Stephen Benatar

In this beautifully-crafted story, Benatar brings to life a character, Rachel, who feels the world and the creatures in it too strongly. She lived with a controlling, powerful mother so long that it warped her sensibility. From the introduction by John Carey, "among the griefs over other's suffering lodged deep in her memory is the death of the gentle young man in Paradise Street who had a club foot and kept the rabbit in the backyard, and was knocked down and killed when she was 10." These feelings...[are] "an index not of social maladjustment but of pathological hypersensitivity...Because she is so defenseless against the world's cruelty, she can only withdraw." Rachel, like us "disturbs, to put it bluntly, because Rachel, the mad narrator, is very like us. Admittedly, she takes things to extremes. Traits that we all recognize in ourselves are, in her case, blown up into intense inner (and sometimes public) dramas."

Rachel is mocked, used, and misunderstood by those around her. We wish her the best, and as her story advances, "We fear for her. Our hackles rise when others approach her. We harbor black suspicions about anyone who seems out to deceive her. Benatar encourages this paranoia in us by not letting us know about other people's motives" ... and we only"wish her 'safe at home.'"… (mehr)

John Wilmot is a beautiful youth who catches the eye and then the heart of a successful artist, Oliver Cambourne. Wilmot is a man with eye fixed steadily on the main chance, and he moves with ease from the life of bookshop clerk to one in which expensive gifts, spur-of-the-moment travels, and the Chelsea Arts Ball are a matter of course. After spending less than a year with Cambourne, he spots an even better opportunity. He grabs it, and the consequences of his doing so leave many people, sooner or later, feeling shattered.

In the long denouement we see Wilmot being denied, and denying himself of, the assurance of a life funded lavishly by others. Gradually, though, he appropriates ever larger bits of Cambourne's past, and the book's ending leaves him with the chance to work his way back into the good graces of yet another benefactor. That's a cynical reading; the author of the introduction to the novel sees Wilmot redeeming himself in this part of the book, and so might you.

This sort of ambiguity is one of the things I particularly like about the novel. So are some very well-drawn characters; the understated way in which Wilmot lays claim to first Cambourne's trinkets, then his actions, and then more still; and, similarly, the slow revelation of another major character's true nature and motives. In fact, the story in general is told with a refreshing subtlety;I can easily imagine other writers playing up the drama in it and in the process making the story itself feel implausible. A few minor drawbacks caught my notice: There's very occasionally a slight awkwardness, mostly in diction but once or twice in phrasing, that suggest that the novel might have benefitted from one final polishing, and though Wilmot does seem as blithely oblivious as ever of others' feelings till very late in the book, his sacrifice and his reactions near the end make it seem almost as if Benatar couldn't make up his own mind about whether he had in the end reformed or simply regrouped. I'm glad of there being no clear-cut explanation, but there's a sense of to-and-fro'ing rather than a consistently smooth presentation of Wilmot's behaviour in the last part of the story. Having said that, this is like all Benatar's novels a good book.… (mehr)

Sin pensárselo deja atrás su aburrida vida en Londres, se despide de su trabajo de oficinista y de su deprimente compañera de piso y se transforma de la noche a la mañana en la mujer que siempre quiso ser: devota del amor, la creatividad y la belleza, y siempre con una canción en los labios. Instalada en su nueva casa, Rachel contrata los servicios de un jardinero, empieza a escribir un libro e impresiona a todos con su optimismo insano. Sin embargo, a medida que Rachel se sumerge más y más en un mundo de lujo y de placeres, su entorno empieza a cuestionar lo excéntrico de su comportamiento y lo enfermizo de su euforia.… (mehr)

This is a first person account from a woman that is truly off her rocker. I don't know what her diagnosis would be today but Rachel Waring most definitely has a progressing mental illness throughout this story. To read this after Isabella Robinson's story (from Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace -- non-fiction) just made me feel the unjustness of that true tale even more as she never once showed real signs of madness. I didn't love this book but was glad to have read it as it was different from my usual reads.

http://webereading.com/2016/02/mental-health-and-victorian-or-modern.html… (mehr)