My library is organized alphabetically by last name. This is a new development, as I have just acquired a big beautiful dinged-up bookshelf off Facebook Marketplace. Not only am I excessively cheap, I also love buying used. There’s something about repurposing a piece of furniture with some history, and learning to love it as your own.
This is the perfect sentiment to begin this book review.
My entire childhood I was blessed to have a family cottage. My grandparents built it with the help of friends and family, and I have spent a minimum of a week every summer sitting on a freshwater Ontarian lake.
For years In the small cottage, there were shelves of books - but these were Grandma’s books. I don’t remember her reading them, though I know she did - but I do remember being intimidated by their thickness and shimmery covers. They seemed intense and dramatic, a far cry from the YA fiction I was blowing through at an alarming speed.
These books continue to intimidate me. I haven’t read a single Mary Higgins Clark or Sidney Sheldon to this day.
After my Grandma died in October 2018, the cottage went to my uncle and his family, and the books came to me. I was free to take what I wanted and get rid of the rest. But how was I to know what I wanted when I hadn’t touched most of them in my whole 22 years?
I took them all. The most riveting made their way to my bookshelf, and the ones my mother refers to as “smut” are boxed in the closet - I will meet someone who wants them one day. They’re vintage!
This book is one of hers. Look at this cover and tell me you don’t expect it to be “smut”:
"Annette's eyes could make out the strange light that was playing on her ceiling. Could someone be in her garden with a light? At this time of night?
She got up and looked out of the window. Her heart beat wildly with fear. Somebody was in the garden, on the lawn, moving about with a flashlight, shining here and there, now down, now up.
The moon was hidden and the night was quite dark; she could not see who the mysterious intruder was. She flung open the window and called:
"Who are you? What do you think you're doing?"
Instantly the light was switched off. And a terrible silence and blackness lay over the garden."
Joan Aiken was an excessively competent story-teller, and she wrote two to three novels a years, ultimately producing over a hundred books by the time of her death in 2004.
Using today’s standards, I felt the author was ripped off. The way this book is packaged makes me feel like her talent was being shrunk to fit into one of those cheesy but also creepy Harlequin romance novels - until I did some more research on gothic romances.
The Fortune Hunters was written in 1965, and the section on “New Gothic Romances” on Wikipedia indicate that many of these novels depicted a “terror-stricken woman in diaphanous attire in front of a gloomy castle” - accurate so far. My brief research indicates the gothic romance was marketed to a female audience, and before long, the market was completely saturated. Soon, the term “gothic” took on the meaning of overdone and trite.
This book is neither of those. It is a fast-paced exciting read with enough descriptive text to thoroughly illustrate the marshy English countryside in which it takes place, but not so much that I am left skimming huge walls of text describing every nook and cranny. The protagonist is neither too stupid to walk into obvious traps, nor too smart to put together the plot against her. An adept reader will suspect much of what is occurring, but there are pieces of the puzzle that remain hidden until the last moment. The romance is minimal, and needless to say, the scene depicted on the cover never happens.
I feel conspiratorial suggesting this - and I certainly haven’t read enough Gothic Romance to warrant this opinion - but given that romance novels were a socially acceptable form of entertainment for the young woman of the 1960s, I’m wondering if this packaging of a story that I would consider more a mystery/thriller was to provide them with a socially acceptable way to expand their reading choices. I could picture an old-fashioned man dismissing his companion’s choice of reading material as smut without cracking it open to analyze the contents. It happens today, with derogatory comments about “chick-lit” and women’s fiction. The wide-eyed woman who is poorly dressed for the weather might have provided the perfect cover for less socially acceptable stories for women. The 60s were revolutionary for western women, with birth-control becoming more accessible and women entering the workforce en masse.
Maybe this was another subversion of gender norms in the entertainment industry.
Maybe this is just what sold.
I couldn’t tell you - I wasn’t there.
This book has some history but now I’ve added to it. It is staying on the shelf.
3.5 stars of 5.
Have you read any Joan Aiken or books classified as gothic romance? What did you think? Comment below!
Happy reading,
Holly
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