The Crimson Petal and the White

As far as the title goes, Tennyson wrote a poem beginning, "Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white," and the book may be Faber's realistic answer to Tennyson's romanticism, the crimson petal being the life of prostitutes on the streets and the white the pale and effete upper society. The book has an intriguing beginning, but trails off in the middle as Sugar becomes a somewhat insipid copy of Jane Eyre. Then it gets good again towards the end. I didn't feel the ending left us hanging; William gets what he deserves, and Sugar and Sophie come out on top. The characters aren't too well fleshed out. William is hard to figure out, Henry is boring and it's never explained how Sugar, having been raised on the streets, is well-spoken and educated enough to pass herself off as a governess (or that her lover would consider letting her do so). The fact that, having been raped repeatedly since the age of thirteen, Sugar would enjoy and look forward to sex, strikes me as a male author's fantasy, although he does give us an excellent and sympathetic picture of the position of women. What the book does very well is to give us a feeling for Victorian society: the prostitutes, the servants, the male chauvinists and the helpless and pampered ladies of the upper class.