[The Life and Death of Harriet Frean] by [[May Sinclair]]

This 86 page novella follows the life of Harriet Frean from her childhood to her death. Born to an upper middle class Victorian-era family, Harriet shows some mild misbehavior and the beginnings of a mind of her own during childhood, but she idolizes her parents and chooses to always "behave beautifully". She denies herself a lover and stays with her parents into her adulthood. Her father is financially ruined and dies and she and her mother carry on. Harriet keeps her three best friends into her old age.

This is an interesting book and I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. Harriet lives a small life, but though she seems to choose this life to please her parents, there isn't necessarily an indication that she regrets it or could have done more if she'd lived in a different era. It seems to be, upon a first reading, simply about the kind of person who can't see beyond themself and is happy living a narrow life. In that respect, I think it's a commentary on Victorian values. Harriet lives the ultimate Victorian female life and Sinclair shows how small that could be.

There are also many miscommunications. Many of Harriet's seminal life events - giving up her first love, idolizing her father and not understanding that his business failure ruined others as well, never communicating openly with her mother and giving up certain things to make her mother happy that she later finds her mother gave up to make her happy . . . the list goes on. I think these show that Harriet's narrow views even held her back in the small life she chose to lead.

The one thing I didn't see in this book was stream of consciousness writing. Sinclair is often compared to Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. I didn't get that out of this novella. That's not to say I didn't love it though. I think it's brilliantly done. It's one I'll save to reread for sure. There's a lot to think about in these 86 pages.

Original publication date: 1922
Author’s nationality: British
Original language: English
Length: 86 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: purchased paperback
Publisher: Modern Library
Why I read this: 1001 books list, off the shelf ( )

The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair is a novella sized morality tale about the narrow existence of a Victorian woman. Harriet was an only child and she was brought up in a close family, she was taught that the number one virtue in life is one’s ability to behave correctly at all times. She took her life lesson to heart, even rejecting her own chance of love in order to do the “right” thing. In her efforts to behave beautifully, she didn’t notice the damage she often left behind her. She put her father on a pedestal and it wasn’t until years after his death that she could finally acknowledge to herself that he didn’t always behave in the right manner. She loved her mother dearly but didn’t notice her shrinking away from cancer. As her life comes full circle we can see that always behaving in the right manner wasn’t actually the same as doing the right thing.

The Life and Death of Harriet Frean is a critique of nineteenth century middle-class society and the damage that lurks beneath a front of good manners. In bare, bleak and ironic prose, the author covers Harriet’s life, from birth to death, in less than 100 pages. I read this story in one sitting at Project Guttenberg, and it felt more like an impersonal report than the story of one woman’s life. ( )

I saw someone else on LibraryThing mentioned this 1001 book as being short and quite good. So, one night when I was having trouble sleeping I pulled it up on my laptop and started it. I didn't finish it that night but I did the next night. Poor Harriet. The only child of a wealthy British financier and his wife she was raised to behave perfectly. So when the fiance of her best friend started expressing an interest in her she turned him down even though she was attracted to him. He married the friend who quite young developed a mysterious paralysis. Meanwhile Harriet continued to live with her father and mother in their large comfortable home. Her father made some bad investments and lost his own fortune and the fortune of several clients. He died before he had to move out of the house but Harriet and her mother had to leave soon after his death. Her paralyzed friend died as did her mother who could perhaps have lived longer if she had been willing to spend the money for an operation but refused in order to save Harriet from penury. Her friend's husband married the woman who had nursed the friend but when Harriet finally visited them she found that he had become a semi-invalid who made excessive demands on his new wife. Later in life Harriet learns that her adored father had caused financial difficulties for others. Her one accomplishment, that of denying herself love to benefit her friend, seemed to have made everyone miserable. So at the end of her life she was alone and sick and miserably confused. ( )

A short read, and yet one which takes the reader entirely through Miss Frean's life, from infancy to old age.
An only daughter, Harriett soon becomes entirely subject to her parents' will - not through any bullying on their part, for they love her deeply, but through (it seemed to me) a combination of moral conviction and a certain sense of superiority:
"She passed through her fourteenth year sedately, to the sound of Evangeline'. Her upright body, her lifted, delicately obstinate, rather wistful face expressed her small, conscious determination to be good. She was silent with emotion when Mrs Hancock told her she was growing like her mother."

Life is not always clear-cut, and when her friend's fiance starts making advances to Harriet, she must decide how to act...
And all the time she is growing older, becoming ever more decidedly an old maid.
I thought the author did a wonderful job portraying a character at different times in her life, from the tiny tot being trained to behave 'properly', to the slightly supercilious young girl...and set-in-her-ways elderly woman. ( )

This is a very short novel but that doesn’t stop Sinclair constructing a complex character who spends her life bound by moral boundaries. Harriett grows up with parents who ensure she is protected in every way. I think they do their best but you can’t help thinking that Harriett also adds to the mix with a kind of supercilious self-righteousness that makes her kind of irritating to be around.

This is put to the test when she falls for her best friend’s fiancé, but her response is, by this point you realise, typical. Thus, she embarks on a lifetime of chastity as she fights off the demons of regret. Her relationship with her parents is also tested as various skeletons come out of the closet, but she holds fast to what she considers to be the best course of action and, as a result, ends life in lonely isolation having built a wall against self-doubt.

You can’t help thinking that the whole point was to tell us that life by moral compass is somehow not a life worth living. It seems that Sinclair’s mother was very strictly religious and perhaps the novel

was in critical response to this. Certainly there are clear autobiographical parallels between the author’s life and her character’s which leads me to believe that she regarded denying oneself for the sake of moral correctness to be worthy of critique.

There’s no guarantee that doing so, however, leads one into a life that is somehow less than we could have had. Life’s too complex for that and, the weakness of the character, for me, was that she was depicted as someone for whom life was as simplistic as always doing what “should” be done. There’s a certain irony in portraying someone who adopts such an approach in simplistic terms, of course, but I did get the point. Just not sure I agree with it.

Sinclair can write, of that there is no doubt, this was an engaging read with characters who you cared about. I just wish she’d taken at least twice as many pages to tell her story. I think she would have a classic on her hands that would be far more well-known than the resulting novella. ( )