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Green Darkness is the story of a great love, in which mysticism, suspense, and mystery form a web of good and evil forces that stretches from Tudor England to the England of the twentieth century. The marriage of the Englishman Richard Marsdon and his young American wife Celia slowly turns tragic as Richard withdraws into himself and Celia suffers a debilitating emotional breakdown. A wise mystic realizes that Celia can escape her past only by reliving it. She journeys back four hundred years to her former life as the servant girl Celia de Bohun during the reign of Edward VI - and her doomed love affair with the chaplain Stephen Marsdon. Although Celia and Stephen can't escape the horrifying consequences of their love, fate (and time) offer them another chance for redemption.… (more)
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Swirling around the characters is the extremely unstable political condition of England at the time. No one – Protestant or Roman Catholic – has an easy time of things. Everyone is forced into a balancing act, depending upon which one of the three Tudor siblings – Edward, Mary or Elizabeth - is in control at any particular time. Those members of the nobility who cannot bring themselves to switch from one religion to another have a harder time of it than the others. The ordinary people are confused by the constant shifting back and forth in religion and many end up not knowing what to think, including Celia, who having come late to religion, eventually decides she needs no religion at all and will, instead, just follow the form of whatever seems expedient at the time. She has a bigger fish to land. With the single-mindedness of the young, she pursues Stephen relentlessly. Stephen, it must be said, does not really do all he should to protect himself from her, but after several years of trying to shake Celia off, he probably just got tired. He is, underneath it all, a man and she is very persistent.
Seton provides Part 2 with a dark ending – a really dreadful one – and she should have left it there, but having afflicted us with Part 1 she really had to wind up that part of the story. I only read Part 3, because I’d read Part 1. It wasn’t good. If and when I read this book again I’ll go straight to Part 2. It was worth the read – the other parts were not.
Three and half stars for Part 2
One and half stars for Parts 1 & 3.
The Book Report: The book description says:
This unforgettable story of undying love combines mysticism, suspense, mystery, and romance into a web of good and evil that stretches from 16th-century England to the present day.
My Review: My sister used to have a book store. She, our mother, and I all spent the summer of 1973, damn near 40 years ago now, reading this book. We'd been stealing it back and forth from each other until finally she gave Mama and me our own copies so she could read it in peace. We did a sort of group read on the book, and oh my heck how we liked it!
I was a teenager then. I wasn't an inexperienced reader, but I was completely suckered in by anything to do with reincarnation. Mama was just getting the Jeebus infection that ate her sense of humor, compassion, and decency...all oddly enough while sexually abusing her teenaged son, funny how often religion masks corruption...and my sister was in one of the periodic hellish patches that have punctuated her road through life.
We all resonated with the travails of the characters, trying to work out their manifold interconnections and karmic debts. The book's very Gothicness was deeply appealing to each of us for our own reasons, and gave us hours and hours of fun things to talk about. For that, a whole star in grateful memory.
Rereading this at fifty-two was probably a mistake. The writing is very much what one would expect of an historical novelist whose career began in the 1940s. She was renowned in the day for her meticulous research, and yet says in her Preface (p. vi of the 1973 Houghton Mifflin hardcover I got from the liberry), “Source books make for tedious listing, but for the Tudor period {of Green Darkness} I have tried to consult all the pertinent ones.” Imagine someone, even a novelist, trying to get away with that now! There would be calumnious mutterings and sulphrous aspersions cast on the character and the ability of such an author. As if it matters in a work of fiction.
The humid Gothic atmosphere of lust and love denied, the surrendered to, then disastrously brought to a close, was a little hard on my older self. I like romantic stories just fine, but the moralizing you can keep. And there is a deal of moralizing! Whee dawggie! The gay characters are ugly...as within, so without, and Seton clearly has the attitude of her day towards gay men...the lusty lower-class wenches get their bastards and get turned out, the Catholic Church and its hypocrisy suffer agonies at the hands of the vile Protestant politicians...Seton was raised a Theosophist...good people turn hard and cold when given property to protect...the Exotic Hindu Doctor who understands Modern Medicine but Knows How to Be In Touch With the Spirits, oof!...oh, the lot!
So not so much on the attitude. I get it, and in those days I absorbed it because it was the way my family thought, but how I wish I could go back to 1973 and smack this book out of my young hands! Along with Stranger in a Strange Land, its misogyny and homophobia leached right into my brain and lodged there. Never made me one whit less gay, just made me feel terrible about it, like the culture's messages continue to do to young and impressionable kids to this day.
But the fact that the lady wrote this, her next-to-last book, when she was nearing seventy and had only just been divorced from her husband of nigh on forty years, and was beginning her long decline into ill health, makes Green Darkness a poignant re-read for me. Her life was unraveling, and mine was too (what little there was of it at that point); I think both my mother and my sister felt the same way. I suspect some resonance of that bound all of us to this book and spoke to each of us about its unhappy people in unhappy lives. There is, in the best romantic tradition, a happy ending. But I for one have never believed it.
The love story of Celia and Brother Stephen was an interesting way to show the contrast between the sacred and the secular. Like religion in that time, there was ultimately no way to bring the two together in any meaningful way and it ended up destroying them both. It was quite brilliantly done and has many valid lessons for our time.
Overall this book had high points of interest and a few dull spots. If you have the patience to see it through, you will be rewarded.
This story starts out in modern 20th century -- turns out the characters are reincarnations of characters in early Tudor England. A monk has an affair with a servant girl.
I began the book and got to Part 2 and decided it was not for me so decided to read the last chapter. I then thought it sounded interesting and read the whole book and the last chapter again. Actually, reading the last chapter first worked best for
The novel has the main characters, Sir Richard Marsdon of England and his American wife, Lady Celia Marsdon.
The periods of time are the 1960s and also the 16th century. Celia goes back into time; a book that somewhat deals with reincarnation. There is history, mystery, romance, hate and Tutor England.
It was not a page turner for me but got better about half-way through the book. I thought there were too many characters and too much happening.
It is a fairly well written book and interesting; the history is what I personally like.
Reading the book does make me want to do some research on some of the characters. It is a book that I could read a second time when I have time.
Leona
Back Cover Blurb:
Celia de Bohun first fell in love in 1552. But Stephen was a priest. When he returned her love, the young sweethearts became
Centuries later, their tragedy threatens the life and happiness of another Celia, the young, rich and unhappy wife of Richard Marsdon and lady of the Sussex manor called Medfield Place.
Only by piercing the green darkness of the past and revealing its mysterious truth can Celia be saved.
Thank goodness for the Mt. TBR Challenge which prompted me to read those books which have
The novel is divided into three parts and begins during what feels like the 1970's. Celia and Richard Marsdon are a wealthy young couple recently married and living in the Marsdon family home. One evening Celia falls into a trance-like state and we find out that she is revisiting her past life in the 1500's. Her past life involves a tragic love and ending which must be resolved in order for her present to be free.
I loved this middle section and thought it was really well done. The reign of Edward the VI and his subsequent death felt really well researched and that shows in the writing. Seton explores the idea of reincarnation and atonement in an interesting way that is believable and not gimmicky.
Another winner from Seton.
I was stunned to discover what I'd brought home--so few novels about reincarnation existed in 1993! I stayed up all night reading it. And now I own a second copy that's in a little better shape. I think it's time to read it again, which is something I almost never have time to do.
On the other hand, I've been spoiled by Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn, which was excellently done, so bearing that in mind I do think this novel is worth a try, if only for that middle section.
While I enjoyed this book and thought it was well written I'm only giving it 3 stars as I
Celia initially gets what she wants, she becomes pregnant with the priest's baby and he agrees to leave with her. However the mistress of the house finds out about them having sex and murders Celia and hides her body. The priest thinks Celia has ran away with somebody else and he commits suicide.