I was nineteen when I first read Titus Groan.

It was like no other story I’d read for my fantasy fiction class. The others were all brighter and Tolkienesque, and when I closed my eyes while reading them I’d picture quite a lot of green -- blurry, rippling green, as if I were in the midst of a great sunny forest and I let my eyes unfocus till the leaves slipping over each other became vague watercolor blots. Titus Groan, on the other hand, was just as despairing a book as its title might suggest. Despite that, the kingdom of Gormenghast held a strange sort of fascination for me. As I flicked through the opening pages, I could almost feel the layers of dust in the Hall of Bright Carvings brush and eddy against my feet. I heard every rattle of a doorknob, every echo, every ominous crack of Flay the butler’s knees. I was, when I read this, grappling with not just my second organic chemistry class but the utter terror it inspired in me, the deep inescapable fear that come on, you idiot, if you don’t understand this stuff, how are you going to survive medical school? Indeed, when I reopened my copy of Titus Groan while writing this essay, I found some fiendish-looking diagram, scratched carefully below the title on the title page, for a reaction I neither remember nor care to remember. I wasn’t to learn properly about Gothic fiction for another two years, but the sheer dourness, the almost farcical awfulness of it all must have appealed to me in some way. Here, the story must have whispered to me, here is a world that does not try to be beautiful, that makes no pretensions to being okay.

And then there was Fuchsia.

I never quite understood why the book started when it did -- Titus himself was only a baby for the entire story, and the only significant things he did were to rip a page out of a book and toss a couple sacred symbols into a lake. The true hero of the story, to me, was his much older sister Fuchsia Groan. In a desaturated world filled with black ivy, white dust, and the Grey Scrubbers who take on the slab-like unremarkability of the stones they are forever doomed to clean, Fuchsia is one defiant splash of color. Even her name is brighter than anything else in Gormenghast. She wears a yellow scarf and a “flaming red” dress, and a green cord encircles her waist. She is as vivid as the Bright Carvings the servant Rottcodd dusts so assiduously each day, but while they are immobile, Fuchsia is all impulse and movement. Her bedroom walls are covered in “impetuous drawings in charcoal” possessed of “an extraordinary energy,” and the whole room has “an appearance of riot.” Everything she does is awkward, erratic, unpredictable -- in stark contrast to the plodding rituals of Gormenghast, the place she hopes to first inherit and then destroy. Her twin aunts Cora and Clarice are a vision of her own future: condemned to uselessness, to powerlessness, all because Titus’s birth pushed her aside the same way her father’s birth pushed Cora and Clarice aside. The attic room near her bedroom, her kingdom, is full of discarded, irrelevant miscellany, and is it any wonder she feels so drawn to this mess, to Gormenghast’s loose bits and bobs that don’t quite fit anywhere?

Fuchsia knows no moderation; she hates so passionately, screaming when Titus is born, but she also loves so passionately. From pages 58 and 59:

“There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. …
The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes’ handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love.”

And Fuchsia is the one feeling such deep love, for her attic full of broken tossed-aside things, for her own little kingdom. Nannie Slagg, first Fuchsia’s and now Titus’ caretaker, feels a shadow of this just a few pages earlier, but her swell of emotion is more in the direction of a painful pride, and furthermore she is fragile while Fuchsia is strong.

I loved Fuchsia so, so dearly. I loved her impetuousness, her resentment, the sheer teenage-girl-ness of her. I saw in her every moment of rebellion, every awkward gesture I’d ever made when I was around her age (and there were many). I have felt exactly as strange and dissatisfied and out of place as she did. I can’t ever bring myself to read any subsequent Gormenghast books, because she dies in the second one, and Gormenghast would just be too bleak and hopeless without her in it.

~~~

I was twenty-one when I first read Lady Audley’s Secret.

The thing about growing up a lonely, atheist blue dot in a deep-red, religious state like Oklahoma is that you get very used to keeping your anger to yourself. You’re outnumbered. It’s not as if railing against people would change their minds anyway. Even within my own family, though my parents are the ones who raised me to be a progressive, I had to keep my mouth shut on some subjects. We went to church every Sunday morning because that was just what we did. I sat in the pews beside my mother, mentally rolling my eyes at… well, most things that happened in a routine Lutheran church service. I drew flowers on the backs of the bulletins. I grew thorns. I stewed in my own discontentment for years, and yet when I had to complete the Confirmation ceremony (also known as Affirmation of Baptism) at the end of eighth grade, my traitorous voice didn’t waver at all when I said, “I do, and I ask God to help me.”

Wishing secondary characters could take over the narrative reins of a story seems to be a pattern with me. It’s not just that I’m always drawn to the sidelined and discarded characters, though -- seventeen-year-old Alicia Audley is genuinely far more interesting than the major point-of-view character, her ponderous and at times grossly misogynist cousin Robert. Not only is Alicia angry, but she also makes no secret of her anger. She has no filter. She rails against her father’s second marriage to the book’s title character, a woman not much older than her. She frequently makes Robert the target of her barbs, at one point in quick succession calling him “a peripatetic, patent refrigerator” and asking, “how should such a sluggish ditch-pond of an intellect as his ever work itself into a tempest?” At times she is downright mean, and yet her utter brashness was, and still is, alluring. In a society where every interaction is so heavily coded, her sheer honesty -- and, it should be said, her keen judgment, for she sees her stepmother and her cousin for exactly what they are, even though she doesn’t always know it -- was revelatory for me. Here was a girl who spoke her mind, no matter the circumstances, regardless of propriety.

Here was a girl who would never be silenced.

~~~

I was twenty-three when I first read The Voyage Out.

That summer was a rough, restless one. I’d been accepted to McMaster University for grad school, but I was still effectively stuck in Oklahoma, in the house where my family had lived for almost as long as I’d been alive, saving money and tying up what loose ends I could before August 30 came and my plane took off. I felt like I’d flipped ahead in a book and seen how many pages remained in the chapter I was on. One finger was stuck in the book, marking where the next chapter began, and I could see how close I was, but that wasn’t making me read any faster. Life still ticked by one word, one phrase, one sentence at a time. I was impatient. I was floating, drifting in between. This big adventure was so near I could taste it, and for a time the only thing I could do was taste it, a tang of anticipation like the smell of sea salt in the back of my throat.

Rachel Vinrace was my companion. She wasn’t actually a teenager, like Fuchsia or Alicia, but she was nonetheless so naïve at twenty-four, so sheltered and unworldly and so educated by her journey across the Atlantic Ocean, that she might as well be a teenager. Helen immediately pegs Rachel as inexcusably dense, as “vacillating” and “emotional,” with eyes “unreflecting as water.” Rachel’s education was haphazard at best, compounded by a lack of real interest in learning on her part, and at least before the titular voyage, she only has one partial friend at best. Hers is a lonely sort of half-life, a vague floating sort of existence. Helen softens towards Rachel after a bit but still characterizes her as “a live if unformed human being” and “experimental.”

In many ways, Rachel is like a grown-up, much more acquiescent version of Fuchsia Groan. When we first meet her, she is “unnaturally braced” for meeting her aunt and uncle, “as though they were of the nature of an approaching physical discomfort,” similar to the way in which Fuchsia, in her own first appearance, stands “in about as awkward a manner as could be conceived.” Later in the book, after the Euphrosyne has reached its nameless South American destination, Rachel is restless. She goes for a walk and ends up nearly jogging, “her body trying to outrun her mind.” On at least one occasion, her volatility, her sheer unpredictability scares her fiancé, Terence Hewet, on a deep, spiritual level. Rachel’s room in South America is like a palace to her, much like Fuchsia’s beloved attic. As well, both Rachel and Fuchsia have a profound capacity for love and for emotion in general, even if they don’t always know how to deal with it or convey it. The first time Rachel experiences such deep yearnings, after Richard Dalloway kisses her, it’s physically painful.

Helen at one point theorizes about the “nameless atrocities” Willoughby must have inflicted on his daughter. She doesn’t elaborate, though the mind (my mind, at least) automatically goes to dark, dark places at a remark like that; but in that day and age, how much would Willoughby really have had to do to make Rachel naïve as a newborn deer at twenty-four years old? Woolf herself talks in “A Room of One’s Own” about the million little ways in which men have devalued women throughout history. A woman with Shakespeare’s genius, she writes, would have been “a woman at strife against herself.” She would have been “so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts” that actually producing Shakespeare’s quality of work, or even just committing some small act of defiance against the society that degrades her personhood, would have led to her destruction. She would have been “snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind,” Woolf continues, “must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that.”

So really, Willoughby wouldn’t have had to do much to convince Rachel that the whole world, or the whole of it that mattered to someone like her, was her house with her aunts and her walking route and the bits of London she saw every day. The world would have done his job for him, much better than he alone ever could.

While Helen seems to pity Rachel, though, I think there’s something endearing about Rachel’s liminality, specifically the way in which Rachel embraces it. “I like walking in Richmond Park,” Rachel tells Terence Hewet, “and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on… I love the freedom of it -- it’s like being the wind or the sea.” Without a doubt, Rachel still longs to form some sort of deep emotional connection, as she tentatively does with Clarissa Dalloway, and then with Helen and Hewet and Hirst. It’s easy to subsequently dismiss that statement as a denial of the depths of her loneliness, but I find it far more plausible that, like many self-respecting introverts, she relishes her alone time, her floating time, as much as she does a small number of close friendships and the endless spectacle of other people. Rachel is aimless, rootless, but she doesn’t want to put down roots, and it is precisely that quality which frightens Hewet so much. “You don’t want me as I want you,” Hewet says to her late in the book. “You’re always wanting something else.”

~~~

Two out of these three girls die, Fuchsia (as mentioned) in the second Gormenghast book and Rachel at the end of The Voyage Out. Alicia is silenced in a different way, by an impending marriage to a suitor she’d previously spurned. The world always has its way with girls like that, it seems. The world will always win.

But in a sense, it doesn’t matter to me that they die. It matters more that they live first, that for a glorious little while, they get to pace and scream and read novels and draw with charcoal and speak their minds. I can always reread their books, flip to my favorite parts and revel in their exploits, in their sheer vitality. “There’s something I can’t get hold of in you,” Terence Hewet says to Rachel -- and in a sense, his words are more true than he could ever know. Paradoxically, it is the precise act of recording these girls’ stories, of capturing each moment of rebellion on ink and paper, that makes them ultimately, deliciously untameable.