Saturday, October the 17th, 2009
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Miriam Burstein directs us to what sounds like a masterpiece of wasp-related fiction:
“This evening, I came across a one-two punch sort of death in a Catholic novel, the Rev. Langton George Vere's For Better, Not For Worse (1882). Early on, the novel's two female protagonists nearly tumble into a quarry; much Flashing Neon Foreshadowing ensues. At the end, the Honorable Laura Mapleson shoots Lizzie, the younger of the two female protagonists, then chucks the body into the nearest “rippling stream” (231)… Righteous smiting soon follows. Laura, who apparently failed to look where she was going, stumbles into a nest of wasps, and is quickly beset by “infuriated insects” (231). While trying to rid herself of the aforementioned insects, the Flashing Neon Foreshadowing kicks in, and Laura “lay a bruised and bleeding mass of humanity in the darksome depth of the old disused quarry, where her victim, the palefaced girl, had stood and shuddered, as she thought of the horror of a fall into that dreadful darkness!” (231)”