Customer Reviews

Victorian Chaise-Longue

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This is a disturbing story about the unusual time-travel journey of a seemingly frivolous young woman.

The story starts out in 1950's England. Melanie Langdon is young, pretty and wealthy, with an attentive husband and a new baby. The only shadow in her life is the serious case of tuberculosis she has been battling. When her doctor pronounces her well enough to leave her bed, she welcomes the change of view that her drawing room offers. She settles in on an ornate but ugly Victorian chaise-longue that she discovered in a junk-shop shortly before she fell ill, and falls asleep.

She awakens to find herself in an unfamiliar room, being called by an unfamiliar name. She slowly comes to discover that the year is 1864 and she is now someone named Milly Barnes. The only person or thing she recognizes is the chaise-longue that Milly is confined to...

There is some disturbing death imagery in this book that seems out of place at first but becomes more fitting as Melanie realizes that Milly is dying of tuberculosis. Worse, as the lines defining her life and Milly's life become more blurred, Melanie is fearful that she will not be able to return to the future in time to escape dying in the past. Melanie/Milly finds herself fighting to make sense of her life in strange, terrifying surroundings.

This is a short, suspenseful novel that you will probably want to read in one sitting. Once Melanie found herself in the past I read it more quickly than I would have liked to. I was eager to see if and how Melanie would be able to make it home. I don't think I will be able to forget this book soon and I'll probably wind up reading it again someday.

Even with the time-travel premise, this book reads more like conventional fiction, albeit with a strong leaning towards horror, than it does science fiction. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories with fantastic elements.

This little masterpiece of horror has been touted as one of the stars of the Persephone catalogue, and deservedly so. It bears comparison to THE YELLOW WALLPAPER but is more sophisticated than Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic tale (which Laski was unlikely to have known about in 1953 anyway). Laski's story centers on frivolous, wealthy Melanie, who lies in recovery from tuberculosis in the months after giving birth. Her doctor allows her to move from her sickbed to an embroidered Victorian chaise-longue she purchased while shopping for her cradle. As she lies upon it, she becomes aware she is no longer in the 1950s but trapped instead in the body of someone else in the High Victorian period--someone oddly familiar...

This little novella uses its fantasy framework to expose our relations to ourselves and to memory and to time, and also to analyze the change in conventions for women and behavior from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. It's a real forgotten classic, deserving of rediscovery both in the United Kingdom and the USA.

In its preface P.D. James describes this as "one of the most skillfully-told and terrifying short novels of its decade." It seems almost reckless to disagree with P.D. James over whether a book is "terrifying," but I do. Having previously read three other volumes from Persephone Books and thoroughly enjoyed them, I was prepared for another satisfying read when I began this one. However, I was disappointed.

The Victorian chaise-longue of the title is a large, ugly old thing that the ptotagonist finds herself inexplicably drawn to in an antiques shop and subsequently purchases. The protagonist, Melly, is a young housewife and new mother leading a comfortable existence in early 1950's (?) London. When she falls asleep on the chaise-longue she awakes to find herself in a rather stark Victorian home, being mistaken for someone else by people she has never seen before. The novel explores Melly's confusion, fear, and desperation as she tries to figure out who these people are and who they think she is, and tries to maintain her true identity and convince those around her of it. The plot is inventive, but while the themes of identity and the nature of reality are interesting from an intellectual standpoint, I feel that Ms. Laski is unsuccessful in making the reader identify with Melly and really FEEL her confusion and terror. I felt like a mildly-interested bystander as I read, and when I finished the book it promptly left me.

I feel that the mark of a really good book is that you can't get it out of your head when you've finished reading it - that you keep turning it over in your mind and considering it from different angles to savor anew. Sadly this novel did not reach that mark.

Set in 1950's London this time-slip novella proves a gem of fantasy--gone horribly wrong for its innocent protagonist. While expecting a baby she enters an antique shop, looking for a cradle. There she is inexplicably drawn to an old Victorian Chaise-longue--a couch/daybed: the vehicle for her dark adventures in time travel. Melanie enjoys a loving husband and a healthy baby, but she herself is somewhat frail as result of TB. While she spends long hours of recuperation on the chaise-longue her mind wanders to the subject of her own mortality; she begins to slip back and forth in time as he anxious husband hovers over her.

When Melanie awakens she finds herself in an unknown Victorian parlor and worse--in a distinctly negative social environment, populated by characters who mistakenly address her as
Milly. This gentle and helpless young woman reveals startling parallels to her own life. On Melanie's successive trips into this repressive past Milly's strict and unforgiving older sister dominates the poor girl with veiled allusions to guilt and shame. But what do Milly's ordeals have to do with Melanie? How can she possibly remember Milly's thoughts and emotions? With each "visit" back in time Melanie realizes more about her unfortunate doppelganger and her domineering sister--which increases Melanie's mental confusion until she begins to doubt her own identity and sanity.

Readers suspect that the Victorian chaise-longue was the scene of forbidden passion--a fact which Milly's sister will never forgive--nor permit her to forget. In these 99 pages the author expresses themes of the role of religion upon morality and the importance of keeping a grip on ones own identity despite apparent and conflicting inconsistencies. How can Melanie prevent herself from being trapped a century before her time, in the body of a young, unmarried mother who is dying of consumption? Chilling!

This short (99 pages) novella is a horror story of sorts. Melanie Langdon is a happily married woman who is recuperating from tuberculosis and the birth of her child, sometime in the 1950s (when the book was published). On her first day out of her sickroom, Melanie lays upon an old Victorian chaise-lounge, and finds herself transported back in time, into the body of Milly, a single woman living in 1864.

Such a short novel and so complicated to explain. It's a horror story, but completely unlike anything I've ever read before. It's also a time slip novel, but again, unlike anything I've ever read before. Melanie/Milly is incredibly preoccupied with the idea of death, for one thing; I know of no other time travel book in which a character actually imagines her alter-ego in the past as rotting and decaying. It's pretty creepy, to say the least.

It's a novel which is incredible preoccupied with the idea of being "saved," in a religious sense, and about identity--it turns out that Melanie and Milly are much more similar, in fact, than you might think at first (in fact, Mealnie finds herself actually remembering Melly's thoughts, which is also pretty freaky). I'm not sure I really understood all the ecclesiastical stuff, and I wasn't too keen on how melodramatic this novella was at times. Also, we never really, truly are told what Milly's story is; Melanie has to find things out by inference, which means that the reader does the same thing. Still, there were parts of the novella I enjoyed; it may have just been too much for me.