This has been one of my favorite novels since picking it up as a kid–I saw my parents laughing over it, and was drawn in by the child protagonist, raised alternately in Britain and France (just as my brother and I were raised in the US and France, with a British father and an Anglophilic mother). I happily re-read it every few years.
Normally I read too quickly, but this time I was tempted to create a guide for all the references, challenging myself to look up the ones I don’t know. For example, the treatment that keeps wealthy people young is presumably a reference to Victor Bogomoletz, who wrote The Secret of Keeping Young and prescribed Sérum de Bogomoletz. A character says of it: “The wonders it has done for me! Why my hair, which was quite red, has positively begun to go black at the roots.”
Even though the moral of the book is that Grace’s happiness comes from ignoring her husband’s infidelities, and Sigsimond is a little monster, it’s more light-hearted than some of Mitford’s books. There are so many wonderfully satirical characters: the odious Hector Dexter, whose speech captures something genuinely 50s American:
I am very very happy to be able to tell you, Madame Innouïs, that the young American male is brimming over with strong and lustful, but clean desire. He is not worn out, old, and complicated before his time, no ma’am, he does not need any education sentimentarl, it all comes to him naturally, as it ought to come, like some great force of nature.
And there are striking insights, like the comparison of idle people playing bridge to workers in a factory: “You sat by electric light at the same table hour after hour, going through the same motions, with music while you work thump thump thumping in the background, life passed by, the things of the mind neglected, the beautiful weather out of doors unfelt, unseen.”
This is a retrieved draft of an earlier post, so there was more I wanted to say that’s been lost. But I’ll be reading it again soon and presumably it will come back–and I can flesh out other references. I love the way the Internet’s expansion makes more of the past accessible even as it recedes further in time. When I first read The Blessing, I could have spoken to people who remembered Boglometz, if only I could have found them. Now they’re doubtless all dead, but I can discover more about it than ever.