Adeline Mowbray, or, The mother and daughter Book

This is the third time I've read Opie's novel (it's one of my thesis books). It gets better each time. When I first read it, I found its melodramatic elements difficult to take. I also misinterpreted the plot. Really this is a raw and thought-provoking book. It is melodramatic because it deals with tough social questions which are hard to weave into the sinuous narrative of a Bildungsroman. Today, a novelist tackling with such large-scale, controversial issues might also use melodrama to make their point, but they would wrap it up in ironic magic-realist conventions to make it more palatable to the reader. Authors like Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garçia Marquez and Arundhati Roy depict fragmented societies on the verge of massive social change, as Opie does, but she tries to make the coincidences and reversals of her plot seem realistic, where Rushdie, Marquez and Roy are happy for such plot elements to seem artificial. This makes it easier to misinterpret Opie. She has a sincere narrative voice, which encourages the unwary reader to take things at face value. The wry postmodern melodrama always encourages suspicion.

In a nutshell, the book is about a woman who tries to live unmarried with her lover, is stigmatised, and suffers terribly. Two hundred years later, attitudes about cohabitation have changed, but there is still residual prejudice against libidinous women and single mothers, and many other kinds of stigma besides. The book is still relevant. Adeline winds up regretting her actions, which has led many readers (including this one) to think that the novel puts forward the oppressive idea that women should always conform. But it is actually more complex than that.

Opie's great strength as a novelist is her liberalism. Every character puts their point of view. Every character is complex, riven by divided loyalties, the victim of unconscious prejudices, their power of action limited by society, their opinions inevitably undermined by incomplete evidence. It is wrong to think that any character'including the remorseful Adeline'represents the the truth. Her sufferings have many causes, and at different times many characters suggest many different solutions to them, none of which is perfect.

Opie had the power to make her original readers burst into tears. But as I say, her melodramatic technique has less power over 21st-century sensibilities. Her great contemporary, Mary Shelley, has more success with modern readers. Her own great study of stigma, Frankenstein, draws on gothic and science-fiction conventions which still have a grip on the imagination. That said, I can think of one melodramatist who retains power to move and shock: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant films, such as Ali: Angst Essen Seele Auf, Lola, Händler der Vier Jahreszeiten and Faustrecht der Freiheit, tread much the same ground as Opie's great forgotten novel, and sometimes in much the same manner.