Reviews for The Recess

The average rating for The Recess based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-27 00:00:00 Henk Bruis A romance with all of the attributes, both thrilling and annoying, of that popular eighteenth century genre. Merely to warn readers: I sought this out believing it to be a Gothic romance. While it does have the thrills of an adventurous romance, the setting of historical romance, and the episodic nature of any old romance, it doesn't have the supernatural or macabre attributes of a true Gothic, in my opinion. The setting is Elizabethan and not medieval (original meaning of the word Gothic) and, despite the element of space so central to the earliest examples of the Gothic romance--castles, keeps, recesses, and dungeons--the horrors here were the all-too-real. Namely, trials and tribulations of those noble enough to become embroiled in Elizabethan politics, but not strong enough or fortunate enough to weather the conflicts of the age without receiving permanent scars. So, on the interesting/worth reading side are the painful realities quite frequently depicted in this historical romance--despite the totally unbelievable machinations of fate and coincidence (prime features of the form) the actual suffering and plausible (even historically accurate) imprisonments, beheadings, shipwrecks, turns of fortune, insurrections, pirates, brigands, and many illnesses herein, all combined to give this tale a strong sense of reality through its many descriptions of human--particularly female--suffering than I'm used to reading in more hardcore Gothics. Therefore, although lacking in eerie supernatural chills, I was often outraged and sympathetically touched by the tragic, if thrilling, adventures of the two heroines of The Recess--twin sisters, the late, hidden daughters of the doomed Mary, Queen of Scots. Hence the text's republication as a gesture toward contributing to the creation of a female canon. Although a male author might have been able to conceive such a plot, the narrative is so completely sensitive to women, their concerns, interactions, and inter-dependencies, that it's an unmistakably female voice at work. (Now that I think of it, there's a queen instead of a king, a mother, two daughters, another daughter born, and all of the various female friends and female enemies who succor or torture our heroines and then, like mere window dressing, the two men with whom the sisters fall in love. Nice to read a novel in which the male characters are seen only through their lovers' eyes and who function only insomuch as their lovers need them instead of the usual other way around.) Also quite interesting and, I think, specific to this particular romance, was its radical shifting and blending of various points of view. The text is split about 50/50 between the voices of the two sisters, making it practically two novels in one--or, shall we say, more accurately, a romance that instead of intertwining the tales of two separated lovers, recounts the lives of the two sisters together through one's POV until their separation, then continues with the first-person narrative until it digresses at length with the first person narrative of the other sister's adventures through the reading of a MSS, returning at the end to the first point of view to finish up the tale. Although this might sound awkward to those of us schooled in the more linear novel form, romance allows for such structures and it works here, keeping the rather tedious prose style at least constantly moving through various adventures to hold our interest. Even within the narrative, and the narrative within the narrative, many characters recount for us events not directly witnessed by the sisters, so we get points of view sometimes several times removed from our overall narrator and this actually functions rather smoothly and the various adventures do come together into a convincing whole. The best part of the various viewpoints is that the two male characters are assessed first through the rose-colored glasses of the women who love them, and then are later re-assessed by the other sister, who does not love them and who therefore presents a more realistic view of their flaws. I really enjoyed both how real this was to human experience and how well it worked within the first person romance form, reminding us that we weren't reading history, or even a novel, but a woman's actual experience--this fiction of the romance was more convincing because of this technique. But, well, all in all, I prefer real Gothic with actual specters, graveyards, ghouls and demons, so The Recess, a very long romance, grew tedious regardless of its many events. Lee also seems to have a knack for whipping too swiftly through interesting scenes and dragging out certain court plots and coups for too long and I found myself frequently wishing that the narrative would either speed up or slow down. Also, and maybe this is the effect of time slipping by--some 225 years since the novel's publication--but since the text re-arranges history so drastically (as the footnotes attempted to chart as responsibly as possible) I feel like the story might have worked better if it had been totally fictionalized, that is set in a fictional England with a fictional queen. History, to a casual knowledge of the period that's mine, has been pretty kind to Elizabeth so it was difficult to see her as the heavy of this piece.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-05 00:00:00 Jeff Lavin This book, written in 1785, is not an easy read. The writing is very old style and requires close reading to understand. The story is quite interesting, with a mix of fictional and historic figures. There is a lot of fainting and swooning and crying - the women were depicted as very emotional but also very strong with enduring life's trials. The men they fell in love with were not very admirable - vain and weak and more concerned with their pride and honor than the women they claim to love. Glad I read this finally but it was a very slow read. Not the book for most.