Queenie's Whim, Volume 2

Queenie's Whim, Volume 2 by Rosa Nouchette Carey

Queenie's Whim, Volume 2 continues Rosa Nouchette Carey's tale of Queenie Marriott, a penniless but proud young gentlewoman who, through the intervention of Garth Clayton (churchwarden of Hepshaw) and Vicar Logan, is appointed mistress of the Hepshaw girls' school at a salary of fifty pounds a year. Queenie insists on accepting only what she has fairly earned, revealing the fierce independence that defines her character throughout the novel. Garth and his sister Langley arrange for Queenie and her fragile young sister Emmie to rent and furnish Briarwood Cottage, with Langley fronting the cost of furniture on the pretense of a repayable loan—an act of generosity Queenie reluctantly accepts, uneasy at incurring debt she cannot repay. Queenie settles into life among the Clayton family circle: Garth, his sisters Langley and lively Cathy, and their brother Ted. A warm, semi-familial intimacy develops between Queenie and Garth, who increasingly admires her spirited independence, though he remains devoted to the saintly, self-effacing Faith Palmer and drawn toward Dora Cunningham, the capable, faintly managing young mistress of Crossgill Vicarage. Dora's polished self-possession and thinly veiled condescension toward Queenie create friction, and Queenie is stung by Dora's assumption of authority over Hepshaw affairs, including the school. Cathy, meanwhile, chafes under comparison to Dora and confides to Queenie her wish to leave home and train as a hospital nurse in London—a plan she has already broached with Garth, Langley, and her mentor Mr. Logan, to whom she is bound by an unspoken but strained attachment she insists she cannot live up to. A visit to Karlsmere brings the party to the home of Langley's friend Gertrude Chester and her husband Harry, whose unhappy marriage—Gertrude embittered by a lost first love and coldly indifferent to her husband and small daughter Nan—weighs heavily on Langley, who is quietly devoted to Harry and the child in ways the narrative leaves delicately unexplained. The volume's central turn comes when Queenie learns, during a visit to her old guardian Caleb Runciman in Carlisle, that the irascible, dying Andrew Calcott—whom she had nursed and forgiven despite his harsh treatment of her family—has left her his entire fortune of some five thousand pounds a year, explicitly bypassing his estranged niece (Emmie) out of a stubborn vow, but charging Queenie to use the wealth for the child's benefit. Overwhelmed rather than elated, Queenie is oppressed by the sudden riches: they threaten to undo the modest, hard-won life she has just begun to love, and she fears—rightly, as it proves—that Garth, who has openly declared his dislike of marrying or befriending wealthy women, will grow cold toward her once her fortune is known. Against Caleb's bewildered protests, she resolves on a secret "whim": to conceal her inheritance for a full year, drawing only a small allowance, and to continue living as the poor village school-mistress in her cottage with Emmie, free to be valued for herself alone. Returning to Hepshaw, Queenie deflects Garth's and Cathy's questions about the legacy with careful half-truths, and resumes her teaching with genuine devotion, finding real meaning in her humble work and in the affection of her pupils, especially the plain, unpromising Prissy Atkinson. She and Emmie move into the cottage, transformed by the Claytons' secret efforts into a charming home, deepening Queenie's gratitude and her unacknowledged attachment to Garth. Garth himself wavers between reasoned resolve to marry the sensible, capable Dora and a restless, unexamined fascination with Queenie, while Dora calmly manages the courtship on her own terms, confident of eventual success. The volume closes with the arrival of a new village doctor, Angus Stewart, who proves to be Faith Palmer's lost sweetheart from her hospital-nursing days a decade earlier, before duty to her invalid sister Cara forced her home. Their unexpected reunion, charged with old feeling, awkwardness, and Miss Cosie's artless meddling, opens a quiet subplot of rekindled romance running alongside the unresolved tensions between Queenie, Garth, Dora, and Cathy's own uncertain path toward independence and Mr. Logan's unspoken devotion. Volume 2 thus leaves its central questions suspended: whether Garth's affections will settle on Dora or on Queenie, whether Queenie's concealed fortune will be discovered and how it will alter her standing with him, whether Cathy will win her freedom to nurse in London, and whether Faith Palmer's long-deferred happiness with Dr. Stewart can still be reclaimed.

By Rosa Nouchette Carey · First published 1881 · Genre: Domestic Fiction, Romance, Victorian Literature · 14 chapters · 83,366 words

First lines

"The trivial round, the common task, / Would furnish all we ought to ask -- / Room to deny ourselves, a road / To bring us daily nearer God. " -- _Keble._

"In a month from this time you will enter on your new duties as / mistress of the Hepshaw girls' school."

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Victorian · domestic fiction · family saga · romance · British literature · 19th century · character-driven · women's fiction · social commentary · class conflict · coming of age · literary fiction

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More by Rosa Nouchette Carey