Comic Rhythms and Narrative Tangents in The Hand of Ethelberta

Abstract

Drawn from the opening paragraphs, the passage immediately outlines the heroine’s family and upbringing. A self-conscious but teasing narrator sounds the keynote of Wessex and the disparity between social appearance and actuality, before playfully alluding to ‘an infant of title who does not come into the story at all’, hinting at Ethelberta’s beauty, and introducing a suggestive gap between infancy and adolescence.² Romantic motifs of a secret marriage, honeymoon death, and unfeeling father-in-law, give way to a clear foreshadowing of a central theme: differences of social class, her mother-in-law’s insistence that she ‘was never to recognize her relations’.

Young Mrs. Petherwin stepped from the door of an old though popular inn in a Wessex town to take a country walk. By her look and carriage she appeared to belong to that gentle order of society which has no worldly sorrow except when its jewellery gets stolen; but, as a fact not generally known, her claim to distinction was rather one of brains rather than of blood. She was a respectable butler’s daughter, and began life as a baby christened Ethelberta after an infant of title who does not come into the story at all, having merely furnished to Ethelberta’s mother a means of occupying herself as head nurse. She became teacher in a school, was praised by examiners, admired by gentlemen, not admired by gentlewomen, was touched up with accomplishments by masters who were coaxed into painstaking by her many graces rather than by her few coins, and, entering a mansion as governess to the daughter thereof, was stealthily married by the son. He, a minor like herself, died from a chill caught during the wedding tour, and a few weeks later was followed into the grave by Sir Ralph Petherwin, his unforgiving father, who had bequeathed his wealth to his wife absolutely ... Latterly [Lady Petherwin] had brought the girl to England to live under her roof as daughter and companion, the condition attached being that Ethelberta was never openly to recognize her relations.¹