Orphan Bride by Sara Seale – this is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, included in the Love Section - 9 out of 10

 

Orphan Bride by Sara Seale – this is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, included in the Love Section

9 out of 10

 

 

This is a remarkable, wonderful novel which has only about forty ratings and maybe twenty reviews on Goodreads (now we can add one to these numbers) an incredible fact, if we look at what Dan Brown, other lesser authors have – millions of ratings and multitudes of opinions expressed – it is a pity that such wondrous work goes unnoticed

 

Orphan Bride takes the Pygmalion myth and somehow tells it again, with Julian Dane in the role of the sculptor, and Jennet Brown would have the part of Galatea – in the old legend, Pygmalion creates this beautiful statue and falls in love with it, only because she is made of stone, he asks the gods to give her life and they oblige

In psychology, there is The Pygmalion Effect – researchers went into schools in California to study what happens if they tell teachers that three students will perform so well in the next few months, without extra classes, or attention – the results were splendid, because the professors believed in those young people

 

Julian Dane had had a fiancée, Kitty, and everything was Wine and Roses, halcyon days, until he suffers a plane accident and one leg is affected so badly that they would consider amputating it, if the pain does not end, but what is worse, is the reaction of the loved one, who informs the injured hero that she will marry an American

Devasted, the hero (who is clearly an anti-hero for those who apply the present day, Woke or Cancel Culture standards and will see him as an abusive, dominant chauvinist pig) decides he will take an Orphan Bride and mold her, educate her in such a way so that ‘she has no preconceived ideas that interfere with his

 

When he visits the orphanage, he does not say he wants to marry the girl he takes, but that she will be taken to his aunt, where she will work, and he is presented with four (if not more…checking now, there were five in all) girls, all of them eager to get out of the place, except for one, who is in the end the ‘lucky one’

The girl is only sixteen, so that would be rather impossible in the present, if there would not be statutory rape to charge, the pained main character is not attempting any intimacy with his pick, most laws would prohibit something like this, at least in the ‘civilized world’, there are plenty of places where this practice is encouraged

 

Jennet is to live with aunt Emily and Homer, a beekeeper with awkward manners, and get visits from the man she is to marry…she does not know anything about this project, ergo she is wondering what was the object of her adoption, especially after she sees that she is not to work, on the contrary, when she helped the maid, she was rebuked

 

For an adolescent, staying with people that are twice as old is no arcadian dream, however spoiled she is in terms of care, she has no duties, expect learning some things, but the isolation and lack of affection would take a great toll, and she looks for validation when she meets some children, and then their mother and older brother

This situation has reminded me of Love In Infant Monkeys https://realini.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-fantastic-divine-love-in-infant.html by Lydia Millet, which looks at the experiments made on monkeys, mothers and babies, the latter had been separated from the former and then given surrogate parents to see the effects

 

The research, which was so viciously cruel, demonstrated that warmth and a feeling of intimacy prevailed, the poor little ones would choose a cloth over food, preferring a wire ‘mother’ covered in textile, which would resemble in small part the estranged adult, and those without any semblance of affection would die soon

Jennet goes to the house of the children she has met on her walks, where the mother is ill, and the orphan helps and they soon become good friends, especially with the nineteen years old Frankie, who becomes infatuated with the generous girl – alas, Julian finds about this and he is infuriated forbidding any further contact

 

When Jennet travels to London, where Julian has a flat, she is met by Luke Fenton, supposedly Julian’s best friend – Thomas Mann https://realini.blogspot.com/2023/06/little-herr-friedmann-by-thomas-mann.html has a short story in which he looks at ‘big words’, like love and friends and concludes that they are extant only in art

Indeed, Julian is actually courting, trying to seduce the Orphan that his ami wants to marry, and the results could have been cataclysmic, it is not just this flirting Cassanova that is to blame, Julian has mishandled the relationship with his Galatea, to say the least, in the present, he would face charges, surely

 

We must remember though that the wondrous author is a woman, and surely, she has been influenced, constrained by the views of her time, but there are eternal messages here, such as the cliché ‘love conquers all’, or to quote Shakespeare ‘let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments’ and it is a glorious read at times

I was enraptured often, and so fervently wanting to know what happens, would they have a clash and everything goes up in smoke, would she run with the shallow, hedonistic Luke, was Julian so hard on the Orphan that she is lost forever?