Customer Reviews

The Virginians 1858-1859 (The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray - Volume 15)

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In a late Eighteenth Century setting, between fashionable London and backward Virginia, two twin brothers from the nobility spend their formative period trying to flee a domineering dowager mother in different ways - the older a saturnine, melancholy character, the younger an easy going type. Both, in their own way, succeed; but both reach old age feeling themselves equally swindled. The usual Thackeray touch of good humoured aristocratic melancholy aimed at bourgeois philisteism. A lot of good episodes also. Only, for XXIst. Century standards, enormouly long-winded and difficult to read from cover to cover. However, perservere, and you will find yourself rewarded as you finish.

I've just begun reading "Virginians" and am in the middle of the chapeter where the two Esmond (or Warrington) brothers want to engage the young George Washington in a duel in order to prevent him from marrying their widowed mother, the unsufferable and domineering Rachel Warrington. After the subdued melancholy of a life ruled by unrequitted love in _Henry Esmond_ this one is full of bantering humour and as always Thackeray offers a lush and lusty, almost carnal prose. It's slow-going, of course, but is a book that as all good XIXth. Century novels demands the modern reader to stand fast and not let it go (I'm reading it partly at the gym, during ergometric bycicle spellls, so I must keep reading or face boredom). After you have clung to it, the book offers you all in the way of tasty morsels.