blww

This is some exciting news I didn’t know was coming – six of the British Library Women Writers series are now available as audiobooks!

I’ve got really into audiobooks in the past 18 months. Well, before that – when I had a long commute – I’d started listening to them in the car. But they came into their own for all those long, solitary lockdown walks. And now I might just have to get hold of one of these new releases. Isis Audio are producing them, and I’ve borrowed the above image from them.

At the moment, the six books available are:

• Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
• The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair
• Chatterton Square by E.H. Young
• Father by Elizabeth von Arnim
• My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes
• Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

The narrators are Penelope Freeman, Julia Franklin, Patience Tomlinson, and Jilly Bond. I think it’s probably easiest to find them by searching in your audiobook app of choice. I don’t know if others in the series are coming out as audiobooks (fingers crossed!) – I’d love to hear from you if you give any of these a try.

What fun it has been to watch the blog tour for the new British Library Women Writers! There have been wonderful reviews on blogs, YouTube, and Instagram – I recommend visiting the people on the list below to see what they think of Mamma and Tension. Spoilers: all the reviews were positive! The final stop on the tour is chez moi, and a bit about why I suggested these books.

One of the best emails I have ever received was the initial ‘feeler’ from the British Library, wondering what I thought about a series of neglected women writers from the first half of the 20^th century, or thereabouts. It was such a delightful opportunity that I did wonder if the email were a hoax, and was half waiting for the venture to take a swerve to requesting my credit card details. To be quite honest, I’d probably have handed them over if it would help get me the series consultant gig.

Suffice to say, nobody was attempting to defraud me – and, a year or so later, I have ended up in the privileged and wonderful position of seeing books I’ve recommended come back onto bookshelves. The response from readers has been just as wonderful to see – whether that’s laughing, feeling comforted, or raging against the ways in which women were treated a hundred years ago. And, of course, sometimes highlighting how little has changed over the years. Perhaps my favourite experience so far is seeing octogenarian readers welcome a book back into print that they had enjoyed with their mothers decades and decades ago.

Choosing the books to recommend is the lifeblood of my role, of course, and I’ve tried to suggest books that cover a wide range of experiences and tones. We didn’t want all the books to be sombre, nor for them all to be frivolous – the aim was some of each, some in between, and some that brilliantly combine the two. And none of the series exemplifies this last category better than Tension by E.M. Delafield, I think.

Delafield is one of the authors in the series who (like Elizabeth von Arnim and Rose Macaulay) is well remembered for some of her work, while lots of it is forgotten. Many readers will know her hilarious Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels, not realising quite how prolific Delafield was. Tension was written a decade before that series began – some of the humour is definitely evident. Anybody who has had a brother or sister, or who has seen young siblings together, will recognise the energy, absurdity, and loudness of Ruthie and Ambrose. The adults’ continuing horror at their presence is among the funniest things I’ve read in ages – but Tension is also a brilliant examination of how a woman’s life could (can?) be destroyed by rumours and by the different standards of sexual morality set up for men and women. There are so many wonderful Delafield novels that deserve bringing to a new audience, and perhaps others will follow in the Women Writers series at some point, but this felt like the perfect place to start.

Much less prolific, though equally wonderful, is Diana Tutton. Her funny, chaotic and delightful novel Guard Your Daughters has recently found a new generation of readers – and another facet of her writing is now available in Mamma. Any synopsis of the novel sounds quite scandalous – a woman starts to fall in love with her son-in-law – but the marvellous thing about Mamma is how sensitively and unsensationally Tutton treats the plot. It is such a nuanced, subtle, and even gentle novel – and shows the exceptional control and sensitivity Tutton has. Perhaps the central story doesn’t reflect many women’s lives from the 1950s, but there are plenty of elements about marriage, widowhood, and motherhood that illuminate the experience of different women in the decade.

There are four more titles to come in this series this year, and hopefully many more in years to come. I’m excited for everyone to read the additions that are coming – covering themes as wide-ranging as adoption, singleness, war, and murder. Until those come out, I hope you find plenty to love in Tension, Mamma, and all the myriad titles in the series so far.

If you click on the tag above, you’ll be able to see my posts about all the British Library Women Writers books as they come out – or, more often, some time after they come out. But Tension by E.M. Delafield only came out a couple of weeks ago – and I’m delighted, as Delafield was definitely one of the authors I was really hoping would get onto the list. But when she wrote so many books, so many of which aren’t in print (or are only POD and ebook), how would I choose?

I’m hoping this won’t be the last EMD title in the series, but I chose Tension for the simple reason that I think it’s one of her best – and I’ve read about 30 of her books now. Apparently I read it in 2004, but I didn’t remember anything about it and loved my re-read for the 1920 Club about a year ago. I’m recycling much of that review here.

The main characters are Lady Rossiter and Sir Julian Rossiter, and when Delafield created them I suspect she had half an eye on Mr and Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. They have very little fondness for each other, though Sir Julian usually restricts himself to silently laughing at Lady Rossiter’s nonsensical sayings and gossip. Where she differs from Mrs Bennet is that Lady R is also hypocritical and a little cruel – though she would always see it as doing her duty. That is one of the main tensions of Tension.

But all starts off very amusingly – here’s the opening of the novel:

“Auntie Iris has written a book!”

“A book!” echoed both auditors of the announcement, in keys varying between astonishment and dismay.

“Yes, and it’s going to be published, and put into a blue cover, and sold, and Auntie Iris is going to make heaps and heaps of money!”

“What is it to be called?” said Lady Rossiter rather gloomily, fixing an apprehensive eye on the exuberant niece of the authoress.

“It’s called ‘Why, Ben!’ and it’s a Story of the Sexes,” glibly quoted the young lady, unaware of the shock inflicted by this brazen announcement, delivered at the top of her squeaky, nine-year-old voice.

Could there be a better fake title than Why, Ben! – I love it, and all the comedy around how horrified everyone is by the idea of this book is glorious. Delafield might also have Austen in mind with her style in this novel – she does lots of sentences with the balance and irony of an Austen sentence, laughing at everyone involved and never saying quite everything – leaving the reader to fill in the gaps and thus feel on the side of the author.

The children (whom the Rossiters unite in loathing, though Lady R would not admit it openly) are neighbours, and the offspring of harassed, jovial Mark. Their mother is (whisper it) a ‘dypsomaniac’, shut away but very much not dead. And that is why Lady Rossiter takes an officious concern when a young woman moves to the area and starts working with Mark – because, surely, it is the same Miss Marchrose who once broke off an engagement when her fiance became disabled…

Delafield often enjoys poking fun at people who ‘Don’t want to gossip, but…’ – and sometimes she shows the dark side of it too. Tension is always an extremely funny book, particularly if you like dry, character-based, and dialogue-heavy comedy (which I definitely do), but it gets darker as it goes on. Lady Rossiter is ruthlessly determined to ruin Miss Marchrose, all in the name of protecting those around her and not wanting to gossip. She never does anything outright. She just quietly and subtly makes the situation impossible for Miss Marchrose. And Delafield is so clever at not making Lady Rossiter a deceitful character – she genuinely does believe she is doing what is right, and has an answer for every exasperated accusation Sir Julian makes. Which isn’t that many, because he follows the path of least resistance.

Delafield is brilliant when she unites comedy and tragedy, and I think Tension is one of her best books. It’s certainly stylised, but it’s a style I loved.

And I think it makes such a great addition to the Women Writers series because it is so centred on how rumours and reputation devastatingly affect women – whether the rumours are founded or not – while men are scarcely impacted. By making a woman the nemesis too, Delafield resists a black and white reading of who hurts whom – though arguably Lady Rossiter is as much a product of a patriarchal society as anybody else.

My sweet spot is books that are funny AND poignant, and this is up there with earlier British Library Women Writers titles Father by Elizabeth von Arnim and Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay in doing just that.

Right, I’m up to date with British Library titles now! This is the one I’m most excited to have brought back into print – I only read it for the first time last year, but O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith is a novel I know I’ll cherish forever. And the interesting thing is, looking at reviews elsewhere online and in the comments and emails I’ve had about it – a lot of people love this book for their whole lives. I’ve seen so many people say they read it many decades ago, and have come back to it time and again.

It’s a coming of age story for a young girl called Ruan, whose love of the moors is what sustains her through pain and grief and uncertainty. I’ve compared it to I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters, but quite a few people have compared it to Jane Eyre more recently. It is certainly quite sombre and poignant, though there are comic moments, and it’s one of the most enveloping novels I’ve ever read. I shan’t repeat my whole review, since I wrote it less than a year ago – head over here to read the whole thing about why I love it so much.

Oh, and I got to talk to two of Smith’s grandsons while putting together the author bio and afterword. That was such a privilege. It was quite hard to find something to say in the afterword except that I loved it, but in the end I wrote about clothing. But mostly about how much I love it.

I am getting behind with writing about these books – there are seven out, and I’m only on number five – but slow and steady wins the race! Much like when I chose Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay for the series, Elizabeth von Arnim was an author I knew I wanted to include. I just had to had a quick think which of her out-of-print novels to choose.

The series is intended to highlight women’s lives in different periods of the 20th century. That’s why I chose Dangerous Ages, which sheds such light onto different generations’ experience of the 1920s. And it’s why I chose Father: the focus on an unmarried woman said so much about the 1930s.

Father is a novel that reminded me an awful lot of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. In both, an unmarried woman is desperate for her independence, and not to be subservient in her relative’s home. For Laura Willowes, it’s her brother’s home; in Father it’s – you guessed it! – the father’s. Jennifer is 31 and a slave to her widowed father, a writer; she laments ‘the years shut up in the back diningroom at a typewriter, with no hope that anything would ever be different’. Only things are different. Father is getting married again, to Netta, who is younger than Jennifer. She sees her opportunity for escape: she can move to the countryside.

Through and beyond father she saw doors flying open, walls falling flat, and herself running unhindered down the steps, along Gower Street, away through London, across suburbs, out, out into great sun-lit spaces where the wind, fresh and scented, rushed to meet her […] Jen, her wide-open eyes shining with the reflection of what she saw through and beyond father. She could feel the wind – she could feel it, the scented fresh wind, blowing up her hair as she ran and ran…

And, like Laura Willowes, she does move to the countryside. Only things aren’t quite as uncomplicated as she’d hoped. Waiting for her, in that village, are James and Alice – the vicar and his tyrannical sister – who make an interesting parallel to Jennifer and her father. Alice is also a spinster, but holds all the power in her brother’s house – and is keen to dissuade any possible sisters-in-law who might oust her from the vicarage. And yet – as she also comes to realise – she is dependent on her brother. She may hold the power at the moment, but it isn’t secure. It’s interesting to see two women who are so completely different both in the role of dependent female relative.

So, Father has a lot to say about unmarried women of the interwar period – but it’s also very funny. Jennifer is a delight, and her actions are always justifiable but often extremely eccentric. Deciding to sleep out on a mattress in the garden, for instance. You can’t help but love her and want freedom for her. And Father is every bit as frustrating as any fictional man who believes he is always right (or non-fictional, I daresay).

When I read Father in 2015, I loved it but didn’t think it was her best. On re-reading it, I think it’s actually one of the best novels Elizabeth von Arnim wrote – out of the ten I’ve read, anyway. It’s another one I’m delighted to see back in print, and with one of the prettiest covers in the series so far.

I’ve left it far too long since I wrote about The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair – I’ve been meaning to write quick posts to let people know about the British Library Women Writers series that I am lucky enough to be series consultant for.

When they asked me, back in the dim and distant past, they’d already picked some of the titles to republish – and My Husband Simon was one of them. It was also the only one of the three they’d chosen that I’d already read. And luckily I liked it – and I liked it all the more when I re-read it to write my afterword (which is about class and reading matter in the novel).

The main character is Nevis, and she is a writer with an early success under her belt. Like Panter-Downes herself, she’d published a book as a teenager and had a follow-up that wasn’t as successful. How far it’s a self-portrait is hard to say – I don’t know if any such man as Simon existed, but Nevis is won over by him pretty quickly. He is proud of the fact that he doesn’t read and hasn’t heard of her. He also, she suspects, wouldn’t have heard of Virginia Woolf. Despite coming from different classes, with very different sets of likes and priorities, they get married. The original US title gives us a clue why: Nothing In Common But Sex.

Into this increasingly fragile marriage comes Nevis’s publisher – and a sort of love triangle forms. But the novel is much more than that. It’s about a meeting of classes that has nothing of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover fantasy to it. I’ve noticed a lot of the reviews have also drawn out the way that women’s work was (and always is) disparaged – that’s definitely in the mix too. It’s a really fascinating look at an incompatible marriage – told in a pacey, page-turning way. It doesn’t have the fine prose of One Fine Day, written substantially later, but it is still good writing with moments of real brilliance. This is the bit I excerpted when I reviewed it here years ago:

We climbed on top of the tram and away it snorted. A queer constraint was on us. We hardly said a word, but in some way all my perceptions were tremendously acute so that I took in everything that was going on in the streets. A shopping crowd surged over the pavements. In the windows were gaping carcases of meat, books, piles of vegetable marrows, terrible straw hats marked 6/11d. I though vaguely: “Who buys all the terrible things in the world? Artificial flowers and nasty little brooches of Sealyhams in bad paste, and clothes-brushes, shaped like Micky the Mouse and scarves worked in raffia?” A lovely, anaemic-looking girl stood on the kerb, anxiously tapping an envelope against her front teeth. Should she? Shouldn’t she? And suddenly, having made her decision, all the interest went out of her face and she was just one of the cow-like millions who were trying to look like Greta Garbo.

Wonderful, no?

It has been noted online that Mollie Panter-Downes didn’t rate the novel as highly as her later works, and didn’t want it republished during her lifetime. Interestingly, I’ve seen this noted by someone who has no qualms about biographies that reveal things their subject wouldn’t want revealed! It’s an interesting set of questions, but not one I’ll go into here – as with the George Orwell novel I reviewed recently, she definitely needn’t have worried. It is not her greatest work, but it is greater than many authors’ entire outputs.