Daisy Goodwin
THe author and creator of iTV’s Victoria suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life
ONE of the advantages of giving up drink is I can always remember what happened the night before. At least I think it’s an advantage. Occasionally I feel nostalgic for the days it would take me a morning to piece together the terrible things I’d done the previous evening in groan-filled post-mortem phone calls to friends.
Now, I’m the boring one who knows where the bodies are buried. These days I suspect I’m the person everyone wants to get away from at parties because I have that look that says ‘you won’t remember anything in the morning, but I will.’ Part of me likes the feeling of control, but I miss being the life and soul of the party.
I was never as bad though as the devilish Barbara Skelton, the anti-heroine of Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music Of Time series who, at a debutante ball, empties a sugar pot over the odious Kenneth Widmerpool for asking her to dance. The irony is that she ends up marrying him — the moral of the story being that some people are not deterred by bad behaviour — in fact, it makes them even more slavish.
I always feel sorry for Mary Bennet, the plain sister in Pride And Prejudice, who tries to make up for her lack of looks with her accomplishments and who takes her music to the Netherfield ball and insists on playing even though she is nowhere near as talented as she imagines. There is an exquisitely awful moment when her father notices that she has outstayed her welcome and says: ‘Come Mary, you have delighted us long enough.’ The humiliation fairly scorches the page, a lesson to all parents on how to scar their children for ever more.
In a crucial scene in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, the heiress Lady Glencora, who has married the politician Plantaganet Palliser to please her family, meets the man she really loves, Burgo Fitzgerald, at a ball. They waltz, and when Burgo whispers to Glencora that they should elope she agrees. But the next morning she realises she does not quite have the courage to go ahead with it. Fortunately, as it turns out, because Burgo is only after her money. Her husband, however, has seen how close she was to leaving and takes her to Europe to work on their marriage.
Sometimes it takes the drama of a party to highlight the obvious.