Misfortune - Hardcover

Stace, Wesley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224072765 ISBN 13: 9780224072762

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2005

Synopsis

Lord Geoffrey Loveall is the richest man in England, reclusive, and heretofore heirless lord of the sprawling manse of Love Hall. He arrives home one fateful morning with a most unusual package - a baby that he presents as the inheritor to the family name and fortune. In honour of his beloved sister, who died at the age of five, Loveall names the baby Rose Old. The household, relieved at the continuation of the Loveall line, assiduously ignores the fact that this Rose has a thorn...that she is, in fact, a boy. Rose grows up inside the endlessly fascinating maze of halls and lawns that make up Love Hall, along with the two inquisitive and ebullient servant children who are her only friends; all three are educated by Rose's adoptive mother Anonyma in the musty recesses of the Octagonal Library. Rose grows up blissfully unaware of her own gender, casually hitting boundaries at Love Hall's yearly cricket game and learning to shave her face even as she continues to wear more and more elaborate dresses, as befits a growing young lady. Until, of course, the fateful day when Rose's world comes crashing down around her, and she is banished from Love Hall as an impostor by those who would claim her place as heir. Filled with unexpected plot twists, outrageous characters, odd details and a vivid, velvety historical background, this is an epic, Dickensian story. Fanciful, whimsical and wry, it is also a moving meditation on the agony of adolescence and the universal difficulty of determining one's identity. Set in the early years of the nineteenth century, and an England at once as believable as Sarah Waters' and as grotesque as Mervyn Peake's, Misfortune is a gothic novel for our times - a huge, rich, funny, exciting work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.

About this title

Review

One of the most auspicious debuts of recent years, Wesley Stace's Misfortune follows the rise, fall, and triumphant return of Rose Old, a foundling rescued from a London garbage heap in 1820 by the richest man in Britain. Lord Geoffroy Loveall, whose character has been shaped by perpetual mourning for a sister who died in childhood, seizes on the infant as a replacement for his beloved sister. With the help of trusted servants, he arranges for the child to be lovingly brought up at his ancestral mansion, Loveall Hall--to all appearances, his biological daughter and unhoped-for heir. No matter that the baby is not a girl.

The story thus far is so engaging, and the details of Rose's childhood so playfully rendered (when she was first brought to Loveall Hall, the staff of 250 included a servant whose sole responsibility was to iron newspapers before their second reading), that it is with reluctance that the reader meets the inevitable rude, scheming relatives whose plotting will lead to the "misfortune" of the title. Luckily, Stace (the given name of the musician John Wesley Harding) takes too much delight in Rose to dump her back on the garbage heap, or at least not for long. The cross-dressing love child of Great Expectations and A. S. Byatt's Possession, Misfortune will find you breathlessly tracking the movements of its principal players, and applauding the most ridiculous twists of fate. --Regina Marler

Amazon.com Bonus Content
Born in Hastings and educated at Cambridge, Wesley Stace is also known as the musician John Wesley Harding. Musical influences are on display in his gender-bending debut novel, Misfortune, a historical tale set in 19th-Century England about an abandoned boy raised as a girl. Read on to listen to three original songs inspired by the book.

A Message from Wesley Stace
Songs weave their way throughout Misfortune--some are ballads, crucial to the plot and written by one of the characters, others are traditional songs sung at various points of the narrative, others are folk songs from a collection in the Octagonal Library of Love Hall, the home of the central family.

Songs aren't anything if they aren't sung, so I decided to match melodies and words and record some of them. I picked these because they were the first two. There will be a full record of the songs of Misfortune, performed by The Love Hall Tryst (myself, Kelly Hogan, Nora O'Connor, and Brian Lohmann) which will be released by Appleseed Recordings later this year. --Wesley Stace

"Lambkin"
From Chapter One: "For a moment, the laundress was unaware that there was anyone beneath. She began to sing as she worked and this is what finally breathed life into Pharaoh again. It was one of the old songs, his favourite of the many she sang: the story of Lambkin the builder who tortures Lord Murray's family when his note is refused. The purity of Annie's voice contrasted starkly with the words of her song and the street below:
"'Where is the heir of this house?' said Lambkin:
'Asleep in his cradle,' the false nurse said to him.
And he pricked that baby all over with a pin,
While the nurse held a basin for the blood to run in."
She had sung it so many times as a lullaby that the horror of the story was somehow soothing."

Listen to "Lambkin"

"Lord Lovel"
From Chapter Two: "Loveall recalled a previous Lord Loveall and the song that bore his name, and he sang it softly to the baby. This ancestor had deferred his marriage for seven years while he went travelling. He returned after only twelve months, but as he rode home, he heard the church bells ringing, "for Nancy Bell who died for a discourteous squire." He died too of grief, as he gazed on her corpse lying in its coffin, and was buried next to her. From her heart grew a red rose and from his heart a briar:
"They grew and grew to the church steeple
Till they could grow no higher
And he pricked that baby all over with a pin,
And there entwined in a true lover’s knot
For true lovers to admire."

Listen to "Lord Lovel"

"The Ballad of Miss Fortune"
"Miss Fortune" is the song from which came the original idea for Misfortune. The Ballad of Miss Fortune is a re-recording of this song from John Wesley Harding's album, Awake.

Listen to "The Ballad of Miss Fortune"

Music from John Wesley Harding

Awake	Adam's Apple	Here Comes the Groom
Trad Arr Jones	Confessions of St. Ace	John Wesley Harding's New Deal

About the Author

Wesley Stace makes records and performs under the name of John Wesley Harding. He has made ten albums, and his song 'I'm Wrong about Everythin' was on the soundtrack of High Fidelity. Aged 38, he was born in Hastings. He now lives in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0224072765
• ISBN 13: 9780224072762
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544