A European Version of Victorian Fiction: The Novels of Giovanni Ruffini.

A European Version of Victorian Fiction: The Novels of Giovanni Ruffini. By ALLAN CONRAD CHRISTENSEN. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 1996. 177 pp. Hfl. 60; $37.50.

In 1961 I bought for three shillings and sixpence a copy of The Paragreens, an anonymous volume published by Constable in Edinburgh in 1856. The pretty green cover with its Victorian gold-leaf title and scrolled decoration hid several surprises: its author was Giovanni Ruffini, an Italian, resident in France, who, it became apparent, wrote stylish English prose of a Dickensian mode. The book concerned an English family of tourists (pilgrims/pellegrini = Paragreens?), who left their home (Eden Villa, Peckham!) to visit the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. Their little-Englander characteristics, attitudes, and adventures were described with sophisticated irony, and Phiz-like cartoons by John Leech embellished the volume. Allan Christensen's fascinating study now goes a long way to explaining the complex secrets behind Ruffini's achievement. Not without reason, the title and thrust of Christensen's book stresses the European dimension of Ruffini's life and writings, and, seizing upon the elegance of Ruffini's language, modelled in its technique, he suggests, on that of Dickens, Thackeray, and other British writers, he assigns the novels to the context of Victorian fiction.

The Paragreens was the third of Ruffini's seven novels to be published, all of them written in the same elegant English. A more important work was the earlier Lorenzo Benoni (1853) with its autobiographical undertones describing the life of a young Italian growing up during his nation's struggle for independence and forced eventually into exile in London. Translated into Italian Lorenzo Benoni has become a classic of Risorgimento literature, and certainly the book for which Ruffini is best known in Italy; in Britain and elsewhere knowledge of him has all but disappeared, and the novels do not seem to have been reprinted. But now Christensen, himself something of a Scandinavian exile in America and Italy, has brought Ruffini back from obscurity with a very readable monograph that puts the Ruffini clan, close friends and allies of Mazzini, into their Risorgimento context, and examines in detail the most enduring legacy of the family: Giovanni Ruffini's novels. As revolutionaries the family paid dearly during the early years of struggle in Genoa and later during the exile of Giovanni and his brother Agostino in London, Edinburgh, and various areas of France. Ruffini's writings reflect closely those autobiographical events, and rely upon them implicitly for their subject-matter, though he was to deny that his novels had autobiographical authenticity.

Christensen writes sensitive appreciations of the several novels, putting them into their historical context as well as showing them against the personal and emotional circumstances of Ruffini's life, from the trauma of Lorenzo Benoni and Doctor Antonio to the Dickensian realism of Lavinia and the dusty retirement of A Quiet Nook in the Jura. Among many fruitful critical views here is Christensen's emphasis on an aspect noted first by De Amicis and earlier contemporaries: the consolatory effect of Ruffini's writings upon readers world-weary or disheartened by self-doubt, creating for the non-Catholic what in the Promessi sposi Manzoni had done for the faithful. Christensen certainly persuades to further reading of Ruffini, perhaps in the same way as feminist reappraisals of Ouida have revived interest in her chronicles of Victorian life and passion. Both writers have the appeal of the unexplored without necessarily committing the reader intellectually, and it may be that in Christensen's emphasis on the consolatory appeal of Ruffini lies the key to his subject's novelty.

Ruffini must have been aware of the echoes his writings evoked, and in private does express doubts about his own originality (p. 42). Lorenzo Benoni has unavoidable undertones of Niccolo Tommaseo's Fede e Bellezza (1839), and Carlino, Ruffini's final novel (1870), smacks of Nievo's posthumous Confessioni (1867). Like Nievo's masterpiece concerning another Carlino, here is the biography of a young Italian growing up and forced into exile during Italy's struggle for independence. The Risorgimento also formed the background for a further story of passion and political intrigue, Doctor Antonio, where the eponymous hero is another of these Italian revolutionaries in exile. Connected with the question of originality is what proved for me the most fascinating aspect of this study and of Ruffini's newly revealed creativity: the role played in his life and work by the two Englishwomen, exiles themselves (from unhappy marriages) with whom, for some twenty-eight years in all, he lived in Paris, at times in a strange menage a trois. If the circumstances of Ruffini's life at that time of political turmoil provided the bare bones of his subject-matter, his two genteel companions, each a published author in her own right, provided him with his English and his style.

The presence of Cornelia Turner and Henrietta Jenkin adds interest and poignancy to Ruffini's biography, a blend of political heroics and middle-class mediocrity, of the kind that characterized the lives of so many Italian exiles in the early nineteenth century, from Rossetti and Foscolo onwards. Christensen traces Ruffini's journey from unswerving allegiance to Mazzini and the cause of Young Italy to his gradual rejection of direct political commitment, helped by disillusionment following the suicide in prison of his brother Giacomo (renamed Jacopo by Mazzini, Giacomo's greatest friend, who created the myth that Jacopo had written in blood, on his cell wall, 'I bequeath the vendetta to my brothers'). If heroic and conspiratorial nationalism dominated Ruffini's first four years of exile in London (1837-41), those thoughts became increasingly less pressing when he left to take up permanent residence in Paris after 1841, resigning himself comfortably to the maternal (and wifely) attentions of Cornelia Turner and Henrietta Jenkin. Cornelia was thirteen years older than he, and lived with Ruffini for twenty-eight years until her death in 1874; until 1870 she shared his life with Henrietta (formerly the mistress of Ruffini's sickly brother Agostino), who returned to her husband in Edinburgh after the German invasion of France in that year. The evidence of Ruffini's manuscripts in the Istituto mazziniano at Genova shows that between them the two women effectively wrote most of Ruffini's published fiction, translating many of his sketches from French and working up his fascinating political intrigues and sufferings into the 'Risorgimento' novels. Lorenzo Benoni, in particular, originally written in French, was translated into English by Cornelia. Christensen provides all the evidence for their contributions, but, perhaps too willing to listen to the denials and protestations of Cornelia and Henrietta, and persuaded by chauvinistic Italian critics, who see only Ruffini's hand in his writings (pp. 39-40), he draws back from the inescapable conclusion that it was the two English ladies who were responsible for the Dickensian precision of the prose and the Thackerian subtlety of the irony, the best part of Ruffini's work. It is simply not credible that after only four years of scratching a living in London, Ruffini had acquired such a brilliant command of the language, whatever we may read about his voracious appetite for the English classics at the time. More significant perhaps is that Ruffini wrote nothing further after Cornelia's death in 1874.

Christensen's study is stimulating and informative; beyond this he leaves one unspoken question that might well bear fuller investigation, particularly by feminist critics. Did Cornelia Turner and Henrietta Jenkin, between them the authors of at least four novels in their own names, find their final literary fulfilment in ghostwriting for Ruffini? And was it their feminine intuition, imagination, and skill that created such a wide range of female protagonists, who included sensible gels, as well as figures of saints and prostituted children?

<ADD> J. R. WOODHOUSE MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD </ADD>

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Author:	Woodhouse, J.R.
Publication:	The Modern Language Review
Article Type:	Book Review
Date:	Jul 1, 1998
Words:	1271
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