Dragonwyck

This is a curiously gripping story of a young farm girl sent to live with the family of her fabulously rich relative in a gothic mansion on the Hudson. Miranda promptly falls in love with cousin Nicholas, who is wildly handsome and masterful. He is burdened with an enormously fat wife.

Dragonwyck, the gothic mansion, is oppressively gloomy, and has a laughing ghost that only family members can hear at critical times. The ghost has a leading role in the plot. Miranda has frequent sensations of icy dread at Dragonwyck.

Mirandas life among the rich is occasionally disrupted by historic events carefully researched by the author such as the Astor Place riot and the class wars over feudal land ownership. Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville pop up in the story too. This is all very interesting. But the main focus of the plot is the mounting sense of horror as Miranda discovers what manner of man she has married.

The plot is chock full of drama and tragedy as well as romance. I can well understand why it was made into a movie. The novel also has lessons to impart, rather like a Victorian novel.

This was the first of the Anya Seton books I read 40 plus years ago. and was the beginning of my addiction to her books. I subsequently read all of her publications – my very favorite book of all times is her Katherine. Through the years and circumstances, I no longer had any of her books. As I tried to replace my collection, I discovered several years ago that they were out of print. I was able to find a few in used book stores, but far from regaining her entire collection. I was estatic to learn they had been republished and that they were available on Amazon. I’ve restored my collection and could not be happier. And I have started re reading them. After alll these years, I don’t remember much about any of the books, but have now completed The Winthrope Woman and Dragonwyck. I enjoyed both probably as much as I did at my first reading. Seton still remains among my favorite authors.

One of the reasons authors write about eighteen-year old heroines is for the fun of watching them grow up. The young protagonist in this novel learns valuable lessons the hard way, albeit in circumstances of wealth and privilege. Fascinating background of an also-young United States in the nineteenth century. Clothes, carriages, steamship races, and even a visit with Edgar Allen Poe what’s not to like? Thanks to Amazon for making available on Kindle books which are very hard to find. Read this one when I was a teen and enjoyed it again more than half a century later.

On the suface of it this ought to bee just my kind of book, I should love it. But I don’t something about how this fascinating plot is told prevents me from liking the characters. I dont even dislike them very much they seem distant an unengaging. only for Abigail do i feel some hint of sympathy. Maybee the vay of telling a story has aged ungracefully.

I have read a couple of Anya Seton’s historical novels, and I loved how she made the people seem so real in those novels. She used very well researched facts and people in those books. This book, however, is one of her totally fictional novels, loosely based upon the lifestyles of the mid 1800’s Hudson River manor owners and elite. I think this novel would really be more appropriate for a tweenie or teenage girl, not for someone in their early 60’s (me). It is very melodramatic-full of a dreamy young girl/woman’s idealized love of her handsome, enigmatic distant cousin, the very wealthy Nicholas Van Ryn. I would have liked to have been able to shake the “heroine” many times and told her to “grow up, already”. Still, on the other hand, I DID read it all.

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