropriate. He is a self-imprisoned man.

To some degree he imprisons his son, too. Little Hanno is musical, with no idea of what he wants to be in adult life. He has only one friend, a socially marginal figure a little like himself, and he does poorly at school. Thomas's will provides for the liquidation of the firm, as he sees so little prospect of Hanno's success at running it. The weight of fatherly disapproval, and the inability to fit in, make Hanno despair of life. When he catches typhoid, he succumbs to it.

So at the end, we have just the women. There's the indomitable Tony, whose marital sacrifices for family have seemingly come to nothing. There's "poor Klothilde", as she is invariably described, the ever ravenous, ever thin, impoverished relation. There is the ghastly trio from the Breitstrasse, whose bitterness towards the more powerful part of the family forms a kind of evil chorus throughout the book. The only one to retain any hope is the indestructible old teacher, Therese Weichbrodt.

You have the feeling that if Thomas had put Tony in charge of the firm, she would have made a pretty good job of it. She has masses of energy, and a large quantity of self-belief. But no, that's not how it worked in those days. Tony lives on, with very little outlet for her abilities. That early romance by the sea -- which, as something that society would never countenance, had to be put aside -- is obviously still in her memory. But nothing good comes to those who marry beneath them in Buddebrooks. Defying convention would have been no guarantee of happiness.

So, a brilliant book. For its little recurring descriptive phrases and snatches of conversation that make you feel you really know the characters, its understated poignancy, and the insights it offers into German history and politics and economics, it will stay with me a long time.