The Mouse rules OK

I recently went to see the latest animated Disney film "Tangled", and - no surprises there - it was excellent. Not quite as good as films from the Disney Golden Age like "The Little Mermaid", "Aladdin", "The Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King", but just as good as those Disney films which have a very high quality indeed but stop just short of greatness, like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Tarzan". "Tangled" actually shares one plot strand with "Hunchback" (more of this later). A drawback is that the film is computer-animated. I enjoy computer-animated films, with those from Pixar in a league of their own, but for the real Disney fairy-tale magic I prefer good old two-dimensional animation. Yes, the settings are spectacular - especially, I reluctantly have to add, if you have those pesky 3-D glasses on - but the character animation still lacks the personal touch. The heroine Rapunzel's eyes are enormous while her mouth is small and rosebud-like: I think both she and the mutton-dressed-as-lamb-villainess Mother Gothel would have benefited from a classical-animation makeover.

But enough carping: it's a great film. The heroine is feisty. The hero Flynn Rider accepts the fact that, though he is the debonair, wordly-wise thief, it is more often than not he who is rescued by the charm and inventiveness of Rapunzel rather than the other way around - and he does it more stoically than I think most men would in real life. There is a heart-warming scene where Rapunzel finds common ground with an inn-full of ruffians over the importance of having a dream. I nearly choked up at the interlude where the country's king and queen - deprived of their little girl from childhood - make themselves ready to face their subjects on her birthday. The horse with a Javert complex is funny, and there are nice touches throughout - the dashing Flynn's real name, for instance, is Eugene Fitzherbert.

So what's my point with this puff-piece, exactly? The Disney people know what they are doing. They've been doing it for decades. No-one compares to The Mouse when it comes to creating that special animated magic. Deal with it.

Some multi-million-dollar-companies are more sneered at and mistrusted than others. Maybe it's got something to do with what you market. If you sell oil, or cars, or armaments, you are expected to be tough, smoke cigars and preferably have a scar running all the way from your right temple to the left side of your chin. But if you sell kiddy-friendly stuff, toughness is seen as hypocrisy. Oh yes, parents fume, the films may be full of gush about following your dreams and being true to yourself, but all Big Bad Disney really wants to do is to MAKE MONEY, by brainwashing little tots into nagging their poor parents into buying stuff. McDonalds suffers from a similar PR problem: my theory is that comparable fast-food chains such as Burger King have escaped much of the hostility directed towards McDonalds by not stressing the child-friendliness factor too much.

One effect of the hostility towards Disney was the hyping of the Shrek franchise at Disney's expense. Aha, the critics crowed, here we have the real future of animation: smart, sassy, computer-animated, and a de-construction of those hoary old fairy-tale clichés. Disney doesn't measure up to this, Disney is past it!

Yes, the Shrek films are funny (though the third wasn't up to much, and I haven't seen the fourth one yet). But they are not better than Disney films because of their "de-construction" of fairy-tales. In fact, it can be argued that it's the knowingness of the films, and the mean-minded side-swipes at Disney, which stop them from engaging you the way a good Disney film does. As I've argued before, if you want to be moving, you musn't be too afraid of sentimentality, and the Shrek-makers were too careful of their street-cred to risk going all out with feel-good or sob scenes. As for the "de-construction" bit, the Shrek films don't really add a new dimension to fairy-tales, they just invert them. We're not given the fairy-tale baddie's point of view, because Shrek, uncouth ogre though he is, is not really a baddie. Instead, Prince Charming and his ilk are the baddies - and it's up to Prince Charming to make the point that fairy tales don't supply "happily-ever-afters" to everyone.

Meanwhile, The Mouse waited, and finally had the last laugh. Disney chose to meet the Shrek attack, very effectively, by standing by their brand. "Yes, we do like fairy-tales just as they are: got any problem with that?" was the defiant message of the film "Enchanted", and it worked. "Tangled" follows suit, and the scene at the inn has the same feel-good factor as Giselle's number "How Does She Know" in Central Park.

There is plenty you can can criticise Disney for, but they know how to put heart into a film, and if this useful skill swells their pocket-books, then so be it. I for one am glad they haven't gone bust. A down-side to having such a dominating influence in animated pictures, though, is that they can become rather self-referential. The death of Tarzan's adopted gorilla-father in "Tarzan" didn't really move as much at it should, because we'd already had that kind of thing in "The Lion King". In "Tangled", there's a strong echo of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame": Rapunzel is kept in her tower with the same arguments as Quasimodo - that the world outside is cruel and dangerous - and when she later confronts her false parent figure, she is in just the same angry and defiant mood as Quasimodo in his similar confrontation with Frollo. Surely this was an opportunity missed: where's the sadness, where's the question "Did you ever love me?" And as for Mother Gothel, didn't she even feel a twinge of regret? It must be hard faking affection for years without ending up feeling at least a bit of it. But "Hunchback" never explored this issue, so "Tangled" doesn't either. Could do better, Disney. Remember your motto from "Meet the Robinsons": Keep moving forward!

Wilkie Collins and women

I have neglected the historical studies lately. The reason is that, after having finished reading the satisfactory Jude Morgan regency romance "A Little Folly" (he really is just as good as Heyer, if not better, though the Austenesque moral message grates a bit - less painful self-revelation for the heroine, please!) I started yet another Wilkie Collins novel. I've read quite a lot of them by now and am constantly surprised at how good they are, even the unknown ones. The only one who has really disappointed me is, strangely enough, "The Moonstone". Whenever I've had problems with some aspects of the other books - the time it takes for the author to set the scene for the really thrilling plot in "Armadale" (though the pre-history is dramatic, it reads a little like a summary of a serialised novel in a women's magazine: you almost expect it to end with the words "now read on"), the disappointing ending of "The Law and the Lady", the seriously irritating lawyer-hero Sir Patrick in "Man and Wife" - I've always ended up thinking: "come on, it's still good, and way better than 'The Moonstone'".

I may have a good moan about "The Moonstone" at a later date, but for now I'd like to dwell on one of the things Collins does really well, and that is female characters. The novel I'm reading right now is "Poor Miss Finch", and though the titular heroine Lucilla Finch is charming enough, though a little missish, the most likeable female in the book is the strong-minded, honest, opinionated, loyal and affectionate Madame Pratolungo, her companion, who is the novel's chief narrator.

Like so many of Collins's admirable women, Madame Pratolungo is a "doer". She engages herself wholeheartedly for the welfare of Lucilla and shows endless initiative. She doesn't mince words either. When Lucilla's love Oscar acts like a poor fish (which one can't help thinking that he is, even though Madame Pratolungo has reason to revise her bad opinion of him as the story unfolds) she gives him an earful. When Oscar's twin brother Nugent starts to get uppity, she gives him an earful. Not that these earfuls help a lot, because the brothers are both in their separate ways pig-headed, but you love Madame Pratolungo for trying. In a way, she is a good version of the impressive female baddie Mrs Lecount in "No Name": they are both resourceful French widows, often reduced to bullying the weak-willed menfolk around them, and they both love and revere their late husbands. Madame Pratolungo memorably remarks regarding the aversion Lucilla (who is blind) has to dark colours and complexions: "This singular prejudice of hers against dark people was a little annoying to me on personal grounds [...] Between ourselves, the late Doctor Pratolungo was of a fine mahogany brown all over."

It is strange that Collins, who created characters like Marian Halcombe in "The Woman in White", Lydia Gwilt in "Armadale", Valeria Woodville in "The Law and the Lady", the two aforementioned French widows and many other fine female characters often speaks so slightingly and patronisingly about women in general. Granted, it is his characters who speak and not he personally, but you have the feeling you are supposed to agree when, for instance, Sir Patrick muses on the female sex and its weaknesses. But I suppose, as a woman, you have to take the rough with the smooth.

The disability lobby must feel equally ambivalent about Wilkie Collins's outlook. On one side, he includes a large number of characters with one handicap or another in his novels and enters feelingly into their situation. On the other hand, these characters are no better or worse than the others, and their particular disability is shamelessly milked for dramatic effect. The novella "The Guilty River" is a case in point: the baddie in this story is deaf, and he is not able to become a better person until his deafness has been cured. At the same time, the story contains a harrowing account of how his condition separates him from his fellow men. I rather like this - horrible word - unsentimental approach. It must surely be a "right" worth having to be depicted as a flawed or downright villainous character in a novel - they are so much more interesting than butter-wouldn't-melt goodies. But then you're talking to the girl whose favourite fictional blind character is Pew in "Treasure Island".

The point of really annoying characters - is there one?

I recently finished the novel "The Confessions of Edward Day" by Valerie Martin and was relieved. This might seem strange as the book has a lot to recommend it. It's well-written and draws you in from the start: the first sentence is: "My mother liked to say Freud should have been strangled in his crib". Its main characters are actors, and I've been stage-struck since I was a girl. What's more, the setting is New York in the Seventies. It could easily have been a pleasant read roughly in the same genre as Helen Dore Boylston's "Carol" books - though with higher pretensions and less compulsive readability - if it had not been for the hero Edward Day's loathsome nemesis Guy Margate.

And when I say loathsome I really mean it. This is a man who, whenever he enters the scene, makes your heart sink a bit. Edward can't easily get rid of him as he owes him his life, but even the life-saving is done in the most ungracious way possible. Afterwards, Guy demands money of Edward when he can ill afford it; belittles him in front of his friends (who mercifully don't pay that much attention); makes a play for his girl and, the worst part in my opinion, claims he's a bad actor. It's true that Edward is not someone you feel a great deal of sympathy for: at one time when he's working at a summer theatre in the country he falls in love with the primadonna, sleeps with the ingénue, reacts to the news that his girlfriend Madeleine is pregnant by sending her money for an abortion, and still expects her to be waiting for him when he comes back to New York, minus the kid of course. And yet, I wholeheartedly shared Edward's distaste for Guy: I gritted my teeth when the bastard was doing well and felt profound satisfaction when he was doing badly. This is quite an achievement on the author's part. But there's no denying that Margate mars the pleasure of one's reading experience more than a little bit.

What is the function of characters like this, the kind I call "please-go-away-characters"? What can they do that a charismatic villain can't? What's the point of tormenting the reader as well as the hero/heroine/other luckless person the p.g.a.-character chooses to pick on? Well, there is the achievement bit. My theory is that a lot of juicy villains started out as potential annoying characters, and then the author inadvertently made them more and more fun until they became the person we root for when we're tired of a priggish hero or virtuous heroine (which in my case would be pretty much all the time). It's hard not giving into the temptation of making the hero's arch-enemy someone it's a guilty pleasure to read or for that matter write about. So if you pull off creating a real pain in the neck, then yes, it's impressive. But then what?

There aren't that many p.g.a.-characters around, it's true. There's Raffles in "Middlemarch", and Rigaud becomes one at the end of "Little Dorrit"; up until then, he has only been one of Dickens's tamer villains, albeit one with a funny Frenchified speech-pattern. He is truly repulsive in blackmailer-mode, though. Maybe one thing these characters can do that colourful villains can't is to make us understand what a strong temptation it can be to kill someone, or at least what it feels like to want someone dead. If you put the question "Would Lady Deadlock be justified to kill Mr Tulkinghorn?" (and he is just as much a menace to her as Raffles is to Bulstrode) the answer, at least from a villain-lover like me, would be "NO, are you kidding?" If, on the other hand, the question is "Would Bulstrode be justified to kill Raffles?" the answer, in my book, is "Probably not, but do it anyway. Please, just do it. Or Will can do it. Or Casaubon. What do you mean he's dead and doesn't have a motive?"

In the case of Guy Margate, his ghastliness is probably unavoidable given the theme of the novel. But what is the theme exactly? That it's not that great being saved? In that case, isn't it cheating making the saviour a d---head? Or is the theme guilt, something poor Edward is saddled with anyway as he feels responsible for his mother's suicide? Guy makes things worse: Edward wishes him gone, although he saved his life, which can't be good for that guilt complex. Yes, all right, that kind of works. But am I glad to be reading Jude Morgan's latest and not having to spend any more time in Guy Margate's company.

Rediscovering history

I used to take a keen interest in history. I even majored in it. During my university studies, I didn't mind ploughing through tomes of less-than-scintillating course material - maybe because it was my main occupation, my job so to speak. But something happened once I had my degree. I had to read up on the social history of 19th-century Prussia for a writing project, and I hated it. It has to be said, German historians aren't known for their gripping prose. Not even Bismarck was enough to inspire them, and as for "everyday" history which isn't that thrilling to begin with - every minute I spent boning up on it felt like a waste not only of time but of quality of life.

It has taken years to get over the shock. Even the history I used to like - "political" history as it's called, i.e. the lives and actions of colourful personalities - lost its charm for me. All I could see when reading a historical article, or a review of a historical book, or the book itself, were the tiresome tics of historians I'd endured during my studies. There it all was: the instinctive distrust of anything resembling a good story; the inability to express a clear opinion on what actually happened; the wooden reasoning which turned the actions of historical personages into an abstract game of money and power, played by lifeless men and women without any feelings, not even noticeable lust for power or greed; and last but not least the dry prose style that could turn the most fascinating life to dust. What didn't help matters was that I still had to browse through some books on "social" history, and found the subject did not grow on me. Some plucky historians - English ones mostly - have tried to make something of it. Instead of showing graphs depicting how much porridge was consumed in average by brick-layers under 37 in Munich on a Thursday, they would jolly things up with little narratives, like, say: "Most days when Franz Müller, a brick-layer approaching his thirty-seventh year, staggered to the breakfast table after having got up at five in the morning, he would find a portion of coarse-grained porridge prepared by his long-suffering wife (and we can only imagine how early she had to get up)" etc. These are brave attempts, but I think Franz Müller (if he had existed) would be the first one to admit that his life was not as fascinating as Bismarck's, or Robespierre's, or Elizabeth I's. Our lives are full enough of boring routines: what's the point of reading about other people's?

Political history is not quite dead, however, and I'm determined to rediscover my interest in it. I'm reading a book on the Habsburgs at the moment by Andrew Wheatcroft which is promising, and full of figures like the wily first Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf, who knew exactly when to be ruthless and when to be gracious; his son, Albert the One-Eyed, a tough egg who was killed by his own nephew; Frederick the Fat who was not exactly the shining hero the Electors hoped he would be but an honest-enough plodder; and the restless Maximilian I who was better at starting projects than at finishing them. Wheatcroft's cover for writing this kind of history, contemptously dismissed by Swedish historians as "kings and wars" (it sounds better in Swedish), is the trend for "cultural" history. Like Peter Burke in his enjoyable "The Fabrication of Louis XIV", Wheatcroft spends a lot of time on his subjects' image-fashioning. It's not so much the kings and emperors themselves that are important, see: it's their "image" and the myths that surround them. Whatever, though I could have done with more political intrigue and less descriptions of Triumphal Arcs etc. Any excuse for writing about the Albert the One-Eyeds of this world is to be welcomed.

I also have high hopes for a documentary series I've started watching on an otherwise quite impossibly high-brow Swedish channel (it normally features things like Russian TV series, classical concerts and analyses of global capitalism). It's about Henry VIII (again) and narrated by David Starkey. Is he for real? Do they still make historians like that? With the exception of the treatment of the Princes in the Tower, which I think even the sainted More would have found slapdash, I liked the first episode a lot, and I hope the series goes on in the same style. Kings and wars (or even better, kings and love affairs), bring them on!

Whatever possessed Richard Curtis? Maybe his inner naughty schoolboy

It was a shock to all of us who loved "Four Weddings and a Funeral", "Notting Hill" and, yes, even the much-maligned "Love, Actually" when Richard Curtis made the commercial for the 10:10 campaign called "No Pressure". The 10:10 people had to take it down from their website in no time, and no wonder - it was spectacularly poor judgement to post it in the first place. In brief, the set-up was this: the short film shows various scenes where someone high up - a teacher, a manager, a football trainer - explains the 10:10 campaign concept (to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10 per cent by 10 October 2010) and then asks his/her audience who would like to join the campaign - and who would not. "No pressure", the establishment figure says sweetly to the refuseniks, only to press a red button a moment afterwards that blows them to smithereens. The victims include a plucky French footballer, some hung-over-looking office workers, and two children. The commercial quite rightly caused an outrage, and the scandal was aptly called "Splattergate".

I'm not going to blog at any length about the utter sick-makingness of this short: this has already been done elsewhere. The only thing I believe people have missed out on commenting is that those killed aren't even vocal opponents to the Cause: they just don't feel like joining it. It made me think of the TV film "The Wave" which I watched about a hundred years ago. Not even opting out is an option. As a dystopia, the brave new world of "No Pressure" takes some beating.

The point that puzzled me when I'd stopped shivering at the contents was: where's the joke? Even if you did think, as at least some of the 10:10 campaigners seem to have done, that anyone who didn't embrace their cause was evil and deserved punishment, a revenge wish-fulfilment fantasy isn't the same thing as a joke, is it? If you hire Richard Curtis, it's reasonable to assume that you are looking for something funny. If you want a horror film and/or a cautionary tale, you would probably go somewhere else.

The worrying part about this is that Curtis's last film - "The Boat that Rocked" - was also completely humour-free, and not a little nasty. Frankly, it stank. So is Curtis losing his mojo?

There are those who claim that he didn't have much mojo to start with, but that's unfair. Also, in my opinion, his sentimentality, which is widely criticised, is not such a bad thing. I believe you have to risk falling into the sentimentality trap if you want to be truly moving. Sometimes the result may be mawkish, but at other times you can strike gold. I mistrust the praise "unsentimental" - it can often mean shallow, distant and cynical.

There's another side of Curtis which annoys me, though, and that is what you could call the naughty schoolboy side. I never really warmed to the Blackadder series, in spite of the fact that the main character was a villain, and one of the reasons was that especially the two first series were full of puerile and "bad taste" humour. I suppose that's why some people - in some cases the same ones who get toothache from all the happy endings in "Love Actually" - like it so much. It's probably what's called "anarchic humour". But I confess it does nothing for me, and I believe we have the "anarchic humour" element to blame for "The Boat that Rocked" and "No Pressure".

In the case of the "Boat", it reeked of the playground: here it was again, the old school hierarchy where the "cool" (and perfectly revolting) males rule the roost and can feel free to hurt and ridicule the "nerdy" (sweet-natured) ones at any time. I had hoped I would never see its like again, much less be invited to embrace it. This is also the film that finds it hilarious that one of the Rock Boat's opponents is called Twatt. The non-existent joke in "No Pressure" may, at a guess, have been that the expression "no pressure" often means the exact opposite. Then Curtis's inner schoolboy ran riot with the idea and put a "bang-bang-you're-dead" spin on it.

To sum up, Curtis has always been a bit hit and miss. He can score beautiful bull's-eyes like "Four Weddings" and "Notting Hill" - and if you think it's easy to create a perfect romcom, I suggest you have a try - and part-hits like "Blackadder", "Love Actually" and "The Vicar of Dibley". (The premise of the "Vicar" palls after a while, but the episode where the villagers stage a Nativity play is perfect: highlights include David trying to humanise Herod, Alice as the Virgin Mary reacting suprisingly well to Peter Brook-style directing and giving the vicar's boorish Joseph what for in an improvised rehearsal scene, and Geraldine actually standing up for her faith and explaining why she does think the story of Christ is "The Greatest Story Ever Told".) And then once in a while, Curtis misses the target completely. However, the "Doctor Who" episode "Vincent and the Doctor", which he scripted, shows signs that he is regaining his aim. It was uneven, but the ending, including the scene where the Doctor gently explains to his companion Amy why Vincent van Gogh still chose to kill himself even after they'd shown him that he would be appreciated one day, had me blubbing. It was moving and quite profound, and in its humane message a hundred years from the "No Pressure" disaster.

It's not fair to compare Trollope with Dickens - but who can resist it?

It's not every day you find yourself agreeing with übergrump Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph. There are few things he has much time for, including the front figures of his own party, and the negative attitude - even when you suspect he has a point, sometimes especially then - can be tiresome. I was completely on his side the other day, though, when he wrote an article on the time-honoured theme of Trollope vs Dickens, and concluded that though Trollope's novels can be amusing, he can't hold a candle to the inimitable.

You might well think "does it need saying"? Actually it does. There are a lot of smitten Trollopians out there who are convinced that their hero was the greatest writer of the 19th century, and that he compares favourably to just about everyone, but especially to Dickens. That's why I'm thrilled every time a Dickens fan hits back. To be fair, though, Dickens and Trollope have very little in common, and there's no real reason to compare them.

I have read two Trollope novels, "The Way We Live Now" and "Can You Forgive Her?". Now, that's not a very high percentage of the author's work, I agree, but as they are both supposed to be among his best work ("Can You Forgive Her?" is one of the famed Palliser novels), and as I have also sat through the very - er - thorough TV adaptation "Barchester Towers" and the more pacy Andrew Davies adaptation of "He Knew He Was Right", I think I have enough to go on to see a pattern of sorts. Trollope's genre seems to be the comedy of manners, where the author casts a more or less indulgent eye on his characters and chuckles "What fools these mortals be". Dickens, on the other hand, writes epic drama (except perhaps in the case of "The Pickwick Papers"). He digs deeper and is more dramatic and colourful because the genre requires it. To compare Trollope and Dickens novels is a bit like comparing the films "When Harry Met Sally" and "Chariots Of Fire". Trollope is less of a poor man's Dickens than a poor man's Thackeray - if the latter's "Vanity Fair" is anything to go by.

Also, Dickens is one of the giants of English literature. You wouldn't dismiss a modern author because he/she was not as good as Dickens. It's hard on Trollope that he should be dismissed for that reason, only because he happens to have been roughly contemporary with the great man. It's like criticising an Elizabethan playwright for not being as good as Shakespeare. It is possible to be very, very good and still not be able to compare with the author of "Great Expectations", "David Copperfield" and "Bleak House".

Having said all that, Trollope has himself and his fans to blame. Trollope satirised Dickens as "Mr Popular Sentiment", but didn't find it beneath him to imitate a typically Dickensian way of villain-naming, thus very unwisely inviting comparisons. (Obadiah Slope - Old Testament first name and one-syllable, unglamorous family name - geddit?) And I'm still not quite convinced that I think Trollope is particularly good, quite apart from how he compares to Dickens and the other towering writers of the 19th century (though I'm willing to give him a few more tries). His characters are so frightfully ordinary in their preoccupations and ditherings. Maybe this is why so many people like him - you would be more likely to run into a typical Trollopian character in real life than a typical Dickensian one. More's the pity.

"Downton Abbey" and the problem with Mary

My parents got hold of "Downton Abbey" when they were last in London (BBC take note: the ITV people had the series out on DVD about a day after it had stopped being aired), and as anticipated I enjoy it hugely. We've seen three episodes so far, and it gets better and better. Not that it was bad to begin with: it is gorgeously shot, well acted and sets up an intriguing drama right from the start. Even so, a little too much time was spent at first pondering the question whether the Earl of Grantham would "smash the entail" of his estate Downton Abbey. Like Mr Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice", the earl has only daughters, but as the eldest daughter was engaged to the male heir, that was all right - until the heir in question goes down with the Titanic. Now, I would have been more interested if I understood what breaking the entail, well, entailed. Can you smash an entail? If yes, how do you go about it? Why didn't Mr Bennet do it - what is the downside? The earl ends up not breaking the entail because he worries that it would harm the estate - but how could it do that, exactly? This is not explained, so the earl's decision looks idiotic rather than upright. But this is a minor quibble, as is the fact that the other plot line in episode one - where a possible suitor for Mary is revealed to have other interests entirely - bears a great resemblance to one of the lesser-known black-and-white episodes of "Upstairs Downstairs".

The series owes quite a heavy debt to "Upstairs Downstairs", and is very much in the tradition of the sumptuous costume drama. It is not "fresh" or "innovative", and that is exactly why it's so enjoyable. I don't care that we have seen hunting scenes, bullying cooks, loyal-to-the-death butlers, unpleasant blackmailers (good job on that one, earl - care to come by Middlemarch one day in a costume-drama crossover?), American heiresses and haughty matriarchs before. I'm happy to see more of them. It's also good to make the acquaintance of a Decent Toff for a change. As I've already hinted in this blog, I'm not exactly the President of the Scarlet Pimpernel Society for Preserving Our Beloved Nobility, but even I think the treatment the nobs have been getting in crime dramas such as "Midsomer Murders", "Morse" and "Lewis" - where they are continually portrayed as depraved and heavy-handedly snooty - is a bit unfair.

The characterisation could be more subtle - unlike, say, "Upstairs Downstairs", the characters are often clearly labelled as Good or Bad - but it doesn't really matter. In fact, the one character that really annoys me is supposed to be one of the Complex ones. Of the earl's three daugthers, the youngest, Sybil, is sweet-natured, and the middle one, Edith, is sour and envious. And then there's the eldest, Mary. I think I know what we're supposed to feel about her: that she is not as upper-class-bitchy as she seems, and that she only puts up a front to hide an inner vulnerability. She is redeemable, a bit like Bella Wilfer in "our Mutual Friend", and we're supposed to warm to her after initially having disliked her. Well, it doesn't work for me. I'm still on the initial dislike stage. There's little to suggest that this chilly beauty really has that much inner depth, and I certainly don't think she deserves to end up with the earl's new likeable, middle-class heir Matthew, which seems to be the way is the story is heading. They're already sparring in time-honoured, romance-starts-with-a-fight fashion. It would be nice if Matthew decided to go for sweet Sybil instead. Anyway, why aren't the earl and the countess making more of an effort in placing all three girls instead of just hawking Mary to all and sundry? Embittered Edith could make a comfortable match with some rich and patient fellow (a love match would probably go sour in a month, so a marriage of convenience seems to be the best thing you could hope for in her case), and Sybil is just as pretty as her eldest sister and good deal pleasanter to have around. Mrs Bennet would certainly not have made the mistake of putting all potential suitor eggs in one basket.