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alibi_shopComedies of Courtship, by Anthony Hope (1894)
text - audiobook (6 hrs 28 min; I read 1h 17m)
This is a collection of two novellas and four short stories, nearly all on the general theme of young gentry types having romantic misunderstandings which usually turn out OK. I think these were probably churned out in that era at an even greater rate than Hallmark Christmas movies are today. The reason I was curious about this one was that the author is now best known for something in a different genre: the adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Both books were published in the same year, and I suspect that this one—collecting some previously published work along with some unpublished stories—might have been rushed into print due to the massive popularity of Zenda, before which Hope had had some minor literary success but hadn't been able to quit his day job as a lawyer. In any case, there's almost nothing here to interest most modern readers, but read on if you're curious.
What I hadn't realized at first, because I hadn't actually read any of Hope before, was that the difference in genre isn't as big as you might think. Zenda has a light-swashbuckler plot with royal family intrigue and mistaken identity in the kingdom of "Ruritania", but it's all seen through the eyes of an English gentleman who, in his mannered silliness, his verbose narration, and his chaste romantic longing for the Ruritanian princess, would fit right into Comedies of Courtship. Except for the main villain and his henchmen, nearly everyone in Zenda is basically nice and helpful toward our hero, and their foibles are described in an affectionate tone. So, in Comedies of Courtship you're getting very much the same kind of storytelling and characterization and humor, except that instead of the stakes being "the rightful king might get assassinated and his throne usurped", they are "two people who love each other and ought to get married might not get married, or two people who who oughtn't to get married might get married, because of poor communication, which is the only problem anyone ever has."
This is for the most part pretty tedious and unbearable, but it's not hard to see why Hope did eventually manage to quit his day job: he can be a decent writer whenever he actually has an idea. He's got a good enough ear for dialogue that, if it's a character he's interested in (within the fairly limited assortment of character types he's picking from), you can get a clear sense of who they are right away. His prose style is chatty and digressive in a typical Victorian way, but even when there's an absurd amount of verbiage being used to convey very little, it flows well and can be surprisingly expressive when read out loud. Sometimes what it's expressing is just that the narrator is wearily amused by all these silly people; at other times Hope goes off on comic riffs that have more to do with the basic enjoyment of bullshitting in a particular style, especially in "The Decree of Duke Deodonato" (the one piece with a non-British setting—a Ruritarian romance/fake folktale), where his elaborate sentences about political events come across like Hope saying "This is courtroom language—lawyers all have to learn to talk like this—sure is ridiculous and kind of insane, isn't it? But also fun!"
And occasionally there's even a tiny bit of real pathos and darkness. My favorite of these stories (besides "Deodonato", which is super predictable but has the funniest dialogue of any of them due to not needing to be realistic in any way) is a very short one called "A Three-Volume Novel", whose title refers to a formerly very popular format of disposable Victorian literature which coincidentally died out soon after this book appeared. Miss Liston, whose hopeless affection for a shallow man drives the story, has written a slew of three-volume novels and is only able to sort out her own emotions by fictionalizing people in her work. We're meant to see her literary and romantic ambitions as silly and sad, but she seems to be a good person and probably a decent writer, which makes the whole thing much sadder because no one's likely to ever notice those qualities—except the narrator, a deliberately unsympathetic character who has as much contempt for himself and his own cleverness as he does for everyone else except Miss Liston, and is aware that he's a bad friend and that she deserves better. To his credit, Hope doesn't push for a happy ending in this one... and yet he doesn't change his style all that much either, which works oddly well as a reminder that this kind of lightly ironic observational tone, in careful hands, is flexible enough to include actual feelings.
text - audiobook (6 hrs 28 min; I read 1h 17m)
This is a collection of two novellas and four short stories, nearly all on the general theme of young gentry types having romantic misunderstandings which usually turn out OK. I think these were probably churned out in that era at an even greater rate than Hallmark Christmas movies are today. The reason I was curious about this one was that the author is now best known for something in a different genre: the adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Both books were published in the same year, and I suspect that this one—collecting some previously published work along with some unpublished stories—might have been rushed into print due to the massive popularity of Zenda, before which Hope had had some minor literary success but hadn't been able to quit his day job as a lawyer. In any case, there's almost nothing here to interest most modern readers, but read on if you're curious.
What I hadn't realized at first, because I hadn't actually read any of Hope before, was that the difference in genre isn't as big as you might think. Zenda has a light-swashbuckler plot with royal family intrigue and mistaken identity in the kingdom of "Ruritania", but it's all seen through the eyes of an English gentleman who, in his mannered silliness, his verbose narration, and his chaste romantic longing for the Ruritanian princess, would fit right into Comedies of Courtship. Except for the main villain and his henchmen, nearly everyone in Zenda is basically nice and helpful toward our hero, and their foibles are described in an affectionate tone. So, in Comedies of Courtship you're getting very much the same kind of storytelling and characterization and humor, except that instead of the stakes being "the rightful king might get assassinated and his throne usurped", they are "two people who love each other and ought to get married might not get married, or two people who who oughtn't to get married might get married, because of poor communication, which is the only problem anyone ever has."
This is for the most part pretty tedious and unbearable, but it's not hard to see why Hope did eventually manage to quit his day job: he can be a decent writer whenever he actually has an idea. He's got a good enough ear for dialogue that, if it's a character he's interested in (within the fairly limited assortment of character types he's picking from), you can get a clear sense of who they are right away. His prose style is chatty and digressive in a typical Victorian way, but even when there's an absurd amount of verbiage being used to convey very little, it flows well and can be surprisingly expressive when read out loud. Sometimes what it's expressing is just that the narrator is wearily amused by all these silly people; at other times Hope goes off on comic riffs that have more to do with the basic enjoyment of bullshitting in a particular style, especially in "The Decree of Duke Deodonato" (the one piece with a non-British setting—a Ruritarian romance/fake folktale), where his elaborate sentences about political events come across like Hope saying "This is courtroom language—lawyers all have to learn to talk like this—sure is ridiculous and kind of insane, isn't it? But also fun!"
And occasionally there's even a tiny bit of real pathos and darkness. My favorite of these stories (besides "Deodonato", which is super predictable but has the funniest dialogue of any of them due to not needing to be realistic in any way) is a very short one called "A Three-Volume Novel", whose title refers to a formerly very popular format of disposable Victorian literature which coincidentally died out soon after this book appeared. Miss Liston, whose hopeless affection for a shallow man drives the story, has written a slew of three-volume novels and is only able to sort out her own emotions by fictionalizing people in her work. We're meant to see her literary and romantic ambitions as silly and sad, but she seems to be a good person and probably a decent writer, which makes the whole thing much sadder because no one's likely to ever notice those qualities—except the narrator, a deliberately unsympathetic character who has as much contempt for himself and his own cleverness as he does for everyone else except Miss Liston, and is aware that he's a bad friend and that she deserves better. To his credit, Hope doesn't push for a happy ending in this one... and yet he doesn't change his style all that much either, which works oddly well as a reminder that this kind of lightly ironic observational tone, in careful hands, is flexible enough to include actual feelings.
