CABINET OF WONDERS

   Sometimes you read a book and it immediately feels like coming home. I’ve often tended to gravitate towards a certain category of books I sometimes refer to as ‘cosy British fiction’, even if some of it tends to be a bit grim, or at least high-stakes, and some of it isn’t even British at all (the majority of L. M. Montgomery’s oeuvre). What this rather inadequate classification tries to encapsulate is a certain earthy richness of language, a wry humour, and a certain love for human nature in all of its glories and foibles. I had a vague suspicion that Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess Below Stairs might at least be a shadow of that category (I can’t exactly remember how I discovered it, though vague memories indicate it may have been the result of clicking through a lot of Amazon recommendations), but until it came in with a flock of inter-library loans I had no idea that it was about to become my book equivalent to a favourite sweater.

   A Countess Below Stairs begins with backstory, which is old-fashioned in the very best way: and Eva Ibbotson has a marvellous knack of illuminating characters both historical and invented. Her story centres on Anna Grazinsky, a young Russian countess who, with her family, has fled the revolution in her homeland and is now mostly penniless in England. Determined to do her part to support the family, she takes a position as a housemaid at Mersham, a countryside estate. Mersham is preparing for the return of the Earl of Westerholme from the war — the shadows and afterimages of war, both of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, run through the whole story like veins, informing everyone’s actions and beliefs, and Ibbotson’s look is unflinching, though this is far from a bleak story. Ibbotson fled her own homeland — Vienna — during the Second World War, and this consciousness of war, exile, and rebuilding runs through many of her novels. But I digress.

It is difficult to describe the plot of this novel in a way that does it justice;  out of their context and Ibbotson’s beautifully humorous and human illumination, the facts of the story seem trite and predictable. Ibbotson does indeed frequently rely on tropes in her novels, and the outcome of things is frequently predictable, but it is the very best kind of predictable, like settling into a cosy armchair and savouring the marvellous prose, comfortable in the knowledge that everything is going to turn out right in the end, but that also the journey to said end will be full of small wonders. Ibbotson’s tropes, too, are illuminated — the cautious romance that flowers between Anna and Rupert, the Earl of Westerholme, is, of course, inevitable, as is the eventual downfall of his unpleasant fiancée. Readers of Ibbotson’s novels have offered the critisism that her heroines are too good — even unrealistically good — and certainly one’s mileage may vary; Anna and other Ibbotson heroines are definitely embodiments of the clever, largely unselfish, bright-hearted girl of literature who sees the world in a different and fascinating light, the girl who enters a place and changes it with her unobtrusive being, like the eponymous Anne of Green Gables, or perhaps some of Louisa May Alcott’s heroines (my defense of Little Women is an essay for another day), and this is one of my favourite tropes — I have always wanted to be that girl, and these fictional examples have guided my ideals and insistence on seeing beauty in small things most of my life. Furthermore, while I do find Anna and her storykin unusually good, they are not unrealistically so — I have met people with this kind of unquenchable joy and unselfishness. Best of all, Eva Ibbotson is never without her sense of humour, which serves to redeem nearly anything from melodrama.

My few criticisms mainly extend to the rather one-dimensional portrayal of Rupert’s fiancée, Muriel, who is all too easy to loathe (though the explanation of why a man like Rupert would engage himself blindly to such a woman is better handled than this trope usually is) — it would be interesting to read an examination of the Fiancée To Be Overcome plot in which the Fiancée is less of a simple stock petty adversary and more on equal par with the other lovers, though the emotional complications of such a story — how do you break off a relationship with a good woman because you find you’re more in love with someone else? is this justifiable? what do you do when your fiancé falls for someone else, especially if he is struggling to remain faithful to you? — might steer the story into more bittersweet terrain that would not suit some plots. My other quibble is that Eva Ibbotson’s romances nearly always turn on The Terrible Misunderstanding, which prevents the lovers from coming together even after the other obstacles are removed — frequently a misunderstanding that could have been easily made clear if people would only talk to each other. But aside from these, A Countess Below Stairs is a rich, rewarding, good-hearted story full of texture, character, culture, and history: the corners of my copy are destined to be worn soff and the cover to become battered.

As an extra note, the Penguin edition of this book, under the imprint Speak, is a truly delightful book for the senses; it is exactly the right size for a book; the typeface is elegant and simple, the pages of excellent quality. Ignore the back cover, however, as it gives much erroneous information about the story — Anna’s gentility is anything but a carefully guarded secret, though her exact background is not revealed to her employers until late in the story (which therefore causes the alternate title The Secret Countess to send me into fits of teeth gnashing and cursing sensationalist publishers).

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