BOOK REVIEW: Georgiana by Maude Hutchins

Having enjoyed Victorine by Maude Hutchins, I found her first novel, Georgiana, in the library. This one was a bit trickier.

Georgiana reads as if it was a novelized effort to showcase the theories of Freud. Georgiana is an orphaned girl living with her nearly invisible but sweet grandmother and her overbearing, dictatorial grandfather (referred to always in the French, Grandpère.) There are other aunts and many cousins in the household, but, oddly, no uncles. The grandfather is a New England gentleman. Georgiana’s dead father, who she knows only by a single photograph and by her grandfather’s disapproval of him, was a Virginian. The whole family is blue-eyed, except for Georgiana and her father, who are brown-eyed.

The story is related by a third-person male narrator who plays no role in the story. He goes to great effort, in very lush prose, to show the near-incestuous relationships and sexual hangups of the enclave of cousins. Georgiana is an outsider, though her blond-haired blue-eyed older sister is not. The narrator explains Georgiana’s pubertal angst.

The story then shifts for part 2, in which we are given excerpts from Georgiana’s diary while she is away at boarding school. This is in Georgiana’s voice – an oddly detached voice. She observes the little games the other girls play. She delights in mischief-making. She is very bright and very pretty. But she does not shed her innocence, managing always to see the actions of the others without understanding the sexual undercurrents.

In the final section, the third-person narrator returns. He explains that Georgiana, in her adult life, moves from one affair to another. He describes two of these relationships as examples, showing how she self-sabotages. And he explains how she is always seeking her father. Or, actually, her grandfather. 

The writing is lovely, but it is a labored effort. Georgiana comes to life, somewhat, in the mid-section. This is actually the part I found most interesting for its insight into life at a girls’ boarding school. The other sections fail to make Georgiana seem like a real person. It seems rather like an academic exercise, trying to use fiction to illustrate Freud. In this way, the effort is dated.