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.
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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.
