How to use this Page

So, apparently Grace Livingston Hill’s brand of religion makes me want to go read about Amy Le Feuvre’s brand of religion. And I suppose it serves me right that Dwell Deep is more Hill-like that any Le Feuvre book I’ve read to date. It’s the story of Hilda Thorn, a young woman who moves in with her guardian’s family, who have little tolerance for her religious scruples.

I think the fact that she was converted before the story begins was part of what bugged me, although I guess it saved me one of Le Feuvre’s weirdly unsatisfactory conversion scenes. I also wasn’t wild about the first person narration, although I eventually got used to it.

The setup reminds me a little bit of Elsie Dinsmore, with a religious main character surrounded by people who not only don’t share her views, but can’t seem to live and let live. But it seems more pointless here. There’s no real reason for them to get angry with her for choosing not to go to parties, as her guardian does, or to tease her mercilessly about her religion, as her guardian’s son Kenneth does. She even points out to Kenneth how unfair he is to her: if she doesn’t react to his teasing, it’s because she considers herself above the rest of them, and if she does, she’s not as good as she pretends to be. She can’t win. And then he’s like, yeah, I guess that’s true, and continues to be an asshole.

That said, it’s hard to see the Forsyths’ lack of sympathy and occasional hostility towards Hilda as anything resembling persecution. A sickly poor child dies, but that’s the function of sickly poor children in books like this. One of the Forsyths’ guests is more of an asshole to Hilda than Kenneth, even, but that never seems terribly important, either. Even when a major character gets sick and nearly dies, we only find out about it once she’s on the road to recovery. The stakes are never very high, is what I’m saying.

I did get into Dwell Deep, eventually. I stopped being disconcerted by the first person narration, and got comfortable with Hilda as a character. And I like Hilda’s hands-off attitude to converting people, and that the most important piece of advice she gets is basically to trust her own judgement, because otherwise someone else’s opinion could become more important to her than God. It’s not exactly the thing I’m used to seeing from Le Feuvre, but it’s in harmony with the way she always treats religion–as a framework, a system of belief rather than just a belief. I don’t think I’m going to itch to reread Dwell Deep the way I itch to reread Her Kingdom and Olive Tracy, but I still like Amy Le Feuvre a lot.

So. More Amy Le Feuvre. This one is called Olive Tracy, and follows the title character over roughly the span of the Boer War. At the beginning, she’s the de facto housekeeper of her family’s home, which she shares with her mother, her younger sister Elsie, and Osmond, the invalid son of her dead eldest brother. The oldest sister, Vinny, is unhappily married and living in London, while another brother, Eddie, is in the Army, and not behaving as his family would wish him to. Then there’s their neighbors, Sir Marmaduke and Lady Crofton, and their two sons: Marmaduke is a captain in the army, and in love with Olive. He’s also steady and reliable and not super attractive in a way that made me think of Lord Algy from Pretty Kitty Herrick. Mark, the younger brother, is even more dissolute than Eddie, and seems to have been given up, even by his parents, as a bad lot.

Olive’s troubles begin when Marmaduke — Duke for short, thankfully — goes off to South Africa to keep an eye on Mark. He proposes before he leaves, but she turns him down, and only afterwards realizes that she might have feelings for him after all. Then her mother dies, and the Tracy household is split up, with Elsie going one way and Olive and Osmond another. Also the Boer War begins, and is omnipresent and awful in the background. Somewhere in there, Olive finds God in the same way that everyone finds God in these books, which is, I don’t know, either the most weirdly flat conversion I’ve ever read, or pure mysticism. Or both.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, “this” being both Amy Le Feuvre’s brand of religious fiction and my reaction to it. Part of it, of course, is that I find religion in fiction and in history a lot more interesting that I find religion espoused by modern-day people who would like me to act according to their moral code instead of my own. But part of it is definitely that matter-of-fact mysticism.

Another part, maybe, is related to how I feel about Precious Bane. Precious Bane has always felt more like Sci Fi or Fantasy to me than it does like a historical novel. It’s hard to identify the setting as Shropshire in the early 19th century, and easy to believe it takes place on an alien planet, with an alien culture and (especially) alien plants. Amy Le Feuvre unintentionally creates an alternate universe in a similar way.

I like the way Le Feuvre’s characters have different personalities that predispose them to different kinds of problems. If the solutions to all of these people’s problems are the same, well, Le Feuvre is convincing enough that it feels perfectly comfortable to believe that she’s writing of a world where things really do work that way. It’s not the real world, but that’s okay. It helps that the characters who find God retain both their personalities and their problems. It’s sort of like what I’ve been told about therapy: you can’t really just fix your problems, but you can acquire tools for dealing with them. And in the strange alternate universe chronicled by Amy Le Feuvre, there is only one tool, and it’s God.

I’m just kind of impressed, I guess, by the faint touch of realism evident in the messes most of Le Feuvre’s characters have made of their lives. Not that this, or her other books I’ve read, are in any way realistic. But there’s something about them — about the way people get better and worse and don’t know how to talk to each other or manage their lives — that kind of is. And there’s something seductive about the idea of handing all your worries over to someone else, someone absolutely trustworthy. And Le Feuvre conveys that appeal instead of doing as other authors of religious fiction do and making everyone prigs.

So that’s it. That’s the appeal, for me at least. I have made my peace with liking these books, and I’m looking forward to reading Her Kingdom again this fall, curled up in a big, comfortable chair with a hot toddy, or some other drink of which Le Feuvre would disapprove.