Brook Evans

Posted on | May 4, 2010 | 12 Comments

Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell is a Persephone Book that never jumped out at me from the Persephone catalogue (in which it is number twenty-six) and may have otherwise passed me by if it hadn’t been for this review written by Rachel of Book Snob last year.  Rachel made the title appeal in a way it never had before; she made me aware of this Persephone amongst many.  At the time Persephone were reprinting the book and by the time it was available again a few other Persephones had wangled themselves onto my Persephone priority list ahead of it; however, this weekend I visited the Lamb’s Conduit Street shop with Teresa of Shelf Love and succumbed to a copy, which I then started off Persephone Reading Week with.

Another of Susan Glaspell’s novels has been rescued from obscurity and reissued by Persephone, Fidelity; I haven’t read -nor acquired- it yet but I have heard promising things.  Glaspell was an American novelist and playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930 with her play Alison’s House; Brook Evans was published in 1928 to critical acclaim.  Of further interest (to me, at least) is that the study of literary tradition in American Women Writers, A Jury of Her Peers by Elaine Showalter (forthcoming in paperback from Virago Press later this year), adapted its title from a Glaspell short story and features the writer herself.

Brook Evans is divided into three movements/acts (over five books within-the-book) covering events in 1888, 1907 and its coda, 1928; the setting moves from Illinois to West Colorado to France and back to Illinois.  The endpaper -pictured above- was a linen from the year of its publication and also set in both the United States and France, designed by a French architect in New York.

Essentially Brook Evans is a love-story; a powerful tale of never-dying love in all its strength and all its pain.  Naomi Kellogg is nineteen years old and in love with Joe Copeland, whose mother does not approve of their relationship; Naomi and Joe meet in secret, down by the brook dividing their families’ land and plan on marrying once the harvest is in.  In the opening book, Joe dies in a machinery accident and Naomi discovers she is pregnant; her religious family marry her off to Caleb Evans, a well-respected man who loves Naomi, albeit aware of her pregnancy, and who takes her off to Colorado.  Nineteen years later the novel picks up its story with its eponymous heroine, Brook, daughter of Naomi and Joe who has been raised by Naomi and Caleb and is ignorant of the truth behind her conception and parentage.  All of this occurs within the first fifty pages and the next two-hundred and fifty is Brook’s story.  All Naomi wants for her daughter is a love that is all-consuming, that she will live for; Naomi had that love herself and seeks it for her daughter.

Brook Evans is powerful and persuasive in its argument for love; it is an exposition of love and the forms it takes, whether it be romantic love, maternal or paternal love, and the fidelity and obligations that can ensue.  The novel’s themes are universal and its concerns as modern as they were during the Modernist period; the nature of love is a timeless  subject as too are the motifs of mother/daughter relationships and of fatherhood versus paternity.  The eventual tension between Naomi and Brook, of mother knowing best and the daughter resisting and finding out for herself the meaning and feeling of love resonated with me; all daughters and all mothers should be able to recognise some of the conflicting emotions that are evoked in Brook Evans between these two women who are united and also divided by love.

The novel is told from the alternating perspectives of both Naomi and Brook; the final book, however, is told from the perspective of another party and is satisfying as a conclusion, more so because of its effective use of dramatic irony.  Brook frustrated me some and both her and Naomi’s decisions are at times misguided but Glaspell has created strong, emotive characters in them and in Caleb.  I found Brook Evans moving and unbearably poignant in parts but ultimately it strongly advocates love.

Of course now I want to read Fidelity.

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A book blog written by a reader who enjoys The Beatles and who is not wholly averse to hardbacks.

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