The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot

It was only as I started writing this review that I noticed the title was The Gentlewomen and not The Gentlewoman – which certainly puts a different spin on this 1952 novel by Laura Talbot. When it was in the singular (in my head), it referred to Miss Bolby – in the plural, it tells us more about the world that Talbot has created.

Miss Bolby is a governess in the mid-1940s, and has recently accepted a new position with Lady Rushford. Miss Bolby is proud of her status as a gentlewoman, keen to tell everyone that her sister married a man with a title, and that she was born into a good family living in colonial India. The Indian bracelets she wears attest to this when her words do not.

But Miss Bolby finds herself in a world where such things are no longer valued as much as they used to be. She arrives at the railway station alongside Reenie, the kitchen maid, and they are treated fairly similarly. At the same time, the dignified family seem to be growing less dignified – no longer putting such an emphasis on the correct names and titles, or a strict hierarchy within the house. As the blurb of my Virago Modern Classic edition writes very well, ‘Miss Bolby needs her pretensions to gentility and, in a household where these are no longer of consequence, her identity begins to crumble’. And that plural title – it shows Miss Bolby striving to put herself on the same level of those above her – but also the threats from those below, as the term ‘gentlewoman’ loses its dignity.

I thought The Gentlewomen was very well written, in a style that didn’t quite fit with anything I’ve read before. There are hints of Ivy Compton-Burnett in the cool and proper ways characters address one another, but also the lightness of the middlebrow novelist – and, woven in between, the manners and mores of society-focused fiction. Miss Bolby is never a pleasant character, but nor does the reader wish her ill – even when she is petulantly using her power as a governess to take out her frustration on her infant charges.

Much of the novel looks at the dynamics between the different characters – but a couple of important plot points in the second half give a new momentum to the narrative, and Talbot skilfully pulls us through.

It’s an unusual and impressive book – looking not just at the world war atmosphere so familiar to us from novels and film, but seeing how one world order was beginning to disintegrate – and how that didn’t only affect and disorientate those at the top of the hierarchies.