Ramona Phail Assis Moreno

Kayla Contreras plays Ramona, 2016

The story of Ramona is told in a novel of the same name first serially published in 1884 by Helen Hunt Jackson. Jackson hoped that her story would dramatize the plight of Native Americans whose lands were being taken from them by Americans. Instead, the success of the novel, which paralleled the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in southern California, sparked a tourist boom and an interest in the “wholly generous and wholly free” Mexican ranchero life about which she wrote. Several films were made of the novel and a “Ramona pageant” has run every year in Hemet, California, since 1923.

Ramona was born to a Scottish father and an Indian mother. When her foster mother dies, she grows up on the Moreno ranch, the ward of a woman who does not like her and disdains her mixed parentage. Senora Moreno’s son Filipe, however, loves Ramona like a sister.  The story begins when Ramona is 19 and a band of Native American sheep shearers comes from Temecula, headed by Alessandro. Felipe is not well during the shearing and Alessandro sings and plays his violin, which soothes Felipe. Alessandro is asked to stay on when the shearing is finished, which makes him happy as he has fallen in love with Ramona. Alessandro brings Felipe out into the air, where he begins to recover.

Ramona and Alessandro meet and confess their love for each other, but Senora Moreno finds them. She is outraged and locks Ramona in her room. Felipe tells Alessandro to leave until her anger blows over. When Senora Moreno tells Ramona she will not permit her to marry an Indian, Ramona says, “The whole world cannot keep me from marrying Alessandro.” At last Senora Moreno tells Ramona about her birth mother and shows her the jewels which were given to Ramona. Ramona keeps the scarf in which the pearls are wrapped, but assumes the rest will be given to the church.

Alessandro does not come when he is expected, but after many days Ramona senses he is near. She goes to meet him. He is a wasted shadow of himself. The people of his village have been driven out, his father has died and his flocks and cattle taken. Ramona begs him to take her with him anyway. They steal away in the night, planning to get married and then go to San Pasquale where a cousin of Alessandro lives. There Alessandro finds that his father had sent some of their animals, so he is still well off. He worries whether Ramona can live in an Indian village. Ramona is happy, making their home in a small adobe with a verandah. She has a baby girl with blue eyes. She is saddened to hear that her friend Father Salvierderra has died. She had hoped to have his blessing.

Once again, however, they find that San Pasquale has become the property of the U.S. government. The lands can be filed on and homesteaded. When a man arrives with lumber to build a house, Alessandro sells everything. “Where will we go?” asks Ramona. “I know not,” says Alessandro. “Somewhere the Americans do not want.” They set off toward the San Jacinto mountains.

Back on the Moreno ranch, everyone misses Ramona. Felipe searches, but an Indian who knew them misdirects him. When he returns he finds his mother is dying. Before she does, she directs Felipe toward the hiding place of the jewels and the letter written about them. Felipe is ashamed. He vows to find Ramona if she is still alive.

Alessandro and Ramona suffer privations and finally settle in another small village, making another home. But Ramona does not feel safe and the baby sickens. They try to take it to San Bernardino, but the baby dies on the way. They go into the mountains, far from people. Alessandro builds another house. They are happy for a while, Ramona becomes pregnant again, but Alessandro broods, repressing his feelings to the point he begins to go mad. At times he has delusions. Ramona hopes the priests can help him, but one day he rides in on an unknown horse. Soon a gunman follows. Insisting that Alessandro has stolen the horse, he shoots him. Ramona sets off with the baby on a day’s journey to the next village.

Meanwhile, Felipe has been searching all over California. He finds the horses, which had been given to a young man from Tennessee who helped them. Then comes the news of Alessandro’s death. Felipe and Aunt Ree find Ramona lying ill in the village, but Aunt Ree knows herbs which will save her. When she grows better, Felipe takes Ramona and her baby, also called Ramona, home to the Moreno ranch.

Ramona wrestles with her bereavement, remembering her duty to be joyful, as taught by Father Salvierderra. Felipe finds American life intolerable and begins to dream of moving to Mexico. He and Ramona plan a new life in this new world. Felipe finally declares he loves Ramona, who tells him, “Part of me is dead, but I will be your wife, if you think it is right.” The Moreno name is remembered in Mexico City and upon their marriage, Felipe and Ramona have sons and daughters. When Ramona hears doves singing, however, she looks up and remembers Alessandro.

Ramona’s faithfulness to her love and courage in taking up a nomadic existence with its privations is moving. Though written by a white woman, and incurably romantic, the story reflects something of the history of the time when “the Franciscans were dying out” and Hispanics were beginning to cede their lands to Americans as well. Its pervasive effect on the region surprised me, a story I did not know until I moved to southern California myself.

Mary Mann Hamilton

In her autobiography, published under the title Trials of the Earth in 2016, Mary Mann Hamilton tells in vivid prose of her life on the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century. She lived from 1866 to 1936, but the part that interests her most is the time of her marriage to Frank Hamilton, thirty years from the time she was 18 until his death in 1914.

Frank got to know Mary’s family after her father died and was instrumental in sending her to Illinois to school. When she found out how far behind she was, however, she quit and studied dressmaking. Frank wrote to her every week. When her mother died, she promised to marry Frank, who had asked for her hand. He was 14 years older, a mysterious Englishman who had been in the army in Bengal, India, was well-educated and knew many languages. Mary could not believe he loved her, but he told her, “You have more common sense than most.” She admired him more than anyone, but felt she didn’t love him.

Mary was never happier than when cooking, and started out working at an 80-person boarding house. She quickly found that Frank had what he called rheumatism, as well as malaria, and drank to deal with it. Mary cared for him and wondered about his mysterious past. He said that he came from a good old family in England, but that he had been betrayed by someone close to him and that they were dead to him.

Frank worked hard managing lumber camps, but couldn’t seem to hold on to money. At the time, lumber was needed for railroad ties. Mary worked so hard that she lost her first baby, and her second. Frank was often gone. They moved to Arkansas and then to Missouri. Mary took time to rest, and writes of the fruitful land around her brother’s house. She wanted nothing more than a little home herself. Ozzie was born, and then Nina and Leslie, two little girls. Mary and Frank delighted in their children, but at six Ozzie was poisoned by a doctor prescribing strychnine by mistake.  The family was devastated.

Frank found that his health was better in the Mississippi Delta, on Concordia Island. A doctor had told him that if he found a climate that agreed with him, he should stay there. The family lived in a large cloth tent and Frank’s crew made barrel staves. Mary was thrilled to see Frank in good health and she also loved the country. She cooked for a smaller crew. By this time another son, Frankie, was born. In an epic storm, Frank saved his family by hollowing out a stump and making a little boat. That winter was a “fat” time, with presents, candy and good food at Christmas.

Mary decided to make every place they lived in a home for them all, as they kept moving from camp to camp. A great storyteller, Mary describes many of these places in detail, as well as what the children said and did. There was much laughter as well as tears, and she reproduces many of the things Frank tells her. Though she didn’t badger him about his past, she did learn some things. When Nina, who had hair and a face like his mother’s, died, Frank went to pieces.

Finally, Frank purchased some land and built a house on the Sunflower River. Mary laid out a big garden and they cleared the rich Delta land for crops. Mary taught her children to help with the work, that the home was theirs as much as their parents. They all loved it. Idris and Bruce were born, and finally a tiny premature baby, John Robert. “I always looked for neighbors,” said Mary. “If you have neighbors you’re never poor. I didn’t look for trouble. It came and found us anyway."

They lost that house, as an overbearing neighbor wanted their piece of land. To get the children in school they moved back to Arkansas. Frank and Mary felt the children were most important, in any case. “My children were my flower garden,” she says. “Each was a new kind, needing different care and cultivation.” They had many happy evenings in front of the fire, Frank reading and telling stories.

One winter when things were going well, Frank thought he might go to England in the spring and try to clear up his family problems. He told Mary of the church where his family had been members for 600 years, their names in the register. But an accident, and another bad decision by a doctor, rendered Frank an invalid. “How I loved him,” said Mary. “Even better than my children.” But she was losing him. Before he died he told Mary that it wouldn’t help anyone to learn who his family was and he preferred not to tell.

After his death, Mary lived with one or the other of her five living children, who were growing up. She was so proud of them. “They weren’t rich or brilliant, but, as Frank taught them, they were straight and honest. They had been fitted by their father’s proud blood, his ideals and the training he gave them to a life far different from the one that poverty and helplessness made the only way after he was gone.”

Mary’s life of trouble and pain, hard work, laughter, love and courage is a riveting story. Her love for her mysterious husband and her children form the backdrop of the book. I can only point to the pleasure of reading it. Indeed, she does have more common sense than most, and she shares it freely.

Penelope

John William Waterhouse, Penelope and the Suitors

Penelope was a central character in the Homeric epic The Odyssey, among the orally transmitted poems finally written down in the late 8^th and early 7^th centuries BC. These poems may have had some historical background in the sieges and wars between the Greek city states which occurred four to five centuries earlier. They are stuffed with gods and goddesses who interact with humans, causing much trouble and saving whom they will.

Penelope is the daughter of Icarius, a Spartan prince famed as a champion runner. He proclaims that the man who wants to win his daughter must beat him at a race. Odysseus does this. When he is about to take Penelope home to his island of Ithaca, her father gives her the choice whether to go with Odysseus or stay home. Penelope simply puts her veil modestly in front of her face, which her father interprets as a wish to go with Odysseus.

In The Illiad, which begins in the middle of the ten-year long Trojan War, we do not hear anything about Penelope. Odysseus is gone all that time, though he and Penelope have had a son, Telemachus. Odysseus’ attempts to get home after the war are thwarted by the gods and it takes him another ten years. During that time, Penelope spends most of her time weaving in an upper room in her home with her women around her. She longs for her husband, as he longs for her.

When it begins to appear that Odysseus will not come home, a pack of young men begin to hang around, intent on becoming Penelope’s second husband. Telemachus, her son, is too young to prevent them from feasting every day at the house, eating up the cattle, sheep and pigs that are his patrimony. Penelope, who is as cunning as her husband, tells the suitors that when she finishes the shroud she is making for her father-in-law Laertes, she will marry one of them. Every day she weaves, but at night she undoes what she has woven that day. For three years this ruse works, but one of her handmaids tells the suitors what Penelope is doing.

When the household poet sings of Odysseus’ exploits, Penelope says “Sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart out.” Telemachus rebukes her and then leaves, to try to find news of his father. Penelope is horrified to find he is gone. The suitors plan to kill him, but Athena sends her a message that all will be well.

At this point Odysseus is still constrained by Calypso to stay with her on her island. He longs for “his quiet Penelope” and home. Athena intervenes and Odysseus has more adventures, but is at last given gifts and a ship to take him to Ithaca. Arriving, he visits first his faithful swineherd, dressed as a beggar. Telemachus also comes back to the island and meets his father there. Together they make plans to kill the suitors and retake their home.

Telemachus goes home first, though Odysseus will not allow him to tell Penelope that he is on the island. “What shall I do?” she asks Telemachus. Inspirited, Telemachus tells her to remain with her women in the upper room. The suitors continue to eat, drink and plot. When Odysseus, dressed as a beggar, comes and sits in the door stoop, they make fun of him and throw things at him. Telemachus tells them not to ill-use his guest.

Athena sends Penelope down in her great beauty, “her shining veil across her cheek.” “Deep-minded queen,” says one of the suitors, “Beauty like yours no woman had before.” At last she brings Odysseus’ heavy bow into the room and says that whoever can string it and send an arrow through 12 axe handles will be her husband. None of the suitors is able to string the bow. Telemachus makes some effort, but then sends his mother upstairs. Odysseus easily strings the bow, then strikes Antinous, the chief suitor with an arrow to his neck. With the help of his son, the swineherd and another herdsman, not to mention Athena, Odysseus slays all of the forty or more suitors. The servants come up to embrace Odysseus and the mutinous maids are made to clean up the mess.

Telemachus tells Penelope that his father has come home, but Penelope is skeptical. She sits on one side of the room, observing her husband, who has bathed and dressed himself, on the other. Odysseus’ old nurse has identified him by a childhood scar. “Let your mother test me,” said Odysseus. “We have secret signs between us.”

Penelope tells a servant to go and take their marriage bed into the hall, making it up for Odysseus. At this Odysseus flares up. “Who dares to move my bed?” he asks. “I made that bed from the trunk of a living olive tree.” When she hears this, Penelope runs to Odysseus and throws her arms around him. At last they weep together, rejoicing. When they go to bed, arms around each other, Odysseus tells her stories. “She could not close her eyes until all the stories had been told.”

The next day, Odysseus goes to his old father Laertes, also wasted with longing for his son. Laertes is spading earth around his fruit trees. Odysseus worries about the fathers of the suitors, who might come for revenge. Athena goes to Zeus, asking how to end this violence. “Conclude it as you will,” says Zeus. Thus, Athena compels the islanders to drop their quarrel and Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus are allowed to live in peace.

The Odyssey has followed me around most of my life. When I finally read it in the Robert Fitzgerald translation recently, hardly any of the incidents were unfamiliar. Indeed, the story of the weaving and unweaving of the shroud is told three times! As the wife of a valiant husband who is gone at least a third of the time, I most identify with the homecoming. When Don comes home, it takes days sometimes before all the stories have been told.

Teresa Urrea

Teresa Urrea was born in 1873 in the lush state of Sinaloa, Mexico, the daughter of Tomas Urrea, the patron of a large ranch and the prettiest of the Yaqui Indian ranch workers. Her mother leaves, and Teresa is brought up by an unpleasant aunt. When she is ten, all the people on the ranch pick up and move in a vast wagon train up to Sonora, since Tomas has angered the regime of Porfirio Diaz. Teresa attaches herself to Huila, the household manager and a curandera (healer and herbalist) for the family.

In Cabora, Sonora, Teresa is the life of the ranch. She is tall and has blonde in her hair, looking much like Tomas. Huila educates her and Teresa begins to help bring babies into the world, stilling the pains of the mother. Tomas finally notices her and admits that she is his daughter. He brings her into the house, educates her and dresses her. She insists on learning to read, though Huila thinks it is silly.

After being attacked by a ranch hand, Teresa is in a coma for 12 days. Her coffin is prepared, but Teresita revives. She begins healing people. Her fame spreads. Thousands visit the ranch, wanting her healing touch. The Diaz regime begins to fear that she is fomenting revolution. Indeed her father’s best friend Aguirre prints revolutionary tracts, putting her name, ‘the Saint of Cabora,’ and her photo in them. When Indians come from up in the hills, Teresa befriends them. The Catholic priest is scandalized by their reverence for her.

When the Rurales come to Don Tomas’ ranch, Tomas stands them down, but he and Teresa flee. Soldiers catch up to them and put them in prison. Teresa is covered with bites and has fever. She expects to be shot, but instead, she and her father are put on a train to Arizona. The Diaz regime calls her ‘the most dangerous girl in Mexico,’ though Teresa, in impromptu talks to her pilgrims preaches only peace.

Tomas and Teresa settle in Arizona, but many assassins come to kill them. They keep moving, enjoying American pleasures like baseball, pretty dresses for Teresa and ice cream. Aguirre draws them east to El Paso, Texas. It is a real town with paved streets. The crowd of seekers finds Teresa here, too. She cannot escape the thousands of people who come to her and does not want to. She feels it is her destiny to heal. Aguirre, however, in his newspaper uses her fame to incite revolution.

In 1896, several villages fight with photos of ‘the saint of Cabora’ covering their hearts. They are killed. Newspapermen and more assassins arrive. Tomas and Teresa go back to Arizona where Tomas buys land and begins to build another ranchita. It is high up in mining country, and Tomas tells Teresa he does not want pilgrims or sainthood in his new home. Tomas loves the country and farming. But Teresa is swept off her feet by Lupe Rodriguez. He demands to marry her, though Tomas refuses. In fact they do marry, but after only a day, Lupe publicly attacks Teresa. The townspeople put him in their jail. He is taken to an asylum, mad.

The rift between Teresa and her father does not heal. She goes to San Francisco to heal the son of a wealthy family. A group contracts her to go to St. Louis and then New York. She insists she doesn’t want money for healing, but the consortium pays for her upkeep. She spends lonely weeks with this tour, unable to speak much English, though her fame is great and pilgrims come to her. Finally she asks an old friend to come from Arizona as a protector and translator. She enjoys John Van Order’s company and they become lovers. In New York, the cream of society welcomes Teresa, making her into a fine lady.

When her contract is up, Teresa goes back to California. She and John have two daughters, Laura and Magdalena. Teresa lives with her sister in Los Angeles and then in Ventura County. At last she goes back to Arizona, where her father has died. She sets up a small clinic, but she is succumbing to tuberculosis herself. According to Luis Alberto Urrea, whose two fictionalized books about her [The Hummingbird’s Daughter, 2005; and Queen of America, 2011] detail her life, Teresa feels she has failed. “All the illusions of that life are gone. I despise the ‘saint of Cabora,’” she says. She dies in 1906 at the age of 33.

Urrea portrays Teresa as a lively character, always in control of her life, though she is humble about her abilities to heal. She smokes, drinks, dances and always insists she is not a saint. She is curious about everything and equal to it, no matter how new. By the end of her short life she has lived everywhere from a peasant hovel to fine hotels, knows the desert as well as cities. She is a mother and makes peace with her father’s people, though she does not see her father again after she leaves home in 1900. It is an extraordinary story, brought to vivid life by Luis Urrea, Teresa’s grand-nephew.

Odile Blanc

Nella Bielski, to whom Berger dedicated "Once in Europa"

Though born in 1936, we hear nothing of World War II in the story of Odile Blanc, told by John Berger in the titular story of his book Once in Europa [1987]. Instead, we learn of the small farm, garden and orchard her parents tend in the shadow of a giant factory which produces ferromanganese in the Haute-Savoie, a region of France in the Alps, very close to Switzerland.

Achille Blanc hates the factory, the furnaces of which are always kept burning, and which spews fumes and leaves ever-growing mountains of red dust slag. Though the company keeps increasing the price it will pay for his farm, Odile’s father will not sell. He does not want his son working there, but eventually Odile’s older brother does.

Despite the factory, Odile grows up feeding rabbits, helping shovel out the stable and going to school. She is very close to her father. At 14, the schoolmistress comes to tell Odile’s parents that she is doing so well she should be sent to further schooling. She boards in the nearby town of Cluses, lonely, but obedient. Odile’s father dies and the village brass band he had been a member of comes to play “Amazing Grace” at the farm.

One day Odile’s mother asks her to take a loaf to her brother at the factory. Michel, one of her brother’s friends, offers to take her for a ride on his motor-bike. At first she refuses, but then accepts. They pack a picnic and ride over the mountains down into Italy. Odile is thrilled, but only a few weeks later she hears Michel has been badly burned at the factory when a furnace wall broke. He spends a long time in hospital, losing both his legs.

On New Year’s Eve, when Odile is 17, she hears music coming from the barracks where the foreign workers for the factory live. She puts on an old coat and goes to look in the window, watching Russians dancing and many other people she doesn’t know. A man comes up behind her and asks her in. He is Stepan, an orphan Ukranian who grew up in Sweden. He asks Odile to dance: “What’s so surprising about music is that it comes from the outside. It feels as if it comes from the inside. The man who had clicked his heels and announced his name as Stepan Pirogov was dancing with Odile Blanc. Yet inside the music, which was inside me, Odile and Stepan were the same thing.”

Odile’s family is horrified. Her mother won’t speak to her. Odile often walks into the mountains with Stepan and, when they have slept together, quits school and takes a job in town at a components factory. Stepan is patient, thinking they will win over Odile’s family. He builds an amazing bed and a separate room in the barracks which goes by the name ‘In Europa,’ and Odile often stays there. One day, however, as she is preparing for work, her brother calls to say Stepan has been killed at the factory. Asphyxiated, he fell into the furnace and was incinerated.

Devastated, Odile does not know what to do. She is only 18 and pregnant. She stays at the barracks until she can bear to leave and then moves to Cluses where she works in the components factory and raises her son Christian, who looks much like Stepan. As a kid, Christian is deeply interested in flight and, in a framing story, takes his mother hang gliding over the mountains of the Haute-Savoie.

When Christian goes to camp one summer, Odile meets Michel again. He runs a tobacco and newspaper shop in a nearby town and has prosthetic legs. He offers to take Odile to Paris, but as they stop to have a sandwich, someone runs into their car. They put up at a hotel and never get to Paris. Michel, Odile finds, has been to hell and back: “Who says hell has to stay the same? Hell begins with hope. If we didn’t have any hopes we wouldn’t suffer. We’d be like those rocks against the sky.” But he offers himself to Odile. She and her son go to live with him over the shop. Michel and Odile have a daughter together.

Thinking over her life, Odile wants to say to her daughter: “I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God.” She thinks of the men in her rich life with much tenderness.

The stories Berger tells of the people he lived among in Quincy, France, are developed from the talk of his fellow villagers, including perhaps a woman such as Odile. Berger’s biographer Joshua Sperling quotes Berger saying of these neighbors: “’his ideals are located in the past; his obligations are to the future, which he himself will not live to see.’ They were the opposite of opportunists; in many ways they were saints.”

Emma Woodhouse

Romola Garai, Emma, BBC, 2009

Though it may seem that Emma Woodhouse has no mountains to get over, this is not entirely true. Emma is most hampered by her own willfulness which, as we learn, blinds her to the results of her actions. The story of her 21st year, as told by Jane Austen in the novel which bears her name published in 1815, brings Emma from her youthful sense of power to shame and humiliation, while opening her closed world to love and a stronger sense of other people’s realities.

Emma lives alone with her father in one of the better houses in Highbury, a village in Surrey. She has seen little of the world due to her father’s fearful temperament and his reluctance to leave home. Emma has just lost her best companion, her governess, who is really more of a friend. Neither her father nor her governess have tried to curb Emma’s spirit, though she is very well educated to filial duty and gentle-womanly manners.

Believing that her own efforts have helped her governess find a husband, Emma decides that the village curate must be in need of a wife. She befriends Harriet, only 17, hoping to educate the beautiful girl into the gentry. Harriet has become the beloved of a yoeman farmer, but under Emma’s influence, Harriet rejects him. Emma is certain that Harriet would make Mr. Eliot, the curate, a good wife. Emma’s good friend Mr. Knightley tries to warn her not to interfere in Harriet’s life, but Emma brushes off his advice.

The biddable Harriet falls in love with Mr. Eliot. Emma emphasizes to her all the ways he seems to care for Harriet, but is then horrified to find that Mr. Eliot’s attentions are actually directed towards herself. When she finds herself alone in a carriage with him after Christmas dinner, Emma rejects his advances. Mr. Eliot leaves town in a huff.

The gentry in Highbury seem to have little to do but visit and talk about each other, sharing letters and news. Jane Fairfax visits her old aunt, and Frank Churchill, who was adopted out of the village and into a wealthy family, also returns. Frank is lively and many think he might become attached to Emma. They plan dances together. Emma thinks Jane more accomplished than herself and does not befriend her.

With Frank away, Emma examines her feelings and finds she is not in love with him. She has quarreled with Mr. Knightley about him also. Mr. Knightley does not think Frank a good man. Emma is surprised to find that Harriet has fallen in love with Mr. Knightley for his kindness to her. Emma has compounded the unhappiness, encouraging her because she believed Harriet referred to Frank. The tangle of feelings in Highbury is finally unraveled to reveal that Frank and Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged. Frank has been covering this up by toying with Emma. This duplicity is felt to be an outrage in the village.

Emma is fearful that Mr. Knightley might prefer Harriet to herself, realizing that she has been foolish. “The only source whence anything like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.”

When Mr. Knightley learns that Emma never loved Frank despite their flirtations in company, he reveals that Emma, with all her faults, is his dearest; that he has loved her since she was 13. Emma is transported, her happiness only marred by knowing Harriet’s feelings. She sends Harriet to her sister in London. There Harriet meets with her farmer, who proposes again. Harriet accepts and is married in September.

Emma’s father hates change and always rails against marriage. Emma thinks she cannot leave home while he is still alive. Considering this, Mr. Knightley suggests that he move in with Emma and her father, which is finally agreed to. Emma marries Mr. Knightley in October.

Jane Austen is careful to elaborate the feelings of her characters in delightfully specific language. She wraps up the stories of each of the important characters. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are suitably remorseful and their apologies are accepted.

Austen’s clear delineation of values makes her stories useful to us more than two hundred years after she wrote. A progressive, she mocks Emma’s pretensions and, through Mr. Knightley, shows that a person’s character is more important than his class. Lack of real feeling, money-seeking and egotism show up as false in characters that have as much life as those we admire. In fact it is quite astonishing how much Austen endears Emma to us, even though we know she is usually wrong! Emma’s sincere shame and growing self-knowledge contribute and we do not begrudge a happy resolution to her story. If you fall in love with Emma, I do not think there has been a better representation of her than Romola Garai’s in the 2009 BBC production of the novel, clips of which can be found on Youtube.

Leila Hosnani

Egyptian Coptic Woman

Leila Hosnani’s story is told in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet (published 1957-1960). We meet her through the eyes of the young diplomat Mountolive, who is visiting the beautiful farm Karm Abu Girg outside of Alexandria where Leila lives with her ailing husband and two grown sons. They are Christian Copts, very proud, who have been the “brains” of Egypt, doing much of the administrative work of the country.

Leila had been a brilliant student, had hoped to become a doctor. But for an Egyptian woman born between the two world wars, this not possible. Leila is obedient, pliant, and loyal. She marries into a family which her parents arrange for her. Her life must belong to Egypt. “Whether she was happy or unhappy she herself had never thought to consider. She was hungry, that was all, hungry for the world of books and meetings which lay forever outside this old house and the heavy charges of the land.”

Thus Leila becomes that age-old archetype of woman, a woman of experience who accepts that her work and natural gifts might not be appreciated in the great world of politics, culture, academia or even art; but knows that this world cannot get on without her; knows what a woman is to men and that her life lies in the areas of graciousness, civility, intimacy and beauty. Such a woman crafts a place for herself at the heart of her household that only she can fill: rooted in family, with children, representing that family to the world with grace, ensuring civility, showing to younger people that it is okay; that life, that being a woman is worth the pain. 

Leila settles into the “rambling old-fashioned house built upon a network of lakes and embankments near Alexandria.” She subscribes to books and periodicals in the four languages she knows besides her native Arabic, and goes into the city of Alexandria for the occasional holiday. But she does not appreciate shallow society and becomes introspective.

Leila begins to live through her smooth and attractive son Nessim, who runs the family banking and shipping businesses. Her other son Narouz runs the farm as her much-older husband suffers from increasing muscular atrophy. Mountolive, a young British foreign service officer, is invited to stay on the farm for a summer to improve his Arabic. He and Leila ride out into the desert together at her husband’s suggestion. They have an affair. “Only I must not fall in love,” Leila tells Mountolive.

When Mountolive is posted to other countries, Leila begins a correspondence with him. With their difference in ages, she had not expected their affair to last, but distance frees them. “She kept pace with his growth in those long, well-written, ardent letters which betrayed only the hunger which is as poignant as anything the flesh is called upon to cure: the hunger for friendship, the fear of being forgotten.”

When Leila’s husband dies, she considers meeting Mountolive in Europe, but that summer she contracts smallpox, which “melted down the remains of her once celebrated beauty.” Leila buys heavy black veils and retires to a life in the summerhouse on the farm where she reads and writes with a tame snake for company. She tells Mountolive not to pity her and begs him to write as gaily as before.

In the third book of his quartet, entitled Mountolive, Durrell reveals the plot at the bottom of all of them, which Nessim has conceived for the sake of the Copts, together with the Armenians, Jews and Greeks in Egypt, as a defense against being engulfed by the Arab tide. He believes that the British have turned the Moslems against them and he has been aiding the Jews in their fight against the British in Palestine, providing arms. This is the basis for his marriage to Justine. He has many covers for this plot. Leila is finally told of it.

In the resolution of this complex tale, Mountolive comes back to Egypt as British ambassador. Leila, who has resisted seeing him, finally meets Mountolive to beg for Nessim’s life, as she is convinced that he has been found out and will suffer. This is humiliating for both of them. The British do prevail upon the Egyptian police, but Nessim has successfully bribed them. Nessim sends Leila to a family farm in Kenya, but Narouz will not leave. The Egyptian police come for him and assassinate him instead of Nessim.

We do not learn more of Leila, though the fortunes of the Hosnani family suffer and we must assume she shares in this. I have always been fascinated by the resignation and the dignity with which Leila conducts herself after her disfiguring illness. And in re-reading this book I finally came to see Durrell’s value. It is not just the lush language for which he is justly celebrated. Or the varieties of love which he describes, including all the cynicism which resulted from the wars when European nations were thrown into chaos with ramifications all over the world. It is also that he can flesh out the meaning and motives of characters with whom he is not naturally in sympathy. The Hosnani family is richly drawn.