Lynn Freed’s latest novel, The Servants’ Quarters, reacquainted me with some of my favorite works of English fiction. Her novel contains within its compact frame of slightly more than 200 pages a re-imagination and transformation of some of the relationships, characters, and themes from English canonical texts such as Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights,  Rebecca, and both Shakespeare’s play and Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Cressida.

Part One of The Servants’ Quarters introduces us to the precocious Cressida, a nine-and-three –quarter-year -old girl who is thrust into the world of the nearby estate Harding’s Rest by her viperously ambitious mother.  Mr. Harding (think Mr. Rochester meets Maximillian de Winter meets Heathcliff meets Pygmalion), a scarred World War II veteran, begins to nurture Cressida’s deeply ingrained sense of mischief and wildness, allegedly with the aim that it will rub off on his “hopeless” adopted orphan nephew, Edgar.  He also acts as Cressida’s mother’s savior and patron by allowing the family to take up residence in his estate’s former carriage house, hence the title of the novel.   This may sound like a standard plot in the aforementioned English texts, but what is markedly different about Cressida is that she is a young Jewish girl growing up in an indeterminate part of post-World War II South Africa.  Freed has given us a protagonist that was never contemplated in the world of Dickens, the Brontës, or Shakespeare.  [Cressida is a nice counterpart to Freed’s own surprise as a child in learning through reading that "’contrary to what was true in my world, small white boys could be made to work for a living (girls, too - to wit the many tales of English waifs dressed in rags, who skivvied all day and were then consigned to freezing London attics to pray and shiver through the night).’”  See New York Times, October 9, 2005  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09brubach.html.]  Cressida is an unaffected and infectious character, part smart aleck part rascal—one that seems close to Freed’s own heart.

It would not surprise me to learn that the Cressida of Part One mirrors Freed’s own childhood during which time she recollects being “treated like a sort of wild card.”  See New York Times , October 9, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09brubach.html. Currently a Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, Freed has published a collection of essays, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home: Life on the Page, a collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man, and five other novels.  In 2002, Freed received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1986, she won the Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award for Fiction.

Cressida is initially repulsed by Mr. Harding, but her feelings for him mature into an inexplicable attraction as she grows into a teenager and becomes more and more isolated and misunderstood in Parts Two and Three of the novel.  Mr. Harding, it seems, is her only intellectual equal within her small circle of family and acquaintances, and the only one not otherwise preoccupied, in a universe peppered with Mad Hatters and Red Queens such as the elder matriarch, Mrs. Harding (think Miss Havisham), and Cressida’s mysteriously nicknamed, mad maternal aunt Bunch.

The terrain of The Servants’ Quarters is and isn’t South African. Rather, World War II itself becomes the larger and looming (emotional) terrain of the novel, much as the moors function in Wuthering Heights.  Cressida’s older sister, Miranda, and Mr. Harding suffer from nightmares in which the Germans are closing in on them.  Ironically, Mr. Harding charges himself with teaching Cressida about her identity as a Jew, but in doing so, Cressida enters the world of night terrors herself. Without giving too much plot away, the end of the novel marks the end of an era; the original world of Harding’s Rest seems to recede in memory, much as the texts and films that Mr. Harding urges upon his young charge recede for the video generation.



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