Rhoda Broughton
Life and career
Rhoda Broughton lived from 1840 to 1920 and was born near Denbigh in Wales. Her classical education informed fiction often concerned with educated women and the constraints of social life. Her first novels appeared in 1867, with support from her uncle Sheridan Le Fanu, and their frank treatment of female desire provoked controversy. Doctor Cupid invites attention to the distance between conventional accounts of romantic feeling and the less orderly emotions experienced by particular people.
Feeling under social observation
Broughton's fiction gives conversation the power to disclose feelings that speakers would prefer to manage. Teasing, exaggeration and an apparently casual correction can reveal distinctions of age, status and experience. In Doctor Cupid, romance enters a world already full of opinions about who is respectable and what another person must mean. The wit does not remove emotional danger. Instead, it shows how difficult it is to describe one's own desires without borrowing judgments already circulating in the neighborhood.
Doctor Cupid
Margaret and her younger sister Prue begin by drawing up a comic account of the advantages and inconveniences of their connection with the nearby Big House. Music, charitable events, awkward guests and borrowed equipment all become items in a social balance sheet. Talk then turns toward Freddy Ducane and the people expected at dinner. Prue's excitement contrasts with Margaret's greater caution. The supplied 1891 edition lets readers enter the novel through this lively domestic exchange, where affection and unequal experience coexist.
Read the joke twice
First enjoy the sisters' account as comedy; then ask what dependencies it identifies. Which favors can be repaid, and which obligations seem impossible to refuse? Listen especially when one sister claims that a person or occasion means nothing to her. A blush, a change of subject or another speaker's silence may complicate the assertion. This attention to the gap between speech and response makes the romantic plot legible without assuming that every character understands her own feelings equally well.