Victorian Restoration

THE STRANGELING (685 pp.) -- Alice Harwood--Bobbs-Merrill ($6).

This novel is a stunt. Its author, Alice Harwood, is a 44-year-old Warwickshire spinster who has loved Victorian novels since she was first able to read them. Since 1938, with time out for other books (The Lily and the Leopards, The Merchant of the Ruby}, she has been planning and writing a Victorian novel herself. The resemblance between The Strangeling and the works of the Brontes, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope. Dickens and Thackeray is therefore intentional and 685 pages deep. The main difference is that her models were Victorian novelists and Author Harwood is merely a conscientious antique restorer.

The Strangeling has a heroine but no real hero. Michal (pronounced Michael) Charteris is a wide-eyed, high-spirited girl of five in 1831 when her missionary parents leave her with a brusque uncle and a browbeaten aunt in the English Midlands.

In no time she is keeping a diary titled Things I Do Which Other People Do Not, e.g.. she writes poems and develops a social conscience. To a friend she confides her fondest wish: "I want to visit the poor districts in London and write an epic poem about them." The fact that she never gets around to it is one of the minor blessings of The Strangeling.

No delicate Victorian violet, Michal is clearly a prototype of the "New Woman" whom Ibsen and Bernard Shaw cheered and caricatured by turns in their plays. Her revolt is a shade whimsical. At one point she chops off her flowing brown tresses because they are "a token of female subordination," and flounces around flaunting a homemade Italian-boy cut.

Her personal life is as complicated as a cricket match. Her first cousin proposes marriage, and jilts her after she accepts. A married schoolmaster proposes a kiss and gets it (Michal is innocent enough to think herself an adulteress). An aristocratic rake proposes something which only an "infernal scoundrel" would propose. Michal is beginning to think that there is no Mr. Right when a Scots journalist clasps her in his arms on page 682.

Author Harwood pours a small army of characters and events into her book, but most of them congeal on the printed page like spilled wax. Michal sees Queen Victoria crowned, watches the Paris mob revolt and King Louis Philippe flee in 1848, applauds the pioneering use of anesthetics in childbirth by Sir James Young Simpson, hears that her grandfather has shaken Dr. Livingstone's hand in Africa, tromps the moors with Anne Bronte, and asks Florence Nightingale for a nursing job in case the Crimean War breaks out. By age 27, and novel's end, Michal Charteris has lived an exhaustive, if not a complete life, and Author Harwood's Victorian restoration has generated not a little fun, some of it unintentional.

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