Reviews for Mr. Meeson's Will

The average rating for Mr. Meeson's Will based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-07 00:00:00 Last month, I committed to read this rare and nearly forgotten novel & post on it this summer in commemoration of the fact that 100 years ago in history, women won the right to vote in federal elections in the States. I felt bound to commemorate the day by reading something written by an American suffragist about the suffragist movement. I believed Hagar would fit that bill. I love that it's a rare novel few have heard of. It always gives me a thrill to "rediscover" an author. I loved sinking into a novel about the suffragist movement in the States. I haven't seen one of those & couldn't believe my luck when I found one -- & from within the actual era! 1913 was the very heart of the suffragist fight, so I expected the novel to be full of fire and a rare perspective on the movement. I expected it to be about a woman who is inspired to join the suffragist movement & faces great odds as she works to win women the vote in America. I expected to learn something about how it felt to live in that era, through the eyes of a fictional suffragist. The truth is, I knew nothing about the book when I bought my copy: it's so forgotten it's rarely even mentioned. It was definitely worth a read, for being of the era & through the perspective of a suffragist in America who had something to say about the state of women. Hagar was apparently the only novel Johnston published that was set in the era of its publication (1913). She had something to say directly to women of her day. Johnston's other novels were historical fiction. Apparently many male critics of the day preferred her "historical romance" to the more contemporary approach in Hagar. Sounds appallingly typical. One wonders what they disliked reading in Hagar. Apparently the novel follows Johnston's own life pretty closely (she too wrote in secret at first, traveled with her father, & settled in New York City where she took up both public writing & activism.) Because her novel Hagar held so many progressive ideas, men & women alike stopped buying her books. She wrote on nonetheless. ❀ July 20, 2020. I only read a few pages today to get myself into the novel. We're on a packet-boat headed home for Gilead Balm in Virginia, & the protagonist (a twelve-year-old girl named Hagar) is asking a woman who appears to be an aunt with authority (Serena) about why she can't read Darwin, which she found in her grandfather's library at Gilead Balm. Serena is appalled, & says Hagar shouldn't read so much, but the protagonist notes that Serena loves to read. I enjoyed that irony, as well as the lovely opening description of light flickering in and out with the movement of the boat, so that the setting is now golden, now in darkness. ❀ July 21, 2020. I've read through the first half of this novel, when Hagar is at Gilead Balm & boarding school. Now she's an adult in New York, & while I definitely still like it, I confess I miss the first half, which was all lush description and ridiculous characters (they made me laugh) and books and daydreams and lazy wind-swept days and beautiful landscapes. Now the writing seems starker -- more aimed at a point. That happened with David Copperfield too: I preferred the story while in David's childhood. Now that Hagar is grown and in New York, she's more purposeful than dreamy, and the setting is (likely intend to contrast with the first half) dark, cold, industrial. Hagar is focused on the poverty she sees around her and the wars in the papers & her eyes are widening & her perspective is becoming more socially focused. I'm sure I'll sink into the novel again tomorrow, & I do approve of the novel's direction -- but I do miss those lush childhood scenes! I could feel the March wind on my face. It was so... peaceful. I imagine that's Johnston's point: not every place is like that, and not every woman wants that life. Hagar starts out loving Gilead Balm but becomes restless, like her mother. As she is slowly informed that she may not grow, she grows. The first half of the book feels like a mix of Jane Eyre and Vera Brittain's work & a bit of Anne Shirley. A strong, decisive heroine with a deeply rich imagination grows up without her mother, an outspoken & therefore odd woman who dies early in the novel, or her father, who has spent Hagar's entire life wandering Europe. She's raised by several of her father's relatives in a once grand plantation home, including Old Miss (Hagar's stern and devoutly conservative grandmother) & the Colonel (her Civil War vet grandfather who feels that women should obey.) She plays deliciously described outdoor games with the overseer's children. (That's one of the ways she seems like Anne Shirley. Plus she's always daydreaming and writing.) Her Aunt Serena doesn't like her to read -- ever. She meets a runaway convict on the land (nineteen years old) and feels that he is the same as her -- both imprisoned. She gives him her lunch (apple turnovers) and weeps for him because she knows he's being pursued by dogs and only has a moment of freedom left. This guy makes a big showing later in the novel. She's eventually sent to an all-girl's boarding school (also filled with lush description and excellent characters -- as in I was soothed and excited and hooked by the amazing setting, & sometimes the characters made me laugh). She falls in love with a professor there, twenty-eight to her eighteen, attends a play and finds his literary critique mid-play intrusive (he accuses her of loving the play more than him). She insists upon telling her grandfather they're to be married (the teacher prefers to keep it a secret), her grandfather insists she tell the teacher it's off, she refuses (with some feminist vigor, telling her grandfather she is as real as he is), & is packed home where she's ignored for a long while by said grandfather, until her own father surfaces by letter having remarried, & offers her a trip to New York. She also writes her first story & wins a contest when she sends it away. She earns $200: the first money she's ever earned independently. That's where I am now. She's staying with some Southern friends in their big mansion in New York and is now hunting for her childhood friend Thomasine, one of the overseer's children she played with at Gilead Balm, who now lives in the slums of New York. Hagar is seeing poverty for the first time and is considering the ways humanity could help if only it would band together. She's also befriending settlement workers, which were (I believe) social workers of the period. That's where the novel reminds me of Brittain: not only is it feminist yet lovely and relatable (a very good story with an interesting protagonist); it is about seeing beyond oneself and doing something. It reminds me of Jane Eyre in that it begins with a set-up of the conservative world the adult Hagar will have to live in, & of the abuses that conservative world heaps upon her before she moves into adulthood. Also, there are kisses and lovers' appeals which are met with cool candor vocalizing her disinclination, thank you. Which offends her suitors. :) Like Anne she writes. I can't wait to see what becomes of that effort! I AM SO NOT TELLING WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. But I loved it & am really glad I read this. It didn't exactly go as I expected, it does contain a sort of love story, & it is full of FIRE. Lots of speech-making happens in the last chapters of the book -- likely relevant and new at the time, but now a little exulted. Basically it's about why equality is necessary, & that isn't news to a 2020 readership, but at the time it apparently SHOOK THE PAGES. Which is a good thing. It's clear Johnston's aim was to inform, inspire, & convince, and it's interesting to see her views on female suffrage spoken in real time. Johnston insists through her characters & narrative persona that writing & art are mandatory to change minds & spread ideas. I totally agree. I especially like that when Hagar meets the former convict in 1902 and finally learns his name (Denny Gayde), she is on equal terms with him: she can pay her own way and has already developed her ideas and focus. There's no sense here he's going to "rescue" her. Instead, I sense friendship, respect, and a strong current of fellow humanity. I would love to read a few more of Johnston's novels: her American Civil War novels The Long Roll (1911) & its sequel Cease Firing (1912) -- one of which my mother recently read and enjoyed, and To Have & to Hold (1899), Johnston's most remembered novel, a colonial drama set at the Jamestown in Virginia, where my ancestors also settled. "Grandmother," said Hagar, "did you ever realize that you yourself only make your mind submissive when it comes into relation with men, or with ideas advanced by men? I have never seen you humble-minded with a woman."- Hagar by Mary Johnston, p. 250.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-22 00:00:00 Jesse Bryant III This is one of Balzac's little jewels. From the very start Balzac sets its date and location. We are in 1612, in the early Regency of Maria de Medici, since only a couple of years had elapsed from the assassination of her husband and King Henri IV. Their son Louis XIII was then only eight years old. And the location is, as we can expect, Paris. But not just any place in Paris. We are in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, which is a perpendicular to the Boulevard of the same name which runs parallel to the Seine just across from the Ile-de-la-Cité. The significance of this street is that this is where the young Louis XIII was almost immediately enthroned when his father died. And the significance of having chosen this earlier period is that Balzac wrote his work soon after the Bourbon Monarchy had fallen. It is as if in choosing this past framework Balzac wanted to go back to a period of France that for him should have not ended. There are two main characters who are real and famous. There is a young painter who is none other than Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and there is also the considerably older and now less well known painter François (Frans) Pourbus (1569-1622) who came from Flanders. As Balzac tells us, the latter had lost his place as court painter to his compatriot Rubens. May be we are not surprised. This is how Pourbus saw the Queen. And this is how Rubens envisioned her husband welcoming her portrait. Balzac is rendering homage to the street where the young Bourbon King was declared King by situating the art studio of Pourbus in the address of Nº 7, Rue des Grands-Augustins. But if the context is seventeenth century Paris, Balzac develops a discourse on art that reads very much like a nineteenth century criticism of the Art Salons. We have a fully developed debate between the Disegno & Colore or the classicists and the Romantics epitomized during Balzac's time by Ingres and Delacroix. Colore And Disegno But even if Balzac also wrote regularly about the contemporary Salons, this is not just the writing of any art critic. This novella is couched in the very colorful, and rich and textured and delineated prose that is Balzac's inimitable writing. A true delight to read. And yet, the novella is not even about these two poles in painting. It is not about these people, nor their times. It is about something else. It is about the relationship of the painter and his representation, or to be more specific, about him and his (female) sitter. Creation and possession, and the limitations and impossibilities in these. And this is precisely what Pablo Picasso chose to focus on when the gallerist Ambroise Vollard asked him to illustrate Balzac's novel in 1931. In his thirteen engravings we see Picasso exploring the role of artistic creation, its limitations and the ultimate goal of appropriation or possession. For Picasso, his art and the implied window, a representational concept inherited from the Renaissance and through which he saw his world, was always framed by the female. We cannot be surprised then if he was fascinated by this Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, where Balzac says: Ce n'est pas une toile, c'est une femme! Une femme avec laquelle je pleure, je ris, je cause et je pens and cette femme nest pas une créature, c'est une création.. Picasso's framing women: Illustrating the tale by Balzac was not enough. A few years after completing the series of etchings, Picasso moved his studio to Nº 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins. To be able to photograph this warrants a new pilgrimage to my most beloved city. And of course, Picasso also had to portray and render homage to his honored genius Honoré de Balzac.