Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham – #1937Club

My first stop for the 1937 Club is Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. I bought my copy in 2011, drawn (as ever) to any novel about the theatre. And what could be more about the theatre than a novel which is boldly given that one-word title? Incidentally, it was a title that was jettisoned for the 2004 movie adaptation, called Being Julia.

The adaptation’s title is a clue to the star of the novel: Julia Lambert. She is also a star of the stage, beloved by everyone from starry-eyed servants to the great and the good of London society. It is an era where film stars have begun to take ascendancy, but her dabbling in that arena has proved unsatisfactory and quickly forgotten – instead, she retains her dominance of London theatrical scene. And W. Somerset Maugham makes clear it is deserved. Julia is attractive (though not as attractive as her matinee idol husband, Michael), but more than that she is magnetic. She is extremely talented, loved as much by critics as by the public. She is also that most difficult of things for a female actress: middle-aged.

In the opening scene, Julia and Michael meet a young man called Tom Fennell. He is an articled clerk, working on audits for Michael’s accounts – and the encounter shows him to be a little bashful, a little in awe of the celebrities he is meeting.

“Poor lamb,” she thought. “I suppose this is the most wonderful moment in his whole life. What fun it’ll be for him when he tells his people. I expect he’ll be a blasted little hero in his office.”

Julia talked very differently to herself and to other people: when she talked to herself her language was racy. It was really rather wonderful, when you came to think of it, that just to have lunch with her for three quarters of an hour, perhaps, could make a man quite important in his own scrubby little circle.

Julia is, as you can see, a snob. But she is not merely a snob about class – she is a snob about significance. She is deeply conscious about her own fame and importance, and years of success have taught her to have a kindly benevolence to people who aren’t as successful as she is. It should be a deeply unappealing trait, but Maugham somehow makes her sympathetic throughout. Perhaps it is because she is no longer in her heyday. The fragility of her period of power makes her confidence in it feel a little sad, rather than unkind.

After this set up scene, Maugham takes us back to Julia and Michael meeting as young actors in a theatre company. He is very good at the different types of actor you will find in a theatre, and the varying types of performance that are needed of them. Michael is beautiful but not especially talented, and there’s certainly a place for that sort of actor, then as now.

He was well suited to drawing-room comedy. His light voice gave a peculiar effect to a flippant line, and though he never managed to make love convincingly he could carry off a chaffing love sane, making a proposal as if it were rather a joke, or a declaration as though he were laughing at himself, in a manner that the audience found engaging. He never attempted to play anyone but himself. He specialized in men about town, gentlemanly gamblers, guardsmen and young scamps with a good side to them. 

Maugham goes steadily through their courtship, the interruption of Michel experimenting (without success) in America and the bigger interruption of the First World War. They decide to set up in theatre management, with Michael as manager and occasional actor and Julia as the star. I found all this section of the novel a little tedious. I’m never a fan of an author starting with a significant scene and then labouring through a whole lot of ‘and here’s how we got here’. It always diffuses the narrative tension, and I found that Theatre lost a lot of momentum as we went through the years of Julia and Michael’s relationship. It was well written and quite interesting, but didn’t pull the novel forward.

The main thing to know, though, is that – by the time of the novel’s first ‘present day’ scene – Julia is no longer in love with Michael. She has no intention of disrupting their marriage, and is quite fond of him and admires him, but the passion has gone. From her side, at least.

Julia was surprised to discover in herself a strange feeling of pity for him because she no longer loved him. She was a kindly woman, and he realized that it would be a bitter blow to his pride if he ever had an inkling how little he meant to her. She continued to flatter him. She noticed that for long now he had come to listen complacently to her praise of his exquisite nose and beautiful eyes. She got a little private amusement by seeing how much he could swallow. She laid it on with a trowel. But now she looked more often at his straight thin-lipped mouth. It grew meaner as he grew older, and by the time he was an old man it would be no more than a cold hard line.

I’m putting in lots of quotes, but I also wanted to share this very contemporary-feeling section about Michael’s good looks. He has built his career on being handsome, and is desperate to preserve it. In an era before plastic surgery, airbrushing and the like, he has a regime that is nevertheless still recognisable. I thought it was quite novel that Maugham gives this vanity to the man, rather than the woman – and that it is an understandable vanity, since his continuing career depends on it.

Nor was he only vain of his business acumen; with advancing years he had become outrageously vain of his person. As a youth he had taken his beauty for granted; now he began to pay more attention to it and spared no pains to keep what was left of it. It became an obsession. He devoted anxious care to his figure. He never ate a fattening thing and never forgot his exercises. He consulted hair specialists when he thought his hair was thinning, and Julia was convinced that had it been possible to get the operation done secretly he would have had his face lifted. He had got into the way of sitting with his chin slightly thrust out so that the wrinkles in his neck should not show and he held himself with an arched back to keep his belly from sagging. He could not pass a mirror without looking into it. He hankered for compliments and beamed with delight when he had managed to extract one.

Theatre picked up a lot more when the main plot of the novel takes off. Julia embarks on an affair with Tom, the auditor who is visiting them in the first scene. It starts when he is something of a fanboy. He sends her flowers after a performance, and invites her to go for a cup of tea. In some ways, it has much in common with the dozens of invitations sent to her by starstruck young men and women – which Julia has always accepted as a touching recognition of her celebrity, but never considered taking up. Even on this occasion, she thinks to herself that it is an absurdly naïve request. But… she goes. And Tom shows himself to have more wherewithal than Julia had imagined. Suddenly, slightly to the surprise of both of them, they sleep together. And they keep sleeping together. 

Julia maintains her aura of superiority with Tom – or at least her appearance of having her act together. But she is overwhelmed by the emotions of it all – and here we see her with the only person she is mostly honest with, her maid Evie:

She had been as excited all the evening as a girl going to her first ball. She could not help thinking how absurd she was. But when she had taken off her theatrical make-up and made up again for supper she could not satisfy herself. She put blue on her eyelids and took it off again, she rouged her cheeks, rubbed them clean and tried another colour.

“What are you trying to do?” said Evie.

“I’m trying to look twenty, you fool.”

“If you try much longer you’ll look your age.”

I was surprised by how casually open some of the descriptions of sex were. Maugham doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty, but he also writes things like this:

For Julia was shrewd, and she knew very well that Tom was not in love with her. To have an affair with her flattered his vanity. He was a highly-sexed young man and enjoyed sexual exercise. From hints, from stories that she had dragged out of him, she discovered that since he was seventeen he had had a great many women. He loved the act rather than the person. He looked upon it as the greatest lark in the world.

Theatre isn’t simply some romantic tale of people meeting across a class and age barrier, though. Maugham takes this premise and has fun with it, and there are certainly some scenes of Tom and Julia enjoying themselves as they deceive the people around them – but it is relatively short-lived. Instead, Julia discovers the pains of jealousy for about the first time in her life. Tom continues working for Michael but, being much closer to the age of Tom and Julia’s 17-year-old son Roger, starts spending time with him instead of Julia. There’s even talk that gets back to Julia of him taking Roger on a double-date to lose the latter’s virginity. Things become even more tangled when Tom meets a beautiful young actress who hopes for a role in Michael’s latest production.

Maugham is so good at jealousy and pride and the things people won’t say to each other. Tom is too proud to acknowledge the big wealth disparity between him and Julia; Julia is too scared about her own disappearing youth and beauty, and turns this fragility into cruelty. There are some masterful scenes that play on these emotions and vulnerabilities, and Maugham is brilliant at taking his main characters’ hubris to their logical limits.

I’m not surely we fully get under the skin of Tom, beyond his vigour, his stubbornness and the charm he can turn on and off. But this is undoubtedly Julia’s book. Maugham writes a layered, fully convincing portrait of a woman who is not particularly likeable but is extremely sympathetic – in the sense that, when she does self-defeating or cruel things, you desperately wish she’d stop, for her own sake.

I think Theatre would be a more successful book if it had been streamlined a bit – cutting down all of the backstory about Julia and Michael, for instance, which could have been a few paragraphs rather than 70 pages. But overall it is a real success of a character portrait, as well as offering a glimpse behind the curtain at the theatrical world of the 1930s.

#1937Club: your reviews!

The 1937 Club kicks off today! Until Sunday, we’d love to know your thoughts and reviews of any book published in 1937 – whatever genre, format, language etc. Together, we can put together a sense of what was going on in 1937 – on the cusp of a world war.

Karen and I have been running these clubs for nine years now, I think(!) and they’re always such fun. Pop a link to your review in the comments, whether on blog, insta, goodreads or wherever – if you don’t have somewhere to write a review, feel free to put yours in the comments.

Rose in Bloom by Louisa May Alcott
The Australian Legend

The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham
Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado
Finding Time to Write

Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson
Somewhere Boy

Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice
Winston’s Dad

‘The Lottery’ by Marjorie Barnard
Whispering Gums

Mouchette by Georges Bernanos
Somewhere Boy

Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
Ripple Effect

The Face on the Cutting-room Floor by Ernst Bornemann/Cameron McCabe
1st Readings

What Every Girl Wants by Phyllis Bottome
Literary Potpourri

A Bullet in the Ballet by Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon
Staircase Wit
Stuck in a Book

Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink
Staircase Wit
A Bluestocking Knits

Deep Summer by Gwen Bristow
Staircase Wit

Case Without A Corpse by Leo Bruce
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Cheltenham Square Murder by John Bude
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends
Sarah Matthews (via StoryGraph)

Serenade by James M. Cain
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

More Joy in Heaven by Morley Callaghan
The Dusty Bookcase

Poison Ivy by Peter Cheyney
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie
Finding Time to Write

Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
Just Reading a Book

Round the World Again in 80 Days by Jean Cocteau
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Daughters and Sons by Ivy Compton-Burnett
Somewhere Boy

Swastika Night by Murray Constantine/Katharine Burdekin
Elle Reads

There are Four Seasons by Richmal Crompton
Old Book Dreamer

The Citadel by A.J. Cronin
HeavenAli
Mr Kaggsy

The Case of Alan Copeland by Moray Dalton
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson
Words and Peace

An Answer from the Silence by Max Frisch
Somewhere Boy

The Case of the Lame Canary by Erle Stanley Gardner
Golden Age of Detective Fiction

The Case of the Dangerous Dowager by Erle Stanley Gardner
Golden Age of Detective Fiction

The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett
Book Word
Staircase Wit

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
Finding Time to Write

The Pendleton Fortune by D.C.F. Harding
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
Hopewell’s Library of Life

L’Oreille cassée by Herge
Somewhere Boy

The Black Island by Herge
Calmgrove

An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer
Wicked Witch’s Blog
What Me Read

They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer
She Reads Novels
Desperate Reader

Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Garchooka, the Cockatoo by Rex Ingamells
Brona’s Books

Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon
Wicked Witch’s Blog

The Crimson Brier Bush by Frances K. Judd
Literary Potpourri

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawbata
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Rising Tide by Molly Keane
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

The Whispering Statue by Carolyn Keene
Literary Potpourri

After Midnight by Irmgard Keun
ANZ Litlover

Bats in the Belfry by E.C.R. Lorac
Scones and Chaises Longues
Fanda Classiclit

The Thing on the Doorstep by H P Lovecraft
Calmgrove

I Would Be Private by Rose Macaulay
Stuck in a Book

Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh
Finding Time to Write
Fanda Classiclit
Entering the Enchanted Castle

The Drum by A.E.W. Mason
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham
Somewhere Boy
Stuck in a Book
Literary Potpourri
746 Books
Ripple Effects

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor by Cameron McCabe
1st Readings

Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery
Literary Potpourri

Goodness, How Sad! by Robert Morley
The Captive Reader

The Bachelor of Arts by R.K. Narayan
Book Around the Corner

Golden Boy by Clifford Odets
Somewhere Boy

The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi: Detective Stories of Old Edo by Kido Okamoto
Words and Peace

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
Ynott59

Let’s Read 

The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla by Stuart Palmer
My Reader’s Block

The Return by Audrey Platonov
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Door Between by Ellery Queen
Stuck in a Book

Mary Plain on Holiday by Gwynedd Rae
Scones and Chaises Longues

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N by Leo Rosten
Somewhere Boy

Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth
Winston’s Dad

Ali and Nino by Kurban Said
Winston’s Dad

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
1st Readings

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp
Madame Bibi lophile Recommends
Old Book Dreamer

Maigret’s Pipe by Georges Simenon
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Cold Cookery by Helen Simpson
Scones and Chaises Longues

A Good Time Was Had By All by Stevie Smith
Somewhere Boy

Catherine Helen Spence: An Autobiography
Australian Woman Writers

Remembering Laughter by Wallace Stegner
Rhode Read
JacquiWine’s Journal

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Wicked Witch’s Blog
Bookish Beck

The Chrysanthemums by John Steinbeck
Just Reading a Book

Rosabelle Shaw by D.E. Stevenson
She Reads Novels

Tennis Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
Mslizreads

Caroline England by Noel Streatfeild
She Reads Novels

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
Finding Time to Write
Winston’s Dad
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends
Calmgrove
Literary Potpourri
Words and Peace

Summer Half by Angela Thirkell
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

O make me a mask by Dylan Thomas
This Reading Life

The Milliners’ Hat Mystery by Basil Thomson
Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Thurston
10 Million Hardbacks

Beginning with a Bash by Alice Tilton
What Me Read

No Peace for the Wicked by Ursula Torday
Stuck in a Book

The Case is Closed by Patricia Wentworth
Staircase Wit
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Elephant Never Forgets by Ethel Lina White
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Years by Virginia Woolf
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
Finding Time to Write
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

Worth Wile by P.C. Wren
The Australian Legend

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino
Fanda Classiclit
Driekiesbookshelf

Celia by E.H. Young
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

Misc recommendations
Wafer-Thin Books
Neglected Books

Reading, In Company
Buried in Print

Happy blog birthday to me!

row of cakes

For once, I remembered to celebrate – today is the blogiversary of StuckinaBook. And it’s old enough to get a driving licence in the UK – 17 years old!!

It’s seems quite extraordinary that I’m still going after all these years, and still enjoying it. More to the point, I’m still enjoying the community and the book recommendations and the readalongs and clubs. I’ve been doing this for almost my entire adult life (I was 21 when I started), and blogging about books is now firmly embedded into the way I think about reading.

The heyday for blogging was more than a decade ago, but there is such a great community who keep going – and I love how thoughtful and interesting and personable people can be with the space to blog. YouTube and Instagram and, I daresay, even TikTok all have their place and are wonderful tools for sharing about books and reading – but, for me, nothing else quite measures up to what blogging allows. (Oh podcasting is delightful fun too, of course.)

I wouldn’t keep going if people didn’t read and comment, so thank you so much to everyone who engages with StuckinaBook in one way or another. Here’s to the next 17 years, I guess?

Picture: from Unsplash

The novel that turned into All Of Us Strangers

Strangers (Paperback)

I loved Andrew Haigh’s film All of Us Strangers and think it’s criminal that Andrew Scott and Jamie Bell haven’t won every award under the sun (and Paul Mescal and Claire Foy can have some too). It sent me off to read the novel on which it was loosely based – Strangers (1987) by Taichi Yamada, translated from Japanese by Wayne Lammers. Interestingly, the original Japanese title translates as ‘Summer of the Strange People’, so it’s had a few metamorphoses.

There’s nothing more irritating that somebody comparing a novel to an adaptation if you haven’t seen it, so I’ll just say that Haigh made plenty of changes to his screenplay for All of Us Strangers – though probably not as many as you might imagine by his slightly disingenuous remarks that he ‘doesn’t remember’ what happens in the original novel.

I listened to the audiobook, so won’t be able to quote from the novel – but here’s the premise. Hideo Harada lives alone in a big apartment block which is in fact mostly offices, and hardly anybody else lives in the building. He is recovering from divorcing from his wife, not mourning the relationship so much (the divorce was his decision) as he mourns the life it gave him. Hideo is a middle-aged TV scriptwriter who only really seems to have one close friend – a TV producer with whom he has worked, and who reveals he is planning to ask Hideo’s ex-wife to marry him. It is the death knell to their friendship and (the producer insists) to their professional relationship. The only other person in his life is his adult son, whom he doesn’t see very often. 

Despite these sadnesses, Hideo is not a very emotional man. He wishes some circumstances were different, but he doesn’t seem to rail against them particularly. He is a man used to tragedy: his parents died in an accident when he was a teenager. And when connection is offered to him, he doesn’t take it up. A beautiful young woman, Kei, is the only other person in the apartment block one evening. She comes to his flat, hoping she can join him for a drink. He turns her away.

Not long later, Hideo bumps into Kei by the lifts. One thing leads to another, and they start a friendship that quickly becomes a sexual relationship. So quickly that it’s hard to tell exactly what is propelling it, besides our repeated assurances that Kei is beautiful.

The far more interesting relationship is happening simultaneously. On a whim, Hideo goes back to the neighbourhood where he grew up. He goes to a show, and Yamada has some fun at the expense of a mediocre comedian in a sort of variety show. From the back, Hideo hears a man call out, and thinks he recognises the voice – but he can’t see the man. After the show finishes, though, this man beckons Hideo to go with him. He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see Hideo, nor does he think Hideo will object to going. And Hideo follows, dumbstruck.

I’m going to say why, though do skip if you’d like to go into Strangers entirely without spoilers.

The man looks and sounds exactly like… Hideo’s father. Despite the fact that Hideo’s father died more than 30 years ago. This man hasn’t aged since that date – he is, in fact, rather younger than Hideo himself. Hideo follows him back to his humble home… and finds the doppelganger of his mother there too. He hasn’t time travelled, because all the modern conveniences are present. So what’s going on? They both speak to him affectionately and without reserve. I was struck by how some of the nuances of Strangers were lost by being in translation: my understanding (from context clues in the novel, and from reading Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds about the Japanese language) is that there are many different grammatical impacts that depend on the register used. For instance, a parent speaking to a child would use different verb endings (maybe?) to a friend speaking to a friend, or a stranger speaking to a stranger. I imagine Yamada makes most of this function of Japanese, in the maelstrom of confusion and trying to establish precisely what is going on and what relationships are at stake.

Strangers is a short novel, so the emotional impact of this encounter is dealt with efficiently. There is plenty of plot and we aren’t given much time to linger in these emotions – which gives the book a feeling of spareness, reluctant to let the reader or the characters get bogged down in the full implications. I think it works, though it could have worked equally well if a longer work had been dedicated entirely to this surreal relationship.

Instead, Strangers hovers on the edge of horror. I didn’t find it particularly scary, which I was nervous about, but it certainly incorporates ideas of fear rather than simply nostalgia or love. Chilling is perhaps the word, though in a way that is interesting rather than challenging. The fear doesn’t come from the encounter with his parents, or parent-like people – rather, it is his own deepening illness. People keep remarking how unwell he looks – how gaunt, like he has the sudden weight-loss of aggressive cancer. But when he looks in the mirror, he seems perfectly fine. What is going on, and is it connected to his visits to his ‘home’?

I thought Strangers was unusual and very good. It’s trying to do things in a genre that I don’t fully understand, and I’ve read so few Japanese novels that I don’t know how much of an outlier it is. Plot-wise it has a lot of similarities with the All of Us Strangers film. Tonally, it is often worlds apart. Both are experiences I can firmly recommend.



 

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

The Baron in the Trees (1957) is my first novel by Italo Calvino – and the description of it is a real tussle between something that really appeals to me and something that really doesn’t. On the one hand, it’s historical fiction – starting very precisely on 15 June 1767 – and that tends to deter me. On the other hand, it’s a novel about a baron who decides to live entirely in the trees. That very tethered version of surreality is exactly up my street. And it comes recommended by people like Karen/Kaggsy, so that was enough to push me in the direction of giving it a go – in an English translation by someone with the excellent name Archibald Colquhoun.

Cosimo is a young baron who, like many other teenagers, has an argument with his parents over the meal table. To escape them, he petulantly climbs into one of the trees in the garden. The event, like the whole novel, is narrated by Cosimo’s younger brother Biagio.

I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds’ nests, but for the pleasure of get­ting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by. So I found it quite natural that Cosimo’s first thought, at that unjust attack on him, was to climb up the holm oak, to us a familiar tree spreading its branches to the height of the dining­-room windows through which he could show his proud offended air to the whole family.

Little did Biagio suspect at the time – he will never encounter his brother on the ground again. Cosimo decides he won’t come down that night, sleeping in the dampness with little protection except the foolhardiness of youth and stubbornness. Everyone expects that he will come down the next day, but… he doesn’t. He never comes down again.

It’s a bizarre premise for a novel, but it works brilliantly. It’s such a simple conceit, and Calvino does interesting things with it. On the one hand, we see some of Cosimo’s exploits – meeting ruffians, courting a beautiful young woman, getting involved with some of the most significant personages of 18th-century Italy. He doesn’t skirt around the practicalities either – we gradually learn how he shelters himself, how he gets about great distances, and even (rather coyly) how he deals with bodily functions. It has some of the plotting of a ‘rattling good yarn’, and occasionally the cadence of it. But I found the novel rather more beautiful than adventurous. And I think that’s partly because we see things from the perspective of the left-behind brother, telling the story of his brother ‘sneaking around the edges of our lives from up on the trees’. For example, how lovely is this from Biagio, early in Cosimo’s exploits?

The moon rose late and shone above the branches. In their nests slept the titmice, huddled up like him. The night, the open, the silence of the park were broken by rustling of leaves and distant sounds, and the wind sweeping through the trees. At times there was a far-off murmur – the sea. From my window I listened to the scattered whispering and tried to imagine it heard without the protection of the familiar background of the house, from which he was only a few yards. Alone with the night around him, clinging to the only friendly object: the rough bark of a tree, scored with innumerable little tunnels where the larvae slept.

There is (presumably deliberate) self-consciousness to the way that any of Cosimo’s further-off adventures are described secondhand by Biagio. He hasn’t been present, and it’s not the most elegant way of portraying these things, but it feels part and parcel of Calvino’s satire of 18th-century literature. And thankfully the satire is largely in terms of plot and presentation, rather than style. The reason I didn’t mind the historical fiction element of it is that Calvino doesn’t try to make it feel at all historical. The dialogue doesn’t ape the 18th-century, and there is a vitality to the novel that comes largely because it would be improbable in any time period – its setting in the past adds to the oddness, in an excellent way.

My favourite parts of The Baron in the Trees were the beautiful descriptions or the sections about how his escape affects the family. The more bombastic bits were enjoyable but not, for me, the heart of the novel. And it is a novel that has such heart, despite its unconventionality.

I’ve finally started my Calvino journey, and better late than never.

What’s For Dinner? by James Schuyler

I wrote on Instagram that What’s For Dinner? (1978) was ‘like Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters leapt forward a century and took to drinking cooking sherry’ and I’m half-tempted to leave my post simply at that. But perhaps I’d better say more.

James Schuyler first crossed my radar as a chance purchase in Hay-on-Wye – I bought, read, and loved his novel Alfred and Guinevere, which is the most realistic portrayal of the way children speak that I’ve ever read. What’s For Dinner? is also chiefly concerned with how people speak – and you hope that it’s not realistic, though it probably is.

The novel opens with a dinner party. Norris and Lottie Taylor have reached the stage of marriage where they ignore and rile each other with equanimity, neither of them discontented and neither of them particularly happy at where life has left them. Coming to visit is the Delehantey family – Bryan and Maureen, their twin teenage sons Nick and Michael, and Bryan’s mother Biddy. They are a ramble of chaos by comparison, proud of their old-fashioned values – which mostly take the form of Bruce being dominant and forever quashing any sign of life from his son, Maureen being houseproud and judgemental, and Biddy sassing them all. (It’s hard not to love Biddy, for all her complaining and martyr complex – she’s one of the few characters unafraid to be exactly herself.)

From the opening pages, we know this is going to be an unsettling but fun journey. The set-up might be quintessentially American Dream of well-off neighbours being neighbourly over apple pie, but everything is always slightly at odds with everything else. The hosting couple bicker while not really listening to each other. The visiting family don’t really want to be there. Nobody hates anybody else, but everybody is mutely exasperated by everyone else.

One of the reason this novel made me think of Ivy Compton-Burnett is how heavily dialogue is used. Here is a section, which also shows Schuyler’s brilliant way of weaving together clichés, antagonisms, banalities, and the disconnect when interlocutors all want to talk about something different:

“Competitive sports,” Bryan said, “make a man of a boy. They prepare him for later life, for the give and take and the hurley-burley.”

“You might say, they sort the men from the boys,” Norris said.

“Do you mean that?” Bryan asked, “or is that one of your sarcasms?”

“It could be both,” Norris said. “I wasn’t much of an athlete, so I have to stick up for the underdog.”

“You ought to take up golf.”

“As the saying goes, thanks but no thanks.”

“Norris always looks trim,” Mag said. “Do you go in for any particular exercise?”

“Just a little gardening. A very little gardening.”

“I thought you had a yardman,” Maureen said, “who came in and did that.”

“We do. But Lottie doesn’t trust him around the roses. No more do I, for the matter of that.”

“Roses,” Biddy said, “the queen of flowers.” She shook out the crocheted maroon throw, so all could see it. “Isn’t this just the color of an American Beauty?” It wasn’t, but if anyone knew it, no one said it.

If a lot of the character work is done through conversation, then it’s bits like those final words that really sold me on What’s For Dinner? – ‘It wasn’t, but if anyone knew it, no one side it’. I love it when an author undercuts his cast, gently ridiculing their pretensions and falsities.

The dinner scene goes on for so long that I wondered if it would be a one-scene novel. But no. We get a clue where What’s For Dinner? might go when Lottie takes a break from socialising to go to the kitchen – and down some wine.

When the second part of the novel begins, Lottie is living in a residential home for alcoholics, trying to be cured. We’re introduced to a wide array of patients and their visiting spouses and families, variously bitter, over-enthusiastic, withdrawn, and brash. The same dialogue-heavy approach continues, but now the characters are even more unhinged and unlikely to speak with anything resembling logic.

Group was in session, and Dr Kearney looked bored. “All right, Bertha,” he said, “you’ve made yourself the center of attention long enough. We’ve all heard your stories of marijuana, music and LSD. You’ve convinced us that you were a real swinger, and you swung yourself right in here.”

“You never talk about your problems, I’ve noticed,” Lottie said, “the things behind your actions. That might be more interesting and helpful. To all of us, not just yourself.”

“My only problem,” Bertha said, “is that I have a family. They’re nice, but they bug me.”

“Bug you?” Mrs. Brice said.

“They let me do anything I want, but all the time I can tell they secretly disapprove. They don’t know what to make of me , but I know what to make of them. Spineless. Nice, but spineless.”

“We haven’t heard much from you, Mrs Judson,” Dr Kearney said.

“I never did talk much,” Mrs. Judson said.

“That’s true,” Sam Judson said. “Ethel was never much of a talker. She shows her feelings in other ways.”

“In other ways?” Norris said. “I’d be interested to hear an example.”

I wondered if Schuyler would be able to sustain the brilliance of his tone with this wider cast and more serious topic, but I needn’t have worried. If there was something particularly excellent about the brittle tension of a dinner party, then there is something equally exhilarating about seeing Schuyler rope more people into the madness. We lose the subtext of a dinner table representing so much more – but he handles both small-scale and crowd dazzlingly. In fact, the only dud note in the novel comes in the scenes of teenagers – either the twin boys together or when we see them with a wider gang. The dialogue doesn’t ring at all true, and let’s just say he falls into a common trap with twins that I complained about the other day. It’s curious, considering how good he can be at conversation between younger children.

Schuyler is apparently best known as a poet. From reading his prose, I really couldn’t guess what his poetry would be like. It seems he only wrote three novels, the third being A Nest of Ninnies, co-authored with fellow-poet John Ashbery. I’m quite sad to have nearly come to the end of his novelistic output, because he is such a lively and piercing writer of prose – but perhaps I should give the poetry a go.

Tea or Books? #126: Should Books Be Banned? and Lessons in Chemistry vs Dear Mrs Bird

Banned books, Bonnie Garmus and A.J. Pearce – welcome to episode 126!

In the first half of the episode, we discuss banned books – should books ever be banned? Does a book being banned make us want to read it more? In the second half, we pit two recent novels set in the mid-century: Dear Mrs Bird by A.J. Pearce and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Strangers May Kiss by Ursula Parrott
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh
Dear Octopus by Dodie Smith
How To Be Multiple by Helena de Bres
The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Barbara Pym
Day by Michael Cunningham
A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell
The Vicar’s Daughter by E.H. Young
The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor

How To Be Multiple by Helena de Bres

When I discovered there was a new collection of essays out about the philosophy of twins, and that it was written by an identical twin, I couldn’t resist. Having tweeted my excitement, Manchester University Press kindly sent me a review copy – it’s been out in the US for a while (published on my and my twin’s birthday!) and is just out in the UK now.

You may well know that I have an identical twin, and that relationship is the most important one in my life. Of all the things I’m grateful for in my life so far, having the good fortune to be born a twin is right up near the top – I still can’t quite get my head around the idea of having a sibling who is a different age to you. Must be weird, huh?

I’m not sure I’d have raced towards a collection of twin essays written by a singleton, but I had confidence that I’d be in safe hands with another identical twin – and these aren’t objective essays written solely with academic philosophy in mind (though Helena de Bres is a professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, a liberal arts college in America). She draws deeply on her relationship with her own twin sister, Julia, who also illustrates the beginning of each chapter.

But what makes How To Be Multiple so interesting to me is that it goes beyond the twin’s point of view: this is about what twins tell us about identity in general. That comes across in the five chapter titles: ‘Which one are you?’, ‘How many of you are there?’, ‘Are you two in love?’, ‘How free are you?’ and ‘What are you for?’. It’s also about how the singleton’s gaze informs the ways in which twins are perceived and discussed.

So many of our cultural ideas about twins are driven by the perspectives and priorities of singletons. Given the numbers, maybe that’s inevitable, but it’s an unfortunate restriction on humanity’s intellectual resources. […] When twins aren’t treated as indistinguishable, they’re often cast as binary opposites, on one or more axes. One twin’s the Chaos Muppet, for instance, the other the Order Muppet; one’s the empath, the other the narcissist; one’s the tomboy, the other the femme. This tendency to binarize twins is rife in individual families, and in myth, art, and culture across the board.

Yes, Helena! The first chapter is largely about this binarising, and our broader human desires to define ourselves in opposition to other things – and to understand other people partly by understanding what they are not. The complexity and clever arguing of her chapters is too detailed to reproduce here, so I’m only going to be able to hint at the contents – but de Bres does a brilliant job in this first chapter at demonstrating how many of our anxieties about identity are crystallised in the way we treat twins. And by ‘we’ I mean, of course, ‘you’. Unless you’re a twin.

I’m going to slip little bits of twin autobiography into this post; hope that’s ok. Because I’ve certainly found that people fixate on the personality/interests differences between Colin and me, and make them loom larger than they do – and I’ve done the same thing myself as I’ve grown up. One studied English at university and one studied Maths? One loves football and one hates it? One is vegetarian and one chooses pizzas based on ‘what has the most meat on it’? There are definitely areas where we are miles apart – but far more where we overlap, without comment.

One way to see the widespread tendency to binarize twins, then, is as a panic response, a knee-jerk defense to the social, moral, and existential threat they pose. Twins remind us, consciously or not, of how frail human identity-detectors can be, and therefore how slippery our associates and our own selves might be. Tagging twins as binary opposites is a way of corralling their disturbingly similar bodies and minds into easily distinguishable ends of the psychosocial field. The lack of subtlety is the point.

The differences between me and Col seemed big to me as I was developing and maturing because I wanted to find areas where I could distinguish myself. But the reason they seem significant to singletons is, I think, because singletons expect twins to be exactly the same. When people have the childhood fantasy ‘what if I had a twin?’, I imagine they are thinking of themselves multiplied by two. When they encounter traits that challenge the one-person-doubled hypothesis, this vision is undermined. In order to cope with this disruption of the fantasy, these differences are magnified into opposites. Good twin / evil twin being the nadir of this particular way of thinking.

This persistent tendency to binarize twins is striking, especially in light of the exactly opposite companion tendency to portray twins as highly similar.

Try thinking of the twins you read about in literature – and identical twins feature far more frequently in literature than we do in real life. They probably fit this line adeptly, and only occasionally does someone do it brilliantly. The greatest example is Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, at least from the books I’ve read.

More unsettlingly, it is strange how often authors include ‘twincest’ in their books, and this is something de Bres mentions in the chapter ‘Are you two in love?’ I’ve read some very good novels that include twins having sex, but (a) it doesn’t happen in reality any more often than any other two siblings – which is to say hardly ever at all – and (b) it says so much about the way Western writers conceive of closeness. Two people have a closer relationship than most have experienced? The only paradigm for expressing it is romantic or sexual. It shows a great limitation on the capacity of people to comprehend the wide range of love.

At this point, I’ve realised that all the quotes I noted down are in the first chapter – which perhaps did have the pithiest bits to excerpt, but the other chapters were equally interesting. The second looks at ‘how many of you are there?’ – coming from the idea that identical twins are one egg split in two, so have some claim to being one person. De Bres also looks at the experiences of conjoined twins, and the way that all twins seem to threaten the concept of individuality a little. No, there are no proven examples of twins mind reading (though some conjoined twins can apparently see out of each other’s eyes) – but twins do offer some counterpoint to the idea of people as unique identities.

I was a little sceptical about this chapter at first. One of the very few times that de Bres’s philosophising got a little too abstract and scholarly for a layman like me to understand was when she writes about theorists who believe all humans may externalise some of our mental processing, thus (?) having our brains outside our body in calculators, computers, and even other people. It was getting a bit high-falutin’ for me. Surely nobody thinks two twins are fewer than two people?

But then I thought about last year. More autobiography here. I started getting strange neurological symptoms in my feet and hands. A few months later, Colin started getting the same symptoms. Long waiting lists later, it turns out we are thankfully both ok – but there was a period when we were both quite worried about more serious neurological issues. And I cannot tell you how strange it is to simultaneously worry about yourself and the person you love most, waiting to see if our shared DNA has the same trapdoor in it. It is the nearest I have come to questioning my individuality – when my body and its possible flaws are both me and not-me. (As it happens, Helena and Julia de Bres both have a connective tissue disorder, and much of How To Be Multiple also considers life as a disabled person – as disabled people – and particularly how that identity is partly shaped by other people’s perspectives. It’s also interesting on the ways the disability differently affects Helena and Julia, and what that is like for them.)

I enjoyed the whole collection a great deal, though the final two chapters perhaps a bit less than the others. ‘How free are you?’ looks at the fact that twins separated at birth often find, when reunited, that they have followed similar paths. Reports of such things always highlight curious similarities – they both walk into the sea backwards! they married women with the same name! – but, of course, you could find any two random people and they’d have a handful of odd coincidences. But twins (whether identical or non-identical, raised together or apart) are fodder for nature/nurture debates and always have been. This essay is interesting, but it re-treads familiar ground. If you’ve ever considered free will vs fate, or nature vs nurture, then this chapter isn’t particularly ground-breaking – and certainly felt like it had the least personal content about Helena and Julia’s lives, which is the strong through-line of How To Be Multiple. And I have to admit that the final essay, ‘What are you for?’, felt quite like a miscellany for various other philosophical ideas that Helena de Bres had that didn’t fit into other chapters. The only other criticism I wanted to mention is that de Bres is a bit lazy in her assumption that her readers will all be atheists, or in suggesting (even flippantly) that nobody believes in God anymore. It feels like quite a Western-centric view, ignoring the huge numbers of the Global South who have theistic faith – and, of course, plenty in the Global North too. Indeed, only 15.6% of the world describe themselves as non-religious. Maybe all academic philosophers come from that percentage, but I suspect not.

But I certainly won’t end on a negative note, because I loved this book. I enjoyed feeling chimes of recognition in what de Bres writes. ‘For the first few years of elementary school,’ she writes, ‘Julia and I wore our initials pinned to our clothes’ – snap! Colin and I had ours stitched onto the front of our pullovers for the first few years of primary school. More trivially, we were also due to be born around Christmas, and were in fact born more than a month earlier. And I had to message Colin my favourite line in the book, which I absolutely agree with: “We had the standard twin view about triplets, quads, and other ‘supertwins’, which is that they take a good idea and overdo it.”

More generally, there are constant touchstones for what it is like to be a twin. I’ve only been an identical twin for about a decade – well, that is to say, I have only known I was an identical twin for about a decade, after almost 30 years believing I was a non-identical twin. It’s an interesting divide, in terms of having slightly different philosophical experiences of twinship and identity. But I’ve never been a singleton, and I feel so seen and understood by How To Be Multiple, as well as realising new things about my experience of the world – and other people’s experience of me as a twin.

De Bres weaves in philosophical understanding so fluidly, and balances autobiography and objective analysis perfectly. It’s quite a fun and funny book, aimed at a non-academic audience more interested in anecdotes than footnotes (though there are plenty of endnotes for people wanting to explore more). I would particularly recommend it to a twin – but, then, I would also particularly recommend it to a singleton. Because you might get a bit more of a glimpse into what twinship is like – and also be a little less likely to ask the same questions that every singleton asks when they discover you’re a twin. I suppose the only people I wouldn’t recommend How To Be Multiple to are triplets. You guys need to calm down.

Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts

I picked up Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts in a wonderful, cavernous bookshop in Whitehaven, Cumbria, when I was there last year. I bought it off the strength of the title, and the fact that I’ve never quite disentangled Norah Hoult and Norah Lofts. The novel is from 1945, but if I’d found an original edition (rather than this reprint) then I wouldn’t have known it was by any Norah. It was originally published under the name Peter Curtis, perhaps to distinguish from the historical novels for which she was, and is, best known.

The lady of the title is Penelope Shadow (what a name!) She is ‘one of those women who is never described without the diminutive: a sweet little thing, a funny little thing, poor little thing’ – and she is not unattractive, but she has never been married. She is reaching the onset of middle age, or at least what was considered middle age in 1932 (when the novel is set), and realising that she is likely to remain single.

And again, however much women may wish to deny this fact, it is a fact that a woman who wishes a man to marry her must do a little – especially in the initial stages, towards bringing this desirable state of things about. After all, Pygmalion, falling in love with a beautiful and unresponsive statues, is unique enough to be remarkable; and even those women who most ardently wished matrimony upon their little friend could hardly say that Penelope ever ‘tried’. She didn’t; she hadn’t; and for the very simple reason that to be married was never one of Penelope’s ambitions.

OK, you might think, but how is Miss Shadow going to survive financially as an unmarried women in 1932? Well, she has recently come into a lot of money – because she turned out to be so chaotically bad at every job she turned her hand to, and decided as a last resort to write fiction. Her first efforts went unnoticed, but the latest novel – Mexican Flower – has become a runaway success. She can certainly afford to live alone. But she has an absolute terror of it.

In a convincing and delightful novel, this is a conceit that takes a bit to swallow. You can understand why someone might not like long stretches on their own, but Penelope Shadow cannot abide a single night. Rather than be alone for a full evening, she will wander the lanes and fields. Let’s assume this trait is believable, and move on.

Being the 1930s, Penelope Shadow has household staff – she can avoid being alone, because she always has a live-in servant who does more or less all the work needed to keep a single-person household going. But they routinely quit or have to be fired. Lofts is quite funny about some of the absurd ways these servants behave, and we rattle through a few. Indeed, particularly at the beginning of Lady Living Alone, Lofts has a delightfully amusing turn of phrase – a mixture of exaggeration, ridicule, and realism that makes a fun concoction. For instance…

The great future opened, as it was bound to do, with a happy burst of generosity towards Elsie and the children – now big enough to enjoy substantial presents. There was a car, too. And to everyone’s surprise and carefully suppressed horror, Miss Shadow herself learned to drive it. That is to say, she mastered the mysteries of making it start, increasing its speed, and bringing it to a standstill; nervous, inattentive, impulsive and completely lacking in road sense, as in most other kinds, she was quite the worst driver in four counties.

I love Miss Shadow’s combination of ineptitude and power. She is evidently, if accidentally, very good at writing a bestseller. She is single-minded in what her spirit needs and forgetful about what necessities she actually needs. She’s great fun to be around.

One evening, keen to evade a night’s loneliness, she sets off as chaotically as ever in her car. Eventually she ends up at a fairly rundown hotel, perhaps closer to a motel. For lack of other options, she decides to stay the night. The proprietress is unhelpful and unfriendly, but she becomes friendly with a young man who works there as a chef – but also as a general dogsbody. When they first meet, he goes off to find some help.

He disappeared, still calling, and several moments passed. Miss Shadow occupied them in staring about the hall. Empty it would have been lovely with its elegant proportions and creamy panelling; but its furnishings were hideous; the carpet looked as though pounds of liquorice all-sorts had been stamped viciously into mud; there was a fiercely bristling hatstand. a Windsor armchair painted a bright sticky red, and the panels were defiled by pairs of Victorian pictures, hung irregularly; Beckworth Bridge in summer and in winter; lovers parted and re-united, married couples quarrelling and making it up again.

Hopefully you can see why I enjoyed Lofts’ writing so much. She is brilliant at this sort of teasing, deprecatory fun. But the tone of the novel slowly becomes something else.

Spontaneously, after a disastrous night and breakfast, Miss Shadow asks this young man – Terry – if he would like to come and work for her instead. He is industrious and kind, clearly equipped for more than his role. Yes, he is muscular and good-looking, but Miss Shadow hardly has that on her mind – she simply sees a solution to her eternal problem. Here is a young man who will not abandon her. She need not be a lady living alone anymore.

I shan’t spoil what happens after that – but Lofts takes us from the funny, fun style at the beginning of the novel through something with more pathos – through to something closer to a thriller. Is Terry the man to protect her? And will their relationship remain one of mistress and servant?

I loved Lady Living Alone, and the way that Lofts expertly manages the shifting tone. It’s not a particularly long novel, but it takes the reader on a long and vivid journey. There are brilliant scenes later in the novel that could be from a psychologically tense film – but because we are bedded in the silliness of Miss Shadow and her whims, Lofts tethers her novel to the domestic and everyday. Her writing style continues to be brilliantly done, and the way she structures sentences is so well observed. It keeps anything from feeling over the top.

This is my first Norah Lofts. I’m not particularly interested in the historical novels, but I’ll certainly be looking out for the three other novels she wrote under the Peter Curtis pseudonym. In my opinion, it’s something unusual and special.

Unnecessary Rankings! British Library Women Writers

 

Since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d commemorate the occasion by… ranking books by women! Yes, putting successful women up against each other probably isn’t the MOST #IWD thing, but it’s really a celebration because all these books are brilliant.

Obviously I’ve read (and reread and reread) all the British Library Women Writers series, but I’ve decided to stick to a top 15 – because it wouldn’t be the best advertisement for the series to put something in last place, especially when I think they’re all very good. So if something from the BLWW series is missing from the list, then I still like it, just not as much as these 15 marvellous books. Ranking was VERY hard, since they’re basically all 10/10 reads in my opinion.

I’d love to know your thoughts – from the ones you’ve read, how would you rank them?

15. Mamma (1956) by Diana Tutton
Guard Your Daughters may be Diana Tutton’s masterpiece, but she is on more sombre form with Mamma. It’s a love triangle between a woman, her daughter and her son-in-law – but the least shocking version of that premise. Beautiful, almost elegiac, and very human.

14. Introduction to Sally (1926) by Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim is so good at finding relatable humour in absurd situations. Sally is like a Greek goddess come alive, but with a ‘common’ accent and working in a shop – von Arnim takes this idea and turns it into a novel with pathos, as well as a great deal fo humour.

13. The Home (1971) by Penelope Mortimer
A spiritual sequel to Mortimer’s much-loved The Pumpkin Eater, this novel is based on the author’s own separation from her husband and re-establishing her life. It’s strange, funny, poignant and expertly written.

12. Which Way? (1931) by Theodora Benson
This forgotten novel gets a little boost up the charts for its brilliant Sliding Doors premise: Claudia has to choose between three weekend invitations. The next three sections of the novel follow, in turn, the very different lives she’d live depending on which invitation she accepts.

11. Tea Is So Intoxicating (1950) by Mary Essex
Some of the books in the series are beautifully writen works of significant literature. Some are just silly, delightful fun. None comes sillier or more delightful than Mary Essex’s Tea Is So Intoxicating, following a couple in their ill-advised attempts to open a tea garden.

10. One Year’s Time (1942) by Angela Milne
Another one that had truly disappeared, despite Milne’s famous uncle – the novel follows a year in the life of Liza, particularly focusing on her romantic and work lives. It feels so modern and fresh, and it makes the top 10 because of the sparkling dialogue.

9. A Pin To See The Peepshow (1934) by F. Tennyson Jesse
I’d argue A Pin To See The Peepshow is the best book in the series – but, of course, best doesn’t always equate to favourite. It is very closely based on the Thompson/Bywaters murder case, with very evident sympathies for Edith Thompson – who, in FTJ’s hands, is an eloquent, compassionate, creative woman. Incidentally, the afterword is perhaps the one I’m proudest of.

8. Keeping Up Appearances (1928) by Rose Macaulay
Macaulay seems to be best-remembered for The Towers of Trebizond, but I much prefer her in witty, lively 1920s mode. Keeping Up Appearances is about two very different sisters – and a lot about middlebrow vs highbrow culture at the time. A constant delight.

7. Dangerous Ages (1921) by Rose Macaulay
And this novel slightly nudges above the other – perhaps because she covers so many generations of women, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 60s, and 80s, if memory serves. Very, very funny on things like the free love movement and Freudianism, while also surprisingly poignant on the topics of ageing and trying to return to the workplace after raising children.

6. Strange Journey (1935) by Maud Cairnes
I love a high-concept novel that retains heart and humour – and few do it better than this 1935 body-swap comedy, which is really about class, as a titled lady and a middle-class housewife find they are inadvertently switching places.

5. Tension (1920) by E.M. Delafield
It’s a crime that Delafield is only known for a handful of novels when she wrote so many brilliant books. I think Tension is one of her funniest, as well as having one of the all-time great monsters in Lady Rossiter, who sets out to destroy another woman’s life in the name of morality.

4. Father (1931) by Elizabeth von Arnim
Another well-known author with an unjustly neglected book: Jen is one of the ‘surplus women’, expected to look after her father’s household until he marries a much younger woman and turfs her out. I love Father because of Jen: such a spirited, fun, naive, joyful creation.

3. The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier
I wrote quite a lot of DPhil thesis on this novella, so of course I love it: Agatha accidentally conjures up her childhood imaginary best friend, and this miracle turns into something rather darker as a power battle develops. This is a tour de force in quiet form – an extraordinary work of imagination with a lot to say about the perils facing unmarried women in the 1920s.

2. Sally on the Rocks (1915) by Winifred Boggs
Another one that gets so high up for its heroine. Sally is a delight – funny, feisty, going after what she wants. She ends up in a love triangle, fighting for the hand of a man she despises but can offer security. What makes Sally on the Rocks so ahead of its time is that both women in the love triangle are amicable and even friendly: there’s no maligned ‘other woman’ here.

1. O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
My number one BLWW title is also one of my favourite ever novels. We follow Ruan from 7 to the cusp of childhood, finding freedom from a repressive home by exploring the moors and befriending a wise older boy, David. The novel has such heart and, even though many sad things happen, it feels full of hope of possibility.