Soon, Charlotte begins to question her father’s motives and various accounts of the family’s history.Īfter Henry calls for a new, gender-specific education, she learns much more about her Condition, which has nothing to do with germs. Though Charlotte’s instructor leaves Fayne House abruptly (and without explanation: another mystery), a few weeks of conversations with him expands her consciousness. She’s more or less housebound, she explains, because of her “Condition,” that of being “morbidly susceptible to germs.” On the anniversary of her mother’s death (an event shrouded in mystery ditto for Charlotte’s deceased elder brother), Charlotte’s life takes a radical turn when Henry hires Mr. Other than servants, her father - Henry, a “vegetableist” and “the embodiment of Virtue” - is Charlotte’s sole companion. Largely set in Edinburgh and Fayne House, an eroding manor situated on “a shifting array of boggy expanses” in the “Disputed Country” between Scotland and England, MacDonald’s novel launches with a narrator, preternaturally bright twelve-year-old Charlotte, describing a stale domestic routine. Audaciously big, a Hummer of a historical novel upholstered in damask, 722-page “Fayne” interrogates and spoofs integral aspects of the late Victorian era - sexuality, gender, class, science - through a vehicle that recalls an extinct Victorian specialty: the triple-decker novel.
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