The Observations is the first novel by UK short story and film writer Jane Harris. It’s a Gothic-style novel set in the 1860s (therefore, it’s ‘contemporary Victorian pastiche’, if you really want a genre).
The main character and narrator, teenaged Bessy Buckley, has fled the poisonous environs of Glasgow and finds a new job as maidservant to Arabella Reid on an isolated country estate. Arabella’s husband is often away pursuing his ambition to enter Parliament; Arabella, meanwhile, is more than a little erratic. She demands Bessy follow a series of strange and repetitive orders and that she keep a minute journal (one of the ‘observations’ of the title) of her actions and thoughts.
We follow Bessy as she seeks to unwind the puzzle of Arabella’s obsession and the mystery of what happened to the ‘perfect’ previous maidservant, Nora; we also gradually learn why she escaped Glasgow and the appalling nature of her mother and past life.
The book is nicely told, preserving the mystery long enough to make reading on a necessity, rationing out the darkness inherent in the life of a working-class girl in those times, leavening it with humour, and, though somewhat sensationalist, deftly avoiding melodrama or cheesy saved-by-white-knight romance (I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that Bessy solves her own problems her own way).
Bessy is a fantastic narrator, with a unique voice and a fine sense of humour; her cheery, if somewhat thoughtless, revenge when she discovers Arabella’s own observations is clever and merciless and precipitates the suitably Victorian gothic chain of events that drives the last part of the novel. Her growing, though fraught, relationship with the struggling Arabella is at the core of the novel.
Jane Harris doesn’t appear to have a website. You can read more about her and the book here.
Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au
