A review by robinwalter
Kate Hardy by D.E. Stevenson

hopeful relaxing medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

 My fifteenth and final book for Dean Street December 2023 was my 13th D. E. Stevenson and was FAR from unlucky. It washed away the toxic aftertaste of the morally and ethically repugnant Smouldering Fire, my last of hers, and left me feeling very glad I ended the challenge with this story.

Like Touch Not the Nettle, the Clavering book I read shortly before this one, what I loved about this story in particular were the nuanced characterisations. Most of the Stevenson books I've read have been set in the Scottish Borders and include wonderfully lyrical descriptions of their geographical setting. This one was set in an English village and comparatively very little space in the book is given to lauding the landscape. Instead, she dives deep into her characters and delivers detailed portraits of the people, while just sketching the place.

The characters in this book come across as very credible. VERY MUCH of their time, but presented with more subtlety and contrast than in Smouldering Fire. This book was written some ten years later, and it's quite possible the author's own world view had changed in that time.. Certainly she writes with a great deal of sympathy for characters perceived by others to be unlikeable, while also writing with refreshing candour and a lack of sentiment about the most truly noxious characters. in the story - of whom there are happily few.

This was another similarity with Touch Not the Nettle and another reason I scored this as high as 4.5/5. The "worst" characters in the book were the protagonist's sister and niece, in that order. Her sister reminded me quite a bit of the odious mother in Touch Not the Nettle, and in the end she received a similarly apt treatment. She simply disappeared from the story as an irrelevance. It was the perfect end to her arc. 

The synopsis hinted at supernatural elements which I do not enjoy, but here again, the story surprised me in a good way. The "spooks and sorcery" all turned out to be manifestation of very human actions and attitudes, nothing remotely fey about them, and indeed several characters chide others for believing otherwise. 

The romantic storyline in this one was also  one less commonly seen in the middlebrow book I've read, and  Stevenson deserves extra bonus points for the carefully considered trajectory of the romantic relationships and especially for 

having her female lead propose to the man she loves

Finally, of course, there's the matter of the writing itself. To borrow from Douglas Adams (again), I know as much about writing as a tea leaf knows about the history of the East India Company, but I do know that at her best, Stevenson really wows me with her skill as a wordsmith. Here's one of my favourite examples from this book, wherein the writer protagonist is describing her process (on a good day, Stevenson is careful to add🙂):

The IDEA which had visited Kate in the barn and which she had likened to a fawn bounding through the thicket, returned to her as she had known it would and was now being tamed. Kate was treating it very carefully, not hurrying it at all, but coaxing it with unlimited patience to feed out of her hand. It was good. She knew that. She was beginning to suspect it was very good indeed. There were set-backs, of course. Some days things wouldn’t come right—the fawn was intractable—but other days she made excellent progress and all went well.

All in all, this was a real treat, a truly satisfying way to end the 2023 Dean Street December and a remnider of why I like middlebrow as a genre and Stevenson as one of its leading exponents.