Book Review: Lady Jane

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Lady Jane


Author: Mrs. C.V. Jamison

Date: 1891 (Century), 1969 (Delacorte)

Publisher: Century Company (1891), Dell / Delacorte (1969)

ISBN: none

Length: 224 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Robin Jacques

Quote: "It's a blue heron, and they're very rare about here."

Herons aren't rare in Louisiana, but herons like Tony, the animal star of this Victorian melodrama, are very rare anywhere. According to the text, Tony fits into a basket and "makes a noise like 'tone-tone,'" which suggests that he must be a Little Blue Heron; it's generally agreed that Great Blue Herons make a noise like "fronk," and they don't fit into baskets that little children can carry. According to the drawings, however, he does seem to be a malnourished Great Blue Heron, with the "breeding plumes" that identify the males in mating season. Birds have had some foul tricks played on them by humans, but it is hard to imagine a mature male Great Blue Heron, in mating season, letting himself be schlepped around like a baby chicken.

It's even harder to imagine any kind of heron living in a house, being fed rice, milk, and an occasional pastry, for three years. Most herons are easier to admire from a distance than to keep as pets. Their sociability seems to depend on the availability of fish; in well-stocked parks they do fish side by side, and when they've eaten as much as they want they like to roost in flocks. In natural conditions, even in Audubon's day, they seemed to think that a quarter of a mile was about the right distance to keep between themselves and other large creatures.

A heron's "peckish" moods are nothing to trifle with, either. Herons don't mind roosting and nesting in flocks, but if they run out of fish they'll eat each other's young. They also have a nasty habit of stabbing their long, sharp bills toward the eyes of anyone they want to attack. They eat some things other than fish and shellfish, such as frogs, but wild herons ignore grains and grain products...except for Green Herons, who are clever enough to pick up bread and drop it on the water for fish bait. Herons have been successfully tamed, although Audubon reported that a fellow bird lover who was living with a baby came to regret having a pet heron...but even tame herons aren't cuddly.

Oh, well. Lady Jane is not a story about the world in which we live, or even the world in which Mrs. Jamison lived, although the introduction to the 1969 edition tells us that she had lived in Louisiana (her home was in Canada). This is the fantasy land of Victorian melodrama, where the little girl's father died long before the story begins, her mother dies at the beginning, and she spends two years passively being a Good Child and hoping to be rescued from an inadequate foster mother. Mrs. Jamison probably thought she was being realistic, because Madame Jozain, who claims to be Lady Jane's aunt, is not as cruel as many inadequate parent-figures in Victorian fiction; only a money-grubbing, cheating, thievish social climber who doesn't deserve a child as nice as Lady Jane.

On a nicer and presumably more realistic side, Lady Jane observes some historical bits of Louisiana culture, like a celebration of Lundi Gras (the day before Mardi Gras). I've not done the research necessary to comment on this aspect of the book. Some people have expressed appreciation of it.

Lady Jane will, of course, be rescued. Mrs. Jamison's attitude toward the French-American culture she describes is "interesting," in a Victorian sense. She never actually says that English people are better than French people. She also resists the temptation to make her heroine Canadian. Still, somehow a reader can tell that a happy ending for Lady Jane will definitely involve being back in a Northern State, among people who have blue eyes and speak the Queen's English.

How will Tony the heron be involved in her rescue? Now that would spoil the suspense...Victorian melodrama was easy to predict, unless you expected it to have anything to do with reality.

Lady Jane is a fun read for informed adults and older children who can appreciate its fundamental, unconscious absurdity. If given to children in the middle-school range the pictures and vocabulary suggest, it should probably be given along with a copy of Audubon's Birds of North America, so the child reader will be in on the joke.