Reading: Incalculable Diffusion
Oct. 28th, 2019 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartAfter a long hard week, and having just finished a book I was slightly disappointed by, I wanted to spend the weekend reading something comforting that I'd be sure to enjoy. So obviously, I picked Incalculable Diffusion, the third volume of Clorinda Cathcart's Circle, the companion series to the Comfortable Courtesan novels, and it was exactly what I needed.
The title, Incalculable Diffusion, is taken from the wonderful concluding sentence of Middlemarch, describing Dorothea Brooke: 'But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.' In this case, it describes Clorinda's influence on those who are perhaps a little more distant from the centre of her circle than the subjects of earlier volumes. I particularly liked a couple of stories focusing on the lives of some of the domestic servants from the series, as that's not a perspective one often sees in historical fiction, and the two concluding stories, set 10-15 years after the conclusion of the main series and depicting some of the younger characters ("the Raxdell House nursery-set") reaching adulthood.
The title, Incalculable Diffusion, is taken from the wonderful concluding sentence of Middlemarch, describing Dorothea Brooke: 'But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.' In this case, it describes Clorinda's influence on those who are perhaps a little more distant from the centre of her circle than the subjects of earlier volumes. I particularly liked a couple of stories focusing on the lives of some of the domestic servants from the series, as that's not a perspective one often sees in historical fiction, and the two concluding stories, set 10-15 years after the conclusion of the main series and depicting some of the younger characters ("the Raxdell House nursery-set") reaching adulthood.
