Such florid archetypes can be put to sly uses, but this one is wheeled out with every appearance of solemnity. Nellie Buck, the foster mother to whose skirts Lily literally clings, regards the world “over the big shelf of her bosom” and brings those around her “to a contemplation of their best selves”. For at Rookery Farm, the young Lily is positively steeped in bucolic bliss, doted upon by a sweet-natured matriarch and surrounded by “a bright immensity of sky, skeins of thistledown born aloft, birds in the trembling heavens”.Īll of which is lovely enough, in its way – though thistledown is surely “borne” rather than “born” aloft – but by this point in the proceedings the accretion of familiar elements is growing worrisome. As befits the heroine of a melodrama, the arrangement also entrains a brief reversal of fortune. It is the hospital’s practice to farm out its charges for the first six years of their lives, presumably to ensure that they are sturdy enough to be properly brutalised.
Henceforth, she will be Lily Mortimer, named for a high-born benefactress, as if to reinforce her own lowly station.īut before Lily’s oppression can begin in earnest, she is whisked off to the Suffolk countryside. In keeping with these grimly benevolent principles, she is “christened anew”.
There she is to be inculcated with humility (her mother being a “shameful sinner”) and fitted in due course for some dismal occupation so that her debt to the upright can be discharged. Rescued from the aforementioned wolves by a kindly constable, the infant Lily is consigned to the Foundling Hospital. At the heart of this novel is a taut moral drama that sits uneasily amid its more frivolous trappings
0 kommentar(er)
