The Red Castle Women

As a matter of curiosity, I requested this book through interlibrary loan back in the fall. It was one that I’d read and reread as an eighth grader after the school librarian recommended it to me. Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind, I remembered bits and pieces from the book, and I wanted to go back and reread it to get reacquainted with my younger self.

By the time it arrived this week, I’d lost interest. But since they’d apparently had some trouble getting ahold of the book (why else would it take 6 months to secure?), and since I had to pay $.25 for the service, I dutifully reread it over the last few days.

It’s a page-turner. I felt a certain tenderness for my 12-year-old self, eager to learn about life and romance, and soaking up what knowledge I could from a book I now have a literary label for: Gothic romance. I remember reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey much later as a student of literature, and enjoying its satire on this genre, without remembering that I had once sat on the edge of my seat, lapping up this book’s key ingredients:

• A beautiful heroine who speaks in the first person of her intelligence and strength, while her husband repeatedly calls her a child and her actions are bewilderingly gullible (“No, don’t get in the carriage and go to the dangerous part of town on a mission of mercy in the dark of night!” or “No, don’t believe that ninny of a cousin YET AGAIN as she sets you up to be kidnapped!” etc. etc… )
• A Gothic castle on the Hudson, full of dark labyrinths, ghost stories, mysterious tales of the past, an ancient curse, and an insane relative inhabiting upstairs apartments
• A tall, dark, handsome hero, just one of the novel’s population of beautiful people — all “tall and broad-shouldered” or ”tall and slender,” with “blond ringlets” or “golden-brown curls,” glittering with jewels and dressed by their maids
• Love at first sight that leads our fair young heroine with her mysterious past into a brilliant marriage

As an adult, I also noticed that this author seeks to legitimize the book with lots of literary allusions, and that it contains enough American history, and enough reference to real places, to make it interesting.

Sometimes it’s fun to reread. My curiosity seems directed by different forces now than it was in eighth grade, but I also come away from this story reminded of a different kind of reading pleasure. This tale is sheer entertainment, and it brought back the original, carefree context of my first reading of it. I suppose that means I’m like the Red Castle, full of passages into the past, even though I don’t travel them much anymore.