Find the best price forLife and Death of Harriett Frean

May Sinclair

Goodreads rating:

Paperback, Published in Jan 2016 by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

ISBN10: 1523408227 | ISBN13: 9781523408221

Page count: 134

NO one can read "Harriett Frean" and fail to be impressed by Miss Sinclair's power as a writer, her unfailing artistry, and her amazing technical ability. It is a tour de force in the "Mary Olivier" manner-a series of episodes so vividly presented that they are inevitably connected and amplified by the reader's imagination. She compresses into a hundred and thirty-three pages the record of Harriett's long life; pages pruned of all non-essentials; pages cruel, almost intolerable, in their relentless, polished, austere clarity. Yet nothing is omitted. And at the end our knowledge of her is harrowingly complete and intimate.
The story of Harriett is the story of a woman whose home life was so ideal that she resented the intrusion of even her best friends. The years slipped by quietly and she and her parents seemed to her the perfect group. And the motif that runs through her whole life, that dominates it, is her love for her mother; a love infantile in its attitude of mind, its dependence, its abandonment. Like Victoria, and at an even earlier age, Harriett determined to be good. It was pleasant to be good. It gave her a warm, superior feeling. It made her parents happy. Disobedience-wickedness, were ugly. And she knew, and they knew, that always, under all circumstances, she could be trusted to behave beautifully. But, unlike Victoria, one of the forms her goodness assumed was an inordinate love of self-sacrifice.
She indulged herself in that in and out of season, with appalling results sometimes. But not really because she thought self-denial on her part would be of any benefit to others or would bring them happiness. It was of herself she thought, complacently; of Miss Harriett Frean, daughter of Hilton Frean, behaving beautifully. She was dazzled by the nobility of her own gestures. That was what happened when she fell in love with Robin-and forced him to marry Prissie. So edified was she by the moral beauty of her own conduct that it never once occurred to her to think of the probable misery in store for Robin and Prissie. Besides Harriett we have glimpses of her mother and father, of her friends, in their relationship to her; at the points where their lives touch hers. And we are shown the havoc wrought by her unselfishness.
The picture is complete: hard, sharp, truthful, accurate, as pitilessly brilliant as a flashlight.
Miss Sinclair's almost uncanny faculty for leaving her readers haunted by the people she dissects for them was never more in evidence than in this book. She is without mercy as well for her readers as for the characters of her own creation. Her dissection is carried out with neatness and despatch, with cool detachment and unerring precision, and the soul of Harriett, most inelegantly stripped of its protecting layers of sham and self-deception, is exposed to the public gaze.
Personally, I am profoundly grateful to her for letting me off with the hundred and thirty-three pages.
-"The Double Dealer," Vol. 3 [1907]