This article features some material in The Brontës Went to Woolworths that gives me the idea that Rachel Ferguson had personal experience of the problems that creating imaginary relationships and living in fantasy worlds can cause.
She mentions the importance of being very careful when talking in the real world to people who have been the targets of fantasies; she also says that these people must be accepted and dealt with as they really are. She describes some inner conflicts that result from having too many fantasies on the go.
Some of the things that the narrator Deirdre Carne says give me the idea that Rachel Ferguson herself had been in a situation where someone had been part of her life in her imagination long before she actually met them in real life. Deirdre mentions for example how difficult it is to have to treat people as strangers when they have been one of the family for years!
This again reminds me of the double agents in Raphael Sabatini's books who were mentioned in the introductory article: people who live a double life must be careful to keep their stories straight and not give themselves away.
Deirdre has feelings of unreality when about to meet Lady Toddington for the first time in real life. The information that she has either invented or obtained via her researches makes her feel both advantaged and disadvantaged when talking to her.
Deirdre slips up a few times but gets away with it.
She says this about the necessity of bringing Lady Toddington up to speed:
“Meanwhile, there was the spadework of the situation to get through, and I wondered how long it would actually take to bring her up to the point at which I had arrived long since, so that we could all start level.”
I suspect that Rachel Ferguson must have done some similar spadework, slowly putting her cards on the table one by one. How else could she have come up with something like that!
Lady Toddington tells Deirdre that Judge Toddington, or 'Toddy' as the Carne family has always called him, is going to a dress rehearsal:
“At this, I struggled with an insane impulse to exclaim, ‘Why wasn’t I told of it?’ or ‘He never said so.’ “
At this point Deirdre has yet to meet Toddy in real life, so she nearly gives herself away there!
Deirdre must not only overcome the little shocks she gets when Toddy speaks out of character, shows himself to be possessed of his own personality and acts differently from what she expected, but also accept that he is not her property and she cannot create the script and control the characters in real life the way she does in fantasy.
Deirdre's young sister Sheil also has to learn to adjust her ideas. Deirdre notices her confusion and dismay when the Toddingtons are different from her imaginings and say unexpected things:
“Sheil started. Inevitable, these jars. I couldn’t protect her against them...Sheil will have to go through it. It is the price of reality...”
Deirdre explains to Sheil that she cannot control what Toddy says:
“He’s got to say things. All by himself...”
Judging by the details she gives, Rachel Ferguson must surely have experienced such jarring shocks and made similar adjustments herself. She must have learned to take people as they were as opposed to what she wanted and always imagined them to be; she obviously understood that real people must be free to be themselves and live their own lives.
I suspect that Rachel Ferguson was also speaking from experience when she describes some painful side effects that playing the game can have.
Deirdre reports that it is can be difficult for some of the Carnes to tear themselves away from the scene of the main action. They may not be able to enjoy a holiday away from London when they have left part of themselves behind:
“It is even apt to ruin one’s summer holidays, the going away and leaving the individual in town, or with some obsession that is probably doomed. Years ago, Katrine and I used to eye the strapped trunks, and then each other, and one of us would say, ‘Are we all clear?’ We meant, was the holiday going to be shorn of fantastic mental disturbance, and, therefore, a normal success?”
Just as people cannot fully enjoy the present if part of them is still living in the past, they cannot fully enjoy living in one place if part of them is still living somewhere else and they are worrying about what they are missing back home.
For Deirdre and Katrine, this works both ways. They become obsessed with someone while on holiday, which means that their return to London is not whole-hearted:
”Sometimes, we found conflict awaiting us, as in the Arcaly year when we both suffered a frenzy of desire to join the resident pierrot troupe, and almost projected ourselves into it by sheer concentration. And that made the return to London all wrong.”
Just as trying to live in both the real world and a fantasy world at the same time can cause conflicts of interest and make people feel that they are being pulled in two different directions, so can trying to live in two different fantasy worlds!
This is the second edition, which was published in 1953:
