I re-read "The Tenor and the Boy: An Interlude," which was published independently as a short story before The Heavenly Twins was a novel. In situ it serves as a wonderful interlude in an uneven work (Grand sells out womankind in the extremely disturbing conclusion, which is why I so rarely recommend this forgotten treasure).

The Heavenly Twins is misleadingly about more than just those characters, Angelica and Diavolo; but the Tenor and the Boy is about those twins, and the difference their sex makes in their ability to experience the world. I love it, warts and all, and it's one of the most influential pieces I've ever read when it comes to my own writing.

Nope. I read this book three years ago and thought I liked it at the time, but the more I think about it, the more I hate it. Grand says some very good things in THT that needed to be said at the time, and she knows how to spin a yarn, but I simply cannot countenance this novel any longer. Why, you ask? Because

Spoiler

a middle-aged man (whom we're expected to view as sympathetic and a "good guy") marries a 16-year-old girl, and after their marriage SHE LITERALLY CALLS HIM “DADDY,” and this is seen as perfectly acceptable. And I won’t be entertaining the “you’re just indulging in presentism, 16-year-olds were considered adults at the time” argument because

SHE

CALLS

HER HUSBAND

“DADDY.”

I’ve never seen this in all the Victorian literature I’ve read in which adult men marry teenage girls half their age (and that phenomenon is bad enough on its own), and I just can’t get past it.

Not only that, but in one scene, the dude gets his shorts in a twist over her acting like a child - i.e. her age - and then in another nauseating scene he’s figuratively biting his knuckle and lamenting having to raise a child when he wanted a wife:

Had he not himself seen fifty households wrecked because the husband, when he took a girl, little more than a child in years, and quite a child in mind and experience, from her own family, and the wholesome influences and companionship of father, mother, brothers, sisters, probably left her to go unguided, to form her character as best she could, putting that grave responsibility in her own weak hands as if the mere making a wife of her must make her a mature and sensible woman also?

“Quite a child in mind” = CHILD, you sick sack of pus. You had the choice to marry someone who was already a mature and sensible woman, so cry me a river.

There are certain things I know to expect from literature of yesteryear and can more or less take in stride because “it was a different time,” but Grand crosses a line. What’s puzzling is that elsewhere in the book she rightly decries the needless self-sacrifice of women, while here she’s brazenly oblivious to her complacency towards girls’ sacrificing the remainder of their childhood - to say nothing of most or all of their adult life, since they “consented” to a marriage that they might not have agreed to if they’d been presented with the choice when they were sufficiently psychologically mature - to creeps who won’t pick on someone their own size (so to speak).

Anyway, further to anyone protesting to this review with “whah whah presentism,” God bless Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Helen H. Gardener, who were also writing in the second half of the 19th century and rightly portrayed predation on girls about

Spoiler

Angelica’s

age as just that - predation.

Fascinating as a piece of historical interest. I kept writing quote after quote in a notebook.

As a novel, a bit all over the place, a bit heavy handed in places, a bit baffling in others. You spend half the time going, yes, we understand your point, stop laying it on so thick. Then you get big sections where you are not sure what the point is at all. Grand should have been allowed in parliament, then she wouldn't have had to try to write a novel. She clearly was an excellent speech writer.

Read as part of an online literature class with the WEA (Workers’ Educational Association).