Susan Howatch Part II

Susan returned to England after some years of living in Ireland, and continued with her writing.   However although she was a success, and her books brought in a lot of money, she began to find her life unsatisfying.   She was depressed and trying to find something that fulfilled her.  She was living in Salisbury near the Cathedral and although she had not been religious previously, she began to get interested in religion.  She embarked on reading about God, religion and the Church of England, and became a practising Christian.
She had always researched her novels carefully so it took some time before she felt ready to start writing a series of books on the Church of England.  After some years of educating herself, she wrote the first book of her series.  It was called Glittering Images.  It was published in 1987 and was set in the 1930s.  She concentrated on the lives and beliefs of 3 different Anglican clergymen.  The fisrt one we meet is Dr Charles Ashworth, who is a young lecturer at university, and who has a highly intellectual approach to his faith as a clergyman.  When undergoing a spiritual crisis, after the death of his young wife, which drives him almost to breakdown, he meets Jon Darrow, who is a former Navy chaplain, and an Anglo Catholic. Jon is a monk –experienced in spiritual counselling but he has been married and had children...
He counsels Charles, and sorts out his problems... But in the second book we see Jon approaching his own crisis, when he believes that he is being called to leave the monastery and work in the world again, at the start of World War II.  He leaves his monastery and becomes an ordinary parish priest but finds adjustment to the world very difficult.   He marries again, and finds that marriage to a younger woman has its own problems.  He has to acknowledge that although he can sort out other people’s problems, he has not been very good at working on his own issues...and has to achieve reconciliation with the 2 adult children of his first marriage. Eventually he becomes a teacher at the diocese's Theological college and has a son by  his second wife.. and achieves a degree of stability.

Susan Howatch

Howatch is one of my favorite authors, and now that the world is in lockdown, I’m planning to read her many works over again.  She was born in Surrey, near London, in 1940… Born to a middle class family, she had a comfortable and happy childhood…but her father was killed in World War Two.  Her historical novels often portray the Home Front of this war.

She studied law and obtained her degree in 1961...  But she began to find the practical side of law boring and looked around for other work.  In 1964, she immigrated to the United States where she married. She worked as a secretary in New York, in the music business, preferring it to law.. then married Joseph Howatch, a sculptor.  The couple had a daughter and Susan began to write at home, intent on writing a novel.  For a few years, she wrote short Gothic novels which sold, but she wanted to write something longer and with more depth and regarded the shorter novels as a training ground.  

In 1971, she published Penmarric a long family saga, set in 19^th and 20^th century Cornwall.  It was a rather novel idea, in that the story was loosely based on the history of the Angevin Kings, Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and their sons but it was updated to 19th and 20th Century England.
 The story starts in the 1890s with the meeting of Janna Roslyn, a beautiful woman who rose from poverty to marry a farmer, but then lost her elderly husband.  Janna's beauty is a double edged sword as it attracts the wrong sort of men and alienates women.  She  then meets the Castallack family who are the local gentry.   She has had a brief affair with Laurence, the father of the family, but he dies suddenly, and she has a farm but no money.  She then embarks on a relationship with Mark, his son, who is 11 years her junior.  They are passionately attracted to each other and decide to marry, but their age difference and the class conflicts cause the marriage to be difficult and unhappy, though they have several children.  
Mark takes a mistress, whom he finds more congenial, and there is a dramatic scene where Janna and her son Philip find out about the existence of his mistress and her two children.  Mark and Janna separate  but the breakup of the marriage causes divisions in the family, which affect the children and Janna, and the story goes on till the end of World War II.   The novel was an amazing best seller and Howatch followed it up with more family sagas with similar themes.
She had achieved best seller status with her first long novel.  Her next work was Cashelmara, which is set in 19th Ireland.  It followed the same format of using the history of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as the model for the story..
Howatch moved to Ireland in the 1970s and lived there for a few years.  She liked it there and Cashelmara was set partly in Ireland and partly in America.  She then turned to a different era, Rome of the 1st century, as her model.  Her novel "The Rich are different" was based on the story of Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.    It was set in the 1920s and 1930s, the main characters were investment bankers in the Roaring 20's prior to the Wall St Crash.   Dinah Slade is a young English woman who seeks  to set up her own business, and sleeps with Paul Van Zale, to get a start in the business world.  He is assassinated and she later marries his friend, Steven Sullivan, who is a successful businessman but has a drinking problem...   This novel and its sequel, Sins of the Father, were also very successful...

 end part I

Raffles Part III

Hornung had a somewhat on and off relationship with his brother in law, Arthur Conan Doyle  but he admitted that some of the inspiration for the friendship between Bunny and Raffles came from the relationship between Holmes and Watson.

His Raffles stories sold well but he did not want to be tied to one form of story.  He may have felt that there was some merit in the criticism about his making a thief the hero of his stories.  He also wrote on the “woman question”, as it was the era of women campaigning for the Vote…

He wrote a set of stories which ended with the 2 criminals being caught.  Raffles escapes by jumping off the ship they are on and being presumed drowned.  Bunny ends up in prison for a year.  When he gets out, he is very badly off and takes a job as a male nurse to an invalid.   Raffles had managed to fake his own death and lived in Europe for a time under a false name.  He has suffered and aged a good deal.  He and Bunny now continue their partnership and their life of crime in a muted fashion.   After a time they both volunteer to fight in the Second Boer war and Raffles is killed.  Bunny begins to write up stories about their life together.

Hornung may have felt that Raffles had to be punished for his crimes by death... Bunny has also been punished.. He was wounded in the war and had been to prison.   But some critics found the whole ending of the series incongruous.

Raffles Part II

In 1898, he began to publish the first Raffles stories.  In 1899 Hornung and his wife moved to Kensington where they lived for many years.  
Arthur Raffles is a “gentleman cracksman”… He went to a public school..where he met “Bunny” Manders who was several years his junior and who was his fag.  Bunny is the narrator of the stories, and clelary Hornung was influenced by his brother in law’s Sherlock Holmes novels... Raffles is the clever one and the dominating one of the partnership.   
 Bunny is less intelligent and active, and he is in thrall to his friend.  Raffles was a brilliant cricketer at school and now, he lives as a gentleman of leisure, gambling and winning quite often but really living on the proceeds of his secret life of crime.  He is a skilled burglar and because of his positon in society and his skill at cricket, he is invited to upper class houses as a guest. Bunny Manders meets Raffles at a party and gets involved in gambling, losing all his money.  Being a very sensitive naïve and conventional young man, he considers suicide, but Raffles persuades him not to do it.  When Bunny learns that his hero is a thief, he is shocked but finds that it does not really impinge on his admiration and affection for his school friend.  The two men become partners in crime.  Raffles has a few scruples, but he has no real qualms about stealing from the rich.  He refuses to steal from his hosts when he is staying at someone’s home... but he will steal from fellow guests. 
The stories were well written and very popular, but many critics felt that it simply was wrong to make a criminal the hero of an adventure story

Hornung and Raffles Part I

Ernest William Hornung is famous for being the author of the Raffles stories, adventure stories, a little like Sherlock Holmes but where the protagonist is AJ Raffles a “gentleman thief” and burglar.   He was born in 1866 in Middlesbrough, in the North of England… His father was a merchant, whose family came from Hungary, and Willie, as he was called was one of a large family.  He was sent to a good school, as his family were prosperous.   Like Raffles, he loved cricket, though he was not a good player, as his general health was delicate. At the age of 17, he was sent to Australia, in hopes that the warmer climate would improve his health.  He liked the new country and took a job as a tutor.  He also began to write.   In 1886 he returned to England, and found that his father’s business was not doing well.  His father died, and he began to write stories and journalistic articles.   He wrote a novel, The Bride from the Bush, set partly in Australia.    He also took an interest in crime; it was the period of the Jack the Ripper murders…. He made friends with fellow writers, including Jerome K Jerome and Arthur Conan Doyle, and fell in love with Doyle’s’ sister Constance... who became his wife.   They married in 1893, and had a son, Arthur Oscar, in 1895.  He was also friends with Oscar Wilde, and his son was named after Wilde.   He wrote more novels based in Australia, and was interested in the fact that the colony had begun as a prison colony for convicts.   He was moving towards a certain sympathy for the criminal as an underdog who was at times to be admired or pitied….