A Fluttered Dovecote — Themes and Context

A Self-Conscious Narrator

Laura's narration is relentlessly self-aware. She addresses readers directly, comments on her own writing process, and even includes a parenthetical note on a poem about tears with the rhyme scheme 'tears, fears, leers, jeers.' This metafictional play undercuts her claims of suffering. She admits to 'a natural repugnance to publicity' even as she publishes her woes. The diary format allows Fenn to satirize the conventions of first-person female narratives: Laura's 'blotted diary' becomes a prop for her melodrama, with tear stains and smears treated as evidence of authentic emotion.

Comic Exaggeration and Bathos

Fenn achieves comedy by juxtaposing Laura's lofty language with banal realities. She yearns to be a 'delicious heroine' like Lady Audley, but her actual concerns involve a gritty lock and a gardener's flowers. When a servant is dismissed, Laura feigns ignorance while secretly knowing the scandal. Her internal monologue veers from horror at being a 'murderess' to practical thoughts about using a 'blind lath' to poke in a cistern. The gap between her self-image and her actions is a running joke.

The School as a Stage for Gossip

The boarding school setting provides a closed world where secrets spread rapidly. Laura depicts the teachers—Miss Furness, Miss Sloman, the Fraülein—as figures of petty authority. When Clara is caught attempting to elope, the information passes from a toothache sufferer to the 'lady principal' through a chain of whispers. Miss Furness's command 'silence is golden' is immediately undercut by Celia Blang's grimace and Patty Smith's eager curiosity. Fenn uses dialogue to show how information circulates, with characters like Patty speaking in a 'dawdly, sleepy way' that contrasts with the urgency of the gossip.

The Unseen Man in the Tank

A central mystery involves a man hiding in a water tank in the conservatory. Laura's imagination runs wild: she pictures his 'wet body laid upon the white stones' and feels like a 'murderess.' Yet she also notes practical details—the broken windows, the missing servant. The narrative withholds whether the man is still there, leaving Laura (and the reader) in suspense. Fenn uses this plot device to parody Gothic conventions: the hidden male figure is less a threat than a source of farcical anxiety, as Laura tries and fails to faint dramatically.

Readers should attend to the gap between Laura's self-dramatization and the actual events. Fenn's satire works through accumulation: each exaggerated phrase and trivial mishap builds a portrait of a narrator who is both ridiculous and endearing. The excerpts suggest a comedy of manners where the real 'flutter' is not the scandal but Laura's reaction to it.

Reading about Laura’s theatrical suffering, I remembered a school diary of my own, full of invented dramas. That same knowing wink—the mock-heroic voice that both feels and laughs at itself—appears in Olinda's Adventures: or the Amours of a Young Lady — Reading Notes, where youthful earnestness keeps tripping over its own irony. Both feel like letters from a younger self, half-sincere, half-performance.