1920s

Skylark

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43. Skylark – Dezső Kosztolányi

I’ve been reading some pretty brilliant books recently, and not finding time to write about them, so prepare yourselves for some enthusiastic reviews coming up soon.  And let’s start the ball rolling with Skylark (1924) by Hungarian novelist Dezső Kosztolányi, translated into English by Richard Aczel, and a heartfelt köszönöm to him for doing so.  It’s gone on my list of 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

Skylark came to my attention when Claire/Captive Reader put it in her Top Ten Books of 2011.  I added it to my Amazon wishlist, and waited… it felt, for some reason, like the sort of book which should really come as a gift.  Lucky for me, Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife spotted it there, and it arrived in my Christmas stocking last year.  So, consider this a tick on the list for my Reading Presently project (where I’m intending to read, in 2013, 50 books which were gifts.)

Before I get on to the wonderful writing and moving story in Skylark, I have to talk about the book itself.  If I’m ever asked why I don’t want a Kindle, my one word reply will now be: “Skylark“.  This NYRB edition is quite stunningly beautiful – not just the lovely colours and image on the front, and that turquoise/mint green I love so much on the spine, but the feel, the flip-flop of the pages, the perfect flexibility-to-sturdiness of the cover… the physical book is a work of art here, and I am so pleased that the content matched up.

The novel starts as a not-quite-young-any-more woman called Skylark leaves her provincial town for a week, to stay with relatives.  Actually, it starts while her parents are packing for her departure:

The dining-room sofa was strewn with strands of red, white and green cord, clippings of packing twine, shreds of wrapping paper and the scattered, crumpled pages of the local daily, the same fat letters at the top of each page: Sárszeg Gazette, 1899. 
The stage is set for the importance of the home – and the way that it is subverted and disturbed by Skylark’s departure.

One might expect (I did expect) that a novel which starts with a character getting ready to leave her home will follow that character on her travels.  Particularly so in a novel whose title bears the name of that character.  What Kosztolányi does so cleverly is, instead, focus on the effects of her absence, leaving the reader to bear witness to the unsettled lives of Skylark’s father (Ákos) and mother (known simply as Mother or ‘the woman’ throughout.)

They have a very obviously unhealthy dependency upon their daughter – but, at the same time, long more than anything for her to marry.  A man who has been polite enough to smile at her is built up into a potential – and then a definite – suitor; when he fails to follow up on this non-existent intimation, he becomes a figure for bitter hatred, much to his confusion.  Mother and Father can barely cope with Skylark leaving town for a week, let alone forever, but this is still their aim in life, even while they realise that it is almost impossible.

And why?  Because Skylark is ugly.  Extremely ugly.  Not horrendously disfigured or anything, simply deeply unattractive.  From what we see of her before she leaves, and hear about her, Skylark also seems domestically very capable (if unambitious), unimaginatively kind, practical, and pretty dull.  But her parents, of course, love her dearly.

This narrative is so clever and subtly written.  It is a mixture of quite pathetic inability to manage in their daughter’s absence, with a glimpse of what life would be like without her.  They eat interesting foods at restaurants and talk to their neighbours; Ákos gets drunk at a local club (which resembles the Freemasons in some fashion), and this leads to the most moving, vital, and brilliant scene of the novel – where all the couple’s unspoken fears and thoughts come tumbling out.  Kosztolányi gives the viewpoint of both husband and wife, so we see the scene through two sets of eyes simultaneously.  It is heartbreaking and extraordinary, but it is not the sort of confrontation that ‘changes things forever’.  Things cannot really ever, we sense, be changed.

They had given her that name years ago, Skylark, many, many years ago, when she still sang.  Somehow the name had stuck, and she still wore it like an outgrown childhood dress.
That passage is from early in the novel, and I marked it as being the one which suggested to me that I’d be onto something special.  It was also the first sign of something I thought throughout Skylark, which was that Kosztolányi’s writing reminded me of Katherine Mansfield’s – which is about the highest compliment I can pay to writing.  He has the same delicate touch, and the same way of showing ordinary people stepping outside of their normal routines, even slightly, and finding that everything is changed thereby, however unnoticeable this is to others.  The subtlest shift in the way acts are performed – the way Skylark holds a birdcage; the seasoning Ákos puts on his risotto – are shown by Kosztolányi to hold enormous significance.

Like a short story by Katherine Mansfield, I imagine Skylark would benefit from being read in one sitting.  At 221 pages, it could be done.  I, sadly, seemed to read almost all of it on bus journeys to and from work, and thus the reading experience was too broken up.  I will have to read it again when I have an entire afternoon to spare.

The only part of this edition I didn’t much like was the introduction by Péter Esterházy, since it barely spoke of the novel at all.  Apparently he is one of the most significant contemporary Hungarian writers, but I wish he’d written this introduction more as a fan of Skylark, and less as a fan of his own thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about the style I aim at on Stuck-in-a-Book, and how I want my posts to be a bit amusing – but it’s very hard to be funny when I have nothing but praise for a novel.  So instead, I’ll finish by saying that I went to a 1970s murder mystery party on Saturday (the one I mentioned I was writing), and somebody said that I looked like a fraudulent spiritualist from an Agatha Christie novel – must have been the floral bandana that did it.  With that image in your mind… go and buy a copy of Skylark; make it this beautiful NYRB Classics edition.

There’s Nobody Quite Like Agatha

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In 2000, or thereabouts, I read an awful lot of Agatha Christie novels – mostly Miss Marple, because my love of slightly eccentric old women started way back then – but since then, I’ve only read one or two.  In 2010 I read The Murder at the Vicarage, and thought it might issue in a new dawn of Christie reading.  Well, two years later that dawn has, er, dawned.  After hearing an interesting paper on Agatha Christie covers at a recent conference, I decided that a fun way to fill some gaps in A Century of Books would be to dip into my shelf of Christies, many unread.  Since she wrote one or two a year for most of the 20th century, she is an ideal candidate for this sort of gap-filling.

Before I go onto the two novels I read (pretty briefly), I’ll start with what I love about Agatha Christie.  She is considered rather non-literary in some circles (although not quite as often as people often suggest) and it’s true that her prose doesn’t ripple with poetic imagery – but the same is true of respected writers such as George Orwell and Muriel Spark, who choose a straight-forward seeming prose style, albeit with their own unique quirks.  Leaving aside Christie’s prose talents – and they are always better than I expect, and often funnier than I remember – she is most remarkable for her astonishing ability with plot.

For a lot of people, myself included, reading Agatha Christie is our first experience of detective fiction.  She sets the norms, and she sets the bar high.  Only after dipping my toe into books by Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers do I realise quite how vastly superior she is when it comes to plot.  It was once a truism of detective fiction that the author would be unfair, only revealing important clues at the last moment.  “What you didn’t know was that the gardener was Lord Alfred’s long-lost cousin!”  That sort of thing.  Dame Agatha never does that.  There are almost invariably surprises in the last few pages, but they are the sort of delightful, clever surprises which could have been worked out by the scrupulously careful reader.  Of course, none of us ever do fit all the clues together along the way – it would spoil the novel if we did – but Christie has a genius for leaving no loose ends, and revealing all the clues which have been hidden thus far.  Other detective novelists of the Golden Age still (from my reading) rely upon coincidence, implausibility, and secrets they kept concealed.

Reading a detective novel demands quite a different approach from most other novels.  Everything is pointed towards the structure.  There can be innumerable lovely details along the way, but structure determines every moment – all of it must lead to the denouement, and everything must adhere to that point.  Many of the novels we read (especially for someone like me, fond of modernist refusal of form – witness my recent review of The House in Paris) are deliberately open-ended, and the final paragraphs are structurally scarcely more significant than any arbitrarily chosen lines from anywhere in the novel.  With an Agatha Christie, the end determines my satisfaction. My chief reason for considering a detective novel successful or unsuccessful is whether it coheres when the truth is revealed.  Is the motive plausible?  Does the ‘reveal’ match the preceding narrative details?  Are there any unanswered questions?  That’s a lot of pressure on Agatha Christie, and it is a sign of her extraordinary talent for plot that she not only never disappoints, but she casts all the other detective novelists I’ve tried into the shade.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

I’d never read Christie’s very first novel, so it was serendipitous that 1920 was one of the few interwar blank spaces on my Century of Books.  I’m going to be very brief about these two novels, because I don’t want to give anything away at all (a carefulness not exemplified by the blurbs of these novels, incidentally.)  Suffice to say that there is a murder in a locked bedroom – and a lot of motives among family and friends.

“Like a good detective story myself,” remarked Miss Howard.  “Lots of nonsense written, though.  Criminal discovered in last chapter.  Every one dumbfounded.  Real crime – you’d know at once.”

“There have been a great number of undiscovered crimes,” I argued.

“Don’t mean the police, but the people that are right in it.  The family.  You couldn’t really hoodwink them.  They’d know.”
I love it when Christie gets all meta.  In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe one character accuses another, “You’re talking like a thriller by a lady novelist.”  Heehee!  But the best strain of meta-ness (ahem) in The Mysterious Affair at Styles is adorable Captain Hastings.  He narrates, and he is not very bright.  He considers himself rather brilliant at detection, and is constantly sharing all manner of clues and suppositions with Poirot, only for Poirot to laugh kindly and disabuse him.  Hastings really is lovely – and doesn’t seem to have suffered even a moment’s psychological unease at having been invalided away from WW1.  Poirot, of course, is brilliant.  It’s all rather Holmes/Watson, but it works.

You’ve probably read the famous moment where Poirot is first described, but it bears re-reading:

Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man.  He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity.  His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side.  His moustache was very stiff and military.  The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.  Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.  As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.

Isn’t that line about the bullet sublime?  (Although, again, demonstrates a remarkable lack of shellshock on Hastings’ part.)  What I found ironic about this, the first Poirot novel, is that (with decades of detection ahead of him), Hastings thinks:

The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old.  Privately I thought it lucky that he had associated with him someone of a more receptive type of mind.

Hastings is wrong, of course, but as a retired man, Poirot must enjoy one of the longest retirements on record.  As for the novel itself – Christie tries to do far too much in it, and the eventual explanation (though ingenious) is very complicated.  Colin tells me that Christie acknowledges the over-complication in her autobiography.  It’s not surprising for a first novel, and it does nonetheless involve some rather sophisticated twists and turns.

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940)

Onto another Poirot novel!  For some reason I love the idea of titles being nursery rhymes or quotations, and Christie does this a lot.  And Then There Were None is my favourite of her books (that I have read), and I also think the twist in The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side is brilliant.  I hadn’t read this one, and chose it over Sad Cypress for the 1940 selection.  Which turned out not to be very clever, as it is set at a dentist’s, where I will probably have to go soon…

The plot of this one isn’t amongst Christie’s best, and does depend upon one minor implausibility, but it’s still head and shoulders over other people’s.  I realise I’m giving you nothing to go on, but I don’t even want to give the identity of the victim (even though they’re killed very early in the novel) because every step should be a surprise.  What I did like a lot about the novel was this moment about Poirot:

She paused, then, her agreeable, husky voice deepening, she said venomously: “I loathe the sight of you – you bloody little bourgeois detective!”
 
She swept away from him in a whirl of expensive model drapery.
 
Hercule Poirot remained, his eyes very wide open, his eyebrows raised and his hand thoughtfully caressing his moutaches.
 
The epithet bourgeois was, he admitted, well applied to him.  His outlook on life was essentially bourgeois, and always had been[.]

Having sat through an absurd talk recently, where the embittered speaker spat out ‘bourgeois’ about once a minute (and then, after lambasting his own bottom-of-the-pile education, revealed that he’d been to grammar school) this came as a breath of fresh air!  One of my few rules in life is “If someone uses the word ‘bourgeois’ instead of ‘middle-class’, they’re probably not worth paying attention to, and they certainly won’t pay attention to you.’  The other thing I loved was the morality Christie slipped into Poirot’s denouement… but to give away more would be telling.

So, as you see, one of the other issues with detective fiction is that it rather defies the normal book review, but I’ve had fun exploring various questions which arise from reading Agatha Christie – and tomorrow I shall be putting a specific question to you!  But for today, please just comment with whatever you’d like to say about Christie or this post – and particularly which of her novels you think is especially clever in its revelation (giving away absolutely nothing, mind!)

A Man in the Zoo – David Garnett

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I spent a day this week in the Reading University Special Collections reading room, going through Chatto & Windus review clippings books, looking at dozens of early reviews of David Garnett’s Lady into Fox and A  Man in the Zoo.  This was incredibly interesting – looking at the initial response to these books, which was pretty positive, and seeing how their consensus over Lady Into Fox as a future classic have rather died a death.  David Garnett has become rather a footnote in the history of the Bloomsbury Group (most famous, perhaps, for marrying Virginia Woolf’s niece Angelica – having previously been the lover of Angelica’s father Duncan Grant.  Messy.)  But if anyone has heard of his literary output, it is for the 90-page novella Lady into Fox, where a lady turns into a fox (surprise surprise), which I wrote about briefly here.  It was a big bestseller in 1922, and lots of newspapers were eager to see what his follow up would be…

Hop forwards to 1924 and A Man in the Zoo, often found in tandem with Lady into Fox, since they only make up 190 pages between them.  Garnett has dropped the Defoe-esque (apparently) style of Lady into Fox, but he’s still in person-as-animal territory – although this time there is nothing fantastic at play.

John Cromartie and Josephine Lackett are visiting the zoo, and are in the middle of an argument.  John has proposed, but Josephine doesn’t want to leave her ailing father – and John believes that she simply doesn’t love him enough.  They’re having quite the contretemps, when Josephine says:

“I might as well have a baboon or a bear.  You are Tarzan of the Apes; you ought to be shut up in the Zoo.  The collection here is incomplete without you.  You are a survival – atavism at its worst.  Don’t ask me why I fell in love with you – I did, but I cannot marry Tarzan of the Apes, I’m not romantic enough.  I see, too, that you do believe what you have been saying.  You do think mankind is your enemy.  I can assure you that if mankind thinks of you, it thinks you are the missing link.  You ought to be shut up and exhibited here in the Zoo – I’ve told you once and now I tell you again – with the gorilla on one side and the chimpanzee on the other.  Science would gain a lot.”
She is venting, but… he takes her at her word.  John offers himself as an exhibit for the zoo – and, mostly to annoy a troublesome member of the committee (‘it was not, however,until Mr. Wollop threatened to resign that the thing was done’) they agree.

So he moves in.  He is housed between an orangutan and a chimpanzee, and draws quite the crowd – to the envy of his animal neighbours, and to Josephine’s horror.  He is given a private bedroom and a library, and simply sits reading, ignoring the visiting public.  (It’s starting to sound a little blissful, isn’t it?  All that time just to read!)

For the rest of this short novel, Garnett shows Josephine and John’s reactions to the situation, and (most adorably) gives John a pet caracal.  I hadn’t looked one up before – but they’re rather beautiful, aren’t they?

(photo source)

As some of the early noted, Garnett doesn’t entirely take full advantage of his scenario.  It could be used in all manner of different directions, but he doesn’t explore very much – and the addition of another man (a black man, rather crudely drawn) feels a bit like Garnett is clutching at straws in an already extremely brief novel.  Lady into Fox was so brilliantly done, so logically worked out from the metamorphosis onwards, that A Man in the Zoo feels rather scattergun in comparison.  And the comparison certainly comes up time and again in those early reviews – as might be expected.

Taken on its own, without any reference to Lady into Fox, it’s an enjoyable little book.  Garnett’s style is pretty plain on first sight, but writing about passionate people without sounding ridiculous or hackneyed is difficult, so he deserves credit for that.  I suppose, with an extraordinary conceit at the centre of a narrative, the style shouldn’t be over the top – so his gentle, straight-forward writing makes the tale seem almost rational.

I’d definitely recommend seeking out a copy which has both of these short novels together – not least because they are likely to have all the woodcuts by Garnett’s then-wife Rachel Garnett, which have wonderful character to them.  Those for Lady into Fox are remarkable in the way she captures the fox’s movements, as well as the human soul disguised in the metamorphosis.  The woodcuts help the fable-like quality of these two novels.  I don’t know what message he might have been trying to give – they aren’t simply Aesopian tales with morals – but an intriguing 1920s take on the strange and unusual, given a matter-of-fact treatment.

 

Dusty Answer – Rosamond Lehmann

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Despite packing and moving and all sorts, I have managed (just in time) to finish Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann, and thus I am participating in Florence’s Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week!  I also realise I’ve been spelling it ‘Rosamund’ up until now.  Sorry, Ros.

I bought Dusty Answer (1927) eight years ago, and it’s been on holiday with me a couple of times, and yet I hadn’t read it (or any Rosamond Lehmann novels) until this week.  I had intended to read a different Lehmann novel, but then decided to start at the beginning, with the novel Lehmann had published when she was 26, the same age I am.  I’m glad I did.  Dusty Answer is brilliant, and fulfilled all the expectations I’ve been building up in my head over the past eight years.

The papier-mache dog (Pastey) was made by my friend Mel’s boyfriend…
Mel insisted that he make an appearance.

The novel concerns Judith Earle, an only-child who is mostly solitary, but who becomes friendly with the children who visit next door – and who end up figuring hugely in her life.  They are Mariella, Roddy, Julian, Charlie, and Martin – mostly cousins, but Julian and Charlie are brothers – and have a busy, high-spirited life which Judith joins in nervously but so very whole-heartedly.  They are her life, for a summer or two – and ice-skating a while later – and have a huge significance in her otherwise lonely upbringing.   It takes a talented writer to write about childhood without the novel feeling like a children’s book, and Lehmann achieves this wonderfully.  The cast is well-drawn – foolish but amiable Martin, above-it-all Julian, unusual Roddy, beautiful Charlie, and self-conscious Mariella.  Lehmann captures childhood, and the fleeting but all-absorbing interaction with other children, even when it lasts only a little while.  Although nothing exceptional happens in these chapters, the atmosphere is consumingly beautiful.  Part of me wishes the whole of Dusty Answer dealt with their childhood, from the subjective but astute gaze of Judith.  It would have been enough.

But, we learn in the first page or two, Charlie is killed.  The children grow up and don’t see each other.  Judith must start to make a life for her own – which she does, as a student at Cambridge.  This was the section I liked least.  The character who looms largest in Judith’s life at this point is Jennifer – they bond over insulting a chubby, ugly girl behind her back; they are essentially horrified by a lack of beauty.  This was where I lost a bit of sympathy for Judith.  But a novel – even one which looks through the eyes of one character – doesn’t fail or succeed on the sympathetic qualities of its protagonist.  Lehmann still writes engagingly and Cambridge life, but I missed the cousins.  I wanted them back.  That group was what gave the novel vitality for me.  And, luckily… they came back!  I shan’t spoil any more, but things get increasingly complex…

Dusty Answer spans Judith’s life from childhood to her early twenties (I think) and Lehmann is convincing at the subtle ways she changes as she ages – and the same for all the children as they become adults (except poor Charlie, of course.)  Only Julian and Roddy got rather confused in my mind, and we might be able to lay the blame at the door of the hot weather this week.  As a central character, Judith is convincing in her thoughts and responses, irksome in her self-consciousness and occasional hysteria, and an odd (but believable) mix of concern for the lives of others and intense introspection.  Perhaps common traits of the only-child with distant parents.  One character sums up her approach to life rather well:

Have you ever been happy?  No.  Whenever you come near to being, you start thinking: “Now I am happy.  How interesting… Am I really happy?”
Yet, although she has a few off-putting qualities, these only serve to make her more interesting and rounded as a focal pair of eyes for the novel.  She seems to have been based on Lehmann herself.  None of the characters are saints or sinners; the good do not end happily and the bad unhappily – Lehmann’s novel reflects the highs and lows, obsessions and irritations of life itself – albeit rather heightened at times.

But the reason I loved Dusty Answer was Lehmann’s writing, especially in the first section.  It’s another of those novels which starts with a little bit of prolepsis (starting with some information, then skipping back into the past) but it worked well here, because we are going back to Judith’s childhood.  The effect lends an air of added nostalgia to the early chapters.  It actually reminded me of a couplet written by Miss Hargreaves (!) – her poetry is usually nonsensical, but there was a definite sense at the beginning of Dusty Answer of ‘Halcyon, halcyon, halcyon days / Wrapped in high summer’s indigenous haze.’    And Lehmann writes so, so beautifully.  As with Sybille Bedford, it’s difficult to pinpoint sections which are especially brilliant, because all of it flows exquisitely.  Karen (whose review is here) wrote on the LibraryThing discussion of Rosamond Lehmann: ‘What beautiful, dreamy, atmospheric prose she writes!’  And she’s spot on.  As I say, picking out an excerpt is tricky – indeed, it somehow seems rather like purple prose in isolation, which it never does in context, but I thought I’d better not write a whole review without any quotations…

Into the deep blue translucent shell of night.  The air parted lightly as the car plunged through it, washing away in waves that smelt of roses and syringa and all green leaves.  The moon struggled with clouds.  She wore a faint and gentle face.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if there was rain before daybreak,” said Martin; and, reaching at length the wan straight high road, accelerated with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Faster, Martin, faster.”

Faster and faster he went.  She settled herself close against him, and through half-shut eyes saw the hawthorn and wild-rose hedges stream backward on either hand.  The night air was a drug from whose sweet insinuating caress she prayed never to wake.  Soon, through one leafy roadway after another, the headlights pierced a tunnel of green gloom.  The lanes were full of white scuts and little paws, paralysed; and then, as Martin painstakingly slowed down, dipping and twinkling into the banks.  Moths flickered bright-winged an instant in the lamplight before being dashed to their fried and ashy death.  Once or twice came human beings, objects of mean and foolish design, incongruous in the night’s cast grandeur; and here and there, under the trees, upon the stiles, in the grass, a couple of them, locked face to face, disquietingly still, gleamed and vanished.  She observed them with distaste: passion was all ugliness and vulgar imbecility.
But I think the only way to see whether or not you’d like Dusty Answer is to pick up a copy and start reading.  Since it was on my shelf for eight years, you’ll have gathered that a synopsis alone doesn’t sell it as a must-read.  But if, like me, you’ve somehow gone through your life without reading any of Rosamond Lehmann’s output, then – hie thee to a library!

Thanks so much, Florence, for running Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week and for making me finally read this novel.  It’s so, so good!

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

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I love Virginia Woolf.  Whenever I’m not reading her, I have slight doubts in my mind – is she really as brilliant as I remember?  Does a little bit of me just love Woolf because I think I ought to love Woolf?  And then I re-read one of her books, and realise that she is as brilliant as I remember – I find it very hard to believe that there is a better writer in the twentieth century.  Suggestions on a postcard.

Even those who wrinkle their noses at her fiction (listen up, Colin) tend to admire her non-fiction.  For my thesis I had the pleasure of re-reading A Room of One’s Own (1929), bringing the total to three reads I believe, and it has confirmed my adoration of the book.  Many of us are probably familiar with its central tenet – that, in order to write, a woman must have a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year – but it is surprisingly how slim a section of the work this mantra occupies.  You might (like me) also recall Woolf recounting her experiences at an Oxbridge college, forbidden from using the library and chastised for walking on the grass.  And Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s hypothetical sister with equal talent but no chance of fame.  But these are only small elements within a much wider exploration of women through history, through literature, and in contemporary society.  Like most of Woolf’s writing, she meanders (in the best possible way) from topic to topic, from thought leading to thought, so that one is at the end, far from where one started, without ever seeing the joins.  The whole essay (originally delivered as two talks, and edited into its current form) winds beautifully through so many thoughtful and striking ideas that to explore them all would be simply to type out the whole essay.

And how tempting that is!  I want to quote it all, to demonstrate the beauty and astuteness (in more or less equal measures) that Woolf fits into A Room of One’s Own.  Woolf is so intoxicatingly good a writer that it feels almost an affront to write about her.  So I shall mostly quote.

Having been turned away from one library, Woolf (or, rather, the essayist – she is probably being playful with truth and personalities at times) takes herself to another, trying to discover what has been written about women by the scholars, theorists, and novelists.  That dry, sardonic, slightly self-deprecating wit that Woolf uses so often in her essays comes to the fore when reading a psychological tome (while doodling the author’s face):
It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.  My heart had leapt.  My cheeks had burnt.  I had flushed with anger.  There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that.  One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man – I looked at the student next me – who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight.  One has certain foolish vanities.  It is only human nature, I reflected, and began drawing cart-wheels and circles over the angry professor’s face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet – anyhow, an apparition without human semblance or significance.Her conclusions, after journeying through much that has been written in literature, history, and psychology, says (of course) more about the ways in which women have been treated in these fields than it does about women themselves:
A very queer, composite being thus emerges.  Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.  She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.  She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger.  Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.As I say, there is far too much in A Room of One’s Own to be able to do it all justice.  As an essay, it deserves and requires slow, careful reading and re-reading.  Woolf’s writing is too rich for skimming.  I can only imagine how frustrating (as well as wonderful) it must have been to hear the lectures – to hear such genius (yes, I will use the word) and not be able to jot it all down for later!  How fortunate are we, to have the book readily available.  But amongst the many glorious elements of Woolf’s essay, I perhaps loved most her journeys through women’s writing over time:
For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Vilette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour’s discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing.  Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.  For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.  Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter – the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek.  All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is,most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.  It is she – shady and amorous as she was – who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.So much of what A Room of One’s Own addresses are battles that have been now won.  Woolf is not arguing about the numbers of female CEOs (why this is ever held up as a statistic, I can’t imagine – how dreadful it must be to be a CEO!) she is arguing for women’s education and entitlement to positions of intellectual credibility.  But one point did stand out to me, a battle which is still unwon:
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war.  This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.  A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.How many of us have heard this!  There are still (but how?) intelligent people who disregard, say, Jane Austen because she does not feature the Napoleonic Wars.  And many of our beloved middlebrow novelists fall victim to the same absurd views about what do and do not constitute viable literary topics.  This isn’t as important as the battle for women to have university education (although sooner or later nobody, male or female, will be able to afford this, at the rate we’re going) but it is a battle nonetheless.

However, I don’t think one needs to be especially interested in feminist non-fiction to value A Room of One’s Own.  I suppose, come to think of it, I am not especially interested in feminist non-fiction (however much I support the cause) because I’ve just realised that I haven’t really read much else in this field.  What makes A Room of One’s Own so sublime in my eyes is not Woolf’s arguments and ideas, but her writing.  It flows so exquisitely; Woolf is so amusing and sharp, laughing at every turn, realising that aggression is far from the only way to make a point.  It is a book to read and re-read and re-read again – and a happy reminder that Woolf is not a writer for the elite or pretentious, but simply for those who admire ability, don’t abhor thinking, and enjoy having a smile at the same time.  If you’ve not read it – oh, do, do, do!

The Love-Child by Edith Olivier

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I have blogged before about The Love-Child, one of my favourite books and in my ongoing list of 50 You Must Read, but I’ve never been very happy with my post on it.   Nor do I think the following wholly encapsulates how wonderful the novel is by any means, but… I thought it worth sharing.  I wrote it for Hesperus Press’s Uncover A Classic competition – but, sadly for me, a different book was chosen.  More on that soon, but I decided not to put my ‘500 word introduction’ to waste – and so, just in case you’ve yet to read this beautiful novel, here is the piece I wrote for the Hesperus competition…

photo source



Edith Olivier’s The Love Child (1927) was her first novel, and easily her best.  Although rediscovered as a ‘modern classic’ in 1981, it has not been reprinted since – perhaps because it resist categorisation – yet it deserves a far wider, rapturous audience.

The Love Child tells the story of Agatha Bodenham, a middle-aged childless spinster mourning the death of her mother as the novel opens.  She fondly recalls her childhood imaginary friend, Clarissa, and even copes with her loneliness by talking to Clarissa again.  This attachment grows until one afternoon, to Agatha’s surprise, Clarissa herself appears in the garden: ‘She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven.  […] Physically, she looked shadowy and pathetic, but a spirit peeped out of her eyes, with something of roguishness, perhaps, but yet it was unmistakably there.’

Initially Clarissa is visible only to Agatha, but gradually others can see her also – and Agatha copes with both the joy of new-found companionship, and the embarrassment of explaining the sudden appearance of a child.  Eventually she decides she must pretend that Clarissa is her own daughter; her love child.  ‘She had saved her.  But at what a cost!  Her position, her name, her character – she had given them all, but Clarissa was hers’.

Olivier constructs a mother/daughter relationship which is more poignant, and more vulnerable than most.  Clarissa may disappear as suddenly as she appeared – especially when, as the years progress, a local man named David begins to fall in love with her.  Agatha’s possessiveness and uncertainty are drawn beautifully, demonstrating the pain suffered by one unused to love when her creation may be taken from her.  She is not cast as a villain, but simply a lonely woman battling for the solution to that loneliness.  Olivier herself had neither husband nor children when, in her fifties, she was inspired to start writing novels.  According to her autobiography, the idea for The Love Child came to her suddenly in the middle of the night, and was written ‘during those feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems let loose to work abnormally quickly.’  The novel certainly reads with the enchanting spontaneity this writing process suggests and, although often addressing sad topics, is far from a melancholy book.  This is primarily due to Clarissa herself.  She is a captivating character – naïve, almost elfin, yet fascinated by science and delighted by motorcars – she animates not only Agatha’s monotonous life, but enlivens the whole novel.

In a short book, which could easily be read in two or three hours, Olivier encompasses moving and involving themes in a warm, lively manner; it seems absurd that this beautiful novel should ever have fallen out of print.  A new generation of readers deserve to discover The Love Child.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – Anita Loos

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Amongst my towering pile of current (but not very active) reads, I mentioned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos.  One or two of you encouraged me to return to it, and I am never one to turn down the call to read a short novel from the 1920s.

Lorelei is the blonde in question, going around America and Europe bewitching rich men and thinking deep thoughts.  These thoughts she has been encouraged to note down in her diary… she is admirably determined to educate herself, but rather more determined to secure diamond tiaras etc. from the gentlemen she encounters.  She is not aided by her unrefined friend Dorothy, whom I absolutely love – Lorelei attempts to refine her, but Dorothy’s slang and insults (“Lady, if we hurt your dignity like you hurt our eyesight I hope for your sake, you are a Christian science”) are thankfully unfettered by decorum – they’re hilarious.

The joy of the novel is the voice Loos creates for her blonde.  Almost every sentence begins ‘So’ or ‘I mean’, and her deep thoughts are about as perceptive as her spelling is correct.  Typos today are, for once, not my own work.

I am going to stay in bed this morning as I am quite upset as I saw a gentleman who quite upset me.  I am not really sure it was the gentleman, as I saw him a quite a distants in the bar, but if it really is the gentleman it shows that when a girl has a lot of fate in her life it is sure to keep on happening.
I haven’t seen the film musical, with Marilyn Monroe, but I think I’m going to now.  At the time of publication, it was hugely successful – the second best selling title of 1926 (although published in 1925), and Edith Wharton called it ‘The great American novel.’  I wonder how tongue-in-cheek she was being?

As the beauty of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is in the style, I’ll give you another excerpt – one which gets across quite how beguiling the young woman is:

So Mr. Jennings helped me quite a lot and I stayed in his office about a year when I stayed in his office about a year when I found out he was not the kind of gentleman that a young girl is safe with.  I mean one evening when I went to pay a call on him at his apartment, I found a girl there who really was famous all over Little Rock for not being nice.  So when I found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr. Jennings I had quite a bad case of hysterics and my mind was really a blank and when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings.

[…]

Because everyone at the trial except the District Attorney was really lovely to me and all the gentlemen in the jury all cried when my lawyer pointed at me and told them that they practically all had had either a mother or a sister.  So the jury was only out three minutes and then they came back and acquitted me and they were all so lovely that I really had to kiss all of them and when I kissed the judge he had tears in his eyes and he took me right home to his sister.
So, I mean, I liked the novel a lot – I didn’t find it quite as uproariously funny as some people evidently do, and I think the joke would wear a little thin if it were stretched beyond the 150pp of this novel – but it was great fun while it lasted.  And I do have the even shorter sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, in the other half of this edition, starting from the other side and meeting in the middle… I’ll report back in due course.

Spinster of this Parish – W.B. Maxwell

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I’m back!  Did you miss me?  I suspect a lot of people barely noticed, since I wasn’t away for all that long – but I usually try to post at least five times a week, so it felt like a lengthy holiday for me.  Sometimes a break is needed to keep blogging fresh for me – and my week-and-a-bit was enough to get me raring for more.  Let’s kick things off with a review to fill the 1922 slot on A Century of Books, eh?

It was in this article by Sarah Waters (an introduction to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes) that I first heard about Spinster of this Parish by W.B. Maxwell.  (A William, it turns out, but not that William Maxwell.)  It was only mentioned in passing, alongside F.M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter (which sadly underwhelmed me) but it was enough to pique my interest.  Luckily Oxford library has a copy in its store, and eventually I got around to reading it.  It’s rather extraordinary.

The action kicks off in 1920, with Mildred Parker (age 25) visiting ‘old maid’ Miss Emmeline Verinder (age 50) in the hopes of receiving some advice.  Mildred is ‘that mixture of shrewdness and innocence which makes the typical modern girl seem at once so shallow and so baffling.’  She has fallen in love with a man of whom her parents do not approve – and is bewailing this state to Miss Verinder when she stops suddenly, and suggests that Mildred might not be able to help her, as she has never experienced ‘the passions’…

Rewind to 1895, and Emmeline’s youth.  We’re still in the third person, so it’s not entirely Emmeline Verinder’s perspective, but she is certainly taking centre stage.  She is engaging in the late-Victorian social whirl, when she happens to meet celebrated explorer Anthony Dyke… and yes, dear reader, Emmeline is smitten.

How had he captivated her?  She did not know.  Was it only because he was the incarnate antithesis of Kensington; because he was individual, unlike the things on either side of him, not arranged on any pattern, not dull, monotonous, or flat; a thing alive in a place where all else was sleeping or dead?  Neither then nor at any future time did she attempt mentally to differentiate between the impression he had made upon her as himself all complete, with the dark hair, the penetrating but impenetrable eyes, the record, the fame, and the impression she might have received if any of these attributes had been taken away from him.  Say, if he had been an unknown Mr. Tomkins instead of a known Mr. Dyke.  Absurd.  The man and the name were one. […] He was Anthony Dyke.  He was her lord, her prince, her lover.

In other words, he is about equal measures Tarzan and Mr. Rochester.  Indeed, he borrows more than a penetrating stare from the world’s most beloved bigamist – for Dyke [er, SPOILERS!], like Rochester, has a madwoman in the attic.  Like poor Rochester (for we can’t our brooding heroes being too cruel, can we?) Dyke was tricked into marrying a madwoman (variety of mental illness not mentioned) who is now not, actually, in an attic but in an asylum.

This is where things start to get a bit daring.  Dyke is rather more honest than Rochester, and tells Emmeline about his wife.  She, in turn, decides that their love is more important than society’s morals and her parents’ approval – and becomes, as it were, his mistress.  This was pretty daring for the time, wasn’t it?  Shunned by her parents (although, to do Maxwell justice, Mr. Verinder ‘was not in any respects the conventional old-fashioned father that lingered in the comic literature of the period’) Emmeline takes her maid Louisa and lives elsewhere.

Being an explorer, Dyke must explore – and he’s high-tailing it off to South America.  They have rather a rushed emotional goodbye and he sets sail… only… wait… Emmeline has sneakily crept onboard!

This, blog-readers, is where everything goes mad.

The next section of the novel takes place in South America – and I highly doubt that Maxwell had ever gone nearer to it than Land’s End.  They go emerald-hunting, get lost in caves, involved in duels… it’s insane, and entirely different from the novel I was expecting.  Had I seen the cover (below) then I might have been better prepared for the excesses of Spinster of this Parish, which were in no way betrayed by the novel’s title.

The Sheik by Ethel M. Hull was published in 1919, and was wildly popular into the 1920s – although Spinster of this Parish involves none of the disturbing rape fantasies of The Sheik, it’s clear that Maxwell (and many others) were influenced by the popularity for exoticism.  I, however, found this section rather tedious, and flicked through it…

Finally we are back in English society – Emmeline grows gradually less shunned, and Dyke’s adventures continue abroad without her.  He is determined to succeed in his quest to get to the South Pole… will he survive or not?  Maxwell has rather calmed down by now, and Dyke’s activities take place off stage, thankfully – instead, we see the changing views of upper-class society, and Emmeline’s unwavering loyalty to her absent lover.

Picture source

Ah, yes, their love.  I got a bit tired of that.  He is physically perfect and unimaginably manly; she is womanfully patient and devotedly passionate.  Hmm.  Not the most original of pairings.  A lot made sense to me when I found out that W.B. Maxwell is the son of none other than Mary Elizabeth Braddon – of Lady Audley’s Secret fame.  He certainly inherited her love of sensation romance literature (did I mention the blackmail plot that’s thrown in?)

And yet – I enjoyed an awful lot of it.  Maxwell’s writing is, if not exceptional, consistently good.  He is quite witty throughout, and certainly writes better than most of the authors who would warrant a similar dustjacket image.  When we were in England, looking at the workings of society, it was very much my cup of tea – even if the characters were a little too good to be true.  At one point I even thought of suggesting it to Persephone Books.  But… I couldn’t get past the insane section in the middle.  The bizarre trip through South America, duels-n-all, is what will make Spinster of this Parish so memorable – but also that which lets down the overall writing, and makes it feel rather silly.

So, a strange book with which to make me blog return!  If nothing else, it has taught be that one must not only forswear to judge a book by its cover – similar caution must be taken as regards a book’s title.

Uncanny Stories – May Sinclair

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To those of us in this particular corner of the blogosphere, where reprint publishers of early twentieth-century women’s novels are our bread and butter, the name May Sinclair is probably most closely connected with her 1922 novel Life and Death of Harriett Frean (and perhaps for coining the term ‘stream of consciousness’, in print).  And a very good novel it is too (my thoughts here.)  What gets less attention is that the following year she published a collection called Uncanny Stories.  Indeed, she was astonishingly prolific, publishing fourteen books in the 1920s alone – and, as Uncanny Stories demonstrates, was not afraid to venture into different genres.

Truth be told, there is only really one story which stands out in this collection, and that is the first one: ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’.  I’d read it a while ago, and hoped that the others in the collection would match up – sadly they didn’t really.  The atmosphere, characters, and writing were all good, but they often follow essentially the same premise: a ghost returns to clear up some unfinished business, usually romantic. I suppose that is as good a ghost story prototype as any, and Sinclair is careful always to incorporate some psychological angle, but ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’ is excitingly original by comparison.  (Oh, and there is ‘The Finding of the Absolute’, which is a posthumous discussion about adultery and Kant… but that was mostly bizarre.)

The term ‘uncanny’ had only recently (four years earlier) been used as the title to an influential essay by Freud (‘Das Unheimliche’) and it is likely that Sinclair deliberately chose her title to connect with his, especially given her interest in psycho-analysis.  But the relationship between sexuality and the supernatural is not hidden in ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’.

The story concerns Harriott who, like her near-namesake Harriett Frean, misses out on an early chance at love.  No further opportunities present themselves until, after her father’s death, she embarks upon an affair with a married man, Oscar.  They spend a fortnight together in the Hotel Saint Pierre, Paris, and the affair drags on… and on…

She tried hard to believe that she was miserable because her love was purer and more spiritual than Oscar’s; but all the time she knew perfectly well she had cried from pure boreom. She was in love with Oscar, and Oscar bored her.  Oscar was in love with her, and she bored him.  At close quarters, day in and day out, each was revealed to the other as an incredible bore.
At the end of the second week she began to doubt whether she had ever been really in love with him.

When Harriott wonders whether or not she could marry Oscar, she thinks ‘Marriage would be the Hotel Saint Pierre all over again, without any possibility of escape.’  Little does she realise the fate that awaits her after her death… Although she lives many years after the end of her affair, even becoming a deaconess, after her death it is Oscar she sees.

The rest of the story is hauntingly surreal, and incredibly filmic.  It would make a superb short animated feature, actually – think Tim Burton meets Salvador Dali.  Harriott keeps escaping Oscar, running through past memories of a church, her village, her childhood home and garden… but every corner she turns, the rooms and streets rearrange themselves into the corridor of the Parisian hotel.  Sinclair writes this so well, vividly and visually.  I thought that Jean de Bosschere’s illustration, which accompanies it, gives a good idea of what Sinclair was trying to convey:

Ineluctably Harriott is forced back to the scene of her loveless affair, overriding everything else she has done.

“In the last death we shall be shut up in this room, behind that locked door, together.  We shall life here together, for ever and ever, joined so fast that even God can’t put us asunder.  We shall be one flesh and one spirit, one sin repeated for ever, and ever; spirit loathing flesh, flesh loathing spirit; you and I loathing each other.”
“Why? Why?” she cried.

“Because that’s all that’s left us.  That’s what you made of love.”
It is unpopular these days for a work of fiction to have a moral; the much-fated quality of ‘openmindedness’ has led to people being extremely closed-minded in this area.  It was pretty unpopular for stories to have morals even in the 1920s, but Sinclair has dared to.  The story is not so much a warning against adultery as a cry against sexual relationships where there is no love – as such I think the story is very resonant today, and chilling in ways that Gothicised tales of horror cannot be.  It’s a shame that the rest of Uncanny Stories is fairly pedestrian – entertaining and diverting enough, but never experimental.  But I do recommend you track down ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’, in or out of this collection.  In fact, you can read a pdf version here…

The Rector’s Daughter – F.M. Mayor

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There are a few books which I expect to love, end up not loving, and then wonder why.  I lean back in my chair, eye the novel sternly, and ask myself (and it) what went wrong.  Was it timing?  Would a re-read make me fall in love?  Have I recently read something else which does the same sort of thing, but better?  That’s a sure-fire way to leave me unimpressed.  Or is the book simply not as good as everyone tells me?

Well, recently a novel joined the ranks of Hotel du Lac, Gaudy Night, and A Passage to India.  All books which have their passionate fans, and (with me) a somewhat underwhelmed reader.  Well, The Rector’s Daughter, I certainly didn’t hate you.  I liked you rather more than the above trio of disappointments.  But nor did I love you in the way that I anticipated I would, based on reviews by Rachel and Harriet.  So I have stalled writing about this novel… I finished it right at the beginning of 2012, and yet… what to say?  How to write about it properly – justifying my lack of adoration for this much-adored title, but not only that: this was one of those novels which gave me no heads-up on how I would structure a review.  But… well, I’ll try.

The Rector’s Daughter (1924) concerns the life and ill-fated love of Mary Jocelyn, the rector’s daughter in question.  She is motherless, and lives a life of obedient graciousness towards her father – who is deeply intellectual, but not able to show his love for his daughter.  I think Mary was supposed to be in the mold of silently passionate women, having to be content with their lot.  A bit like Jane Eyre, perhaps… but then I have always thought Jane Eyre a little overrated.  Here she is:

His daughter Mary was a decline.  Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early.  Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair.  She had her father’s beautiful eyes, and hid them with glasses.  She was dowdily dressed, but she had many companions in the neighbourhood, from labourers’ wives to the ladies of the big houses, to share her dowdiness.  It was not observed; she was as much a part of her village as its homely hawthorns.
Mary has one great chance at love, with Mr. Herbert – and I do not think it gives too much away (for it is no surprise) to relate that her chance comes to nothing, and she must live with the consequences of this unlucky, ineluctable failure.  Love is one of the major themes of the novel.  That’s true of a lot of novels, but in The Rector’s Daughter the theme is love-out-of-reach; the journey from innocence to experience, bypassing happiness.  What horrifies Mary – and what seems to horrify F.M. Mayor too – is any sort of irreverence towards love.

One winter day when Dora Redland had come to stay with Ella, she and Mary met for a walk.  Mary suddenly started the subject.  “I wish you would tell me something about love.  I should think no one ever reached my age and knew so little, except of love in books.  Father has never mentioned love, and Aunt Lottie treated it as if it ought not to exist.  There were you and Will, but I was so young for me age I never took it in.”

“What a funny thing to ask!” said Dora.  “I don’t think I know much about it either.  There was one of the curates at Southsea – I never imagined he cared at all for me; I had hardly ever spoken to him.  I think some one else had refused him.  That makes them susceptible, I believe, and also the time of year and wanting to marry.”  There was a mild severity, perhaps cynicism, in this speech, which astonished Mary.

“But, Dora, don’t you think there is a Love ‘Which alters not with Time’s brief hours and days, / But bears it out even to the edge of Doom’?”

“Take care, Mary dear, you stepped right into that puddle.  Wait a minute.  Let me wipe your coat.  I am not quite sure that I understand what you were saying.”
Dora is also a spinster, but less angsty.  I think I would have rather enjoyed a novel from Dora’s perspective…

It is usually easy to give reasons why a book didn’t work for me.  Indeed, they are few more satisfying activities than laying into a poorly written novel… but The Rector’s Daughter isn’t poorly written.

Perhaps my ennui can be attributed to spinster novel fatigue?  I have read quite a few recently, and have to say that May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean attempts a similar type of novel rather more (for me) successfully.  The public debate about unmarried women between the world wars (covered fascinatingly in a chapter of Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession, and less fascinatingly in Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out) was loud and often angry; the 1920s novels dealing with this issue were written at a time when the issue was contentious, as well as potentially tragic.  Maybe I’ve just read too many, now?

Perhaps I found The Rector’s Daughter too earnest?  I have often noted that novels others love sometimes fail with me if they are very earnest.  It kills a narrative.  And certainly there appeared to be very little humour in Mayor’s novel… at least in the first half.  I was surprised, in the second half, to come across moments which would be at home in Jane Austen or E.M. Delafield’s lighter work.  This passage was brilliant – it’s from Miss Davey, a character (looking back) whom I remember nothing else about:

“Who can that be coming down the road?  Why, it’s the pretty little girl with the dark curls we saw yesterday when the Canon took me out a little walk – your dear father.  Oh no, it’s not; now she comes nearer I see it’s not the little girl with the dark curls.  My sight isn’t quite as good as it was.  No, she has red hair and spectacles.  Dear me, what a plain little thing.  Did you say she would be calling for the milk, dear? Or is this the little one you say helps Cook?  Oh no, not that one, only ten; no, she would be rather young.  Yes, what the girls are coming to.  You say you don’t find a difficulty.  Mrs. Barkham – my new lodgings; I told you about her, poor thing, she suffers so from neuralgia – she says the girls now – fancy her last girl wearing a pendant when she was waiting.  Just a very plain brooch, no one would say a word against, costing half-a-crown or two shillings.  I’ve given one myself to a servant many a time.  Oh, that dear little robin – Mary, you must look – or is it a thrush?  There, it’s gone.  You’ve missed it.  Perhaps we could see it out of the other window.  Thank you, dear; if I could have your arm.  Oh, I didn’t see the footstool.  No, thank you, I didn’t hurt myself in the least; only that was my rheumatic elbow.”
Had I simply missed this sort of thing at the beginning, or did Mayor alter the tone?  I’m not suggesting that all novels ought to be comic novels, but without a slightly ironic eye, or dark humour, or even a slight reflective smile, I am rather lost.  This came too late in The Rector’s Daughter – or at least I missed it.  Hilary wrote in her review at Vulpes Libris that “There is no distancing irony or humour – its serious tone is relentless.”  I didn’t find it quite relentless, but otherwise I agree with this sentence (although Hilary, as you’ll see at the bottom, was overall more positive about the novel.)  I admire good comic writers so much more than I admire good poignant writers – it is so much more difficult to be comic – but maybe that is simply horses for courses.

However, as I finish a lukewarm review of The Rector’s Daughter, I am chastened by the memory of my initial response to Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day.  Who knows, perhaps a re-read of The Rector’s Daughter would give me an equally enthusiastic second impression?

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“This is such a brilliant book, worthy of being a classic, really, in that it so perfectly encapsulates how limited unmarried women’s lives could be before the advent of feminism” – Rachel, Book Snob

“The novel is minutely observed; there is beautiful detail about each day and the East Anglian countryside, so that although time passes in the book very slowly, it is wonderfully described.” – Verity, Verity’s Virago Venture

“This is a novel about how hard it is to understand other people, and how many misunderstandings and even tragedies arise from it.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog

“I wouldn’t have missed it, and I do recommend it. I can understand why this novel is regarded as a hidden gem.”  – Hilary, Vulpes Libres