This blog believes that Valentine’s Day should be abolished, so prepare for disappointment if you’re looking for praise of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s sugared bleats.
If you haven’t read it yet, Tessa Hadley’s short story collection, Married Love, is beguiling. Each story presents a stereotype of love, delves into it and turns out a fresh perspective. The book begins with precious student Lottie ruining the family breakfast by announcing her engagement to her hoary tutor — the soon-to-be-septuagenarian, Edgar. We then follow Lottie over 15 years of loveless marriage, sexual diffidence and wasted youth, before reaching the ironic conclusion that it was the woman she supplanted who had made Edgar so attractive in the first place.
Lottie’s idiocy is reminiscent of Dorothea’s bizarre infatuation for Casaubon in Middlemarch, a comparison that might have been inspired by Hadley’s debt to the great Victorian stylists. The precision of her prose is striking, as is her delicate evocation of place.
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