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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Disentanglers," Andrew Lang employs a fluid narrative style that masterfully weaves together elements of folklore, adventure, and moral inquiry. Set against the backdrop of a fantastical world filled with whimsical characters and enchanting landscapes, the story unfolds as a quest for resolution and understanding. Lang skillfully incorporates rich, descriptive language and vivid imagery, evoking a sense of place that deepens the reader's engagement with the narrative. This work reflects Lang's affinity for blending literary charm with profound themes, as he navigates the complexities of human relationships and the trials of self-discovery within the tapestry of magical realism. Andrew Lang, renowned for his contributions to literature as a folklorist, poet, and literary critic, brought a uniquely inquisitive mind to his writing. His diverse background, including extensive travels and an avid passion for collecting folktales, informs the rich tapestry of cultural references and characters that populate "The Disentanglers." Lang's commitment to illustrating moral lessons through engaging storytelling is evident, making his works both entertaining and thought-provoking. Readers seeking a captivating blend of adventure and introspection will find "The Disentanglers" an essential addition to their literary collection. Lang's ability to engage with profound themes while captivating the reader with fantastical narratives positions this book as a timeless exploration of the human experience that resonates across generations. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Disentanglers
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a society where romance, reputation, and convenience pull in opposite directions, ingenuity becomes its own curious kind of courtship.
The Disentanglers is a work of comic fiction by Andrew Lang, a Scottish author and critic best known for his fairy books and literary essays. First published in the early 1900s, it unfolds in the milieu of British high society, where drawing rooms, clubs, and country houses form the discreet stage for private intrigues. The novel belongs to the tradition of social comedy, using satire and light adventure to examine the delicate machinery of courtship and class. Its period setting gives it an Edwardian flavor, while its preoccupations with appearances, discretion, and strategy remain strikingly familiar.
At its core is a simple, mischievous premise: an enterprising firm offers to help clients extricate themselves from awkward engagements, unsuitable attachments, and the delicate knots of social obligation. Each fresh complication presents an ethical puzzle as much as a logistical one, inviting strategic interventions that must be clever without becoming cruel. The narrative moves briskly from situation to situation, favoring ingenuity over melodrama and treating romance as both a personal matter and a public performance. Readers can expect a light, playful experience that delights in the maneuvers of polite society without tipping into cruelty or cynicism.
Lang’s tone is urbane, ironic, and companionable, guided by a narrator who appreciates both the comedy and the danger of social maneuvers. The prose leans on nimble dialogue, keen observation, and a steady undercurrent of amusement at human self-deception. The book’s structure feels casebook-like, each scenario revealing another angle on love’s pressures and society’s expectations. Humor is the primary instrument, but it plays alongside curiosity about motive and consequence. The result is a distinctive blend of wit and gentleness, a comedy of manners that values finesse over farce and leaves room for sympathy amid the satire.
Thematically, The Disentanglers probes the tension between personal choice and public duty, asking what people owe to themselves, their families, and their reputations. It examines the price of discretion, the ethics of interference, and the theatricality of courtship—how roles are learned, performed, and sometimes subverted. Social rank and money shadow every decision, and the book keeps returning to questions of autonomy: who gets to decide a future, and at what cost. By treating each predicament as a fresh test of principle, Lang invites readers to ponder whether a tidy solution is always the right one, or simply the most convenient.
Situated in early twentieth-century Britain, the story reflects a world attentive to appearances and wary of scandal, where engagements have legal and social weight and private services grow up to manage delicate problems. This context sharpens the comedy while grounding it in recognizable pressures: the need for tact, the fear of gossip, and the limits placed on courtship by class expectations. Modern readers may find echoes of contemporary dilemmas about privacy, reputation, and the outsourcing of emotional labor. The novel’s playful strategies anticipate later preoccupations with image management, making its satire feel both period-specific and unexpectedly current.
For today’s audience, The Disentanglers offers an elegant entertainment that also rewards reflection. It is a novel about clever plans and softer hearts, about tidy endings that are not always simple victories, and about the thin line between kindness and manipulation. Readers drawn to light social comedies will find buoyant pacing and polished humor; those curious about moral nuance will find questions that linger beyond the laugh. Without revealing outcomes, it is enough to say that Lang’s design turns each social knot into an occasion for tact, irony, and grace, inviting us to enjoy the spectacle while considering the stakes.
Synopsis (Selection)
Andrew Lang’s The Disentanglers is a comic novel of manners set in late Victorian and Edwardian society. It follows two well-bred young men who establish a discreet agency to resolve romantic complications before they turn into scandals or unsuitable marriages. Observing the anxieties of parents, guardians, and heirs, they propose orderly solutions to the disorderly business of courtship. The narrative introduces their practical premise: social rituals can be managed like cases, with strategy replacing chance. The book proceeds episodically, each chapter presenting a new client and predicament, while the founders refine their methods and confront the unpredictability of human affection.
The agency begins with careful rules intended to distinguish relief from wrongdoing. They will intervene only at the request of responsible parties, use no coercion, and avoid actions that could permanently damage reputations. A first commission, prompted by an alarmed parent, requires undermining a precipitous engagement without provoking scandal. The partners apply quiet observation, orchestrated encounters, and a sympathetic reading of the couple’s temperaments. Their solution hinges on exposing incompatibilities gently, letting the parties arrive at conclusions that appear self-generated. This approach establishes the book’s pattern: elaborate yet ostensibly harmless contrivances that test ingenuity against sentiment and social expectation.
A succession of cases demonstrates the scope of their work and the variety of suitors that London society produces. A fashionable fortune-hunter is navigated out of proximity to an heiress through misdirected invitations. A romantic poet’s impractical promises are tempered by a reminder of obligations disguised as chance advice. A celebrated foreign visitor’s credentials are quietly checked, while a pair of cousins discover separate paths after an engineered misapprehension. Country-house weekends, river excursions, and dances become stages for subtle maneuvers. The tone remains light, emphasizing wit and decorum over melodrama, as the partners achieve results that keep clients both relieved and discreet.
One case complicates their confidence. Their plan, designed to expose superficiality, instead reveals genuine feeling, and intervention begins to look perilous rather than prudent. The partners confront the limits of social engineering when motives prove better than appearances suggested. Their professional detachment is tested by the possibility that, in saving a reputation, they might harm a deserving attachment. They revise tactics, placing greater weight on consent and candor. This episode marks a shift in the narrative, from untroubled cleverness to a more cautious practice, and introduces the book’s central tension: how to reconcile familial caution with personal choice in a society governed by forms.
Subsequent commissions come not only from anxious elders but from young women and men determined to assert themselves. Clients ask for escape from arrangements made on their behalf, or for protection against persistence that ignores polite refusal. The agency learns to act as mediator as much as strategist, providing cover for decisive conversations and quiet exits rather than elaborate masquerades. The partners consult chaperons, enlist friends of unimpeachable reputation, and frame outcomes that leave all parties room to withdraw with dignity. The focus moves toward enabling informed decisions, acknowledging that disentangling may mean clearing misunderstandings as often as preventing imprudent vows.
The firm’s discretion attracts scrutiny. Gossips suspect their involvement where engagements falter; a whisper of conspiracy follows them from club to drawing room. A minor scandal threatens when a letter goes astray, forcing them to protect a client without exposing their methods. They contend with opportunists who profit from rumor and, at times, with intermediaries who prefer entanglement to clarity. The partners cultivate allies among men of law and women of impeccable standing to preserve both privacy and credibility. These pressures add urgency to their operations, tightening their procedures and reminding them that reputation, once questioned, can undo even careful success.
Personal complications further unsettle their resolve. Professional proximity to charm and gratitude invites attachment; a partner’s impartial judgment falters under the strain of sympathy. The boundary between case and biography blurs, and the firm must decide whether to retain impossible clients or risk partiality. This conflict introduces a new line of work: not merely preventing ill-suited unions, but repairing separations caused by haste or pride. Their skills prove adaptable to reconciliation, arranging encounters that foster clarity rather than confusion. The narrative suggests a widening purpose, with the founders weighing a practice that balances preventing mistakes with supporting alliances that withstand scrutiny.
A culminating commission gathers many threads: guardianship disputes, ambiguous credentials, and pressures of inheritance converge around a match watched by the press and by family factions. The case requires every tool they have developed, from misdirection to meticulous verification, as well as restraint when truth itself threatens embarrassment. Set across townhouses, a country estate, and a seaside interlude, the episode tests the partners’ reformed principles. They aim for an outcome that preserves choice, limits harm, and acknowledges new understanding between the parties. The resolution, carefully staged yet unobtrusive, displays the book’s preference for tact over triumph and measure over bravado.
The Disentanglers closes by reaffirming the limits and uses of social management. The partners recognize that strategy can simplify circumstances but cannot manufacture sincere attachment or improve character. Their evolving code favors consent, truth told at the right moment, and exits that do not foreclose future happiness. The linked cases, humorous in tone and precise in detail, assemble a portrait of a society negotiating between convention and individual desire. Without disclosing final outcomes, the book points toward a practice that values both prudence and generosity. Its central message is clear: good sense can guide courtship, but it must defer to the claims of the heart.
Historical Context
Andrew Lang’s The Disentanglers (1902) is set in late Victorian and emergent Edwardian Britain, centered on London’s drawing rooms, clubs, and suburban or Home Counties country houses where engagements and marriage settlements were forged and broken. The period immediately after Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 saw old aristocratic codes colliding with modern urban anonymity, hansom cabs giving way to motorcars (after the 1896 Act), and telegrams and telephones quickening social intrigue. The novel imagines a discreet firm that dissolves imprudent betrothals, a premise grounded in the real anxieties of reputation in Mayfair and the West End, and in a society where family strategy, inheritance, and propriety still regulated courtship and matrimony.
Nineteenth-century English marriage and divorce law set the institutional backdrop. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 transferred divorce from ecclesiastical to civil courts, created the Divorce Court, and entrenched a double standard—adultery alone sufficed for husbands, while wives had to prove adultery with aggravating factors. Subsequent reforms, including the Matrimonial Causes Act 1878 (magisterial separation for cruelty) and landmark ruling R v Jackson (1891), which forbade a husband’s physical restraint of his wife, inched toward female legal autonomy. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 let wives control earnings and property. The Disentanglers mirrors this legal terrain: engagements, settlements, and guardianship become technicalities the firm exploits to unwind matches without exposing clients to the punitive glare of the Divorce Court.
Breach of promise actions—civil suits for damages when an engagement was broken—were a notorious Victorian and Edwardian hazard. Plaintiffs, often women facing reputational and financial loss, introduced evidence such as letters and gifts; juries in the 1880s–1890s sometimes awarded substantial sums, reported to reach into the thousands of pounds. Newspapers sensationalized trials, making private correspondence public currency. Although abolished in England and Wales only in 1970, their social force peaked earlier, when public shame could blight a career or lineage. The Disentanglers engages this matrix of risk: its premise reflects a market for discreet recovery of letters, quiet exits from imprudent vows, and strategic avoidance of the courtroom and the front page.
Economic shocks to the landed elite decisively shaped the marriage market. The long agricultural depression (circa 1873–1896) and the Estate Duty introduced by Sir William Harcourt in 1894 eroded rent incomes and burdened inheritances. In response, transatlantic “dollar princess” marriages—estimated in the hundreds between 1870 and 1914—linked titled but cash-poor Britons to wealthy American heiresses. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1895 union with the 9th Duke of Marlborough, and Mary Leiter’s 1895 marriage to George Nathaniel Curzon (later Viceroy of India), exemplified the phenomenon, as did Jennie Jerome’s 1874 marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill. Lang’s novel lampoons marriages of convenience and familial pressure, dramatizing how financial calculus, not sentiment, often organized engagements in the fin de siècle.
Parallel advances in women’s legal and civic status reframed courtship and choice. The Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) underwrote economic independence; the University of London opened degrees to women in 1878; and the Local Government Act 1894 expanded participation in local elections. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) formed in 1897 under Millicent Garrett Fawcett, while the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) followed in 1903. This ferment—along with debates around the “New Woman”—encouraged scrutiny of parental control, chaperonage, and coerced matches. In The Disentanglers, women seeking to escape ill-suited engagements echo these currents, asserting consent and self-determination against the contractual logic of settlements and the expectations of lineage.
The rise of mass-circulation newspapers and “New Journalism” transformed privacy into a public commodity. Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe) launched the Daily Mail in 1896; the Daily Express followed in 1900. The Law of Libel Amendment Act 1888 eased reportage of public meetings, while W. T. Stead’s 1885 “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette displayed the press’s capacity to expose—and sensationalize—moral issues, precipitating the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. Society columns, press-cutting agencies like Romeike & Curtis (founded 1852), and the appetite for scandal made discretion a currency. Lang’s disentangling firm operates in this environment, where the true antagonist is often publicity, and success is measured by the absence of headlines.
Modern policing and private inquiry culture supplied methods for managing romantic crises. The Metropolitan Police (1829) and Criminal Investigation Department (1878) professionalized detection, while private agents such as Ignatius Paul Pollaky’s Private Inquiry Office (established 1862) catered to elite sensitivities. Rapid transport and communications facilitated both elopements and their interception: railways sped couples north to Scotland, where, under distinctive Scots law, informal marriages remained valid until the twentieth century, making Gretna Green an enduring symbol. Telegrams and, increasingly, telephones enabled surveillance and negotiation across distances. The Disentanglers adapts these realities into plot mechanics—trailing clients, interdicting hurried weddings, and deploying quiet inquiries to prevent entanglements from hardening into legal or social catastrophes.
As social and political critique, the book indicts the commodification of intimacy at the turn of the century. By staging engagements as problems for a consultancy, it exposes a regime where family strategy, estate finance, and press management subordinate personal choice. It highlights gender asymmetries perpetuated by divorce standards and breach-of-promise pressures, even as expanding women’s rights unsettle those norms. Its focus on discreet services and private agents satirizes a society outsourcing conscience and conflict to professionals while preserving surface respectability. In depicting transactional alliances and reputational risk, Lang anatomizes class anxiety, the marketization of private life, and the moral evasions that sustained elite power in early Edwardian Britain.
