1920s

Naomi by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (25 Books in 25 Days: #25)

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Finished! Hurrah! I managed a book a day for 25 days, even though one of those wasn’t read in the single day, and two were under 50 pages. And 23 of them have had people’s names in the title, for #ProjectNames! I’ve gone out on a rather more respectable 233 pages, because I’ve been on public transport for quite a lot of the day – specifically, Naomi by the Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

It was serialised in the 1920s, finishing in 1925 (after a brief time in the wilderness when one magazine stopped publishing it), and translated by Anthony Chambers in the 1980s. Sakura (who blogs at Chasing Bawa) very kindly gave me a copy when we met up in 2016, and she was right to think that I would really like it.

The narrator Joji is 28 when he meets the 15-year-old Naomi. He is an ordinary office worker, but is beguiled by the concept of the ‘modern girl’ – which, in the Japan of the 1920s, was apparently somebody who had Western facial features, wore Western clothes, admired Western furniture, and ate Western food. (Goodness knows what counted as Western food in 1920s Japan, because I can’t think of a lot that American, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish food has in common.) I should say I am lifting the word ‘Western’ from the novel – it is repeated often, in a way that is quite uncomfortable to read. The narrator takes for granted that everything Western is better than everything Japanese, and I couldn’t work out whether Tanizaki was satirising this viewpoint or passing it on without question.

Taken by her sophisticated name, he believes that Naomi can be moulded into the sort of person he would want to marry – and moves her into his house as a sort of maid, until such time as they know each other well enough to be wed. As she begins to develop and learn, and have access to more money and opportunities, the power dynamics of their arrangement subtly and very gradually start to shift…

That’s a very brief look at a psychologically fascinating novel. The modern reader is a lot more in sympathy with Naomi and her independent spirit than with Joji – who is somehow both affectionate and controlling, naive and modern, conservative and cultural. He is not a straightforward villain by any means, and I’m sure he was still less meant to be in 1924/5. This is a really nuanced and intriguing look at what happens when people live together whose outlooks and purposes are not quite compatible – and all about how power and effect work within a marriage. And how illusions can fade, but still be too appealing to abandon.

On the train, I deliberately sat opposite her so I could take another good look at this woman named Naomi. What was it about her that made me love her so much? Her nose? Her eyes? It’s strange, but when I inspected each of her features in turn that night, the face that had always been so appealing to me seemed utterly common and worthless. Then, from the depths of memory, the image of Naomi as I’d first met her in the Diamond Cafe came back to me dimly. She’d been much more appealing in those days than she was now. Ingenuous and nave, shy and melancholy, she bore no resemblance to this rough, insolent woman. I’d fallen in love with her then, and the momentum had carried me to this day; but now I saw what an obnoxious person she’d become in the meantime. Sitting there primly, she seemed to be saying, “I am the clever one.” Her haughty expression said, “No woman could be as chic, as Western-looking as I. Who is the fairest of them all? I am.” No one else knew that she couldn’t speak a syllable of English, that she couldn’t even tell the difference between the active and the passive voice; but I knew.

I think the novel was a bit shocking when it was first serialised. It’s not now, but the tautness and captivation of the writing has remained, and I thought this was wonderful. Thanks Sakura!

Marriage of Harlequin by Pamela Frankau

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Look, I try not to be the envious type. But when I discovered that Pamela Frankau had oublished 20 novels before her thirtieth birthday, I confess I was rather incensed. Checking the maths, I had zero novels published by the time I was 30. Or, indeed, subsequently.

I’d only read one of her novels – A Wreath for the Enemy, published quite late in her career. It’s brilliant. Are all her books brilliant? I decided to rewind by almost three decades, and read her very first novel, Marriage of Harlequin (1927). So, over the course of a few lunch times sat in the Bodleian, I read it.

Well, I really enjoyed it, but it does feel like an entirely different writer. I suppose that isn’t hugely surprising, since she was only 19 when she wrote Marriage of Harlequin, and didn’t have the nuanced and wry look at life that charactertised the later novel. In Marriage of Harlequin, instead, we are thrown into the whirlpool of a first love – along with a heavy dose of 1920s gaudy cynicism.

Sydney is the heroine, and we first meet her as a teenager at school. She is queen of her circle, and expecting much from life. Part of this expectation is met when she inherits a large fortune – making her quite the eligible match on the marital market. At the same time, she is writing a novel. This is where things doubtless get a bit autobiographical, and it was fun to read about this ingenue writing a novel that is snapped up by publishers – at the hands of a writer about to experience the same thing. Her novel is a big success, making her still the more eligible. In the background is her protective cousin Gerard – in her foreground, though, is a cynical 30-something man who works for the publisher. He is tired of life, has disappointed his father, and badly needs money to cover his debts. His name is Lionel de Vitrand, but he is also the Harlequin of the title. He proposes to her, and is accepted.

“I’m not going to be polite, de Vitrand. I’m warning you – I can’t stop my cousin marrying you if she wants to, but the very second you behave badly I’ll come round to your house and knock your head off.”

“How crude.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“That’s my business.”

“It’s mine too.”

Lionel yawned behind his hand. “My unworthy father’s port must be stronger than I’d imagined.”

“You’d better be careful.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

Silence. Lionel stepped from the fender on to the hearthrug, and bowed elaborately. “Well, have I your permission to retire?”

“No, you haven’t,” said Gerard bluntly. “You’re marrying Sydney for her money, and you don’t intend to be faithful to her. You couldn’t even if you did intend to, because you aren’t that sort. I’ve done all I can do to stop this business -“

He paused. Lionel said, still unmoved: “I don’t want to hit you in my house but I’m afraid I shall have to if you don’t shut up.”

“Come on, then. Hit me.”

“Unfortunately, I have a few manners. They linger, an expiring force, in uncongenial surroundings. What else have you to say?”

“Only what I’ve said before.”

You get a sense of the style, I suspect. It’s on the tightrope between melodrama and Wildean callousness. Nobody has ever spoken quite like this, but it is controlled so well that it feels deliberately stylised rather than poorly judged. Some of the weaker passages are when we are supposed to feel genuine sympathy for Sydney (because the truth, of course, comes out – though you can doubtless anticipate what happens after that). She is a bit too flimsy to warrant empathy, but certainly sturdy enough to be the heroine of a frothy, mildly melodramatic novel.

Taken on that level, Marriage of Harlequin is very fun, amusingly and skilfully written, and quite an astonishing achievement for a 19 year old. By the 1950s, she was writing much more complex, subtle novels – so I do wonder what the trajectory of her writing career was like in between.

Madame Claire by Susan Ertz

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I first heard about Susan Ertz from one of the Persephone Quarterlies, when they put a list of titles they were vaguely considering publishing. (I should dig out that PQ for further reading suggestions, thinking about it.) I can’t remember which book they recommended, but the name was distinctive enough that I’ve kept an eye out for her over the years – and have three on my shelves. Madame Claire (1923) is the first one I’ve read.

Who is Madame Claire, you ask? She is the matriarch of a several-generation family, 78 years old and living in a hotel. As the novel opens, she has reconnected with a close friend – Stephen – whom she has not seen for nearly two decades, as he disappeared from her life when she (as a recent widow) turned down his proposal for marriage. They have begun writing again. And it is an elegant conceit for her to bring him up to speed on her extended family…

These cover some favoured tropes of 1920s domestic novels. One of her children, Eric, is in a loveless marriage (or, rather, one where the love has become buried beneath resentment and bitterness); another, Connie, has abandoned her husband and is living with a man who doesn’t truly care for her. Her grandchildren (from yet another children) are young and feckless – and the granddaughter Judy is in danger (!) of settling into a spinster lifestyle. Luckily, she hits an affable young man with her car, and they can get to know each other over his sickbed. And Claire and Stephen continue to write back and forth; her letters are a delight.

This sort of novel from this sort of time is so good at combining high emotion with high comedy, expecting the reader to feel sad on behalf of a tortured marriage while simultaneously laughing affectionately at witty, foolish young things falling in love. It is expected of the reader, and we deliver – or at least I did. A bit like soap operas today, we can adjust our emotions and responses to the scene in question. It helps, of course, that Ertz writes very well – only occasionally letting the melodrama get to her head with a few overwritten passages.

Above the fray, and helping everybody in the right direction, is Madame Claire herself. She is something of a benevolent dictator, loved by all and cloaking her dictatorship beneath good advice and expectant patience. Scott wrote an interesting blog post that is partly about manipulation in this novel, but I think I’m fine with it in a novel like this – which uses metonymy but never quite has the stakes of real life.

If you are a fan of Richmal Crompton, EM Delafield, or any number of Persephone authors – this will be up your street. Relaxing and fun, even when the characters are in high peril – but I think my favourite story was Judy and her hit-and-not-run victim. Maybe I’m a romantic at heart after all.

The Proper Place by O. Douglas

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My dear friend Emily and I often watch sitcoms together – we have recently named ourselves ‘sitcommoisseurs’ – but don’t really share a taste in reading. But you know who does largely share my taste? Emily’s relatives – her mum and, as it turns out, her late great-grandmother. Mrs S very kindly thought of me when divvying up the library of her mother, which included books from her grandmother – who was a fan of O. Douglas. I’ve only read one but I really liked it, so gratefully received a little pile of them (thanks v much!) – and over Christmas I read The Proper Place (1926).

As I’ve mentioned before, househunting and moving house are things I love to read about (even though they are a world of anxiety in real life), and the opening pages of The Proper Place are all about it – which is why it was the one I got off the shelf.

The Rutherfurd family are leaving their family seat in the Scottish borders with its twenty bedrooms, no longer able to live up to such grandeur because they are so diminished in size: there are now only three Rutherfurds: Nicole (sprightly, cheerful), her orphaned cousin Barbara (realistic, wry), and her mother Lady Jane (resigned, dignified). They have lost relatives in World War 1, and must start anew – Nicole displaying bright optimism about their future and Barbara, if not dour, then not delighting in the prospect.

“How many bedrooms does that make?”

Mrs. Jackson asked the question in a somewhat weary tone. Since her husband had decided, two months ago, that what they wanted was a country-house, she had inspected nine, and was frankly sick of her task.

The girl she addressed, Nicole Rutherfurd, was standing looking out of the window. She turned at the question and “I beg your pardon,” she said, “how many bedrooms? There are twelve quite large ones, and eight smaller ones.”

They were standing in one of the bedrooms, and Nicole felt that never had she realised how shabby it was until she saw Mrs. Jackson glance round it. That lady said nothing, but Nicole believed that in her mind’s eye she was seeing it richly furnished in rose-pink. Gone the faded carpet and washed-out chintzes; instead there would be a thick velvet carpet, pink silk curtains, the newest and best of bedroom suites, a rose-pink satin quilt on the bed. 

The new occupants are from the nouveau riche – Mr and Mrs Jackson, leaving their community in Glasgow to buy their way into the aristocracy, in the hope that it will be a bright new future for their son. Mrs Jackson is disarmingly realistic about her own shortcomings and how unlikely it is that she’ll fit into her new life, making sacrifices for that adult son (who is fond of her but not all that engaged). The meeting of the Rutherfurds and the Jacksons is not the clash of cultures that you might think – Douglas is amusing, but not at characters’ expense. Mrs Jackson is eager, Lady Jane is kind. There is pain and anxiety on either side, but not immeasurably.

The title comes from a Hans Christian Andersen story that I’m not familiar with – to quote the novel: “at a dinner-party, one of the guests blew on a flute made from a willow in the ditch, and behold, every one was immediately wafted to his or her proper place. “Everything in its proper place,” sang the flute, and the bumptious host flew into the herdsman’s cottage”. I’m not sure how relevant it ends up being, because there is no moral attached to these characters’ house moves, though they are certainly changing places. There is even a suggestion at one point that the Jacksons and the Rutherfurds will swap houses, though the Rutherfurds instead move to a harbourside house in Kirkmeikle, Fife. It’s the sort of downsizing that is a house far beyond anything I’ll ever live in, of course. (You can see where it was based in Katrina’s investigative post!)

Much of the novel looks at this new community – including (somewhat surprisingly) Simon Beckett, who was recently climbed Everest and is writing a book about it. Very little that happens among this new throng of characters is of especial note, but it is all the gentle, enjoyable happenings that are so fun to indulge in reading about. Nicole is such a lovable character, helpfully offset by Barbara’s clear-sightedness, that it was all good fun.

We don’t see as much of the Jacksons later in the book, but I think I preferred those sections. Mrs J’s anxieties about her position, together with a certain over-the-topness, made for good-humoured comedy. And the families do meet again, as Nicole and Barbara sequentially go back for visits – these were my absolute favourite sections, as it was the meeting of the families that I thought worked best. Happily for me, there is a sequel (The Day of Small Things), which I can keep an eye out for.

(I had to skip a few pages of Scots dialect, but far fewer than when I read Pink Sugar.)

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

“Unputdownable & with characters I care about. I loved the feeling of gentle melancholy that is evident in so many books of that post-war period.” – I Prefer Reading

“O. Douglas is a very fair-minded author; she always allows her characters the grace of a deep enough glimpse into their lives and thoughts to allow us to place their words and actions in full context; something I fully appreciated in this story.” – Leaves and Pages

“Her books are as sweet as home-made toffee, but they’re always mixed with sadness somehow, which makes these comfort books of hers more true to life.” – Pining for the West

25 Books in 25 Days: #24 The Misunderstanding

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(So close to the end!) I think I got a review copy of The Misunderstanding (1926) by Irene Nemirovsky in about 2012, when it was published in English for perhaps the first time, by Sandra Smith. I’ve certainly bought or been given quite a few Nemirovsky novels, but have only read Suite Française and one other. While looking around my shelves, I thought… why not?

The Misunderstanding was Nemirovsky’s first novel, and it is a love story of sorts. As Sandra Smith points out in her translator’s note, the original title Le Malentendu can be translated as ‘the person who is misunderstood’ and ‘incompatibility’ as well as the title the novel was given in English, and it is the last of these that perhaps gets the biggest focus – as we watch disaffected Yves start a relationship with the bored wife of an old friend. They are passionate but uncertain, and we follow something of a strange trajectory, as each miscommunicates what they feel about each other – dashing through 1920s French seaside and Paris. One of the biggest obstacles to their agreed happiness is – he is poor, and she is rich, and all the awkwardness and pride that comes with that.

It was already very hot; it was the beginning of a beautiful summer’s day; women’s faces peered over the balconies; street sellers passed by with their little carts full of flowers, shouting: “Roses! Who wants some beautiful roses!”; tiny fountains of water from hosepipes sprayed from one side of the pavement to the other, glistening like liquid rainbows; young children went past on their bicycles, chasing each other and singing loudly; they had wicker baskets on their backs and their smocks fluttered in the win. Yves tried hard to notice every last detail in the street, just as a sick man desperately tries to concentrate on the countless little things in his bedroom.

I’m not always particularly interested in stories about love affairs, but I did find the way Nemirovsky wrote about Paris – and about people, about their flaws and lack of self-knowledge – rather poignant and lyrical. If it leans a little on the histrionic, we can blame that on the author’s youth – I’ve certainly read books with less emotional restraint by writers who should know better.

25 Books in 25 Days: #10 As Far As Jane’s Grandmother’s

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I hope these 25 Books in 25 Days posts aren’t getting tedious for people? Nearly halfway! And today I wasn’t sure if I was going to find time to read As Far As Jane’s Grandmother’s (1928) by Edith Olivier, particularly since I’d had an aborted attempt to read it a couple of years ago. As it turns out, I liked it much more this time around.

It was the limit of their nursery walks, and all through their lives it remained for them the most explicit measure of distance.

The title refers to the distance that Jane usually travels as a child – no further than her grandmother’s. If memory serves from Anna Thomasson’s excellent A Curious Friendship, the phrase was one Edith used in her own life. In the novel, though, it takes on a second meaning – the metaphorical parameters of life determined by Jane’s grandmother, outside which she cannot pass. Having had a childhood and young womanhood circumscribed by what her grandmother believes moral and correct, the book shows us people entering Jane’s life who might transform it – whether friends or lovers, or even a nunnery. And will she ever be able to escape the role set out for her?

I’ve now read all of Olivier’s novels (there aren’t that many), and none come close to The Love Child, her first. This one followed a year later, and I think is my second favourite – what made the first so special was a sort of fairytale naivety that she could never quite recapture, but this is a very engaging novel nonetheless. I think it would fit alongside many of the green-spined Virago Modern Classics.

25 Books in 25 Days: #3 A Lost Lady

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I fancied a Virago Modern Classic, and didn’t have all that many that were slender. I wasn’t sure which to choose – but thankfully I pulled down A Lost Lady (1923) by Willa Cather. I bought it in Oxford in 2015, and it’s the second Cather novel I’ve read – and it’s really good.

It’s essentially a portrait of Mrs Forrester from the perspective of a younger man – who knew her when he was a boy and she was recently married to a man much older than her. The novella follows her over the years, as his admiration for her kindness and happiness becomes tempered when he realises that she has feet of clay. It’s beautifully, sparely written – and the drawing of the characters is expertly done. I suspect it might be one of my books of the year – perfect in what it is doing. (And a perfect meeting of book and bookmark!)

She had a fascinating gift of mimicry. When she mentioned the fat iceman, or Thad Grimes at his meat block, or the Blum boys with their dead rabbits, by a subtle suggestion of their manner she made them seem more individual and vivid than they were in their own person. She often caricatured people to their faces, and they were not offended, but greatly flattered. Nothing pleased one more than to provoke her laughter. Then you felt you were getting on with her. It was her form of commenting, of agreeing with you and appreciating you when you said something interesting, – and it often told you a great deal that was both too direct and too elusive for words.

Long, long afterward, when Niel did not know whether Mrs Forrester were living or dead, if her image flashed into his mind, it came with a brightness of dark eyes, her pale triangular cheeks with long earrings, and her many-coloured laugh. When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he could be gay.

Sphinx by David Lindsay

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As I’ve probably already mentioned, part of my plans for A Century of Books was to go back to the books I’ve had waiting on my shelves for years and years – particularly the rarer ones. If I’ve been lucky enough to find copies of them, I should probably the next step and actually read them. And Sphinx (1923) by David Lindsay is certainly one of those books. I tracked down a copy after loving his novel The Haunted Woman (though I liked it a bit less on a re-read), and I’ve been intrigued to try it ever since.

Lindsay is best known now for A Voyage to Arcturus, which I have not read, but some of his other novels took place solidly in this universe – though always with the supernatural and metaphysical at play. In The Haunted Woman, it was a room at the top of a staircase that only occasionally appeared and revealed people’s innermost beings – but they forgot everything that happened whenever they left the room. In Sphinx, Nicholas Cabot rents a room in the village of Newleigh, intent on developing his machine that can record dreams – and translate them into a curious psychical experience.

It’s a very curious novel – in that Lindsay has essentially superimposed a strange psychical phenomenon over the top of a fairly paint-by-numbers novel of love affairs and thwarted love. The family he is staying with has three adult daughters – Audrey, Evelyn, and Katherine – while there is a composer nearby (Lore) and a vampish widow (Celia) also in the neighbourhood. A violent, temperamental rogue called Maurice Ferreira seems to be having, have had, or thinking of having love affairs with all of them – but he has something of a mechanical mind, so Cabot hires him to put together some of his dream machinery.

As the novel progresses, Evelyn and Cabot experiment with the dream machine – but begin to see (or, rather, to experience) Lore being hunted through the woods – and they begin to worry for her safety, unsure whether the machine is showing truth or fabrication.

There are definite strengths to this novel. At the outset, Lindsay writes more naturally than I’ve seen elsewhere – the back-and-forth conversation of sisters and their uncertain guest is even quite amusing. And Lindsay is good at describing how fantastic phenomena can disrupt the everyday – fully immersive:

Suddenly Evelyn was in the middle of a nightmare!

The room streaming with sunlight, the open window with its blind only half lowered, the glorious green, blue, and golden world outside, the sweltering heat – all, without warning, had given place to a mad, fantastic dream, into which she had not even time to wonder how she had fallen. Se was not frightened, but it seemed to her as if her nature had parted from its moorings and that she had somehow become transported into chaos!

The world in which she now was bore much the same resemblance to the ordered world of reality as a cubist painting to an actual scene or group of persons. It was a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds, odours and skin sensations. Everything was accompanied in her by such a variety and rapidity of emotion that she had scarcely the ability to realise her internal feelings at all. She was just one big nerve!… All was hopelessly mixed together – darkness and brightness, heat and coolness, one landscape and another, triumph, gloom, laughter, exaltation, grief!… The things only came in vivid hints and momentary splashes, immediately to be lost again. It was no dream, but the dream of a dream. Supposing reality to be solid and dreaming fluid, this was gaseous. The elements of life were in a condition of disintegration. They still existed, but in combinations so impossible that she could not even understand their meaning…

I think that is rather brilliant, and shows us the world from an entirely new perspective. But the main problem with Sphinx is that all the women are essentially the same. I gave up trying to distinguish them after a while. The dialogue may be amusing, and Lindsay’s ideas are certainly unusual and (in their own way) brilliant – but he isn’t quite capable of encapsulating these within the confines of a novel. It is almost a truism, among those who write about Lindsay, that he was a first-rate novelist trapped with the prose of a third-rate novelist. Here, his prose is perfectly serviceable – but his characterisations and (to a lesser extent) use of structure are too weak to hold or sustain the ideas he has. A shame, but Sphinx remains fascinating – and I don’t doubt that Lindsay will retain the small but devoted following he has for at least another generation.

Bill the Conqueror by P.G. Wodehouse

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Somewhat surprisingly, given that it was all about children’s books, Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm had me heading straight to the bookshelf for a P.G. Wodehouse. She wrote a very convincing comparison of Richmal Crompton’s WIlliam books and P.G. Wodehouse’s novels – if you like one, you’ll almost certainly like the other – and I went to my many unread PWGs. The only one that fit an unclaimed ACOB year, though, was Bill the Conqueror (1924).

I don’t think this is one of Wodehouse’s better-known novels – it’s not part of the Jeeves and Wooster series, or the Blandings series, though apparently some of the characters in it do pop up in other books. And what a dizzying number of characters it has, spread over both sides of the Atlantic. It’s apparently a matter of comparative ease to pop from one side to the other, and I got rather confused about who was where. But let me give a try at working out who is who and what is what…

In England, Flick is engaged to Roderick, the weak son of a newspaper magnate, but she is still in love with Bill (who lives in the US, and once saved her life). He’s besotted with his friend Judson’s sister (Alice), and also has a brainwave to start earning his own living – which happens just as his uncle disinherits the family, as he’s just adopted an uninspiring child. Bill and Judson sail off to London so Bill can work for the family pulping firm, which is in the midst of fraud. I feel like there are other subplots too, but I can’t remember all of them – even for Wodehouse, there’s a lot going on. Potentially a bit too much. Usually he winds everything together brilliantly at the end – here, there was nothing left unresolved, but some of it felt a bit extraneous.

I don’t think anybody reads Wodehouse because they’re desperate for a couple to find love. Indeed, there is quite a contrast between Bertie Wooster (who is forever getting engaged by accident, and then trying to extricate himself) and the heroes of PGW’s stand-alone novels, who are usually starry-eyed lovers who’ve fallen in love at first sight. And, yes, I didn’t really care which woman’s heart Bill conquered – I’m here for Wodehouse’s hilarious writing.

And the writing is very good in Bill the Conqueror. It has Wodehouse’s usual winning combination of litotes and hyperbole – I particularly like it when he makes an unnecessary and over-the-top reference to Greek myth, making ordinary situations jolt into the extremely dramatic, but only for the span of a sentence. But there weren’t any so-amazingly-funny-I-have-to-write-them-down moments. And his humour was a bit more intermittent than when he’s on his finest form.

It was lovely to go back to Wodehouse after too long a break, and this was an engaging, funny delight. If it had been by any other author, I’d be shouting my discovery from the rooftops. But Wodehouse is SO brilliant that I think it’s worth starting somewhere else – probably one of the Jeeves books. And it’s good to know that there are any number of books where Wodehouse will provide reliable fun – plenty of them still on my shelves.

In The Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim

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It was Elizabeth von Arnim Reading Week a week or two ago, organised by some nice people on Facebook, and I took In The Mountains (1920) off the shelf. One of the things I wanted to do this year was read more of the unusual or rare books I’ve got, because it seems a shame that the excitement of finding them shouldn’t get the opportunity to be matched by the reading experience. In the Mountains is one of the harder E von A titles to find in an early edition – though print-on-demand options are there – but I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy in a little bookshop in Dunster. It taught me always to check the pocket editions sections, as it won’t always be Thackeray and Austen.

In the Mountains was initially published anonymously – suggesting, perhaps, that it’s more autobiographical than she could allow under her own name. But any fan of von Arnim’s who came across this novel couldn’t possibly have mistaken it for the work of anybody else – it bears many of the hallmarks of her writing, from various different genres.

The mountains of the question are in Switzerland – the English narrator has returned there after a gap that encompasses the war. She comes with grief and weariness. We are never truly told what the grief is, but the first part of the novel (all of which is told in diary entries) tells how the landscape and the solitude are beginning to cure her. It isn’t quite the vision of natural panacea seen in The Enchanted April, but it is certainly of that ilk. And presumably it was largely inspired by von Arnim’s own Swiss mountain home.

I enjoyed all of this, but I will admit that one of my least favourite of von Arnim’s characteristic narratives is the nature-idyll-description. I still like it a lot, but there are other moulds in which I rather prefer her writing. And, in In the Mountains, she turns from one to the other – the comic outsider.

Mrs Barnes and Mrs Jewks arrive – they are English widows, exhausted by the heat and looking for a pension to stay. While our unnamed narrator isn’t hosting anybody officially, she has had enough of the curing solitude and quite welcomes the company. We see them through the prism of the diary entries, as the narrator gets to know them – or, at least, gets to know Mrs Barnes. She’s a conservative woman, horrified by anything too personal and constantly worrying that her impromptu stay is costing her hostess too much money. No protest assures her, and von Arnim writes amusingly about the hostess having to give up readily-available and much-liked treats to pacify her. Mrs Barnes’ strong (kind but immensely forceful) character gradually dominates the whole group. Her sister just smiles and complies, the only sign of a different character being the wry, amused looks she occasionally shoots the narrator.

All day to-day I have emptied myself of any wishes of my own and tried to be the perfect hostess. I have given myself up to Mrs. Barnes, and on the walk I followed where she led, and I made no suggestions when paths crossed though I have secret passionate preferences in paths, and I rested on the exact spot she chose in spite of knowing there was a much prettier one just round the corner, and I joined with her in admiring a view I didn’t really like. In fact I merged myself in Mrs. Barnes, sitting by her on the mountain side in much the spirit of Wordsworth, when he sat by his cottage fire without ambition, hope or aim.

This was my favourite section of the novel. It was really amusing, and von Arnim draws the characters really well – the anxieties of hosting people one doesn’t know well, the exasperation of coping with well-meaning pains, and the gradual development of friendship. Because Mrs Jewks brings one or two unexpected secrets with her…

The final act is a little forced, but von Arnim often sprinkles a bit of fairy dust into her conclusions and it’s forgivable because it’s enjoyable. This is the tenth novel I’ve read by von Arnim, and while it doesn’t hit the top spot – that honour still belongs to Christopher and Columbus – I thought it was a lovely, slim introduction to many of the things that make von Arnim charming, witty, and with an undercurrent of topical commentary that prevents the mixture being too sweet.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“It is a nice book but rather an odd mix” – The Captive Reader

“It’s a little compromised by its structure, by the sharp change part-way through, by the need to come to an end where there should be not an end but simply a change.” – Fleur in Her World

“I loved reading it, and it has put me in the mood for a lot more Elizabeth Von Arnim” – HeavenAli