A review by glyptodonsneeze
The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair, D.J. Taylor

4.0

What if you don't get out enough? You will die wondering if it is better not to have lived at all, that's what. Nobody could live a duller life than Harriet Frean of The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair. Sinclair was a suffragist and Harriet Frean is the opposite, a woman who is raised to be "nothing but beautifully behaved." Harriet never tries to be anything but beautifully behaved and chugs along dutifully and self-sacrificingly until, at the end of her life, she's gained an inkling that maybe her parents didn't want her to be beautifully behaved so that they could admire her across the breakfast table when she was forty. She does fall in love with her best friend's fiancee, but nobly refuses him as an act of self-abnegation, which makes all three of them utterly miserable for decades, but when her niece says, "Would you do it again?" Harriet insists she would. How could she act selfishly, even if the consequences would save her best friend's life? The Life and Death of Harriet Frean is an apropos manifesto for the elevation of women to the rank of humans. I was reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening before I started Harriet Frean and HF is way better. The Awakening reads like a smoking gun forgery by English teachers, or a long form Jeopardy question: "What is dissatisfaction?" Harriet Frean nails the limited lack of expectations predicated by Victorian mores; the only trouble is that May Sinclair did it a bit too well. Every generation has its slow-witted children who live at home for decades. Nowadays Harriet would have the opportunity to drop out of community college before she moved back to her parents' couch, but she never would be Interim Department Manager Harriet Frean.

http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/2014/04/four-stories-of-outdoors-and-one_23.html