Hortus Deliciarum

I was the youngest of three daughters. Our literal-minded mother named us Grace, Hope, and Honour, but few people except perhaps the minister who had baptized all three of us remembered by given name. My father still likes to tell the story of how I acquired my odd nickname: I had come to him for further information when I first discovered that our names meant something besides you-come-here. He succeeded in explaining grace and hope, but he had some difficulty trying to make the concept of honour understandable to a five-year-old. I heard him out, but with an expression of deepening disgust; and when he was finished I said: “Huh! I’d rather be Beauty.” He laughed; and over the next few weeks told everyone he met this story of his youngest child’s precocity. I found that my ill-considered opinion became a reality; the name at least was attached to me securely.

Beauty.  Robin McKinley.  1978.

In junior high, my father dropped me off at my school every morning before he went to work.  Because he went to work early and classes started late, at almost 9:00, for a half an hour I’d sit under a tree in the quad and read.  At 8:00 I’d be waiting on the steps up to the library and Mrs. Babcock, the school librarian, would unlock the door, greet me, and let me in.

Mrs. Babcock was on the stricter end of the school librarian spectrum.  She wouldn’t open that door before 8:00 and we all knew that there were Rules that needed to be Followed [tm] and, generally, behaved well.  Of course, I would have behaved anyway, being the geeky junior high girl that I was, but because I spent every morning in the library, Mrs. Babcock and I got to know each other fairly well.  If I ran out of books, she’d recommend titles; one of my all-time favorite authors, Robin McKinley, came to my attention because of Mrs. B and her suggestion that I read Beauty.

Beauty is a re-telling of the traditional “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale, only done with far more innovation than the Disney version (although I will confess a certain fondness for that cartoon too!).  Beauty is gawky, awkward, and obsessed with books.  Like me, she was an ugly duckling and felt out of place in the Beast’s strange and unfamiliar castle.  The Beast, on the other hand, was intriguingly terrifying: a sort of Mr. Rochester to Beauty’s Jane Eyre.  Of course they fall in love and we are treated to the delicious suspense of wondering if Beauty will get back to the castle in time to rescue him before he dies, whether he will be turned back into the handsome prince and they will have their happy-ever-after.

And, of course, they do.  What makes Beauty such an exceptional read is McKinley’s writing.  Even in this, her debut novel, her descriptions are lush.  One feels the velvet petals of her roses, sees the jeweled peacocks on the tin of birdseed on Beauty’s windowsill, revels in the glissando of silk under Beauty’s fingertips when she is dressed in a veritable panoply of beautiful fabrics and colors.  McKinley’s language makes me want to reach into the pages and dream dreams…and while she later retold the same fairy tale in another way, saying that she had been too inexperienced a writer to create the ending she wished she had in Beauty, I still have a substantial preference for Beauty over Rose Daughter, the second retelling.  Beauty’s Beauty is more real, less silly, really, than the Beauty in Rose Daughter and there is something quite delightful about the transformation of Beast to prince that is so much more fairy-taleish than a Beast that stays a Beast.

If I could achieve anything in my own creative writing, which I fear is a rather poor, lackluster thing in comparison with Beauty, it would be to make the characters as real and the language as vital as McKinley’s.  I remember once saying that if I could write like anybody, I’d want to write like her.  In truth, I don’t want to write like anybody but myself…I just hope that someday my own writing contains as much magic as Beauty.