I’m not sure I would’ve finished all seven stories if I hadn’t been stuck on a plane, but I can’t say I regret the 35 cents I spent on this collection (yay thrift shops!). The first story in the book is the best one, and I was hopeful at the beginning, but then some later stories were awful or maddening.
The first story is about a terrible flood in a town peopled by very poor farmers and one spa-full of very rich people. A local vicar mobilizes the rescue effort and helps save many townspeople, and then gets stuck in a hayloft overnight with an amazing old lady and two lost young people. They have an evening full of philosophical conversation, life story swapping, and a surprise marriage, before it turns out the vicar isn’t who he seems to be. It’s interesting and witty, and I would pay good money to be stuck in a hayloft with old lady Nat-og-Dag. Some choice quotes:
- “You have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head.”
- “It is doubtful whether any spectacle can be enjoyed in the same way by those people who may run a risk of becoming part of it and by those who are by circumstance entirely cut off from any such possibility. In this way, it is unlikely that even the most pious old lady would attend the trial and burning of a witch with quite the untroubled mind of the male audience around the stake.”
- After she tells the story of the hardships of a beautiful young girl, her young male listener says “I feel how edifying is the thought that toward women we are always in the wrong.”
The author was a woman who married a baron in 1914 and then divorced him in 1921, and wrote under a pseudonym. Several of the stories are about young women being pressured into marriage, usually unhappily, with the appropriately gothic whinging about it. Sometimes the bad guys get their comeuppance, but usually everyone in their vicinity gets hit by the same comeuppance, so don’t go expecting any happy endings.
The craziest story was about a rich old spinster aunt with a pet monkey whose nephew wants to marry the girl in the next castle. The neighbor girl comes to dinner, politely declines the proposal, and then the aunt gives the nephew a drug that makes him “forcefully seduce” the poor girl. They then gang up on her, telling her now she HAS to marry the scumbag because she’s probably pregnant now and no one else will take her. Just when I was ready to fling the book across the plane, the monkey runs into the room, does (or undoes) some spell, and the aunt and the monkey switch places. The End. WTF?
Not worth it for one good story, but interesting all the same.
P.S. I found this line interesting, considering that it was written in 1934…it seems to apply to a lot of stuff going on now: “This was the first moment, I think, since I had met her, in which I saw her as a human being, within an existence of her own, and not as a gift to me.” If only the ‘dudes getting a clue’ trend had caught on way back then!