U3A The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin

[Betty]

Fact or Fiction?

[U3Agraham]

Maybe 'faction'?

I'm ploughing though the first part and I have to say that while it is interesting 'colour' writing about the times and the working life of actors in the country circuits it is rather hard going.

I think this is because it purports to be about the Nell/Charles liaison and at the moment that seems far far ahead. I'm all for delayed climaxes (in literature that is) but this is creating tensions.......

Impressive academic study but some really gauche purple patches and rhetorical questions leap out at you. Almost as if she has caught the 'dramatic disease' and is condemned to write like that.

I'll keep ploughing on.

ONE WEEK LATER

Impressive academic rigour.
When you look at what little information she had the connections she has made from that are great detective work.
Excellent background detail, both about the social conditions of England at the time and about the carefully controlled social morality.
Suffers from protesting too much.

The main thrust is not to write a biography of Ellen. It was to write an expose of the mores of Victorian England.

I felt that Ellen's story was gushingly overwritten with too many rhetorical questions and unstubstantiated hypotheses supporting her main thrust, which was that Ellen was the VICTIM. She makes it seem that she was locked away for thirteen years, but the facts as she relates them are not showing that.

And the 'scandal that had to be hushed up' is a beat up. That it would destroy Dickens is not supported. The example of William Wilkie Collins shows that an d there are others listed which show that Edmund Wilson's take on Dickens was correct. He showed that the highest and the lowest levels of society were intertwined and needed each other to operate. In doing this he was simply reflecting society.

Her detective work is amazing and the story rollicks along but it tries too had to make Ellen into the tragic figure, storm tossed on the hypocrisy of society, but the information she provides shows her to be something else.

I was a little uneasy after reading it. I felt that I had been cheapened by almost being taken in by her clever writing. I felt like a voyeur getting cheep thrills by peeping at the show she gave us.