Betty by the Numbers: Names Redux

We've had enough new folks start chiming in on our discussions that I decided to pull out a couple of the original Betty by the Numbers pieces in the hope they may be useful.  This was my first effort, in response to regular commentary, including a full post, about Betty's use and re-use of certain names.  Next week:  servants' names.

From the beginning, when she created the eventual Baroness Adelaide Blankenaar van Essen, to the Aramintas and Olivias and their various Gijses and Jameses, we have loved Betty for her names.  No Dracon Leloupblancs in Neels-land!  Perhaps you have your own favorites – maybe Britannia and her Jake, or the Ms. Makepeace who finds happiness with Mr. ter Brons Huizinga, or the near-ridiculousness of Lucy Lockitt or Eustacia Crump (or Krijn van der Brink-Schaaksma, come to that).

For those who may find a superficial study of interest, I’ve run a few numbers:

THE HEROINES

Eleven first names get used three times each.  These popular young women are:  Araminta, Beatrice, Charity, Deborah, Emma (there are also two named ‘Emily’, making Emma/Emily the #1 Neels name), Francesca, Julia (plus one Julie, so Julia/Julie becomes runner-up), Katrina, Louisa, Matilda and Serena.  There are also two Mary Janes and one Mary, but I don’t count that as three ‘Mary’ variants – would you?

This seems like a high proportion of names ending in ‘a’.

Harriet Tubman, 1820-1913, born Araminta Harriet Ross according to Wikipedia.  For non-US readers, Araminta Harriet was born into slavery, escaped to a free state and then returned to work the so-called Underground Railroad, guiding over 70 slaves to freedom.  She subsequently worked for the Union army as a spy, and packed heat as an Army scout.  She had mystical visions she believed were messages from God, but they might just have been hallucinations resulting from a serious head wound she suffered when beaten by a ‘master’ in her childhood.  Would history be different if she’d stuck with the ‘Araminta’?

Fifteen first names show up in two books (including Loveday, Philomena and Eulalia), which leaves 72 unique-use first names.  There’s no Charlotte, which some sources report as Betty Neels’s daughter’s name, and no Jessie, Evelyn or Betty, which are the various names credited to the author.  (I haven’t tracked secondary characters’ names, but there’s at least one Great-Aunt Jessica.)

All told, Betty used just 98 first names across 135 stories.  But she managed to come up with 112 last names for the ladies!

For heroines, last names run more toward the usual than we see in the first names, though feet show up more than they might in your own daily life, with two Proudfoots and two Lightfoots.  Since there are two Creswells (single ‘s’) and two Cresswells (double ‘s’), I’m crowning that the queen of surnames.  Five show up three times each:  Brown, Crosbie/Crosby, Parsons, Smith and Trent.  Besides the feet, eleven other last names repeat, but there’s only one each of Pennyfeather, ffinch and Darling.  And how is it I never really noticed before that Judith, of Judith, carries the last name Golightly?

 

Hannah Lightfoot (1730 - ??), a Quaker from London who married outside her faith, ran away from her husband, disappeared and was presumed dead before she was 30 .  Some unkind scalawag started an entirely untrue rumor that the very shy, 15-year old future George III had stolen her from her husband and married her, which rumor apparently persists still, which is enough to land her in Wikipedia.

THE HEROES

Okay, first of all, 91 of the heroes are Dutch, so 44 are English, a two-thirds/one-third split.  Of the Dutch, 13 are Jonkheers or Barons, while the English muster six knights (“Sir William,” “Sir Paul”).  That’s 14% titled heroes, which is certainly higher than what I can boast amongst my family, friends and acquaintance (currently 0%, though I did once chat with an earl in his gorgeous garden in the County Offaly), but seems fairly moderate compared to the number of billionaires, sheiks and princelings who populate current genre romance.

Birr Castle in County Offaly has one of the absolutely most bee-yoo-tee-ful gardens I have ever visited.  I was wandering the grounds one morning, waiting for an Irish nurse’s wedding to start (not a lot else to do in Birr village), when a courtly older gentleman asked my opinion on lilacs.  In the course of our conversation (thank you, Arnold Arboretum) he made clear that he owned the castle, which would make him the Earl of Rosse.  Lovely man.  You can have lunch with him (or his son; my chat was 20 years ago) and the countess for 115 euros per person if you get 29 others to kick in with you.

Since the masculine equivalent of “Eulalia” (whatever that is – Ethelred?) would probably get an author laughed out of the publishing house (although, given “Dracon,” perhaps not), Betty narrowed her scope considerably with men’s names, using just 86 across the 135 books – though the Brits repeat far more often than the Netherlanders do.  James shows up six times; Jake and Oliver five each; Alexander and Thomas four times apiece.  Gijs and Julius are among the seven names that make three appearances each; the others are all English.  Yes, Julius wouldn’t be an unusual name for an Englishman, but in Neelsland he’s Dutch each time.

There are two heroes named Haso, Renier, and, of all things, Benedict.  Both Benedicts are Dutch.  (In the US, “Benedict” used to connote one man to many people; “Benedict Arnold” is a vernacular synonym for traitor, since the historical figure was infamous for plotting to turn the West Point Fort over to the British during the Revolutionary War.  However, Joseph Ratzinger has done a lot to change that.)

Saint Benedict of Nursia – he is a monk, Charity Dawson!

Hissing and byword Benedict Arnold, pre-defection.

There are a total of 15 names that show up twice, and 16 if you count the English Valentine Seymour (called “Val” by his sister) and the Dutch Valentijn van Bertes as a repeat.  Then we get 57 that don’t repeat at all, including Fenno, Raf and Sam.

A Valentijn (Overeem, Dutch mixed-martial arts fighter)

for Daisy (Buchanan, as played by Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby, though she may prefer to stick with Robert Redford).  In real Betty-life, Daisy got

  a Valentine – perhaps Val Kilmer would do, if rumors as to his full name are correct.

But it is with last names for men that Betty truly spread herself, coming up with a total of 131 distinct last names.  The only repeaters, with two each, are Fforde, Latimer, Seymour and van Diederijk (Tane from An Apple for Eve and Sarre from Sun and Candlelight).  Sixty-five men’s names start with “van” and seven with “ter.”  Curiously, on the other side of the channel, there’s both a Tait-Bouverie and a Tait-Bullen.  Perhaps they’re related.  Eight English and one Dutch surname are hyphenated, which in England is often seen as a sign of upper-class-ish-ness.

The UK poet laureate from 1968-1972, C. Day Lewis, deliberately changed his name from Day-Lewis to Day Lewis, reflecting what he called ‘inverted snobbery,’ “and thereby threw librarians into a confusion from which they have not recovered,” according to Norton’s.  Reason enough, surely for a photo of his son, Daniel. I’m afraid his hair may be a bit long for Betty, but I could stand a lot of Chinese food if I were sitting across from that...

Two surnames occur in both heroes and heroines:  the aforementioned Creswell/Creswell for four heroines and a single hero, and two Seymours of each sex.  Wikipedia lists three English villages called Cresswell, and 15 people, including Sir Cresswell Cresswell PC KC (1794-1863), who “set divorce on a secular footing, removed from the traditional domain of canon law.”  Somehow I doubt that’s the one Betty was honoring.  There are five places called Creswell in Wikipedia, two in the UK and three in the USA, plus a Navy base in Australia.  The five human Creswells include K.A.C. Creswell, the English architectural historian – sounds good so far, doesn’t it? – specializing in Egyptian Islamic architecture – yea, maybe not so much.

CONCLUSION

The generic Betty Neels couple is Emily (called Emma) Creswell and James van Diederijk.  Neither combo actually shows up in the canon.

Betty by the Numbers: Cross-over Characters

You know this moment, right?  You’re reading along in your current Betty, and the hero says to the heroine, “I’d like you to meet some friends of mine,” and you think, “Oooh, oooh, please let them be Clotilde Claribel Fothergill-Fox and her husband, Eduard Everard Tait-ter Teylingen!”  And it is!  Or it’s someone else you’ve met in a prior volume, and when the H&H drop by for their visit, Domus opens the door, and Bep brings the tea tray, and Charlie and Beauty thump welcoming tails against the flowered carpet in the exquisite-yet-lived-in drawing room, where Clotilde Claribel has cast down her knitting on a Regency piecrust table in order to play a rowdy-in-a-well-mannered-way game of Happy Families with Eduard Jr. and his little sister, Maisie (real name Megan Matilda, but we call her Maisie in honor of the ward maid who helped bring us together).  Yaaay!!  From all these warm details, and the way Doctor Baron gazes adoringly at his cashmere-and-silk swathed wife, you know there really is such a thing as happy ever after! 

Yay!  Perfect bliss is attainable!

These are cross-over characters, and they appear in 32, or 24%, of Betty Neels’s novels.  The first such occasion is in the third novel, Blow Hot, Blow Cold (later Surgeon from Holland and then Visiting Consultant) (1969), wherein Sophy has the pleasure of meeting Max’s dear friends Coenraad and Adelaide, from TGB’s very first outing, Sister Peters in Amsterdam (1969).  At that point, they have a baby boy (copyright dates, I’m sure, not premature Brighton visits).  A few books later, Coenraad the Younger, nicknamed Champers, has an 18-month old sister, Lisa, and Adelaide has a Bath bun in her oven (or maybe a Baarn bun) when Deborah and Gerard visit with the Blankenaar van Essens in 1973, in Stars Through the Mist.

Aderaad (get it?  Like ‘Brangelina’ and ‘TomKat’?) are not the only couple to appear in multiple future volumes.  Three others also make two cross-over appearance, and Chrisert of Not Once But Twice (1981) re-appear not twice but three times, the last cameo in 2000’s Dearest Eulalia, when Christina is a handsome 45-year old who has pledged her affection to Duert to the extent of three sons and one daughter, all of them offstage.  We did meet the kiddies tangentially in 1999’s A Good Wife, but then there were only two sons and the daughter, all grown enough to pass trays of titbits.  So at 44 she birthed her final babe, with three well-grown siblings ahead of him?  Yikes.  A Good Wife also offers a poignant moment when Serena meets the ter Brandt children’s puppy, by which we may infer that Thomas, Duert’s dog in 1981, has gone to the Happy Hearth beyond our mortal reach.

Puppy ter Brandt senses danger!  She will relax when she realizes it’s only Serena, come to help sort woolies for the jumble sale.

So in all we count five multiple-recurrers, for 5% of the books.  There’s another 23 couples who chalk up a single future visit, for 17% of our total hero/heroine headcount.  So 28 couples make 34 appearances in 32 other books, which I can explain by noting that four books include visits from two sets of hey-I-know-yous.  Dearest Eulalia is the last book to include cross-over characters, and one of the double-features:  we get both Christina and Duert and Daisy and Jules (Dales?  Juisy?) from the prior year’s Discovering Daisy, along with three-week old Julius.  (Julius is named not for dad, as is usual in Neelsland, but for dad’s dad, but then, it’s practically the same name.)

The other three books with multiple special guest stars are all from the early 1970s, with Aderaad and Domigail (Saturday’s Child, 1972) both showing up in Stars Through the Mist (1973); the BH,BC/SfH/VC crowd and the Saturday’s Child crew both popping up in The Gemel Ring (1974); and the van Amstels and the van Beeks (Uncertain Summer, Tabitha in Moonlight, both 1972) both mixing and mingling with the van der Graafs at The End of the Rainbow (1974).

I am starting to feel dizzy as I consider the task of interconnecting all the connections here – Aderaad met Max and Sophy, and also Gerard and Deborah, and Maphy met Everard and Charity, who also met Gerorah...

A cup of tea with my feet up, and I felt ready to tackle the overlaps again.  I found it easier to do by expanding my crossover chart.  There are 18 clusters of crossings-over, from ten simple two-book matches – like Hariso show up in A Matter of Chance (1977), and then we never hear about any of them again – to the six-book hopscotch of Chrisert appearing in A Girl Named Rose (1986), whose H&H have a cameo in The Doubtful Marriage, plus we see Chrisert in A Good Wife and Dearest Eulalia, the latter of which also offers the visit, mentioned above, from Daisy and Jules.  All clear now?

Not actually me, nor actually tea.  But the spirit of the thing is right.

Look at the chart, please, for visual clarification.  I think it helps, especially page three.

Interesting to note that, although 33% of Neels heroes are UKish (UKean?  anyway, 32% English and 1% Scottish), only 7% of recurring heroes are English – Gerard Grenfell and Guy Bowers-Bentinck (Heidelberg Wedding, 1984, and The Chain of Destiny, 1989).  We’ve got slightly less of a disparity on the receiving end:  four, or one-eighth, of the books that host cross-overs have English heroes.  Still, this inter-book visiting is primarily the prerogative of the Dutchmen.  I wonder if Betty liked them better?

The most plot-essential cross-over characters are Georgina and Julius from Damsel in Green (1970), who are critical to the evolving romance of Tishy and Jason in A Small Slice of Summer (1975), as are the baby Ivo van den Berg Effert, who enables both hero and heroine to show off their infant-caring skills, and toddler Polly, whom Tison must rescue from goring, thus clearly demonstrating they’re made for each other.  We also catch up with Julius’s cousins, including Karel, whom Letitia loves like a brother but how could Jason know that, and the peace and serenity of both Dalmers Place in Essex and whatever the vdBE estate in Maarternsdijk is called, plus of course the Leggs, the Stephenses, Ginger, Toto, Robby, Andersen and Flip.  Honestly, A Small Slice of Summer is about 30% Georgina and Julius.  Good thing I love them so. 

Not this...

...more like this

Another critical crossover is Chrissy and Duert’s in A Girl Named Rose (1986), as they provide the badly-injured Duert, Jr. whom Gold Medalist Rose Comely must nurse.  Yes, that’s right – Chrissy is a skilled nurse herself, but she’s highly preggers with the second of her brood of three or four, and therefore needs an assist.  She returns the favor by inviting Rose back to Den Haag for a vacation where she can meet her Sybren again, for the additional pining and cross-purposing that eventually leads to marriage.  And then Rose pays it forward when she routs old friend and troublemaker Nikky van Wijk from the van Kempler drawing room.  (Nikky is striving to raise even further the doubtful-quotient in The Doubtful Marriage (1987) of Matilda and Rauwerd.)  How does one rout an old friend and troublemaker, you ask?  Rose’s method is to brandish a baby-carrier, speak a few home truths, and not take any guff.

One of the most poignant crossovers has got to be Sarah and Hugo’s (Fate is Remarkable, 1970) visit to the van Amstels (Uncertain Summer), during which TGB introduces the year-old twins Hugo (of course) and Rosemary, named for the congestive-heart-failure afflicted patient, Mrs. Brown, whose final months Hurah made happier with cat-care, garish cabbage-rosed wallpaper and copious quantities of tea.  Her dying words:  “Me name’s Rosemary – it’s a nice name for a little girl.”  Another good one, many years and volumes later, is when Fran Manning van Rijgen leaves The Secret Pool to visit her Old School Friend Lucy Lockitt, The Girl with Green Eyes (1990), during which visit she reveals that her and Litrik’s daughter is named Lisa, in memory of the baby’s sadly-deceased big sister.  Talk about poignant.  On a side note, I believe this is the only cross-over where the heroine knows her predecessor character – in every other case, we meet through the hero.

“Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.”

Overall, Mrs. Neels kept her characters reasonably sociable; 38% of her books, 51 in total, include characters who will meet their literary successors in a later book, who do meet their literary predecessors from a prior book, or both.  In fact, eight of her novels – that’s 6% – hit that “both” threshold.   Check the chart for details, will you?  I need another tea break, or possibly a medicinal sherry.

Also not me; also not tea; nor yet sherry.  And yet...

Life After Betty

Life After Betty:  The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett always makes me think of A Girl to Love, one of Betty Neels’s six stories to feature a non-doctor in the role of hero/future husband.  In that one, Oliver Trentham is a wealthy, well-known writer for television.  That’s what Alan Bennett is!  And he’s about the only writer for TV I could name, and he was rather handsome as a youngster.

 

Bennett in 1973 – not bad for a bisexual intellectual comedian who writes TV plays with Wittgenstein references, right?

In addition to TV scripts, Bennett has also written a host of plays, movie screenplays, essays, short stories and novellas.  Apparently he acts, too, with a thick Northern (Leeds) accent.  The Uncommon Reader is one of the more recent of the novellas, published in 2007.  At about 25,000 words, it’s a quick read, and with Bennett holding the pen it’s a delightful and inspiring one that repays re-reading.

The central conceit of the story is that Queen Elizabeth II, stumbling upon a mobile public library, picks up a novel to be polite and gets captivated by the world of literature.  Bennett conjectures that the queen had previously not been a reader in part because of the requirement attaching to her role that she avoid obvious preferences.  “And besides, reading wasn’t doing.  She was a doer.”  On her first attempt, she inadvertently chooses a “duff read,” but perseveres:  “That was the way one was brought up.  Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate.”  To escape a dull meeting, she takes out a second novel, and Nancy Mitchell’s The Pursuit of Love captures the queen.

She becomes a voracious reader with a catholic taste that encompasses Jean Genet, Lauren Bacall and Alice Munro.  Staff and family are forced to make adjustments in schedules and standard procedures to accommodate her majesty’s reading.  Various functionaries try to curtail it, but their efforts are powerless in the face of literature’s pull.

This imaginary queen makes important discoveries in her reading, both as she thinks over what she’s read and as she moves on to writing down her thoughts.  “Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.  Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.  Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”  “A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”  “You don’t put your life into your books.  You find it there.”  As she writes, she is liberated to discover, for the first time, her own voice.

This is a wonderful, chatty little story with some great suggestions for future reading, and some thought-provoking reflections on the causes and effects of literature.  The queen, as Bennett imagines her, is a delight – smart, thoughtful, forthright.  His suppositions seem so reasonable that I have a hard time remembering this is a novel, not a biography, and I still finish up with a strong affection for the real queen, as it seems so possible she could be just like the one in the book.  And then I read it again.

Brighton:  not even vaguely

Clothes:  the queen becomes very slightly less attentive to her wardrobe as she reads more; “’I’d outlaw that cardigan,’ said her maid.”

Food:  boeuf en croute!, poires belle Helene, a wicked trifle, etc.