Entry tags:
ibbotson issues
So I just finished rereading Eva Ibbotson's The Morning Gift and enjoyed myself hugely but also felt quite keenly her flaws as a writer.
Her strengths are so strong, though! I absolutely adore her writing on the sentence level. Especially in her adult books (though I do love her more historical kids books too--I could never get into her children's fantasy books--I discovered her in my late teens and it was too late. So Journey to the River Sea, The Star of Kazan, The Dragonfly Pool: yes. The other kids' books: no). The way she describes places and people, the way she can sketch character in such a few words. Her gift for details that make people and places and cultures come alive. I really don't think any other writer I've ever read makes me want to shriek and bury my face in a pillow and kick my heels the way she does. I can't explain it or even really pin down what it is about her writing that speaks to me so deeply, but I love it.
I could read her writing about Vienna forever and ever. In her hands, pre-WWII Vienna is a fairyland. Obviously, the real Vienna was not. But I love her Vienna so very, very much. I want to live in it the way I want to live in Tolkien's Shire. I wish she had written more books set in Vienna. And her supporting characters--I would read an entire novel about Uncle Mishak or the Honourable Olive or the kids at the school in A Song for Summer!
The central romances of her adult books are not the draw for me, though. They're fine! I like some more than others! But as with L.M. Montgomery (The Blue Castle aside) the romance is the lowest thing on my list of favorite things about her books. The Morning Gift is one of the better ones romance-wise--I actually believe that Ruth and Quin know each other well enough to be in love, I believe that they're suited and will have a good life together--but it's still not the thing I'm in love with about the book.
I really just love her prose, her way of evoking a world, and the way she sketches her characters. Reading all that is truly the most delightful thing!!!! Have some more exclamation points!!!! This is how much I love her writing!!!!
But let's be honest, she was a snob.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol and I were talking about snobbery the other day--how both Dorothy L. Sayers and Georgette Heyer were snobs, but you mind it less with Heyer (the snobbery, not the racism and antisemitism, that's a different thing) because Heyer's not trying to wrestle with any big questions where Sayers is, but not succeeding. Ibbotson's rankles more than Heyer's but less than Sayers'. (Although I do respect that Sayers was at least trying, whereas Heyer decidedly was not.)
Ibbotson wasn't a snob in the most typical sense. Her books tend to be full of upper class British snobs who are terrible. She's really quite genius at evoking them--they glide along through the world, absolutely convinced of their own inestimable value and that their own perspective is totally right. She rarely has the text come out and say they're abominable, but they always are.
And she often ties this particular kind of snobbery to eugenics; in her most hate-able characters, there's always some kind of obsession with blood or breeding. Sometimes it's very explicit, like in A Countess Below Stairs where the main villains are literally eugenicists. In The Morning Gift, it's not explicit scientific eugenicism, but it's sheer class snobbery--"our kind," "not our sort," that kind of thing. Ibbotson has no time for this.
I think she's really fantastic at skewering this worldview (though sometimes she goes too broad with it, as with the end of A Countess..., which I think is just too silly. I know it's her most popular adult book, but while I do have a lot of affection for it, it's not one of my favorites of hers). She rejects the xenophobia of her worst characters and it's great.
But I still think she's a snob sometimes! She's just a snob in the other direction! She values the intelligentsia and artists and really does seem them as a sort of special class. And when her characters are poor...it's like...a temporary thing? There's not much of a belief that good people can just be poor because the world sucks.
Most of her male romantic leads are from the British upper class, but they're Different, you see. So of course it's okay for them to have estates and lots of money, because they aren't going to use it for something bad like eugenics schools. And her heroines can either be high-born, too, like Anna or just the product of well-established artistic/academic families like Ruth or Harriet. And they may be temporarily poor, but they deserve to not be poor, so sooner or later, they won't be.
So her snobbery doesn't have to do with money, mostly, but with...priorities, I guess? Like there's a sneering attitude towards people who don't care about books/art/education/science/music/etc. People who are not very intelligent (in a particular way--Verena is intelligent, but she's awful and uses her intelligence in a way that Ibbotson does not approve of) or have no education or don't care about the ~finer things~ in life are just...not worth writing about.
Except that the money thing is complicated because...all of her characters always end up very comfortably off or even outright wealthy. Which I can maybe write off to the fact that she really writes fairytales. Of course we don't want our heroine to have to worry about money again! It wouldn't be a fantasy if you knew she was going to have to struggle for the rest of her life! But I don't know. It seems weird that all of her heroes are very democratic in ideals, and the heavy implication is that it's not your fault if you're poor, but also...there's no way our leads would not have tons of money!
She also has some weird gender stuff going on. I'm not sure that it's sexism explicitly. I think it's just her kink. Her kink is for fairly masterful men (they're not so domineering that you hate them, but they're used to having their way enough that I do get irritated with them) who happen to well-born and well-educated and well-off British men. (Except for Marek, who's well-born but from the Black Forest, if I remember correctly? Anyway, none of her heroes are Jewish even though her heroines occasionally are. I would read a 500-page book about Ibbotson's relationship with her own Judaism, but I don't think such a thing exists.)
And her heroines are all of a type. They're all extremely passionate and guileless and intelligent and attractive and domestic. They want to mother people and just be relentlessly feminine. They have gorgeous hair. They're instantly adored by everyone except the villains and they fit perfectly into the romantic lead's life, whatever that is, being knowledgeable/passionate about whatever he's knowledgeable/passionate about without ever threatening him in any way.
And I like them! I really do! I don't know how you could not like Ruth or Ellen or whoever. But my goodness, the fact that they're all variations on the same character with the same dynamic with our rich British guy...is really noticeable! Eva, you had a kink!
And there's nothing wrong with that, as they say. But as a person who likes all kinds of different relationship dynamics (enemies to lovers! friends to lovers! old marrieds! people who don't know they're married but actually they're super married! estranged marrieds! marriages of convenience! etc. etc. etc.), I always shake my head at writers who only seem to like one relationship dynamic (I'm looking at you, Naomi Novik!). Like, please! Please branch out a little bit! Dear gods above, try something new!
And as delightful as it is to watch Ibbotson skewer toffs or describe side characters that she loves, there's also a tendency to write about people's physical appearance in a way that feels like she's passing judgment on their characters. Like their ugliness is a manifestation of their badness (I see this quite a bit in British children's books? JKR comes to mind too.). In her books, a good person can be plain (though not her heroines!), but a bad person is going to have their physical "flaws" explained in detail. It just feels slimy sometimes.
I don't know...there's just something about reading a writer who you on the whole really like and who probably agrees with you on paper about most things politically/etc. but who gives you a ~feeling~ that underneath, you see the world very differently.
Ah, well, back to praising her: I absolutely love how often she writes about immigrants in exile, trying to hold a community together. Trying to be true to the people they were at home but who they are not allowed to be anymore. With this book in particular, I think of Ziller the great musician playing for tips in a cheap restaurant and Dr. Levy the world-renowned doctor trying to learn enough English to get his medical license in the UK and knowing he might not be able to.
Honestly, I kind of wish she hadn't focused so much on the main romances and had just written more books about these little groups of exiles. I can't think of another writer who's as concerned with a famous opera singer run out of his own country who now has to milk cows in some English barn somewhere. (Of course, her snobbery does surface with this! And yet I still love it!)
Sometimes she moves me very deeply. Like when the two spinster owners of the tea room decide to make gugelhupf for the refugees despite their misgivings...I really do tear up. She has a way of writing about the small ways that people can be kind and human to each other that is really lovely. She's often writing about people in really dark circumstances, but her books come across as light and optimistic. Her characters choose to see beauty in small things in a way that is really lovely and the world needs more of.
I do have to say that the last act's ~misunderstanding~ in Morning Gift makes me roll my eyes...and yet the text addresses it. Ruth is being ridiculous! The book knows it! But I wish it had explored the why a little bit more--I think she's being ridiculous because of her trauma, and that's not explicit enough imo. It just feels too rushed.
That said, I think it's one of her stronger books. I do really love it most deeply, and it's rare that I find a writer who can delight me on every single page. I wish I'd discovered her as a kid--I can only imagine how 12-year-old Lauren would have reacted to her writing. (Though quite a few of her books were not published when I was 12--she was very busy in the early aughts!)
I reread Countess a couple of months back and while it's lovely, it just doesn't hold up to me as well as Morning Gift does. I wonder if it's because the latter was written more than a decade later and she just had more writing experience or whether it's a coincidence. Either way, I'm looking forward to rereading the rest of her adult and historical children's books.
Her strengths are so strong, though! I absolutely adore her writing on the sentence level. Especially in her adult books (though I do love her more historical kids books too--I could never get into her children's fantasy books--I discovered her in my late teens and it was too late. So Journey to the River Sea, The Star of Kazan, The Dragonfly Pool: yes. The other kids' books: no). The way she describes places and people, the way she can sketch character in such a few words. Her gift for details that make people and places and cultures come alive. I really don't think any other writer I've ever read makes me want to shriek and bury my face in a pillow and kick my heels the way she does. I can't explain it or even really pin down what it is about her writing that speaks to me so deeply, but I love it.
I could read her writing about Vienna forever and ever. In her hands, pre-WWII Vienna is a fairyland. Obviously, the real Vienna was not. But I love her Vienna so very, very much. I want to live in it the way I want to live in Tolkien's Shire. I wish she had written more books set in Vienna. And her supporting characters--I would read an entire novel about Uncle Mishak or the Honourable Olive or the kids at the school in A Song for Summer!
The central romances of her adult books are not the draw for me, though. They're fine! I like some more than others! But as with L.M. Montgomery (The Blue Castle aside) the romance is the lowest thing on my list of favorite things about her books. The Morning Gift is one of the better ones romance-wise--I actually believe that Ruth and Quin know each other well enough to be in love, I believe that they're suited and will have a good life together--but it's still not the thing I'm in love with about the book.
I really just love her prose, her way of evoking a world, and the way she sketches her characters. Reading all that is truly the most delightful thing!!!! Have some more exclamation points!!!! This is how much I love her writing!!!!
But let's be honest, she was a snob.
sophia_sol and I were talking about snobbery the other day--how both Dorothy L. Sayers and Georgette Heyer were snobs, but you mind it less with Heyer (the snobbery, not the racism and antisemitism, that's a different thing) because Heyer's not trying to wrestle with any big questions where Sayers is, but not succeeding. Ibbotson's rankles more than Heyer's but less than Sayers'. (Although I do respect that Sayers was at least trying, whereas Heyer decidedly was not.)Ibbotson wasn't a snob in the most typical sense. Her books tend to be full of upper class British snobs who are terrible. She's really quite genius at evoking them--they glide along through the world, absolutely convinced of their own inestimable value and that their own perspective is totally right. She rarely has the text come out and say they're abominable, but they always are.
And she often ties this particular kind of snobbery to eugenics; in her most hate-able characters, there's always some kind of obsession with blood or breeding. Sometimes it's very explicit, like in A Countess Below Stairs where the main villains are literally eugenicists. In The Morning Gift, it's not explicit scientific eugenicism, but it's sheer class snobbery--"our kind," "not our sort," that kind of thing. Ibbotson has no time for this.
I think she's really fantastic at skewering this worldview (though sometimes she goes too broad with it, as with the end of A Countess..., which I think is just too silly. I know it's her most popular adult book, but while I do have a lot of affection for it, it's not one of my favorites of hers). She rejects the xenophobia of her worst characters and it's great.
But I still think she's a snob sometimes! She's just a snob in the other direction! She values the intelligentsia and artists and really does seem them as a sort of special class. And when her characters are poor...it's like...a temporary thing? There's not much of a belief that good people can just be poor because the world sucks.
Most of her male romantic leads are from the British upper class, but they're Different, you see. So of course it's okay for them to have estates and lots of money, because they aren't going to use it for something bad like eugenics schools. And her heroines can either be high-born, too, like Anna or just the product of well-established artistic/academic families like Ruth or Harriet. And they may be temporarily poor, but they deserve to not be poor, so sooner or later, they won't be.
So her snobbery doesn't have to do with money, mostly, but with...priorities, I guess? Like there's a sneering attitude towards people who don't care about books/art/education/science/music/etc. People who are not very intelligent (in a particular way--Verena is intelligent, but she's awful and uses her intelligence in a way that Ibbotson does not approve of) or have no education or don't care about the ~finer things~ in life are just...not worth writing about.
Except that the money thing is complicated because...all of her characters always end up very comfortably off or even outright wealthy. Which I can maybe write off to the fact that she really writes fairytales. Of course we don't want our heroine to have to worry about money again! It wouldn't be a fantasy if you knew she was going to have to struggle for the rest of her life! But I don't know. It seems weird that all of her heroes are very democratic in ideals, and the heavy implication is that it's not your fault if you're poor, but also...there's no way our leads would not have tons of money!
She also has some weird gender stuff going on. I'm not sure that it's sexism explicitly. I think it's just her kink. Her kink is for fairly masterful men (they're not so domineering that you hate them, but they're used to having their way enough that I do get irritated with them) who happen to well-born and well-educated and well-off British men. (Except for Marek, who's well-born but from the Black Forest, if I remember correctly? Anyway, none of her heroes are Jewish even though her heroines occasionally are. I would read a 500-page book about Ibbotson's relationship with her own Judaism, but I don't think such a thing exists.)
And her heroines are all of a type. They're all extremely passionate and guileless and intelligent and attractive and domestic. They want to mother people and just be relentlessly feminine. They have gorgeous hair. They're instantly adored by everyone except the villains and they fit perfectly into the romantic lead's life, whatever that is, being knowledgeable/passionate about whatever he's knowledgeable/passionate about without ever threatening him in any way.
And I like them! I really do! I don't know how you could not like Ruth or Ellen or whoever. But my goodness, the fact that they're all variations on the same character with the same dynamic with our rich British guy...is really noticeable! Eva, you had a kink!
And there's nothing wrong with that, as they say. But as a person who likes all kinds of different relationship dynamics (enemies to lovers! friends to lovers! old marrieds! people who don't know they're married but actually they're super married! estranged marrieds! marriages of convenience! etc. etc. etc.), I always shake my head at writers who only seem to like one relationship dynamic (I'm looking at you, Naomi Novik!). Like, please! Please branch out a little bit! Dear gods above, try something new!
And as delightful as it is to watch Ibbotson skewer toffs or describe side characters that she loves, there's also a tendency to write about people's physical appearance in a way that feels like she's passing judgment on their characters. Like their ugliness is a manifestation of their badness (I see this quite a bit in British children's books? JKR comes to mind too.). In her books, a good person can be plain (though not her heroines!), but a bad person is going to have their physical "flaws" explained in detail. It just feels slimy sometimes.
I don't know...there's just something about reading a writer who you on the whole really like and who probably agrees with you on paper about most things politically/etc. but who gives you a ~feeling~ that underneath, you see the world very differently.
Ah, well, back to praising her: I absolutely love how often she writes about immigrants in exile, trying to hold a community together. Trying to be true to the people they were at home but who they are not allowed to be anymore. With this book in particular, I think of Ziller the great musician playing for tips in a cheap restaurant and Dr. Levy the world-renowned doctor trying to learn enough English to get his medical license in the UK and knowing he might not be able to.
Honestly, I kind of wish she hadn't focused so much on the main romances and had just written more books about these little groups of exiles. I can't think of another writer who's as concerned with a famous opera singer run out of his own country who now has to milk cows in some English barn somewhere. (Of course, her snobbery does surface with this! And yet I still love it!)
Sometimes she moves me very deeply. Like when the two spinster owners of the tea room decide to make gugelhupf for the refugees despite their misgivings...I really do tear up. She has a way of writing about the small ways that people can be kind and human to each other that is really lovely. She's often writing about people in really dark circumstances, but her books come across as light and optimistic. Her characters choose to see beauty in small things in a way that is really lovely and the world needs more of.
I do have to say that the last act's ~misunderstanding~ in Morning Gift makes me roll my eyes...and yet the text addresses it. Ruth is being ridiculous! The book knows it! But I wish it had explored the why a little bit more--I think she's being ridiculous because of her trauma, and that's not explicit enough imo. It just feels too rushed.
That said, I think it's one of her stronger books. I do really love it most deeply, and it's rare that I find a writer who can delight me on every single page. I wish I'd discovered her as a kid--I can only imagine how 12-year-old Lauren would have reacted to her writing. (Though quite a few of her books were not published when I was 12--she was very busy in the early aughts!)
I reread Countess a couple of months back and while it's lovely, it just doesn't hold up to me as well as Morning Gift does. I wonder if it's because the latter was written more than a decade later and she just had more writing experience or whether it's a coincidence. Either way, I'm looking forward to rereading the rest of her adult and historical children's books.
no subject
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Ibbotson
Also, I think her books are so deliberately written as fairy tales (the heroines are way too good in the way that fairy tale heroines are, the bad often very bad, and rewarded with fairy tale princes to make them actual princesses in the way that those stories go), that I think it would be unwise to draw too many conclusions about her rl beliefs from that kind of thing or imagine that she expected us to take that part too seriously. (She's certainly not coming from the same place as contemporaries like Heyer and Sayer, because she's writing from a time when that kind of life was already gone.)
My fave of hers remain the ones you haven't read, probably because I did read them growing up - The Haunting of Hiram C Hopgood, THe Great Ghost Rescue and Which Witch?, where the humour and creepy bits and the candyfloss fairy tale elements balance each other out much better - the historical ones are very lovely, but I kind of need some contrast, or it's like eating too many sweets at once by the time you've finished! (Hiram C. Hopgood is also the one where she first showed her love of the Amazon, clearly foreshadowing the River Sea one - the two sets of her writing are, really, not at all unrelated, and personally I would have loved to see what she might have done later with the more humorous/supernatural ones, because while the ones we have are great, they were written that much earlier than the others. It was very frustrating that she never tried it, other than one younger piece that wasn't really on a par with the main 70s/80s ones. I was waiting for her to!
no subject
that I think it would be unwise to draw too many conclusions about her rl beliefs from that kind of thing or imagine that she expected us to take that part too seriously
Yeah, I don't take the class stuff as seriously as I normally would for exactly this reason, but there is an aftertaste of something that I just dislike. Plus, I do think the physical descriptions of her villainous characters are gross. On the whole, I'm a huge fan of her work though!
Aww, I'm sorry she didn't manage to write you more of what you wanted before she died. What a shame!
no subject
I always was so sure that the author of Which Witch? must go back to that sometime! (It is very dark in places, that one, though! It's also delightful and charming at the same time, so, you know. She's just like that, lol. Great Ghost Rescue and Haunting were pretty cute, I remember. But I loved WW the most.)
no subject
Yeah, definitely. And I don't think she was a nasty person the way Heyer was probably a nasty person (if you didn't fall within the very narrow bounds of what she considered "acceptable society"--I bet she was charming if you were well-off and white and Christian). I am willing to guess that Ibbotson was lovely! But sometimes there are things that bubble up!
I feel like if I'd read her kids books at 8, I would have passionately devoted to them. It's just different when you're coming to them at, like, 23, which was when I discovered her.
no subject
When you mentioned the Shire as being analogous to Ibbotson's Vienna, I remembered visiting Sarehole Mill and seeing a quote from Tolkien:
"It was a kind of lost paradise. There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go - and it did."
I suppose that Tolkien's Shire and Ibbotson's Vienna may have come from a similar place in their psychotopography, though they lost them in different ways?
no subject
I suppose that Tolkien's Shire and Ibbotson's Vienna may have come from a similar place in their psychotopography, though they lost them in different ways?
Oh yes, definitely! This sunlit world that they can never return to again!
no subject
I only ever read The Star of Kazan when I was a child, but I read it again and again. I should revisit her and see what I think these days.
no subject
The Star of Kazan is a fave! I love it muchly! I would be very interested in any thoughts you have on her.
no subject
no subject
Yeah, that sounds like her! What an interesting lady she must have been--I wish I could have met her!
no subject
My interpretation of the way Ibbotson's snobbery presents itself is that, like....hm, how to phrase this. Upper-class people who are obsessed with the importance of class are fools with the wrong priorities, but GOOD upper-class people, who are just naturally wonderful people but don't put on airs, are obviously the best kind of people. Like how in Journey to the River Sea, Finn may not be interested in being the wealthy heir to a lordship, but he's presented as an obviously superior kind of person; meanwhile, Gwendolyn and Beatrice are obsessed with their position and that's Bad, and Clovis who LIKES the life of a lord's heir is a nice enough boy but someone to look down on. Or in A Countess Below Stairs, Anna is a countess but the good kind because she's happy to just do her best in whatever situation she finds herself, even if that's dedicating herself to being the best housemaid, but of course at the end she's returned to her true position of nobility and wealth through marrying Rupert; but Muriel, who's obsessed with status and bloodlines, is foolish and overreaching.
So I think you're right that it's priorities that Ibbotson is snobbish about, and that she sees caring too much about being aristocratic/wealthy/well-born is a bad priority, but I think she does still see being those things as being inherently superior as long as you have the right priorities.
I love what you say about the things she does well, about community and about immigrants in exile, her ability to characterize and her gift for detail. She really does make the things she writes come alive! and I care so MUCH about her characters, because she really makes you want to care!
I do wish she hadn't written romances though, you're right; adult focused books WITHOUT the determination that there had to be a romance involved would have been so good from her, I think! I once tried to read a collection of short stories by her and I genuinely had to abandon it after the second story because I was so upset. "Doushenka" is about a man who's infatuated with Russia, goes there on a visit, falls in love with a ballet girl and wistfully imagines staying in Russia with her and making a life together, then goes home to his wife who's always refusing to have sex with him and starts engaging in spousal rape, and the whole thing is treated as ROMANTIC AND SAD that he couldn't have the life he'd dreamed of in Russia and that he's stuck with his ~terrible~ wife. Dear Eva Ibbotson: no. Please stop writing about what you think is romantic because you are wrong.
no subject
This is it exactly:
Upper-class people who are obsessed with the importance of class are fools with the wrong priorities, but GOOD upper-class people, who are just naturally wonderful people but don't put on airs, are obviously the best kind of people.
and
So I think you're right that it's priorities that Ibbotson is snobbish about, and that she sees caring too much about being aristocratic/wealthy/well-born is a bad priority, but I think she does still see being those things as being inherently superior as long as you have the right priorities.
YUP.
Oh, I couldn't make it through the short stories, either, though I didn't get as far as that one. Horrific. There's one adult book she wrote that's entirely set in Vienna and I was so torn about it because I loooooved the local color and the sentences so much...but the gender stuff! The main character was the mistress of a man whose wife was not sufficiently feminine or understanding or loving enough, so of course she deserved to be cheated on! And of course the man deserved to cheat! How could he not, when his wife wasn't providing enough emotional support???? GROSS, EVA!
no subject
Ohhhhh boy, I don't think I've come across that particular novel of hers and YIKES. GROSS, EVA indeed!!
When I was a child I loved the children's books I had by her, Which Witch? and The Secret of Platform 13, but as I got older I realized how much her issues were showing in these books and they were no longer fun. Journey to the River Sea and Star of Kazan have held up much better, even if they are not immune to problems, and more books along those lines from her would have been lovely, alas.
no subject
Journey to the River Sea and Star of Kazan have held up much better, even if they are not immune to problems, and more books along those lines from her would have been lovely, alas.
Agreed with everything.
And it's interesting--she could have been my favorite writer. I really think she could have. But every one of her books has some sort of something that just makes me uncomfortable. She didn't write even one book that, imo, lives up to her promise.
no subject
Yes exactly! And it's such a disappointment because there's so much possibility there that you keep being like, "maybe THIS will be the book where she manages to evade her problems," but she never does, and one can just picture what kind of brilliant book she might have written but never quite managed to.
no subject
But yes, I'm with you on the thing where Ibbotson is *so compassionate*, up until the point where you notice the limits of her compassion. I think I noticed it first with the uncle in *Journey to the River Sea* who collects glass eyes, which yes is weird but I felt didn't get compassion. And the psychologist lady in *Madensky Square* who is Insufficiently Feminine and has facial hair! >:-( But her flaws are more noticeable because the rest is *so good*...
But yes -- I love her writing / settings / protagonists / side characters much more than her love interests/romance plots (who for the most part can defenestrate themselves as far as I'm concerned). I discovered *A Company of Swans* at age 14 and fell in love with the writing and story, but that was the only one of her books my library had in the YA section, so I didn't find the rest until I was in my 20s, none of which lived up to my memory of *A Company of Swans* (which didn't do as well on reread either). I really like her setups, but then I want more self-actualization and less romance.
no subject
But yes, I'm with you on the thing where Ibbotson is *so compassionate*, up until the point where you notice the limits of her compassion.
This is such a good way of putting it! Exactly this!
And the psychologist lady in *Madensky Square* who is Insufficiently Feminine and has facial hair! >:-( But her flaws are more noticeable because the rest is *so good*...
Yes yes to both of these observations!
(who for the most part can defenestrate themselves as far as I'm concerned)
Lol. She has such a 20th century view of what romance is and it really shows!
I really like her setups, but then I want more self-actualization and less romance.</i. Yup. She should have taken a note from L.M. Montgomery's book and focused more on her heroines.
no subject
no subject