Renault almost always collapses into gender essentialism. IT IS SO MADDENING. The historicals are not immune, see Funeral Games (or don't, really argh all the way for multiple reasons, it's like she's punishing herself for something and incidentally us with it). Return to Night, ditto. The structure of that one is somewhat similar in its bait and switch to both The Friendly Young Ladies and Purposes of Love: it begins quite interestingly with a woman who has agency and her own life and then these pleasing factors are slammed head-on into a romance that perverts and wrecks them. And yet I don't feel that Renault is angry about this, more that she has a serious contempt for women and feels we can never ever get it right, because, as Return to Night tells us, "Being a woman was a fact about which absolutely nothing could be done."*
I am wondering if you've read Kind Are Her Answers. Renault avoids this pattern by trivializing the talent and personality of the woman in question, and also by not beginning with her but with a different woman one is uninclined to like at all, though it's possible to be very angry at the book's treatment of her just the same. It's also sometimes difficult to see where we are seeing Renault's actual view of Christy and when we are just seeing Kit's. The line I recall very vividly is, "Honesty flourished in her like a weed untended." I, um, wow.
I compulsively reread all these books just the same because, before the fatal flaw opens, they are so very well done, so vivid, so human, so quirky and even, perhaps honestly and perhaps really not, humane and kindly.
P.
*This remark struck me very forcibly, not the first few times that I read it, but later on; and yet I am not sure it means what it could about Renault. I am not sure what it means at all, at this point, even about Hilary.
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I am wondering if you've read Kind Are Her Answers. Renault avoids this pattern by trivializing the talent and personality of the woman in question, and also by not beginning with her but with a different woman one is uninclined to like at all, though it's possible to be very angry at the book's treatment of her just the same. It's also sometimes difficult to see where we are seeing Renault's actual view of Christy and when we are just seeing Kit's. The line I recall very vividly is, "Honesty flourished in her like a weed untended." I, um, wow.
I compulsively reread all these books just the same because, before the fatal flaw opens, they are so very well done, so vivid, so human, so quirky and even, perhaps honestly and perhaps really not, humane and kindly.
P.
*This remark struck me very forcibly, not the first few times that I read it, but later on; and yet I am not sure it means what it could about Renault. I am not sure what it means at all, at this point, even about Hilary.