Consequences

Description

The author of the famous Diary of a Provincial Lady gives us another look into the numerous layers of Victorian society with Consequences. E.M Delafield thus allows a closer inspection thanks to Alexandra Clare, a girl of many, who faces the harsh rules of the oppressed young woman. In an age where the woman’s highest rank was that of a wife, Alex wants nothing to do with it. She is Delafield’s magnifying glass pointed at what England’s past valued.

Her family wishes Alexandra an appointed future, while she does not see eye to eye. Even though she was raised with the sole purpose of ending up as a wife and mother, Alexandra instead goes against the current -by failing at school, rejecting the only man who offered himself for marriage and making problems for her parents. E.M Delafield follows Jane Austen in that she crafted a novel whose protagonist would be Austen’s description of her ideal heroine. Somebody “no-one but myself will like”.

Alexandra Clare is the type of girl that was the most common in Victorian England. The type that wished for something else but instead fell into the world of the awkward and misunderstood.She tried at first but saw a glimmer of resistance inside her – she ends her engagement and does what every sane girl would do after. She enters a convent.

A novel where Victorian values are not viewed with the most forgiving eyes, Consequences is one of Delafield’s many notable works, one that stands out thanks to her personal experience.While Diary of a Provincial Lady was humorous in its descriptions and story, Consequences instead adopts a more somber, delicate tone where the plight of the Victorian woman is the center stage – where society, religion and school all shared the role of turning Alex and every other woman into man’s polar opposite.
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