Purposes of Love is (apart from The Charioteer, which as an outright queer novel is different) the only one of Renault's contemporary novels I've read. I hated it and have never re-read it.
I have no intentions of trying to persuade you to. I hadn't re-read it since discovering it and I think I am even more annoyed with it now. I disagree with it philosophically and it's also just not that good. I could have cratered that romance far more convincingly if I had to.
Increasingly, I can't re-read the Charioteer either, because while the heart of the story was literally formative for me, much of the rest makes me wince.
Understood. I am glad you were able to take from it what you needed when you did.
Renault, to me, is a hugely gifted artist wedded to an awful worldview. The painful thing is that every once in a while she rises above it, and you can see what might have been.
That's a factor in my frustration with Purposes of Love, actually. I am unironically interested by its exploration of the ways in which the heterosexuality of the romance stresses and endangers it from directions previously unconsidered by both parties: the question of marriage, the potential for pregnancy, the conflict of careers, all the societal considerations that just wouldn't affect two women or two men in 1938. Before it all falls over in a heap of conservatism, the novel actually pulls off the subversive suggestion that however deeply the principals are drawn to one another as people and however impossible it seems for them to break the relationship off, they might take less damage from pairing off with some nice queer alternative. And then it turns out that Renault isn't interested in that aspect of the narrative at all except insofar as it can be used to drive home the inevitability of the hetero norm. And she was already with Julie Mullard by the time she began writing the novel, so what the hell. And I'm left complaining about it because it's in my head.
Incidentally, I have not read it myself and so cannot recommend it per se, but when I saw that Valancourt had reprinted a rare gay (in both theme and author) novel, I thought of you: L. P. Hartley, The Harness Room (1971).
no subject
I have no intentions of trying to persuade you to. I hadn't re-read it since discovering it and I think I am even more annoyed with it now. I disagree with it philosophically and it's also just not that good. I could have cratered that romance far more convincingly if I had to.
Increasingly, I can't re-read the Charioteer either, because while the heart of the story was literally formative for me, much of the rest makes me wince.
Understood. I am glad you were able to take from it what you needed when you did.
Renault, to me, is a hugely gifted artist wedded to an awful worldview. The painful thing is that every once in a while she rises above it, and you can see what might have been.
That's a factor in my frustration with Purposes of Love, actually. I am unironically interested by its exploration of the ways in which the heterosexuality of the romance stresses and endangers it from directions previously unconsidered by both parties: the question of marriage, the potential for pregnancy, the conflict of careers, all the societal considerations that just wouldn't affect two women or two men in 1938. Before it all falls over in a heap of conservatism, the novel actually pulls off the subversive suggestion that however deeply the principals are drawn to one another as people and however impossible it seems for them to break the relationship off, they might take less damage from pairing off with some nice queer alternative. And then it turns out that Renault isn't interested in that aspect of the narrative at all except insofar as it can be used to drive home the inevitability of the hetero norm. And she was already with Julie Mullard by the time she began writing the novel, so what the hell. And I'm left complaining about it because it's in my head.
Incidentally, I have not read it myself and so cannot recommend it per se, but when I saw that Valancourt had reprinted a rare gay (in both theme and author) novel, I thought of you: L. P. Hartley, The Harness Room (1971).