rereading Charlotte Macleod

I’ve been on a bit of an orgy of Charlotte Macleod rereadings, in the last few months, since they started coming out in Kindle editions, and the effect of reading them in the aggregate is … rather odd.

They’re definitely a bit dated; it shows most in the Kelling-Bittersohn books, because there are more of them and they’re more realistic, though it’s seen a bit in the other series too. Some of it is in the expected ways; Max Bittersohn gets in all kinds of plot points while trying to find a phone to call Sarah, for instance. It’s interesting to think about how he’d have so many interesting and useful chance encounters if he could just pull our a mobile phone to call home. Some of it is stuff I wouldn’t have expected; in the early 70s, people are routinely choosing to live in boarding houses rather than apartments. It’s taken to be more proper for young single women like Janet Wadman (later Janet Rhys) or Sarah Kelling’s tenant Jennifer Lavalliere, and when apartments are mentioned they’re usually dreary and / or overpriced. (Madoc Rhys has a sad, small bachelor flat before he marries Janet; Sarah and Max move into an overpriced apartment next door when the boarding house is full but seem to spend as little time there are possible.

They’re clearly from a period very much in transition. In the Peter Shandy books, people routinely get married with as little acquaintance as any of Georgette Heyer’s couples – sometimes just a few days. In the Kelling-Bittersohn books quick marriages are also common but only among the older generation – two or three of Sarah’s older cousins marry after just a few meetings, but Sarah herself takes some time to make up her mind, and so do the younger couples in the books. In the Grub-and-Staker books no one has sex outside marriage; in the Peter Shandy books only trollops like Heidi Hayhoe do. Of the two more realistic series, Janet and Madoc Rhys know more-or-less respectable people who do, but they themselves wait even after getting engaged, though this is presented as being more about waiting for the right time and place, and Sarah and Max do actually sleep together while engaged – but though young, she’s a widow rather than a virgin (though she slept with her first husband exactly once) which may make a difference.

But aside from actual sex, there are all kinds of issues around it. For instance, while wearing a sari as disguise, Sarah ends up having to take off her bra but can’t bring herself to remove her pantyhose. There’s an odd preoccupation with women’s underwear in that series, with lots of comments on whose is nice and whose is not, either due to poverty or a Yankee determination not to spend unnecessary money on new things while the old ones are still functional. Sometimes older people get a pass on the extramarital sex, though it’s implied they don’t actually do much with it, as with Sarah’s Uncle Jem or Professor Shandy’s friend Henny Horsefall’s uncle Sven. (Janet Rhy’s brother’s handyman Sam does, but he’s not that old and is a law unto himself.)

There’s also the question of who is considered hot. Each of Macleod’s four heroines is small, slim and pretty – yet in each series there’s one or more spectacular and charming older women, appearing to range from their 40s to their 70s, who is anywhere from zaftig to downright fat, and whom all the men around fall in love with (except the heroes, who merely like and admire them). Janet’s sister-in-law Annabelle is a modest example and her mother-in-law Emmeline Rhys is an imperious one, but then there are the bounteous Iduna Stott, queenly Sieglinde Svenson and Emma Kelling, gorgeous Theonia Kelling, the sensible and giving Miriam Rivkin, the Reigning Queen of Roguish Regency Romances Arethusa Monk, and a few more. I suspect they’re there as vicarious stand-ins for Macleod herself and for a lot of her readership – though it’s also possible she just knew a lot of brilliant and beautiful larger women, I suppose.

Oddly, in the Kelling-Bittersohn books though not in the other series, there seems to be a prejudice against fat men; in contrast to the beautiful and lush women, there are a number of fat men who are presented as disgusting: aging, dirty, sloppy, often with missing teeth and unappealing personal habits. Once is a character, but when it happens multiple times in two books (the first two of the series) it’s a trend.

ETA: Since I’m now reading The Luck Runs Out, I should mention that there’s at least one counter example in the Peter Shandy books, in Professor Stott, who is literally porcine but still attractive.

An unpleasant sign of the times is the anti-Semitism among Sarah Kelling’s Boston Brahmin crowd in the early books, of an outspoken and vicious sort I’ve been lucky enough never to encounter in person (my parents may have). Those range from sweet Aunt Appie’s expectation that of course Sarah would marry “one of our kind” to the unpleasant drunken Miffy’s mutterings about sending Max “to the gas chamber, where they all belong”. This seems to vanish later in the books after Saraha and Max marry; Max still has a tendency to spout Yiddish when wished a Merry CHristmas, but there’s nothing so blatant (possibly because once Sarah’s married Max it’s easier for her to avoid the people who say such things). However, even though some of the anti-Semitic characters aren’t otherwise unsympathetic, Macleod makes it clear that the prejudice belongs to the characters rather than the author.

The dated-ness doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment of reading the books – well, except for the anti-Semitism – but that part isn’t supposed to be pleasant, except for when the people voicing it end up dead, foiled, or converted (to tolerance and respect, not to Judaism). I probably wouldn’t notice it much when reading one book, but it’s hard not to when you’ve read ten in a row.