William Morris's The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897)

I continue rereading the mediæval-eclectic quest novels of my guy William Morris, founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, socialist, and arguably the greatest wallpaper designer in history (although Morris didn't really like wallpaper; he considered it a sad necessity because most people could not afford to cover their walls with tapestry, the perfect wallcovering. In Morris's ideal world, every object would be the lovingly decorated creation of an artisan who delighted in making it beautiful. When his friend designed a house for him shortly after his marriage, he invited all his pre-Raphaelite artist friends over and they had painting parties, hand painting the walls and furniture. But I digress).

This is Morris's last novel, published a year after his death. It's one of his most memorable plots, in my view. In the words of the introduction on Standard Ebooks, where you can download a nicely formatted edition:

[T]he novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw. After she encounters a wood fairy [who] helps her escape the witch's clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both as parables for contemporary Britain and as vehicles for investigating his radical socialist beliefs. As Birdalone travels through the isles she slowly evolves into the embodiment of [Morris's progressive version of] the Victorian "[N]ew [W]oman," embracing hard physical labor, healthy exercise, higher education, socialist values, and financial freedom, while rejecting sexual exploitation, physical abuse of both women and children, and the restrictive sexual mores of the era. This makes her unique in the fantasy fiction of the era as one of the genre's first examples of a strong female hero.

( A brief comment on that )

The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a deliberately allegorical story; the heroine's very name, Birdalone, is a term for the last surviving child in a family as well as an expression meaning simply "all alone" (and apparently has never been a name). The characters include two nameless witches as well as three color-coded pairs of knights and maidens: Aurea (golden, fem., Italian), Viridis (green, neut., Latin), and Atra (dark or black, fem., Italian), and their suitors the Golden Knight, the Green Knight, and the Black Squire (so-called, but actually a knight), though the suitors, unlike the ladies, also have ordinary given names. On the other hand, Birdalone meets such ordinary people as Laurence, Gerard, Roger, Jacobus, and Audrey, in presumably less symbolic portions of the story.

Also, I love the weird little departures from what might be considered good storytelling and how they reveal the author's character. Five years are elided in the middle, and not even at the beginning or end of a chapter: in the midst of one it's suddenly like 'and five years went by like that, but then...'. It's also very funny that several scenes and a bunch of details are devoted to making sure we know that Birdalone is learning calligraphy and illumination from a priest, and then when she sets out to earn her fortune she's like 'I have two crafts that I could earn my living in, calligraphy and embroidery!' and then the calligraphy (or indeed, books at all) are never mentioned again. Morris just wanted us to know that he also stans calligraphy because it's very cool and obviously the coolest heroine has to be amazing at it, but he didn't have time to fit it into the plot anymore.

Anyway, here's my detailed summary: ( The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) )

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from this book:

• so she arose and thrust her grief back into her heart,

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