Free Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien

Two women then cast a shadow on that otherwise happy union: Barbara, with poison in her heart, and the imperiously willed Miss Corny, sister of Mr. Carlyle, who takes up residence with them and begrudges Isabel her happiness and her lovely black dresses, beaded with jet. The couple settle into married life, stroll in the grounds in the evenings, and Isabel sits at the piano and sweetly sings verses from
The Bohemian Girl,
as, unable to restrain himself, Mr. Carlyle then holds the dear face to him, “taking from it impassioned kisses.” Yet shadows loom. Isabel overhears servants talking of Barbara Hare and her former friendship with Mr. Carlyle, and jealousy, like an incubus, takes hold of the young bride. Yes, years pass. There are full moons and half moons, three children are born, and yet Isabel cannot cure herself of the affliction now gnawing at her heart. She falls ill, goes into decline, whereupon a change of air is recommended, and so, alone in Boulogne-sur-Mer, she re-encounters the dashing Captain Levinson, whom she was once madly in love with. As she sits on the sands to enjoy the sea air each morning, Captain Levinson accompanies her, pretending to serve as the anxious brother in the absence of Mr. Carlyle. Soon she is affected by the intoxicating breezes of his attentions, and the symptoms of clandestine happiness are taking root. Her heart beats with rapture, the skies are bluer, the waving trees have an emerald brightness, and she finds herselfincreasingly reluctant to separate herself from this dangerous foe. One morning, “taking terrible possession of her arm,” he tells her that if ever two human beings were formed to love one another, it is they. She flees Boulogne and his dangerous sophistries; she puts the sea between them, only to find that he follows, ingratiates himself with her husband, and one midnight—it had to be midnight—a chaise and four is tearing through the English countryside, leaving a household in disarray, servants fainting, motherless children, a baffled husband reading a farewell letter, the handwriting swimming before his eyes, and the inevitable fact that Isabel had
flown
. Here the author, Mrs. Henry Wood, painted the frightful colors and blackness of guilt, addressing her readers, presumably all female:
    Lady, wife, mother, should you ever be tempted to abandon your home so will you awake… whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond your endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them, bear unto death rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience, for be assured that the alternative, if you rush unto it, will be far worse than death.
    Isabel is soon plunged into an abyss of horror; the faithless Captain Levinson is in Paris oftener than not, while she languishes, shivering with cold, hunger, and loneliness in a barn in Grenoble. Completely abandoned, she suffers a railway accident in which she is not only disfigured but lamed in one leg. It serves as a blessing and allows her to come back in disguise to East Lynne as governess to her own children, having assumed the name Madame Vine. Clad completely in black, black crepe swathing throat and chin, thick spectacles, and a pronounced French accent, she has to endure the caresses between Mr. Carlyle and his new wife, Barbara Hare, caresses that were once hers. A solitary candle beams its cold rays in a sickroom whereher little boy is dying, while down on her knees, her face buried in the counterpane, a corner of it stuffed in her mouth, the disconsolate mother weeps and weeps, and her former husband, restrained and heroic, remains ignorant of her true identity.
    Conveniently, his new wife, Barbara, is thirty miles away at a watering place, and no sooner has the funeral taken place than Isabel herself is struck down, just as her little boy was, and rapidly, helplessly, she deteriorates. Shall she tell him of that which she had never meant