A Cathedral Courtship: A Romance Told in Two Voices
Kate Douglas Wiggin's slight, sharp epistolary romance follows a young American woman, her High Church aunt, and a persistent architect through England's cathedral towns.
This is a short romance built entirely out of alternating entries. The thirteen chapters are titled only SHE and HE, in strict turn, beginning and ending with SHE. Each is dated and headed with an inn's name as the pair moves through a fixed circuit of English cathedral towns. What we know of the story we glean from these entries: an American girl travelling with her aunt Celia keeps encountering a young man who rescues them from small mishaps, and something grows between them.
The shape and texture of it
The pleasure here is voice rather than incident. Wiggin lets the young narrator run on with a light, mocking self-awareness, and much of the comedy comes from her deadpan reports of her aunt's rigid tastes. Aunt Celia is drawn in a single well-aimed line.
Aunt Celia has a temperamental distrust of joy as something dangerous and ensnaring.
SHE
The book knows it is a comedy of tourism as much as courtship. The two women drag themselves from town to town under what the narrator calls an iron itinerary, defeated by railway timetables, cross-referencing Baedeker, Wordsworth and Hawthorne before they are allowed to enjoy anything. There is a genuinely funny thread about the narrator's helplessness with train guides that any traveller will recognise.
The trains, so far as I can see, always arrive before they go out, and I can never tell whether to read up the page or down.
SHE
What dates it, and what does not
The romance itself is very much of its period. The young man is admired for building suburban churches and a state lunatic asylum, praised for looking manly in knickerbockers, and repeatedly cast as the flower of chivalry rescuing ladies in distress. The class attitudes are casual and untroubled; a joke about consorting with poachers and cockneys is made without a second thought. Readers who dislike a heroine whose independence is largely comic, and whose rescue is the point, will find the machinery creaky.
What survives better is the observing eye. The verger who, when wound up with a shilling, talked like an electric doll; the aunt armed for cultural combat with a volume of Wordsworth in one hand and one of Hawthorne in the other. These small malicious portraits are sharper than the love plot they decorate, and they still land.
Who it rewards, who it bores
This is a slight book and does not pretend otherwise. It is a series of postcards with a marriage plot running quietly underneath. There is little suspense, since the narrator's affection is obvious early, and the alternating HE and SHE device is charming rather than deep.
- Rewards readers who enjoy a witty first-person voice, gentle social comedy, and travel writing about Victorian-era England
- Rewards anyone who likes epistolary form and does not need a strong plot
- Will bore readers wanting substance, tension, or a heroine with real agency
- May irritate readers impatient with period class snobbery and chivalric romance
Read for an afternoon, and taken in that spirit, it is a pleasant, quick, and often funny thing. Expect a full novel and you will feel short-changed. It is best approached as a light comedy of manners that happens to end in a courtship.
The book, free to read
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