The Judge and the Lady By Marlyn Horsdal Touchwood Editions, 217 pp., $19.95
With The Judge and The Lady, Saltspring Island author Marlyn Horsdal sets a fictional story around the life of Judge Matthew Begbie that might have been more successful if she had simply stuck to the facts and written a straight biography.
The Judge and the Lady is told from the alternating points of view of Eleanor Wentworth, a young, flirtatious woman newly arrived from London, and Celia Turner, the wife of the local Anglican minister. The two are opposites in many ways yet become true lifelong friends, a bond that is strengthened when consequences of Eleanor's behaviour threaten to ruin her (and her family's) social status. Intertwined throughout the women's story is the real-life figure of Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie.
As a fictional character, Eleanor is not a very likable person, coming across as self-centred and above the rather regular citizens of Victoria of the 1870s with whom she has been forced to live after a scandal in London causes her exile. Being likable is certainly not a requirement for any character, fictional or otherwise, but so often Horsdal seems to use Eleanor simply as an excuse to namedrop various important figures in Victoria's history. It seems at times that what Horsdal really wants to do is write a history of early Victoria; had she done so, much of what bogs down The Judge and the Lady would have been avoided.
Chapters told from Celia's point of view tend to be far more successful. Arriving in Victoria a few years earlier than Eleanor as the wife of an Anglican minister, Celia is already established as a part of society when the two meet. An artist and free spirit, Celia is constantly inspired by the wilderness of the late-1800s British Columbia and the people that populate it. As the story progresses, she has to come to terms with the widening gap between her husband's religious beliefs and her own feminist and increasingly atheist views on life.
Horsdal's storytelling thrives when dealing with Celia and her evolving views of the world. Freed from focusing so much attention on the other historical figures that surround Eleanor, Celia becomes a far more intriguing character and it seems a missed opportunity that her story was not more the focus of the book.
Though Judge Begbie is the one that binds the story together, he is mostly a peripheral character, making appearances at social gatherings with Eleanor or running into Celia while she is travelling around the province with her husband. It is not until the last few chapters, when Eleanor begins to tell her great secret, that Begbie truly becomes a character in the tale, and by that time the "secret" is extremely obvious to the reader and so lacks much of the drama that it could have contained.
Horsdal states in both the afterword and acknowledgments that she wants to clear Matthew Begbie's name of the stigma of "The Hanging Judge," a title erroneously applied after his death. It seems curious that she would deem it acceptable to involve him in an illicit relationship with one of her fictitious characters.
Horsdal served as editor of David R. Williams' A Man for a New Country, a biography of Begbie published in 1977, and so was well-versed in the life of the judge long before this novel took shape. However, if she truly wanted to clear Begbie from his past, it would have been better to present a new biography of the judge instead of facts surrounded with fiction.
Had The Judge and the Lady contained entirely fictitious characters, it would have been an occasionally entertaining story with a local setting. By wrapping it around Begbie, all that is achieved is muddying his name in a different way than the original story that led to the Hanging Judge moniker.
Colin Holt is a reviewer and bookseller in Victoria.
