Holly's Books 2 and 3: Evelina, and Caleb Williams

So here we are, a month and a half into the year, and I'm finally writing about books number two and three. At this rate, I will end up with exactly half of my goal by December... oh well. And to top off my exceptionally slow pace, both of these are books that I read for class - had they not been, I wouldn't have finished them at all. Anyway.

Evelina by Frances Burney was published in 1778 (I think). It chronicles, in epistolary form, a naive young girl's debut into society. Think Jane Austen, only less interesting. You follow Evelina from assembly to assembly to play to garden to assembly, listen as she obsesses about Lord Orville, the most boring hero ever invented (one of the people in my class described Lord O as a "manners machine," and the phrase fits), and watch as she becomes, perpetually, "mortified" by everything and anything. If all of this is not exciting enough, everyone Evelina comes into contact with expounds upon her beauty and her "sensibility," fighting for her attention and affection. I didn't realize how annoying Evelina was until around page 150 or so, but once I did, it was difficult to get through the next 250 pages. Not to say that Evelina didn't have its high points: Captain Mirvan, who Evelina presents as a buffoon and a burden (because he lacks any sort of manners), is actually hilarious and seems to have more common sense than most of the other characters in the novel - he just doesn't see the need to conform to social conventions.

And, okay. When I think about the novel's plot, it actually was a pretty good book. If I were a young girl living in late eighteenth-century England, I probably would have loved this novel. Being a young girl living in the twenty-first-century US, I thought that cutting half of Evelina's content would have helped its cause: less assemblies, more old lady foot-races. That stuff's hilarious.

Next: Caleb Williams. Same class, different book. This one was written by William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, father of Mary Shelley) in 1794, the year after he published his massive political treatise, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Caleb Williams is about a servant who finds out that his master has killed someone, and who is then persecuted by his master for his knowledge. Again, the plot is interesting I suppose - but so incredibly verbose. The first third of the book (120 pages) is the master's backstory. The middle part drags. Things really don't pick up until the last part of the book, at which point there are only 130 pages left. And sprinkled throughout are moments where Godwin gets up on his soapbox to talk about the political and social system in 1790s Britain. Which, granted, is the reason he wrote the book: to bring his multi-volume treatise down to terms that us normal folk can understand. And, granted, it can be interesting.

With that said, I think I might be one of the few people in my class who read the who book. Most people said that they skipped around until they found parts of the book that actually had some bearing on the plot. The Marxist kid said he skipped around until he found parts of the book that had nothing to do with the plot (ie: the soapbox). I thought it was interesting to see how Godwin fit the two together, especially since this is touted as the first novel to have an explicit political agenda. That's really not reason enough to read this novel, though. I can't really think of a good reason to read this book, in fact.