Emma Darwin

A curious mixture of two stories: one set in the early 1800s, featuring a veteran soldier, the other taking place in 1976, featuring a rather loose teenage girl. The two are connected by the letters written by the soldier to a woman. The teenager, Anna Ware, is given copies of the letters by an art dealer when she is staying at a failed school that years ago was the home of the soldier, Stephen Fairhurst. She becomes intrigued by the story that is unfolding in the letters, and they cause her to think about her own life differently.

Stephen's story is told in the first person, in a style that is based on the novels of Jane Austen. I felt that the style was rather stiffer and, to me, irritatingly sluggish. I haven't read Austen for some time so I can't say for sure that she did not write like this, but I suspect her writing had a spark I find missing here.

I came to feel irritation at Stephen himself, partly because of my own sensibilities. Two incidents bothered me: 1) when he takes his favorite horse on a fox hunt, and 2) when he writes of having to have men under his command flogged. Both of these practices strike me as barbaric and I know that just because they were common then does not mean that everyone would have found them to their taste. His later actions, traipsing after a lost love and not bothering to meet the child he had with her, reinforced my feelings about him, for different reasons. I simply felt he was not that sensitive or thoughtful. He writes to his friend Lucy what it was like to have part of his leg missing, how difficult it was initially to get around. The details of his walking in pain struck me as self-serving. I guess I just didn't like the chap.

Thus it was a bit of a mystery to me why Anna would like his letters. I preferred Anna's story by a long shot. Frequently Anna's mother would leave her in various places while she went off with her current lover. At this time she sent Anna to her brother's school to spend the summer and perhaps more. Only, when Anna gets to the school she learns that it has failed and it is just her uncle, her mother's mother (unexpected), and a wild little boy named Cecil, clanking around the old house and making do rather casually. It's not too surprising that she jumps at the chance to get to know the neighbors, Theo and Eva. Theo and Eva introduce her to photography, the profession both practice, although their styles vary considerably.

As she reads about the budding love affair between Stephen and Lucy, Anna develops an attraction of her own, but her choice is not quite as suitable as Stephen's. Did the letters have anything to do with her actions? I did not see how, yet others may disagree.
… (mere)