The Captive Reader

2012 is apparently my year to aggressively delve into the world of intensely domestic, monotonously cosy, Scottish-set second-rate light romantic novels.  There has been a lot of D.E. Stevenson but I have also been sampling the works of O. Douglas (Anna Buchan).  My first few encounters with Douglas (Eliza for Common, Penny Plain and Priorsford) did not wildly impress me but I still enjoyed her writing.  I had decided she was nice, occasionally even clever, but not for me.  And then I read Taken By the Hand, published in 1935, and fell completely head over heels.

Taken By the Hand is the story of Beatrice Dobie, a rather quiet young woman who is used to living in the shadow of her outgoing mother.  But when her mother gets sick, Beatrice must face the idea of a future without her:

It had been so delightful to have a mother who did the work and the talking, leaving her to dream.  Beatrice quite realised that she was an anomaly in this age of competent young women.  She liked to look on at life, and the very thought of driving a car, or gliding, or indeed doing anything on her own, terrified her.  But what was to happen to her if she lost her bulwark?  If this mother so big and strong and dear was going to leave her she was lost indeed – but this was not a time to think of her own plight; she must try to calm her mother’s fears.

Sadly, her mother does die.  All of their friends – really her mother’s friends – worry about Beatrice, knowing how ill-prepared she is to face the world on her own.  What she really needs, they decide, is someone to take her by the hand and guide her through life, as her mother had done.  But Beatrice is not entirely alone in the world and moves to London to stay with her elder brother and his family.  Though she gets along rather well with her much older brother, the rest of his family is awful and Beatrice feels perpetually out of place.  It isn’t until she makes friends with the cheerful Sellars family that she really starts to be happy again.

Honestly, it has been quite a while since I read this and it is not the sort of book where every detail sticks in your mind.  What does stick is the wonderful warm feeling I got from reading it.  Beatrice is one of those quiet, good heroines who manages to be entirely wonderful rather than insufferable.  And the Sellars family is, to a man, delightful, though some are more delightful than others: my Angela Thirkell-conditioning to view all struggling young schoolmasters as potential love interests helped me warm to Christopher, the eldest son, particularly quickly.  If there was any doubt that they were a right-thinking family, just witness this conversation about Jane Austen:

When she closed the book, Christopher turned to Beatrice and laughing, remarked, ‘What a dangerous neighbour Miss Austen must have been!  ‘Round-cheeked, preternaturally capped, sedate!’… Isn’t it Chesterton who says that Jane Austen may have lived in towns where women were protected from the truth, but there was precious little of the truth protected from Jane Austen!’

‘But,’ said Beatrice, ‘she only laughed at people who deserve to be laughed at, like the valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse, and the terrible Mrs Elton; and Mr Collins and Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.’

‘Mrs Bennet,’ said Christopher, ‘I can’t believe in.  She was too utterly foolish to be the wife of Mr Bennet and the mother of Elizabeth.’

Any time characters progress from reading Austen (aloud! En famille!) to discussing her, I cannot help but love them.

This is really a charming, heart-warming novel.  I have read two more of O. Douglas’ books since Taken By the Hand (Olivia in India and The Proper Place) and found them both wonderful but this remains my favourite.  Greyladies has been reprinting O. Douglas’ books in recent years and I can only hope they are planning to reissue this too.