A Programme Astray

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 871, 13 April 1956, Page 31

A Programme Astray

OLIVER A. GILLESPIE’S programme, Love Among the Novelists, promised well. My Listener told me that. it would give an account of romance through the ages, a somewhat large claim for a survey which began with Clarissa Harlowe in 1742. However, if the love was to be among the novelists, then I suppose it was fair enough to start with Richardson. But I became aware later, as the cast voyaged through passages of Mrs! Henry Wood, Elinor Glyn, Marie Corelli and Hall Caine, that the. true purpose of the programme was to mock the more inflated aspects of Victorian writing; old-time Theaytre as it were, so that we could giggle at its absurdity and think to ourselves how very sophisticated we are now. Love Among the Novelists, even, 19th century English novelists, can harcly give a true picture without some reference to Jane Austen, Thackeray; Dickens, Trollope and Hardy; it is monstrous to assume that all writers of the 19th century wrote, romantic nonsense. At the end of the programme, we were assured that it was the ideas of love in best-selling novelists; all right, then. Was not Dickens a best-seller? Did not Queen Victoria weep at Little Nell? And in the script itself, one ferocious love scene was acted with such abandon, that for me, it traragressed the limits of good taste. I despise the practice, so easy and so common now, of assuming that 19th century literature is a sea of women scorned and vile seducers, This programme did nothing to dispel this assumption.

B.E.G.

M.