(2 of 2)
Or so she tells Justin. The growing friendship between the uprooted girl and the landlocked aristocrat shimmers with ambiguities and half-truths. Justin is flattered that a woman as haughty as Ursula seems genuinely interested in her and her disrupted perceptions. To find such a confidante in an alien place seems an answered prayer: "She lived the kind of life that reminded me a lot of the one we had lost." For her part, Ursula appears to take on this fledgling out of a mixture of kindness, boredom and the desire to create: "She's a clean slate. When she meets new people, or new challenges, she is free to respond to the unique demands of the moment." Ursula starts calling the hut where they first met, on the dwindling DeVane estate, Justin's "finishing school," the place where example will groom youth for the trials that await it.
This description proves accurate, but in ways neither of the friends could have imagined. Justin learns much from her mentor, including the necessity of betraying and abandoning her, of finishing an evil that Ursula's school had hidden from its inception. The vague outlines of this conclusion are visible in the first few pages of Justin's narrative; the hows and whys appear with deliberate speed and stunning effect. Godwin's account of the making of a forcibly modern heroine (career, two failed marriages) uses nearly every trick in the book, circa the 19th century. Good Dickensian fun is had with Justin's Aunt Mona, a kind but stereotyped soul who cannot resist mentioning, regardless of context, the advantages that life has failed to bestow upon her. But Mona's idiosyncrasy serves more than comic relief. She emerges as exactly the sort of woman who would marry, and then separate from, the kind of man who would naturally feel obliged to assist Justin--at just the moment when his kindness can do the most harm.
Nothing, ultimately, is wasted in The Finishing School. Every character and scene leads somehow toward an inexorable crisis. Simply coasting on the surface of this tale, while waiting for the crash, is most enjoyable. Those readers who want to know why they are having such a good time can stand back and appreciate Godwin's skill. She has taken some timeworn contrivances and shown, by example, why storytellers invented them in the first place: to ! heighten life into story, to funnel random experience into manners, morals and destiny.