Lady Edith Crawley

I feel bad for not liking Edith Crawley more. She’s the middle sister in Downton Abbey’s troika, and in classic middle child fashion she’s constantly overlooked. She isn’t as charming and poised and beautiful as her older sister, Mary; she isn’t as clever and political as her younger sister, Sybil; she isn’t, in fact, much of anything, except lonely and pathetic.

It’s because of this loneliness that I feel bad for not liking Edith more; I want to make up for her isolation by liking her as a viewer. But while loneliness can be an appealing quality, being pathetic isn’t, and in the first season Edith is pretty pathetic. She’s miserable where she is, both physically and mentally, but she doesn’t have the guts or the vision to get anywhere else.

Despite being inferior to Mary in essentially everything their society considers important in women, Edith nurtures a rivalry between them. Mary is more than willing to act as Edith’s rival, and her needling cruelty to someone so inferior to her does her no credit, but the fact that Edith continues such a lopsided contest makes Edith look like a fool. Edith’s one success, engaging the affections of Sir Anthony Stralin, feels less like a triumph than an exhausted relief: finally someone likes her!

And then, of course, Edith’s own actions come back to destroy this success. In a fit of rage, Edith writes to the Turkish embassy about Mary’s liaison with Kemal Pamuk, hoping to wreck Mary’s reputation. It’s an astonishingly cruel act, as bad as Thomas’s and O’Brien’s quest to get Bates fired. Maybe even worse; Thomas and O’Brien just want Bates out of the way, and attempt to do it in a way that will incidentally ruin his life, while for Edith ruining Mary’s life is the point.

But despite the magnitude of this act of cruelty, Edith still can’t ascend to the dizzying heights of tragic, romantic evil. She’s still essentially a small person, motivated by petty jealousy and self-absorption. When Mary catches her out, Edith offers excuses. The embassy had the right to know what happened, she claims, voice quavering, and she sounds like she’s trying very hard to believe her own rationalization.

Compare Mary’s revenge: she lies to Sir Anthony Stralin, telling him that Edith has been regaling them all with the tale of the silly old bore (Sir Anthony) who is going to propose to her at the garden party. Sir Anthony flees, Edith stares after him in devastation and then glares at Mary, and Mary raises her glass in a toast.

Even at cruelty, Mary beats Edith hands down: more stylish, more incisive, and not inclined to offer mealy-mouthed excuses. No wonder Edith hates her guts. How could she help being miserably jealous?

Edith is a living representation of the idea that no one will love you if you don’t love yourself - which I hate, by the way; how are you supposed to learn to love yourself if no one loves you? Love doesn’t exist in a vacuum! But the fact that I don’t like the saying doesn’t mean that it’s false; it’s hard to see how anyone will find value in someone who rates herself as low as Edith does. Even what modest qualities she has are eaten up by jealousy.

Fortunately for Edith, in the second season she finds people who - if they don’t love her - at least appreciate her: the farmer she flirts with in episode two (which shows a shoddy side of her character, but nonetheless boosts her confidence. I should write something about cross-class relationships in Downton Abbey), the wounded soldiers who convalesce at Downton - I bet she was devastated that Downton didn’t become a permanent convalescent home.

It doesn’t make her prettier or more perspicacious - she’s all too ready to believe a wounded soldier who claims he’s Downton’s lost heir - but it does mean that when she tells Sir Anthony Stralin in the Christmas special that she’s not giving up on him, it finally sounds like she really wants him, and isn’t just settling because she’s desperate for anyone to love her.

23. Peony in Love, + the movie of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

There’s a movie version of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan! In which they’ve apparently introduced a parallel modern-day story. I’m not sure I approve of this tampering.

But nonetheless I must watch the movie, if only so I can shred it properly if it proves unworthy of the book. I loved the book: it’s set in a rural province in nineteenth century China and chronicles the lives of a pair of ceremonial soulmate penpals, who use a special form of writing known only to women to write letters to each other on fans.

LETTERS ON FANS, you guys, what could be more awesome? And they draw on a traditional poetic vocabulary of favorite metaphors as they write, too, which utterly charmed me. I now wish to write all my friends letters in which I tell them we are like two mandarin ducks floating on a pond. I’m sure they’ll all think that’s incredibly normal.

I also read Lisa See’s Peony in Love, and you GUYS, the heroine is a 17th century Chinese fangirl. She owns twelve different copies of the opera The Peony Pavilion and spends acres of time loafing around reading it and is transported with delight when she gets to attend an ACTUAL PERFORMANCE.

But after a chance meeting with a charming young man in the opera audience, Peony - just like the heroine of her beloved opera, Liniang - contracts lovesickness. So fiercely does she pine for her young man that she starves herself to death. (And people complain that Twilight is bad for girls.) Apparently lovesickness was the disease for smart, dreamy young ladies in 17th century China.

Incidentally, 17th century China? Super interesting! Mid-century, there was a period of great political instability, and while the menfolk were occupied with the world falling down around their ears, the women took the opportunity to leave their houses and form poetry groups and publish piles and piles of books. Sort of like the 17th century French salons where women gathered to write fairy tales - a brief blossoming of opportunities for talented women, which closed up as society stabilized and was then forgotten.

It’s too bad that the Chinese women poets and the French women fairy tale writers never met, and probably couldn’t have surmounted the enormous language barrier if they had. I bet they would have had a blast together.