Arabella the Awful

[Republished in 1939 by Dodd Mead as Arabella Arrives.]

When well-to-do, down-to-earth village grocer Mr. Ames passes along an investment tip to the Squire that ends up saving the Cattermole family fortune, he requires no thanks for his good turn. What he wants, instead, is for the Cattermoles to take his only daughter, the gorgeous, gaudy, goodhearted, marigold-headed Arabella, into their home, make a lady of her, and find her a husband among their set. This, they reluctantly agree to do. Arabella's willing (to please her dad) and the toffs are weak -- but is this the life she really wants?

In a genre where the drama's almost defined, during the late 19th and well into the 20th century, by the social restraints on what characters feel able to reveal to each other, Ruck's Arabella is a breath of fresh, even bracing, air. There's no "big mis" when it comes to this miss: she's 100% forthright, no dissembling: "I never pretend! I don't go in for that luxury!...What I say I mean!" Of course, the out that Ruck gives her is class: because she's not gentry, Arabella's portrayed as less hemmed in by gendered conventions and, with the model of the dysfunctional Cattermoles before her, she sees those conventions for what they are and what they cost. There's some class condescension in Ruck's depiction: Arabella's clothes are loud, her tastes vulgar, but withal, she's a model -- to young readers, certainly -- of kindness and honesty, self-advocacy, and healthy self-esteem. And the story's really not about romance -- it figures so lightly for a Ruck -- it's about Arabella being awesome.

Beyond this, there are some interesting reflections on the potential for unhappiness in marriages contracted for practical considerations -- "May you get the Fairy Prince that you want!" a sympathetic older woman cautions Arabella, "And may you want him after you've got him..." Ruck also alludes to the cultural shake-up in the British class structure and the social interaction between classes that would come with the Great War, when young men of the upper classes were thrown into a military setting where they found themselves socializing with, and sometimes even saluting, "their tailors" (to be clear, she views this as a good thing).

Arabella the Awful is totally insubstantial, but it's, as reviews of the 1939 American edition put it, "sprightly" and "amusing" fun.

Flag: One very brief negative reference to Jewish lenders.