1925

The Little World by Stella Benson – #1925Club

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Little world (Caravan library) : Stella Benson : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

My final review for the 1925 Club is Stella Benson’s The Little World. I found it in Hay-on-Wye seven years ago, exploring the pocket editions section where, it turns out, it’s not all uniform editions of Kipling, Trollope, Galsworthy etc. I was excited to add to my Benson collection, but hadn’t realised until I picked it off the shelf for the 1925 Club that it wasn’t a novel. It wasn’t even (as I wondered next) short stories. It is, in fact, travel essays.

Having said that, it starts with a couple of sections – ‘Trippers’ and ‘Oldest Inhabitants’ – which are more short stories than essays, since Benson is not involved and the first one involves the premeditated murders of tourists. There may be some living in places like Cornwall that would have empathy, but it’s hardly travel writing proper.

After that, most of the book is about the places Benson goes, often five or six sections in a row in the same place. The ‘essays’ vary from a couple of pages to over 50, and the places she goes are the US, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, India, and Vietnam – perhaps surprising for woman in the 1920s, particularly one who seems to travel mostly alone or with a female companion.

If you’ve read Benson’s fiction, you’ll know what marks her out as a novelist. Her writing style is eccentric, dry, and totally unpredictable. I love it, and her ways of framing a sentence are extraordinary. Once I knew what The Little World was, I wondered how similar the tone would be.

On occasion, you could see the novelist in evidence. The opening of an essay on the US is ‘Being alive at all is an incessant shock and, I think, all the best lives are melodramas.’ That could be lifted from any of novels, whether the narrative or a line from one of her joyfully unhinged, determined heroines. Similarly, this paragraph from a section on teaching in Hong Kong could have one of her heroines’ self-deprecating humour (of the variety that isn’t really humble, because she doesn’t expect you to think any the worse of her):

I lacked not only degrees, diplomas and all necessary knowledge, but also the voice and address of the teacher. I had a very noisy and robust-spirited class, but to its credit let me say that no boy ever actually defied me. If any boy had defied me on a hot day I should have cried; I don’t mind confessing that now. The boys, in spite of a penchant for pea-shooters and cribs, were in the main extremely kind to me, and I think that was because my teaching did not tax their brains, and my discipline was so erratic that it demanded an almost paternal tolerance on their part.

But, for the most part, it didn’t have the same sparkle as her novels. It felt like a subdued version of Benson. For whatever reason – respect, perhaps, a genuine intention of informing her audience – she is much more restrained. The greatest exhuberance seems to come out in the sections on the United States, but otherwise she could be dry, not to say worthy.

In her novels, particularly I Pose, Benson has a powerful feminist voice. And that is threaded in occasionally – curiously, not really about the role of women in the countries she visits, but as asides that help contextualise a country. I noted down this section, which I don’t think would offend a Hindu, but apologies if it does:

Cows in India occupy the same position in society as women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle-race owing to the anxiety of man to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told, that she must occupy a Place Apart—and indeed, so far Apart did her Place prove to be, that it was practically out of earshot. The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. 

Of course, I should admit that travel literature is not really my cup of tea. I love learning about other countries, but I want to do that through the eyes of somebody from that country – not from a British person who happened to pass through. That is true of writing today, and it’s true of writing from 1925. And, of course, the countries that Benson sees will have transformed enormously. I was most engaged by the section on India, because it is the country covered that I am most interested in, but in 1925 it was under British rule. Benson has more sympathy than many of her compatriots for the Indian men and women who are living as colonised people, but I would still rather read about it from an Indian point of view. And there is something distasteful about the ease with which she visits and travels around, compared to the everyday lives of people being oppressed within their own country.

All in all, I think The Little World is for Stella Benson completists only. Or perhaps travel literature aficiandos. I did like the final words of the book, though, so that is where I’ll leave the review:

Having at last boarded the dirty little ship, we sleep and sleep and sleep. And so we lose the end of a journey, we lose the transition from one life to another, from the known to the unknown, from a life of seven-headed snakes and ghosts and gods under a red sinking moon to a life in which the cook wants seventy cents to buy a chicken for supper.

Love by Elizabeth von Arnim – #1925Club

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Love

I have let my Audible subscription expire now, since I have such a backlog of downloaded titles I haven’t listened to yet (and since I discovered the free audiobooks from the library) – but, earlier in the year when I still have a sub, I listened to Love by Elizabeth von Arnim as part of their free Audible Plus catalogue.

I was pretty sure I owned Love as a print book, but I couldn’t find it on my shelves – did I lend it to someone? – but I’m delighted to have listened to it now, as it is now up there with my favourite Elizabeth von Arnims.

It’s incredibly bold to give a novel such a broad title, particularly when that title is the theme of more than half of books out there, so – what sort of love is von Arnim talking about? Well, it’s a May/December romance between an older woman and a younger man – but the man doesn’t realise that for a while.

Catherine and Christopher meet while in the audience for a play, The Immortal Hour, that they both love and have gone to see repeatedly. She is widowed with an adult daughter – by some complexities of her late husband’s will, she has been left with very little money so that she shouldn’t be targeted by fortune hunters. (What to make of this husband’s ‘thoughtfulness’ is left to the reader.) Going to the theatre is one of her outlays, but she does not expect to be intercepted by a young man – let alone one as boyishly enthusiastic as Christopher.

He is 25; she is about 20 years older. In the low lighting of the theatre, Christopher assumes they are about the same age – and, while she doesn’t intentionally lie, Catherine says a few things that mean he doesn’t put the pieces together at first. And then she runs with it (even though, as soon as he sees her in daylight, he is forever asking her why she looks so tired).

Catherine is flattered and amused, and rather bowled over by his enthusiastic romancing. And then… she falls for him too (although not until he has essentially kidnapped her against her will, which was a scene that thankfully would not be construed as impetuously romantic in 2025):

Vanity had been the beginning of it, the irresistibleness of the delicious flattery of being mistaken for young, and before she knew what she was doing she had fallen in love – fallen flop in love, like any schoolgirl.

Adding to the dynamics, Catherine’s daughter Virginia has also recently married, and has a young baby. Her husband is a clergyman who has long been a friend of Catherine’s – staid and wise, though himself silly and lovey-dovey when with Virginia. There is no disputing that Virginia and Stephen’s marriage is also a loving one – but von Arnim is drawing our attention very clearly to which age-gap relationships are acceptable and which are deemed beyond the pale. Quick clue: the men can get away with being decades older, and the women can’t.

Elizabeth von Arnim takes the story beyond an amusing premise, though. She asks: what happens if such a couple actually get married? Love perhaps isn’t as much a cautionary tale as Introduction to Sally is, and at least both partners are initially keen for the marriage to happen, but it becomes a much more sombre, serious novel as it goes on.

I certainly preferred the first half to the second. Von Arnim’s endlessly deft, light, sharp humour is on full display. She is very, very witty at the expense of pretty much any of her characters, while also holding up society’s foibles to ridicule – and, at the same time, recognising the very real impact they have on people’s lives, particularly women’s. As Ali points out in her review, von Arnim had recently been in a relationship with a man several decades younger than her, when she wrote Love, so she is being unsparing to herself too.

I prefer von Arnim on flippant form, and love her most when she manages to be ironically witty while still having a serious point (Father is the best example), and I found the melancholy rather overtook the irony in the second half. But I still think Love is up there with her best novels, and I’ll have to make sure I do have a print copy, if nobody returns mine. Did she earn the ambitious title? Perhaps that would be impossible, but she certainly makes you wonder about the limits that love can protect you and your relationship – particularly in 1925.

The Chase by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1925Club

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One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes is one of the worst-kept secrets of the mid-20th century, isn’t it? She isn’t a household name, and you might not even find that book in the average bookshop, but it’s well-known that One Fine Day is an absolutely extraordinary novel of life immediately after World War Two. Some of her stories are in print with Persephone, and her novel My Husband Simon was one of the first titles in the British Library Women Writers series – but, for such a well-regarded author, some of her books still remain a mystery.

For years, I’ve been tracking down her books at reasonable prices. The Chase will currently set you back at least £200 online, though my patience paid off with a much cheaper copy a few years ago. I’ve now read all of her novels, and unquestionably One Fine Day is the best – but I enjoyed The Chase a lot more than I expected to when it started.

The novel opens in East London, and I’m sorry to say that the first line of dialogue is “Blimey! ‘Ere’s the Standish kid!” – though the actual first line of the novel is rather more beautiful than that: ‘The kindly winter dusk was just falling over Perk’s Alley, softening its grime and squalor, making the gaunt, sordid houses shadow blurred, like a Post-Impressionist painting.’ We are thrust into the dynamics of a group of Cockney boys having a fight, and it has absolutely no authenticity. As I wrote in my review of her novel Storm Bird, it is clear that Panter-Downes was, at this stage of her career, drawing her characters and stories from what she had read in books, rather than what she had experienced. What did she know about life in poverty, with an alcoholic father, for a young boy? Had she ever met a Cockney? I suspect not.

There are elements that are clearly borrowed from melodrama, or cinema, and our young hero – Charles Standish – is given to vocalising his thoughts in the way that a silent film hero of the period might have had appear onscreen. It means that there isn’t a huge amount of subtlety in this early section. For instance, Charles says this out loud, to nobody:

“Some folks have too much, an’ others too little. It ain’t fair. Every one ought ter ‘elp every one else wot ain’t got enough – not that we want their blarsted charity.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this I was going to be able to take, if I’m honest. What kept me going was Panter-Downes’ wit, sprinkled in alongside:

One of Charles’ mottoes was: “Always look as nice as you can – you never know who you’re going to meet on the way.”

The only person he met on the way to High Derwent was on futuristically spotted cow looking over a hedge, but I am sure she was very much impressed by the angle of Charles’ hat.

Things got a lot more enjoyable when Charles comes across Nick. Dominic – known as Nick – is eight or nine years older and considerably posher. He is an affable, witty, silly man who speaks pleasant nonsense at him and welcomes him into a set of young men and women wealthy enough to be bohemian. Nick is very like a P.G. Wodehouse character, and Panter-Downes carries him off well – a total pleasure to be around. For Charles, he is the first person to be kind to him without expecting anything back. Their acquiantance is short-lived, but it gives him confidence to be aspirational. He carries Nick’s name (and a tie) with him, idolising him as a lesser god.

We jump forward a bit and Charles has got a job as a steward on a ship going to America. There, he beguiles a financial tycoon who gives him a job in his office. You see what I mean about Panter-Downes borrowing from Hollywood? Given the realism of One Fine Day, you certainly have to adjust yourself to the sort of writer she was a couple of decades earlier – and then enjoy it on its own terms. It’s why the novel is more successful after it detaches from the Cockney working-class background – because Panter-Downes’ attempts to merge realism and fantasy don’t work, until we are loosened to enjoy the fantasy. As someone says of him later in the novel (explaining the title of the novel, too):

“He is a solitary sort of chap really. I mean, he’s worked like hell for years to get where he is to-day. His chase, he called it once to me. I bet it was some chase. It was sheer luck that Porter got interested in him, of course – I dare say you know the story – but if he hadn’t followed up the advantage with sheer hard work it wouldn’t have done him a scrap of good. As it is, he sweated up from the bottom, always alone, and – well, a millionaire at thirty isn’t bad.”

Which isn’t to say there isn’t emotional reality to the novel. As it progresses, Charles gets involved (fairly unknowingly) in a love triangle. As (of course!) he becomes extremely successful himself, and moves back to England, he and his lovable secretary (Clive) get into another love quadrangle with a pair of sisters, all of which is enjoyable to read and has genuine emotional weight, despite the unlikely paths we’ve taken to get there.

I’m racing through the novel as I describe it, and that is fitting: it is the sort of novel you race through. When we move onto a new stage in Charles’s life, a new group of characters take centre stage and we tend to forget the ones who have come before – though Panter-Downes is also very good at re-introducing them when the moment is right. Her settings of a New York boarding house and an English estate are both perfect for bringing together various interesting characters and dynamics between them, and if she doesn’t know much about the way one might become a financial whizzkid, then, well, neither do I. After the false start of the horrible attempts at Cockney dialect, I loved reading The Chase.

It is amazing to think that she was only 18 or 19 years old when she wrote The Chase. It definitely comes across as the work of an older writer, but perhaps less than ten years older. The author’s inexperience of the world is clear – but what is also clear is, under the froth of the genre she has stumbled into, the seed of her psychological wisdom and her moments of subtlety. It’s a curious concoction. As a novel, it is a fun romp without the brilliant nuance and insight of One Fine Day – but, at the same time, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the writer of The Chase grew into the writer of One Fine Day.

I don’t know if The Chase would ever get reprinted. Since the main character is a man, it falls down on one of the main criteria for the British Library Women Writers series. Persephone have said they won’t. But I don’t think it would do her any disservice if somebody did bring it out again, and I certainly had a lot of fun reading it.

A Saturday Life by Radclyffe Hall – #1925Club

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A Saturday Life

Radclyffe Hall’s name echoes through any history of early 20th century women’s writing, or queer writing. We all know that The Well of Loneliness was banned for its portrayal of a lesbian relationship (in the so so saucy words ‘that night they were not parted’) – but what is Hall actually like as a writer? While I’ve read some of her short stories, A Saturday Life is my first novel by Hall. And, wow, it is so much freer and funnier than I was expecting.

I’d sort of assumed Hall would be worthy and earnest, and the more I read the less time I have for earnestness in fiction. In A Saturday Life, though, she is neither of those things. And we might be able to grasp that from an opening scene, where young Sidonia is experimenting in naked dancing, and her absent-minded mother is called upon to look away from Egyptian research and do some parenting.

Sidonia is an extremely gifted child, given to whole-hearted creative expression – for a time. Over the course of the novel, she embraces dance, singing, the piano and sculpture with wild enthusiasm that fades almost as soon as the commitment to pursue them has been made. The slightly odd title is only explained when the novel is well past the halfway mark: a ‘Saturday life’ relates to ‘an Eastern tradition’, which suggests certain spirits have seven incarnations on earth – and, in the final stage, someone is ‘said to exhibit remarkable talent for a number of different things; but since they have many memories to revive, they can never concentrate for long on one’. I have no idea if such a theory exists, but it does feel rather like Hall read about it and wondered what a character like that would be in reality, in an upper-middle-class home, and what their impact might be on the people around them.

In the very good introduction to my Virago Modern Classics edition, Alison Hennegan describes Sidonia as ‘wilful, enchanting, exasperating and ultimately ambiguous’, and I think that is an excellent way of putting it. As a person, she is all those things – but as a character to read about, she is chiefly (at least at first) very funny to read about. I didn’t expect Hall to be so dry and funny, with such a deadpan tone. We see how ridiculous Sidonia can be, without losing the simultaneous sense of how tricky her life might be to live. And a lot of the humour comes from the ways in which her mother, Lady Shore, struggles to really pay attention to Sidonia’s development – even while caring. Here’s a conversation she has with Frances, an unmarried friend who is a go-between for mother and daughter, a confidante for both, and a source of reason and sense that both need and both often disregard.

A year slipped by, and another year. Lady Shore began a new book.

‘It’s so peaceful, I think I could work again.’

‘Sidonia’s seventeen,’ said Frances.

Lady Shore looked puzzled.

‘So she is, my dear. I shall write my hand-book on scarabs.’

‘Some people would think Sidonia quite lovely.’

‘Yes, of course. Have you seen my spectacles?’

‘Here they are. We don’t know many men, do we, Prudence?’

Lady Shore was trying hard to breathe a scratch off her glasses. ‘There’s Professor Wilson,’ she murmured abstractedly.

‘I said men, not ichthyosauri,’ snapped Frances.

‘But why do we want to know men, my dear?’

‘There’s safety in numbers,’ Frances remarked thoughtfully; ‘the thing to be dreaded and feared is one man. One man is usually the wrong one.’

Lady Shore put down her glasses.

‘Oh, dear!’ she complained, ‘I know, you want to discuss something tiresome.’

‘Sidonia’s seventeen,’ repeated Frances stubbornly. ‘Sidonia’s no longer a child.’

Lady Shore looked frightened.

The actual man arrives on the scene rather later, after Sidonia has had an ill-fated beginning to some sort of scholarship to sculp elsewhere. The man she meets wouldn’t be out of place in a made-for-Netflix romantic comedy:

He was tall, quite six-foot-two, thought Sidonia, and his shoulders were flat and broad. His waist and flanks were excessively slim, his close-cropped hair waved a little. His eyes were grey, not intelligent, but kind, his features blunt and regular. His clean-shaven face would have looked well in bronze. He had a deep cleft in his chin.

Ok, yes, it does feel rather like a queer writer being all, “Idk what makes men hot; I guess I’ll describe a statue” but with added flanks, which I have only encountered elsewhere in horses. But maybe she is making a point? Anyway, David (!!) is cut from the kind-but-stupid mould, and increasingly wants Sidonia to conform to his outlook on life. And she is pretty willing to do so. The comedy of the novel gets a little tempered as we see what a strong-minded, unartistic, determined man can do to a woman who is creative and clever but unsure of herself – particularly if she is in love with him.

But the real love story in the novel, in my opinion, is between Frances and both Sidonia and Lady Shore. There are moments in the novel where Sidonia is very clear in her love for Frances, even if it framed as friendship – “Frances, look at me! Don’t you love me? Frances, won’t you be my friend? All, all my friend? I don’t want to marry anyone, I tell you; I just want to work and have you, all of you.” I suspect these lines would have been more heavily censored if A Saturday Life had been published after The Well of Loneliness, rather than before. But even beyond these heightened moments (that are not really reciprocated), the relationship that Frances manages to sustain with both mother and daughter is fascinating, moving and sometimes beautiful. The three women are so different, and the three sides of the relationship triangle could scarcely differ more, and Hall does it all so well.

My 1925 Club read was a series of surprises. First, that Hall was so funny. Second, that the comic novel had such melancholy undertones. Third, that the real star of the novel would be Frances, who lives so much in the background.

The Chip and the Block by E.M. Delafield – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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E.M. Delafield was a very prolific novelist, and even though I’ve been reading her steadily for more than 20 years, there is still a handful of her books I’ve not read. I am pretty sure I’ve owned The Chip and the Block (1925) for the best part of those 20 years, and I finally got it down from my special Delafield shelf yesterday – and it’s lovely to spend more time in her company. (I will note that she needlessly uses the n-word in the first line, which was not an auspicious beginning, and I’m glad didn’t continue beyond that.)

If you’ve only read The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels, you might think of E.M. Delafield primarily as a comic writer. And, yes, she is brilliant at comedy – often weaving dry humour into most of her more serious novels. I think The Chip and the Block is one of the least overtly funny – though there is dark humour, and the comedy that comes from somebody being totally lacking in self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge (and, yes, its lack) is the dominant theme in E.M. Delafield’s oeuvre, taken as a whole. In The Chip and the Block, it is seen chiefly in Charles Ellery, also known as Chas. He is the patriarch of a small family, with his tired, good wife Mary and his three children – Paul, Jeannie, and Victor. As the novel opens, the children are young – Victor, the youngest, is only recently engaging in conversations. The whole family has been recovering from influenza, and the most affected are Victor and Charles. Victor has been seriously ill. Charles has declared himself so. This telling scene happens during the recuperation period:

“Come along!” Father shouted gaily, catching Jeannie by the hand.

“You’re forgetting your stick, Father,” said Victor’s baby voice.

He pointed to the stick that had fallen unnoticed to the ground.

Father looked at Victor, and Victor looked back at his father. Paul could not help noticing them.

Although he was so unobservant about things and places, he always noticed people, and he often felt curious certainties as to what they were thinking and feeling.

This time he did not feel any certainties at all, but only a little uneasiness that he could not possibly have explained even to himself.

It is emblematic of many personalities. Paul is also watching, bewildering by the world even while he can perceive things that others miss. He is often close to tears, and fears his father’s ready wrath – which irritates him even more. Jeannie is content, happy to dismiss any sad feelings, and amiably unintelligent. And Victor? If Charles is the block, he is the chip. He sees through his father’s masquerades – while also being given to many of the same foibles as he grows older.

Delafield’s portrait of Charles is so frustratingly accurate. We all know people who have at least some echo of his personality. Charles is a fairly unsuccessful writer, totally given to self-mythologising. He is ruthlessly selfish but presents himself as angelically selfless, always berating his children for not considering anybody except themselves. He tells stories of finding Beethoven so beautiful as a four-year-old that he bursts into tears of artistic joy (his sharp elderly mother says he was seven years old, and cried because he’d eaten too many plums). He claims to have slaved night and day to write books while the children played and cried around his feet – while they distinctly remember being kept far from his study, and shouted out if they made any noise.

Charles doesn’t develop or grow as a character, it is fair to say, but Delafield has drawn him so well that it doesn’t matter. His arguments and self-presentation are so eloquently twisted that it is hard to disagree with him – and he certainly wouldn’t brook any contradiction, given his self-proclaimed artistic and sensitive temperament. But he is a nightmare to be near, poisoning the family around him.

The novel progresses until the children are grown up, and the second half of the novel looks more at the legacies of this upbringing – including careers, romances, and the inescapable expectations of their father. Again, they develop entirely in line with the personalities they showed as infants. Is that true? Perhaps, though I imagine there is more scope in reality for people to be distinct from their past selves. I hope I’m not very like my eight-year-old self, though maybe that is wishful thinking.

Anyway, I think this is a strong, convincing and engaging contribution to E.M. Delafield’s wide output. I did miss the wit that characterises most of her books, and she clearly wanted to do something more sombre and serious. On its own merits, it’s very good indeed.

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!