Book Review: Green Dolphin Country

What would have happened in Gone With the Wind if Ashley had married Scarlett? If Scarlett had matured in that marriage and later met Rhett? If Melanie had truly, deeply loved Ashley but hadn’t married him?

These were some questions my dear friend SM posed to me while recommending this book to me to read. She is part of a book club that just read this book, and she, knowing my taste in books well, wanted to acquaint me with this author and book. She and I are both fans of Gone With the Wind and think that the love-story of Rhett and Scarlett is almost without peer in the literary world. So it was with great interest that I discussed (not having yet read Green Dolphin Country) the above questions about Mitchell’s famous characters and had my interest piqued to read Elizabeth Goudge’s work.

I picked up my 1944 hardback copy at my local library. From looking on Amazon, there are quite a few options and editions for purchase, and I would definitely pick this book up if I saw a nice hardback edition for sale at a local bookstore.

Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984) was a contemporary of Margaret Mitchell’s, and her work shows much the same flavor as Mitchell’s. Both are set in the mid-1800s, both center on two women, sisters actually, and the single man they both love… but Green Dolphin Country pairs the stronger Marianne with the man she has loved, William, who is much weaker in ambition than she, while the woman HE truly loves, and who TRULY loves him back, is left behind. Marianne meets her Rhett in the wilds of New Zealand, but because of her jealous love of William, doesn’t allow herself to pursue it. The book culminates with a happiness of understanding between the two characters center to the storyline, but I did leave saddened that they neither one had found true marital understanding until the very end of their lives, and so they had never truly been happy.

All in all, I would give this book a rating of five out of five stars, it had parts that were truly beautiful bits of writing (SM and I agree that one of our favorite passages describes the girls’ childhood walled garden!) and there is a wholeness of character development that was the standard in old literature that has been lost in most current stuff.

 

BookReview: Emma & Knightley

Emma & Knightly: Perfect Happines in Highbury by Rachel Billington

I picked this up at our local library on a whim. I was dealing with fussy children and a library that had the A/C out, so I was desperately grabbing anything that caught my eye, and I figured if it was horrible, I didn’t have to finish it.

Well, the book wasn’t horrible, and I did finish it. I’m a HUGE fan of Jane Austen, and find fan-fiction books based on her characters (or even the movie renditions of her books, like Austenland) to be fascinating in their own right. Not as good as Austen (who could be?) but still fun (if not fluff) reading for a die-hard Austen fan.

The book opens a year after Emma and Knightley (she still calls him Knightley) have wed, and Emma is still living at Hartfield, as was discussed in the original Emma. Rachel Billington did a fair job at keeping Jane Austen’s voice throughout the book. I did take exception at a few of her conclusions, she didn’t allow the reader to come to their own, but rather wrote her preconceptions into the book in a way that left some of the surprise out.

Where sometimes I think Jane had an anti-hero (Frank Churchill in Emma) to come to a good ending, Rachel turned the happy ending of Frank and Jane on its head. I won’t ruin all the story lines, but Harriet comes into her own, Emma realizes her faults, Knightly is still my favorite Austen hero (I’m sorry, but he’s the only Austen hero that makes me swoon!), and Mrs. Weston and her husband are still blissfully happy.

Out of five stars, none being horrible and five being excellent, I would rate this a 3. I felt like Billington tried a bit too hard at times, there wasn’t the depth and intricacy of the original Emma, but it was a fair continuation of the classic.