My Response to "The Real Charlotte" by Somerville and Ross (Published 1894)

          After a year of education articles and thousands of tweets, I pushed my mental stamina to the limit.  What I will tell my literary friends about Somerville and Ross’ The Real Charlotte is the amount of character and setting development that took place before things got moving.  I posited real interest into the characters and plot around chapter eighteen, or roughly two hundred pages into the story, when Francie is sent to the Dysart estate in Bruff.  I imagine in 1894, a capsizing yacht may appeal to readers, but what I took away from this text was how the authors described characters and their near-constant cringe-worthy behavior (Isn’t that the motif of literature?).  Francie Fitzpatrick is tactfully crafted as physically stunning but, “to whom flirtation was as ordinary and indispensable as the breath of her nostrils” (377).  The object of her desire remains a mystery for the reader until she loses the reader’s sympathy by turning down the good guy.  One hundred pages from the end, the authors lay bare Francie’s character, “she had never pretended … that she was in love with him [Mr. Lambert]; her engagement had been the inevitable result of poverty, and aimlessness, and bitterness of soul…” (408).  The mixture of economic position and carelessness portray Francie as a product of her environment, while at the same time, entirely to blame.  Miss Charlotte Mullen is subtly shown to be a bearable shrew until she kills her friend, Mrs. Lambert, in the surfacing of, “the real Charlotte” (304).  It took a several re-readings of the scene in chapter thirty-two where Mrs. Lambert dies while being exposed to the traumatic correspondence between her husband and Francie.  The real Charlotte allows Mrs. Lambert to die by cleaning her tracks rather than providing the lady with her “drops” (312).  It is a truly horrendous display of Miss Mullen’s ruthlessness in forcing the “turkey-hen” to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity (306).  Mr. Lambert is a creepy sad excuse for a human who failed to kill Francie in his yacht only to be the impromptu destination of Francie’s fatal ride after he wins over his Lolita.  The nature of his creepy predation is laid bare in chapter sixteen when he meets with Francie after the yachting accident.  He becomes indignant, whiney, predatory, and finally, generous when he spends part of his loan from Miss Mullen on a gold bracelet for Francie (160).  Christopher Dysart materialized as the hope of all my goodwill for the cast in this novel.  His demeanor is amicably aloof yet intellectually burdened; “deadlock[ed]”as the authors mention in his description on page 120.  Even after saving the “man-eater[‘s]” life (Francie, according to his mother, Lady Dysart) he is still rejected when he proposes to her (239, 325)).  The cast is a collection of debased money-grabbers, socialites, and their Irish plebian-speaking servants, but ultimately the book reveals a certain “social poverty” of the Irish gentry (correction: all elites, past and present), and those immediately below them in the socio-economic hierarchy (197).  The Real Charlotte is a remarkable novel that I’m sure only increases in value as the knowledge of late 19^th century Ireland increases.