Catherine Lowell - The Madwoman Upstairs

Publisher: Touchstone
Author: Catherine Lowell
Title : The Madwoman Upstairs

Sometimes you stumble across a book which is completely to your taste. It is like browsing in a library, looking through a few pages and saying to yourself, 'I know nothing about this author but I will try reading it.' This feeling is precisely why I love browsing books in a library. 'If I don't like it', I think,' I can always return it.' There is no commitment via a purchase to hound you if you don't like it. 

I was a member of a private library called Browser in Chandigarh. For some amount, you could read any of the books on offer there.  If you wished, you could also buy a book from their library at a discounted rate. It was a good arrangement, but the library was far from where I lived and it was a bit of drag to come and go.  Now I have an app called Scribd where I pay a subscription and can read any of the books on display there. They don't have every book under the sun, but a good many. I get the same library experience without the pressure of due dates and visits.

I found The Madwoman Upstairs on Scribd. Just like I would do in a regular library, I flipped through a few pages and was hooked.  It is about a young woman Samantha Whipple, who has come to Oxford to study English Literature and is assigned to the dishy Professor Orville. Samantha Whipple is famous, she is the last living relation of Patrick Bronte, the father of the Bronte sisters. This has brought her a lot of attention, most of it unwanted.  Her father, Tristan Whipple was an avid student of his famous ancestors and an author in his own right.

Her father is now dead but the rumor is that he hid some Bronte relics. There are people who are interesting in knowing more about them and are hounding Samantha. She has to grapple between her own theories about her famous cousins, trying to locate the said relics and learning more about her eccentric father. On top of all this, she has to fight her attraction to the dishy Orville who is never happy with the papers she turns in.

If you like this kind of a book which is chockablock with literary allusions you have hit jackpot. Read this ASAP.  It is funny and smart, but without any pretensions. It propounds some really wild theories about the B sisters which are fun. Samantha is fixated on Anne Bronte, so get ready to hear some things about the least famous Bronte. The tower that Samantha lives in as a student is about as Gothic as the tower that Bertha Mason was locked up in.

It is not exactly a derivative as it references the books by Brontes directly. It references even the best known derivatives, Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea. Yet when you are ready to snap the book shut after a very satisfying end, you realize the book was a derivative after all, maybe of The Professor? The epilogue has a dreamy feel that makes you wonder, did this really happen?

It addresses the madness that descends on Literature students who want to unravel the lives of famous authors and find clues to what led them to write the books. The book, for this reason, kept reminding me of Possession by A.S. Byatt. Byatt had created a fictional writer and  his body of work. It was brilliant. Yet this book by Catherine Lowell does not pale overmuch by comparison, as it is very good. You will fall in love with the quirky, socially awkward, Bronte loving character of Samantha Whipple.

Anne Bronte - Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The more said about the Bronte sisters is less. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a classic, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is likewise, a classic. However the two books by Anne Bronte are often overlooked. She outlived her most illustrious sister, Emily, by a year, dying at the young age of twenty-nine. In her lifetime she wrote only two books, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Even with my avid readings I have not read the other books by Charlotte – Vilette, Professor and Shirley – mainly because I was ignorant about them. These books and Anne’s books were not readily available at my school library, where I read most of my classics. Recently, a friend of mine (Vani) visited my house and was struck by the amount of books I had. She had been gifted a number of books that were lying unread by her and offered to lend them to me. Never the one to look a book-gift horse in the mouth, I agreed. She offloaded a stack of books on to me and I was charmed to find amongst them The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.



I began reading the book and was struck immediately by the way the book avoided the ‘Gothic’ and the ‘Romantic’ traps that were so typical of Victorian novelists. I was refreshed by her normal, colloquial use of language, the simple unassuming style. In fact I read the title page once more to check if the novel had been abridged, and hence simplified, but it was not. Let me outline the plot a little. I had assumed that the Tenant of Wildfell Hall was some Rochester/Heathcliff like creature, prowling amongst great halls full of angst. But this tenant is a mysterious lady called Mrs Helen Graham who is dressed in widow’s weeds and has a little son. She makes her living by selling paintings and seems to be a gentle lady who has fallen on ill days. The parish is abuzz with the new arrival and families start visiting the lady, eager to make acquaintance of her. She seems friendly but a bit standoffish. Her great beauty wins her admirers among the men, which in turn angers their former beaus. Some women are struck with jealousy and spread rumors about her character. It is then revealed that Helen is in fact on the run from an abusive husband, Huntingdon, and is trying to bring up her son away from his harmful influence. What happens to Helen, and how her past is revealed is the rest of the story.

The story was set in Regency and was based on the various young squires (some say the wicked Bronte brother, Branwell was the model) who led degenerate lives, going on wild drinking binges and hunting. Along with this, hitting on each others wives was also a great sport for them. The gentler wives were obviously distressed by the events. To add to their misery, the law was stringent for women. They had no identity or existence without their husbands, could not own money or property independent of them. They could not leave their husbands without their consent, nor claim custody of their children. In such a background the mystery with which Helen Huntingdon has to surround herself is necessary, and the step she had taken was seen as unusually bold for those times. Anne invests strong characteristics in Helen and creates a character of great strength and beauty. Her characters spring out of the book, quite like the one’s created by Charles Dickens. She describes the landscapes beautifully. Her greatest strength however, is her graphic presentation of the society. She is able to bring to life the equally the degenerate lifestyle of Huntingdon and his friends and the family lives of the gentleman farmers that dwell around Wildfell Hall. Her humor is gentle and satirical like her famous predecessor Jane Austen. She is like a bolder and a more decisive version of Jane Austen. While her sisters content themselves with presenting just the lives of Heathcliff, Linton and Earnshaw on one hand and just Rochester and Rivers on the other, Anne meticulously draws the portrait of several families near Wildfell Hall. We learn of the mating rituals of the young and fashionable when Helen is young and is being courted by several gentlemen. Likewise, we learn about the married lives of several people when Helen marries Huntingdon and starts living with him. She gives us valuable snapshots of various lives.

All people who habitually read Victorian or pre Victorian authors like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte among them, should read Anne Bronte too and not treat her like a ‘lesser’ Bronte (a fault I was prone to).

At home I was reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall and at work I downloaded her only other book, Agnes Grey. Agnes Grey lists in useful and entertaining detail the travails of a young girl who works as a governess for two families. The book is supposed to be drawn on her own experiences in a couple of households as a governess. Agnes is a young gentlewoman fallen on hard times. But her betters in wealth treat her no better than a servant and often heap abuse on her, neglect her and inflict her with spoilt children. However, she meets a cute curate and the story ends happily. This book is very slim and not ridden with any lengthy digressions that often mar the classics of that age. She goes deep into the psychology of the character and describes their feelings in great detail. She also describes the environs almost photographically and brings the scene alive to us.



The only fault of this work is extreme piety and often correct-to-the-point-of-harshness attitude of the heroine. She allows no levity to the children and young girls, and often follows the story through to make the reader realize that the girls suffered in later due to some frivolity of theirs in young age.

If I compare both the books, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her second work, is much better. The story is gripping and the female characters are very strong. In face of Huntingdon’s dissipation, Helen seems too correct, but that is the fault of the times. The character of Helen grows from a skittish young girl to a fine woman who is very sure of herself. When she finds love again, she is not afraid of revealing her true feelings and ends up practically proposing to the young man. Again, like Agnes Grey, Tenant of the Wildfell Hall is a slim book and does not put in any story elements that are unnecessary. Her realistic, flourish-less language is a delight to read even in these times. Indeed she writes more like Anne Austen than Anne Bronte. But she has to be lauded for sticking to her convictions and writing the way she did, so apart from the more romantic style of her sisters. With a will like hers and a talent like hers, who knows what beautiful stories she would have turned out, had she lived longer.