Home Fetters by Raymond Jacberns
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I had a bit of an interesting time in a bookshop recently, spotting a vast pile of those books that you just know are the sort of books that you want. Luckily enough they were also the sort of books that clearly didn’t sell that well in this bookshop, considering by how much dust were on them and the price they were, and so I scooped them up and ran away home, cackling wildly to myself.
Many of the authors in that pile were new ones to me, and my eye was drawn to Home Fetters by Raymond Jacberns as a suitable place to start. Upon hearing the name of this author, my mum turned to me and said, “That’s a pseudonym.” “Is it?” I said, “How do you know?” “I just do,” she said, and then I googled and she was right. Raymond Jacberns was the pseudonym of Georgiana Mary Isabel Ash, and my mum has psychic powers.
Home Fetters was published by the Society For Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1904 and as such is inculcated with a very particular form of values. The moralising is sometimes quite hamfisted, and somewhat unfathomable, but then again this isn’t anything unusual in this particular type of literature. What is unusual about Home Fetters is how good it is despite its marked weaknesses. Not much happens, and that which does happen is a bit episodic, and a little bit ‘wait, why is this all ‘character x’s’ fault’, but what does happen is told in a really genuine and vivid style. Jacberns (Ash) has this great gift of vibrancy which, when it’s allowed to happen, can absolutely shine.
I suspect in a way she’s too early with her style. You can almost feel it fighting against the restrictions of the form to make itself known, and I wonder what we would have had from her if she were writing and working in the context of twenty or thirty years later. She’s a great writer; and when she can express it, this book is surprisingly good.
Daisy May Johnson 