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UBC: The Leavenworth Case
Aug. 10th, 2009 01:05 pmGreen, Anna Katharine. The Leavenworth Case. 1878. Teddington: Echo Library, 2008.
I first read about Anna Katharine Green in Murderess Ink (1979). (I notice on looking at it now that Murderess Ink describes Charles Rohlfs as a "furniture tycoon," a grossly inaccurate label given that throughout their married life, it was Anna Katharine Green's income that supported the family. On the evidence of the exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Rohlfs was a brilliant furniture designer, but that's not at all the same thing.) I've been curious about Green ever since, so I was delighted that, not only did the exhibit mention her, but the exhibition store also had a copy of her first novel, The Leavenworth Case.
It's a rather odd affair. Sentimental, melodramatic, full of inflated rhetoric (the exhibit mentioned that Charles Rohlfs, who wanted to be an actor before he turned to furniture design, starred in a dramatization of The Leavenworth Case, and from reading the book and from what little I know of Victorian theatrical sensibilities, I was not at all surprised). Class and gender roles are strictly defined and strictly adhered to, and I got tired of the surpassing beauty of Mary and Eleanore Leavenworth (not to mention Eleanore's self-sacrificing nobility) long before any of the characters did. And everybody talks too much. It is very very VERY Victorian. (I was not exactly surprised to learn from her wikipedia entry that Anna Katharine Green opposed women's suffrage.) On the other hand, as a mystery, it's quite well done. She plays fair, and amongst all the histrionics there's some psychological acuity. (There's one particular red herring that turns out, when interpreted correctly, to be an especially revealing clue.) Her narrator is frequently as dumb as a box of hammers, but she never goes more than a chapter before having him brought up short and redirected. It does not transcend any of its conditions of production, but taking those givens into consideration, it's a well-crafted example of its species.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same of the physical object. Echo Library is a POD press, and their edition of The Leavenworth Case could be Exhibit A in the case against Print On Demand. There are a great many typographical errors. Some of them are clearly the results of scanning in the source text and printing it without filtering it through a human reader first: the chunk of missing text that has to be more than a line long, but might be anything from half a paragraph to a page; two pages of the book where the first letter of every line of the source text was cut off in scanning (my favorite is "whirling slowly around in his hair"--that c makes all the difference in the world); the creative misprint "nanias" for "names" and a handful of other cases where the scanner's text-recognition software goofed ("Leavenworth" frequently becomes "Leaven worth" and once "heaven-worth"). And there are errors and omissions that seem more the results of not caring about the book. The text refers to diagrams in three different places (the reconstruction of a partially burned letter (correspondence), mysterious letters (alphabet) engraved in a windowpane, a diagram of a house with a significant room marked), but they are not reprinted (the windowpane irks me particularly, because the narrator doesn't tell us what the letters are, so there's no way to reconstruct the missing diagram even in my imagination). And finally, the cover and title page misspell her name. KATHARINE with two As, not KATHERINE. So while I'm very grateful that Echo Library reprinted The Leavenworth Case, I do wish they'd taken slightly more care with it.
I first read about Anna Katharine Green in Murderess Ink (1979). (I notice on looking at it now that Murderess Ink describes Charles Rohlfs as a "furniture tycoon," a grossly inaccurate label given that throughout their married life, it was Anna Katharine Green's income that supported the family. On the evidence of the exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Rohlfs was a brilliant furniture designer, but that's not at all the same thing.) I've been curious about Green ever since, so I was delighted that, not only did the exhibit mention her, but the exhibition store also had a copy of her first novel, The Leavenworth Case.
It's a rather odd affair. Sentimental, melodramatic, full of inflated rhetoric (the exhibit mentioned that Charles Rohlfs, who wanted to be an actor before he turned to furniture design, starred in a dramatization of The Leavenworth Case, and from reading the book and from what little I know of Victorian theatrical sensibilities, I was not at all surprised). Class and gender roles are strictly defined and strictly adhered to, and I got tired of the surpassing beauty of Mary and Eleanore Leavenworth (not to mention Eleanore's self-sacrificing nobility) long before any of the characters did. And everybody talks too much. It is very very VERY Victorian. (I was not exactly surprised to learn from her wikipedia entry that Anna Katharine Green opposed women's suffrage.) On the other hand, as a mystery, it's quite well done. She plays fair, and amongst all the histrionics there's some psychological acuity. (There's one particular red herring that turns out, when interpreted correctly, to be an especially revealing clue.) Her narrator is frequently as dumb as a box of hammers, but she never goes more than a chapter before having him brought up short and redirected. It does not transcend any of its conditions of production, but taking those givens into consideration, it's a well-crafted example of its species.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same of the physical object. Echo Library is a POD press, and their edition of The Leavenworth Case could be Exhibit A in the case against Print On Demand. There are a great many typographical errors. Some of them are clearly the results of scanning in the source text and printing it without filtering it through a human reader first: the chunk of missing text that has to be more than a line long, but might be anything from half a paragraph to a page; two pages of the book where the first letter of every line of the source text was cut off in scanning (my favorite is "whirling slowly around in his hair"--that c makes all the difference in the world); the creative misprint "nanias" for "names" and a handful of other cases where the scanner's text-recognition software goofed ("Leavenworth" frequently becomes "Leaven worth" and once "heaven-worth"). And there are errors and omissions that seem more the results of not caring about the book. The text refers to diagrams in three different places (the reconstruction of a partially burned letter (correspondence), mysterious letters (alphabet) engraved in a windowpane, a diagram of a house with a significant room marked), but they are not reprinted (the windowpane irks me particularly, because the narrator doesn't tell us what the letters are, so there's no way to reconstruct the missing diagram even in my imagination). And finally, the cover and title page misspell her name. KATHARINE with two As, not KATHERINE. So while I'm very grateful that Echo Library reprinted The Leavenworth Case, I do wish they'd taken slightly more care with it.
