Dolores
BY
IVY COMPTON-BURNETT
Introduction
The first and till now the only edition of
Dolores
was published by Blackwoods in 1911. It sold well, and was promptly forgotten; apparently even its author did not want to remember it, since she did not publish another novel until 1925, nor did she include
Dolores
, the first of her twenty novels, in later lists of her publications. But now that her career of sixty years is ended, and her long achievement more and more acclaimed,
Dolores
, standing at that remote beginning, is curiously reborn. When a writer is alive, his works tend to be regarded one by one, as they appear; when he is dead, they tend to be seen as the whole they have become. The genesis of genius attracts a natural speculation. If the author of
Dolores
preferred to forget it, her readers will not. When a writer dies, he loses his privacy, all but his essential, his irremediable privacy; and critics, disciples, the rare book dealer and the bibliographer would not leave him that, if they could help it.
The first edition of
Dolores
(which is now virtually unobtainable) contains in its end pages, in the manner of volumes at that time, a thirty-two page Catalogue of Messrs Blackwood & Sons' Publications. It is interesting reading. Black-woods was publishing Conrad and Forster;
The Longest Journey
was in its second impression. But its leading author by far was George Eliot, dead thirty years, one Victorian who still retained her eminence. Of her works Blackwoods offered a New Popular Edition, a Warwick Edition, a Standard Edition, a Cabinet Edition, a Popular Copyright Edition, and a Cheap Edition. There was even a new edition, at 3/6, of
Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse, selected from the Works of George Eliot
. Among her great female predecessors in the English novel, I. Compton-Burnett is in a general way most like Jane Austen, least like Charlotte Brontë, but the dominant influence on
Dolores
is George Eliot, an influence so pervasive that it extends to characterisation and tone, subject, theme, and even diction.
Perhaps it extends too far or not far enough, because
Dolores
seems both overdone and underdone Eliot. Its story concerns a young Victorian woman, Dolores Hutton, who sacrifices her chances for personal happiness to the larger interest of duty to her family. Its settings are the village of Millfield in Yorkshire, where
Dolores' father, the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, is rector, and Oxford, where Dolores attends a woman's college; the twenty-one chapters of the novel are fairly evenly divided between Millfield and Oxford. Its characters are, in Millfield, the members of the middle-class households of that village (Hutton; Blackwood; Cassell; Merton-Vane), and, in Oxford, the women teachers at Dolores' college, a don or two, two school companions and friends of Dolores, and a great but unrecognised dramatist (his name alone, Sigismund Claverhouse, might seem to have conferred a certain notoriety). Its structure is a series of Dolores' dutiful sacrifices: to begin with, she must reject a position as teacher in her college upon her graduation from it to become instead the governess of a younger stepbrother and stepsisters. The favourite child of her father the rector, Dolores bears patiently the ill will of her stepmother. When an uncle provides for the education of her pupils, Dolores is free to return to Oxford and to Claverhouse, whom she loves and reveres. Unfortunately Claverhouse has fallen in love with Dolores' shallow and pretty friend Perdita, and it becomes Dolores' task to help bring about this marriage. It is brought about, but after nine months Perdita Claverhouse dies in childbirth, and Dolores returns to her role of spiritual companion and amanuensis to
Sigismund, whose eyesight is failing, and who has begun to reciprocate her love. Frustration, however, is the rule: her stepmother dies, and Dolores must return to Millfield to preside over her lonely father's house. She does so, for the next five years. She rejects an Oxford don (âSoulsby') who has long admired her when she discovers that her younger sister Sophia is in love with him. It is once again a question of their father the rector's needs, and Dolores easily arranges that Soulsby marry Sophia instead of herself, herself continuing the martyr role of father companion. On a brief visit to Oxford, Dolores is re-united with Claverhouse, near-blind and near death. In a climax of self-abnegation Dolores comes back to her father, to find, ironically, that he is about to marry for the third time and no longer needs her. The irony is compounded in that Claverhouse, whom she is now free to join, dies during her brief absence from him. She ends as teacher in the women's college.
Presumably, for the rest of her life, she will be a dutiful teacher. Duty is a keyword in George Eliot's novels, and it is here; sometimes, as the preceding synopsis has shown, assuming the classical form of duty versus love. The sense of duty that inspires the highminded Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of
Middlemarch
, is the same sort of obligation felt by Dolores
Hutton. They are related in other ways. The young Dorothea's marriage to the middle-aged pedant Casaubon, whose magnum opus is to be a
Key to All Mythologies
, resembles Dolores' devotion to Claverhouse, who is much older than she, and whose dramas, as they are once or twice described, sound similarly vast. Unfortunately neither Dolores' nobility nor Claverhouse's dramas are questioned ironically as their counterparts in
Middlemarch
are. Dorothea's sense of duty is presented as both noble and absurd. Dolores' is only noble. And thus becomes, too insisted-upon as it is, absurd inadvertently. What ironies in Dolores there are, are amateur, discrete, and heavy observations of discrepancies, while those in
Middle-march
seem like the inevitable products of a grave, austere, and philosophic vision.
There are in
Dolores
a range of social comment, an attention to class differences, and an emphasis on setting that will not be met with again in the following nineteen novels. They show that the author of
Dolores
was conversant with the typical scope and the areas of comment of Eliot and the other Victorians. Specifically Eliotean is an insistence upon the importance of âlow' or obscure destinies, on the heroism of the unheroic. Such âideas', the cast of intellectualism to
Dolores
, are rare or missing in the later nineteen.
There are other Eliot echoes. The addresses
to the reader, of which there are many, reproduce the tone of Eliot's addresses, weightily humorous, portentous, finger-wagging. Didactic throughout, the author of
Dolores
tells us very early that âDolores' means âsorrows' (for duty is sacrifice and suffering), reminds us much later that the heroine's life has been sorrowful, and even supplies a happier-natured friend named Felicia to drive the point home. George Eliot almost never wrote a light or supple phrase, and, knowing Dame Ivy's later style, one finds astonishing the sentences like polysyllabic puddings in
Dolores
. The following can serve as example for those Eliot-derived habits of style just mentioned:
Now, as a person of observation, and knowledge of human nature in its subtler aspects, for example, as acted upon by difference in religious views and sameness of blood, are you disposed to dark surmise on the relations of the houses of Blackwood and Hutton; or wondering how long it had been since relations between them existed? In this thing you may take heart. Their ground of intercourse never presented clefts on its surface, though the ensuing stratum was at times volcanic. As far as the masters of the families went, the intercourse was so entirely on the surface, that this covered eruptiveness did not affect it. (
Chapter II
.)
What
Dolores
lacks that George Eliot's novels, even her first ones, pre-eminently have, is the richness of detail, the patient construction of effect blended with exploratory pause, the ample and leisurely pace so characteristic of the Victorians, who so frequently complained of the increased tempo of modern life. But
Dolores
was written in the twentieth century, and no matter how it leans backward to adopt the stances of an earlier fiction, its subject is too big for its length. Some chapters read like outlines for chapters. There are many undeveloped characters, truncated scenes, phrases which intimate issues that a paragraph should expound. The effect is that of a remarkable intelligence exercised perversely and uncomfortably. Dame Ivy's imagination did not respond to the philosophical, the sociological, the theological; but her admiration for George Eliot led her to adopt just those biases, and she could flesh them out only meagerly.
There are other aspects of
Dolores
, besides its being so marked as influenced, that indicate its interesting immaturity. It seems that the author did not know what kind of novel she wanted to write, and the fact that, on her own evidence, her brother had some share in the composition of the work, may further have clouded her aim.
Dolores
is intermittently a Bildungsroman, a domestic drama, a comedy of manners, and,
if one judged only by the first three chapters, a religious novel, of Church versus Chapel. It is a mélange of moods as well as of modes; passages of alert bright comedy are side by side with the meditative, the dour, the lugubrious. The character of Dolores is presented with morethan-Victorian sentimentality; she suffers, and suffers, and suffers. The young ComptonBurnett often describes where it would be more effective to dramatise, and she will talk a character out of existence where he should be talking himself into it. In
Chapter I
especially, there are excessively long descriptions of several quite minor characters. Surely the most bizarre element in the compound of
Dolores
is the Gothicism of the Claverhouse family, wizened ninety-year-old Janet Claverhouse and her deformed son, the genius Sigismund. Their macabre daily life, as described in
Chapter V
, makes them the oddest household in twenty novels devoted to the eccentricities of families.
What the beginning author has to find is his unique tone. Once he knows what he sounds like, the rest follows. To begin as a writer is to get in touch with one's self, to learn what is one's own most truthful and natural voice. The uncertainties listed in the last paragraph are peripheral matters compared with the uncertainties of tone. Several styles, in addition to the Eliot imitations already noted, jostle one
another in the pages of
Doloresâ
the jaunty, the glum, the intense, the urbane, the impressive. There are many bad sentences like the following:
But as the days passed, they carried with them that which was of them. (Note the five pronouns.
Chapter IX
.) ⦠Dolores' time was her own from dawn to dusk. Her purpose was not of the things to which Dolores was easily blind. (This means that Dolores knew her purpose.
Chapter VII
.) But there was no place in Dolores' soul, for remorse for that which was wrought with pain for the sake of conscience. (Three âfor's'.
Chapter XI
)
He [the Very Revd. James Hutton] was yet in the prime of his pomposity and portliness, his fondness for kindly patronage, and his contentment with himself and his ecclesiastical condition. (Alliteration is used heavily throughout
Dolores
.
Chapter VII
.)
There are unconvincing verbal tics used to identify a character (Mr Blackwood, Mrs MertonVane, Soulsby). And there is much else one could say about the abstract, the pretentious, the wordy, the opaque. But what is curiously impressive, in fact the glory of these errors, is the determination, the energy, the psychic vigour they show.