One of the best-known sensation novels from the 1860s, East Lynne is a book to be devoured. It's impossible to resist the lively prose, slangy dialogue, vivid characters, and melodramatic events. From a velvet gout stool in the first paragraph to the pious summing-up in the last, the Victorian hits just keep on coming: aristocracy, debt, adultery, spinsters, suppressed love, disguise, consumption, false accusations, suffering mothers, dying children, politics, and revenge. Reading East Lynne in 1862 (on the insistence of the Prince of Wales), a staid middle-aged Professor of Ecclesiastical History raced through its 600-plus pages in three sittings. The story's enduring interest is also testified to by its many dramatic productions, most recently in 1982.
The convoluted plot concerns the classic Victorian pairing of a dark and sinful woman, Lady Isabel, with a blonde and good woman, Barbara Hare. Being beautiful, aristocratic, and touchingly alone and penniless, Lady Isabel captures the heart of upcoming attorney Archibald Carlyle, who asks her to marry him even though he knows she is not in love with him. Perhaps he finds her especially pitiful because he bought her father's estate, East Lynne, before he died bankrupt, and this is a chance to return her to her home. Poor Barbara, meanwhile, truly does love Archibald, and is devastated to learn of their marriage. She's also suffering because her brother Richard is on the run, accused of murdering a local man, and this has turned their mother into an invalid wreck.
Add to this mixture the very badly behaving Sir Francis Levison. He'd flirted with Isabel before her marriage; then, some years afterward, when she's tired and weak from child-bearing and Archibald is not as attentive as he once was, Levison appears again on the scene—to work her ruin. He convinces Isabel that the secretive meetings between Barbara and Archibald (they are discussing how to help Richard) are love liaisons and that he, Levison, is the one who always loved her. Though she has everything to lose, including her children, Isabel feels so jealous and neglected that in a moment of madness, she runs away with Levison to the Continent.
This is only the beginning. Carlyle promptly divorces Isabel, and Levison almost as promptly abandons her, soon after the birth of their child. Isabel then suffers a train crash that conveniently kills her baby and its nurse. She is reported dead, affects a new identity (she is disfigured from the accident), and gains work as a governess. Meanwhile, Carlyle makes Barbara the happiest woman in England. They marry and have children. Guess what family in England happens to need a governess? That's right. In a Lifetime Movie Moment, disguised Isabel returns to her own former house, not as an honored wife and mother, but as an awkward, overlooked governess—not just to Barbara's children but to her own!
This leads to the most fascinating section of the novel, because Isabel's situation is so strange. She's in what used to be her own house where she lived first with her father and then with her husband. Her children are right there, but not her children; she has to call her own daughter "Miss Lucy." She has to accept the Carlyles' instructions as to the children, agree or disagree. This time she sees Carlyle's merits and loves him as she never did when she was his wife; and now she has to see him treating Barbara as lovingly as he once treated her. Isabel's previous life is strangely doubled in front of her, enacted by another, and she has only herself to blame for no longer being the star player.
Up to now, point of view has alternated among the various characters, with a good deal of Barbara Hare worrying about her brother and mooning over Carlyle. In the first part of the book, Barbara is a reasonably attractive figure; she sasses her pompous father and bravely works on behalf of her brother. But once the disguised Isabel comes to East Lynne, we see Barbara from a distance. Barbara secure and beloved is far less interesting than tormented Barbara, and only now does she reveal a certain coldness, saying to Isabel, "No. I never was fond of being troubled with children. When my own grow up into childhood I shall deem the nursery and the schoolroom the fitter place for them."
As Barbara recedes in interest, Isabel, in her physical and mental suffering, becomes more so—though never exactly sympathetic, as she indulges herself in emotions other than repentance:
She tore upstairs to her chamber, and sank down in an agony of tears and despair. Oh, to love him as she did now! To yearn after his affection with this passionate, jealous longing, and to know that they were separated for ever and ever; that she was worse to him than nothing!
Softly, my lady. This is not bearing your cross.
One can't sympathize all that much with her predicament. Mrs. Wood seems to acknowledge here that Isabel has not truly repented, that all her shame and sorrow is more about having ruined her own life than about the real hurt she caused other people. Ostensibly Isabel has taken this risk of returning to East Lynne because she can't bear to be separated any longer from her children. But her attachment never seems more than sentimental; if she cared that much about her children, she wouldn't have abandoned them. It's not as if Carlyle had been abusing her or making her life a misery, after all. She was just bored and felt she deserved more attention.
Nevertheless, the contrast developed in the last part of the book, between Isabel with her passion and grief and Barbara's complacency, undercuts to a large degree the pious moralizing over Isabel's fall. In the end crazy Isabel is just more fun than good Barbara. Without Isabel, after all, there'd be no Frances Davison, and his downfall is the most fun ever. He's manipulated into running for MP against Carlyle, hometown favorite and the man he wronged, to general disgust—and revenge in two flavors, comic and serious. Of course at the end all things are set right, but not before we get to thoroughly enjoy their wrongness.
Note on the Oxford World's Classics edition: My volume has an extra helping of pages 239-286, inserted after page 286. Weird.
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