A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley

A Perfect Woman by L. P. Hartley | Hachette UK

About ten years ago, John Murray did some rather lovely reprints of L.P. Hartley’s novels – and it was around that time that I read their edition of his brilliant novel The Boat. And then Harriet wrote a wonderful review of A Perfect Woman (1955), and I was all set to read it asap. I suspect most of you will understand that somehow more than eight years went past before I finally read it. And it’s another excellent book.

L.P. Hartley is known best, of course, for The Go-Between – which holds the distinction of being one of the relatively few novels that me, my brother and both my parents have read. He’s not entirely considered a one-hit wonder, as quite a few people know The Shrimp and Anemone and the rest of that trilogy, and quite a few of his books turn up in secondhand bookshops – but there is still a wide range of his books that don’t get mentioned. And I haven’t seen many people talk about A Perfect Woman.

For quite a long novel, the plot is simple and the cast list is short. There are four main characters: Harold and Isabel, a middle-class couple who have married fairly contentedly for a fair number of years. Alec Goodrich, a novelist. And Irma, the Austrian barmaid.

How do these four come to know each? It starts when Harold – respectable accountant, unimaginative and (for that reason) broadly happy – is on a train journey. He finds himself oddly interested by a man sitting in his carriage/

Yet there was nothing so remarkable about the man. He was above the average size, loosely built and inclined to corpulence; he was wearing a good brown tweed suit, a brown and white check shirt, a knitted brown tie and pair of heavy brown suede brogues. So far so good: all was in rural symphony. But there was a discordant note, the socks. Dark blue and of cheapish material they were obviously meant for town. In his vacant mood the discrepancy worried Harold. Cautiously he lifted his eyes to the stranger’s face. There, at a first glance, everything seemed to match., The general impression was sandy.

The gentleman is reading After the Storm by Alexander Goodrich. And is, it transpires, Alexander (Alec) Goodrich himself.

“Well, yes I am.” He leaned forward, put his hand on his knee, and said with great intimacy, as to an old friend, “It’s always been my ambition to find somebody in the train reading a book of mine. I never have, but sometimes I read one myself in the hope that someone will connect me with it.”

Alec is boyishly open, and yet with an undercurrent of something else. He is clearly used to getting his own way, and expects no obstacles in his path. Luckily his own way is usually pretty harmless – in this instance, for example, he wants Harold to take over his tax affairs. The offer is made with spontaneous enthusiasm. Harold, who is seldom spontaneous, agrees with some misgivings.

Back home, he relates the tale to his wife Isabel – who is, it turns out, a big fan of Goodrich’s writing. It is characteristic of their marriage that he would not know that. She, in turn, has dampened down the evidence of her intelligence and literary leanings – as, the narrator drily notes, ‘was likely to happen when a woman of slightly superior social standing, decidedly superior brains and greatly superior imaginative capacity married a dullish man and lived in the provinces’. She is also expected to devote most of her energies to motherhood – Hartley is brilliant at observing children, and giving proper weight to the depth and strength of their emotions and fears. Jeremy and Janice are both drawn so distinctly and believably. Jeremy – eight, I think – is serious and worried. Janice (6) is obsessed with marriage and much less anxious, but still with a fragility that is very moving.

When Alec comes to stay, he befriends Harold and Isabel happily – but the woman who really bowls him over is Irma, the barmaid of the local pub. She knows she is a figure of fun to many of the locals and regulars, and takes it in good part – but Alec sees something different, and asks Harold to connect the two. Reluctantly, Harold agrees to try and woo Irma on Alec’s behalf.

From here, the tangle of the four characters gets tricky. Secrets and lies abound, and the worlds of literature and tax affairs provide an unlikely but wonderful background. Hartley’s theme is eternal, but I loved the way he bedded it firmly in the clash of 1950s middle-class stability and a kind of relentless bohemia. These four are not likely friends, and the whirlwind of their experiences together will loom long in all of their lives. But there is nothing sensational in the way Hartley presents this novel. He resists anything that would make this melodramatic, and it is instead moving and rather beautiful.

What a storyteller. I haven’t mentioned that A Perfect Woman is also a page-turner. The way Hartley combines reflective insight and tense pace is very impressive.

Hartley seems to bubble under as one of those authors who doesn’t need rediscovery – he certainly isn’t forgotten – but he is one of those mid-century novelists who hasn’t received their proper due. I’m already looking forward to reading my next book by him.

The Shrimp and the Anemone by L.P. Hartley #1944Club

My second (and probably final) read for the 1944 Club was L.P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone, which i am grateful I am typing, because I can never say that word. It’s the first book of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, and covers about a year in the young lives of the brother and sister.

I bought the trilogy many years ago, and I think I also had this book separately until I realised that it was a duplicate. While I read The Go-Between a decade or so ago, it was only last year that I started to explore his other work – specifically The Boat, which was brilliant. And so I was pleased to see that one of my Hartleys could coincide with the 1944 Club, even if it meant lugging around the chunky book pictured above.

It opens at the beach, and we don’t have to wait long to see the shrimp and the anemone in question. Eustace is nine; his sister Hilda is four years older, and they are playing on the sands. Eustace is looking in a rockpool, and sees an anemone slowly swallowing a shrimp – he is a sensitive child, and is keen to save the shrimp. Hilda comes to help extricate it – but, in doing so, both the shrimp and the anemone are killed. It is rather a graphic depiction of a relationship that goes through the whole novel (and, I believe, the whole trilogy). Hilda is domineering and possessive; Eustace is anxious to please. It’s leaping ahead a bit, because this comes in the second half of the novel, but it crystallises their sibling relationship well:

For the first time, then, he obscurely felt that Hilda was treating him badly. She was a tyrant, and he was justified in resisting her. Nancy was right to taunt him with his dependence on her. His thoughts ran on. He was surrounded by tyrants who thought they had a right to order him about it was a conspiracy. He could not call his soul his own. In all his actions he was propitiating somebody. This must stop. His lot was not, he saw in a flash of illumination, the common lot of children. Like him they were obedient, perhaps, and punished for disobedience, but obedience had not got into their blood, it was not a habit of mind, it was detachable, like the clothes they put on and off. As far as they could, they did what they liked; they were not haunted, as he was, with the fear of not giving satisfaction to someone else.

A lot of the novel is simply about this fraught relationship – one filled with love, because Hilda is not trying to inflict pain; she believes she is doing the best thing for both of them, to the extent that she considers the question at all. I found it fascinating, because I’ve never quite got my head around what it must be like to have a sibling who is either younger or older than you. I know that’s the norm, but it seems to me like it must be quite odd – not being on the same footing, as it were. And Hartley captures that inequality well.

Into this world comes Miss Fothergill, an old lady who is largely alienated from the community by her disabilities. We see these through Eustace’s eyes, so I’m not sure exactly what they were – but they lead to her being in a wheelchair, and having deformities in her hands and face. Hilda forces Eustace to speak to her when they encounter her on a walk – and, unexpectedly, he (after some misadventures on a paperchase!) ends up visiting and befriending her – leading to various seismic changes in Eustace and Hilda’s lives towards the end of the novel.

I didn’t find this as wonderful as The Boat, possibly because it doesn’t try to have the humour of that novel. And I’ve found every novel about children that I’ve read since Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler somewhat deficient in dialogue, because Schuyler captures so well how young siblings talk. And if Hartley’s child characters lean towards the adult in how they converse, they are wonderfully realised in how they think and relate. Eustace’s anxieties are drawn perfectly, and their relationship rang very true. I’m not very good at carrying on with a series after I’ve started it, but I should move onto the next two before I forget the first of the trilogy – it will certainly be intriguing to see how this relationship develops as the brother and sister age.

Tea or Books? #51: Author Parents vs Author Children, and The Boat by L.P. Hartley vs Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Literary families, and the reveal on our recommendations for each other – we’re back after a seasonal break. We’ve missed you!


 
In the first half of our 51st episode, we look at families where more than one generation has written, and try to determine whether we tend to prefer the parents or children – thank you Paul and Kirsty for your suggestion. And in the second half we find out whether or not our recommendations worked. We each picked a book we thought the other one would love – how well do we know each other’s tastes? I chose The Boat by L.P. Hartley for Rachel, and she chose Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner for me.

In the next episode we’ll be doing Penelope vs Penelope. All suggestions welcome (if you’ve sent one, it will doubtless happen eventually, once I dig it out from somewhere), and you can see our iTunes page here. If you can work out how to do reviews, via iTunes, they are always much appreciated!

The (enormous number of!) books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Mr Men series by Roger Hargreaves
Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls
Bluestockings by Jane Robinson
No Surrender by Constance Maud
The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther
Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
The Priory by Dorothy Whipple
Money by Martin Amis
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Faulks on Fiction by Sebastian Faulks
E.M. Delafield
The Unlucky Family by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (not The Unhappy Family!)
Provincial Daughter by R.M. Dashwood
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Trilby by George du Maurier
Only the Sister by Angela du Maurier
Virginia Woolf
Leslie Stephen
Anthony Trollope
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope
American Notes by Charles Dickens
A.A. Milne
Christopher Milne
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft
Angela Thirkell
Colin Macinnes
Denis Mackail
E.F. Benson
Stella Benson
Sitwells
Corduroy by Adrian Bell
Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell
Bloomsbury by Quentin Bell
Angelica Garnett
Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett
Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson
Frieda Plath
Ted Hughes
Sylvia Plath
A.S. Byatt
Margaret Drabble
Margaret Forster
Ivy Compton-Burnett by Cecily Grieg
Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor
Meyer
Bloomsbury’s Outsider by Sarah Knights
H.G. Wells and His Family by M.M. Meyer
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Alan Bennett
Two People by A.A. Milne
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley
The Betrayal by L.P. Hartley
According to Mark by Penelope Lively
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Mortimer

The Boat by L.P. Hartley

The Boat

When Rachel and I discussed trains and boats in novels in an episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ – you can hear the episode here – David had a few suggestions in the comment section, one of which was The Boat (1949) by L.P. Hartley. I was particularly pleased to see him mention it because it was on my shelves. John Murray kindly sent me all their L.P. Hartley reprints a few years ago, and I’ve been fully intending to get to them – better late than never, as The Boat is brilliant.

Timothy Casson makes his living writing articles, usually travel articles, and has spent happy, carefree years touring Italy and the like. But now he has been requested to write about England, to support the war effort, and it is partly this stricture that finds him renting a house in an English village – having chosen a house next to the river largely because of its boathouse. He has a passion for rowing and for boats, and has proudly brought his boat with him. But he discovers that the local gentry aren’t happy at the idea of disturbing the fishing, and the landowner – who also owns the river – has to decide whether or not to allow him his rowing.

Such is through-thread of this novel, which is over 450 pages long. Such, one might say, is the river running through it – at just the right moments, perfectly judged, Hartley returns us to this theme. A letter may be sent to the old lady whose decision it is, or Timothy might make a bold decision against his plan – it crops up just often enough to remind the reader that it is something of an impetus. And it pays off in a bold climax – but the novel is not really about climaxes. It is slow, observant, gradual – brilliantly paced, while not being remotely pacey.

I talked a bit about this in another podcast episode – it really is one of the most brilliantly structured books I’ve read. I had to read it slowly. It took months, and I read many other books at the same time, but that was how it worked – gradually finding my way through the hundreds of pages, letting this life ebb along beside me.

For it is mostly about Casson’s life – about his relationship with his maid and cook (who are hilarious; I loved every scene in which they appeared, particularly when they considered themselves affronted), about his gardener, about a fledgling romance, about confusing conversations with the vicar’s absent-minded wife, about failures to ingratiate himself with the local landowners. Most touchingly, about a pair of young boys who are briefly evacuated to his house. Hartley puts together a village world – but, unlike most rural novelists, we are not introduced to that world as a whole. We feel our way through it, alongside Timothy, learning more and more about it but feeling forever at a slight distance. He is nobody’s equal in this social hierarchy.

Lest this sound worthy but dull, I must emphasise that The Boat is an extremely funny – often, as I said, through Timothy’s baffled methods of living with servants, but also through Hartley’s dry tone. His observation often has the mildest of barbs, and the balance of his sentences makes them joyful. While this isn’t the most amusing part by any means, it’s a section I noted down as enjoyable…

Mr Kimball was a sweet-pea fancier, and knew more about them than Timothy knew of all of the rest of the world’s flora put together. Like most experts, he had an attitude towards his subject which no amateur could hope to enter into; the beauty of the flowers he took for granted; what interested him was their size, shape, colour, the difficulties attendant on rearing them, their habits of growth and above all their prize-winning capacities. But even this last was devoid of excitement for him; the thrill of the prize was subordinated to and almost lost in the various technical points necessary to secure it. The winning of the award was not so much a crowning glory as the logical outcome of having fulfilled all the conditions, and he expatiated at equal length on Mariposa which had taken several first prizes and on Wolverhampton Wonder which, owing to an exaggeration of certain qualities, attractive to the public but fatal to the true harmony and balance of the bloom, was never more than Highly Commended. Timothy listened, bored as one must be with an accumulation of details outside the grasp of one’s mind, but respectful, because he recognised in Mr Kimball’s dispassionate approach to his hobby the signs of an austere idealism which was lacking in his own art. From time to time Mrs Kimball supplied the personal touch that her husband had left out – “Mr Kimball stayed up until three o’clock the night he thought Bradford Belle had caught cold,” and so on, but he clearly deplored these womanly intrusions, and quickly elbowed them out of the conversation.

You see, perhaps, that Hartley does not rush. Mr and Mrs Kimball aren’t important characters, but nothing is hurried in Hartley’s prose – but it is a wonder to read each unhurried moment. And somehow the more eventful moments didn’t feel out of place, but almost earned by the mellow timbre of the rest of the writing. I could have done without the letters he writes and receives from two off-stage characters (who remain off-stage throughout); I suppose are there to help us work out Timothy’s personality, and give him opportunity to reveal himself in ways that he can’t to these neighbouring strangers. See, I even argue myself out of my criticisms.

This is such a leisurely book, and also an extraordinary one. Thank you for prompting me to read it, David, and I hope that – in turn – I might have prompted some others to do so.

Tea or Books? #116: Do We Like Books About Sport and Quick Curtain vs It Walks By Night

John Dickson Carr, Alan Melville, sports – welcome to episode 116!

In the first half, we talk about sports in books – do we like them? Will we be able to think of any? Thank you to Lindsey for suggesting the topic! In the second half we compare two murder mysteries: It Walks By Night by John Dickson Carr and Quick Curtain by Alan Melville.

Get in touch at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – get early access etc through Patreon, and do rate and review wherever you get your podcasts!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

This Census-Taker by China Miéville
The City and the City by China Miéville
The Portrait by Willem Jan Otten
Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton
Hornet’s Nest by Helen Ashton
Dr Serecold by Helen Ashton
Yeoman’s Hospital by Helen Ashton
People in Cages by Helen Ashton
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman
How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup by J.L. Carr
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
A Season in Sinji by J.L. Carr
The Silence of Colonel Bramble by Andre Maurois
A.A. Milne
P.G. Wodehouse
Rudyard Kipling
Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes
St Clare’s series by Enid Blyton
Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman
Double Fault by Lionel Shriver
Morse series by Colin Dexter
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Opening Night by Ngaio Marsh
Cinderella Goes To The Morgue by Nancy Spain
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Death of Anton by Alan Melville
Weekend at Thrackley by Alan Melville
Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley

If you look at Jane’s 2010 review of Love in the Sun (1939) by Leo Walmsley, you’ll see a comment from me saying that I’d like to read it. And, indeed, I bought a copy in 2012, still remembering Jane’s enthusiasm and how wonderful the novel sounded. Recently for my book group, I read The Village News by Tom Fort – there’s a chapter that mentions Walmsley a lot, and so 2021 finally became the year when he got his moment in the sun(!) Now read Love in the Sun, I can report that it is just as wonderful as Jane says.

I’ve done a bit of background reading online now, and haven’t quite worked out how autobiographical Love in the Sun is, nor how it relates to Walmsley’s earlier novels – but all of that can be put to one side to enjoy what this is: the story of a couple who’ve fled a financial crisis in Yorkshire, arriving in Cornwall with almost no money.

St Jude is a seaport in South Cornwall. It lies near the mouth of a small river, the Pol, whose estuary, shut in on all sides by high land, affords a safe, deep-water anchorage to ships of considerable size. The town itself, while small, straggles along a mile and a half of waterfront, its main street widening out here and there into wharves and jetties. This street continues through the old town into a residential area of hotels, boarding-houses and modern villas, becomes a parade, and ends near the sea in public pleasure gardens, with a golf course extending along the coastline.

[…]

It was the afternoon of a Christmas day that I, a Yorkshireman and a stranger, arrived on foot in St Jude, and, from one of those quays that break its straggling main street, had my first view of its harbour. That view was not specifically attractive. It did not encourage the hope that I was near the end of my peculiar quest: least of all did it suggest the beginning of a great adventure.

And perhaps it isn’t a great adventure, in the literary sense of the word. The plot of the novel is steady and simple, and all the more immersive for that. The narrator and his partner (they are not married because he still has a wife, but this is an incidental strand of the novel) fend for themselves by setting up home in a cheaply-rented old hut. Rain pours through the roof on the first night, when a storm seems almost to remove any possibility of staying. But gradually, resourcefully they make the hut into a home – they start growing vegetables, they adopt a visiting cat. In their quiet cove, they have idyllic beauty in front of them – and anxiety alongside, since they don’t know how they will survive with almost no income.

The solution is for the narrator to write a book, and it was fascinating to follow this process – aggravating at first, because he seemed so certain of its success. And, indeed, he is ultimately published – but the feelings he goes through after his first emotionless rejection are feelings that I recognise 70 years later! The development of his manuscript is perhaps the closest this novel comes to adventure. Unless you count some cat drama, which (thinking about it) gave me more tension than most tales of humans in peril.

Love in the Sun is lovely because it is authentic and beautifully realised, in all its day-by-day details. Walmsley is also wonderful at depicting this corner of Cornwall, making me ache to visit it. But the novel certainly isn’t a sweet tale of escaping somewhere beautiful. Even if it weren’t for the financial difficulties, the community are pretty lukewarm to the new residents – partly because they are new, but also because they are unmarried and eccentric. The narrator and his wife don’t seem unduly concerned about their reception, and it isn’t a dark thread of the book – rather, this is a story of solitary struggles and progress, not a saccharine story. Having said that, there is an unlikely friendship along the way, which is rather touchingly done.

The narrator, whom I think is unnamed but could be misremembering, is certainly the dominant character – but I think Walmsley’s portrayal of the partner is good too. She does have a name – Dain. Dain shares the same vision, capable work ethic and determination of the narrator, with just enough differences to make them work well together – she has a touch more romance, a little more optimism, a bit more willingness to see the best in people. If it is autobiographical, it is an affectionate portrait that still feels honest and accurate.

This novel is relatively long, but it felt even longer – in a good way. Like when I read L.P. Hartley’s brilliant novel The Boat, it’s the slow and steady pace of the novel that helps make it a beautiful reading experience. One to luxuriate in, even if it took me more than a decade to get to it after reading Jane’s review. And, you know… there are two sequels…

BookTube Spin #2: My List

You might remember Rick MacDonnell’s BookTube Spin earlier in the year – in brief, make a list of 20 books you want to read – he’ll get a random number from one to twenty, and you have a couple months to read the book. The first one went really well for me, and I thought Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House was really good. The spin is happening every few months, and it’s time for round two…

This time, I’ve gone through my unread books list on LibraryThing, picking the first book from each page of titles… Now, I have 83 pages of unread books, so I allowed myself to skip to the ones I particularly wanted to read. Here’s the list…

1. The Adventures of Elizabeth in Ruegen by Elizabeth von Arnim

2. The Enchanter by Lila Azam Zanganeh

3. The Brandon Papers by Quentin Bell

4. An Autumn Sowing by E.F. Benson

5. Caroline by Richmal Crompton

6. The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell

7. Doctor’s Children by Josephine Elder

8. Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald

9. Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets by Jessica Fox

10. The Familiar Faces by David Garnett

11. Don’t Open the Door by Anthony Gilbert

12. The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley

13. Sun City by Tove Jansson

14. Ignorance by Milan Kundera

15. My Remarkable Uncle by Stephen Leacock

16. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis

17. The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell

18. Mr Beluncle by V.S. Pritchett

19. The White Shield by Myrtle Reed

20. Migraine by Oliver Sacks

 

Tea or Books? #83: Comfort Zones (Yes or No?) and Two Willa Cather Novels

Comfort zones, comfort novels, and two novels by Willa Cather – welcome to episode 83!

In the first half of this episode, Rachel and I talk about whether or not we have comfort zones when it comes to reading – and what our comfort reading is, which isn’t quite the same question. In the second half, we pit two Willa Cather novels against each other: A Lost Lady and Lucy Gayheart.

We hope that Tea or Books? can be a ray of sunshine in this complicated and anxious time. We’ll keep recording as much as we can! Do let us know if you have any suggestions for future episodes – and please do rate and review us at your podcast app of choice SHOULD you wish. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, and we’re on Spotify too now. If you’d like to support the podcast, that’s an option at Patreon.

You can get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com. Please do!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart
Tension by E.M. Delafield
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Denis Mackail
Rose Macaulay
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm
Virginia Woolf
Gertrude Stein
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Two Lives by Janet Malcolm
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Love Child by Edith Olivier
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The People on the Bridge by Wisława Szymborska
Circe by Madeleine Miller
Miss Read
Agatha Christie
Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill
The Illustrated Dustjacket 1920-1970 by Martin Salisbury
Penguin By Design by Phil Baines
When I Was A Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford
The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
The Shelf by Phyllis Rose
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet
A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Packing My Library by Alberto Manguel
Jorge Luis Borges
The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Aunt Mame by Patrick Dennis
Her Son’s Wife by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Some books I’ve bought in 2020

The new decade is still very young, but I’ve been busying myself with buying books…  These aren’t all from the same shop, but represent trips to a couple of old reliable shops and a couple of books I bought online. The reliables are the bookshop in Wantage and Notting Hill Book Exchange. They’re both shops I’ve been to time and again, and they always turn up affordable gems. But the first two came from the great wide internet…

Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
When I wrote about the wonderful O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Sarah said that she’d read and loved Proud Citadel. And so I had to have it, didn’t I? Watch this space.

Another Year by R.C. Sherriff
Every Sherriff novel I’ve read has been amazing, and so obviously I need to track down as many as I can. Watch this space AGAIN. Just keep watching spaces.

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden
I’ve already read and reviewed this one, so you know what I think about it and why I bought it!

Sing For Your Supper by Pamela Frankau
I loved A Wreath For The Enemy so much, and have been stockpiling Frankau ever since – but have yet to read any of the others on my shelves (though did read one in the Bodleian). Let’s throw another on the pile. Anybody read this one?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way by Nancy Spain
I’ve been keeping eyes out for this autobiography for a while because apparently it includes an account of meeting A.A. Milne. She was also a fascinating person for many reasons, so it’ll be fun to find out more about her from her own mouth.

Authenticity by Deirdre Madden
You know how much I loved Molly Fox’s Birthday, and I’ve now bought a couple of Madden novels to try next – the title is intriguing in a Milan Kundera sort of way.

Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie
I definitely said I wouldn’t be buying any more Mackenzie novels until I’d read some of the ones I own. When I saw this, I thought ”I won’t buy this unless it was published in the 1920s”. And I picked it off the shelf and saw it was from 1927. The decision was OUT OF MY HANDS.

The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley
I have so many unread Hartleys and I don’t know anything about this Hartley novel, but it was only a quid so why not.

Present Indicative by Noel Coward
I’ve seen this one around a few times, and finally succumbed. Will Coward be as funny in his autobiography as he is in his plays?

Embers by Sandor Marai
I don’t know anything about this but I’m trying to read more translated fiction, after my all-time record of eleven last year. And this one looked interesting.

The Shadow of a Sorcerer by Stella Gibbons
Continuing the theme of this post, I have so many Gibbons novels I haven’t read – but it felt like quite a coup to stumble across one I haven’t even heard of. And there’s surprisingly little info about it online…

Have you read any of these? Any that should race up my tbr pile?

 

Tea or Books? #73: One Chance or Many Chances, and Two Margery Sharp Novels

How many chances will we give an author? And Margery Sharp!


 

In the first half of the episode, we ask whether we’re one-strike-you’re-out people or if we’re willing to give an author several chances – and which authors we’ve learned to love after a few books. In the second half, we compare Cluny Brown and The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp.

Do get in touch to let us know which you’d choose, and any other Sharp novels you’d recommend. You can see the podcast at iTunes, support us at Patreon, and do rate and review us at your podcast app of choice, please! Get in touch also if you have any ideas for future episodes – we’re pretty open to suggestions, especially for the first half of the episodes. Apologies for some dodgy sound quality in Rachel’s recording – and for her washing machine, of course. And the discussion of the novels is a bit shorter than intended because I cut a bit where we gave away too many spoilers!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier
Mary Anne by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
A Room With A View by E.M. Forster
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Howards End by E.M. Forster
Charles Dickens
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
To The North by Elizabeth Bowen
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Jose Saramago
Dan Brown
William Shakespeare
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Sandcastle by Irish Murdoch
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Black Dogs by Ian McEwan
Atonement by Ian McEwan
E.M. Delafield
The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp
P.G. Wodehouse
The Eye of Love by Margery Sharp
Britannia Mews by Margery Sharp
Lise Lillywhite by Margery Sharp
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
The Triumphant Footman by Edith Olivier
Miss Mole by E.H. Young
Chatterton Square by E.H. Young
The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp
Stoner by John Williams
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates