For my next #1962club  read I’m once more taking a trip back into my past reading, albeit with the slight difference that today’s book is not a re-read! Back in my early teens we didn’t have a lot of money to buy books, and so I tended to grab just about anything I could get my hands on. We also didn’t have Young Adult books as such, so as I grew up was drawn to my father’s crime books and my mother’s romances – which inevitably meant reading a lot of books I probably would never go back to now! However, one of my mum’s favourite authors was Victoria Holt, and I did spend a lot of time with her gothic romances. So when I realised that her second novel, “Kirkland Revels” was published in 1962, I couldn’t resist tracking down a copy – it’s a title of hers I don’t recall having read so I thought it would be fun to spend some time travelling back into my past!

I didn’t know it at the time, but Victoria Holt was one of many pen-names used by the author Eleanor Burford/Hibbert. A massively prolific author, she was also responsible for all of the Jean Plaidy and Philippa Carr books my mother and I read, and according to Wikipedia she wrote under eight different names! Looking down the lists, I recognise a good number of the Holt titles, and this particular strand of writing, those gothic romances, was obviously one my mother favoured. So now, more decades on than I would prefer to acknowledge, how did I find the writing of Victoria Holt?

Well, “Kirkland Revels” follows what I would regard as the basic template of all the Holt novels. The heroine is 19 year old Catherine Corder; returning home from finishing school in France to her emotionally cold father and unwelcoming home, she instantly falls in love with Gabriel Rockwell, the heir of Kirkland Revels. The latter location is of course an old house, previously an Abbey, set deep in Yorkshire. Marrying Gabriel, she finds herself not particularly welcomed by his various family members who see her as a bit of a fortune hunter. However, it’s not long before there are deaths and disappearances, mysterious monks and threats to Catherine all around her. Can she find out the truth, survive the hostile forces threatening her, retain her sanity and ensure the safety of her forthcoming child? You’ll just have to read the book to find out…!

I’m pretty sure now that I didn’t read this Holt back in the day (“The Mistress of Mellyn” and “The Shivering Sands” are the titles I can be sure of), but I can see that it would certainly appeal to a bored, mixed up teenage girl such as I was! As I recall the Holt books, they were pretty much always a mixture of romance, melodrama, gothic settings and usually a scary old house! The topic of families and ancestral homes and inheritances were always popular and feature in “Kirkland”. The heroine here was pleasingly feisty, keen to prove her independence though restricted by the conventions of the time (whenever that was – I don’t think it was ever explicity stated but I’m guessing 19th century). However, it’s clear her agency is limited by society’s structures and she’s very vulnerable to e.g. people claiming that she’s mentally unwell and that the claims of a monk tormenting her are just some kind of female feebleness of the mind. It makes for plenty of drama and the conclusion is satisfyingly done.

The Victoria Holt books were very popular in their day, though I have no idea how they’re thought of nowadays. As for me, it’s very clear that my reading has moved on masses since my early teens, and I doubt I would want to spend much time with Holt nowadays! However, revisiting my teenage self and her voracious need for any kind of reading was interesting, and the book was written well enough with plenty of atmosphere; though it was perhaps a little dialogue-heavy for my taste, especially when that dialogue was a tad predictable. But reading “Kirkland Revels” was an interesting experience which I never would have had without our #1962Club! 🤣🤣