There’s Merritt Emmons, a one-time wunderkind who wrote a dazzlingly successful book called The Happenings at Brookhants when she was 16, and has entered her early 20s with nothing more to show but writer’s block. Those events entangle three more Plain Bad Heroines in the present day. The relationship between principal Libbie Brookhants and her dear companion Alexandra Trills is tested beyond natural limits. But then two of the club’s members are killed by a freak swarm of yellowjacket wasps, one of their admirers dies strangely, and after that things get weirder still at Brookhants (pronounced “Brook-haunts”, a pun which the narrator disowns with winning chutzpah: “I cannot help that the school’s name is Brookhants and that it’s said to be haunted”). In those first pages of danforth's book, MacLane is established as both Writer and Reader.In the early 19th century, MacLane’s (real) book reaches Rhode Island’s (fictional) Brookhants School for Girls, where its scandalous mix of sapphism and ego inspires the formation of a Plain Bad Heroines Society.
But her writing was also born out of the frustration of never seeing herself represented in them. As she laments the lack of "plain bad heroines," she makes reference to none other than Jane Eyre, a plain woman, to be sure, but one so full of moral righteousness as to make her "very unsatisfactory." MacLane's references are all from literary texts, revealing how she has constructed herself through the books she has read. Take for instance, that opening excerpt from Mary MacLane's scandalizing memoir: in it, she is writing about herself as the author of the memoir, and writing about herself as a character in the memoir, the heroine of the story and of her own life. In her capable hands, the narrative voice is just one barb on the branch of brambles that is this book, one of the many ways it will enfold and ensnare you. Her use of narrative intrusion is skillful indeed.
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