{"id":1646,"date":"2012-06-13T06:31:03","date_gmt":"2012-06-13T06:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1646"},"modified":"2012-10-23T10:46:43","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T10:46:43","slug":"a-humble-companion-by-laurie-graham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1646","title":{"rendered":"A Humble Companion by Laurie Graham"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Quercus 7 June 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

320pp, hardback, \u00a316.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Charlotte Moore<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Humble Companion<\/em> is the adult equivalent of the juicy historical novels I enjoyed in my early teens, bursting with details of food, clothes, animals, carriages, greed, jealousy, madness, unrequited love, and a touch of incest. The delightful narrator is Nellie Welche, \u2018humble companion\u2019 to Princess Sofy, twelfth of the fifteen useless children of George III. \u2018My position in Sofy\u2019s life was an unusual one, the result of a royal experiment,\u2019 Nellie explains, \u2018a radical notion dreamed up by the most unradical of kings, old George, that his daughter should have a playfellow, a humble companion plucked from the ranks of ordinary people so that she might have a better understanding of the world.\u2019<\/p>\n

Sofy never does achieve a better understanding of the world, or of much else. Her unenviable life is frittered away in a series of underheated royal apartments, waiting for a marriage that never happens. One of her few diversions is to visit the royal menageries where the exotic animals lead lives as thwarted as her own. Nellie Welche cannot release Sofy from her prison but she can give her friendship. In return Sofy, who manages to squirrel away a spectacular secret in the course of her dull life, entrusts this secret to Nellie.<\/p>\n

Nellie has two outstanding features – a port wine stain that disfigures her face, and a writer\u2019s gift. The two go together; the birthmark sets Nellie apart, turning her into an observer, while at the same time enabling her to empathize with the woes of others, regardless of their social standing. At court she meets the novelist Fanny Burney whom she tries to emulate. But for all her independence of mind, Nellie still needs the security of marriage. Jack Buzzard, a hard-headed, ambitious confectioner, is a dependable husband, but when he discovers the manuscript of Nellie\u2019s novel, he burns it. It\u2019s a man\u2019s world in which female talent and aspiration must be furtive. Nellie doesn\u2019t complain, she just secretly rewrites the whole thing.<\/p>\n

Laurie Graham has adhered quite closely to the known facts about Princess Sofy\u2019s life. The vast, corrupt family of George III proves that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction. Between them, the fifteen princes and princesses display every imaginable permutation of vice and ineptitude, making one realize how remarkable was QueenVictoria\u2019s achievement in refashioning the Royal Family into an ideal of respectability and rectitude. But Graham does not merely present us with a gallery of grotesques. Nellie\u2019s narrative voice is sardonic, critical, but always humane. I don\u2019t know whether she\u2019s based on historical fact, but she\u2019s one of the most real heroines I\u2019ve come across for a long time. An entertaining and salutary Jubilee read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Charlotte Moore<\/p>\n

Nellie has two outstanding features – a port wine stain that disfigures her face, and a writer\u2019s gift. The two go together; the birthmark sets Nellie apart, turning her into an observer, while at the same time enabling her to empathize with the woes of others, regardless of their social standing. At court she meets the novelist Fanny Burney whom she tries to emulate. But for all her independence of mind, Nellie still needs the security of marriage. Jack Buzzard, a hard-headed, ambitious confectioner, is a dependable husband, but when he discovers the manuscript of Nellie\u2019s novel, he burns it. It\u2019s a man\u2019s world in which female talent and aspiration must be furtive. Nellie doesn\u2019t complain, she just secretly rewrites the whole thing.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1646"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2937,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646\/revisions\/2937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}