Other readers

I've been reading a lot of library books lately, and have therefore been exposed to the marks and traces of other readers.  The most amusing example I've found is above: this is the first page of F R Leavis's Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, first published in 1930.  I particularly like the fourth commentator, who either can't resist the temptation to instruct while insulting, or vice versa, and adheres to a high standard of punctuation even when writing graffiti.  Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture is a short book and there is only one copy in my university library; it's therefore particularly heavily inscribed with other readers' marks. Paragraphs are underlined, starred, marked with arcane groupings of vertical lines and curly brackets, and key words are noted across the top of pages.   Page corners are creased where they have been turned down.  There is something ironic in this accumulation of evidence of mass readership on a text concerned with the preservation of a cultural elite.

In other books, readers have corrected typographical errors; one reader of a Delafield novel had carefully corrected the author's grammar.  Unfortunately, their grasp of the use of the subjunctive was less sophisticated than EMD's, and the correction itself was wrong.  Sometimes you get a sense of the reader's response through their marginalia, an exuberant "YES!" against a provocative statement or a bracing "Nonsense!".  Changes in our sense of what is acceptable provokes readers to label racism and sexism where they encounter it. 

I never, now, write or mark books, although I was encouraged to by previous English teachers: my A level copy of Keats is covered in pencil scribblings.  Instead, I'm addicted to the use of page flags and post-its, which leave no trace for later readers.  While I find it distracting when people have underlined bits of text - the eye is inevitably drawn to that sentence at the expense of others - the written annotations can be amusing, as above, and sometimes enlightening.  They remind me that reading is not necessarily a solitary, individual activity, but can be a communal one, and that my understanding of a text draws inevitably on that of other readers, be they critics or marginal commentators.

A Reversion to Type by E M Delafield

This novel, another one of Delafield's Edwardian period pieces, deals mainly with issues of social class and with parenting, with a couple of perhaps unwise excursions into genetics.  The Aviolets have lived at Squires for many years; they are dyed-in-the-wool rural gentry, related to half the families in the county, utterly traditional in attitude and utterly repetitive and predictable in behaviour.  Their equilibrium is disturbed by Rose, the widow of their younger son Jim, and her child Cecil.  Jim is a dissolute character who is packed off to Ceylon after an incident with a housemaid about five years before the novel begins.  On the boat he meets Rose, tall, pretty, and working-class; she has grown up in her uncle's pawnbroking business in London.  They marry after their shipboard romance. Cecil spends his early years in Ceylon, cared for by an ayah while Rose attempts to manage Jim's drinking; she fails, and after he dies she returns to England where her in-laws have offered her a home.  The plot of the novel revolves around the differing opinions of the Aviolets and Rose over Cecil's upbringing, and Cecil's tendency to weave elaborate and fantastic stories, or 'lies' as the Aviolets see them.  Rose is determined that Cecil should not go to a boarding school, fearing that it will make his tendencies worse, and this brings her into constant conflict with the Aviolets, particularly Ford, the eldest son.  All the Aviolets despise intimacies and personal remarks, and these comprise most of Rose's conversation; they cannot abide scenes, and Rose's temper will create more than one during the novel.  Rose eventually allows herself to be persuaded to try a prep school for Cecil, and this is the beginning of more serious problems for the boy.

Delafield makes use of the family doctor, Maurice Lucian, as a more neutral observer of this family drama; he is also called upon to explain the family dynamic both in terms of psychology and in terms of heredity; there is a long speech towards the end of the book about the doubtful genetic heritage of the Aviolets that sits rather awkwardly and suggests to me that EMD was winging it rather.  Lucian also provides the romantic element in the novel, which is a little superfluous in my view but was probably necessary to make it sell; it also makes it slightly reminiscent of The Little Stranger.  The book stands or falls by the character of Rose, and Delafield has created an engaging, entertaining portrait of a woman determined to do her best for her son and to make her way in the world with integrity.  Rose is, at first, bored witless by life at Squires and its unchanging routines, and then comes to despise the lassitude and superficiality she finds there.  Her desires to raise her child herself, and to find meaningful work, are contrasted with the vacant Lady Aviolet, interested only in her neighbour's intermarriages, and then with Ford's wife Diana, unable to have children of her own, who regrets that she lacks Rose's energy and spirit, as well as Rose's friendship. 

Delafield has a certain amount of fun at Lady Aviolet's expense: "No Amberley [her maiden name] has ever been clever that I know of.  In fact, Sir Thomas and I have often wondered how Ford turned out clever, because the Aviolets have none of them ever been in the least odd either".  There is also some comedy to be extracted from Rose's Uncle Alfred, a devoutly religious man, and his assistant Felix Menebees, a fan of novels featuring "Frank Bellomont, the Gentleman Crook", who is utterly devoted to Rose and yearns to travel.  However, this Edwardian novel does not stop short of the First World War, and the sombre tone that overtakes Cecil's story will affect the other characters as well.

This is an early Delafield, and you can trace the development of her ironic voice and thematic interests, but later works show more subtle characterisation and greater structure to the narrative.  Aviolet can be added to the long line of unpronounceable surnames EMD bestows on her characters - was she afraid of being sued, I wonder, if names were at all likely? - and in fact she enjoys a joke about its difficulty in the novel itself.  The most interesting aspect of the novel is its use of a working-class woman as protagonist; I think the only other EMD that does this is the very different Messalina of the Suburbs.

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Bluestockings by Jane Robinson

Jane Robinson's book surveys the development of university education for women in England, from its earliest origins in the 18th century until the start of World War II.  Robinson focuses mainly on the period from the late 19th century onwards, and includes an account of development of formal school education for girls, which led in turn to a demand for the opportunity to study at a higher level.  She goes on to describe the founding of the Oxbridge colleges for women, the opening of provincial universities with no gender bar, and the gradual infiltration of women into institutions that were not always ready or willing to receive them.  All of this is illuminated by personal accounts, memoirs and diaries of the women who studied and taught in these institutions; these are usually inspiring, sometimes rather tragic, and often extremely funny.  I particularly liked the nervous sixth-former, arriving at at St Hilda's expecting a rigorous interview, only to find herself making shadow-puppets in the firelight with the English tutor.  Clearly she was good at it, as St Hilda's offered her a place.

Robinson is very good on the arcane rules of institutions, getting under the skin of what can seem like gratuitous regulation so that the reader understands the rationale, and gives a wonderful sense of what daily life could be like for the female undergraduate in the first half of the twentieth century.  The resistance to women students from institutions (particularly Cambridge) and families (one enterprising father offered his daughter a pony if only she would give up her idea of going to college) is also well-described, including the wider establishment's antipathy to the female scholar, who, it was thought, would damage her chances of producing healthy stock by keeping her nose in a book.  I was also interested to find how socially mixed interwar university students could be, with scholarships, contributions from schoolteachers, and occasional quiet waiving of fees all helping to get girls from poorer backgrounds into higher education.

Now women outnumber men in higher education in England and Wales, at least on undergraduate programmes, and there is no need to struggle to be taken seriously as an applicant because of your gender, except perhaps in some subject areas. Parents are much more likely to expect their daughters to go to university than to oppose such a plan.  It's good to remember the pioneers who bucked convention on our behalf, so that university education for women became a norm, not an exception, and Jane Robinson's book celebrates them in great style.

St Deiniol's Residential Library

I'm just back from a few restful but productive days at St Deiniol's, Britain's only residential library.  The library was started by Gladstone to provide an opportunity for scholars to consult his personal library; 32,000 of Gladstone's books formed the core of the collection, and he left £40,000 in his will to develop the library further.  The current library building went up in 1902, and became residential in 1905.  The current collection develops Gladstone's interests in theology and history, but has been continually increased and improved over the years, and there is a good variety of stock in literature and the humanities.  I've spent the last few days reading various histories of English feminism and consulting biographies of leading twentieth century feminists, all in good supply; last time I was there I spent most of a day reading E M Delafield's Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen, and there is a section of twentieth-century fiction that came as a bequest and has the largest collection of Melvyn Bragg novels that I've ever seen in one place.

Anyone can stay there - you don't need to be a scholar or a member of the clergy, although those two groups probably dominate among the visitors - and for a very reasonable rate you get half-board accommodation and access to the library from 9am to 10pm each day.  It is a marvellous place to work; the distractions are few, the responsibilities of daily life are all dealt with, and the library itself is a peaceful and beautiful environment, rather Arts and Crafts in style.  I did the amount of reading in three and a half days that would normally take me three weeks.  Coffee break chats with fellow residents are enlivening - one of our fellow guests was researching transvestite women monks in Egypt - and there's a fair amount of gossip about bishops to be overheard.  St Deiniol's started as an "inclusive Anglican community" and the Warden is always a minister of the Church of England, but proselytising is not allowed and the library welcomes those of all faiths and none.  Godless heathens like me will not find the atmosphere uncomfortably spiritual.
 
The Library is in Hawarden, a few miles from Chester; Hawarden has its own station but it's quicker to get the bus from Chester station, which will also take you back into Chester again if you fancy an outing.  There are walks in the park of Hawarden Castle, Gladstone's family home, and through the nearby woods, provided you can tear yourself away from the library and its tempting books. 

The Chip and the Block by E M Delafield

Delafield's 1925 novel is part Bildungsroman, part family drama, combined with some ironic contemplation of the lot of the writer.  The Bildungsroman element concerns Paul Ellery, the oldest child of Mary Ellery and her husband Chas, a novelist.  Paul is around ten at the opening of the novel, and we follow him through family trauma, school and university until he attains the adult pleasures of work and sex.  Paul, like his creator, is very interested in people and their psychology; he analyses those around him, searching after their motivations.  The family drama concerns the eponymous chip and block.  Chas Ellery, the block, is a determined egotist and intolerably pretentious; his youngest son Victor, very like his father in many ways, constitutes a perpetual challenge to Chas's authority and status.  Victor remorselessly exposes his father's pettinesses and stupidities, until a final confrontation and literal battle of wills allows Victor to demonstrate the significance of his forename.

The Provincial Lady, during her wartime adventures, comments that "writers are too egotistical to make ideal husbands for anybody", and Chas Ellery bears this out.  His ceaseless attention-seeking - when one of his children is ill, he invariably takes to his bed - and self-dramatisation are, it is implied, behind the early death of his kind and attentive first wife Mary; they nearly finish off her successor, the calm and rational Caroline.  As a writer, Chas is initially committed to the principles of realism; this commitment does not make him rich.  But the approach and content of his work change, and he begins to gain recognition and status.   Chas seeks constantly to maintain his position as the artist of the family, the representative of high culture; he defends this position against the predations of low culture arising from his children's reading material and the praise of servants for his work.  The public needs to buy his books to ensure his success, but when they do he dismisses them as mere sheep, following a literary trend.

Covering the period from the mid-1890s to 1913, this novel does not engage with the First World War; as with many of Delafield's Edwardian-set novels, the presence of the war hangs over the future of Victor, Paul and their sister Jeannie at the close of the book, when they have reached adulthood and found ways of living that suit them.  An unusual aspect of this novel is its frankness about sexual matters.  Jeannie professes a chaste sort of sexual freedom, declaring that kissing young men to whom one is attracted is only natural; after she makes an advantageous marriage to a rich, older man, it is strongly suggested that she continues an affair with her first love.  Paul has been "shown life" in Paris and London, a reference to "soiled pink ribbons" equating "life" with visits to brothels; later, he will enjoy a lighthearted sexual relationship with his widowed landlady, Mrs Foss, who shares and develops Jeannie's views.  The Times Literary Supplement suggests that the "episode with Mrs Foss is discreetly handled", which is true, although the straightforward way in which their relationship is presented, with none of Delafield's customary ironies, seems to me uncharacteristic.

For the novel to work,  the reader needs to agree that Victor is more likeable, and Chas more tiresome.  Delafield achieves this through Paul's narrative viewpoint; his affection for Victor is clear-sighted but genuine, but his love for his father is very muted.  Victor does not crave attention in the way Chas does, but rather shuns intimacy and dependency, and is committed to his ideals and principles, which Chas discards as soon as their glamour is worn off.  Paul himself is a likeable and interesting character, and the interactions between Victor, Chas and old Mrs Ellery, Chas's mother, provide considerable humour.  Paul's story is interesting enough to merit its place in the spotlight, but it has to be balanced with the war of attrition between Chas and Victor, of which sometimes there is more than enough.   The novel also has to move easily between sad and serious events, such as the death of Mary Ellery, and high comedy, and sometimes you can hear the gears changing.  Delafield handled this aspect better in Mrs Harter, although perhaps she had the advantage there of a retrospective narrative in which the first-person narrator already knows what will happen and can draw more heavily on irony to adjust the tone. 

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

Another beautiful translation of a Tove Jansson work for adults, this was a lucky Oxfam Bookshop find.  In Jansson's usual cool and lucid prose, we read about Katri and her slightly simple brother Mats, who live in a small coastal village; Mats works, informally, at the local boatbuilders, and Katri worries over how to establish a secure life for them.  The answer seems to come through a local artist.  Elderly Anna Aemelin lives alone in her family's house on the edge of the village; she is wealthy, drawing pictures of the ground in the woods near her house; with the addition of flowery rabbits, these drawings form the basis for bestselling children's books and all the marketing paraphernalia that goes with this.  Anna seems naive and unworldly; Katri takes advantage of this to establish herself as a prop and support for Anna, and before long Katri, her large dog, and Mats are all established in Anna's house.  Jansson explores the peculiar ambiguities of this situation.  Who is relying on whom?  Who is being exploited, and how?  Can good things arise from bad intentions?

The timing of the novel moves from the frozen certainties of deep winter to the fluid possiblities of spring.  Katri, blessed with an analytical and mathematical mind, is forced to consider irrationalities such as love and conscience; the innocent Anna discovers new reserves of guile.  The genuine affection that both women have for Mats - and that he has for them - controls their subdued power play and pushes them on towards resolution.  Around the three protagonists, the villagers watch and comment on events at Anna's house and in the boatyard.  And throughout the story Anna's relationship with her art is shifting and changing, leading to exciting and novel possiblities.

Anna's work as an artist echoes some of the themes of Fair Play, but this book considers different themes, of negotiating, comprehending and telling the truth.  It is written in a blunt, exposed style that contrasts with the ambiguities of the story, almost to the point of disingenuousness.   The snowy landscape and Jansson's prose are both pure and cool, but conceal as much as they reveal.  This gives the novel a compelling quality; you are constantly drawn on by the need to comprehend, to see what is underneath the frost.

Turn Back the Leaves by E M Delafield

Turn Back the Leaves does not start well.  Its first sentence runs like this: "In an era when hansom-cabs still jingled their way through the streets of London, and to the rollicking air of 'The Man Who Broke the Bank' and the rock-swing-crash of 'Ta-ra-ra Boom de Ay!' Edmunda Floyd and Charles Craddock fell in love with one another".  Not at all enticing, but thankfully things improve very quickly.  I'm going to discuss the outcomes of the plot in this post, so look away now if you don't want to know what happens.

The story of Edmunda's seduction by Charles is the prologue to the main part of the story.  Edmunda is the much younger wife of the fervently Catholic Sir Joseph Floyd, owner of Yardley who always wished to be a monk, but has been persuaded by his confessor that his duty is to marry and produce little Floyds who will inherit his estate and continue the Catholic family line. This same tactic persuades him to take back Edmunda even after she has given birth to Charles Craddock's daughter; Edmunda bears four more children in as many years and dies after producing the much-desired son and heir.  Sir Joseph, after a decent interval, marries Edmunda's older friend, Teresa Delancey, mainly to provide a good Catholic stepmother for his children.

The novel then proceeds episodically, with the narrative point of view shifting between central and peripheral female characters.  We meet the ten-year-old Stella, living an odd life with a nanny, a housemaid and a governess in a London flat, through Chloë Bourdillon, a New(ish) Woman still hoping for matrimony at 28; when Teresa succeeds in persuading Sir Joseph to accept Stella at Yardley, we see the house and meet the children through Stella's eyes.  Later chapters will pass the point of view to Cassie Floyd, the youngest daughter.  The novel has no real protagonist: Stella's story fades out of sight as other family dramas take precedence, and minor characters move in and out of the novel in a realistically contingent way.  Delafield handles the changes of point of view skillfully, never allowing her younger characters to understand more than is likely; the shifting point of view, and the long timespan of the book from 1890 to 1923, allow layers of meaning to be built up both for the reader and for the Floyd children.

The main theme of this book is the disastrous effect of Sir Joseph Floyd's extreme form of the Catholic faith.  He is ascetic, convinced that everyone s eating too much; obsessed with an idea of sex as sinful; terrified that his children's innocence may be corrupted in some way.  The young Floyds are condemned to wear exceptionally modest clothing and forbidden to make friends with non-Catholics.  As the Catholics in their immediate area are thin on the ground, their social lives are necessarily limited, and their chances of marriage very slim.  When Sir Joseph's piety tips over into religious mania, this is explained in part by the marriage choices of previous generations: he is the son and grandson of first cousins, clearly desperate to find a Catholic spouse.  Delafield provides a preface to the novel, stressing that it is not intended as a criticism of the Catholic faith, but certainly it can be read as a criticism of the practice of Catholicism in upper-class English society at that time.

Doing your Catholic duty has particularly negative implications for the women of the family.  Edmunda is killed by repeated childbearing; Teresa Floyd attempts occasionally to rationalise with her husband, but when that is beyond use she must dedicate herself to caring for him; Cassie, who hoped to escape Yardley into some sort of work, and managed this for a while during the war, is trapped there when Helen, her only unmarried sister, becomes a nun.  Their other sisters are estranged from their parents after their marriages: Veronica marries a Protestant who will not promise to bring up their children as Catholics, and Stella marries a divorced man.  However, Catholic duty  certainly does not favour Joey, the youngest and only boy.  Unspecified trouble at school (possibly an episode of homosexual behaviour) causes great difficulty between Joey and his parents; before leaving for the Western Front, he tells Cassie that he hopes a bullet will solve all his problems.  There are relatively few male characters in the novel, but those from outside the family, particularly Tom and Peter Neville, represent and articulate the views of worldly rationalism to the Floyds, opening the eyes of some of the children to alternative points of view.  The novel is fair-handed, however, and characters such as Cassie and Veronica give a sense of the value of their faith without being unreasonably pious.

There is an underlying strand in the novel that suggests that frustration of sexual instincts is unhealthly.  Both Sir Joseph and Helen fear sexuality and its expression and will go to immense extremes to avoid it.  The Yardley standards of modesty extend to social behaviour, with fairly innocent acts being characterised as "fast" or "disgusting".  Chloë Bourdillon ages into a plump and pop-eyed spinster, still yearning for male attention and sublimating this desire into sentimental friendships with much younger women.  The characterisation of Chloë is harsh and unattractive, and conveys no sympathy for the plight of the surplus woman.

Turn Back the Leaves is unusual among Delafield's novels set in the Edwardian period in that it includes the First World War in the narrative; most of these novels end without engaging with the war, leaving a sense that the books are unfinished in some way, that the triumphant marriage or exciting new career is about to be cut short by world events.  Including the war helps Delafield emphasise the fossilised nature of Yardley and Sir Joseph, both of them unable to adjust to a rapidly changing modern world, as well as dramatise more intensely plot strands like the estrangement of Veronica.  It is also a war event that pitches Sir Joseph into insanity; the loss of Joey in combat is more than his fragile psyche is able to bear.

The novel has obvious parallels with Brideshead Revisited, which - in elegiac rather than critical terms - also seeks to show us upper-class Catholicism.  Sir Joseph is an extreme version of Bridey, who wanted to be a monk but, as eldest son, could not; Joey has echoes of Sebastian Flyte; and elements of Julia Flyte's struggle between love and duty can be seen in the stories of all the Floyd daughters.  I wonder if Evelyn Waugh ever read the novel.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

Another of Sarah Dunant's historical novels, this book is set in Ferrara in 1570.  At the city's Benedictine convent of Santa Caterina, a young and unwilling novice, Serafina, is resisting her induction into convent life.  For a while, she works alongside the dispensary sister, Suora Zuana.  Zuana has been sixteen years in the convent, entering when the death of her doctor father left her unprotected and  unmarriageable.  A reluctant entrant herself, she has come to value the regime, its stabilising repetitions and rituals, and the opportunity it has given her to continue her study of medicine and herbalism.  For most of the novel, the narrative point of view switches between these two women, as they grapple with the politics and complexities of the convent, the city that holds it, and the changes affecting the Church itself.

This alternating narrative allows Dunant to retell events from two viewpoints, and so doing to ratchet up the suspense and maintain a compelling plot which comprises both deeply personal and wider political matters.  The Council of Trent, held in 1563 to address the issues arising from the Reformation, threatened the liberty of convents to govern themselves, to work with local communities, and began to prevent nuns from pursuing study, art, and music.  Santa Caterina is famed for its choir and the musical settings composed within the Convent; it produces delicious cakes and sweetmeats for Carnival; and Zuana's remedies are greatly prized by the Bishop, a martyr to his haemorrhoids.  Zuana's medicines can be powerfully effective and are valued within the Convent as a means of helping the sisters stay well to do God's will.  But there are factions within the convent that seek a greater asceticism and more charismatic exhibitions of faith: ecstasies, visions and stigmata.  The current liberal doctrine overseen by the Abbess may be preventing the holy sisters from achieving closeness to God.  Serafina will find that she is a battleground for the conflicting forces within the Convent.

Throughout the book, Dunant and her characters use the metaphor of the Convent as a body, a single organism that must be nurtured, balanced and healed as necessary.  This metaphor is played out almost literally on the body of Serafina, who will be starved, drugged and purged over the course of the novel.  My complaint about the other Dunant novel I've read, The Birth of Venus, related to the cheekiness of the ending: I'm obliged to say that she is at it again in this book, but the final part of the story is perhaps a little more credible here.  In any case,  it does not detract from a highly enjoyable read.   There is also a helpful bibliography for those interested in the history of conventual life.

Who Was Sophie? by Celia Robertson

Celia Robertson has written a memoir of her maternal grandmother, known in her final years as Sophie Curly, but who started life as Joan Adeney Easdale in 1913. Joan published three volumes of poetry when she was a young woman; her work was published by the Hogarth Press and received positive critical attention. By the time Celia was growing up, her grandmother was a drunken, mad bogeywoman kept at bay through legal process; a solicitor dealt with correspondence between Sophie and Celia's mother Jane. When Celia was seventeen, Jane decided to take her to meet her grandmother for the first time; the squalor of her flat, and its bizarre arrangements for catching burglars, were frightening, but the physical reality of Sophie, a tiny and frail old woman, counteracted the images of Sophie as an insane and monstrous creature. Celia continued to visit Sophie regularly after that; following Sophie's death, she was inspired to write the book, to piece together the journey that took Joan/Sophie from young poet to a bag lady haunting the rougher pubs of 1980s Nottingham.

"Poignant" is the word from the TLS review chosen for the front cover, and the poignancy of this book is undisputed and powerful. Joan's descent into madness, her treatment at Holloway Sanatorium, the loss of her children (and their loss of her), and the poverty, violence and squalor of her final years are terribly sad. Celia Robertson's obvious affection for her grandmother, and kindly, loving attention to the story of her life, mitigates this sadness and exposes the value of Sophie's story even at the points where she is, apparently, at rock bottom. Joan is told repeatedly by psychiatrists that she should give up her writing and devote herself to domestic duties. She does, but Joan is a hopeless housekeeper, clumsy, forgetful and unable to budget at all; domestic work for her is no cure. Virginia Woolf appears several times in the narrative, and the story of Woolf's illness is an obvious parallel with Joan's, pointing up an underlying theme of the book: choices for women artists, in the first half of the twentieth century, were limited and often dangerous.

Celia Robertson is overt and frank about the gaps in Sophie's story, the things that can be known and learned about her, and the things that must be guessed at or assumed. This book seems to me to be a brave undertaking, to try to understand the truth of a chaotic life of such a close relative. Who knows what she might have found? What she did find can be disturbing enough. She is also clear that this is her story of Sophie, that other Sophies exist, and could be narrated, by those that knew and loved her. It is Robertson's approach to the narrative, as well as the twists of Sophie's story, that contribute to a richly enjoyable and consuming book.

By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel

Claudel's novel (also available in English translation under the title Grey Souls) combines a mystery story - three young women will die during the course of the novel - with an extended contemplation of the workings of memory and the nature of truth.  Set in a village close to the front in World War I, the novel is narrated by the local gendarme, who is professionally involved in two of the deaths.  These two deaths - a murder and a suicide - will come to affect him as profoundly and as personally as the death of his wife Clémence in childbirth, and the unravelling of the cause of the deaths forms the structure of the novel.

Our narrator is attuned to the workings of hierarchy in French society in general and in the justice system in particular. The caste separations between the semi-aristocratic or professional classes and the peasant/servant class are marked, but are being challenged by the effects of war and of the early twentieth century in general.  The narrator exemplifies this: he comes from peasant stock, but his work brings him into the world of the bourgeoisie, and he watches it defend itself against intruders, dismissing and abusing the proletarians that pass through its machinery.  The village he lives in is curiously untouched by the war; columns of soldiers pass through, and many young men have vanished, but enough are in trades that exempt them from war service. There is a new hierarchy to be negotiated, separating those who have fought and died in the war from those remaining at home.

 He also grapples with the slippery nature of memory and the elusiveness of truth.  On the first page, he speaks of "calling forth a lot of shadows"; the figures of memory can be insubstantial and two-dimensional, yet the narrative makes the key figures of the story vivid on the page.  He points up his own unreliability, yet throughout the narrative there are literal and metaphorical loaded guns, waiting to go off in the third act, that will both reinforce and subvert his assumed lack of control of his story.

It almost goes without saying that this book is profoundly sad.  Both plot and narrative style work to develop an air of melancholy, ennui and a fatalistic lack of agency that infects key characters with profound lassitude.  Because of this, I found it rather difficult to read for long periods, and had to approach it in short bursts.  Probably not a book to be picked up during low periods, but definitely one worth reading during happier times.

Jill by E M Delafield

The eponymous Jill (or Jacqueline; Jill is a nickname and the character is referred to by both names throughout the novel) is the nineteen-year-old daughter of Pansy Morrell, a demi-mondaine who has made a career of living off various gentlemen friends in America, France and England.  Jill comes into the lives of two married couples: stockbroker Oliver Galbraith and his highbrow, fastidious wife Cathie; and Oliver's second cousin Jack Galbraith and his fashionable wife Doreen.  Oliver and Cathie earn enough to pay super-tax, live in comfortable circumstances in Chelsea Park Gardens, even though the super-tax means they have to choose between a car and a lady's maid for Cathie.  Jack Galbraith served in the Great War but is effectively unemployed, living on his name and his status.  He and Doreen live at a Kensington hotel where they are supposed to lend tone and attract the right sort of guests in return for free accommodation; their daily post invariably comprises unpayable bills.  Jack attempts to interest Oliver in a scheme for extracting oil from shale beds in Cornwall; the trip to Cornwall, although it fails to secure a business deal, allows them both to meet Jill.

Delafield uses her familiar technique of doubling and mirroring characters in this book.  Oliver and Jack are two sides of the same coin, one successful, the other struggling; both, at the start of the novel, are cut off to some extent from their own emotional responses.  Cathie, serious and fastidious, is set against Doreen, who is not above extracting money from her admirers; prostitution is strongly implied if not explicitly stated.  Both women are unsatisfied with the condition of their marriages.  Jill moves between these two couples and in both cases is a cause of reflection and reconsideration of their relationships.  Jill herself is a free spirit; an unconventional upbringing has left her strangely naive in some respects and highly sophisticated in others.  Her candour and free emotional responses are liberating for some of those she encounters; others find them tiresome or dangerous.  Most of the characters project onto Jill; either their own emotions, or their own ideas of how she should behave; she is adaptable but retains, always, her own point of view.  Her outward mutability is perhaps a reason for the narrative's random use of her two names.  Jill/Jacqueline does not mind what she is called; her identity is secure enough to allow her to bear any number of names.

Delafield valued the observational quality of her writing and its strengths and weaknesses are reflected in this book.  Readers of The Way Things Are will recognise the accurate representation of a mildly unsuccessful upper-middle-class marriage in the portraits of Oliver and Cathie; her attempts to depict the seedy world inhabited by Jack and Doreen, however, suggest that she had observed this only from a considerable distance.  When the novel takes an odd turn towards the thriller genre in its later stages, Delafield seems even more unsure of her material.  However, there is much to enjoy here.  The characterisation of Oliver, in particular, goes further than many of Delafield's novels in its exploration of the reasons for a husband's lack of demonstrativeness; Cathie is, at times, an enjoyable satire of the serious committee member.  The book also contains one of the few depictions of pregnancy that I've come across in Delafield's work, and we hear several characters' views on motherhood and family planning.  The plot of the novel also has some interesting, and perhaps inadvertent, things to say on the value of paid work for women.

Jill is hard to find (three copies on AbeBooks at the moment) and rather expensive. My library copy has been helpfully annotated with blue pencil by an earlier reader, who points out when EMD has used the same word rather too many times on the same page, and inaccurately corrects her grammar on page 106.

The Pelicans by E M Delafield

The Pelicans gets its title from the legend of the pelican mother feeding its chicks on its own blood, and there is certainly an abundance of mothers in the novel.  Sisters Rosamund and Frances Grantham have lost their own mother at the start of the novel; orphaned, they are taken in by their only relative, cousin Bertha Tregaskis, who prefers to be called Bertie. The sisters acquire other substitute mothers over the course of the novel: pretentious Nina Severing, a composer who once enjoyed brief success and whose star has long since faded, takes a shine to Frances; the vague Lady Argent provides help and shelter to both girls; and Frances, eventually entering a convent, acquires new mother-figures in the shape of Mrs Mulholland, doyenne of the convent's lady-boarders, and Mère Pauline, her Mother Superior. There is only one father in the novel; Frederick Tregaskis is taciturn and misanthropic, but occasionally understanding. Bertie Tregaskis is a ridiculous character at the start of the novel, energetic, fond of fresh air and indefatigable in conversation.  She considers herself as altruistic as the pelican of the title, but is in fact an early incarnation of a monstrous Delafield egotist, controlling, self-absorbed and unable to recognise that her daughters have the right to live their own lives, as Rosamund shrewdly observes.  I found Bertie's characterisation satirical rather than humorous, although the scene in which she encounters the even more self-important and voluble Mrs Mulholland, and feels as if "she were listening to a caricature of herself", is one of high comedy.  The novel requires us to recognise Bertie's true values, as Rosamund does, and this is a little hard to reconcile with the Bertie of the opening chapters.

There is a lot of humour in the other characters, however; Morris and Nina Severing's ongoing battle of wills, and Lady Argent's naivety and charm, both generate a good deal of fun. These characters, ranged around Frances and Rosamund, contrast with the highly serious and eventually tragic events that will overtake them. Sometimes the changes of mood are too abrupt, showing Delafield's inexperience as a novelist; the overall change of tone, as the impact of Frances's decision to become a nun shows its effects, feels rather as if two books had been joined together. Delafield's characterisation of Mrs Mulholland exemplifies this shift in tone: initially highly ridiculous and pompous, Mrs Mulholland eventually has serious things to say about faith and religion, and serious emotions to feel, but the reader needs to be able to reconcile her ridiculousness with the kindness and generosity perceived by some of the other characters.

The Pelicans was written during 1916 and 1917, and Great War Fiction's review suggests that the change in tone might have been due to Delafield's wartime experiences and the darkening mood of the country at that time, although the setting of the novel is Edwardian.  It has much in common with Zella Sees Herself, particularly the themes of motherhood and conversion to Catholicism; Delafield also begins to consider what will be a rich subject for her novels, that of unhealthy sibling relationships.  There is a facsimile reprint of the novel available, although the quality isn't that great, and a secondhand copy is probably best for those tempted by this rather intriguing early Delafield.

The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson

In The Great Silence, Juliet Nicolson sets out to describe the two years following the Armistice in the terms of the cyclical sequence of emotions that accompany grief and mourning.  In chapters headed Wound, Shock, Denial, Release, Resignation and so on, she draws on personal and establishment archives, diaries and letters to bring us the authentic voices of the times.  The social and political uncertainty, and sometimes unrest, of the era is also clearly narrated.  Through this dense and detailed account, forgotten stories of this period are retrieved and celebrated.

As in her previous book, the highly enjoyable A Perfect Summer, Nicolson draws on the writings of the celebrated and eminent, and also on those of the obscure, so we get a range of voices and opinions from the most powerful - the King and Queen - to the least, in the form of the memories of those who were small children at the time.  Often Nicolson uses key figures - T E Lawrence and Nancy Astor are good examples - to exemplify the ways in which a wounded society sought to repair and rehabilitate itself through establishing heroes and forcing change.  She also retells some of the stories of hope from the period, particularly the story of Harold Gillies, a plastic surgeon who did pioneering work to repair soldier's damaged faces; Gillies's cousin Archie McIndoe started the more famous Guinea Pig Club after the second world war, drawing on the techniques and approaches Gillies had established, which included using artists such as Kathleen Scott and Henry Tonks, Professor of the Slade, to help draw and model reconstructed faces. She is also very good on the position of women, who had achieved the vote and could get an Oxford degree, but were being encouraged back to the home to make way for returning war heroes in need of jobs.

Nicolson has created a narrative of this two year period in which the shock and grief of the first World War are gradually accommodated and accepted, and in which the possibilities of hope for the future began to be permissible. Her last chapter, which describes the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920, suggests that this funeral helped to heal the scars of the war, and her ending, which quotes Winifred Holtby, exuberantly in love with life, suggests an open doorway to a new world.  However, she does not overstate her case; the ongoing problems left by the war are recognised, as is dissent from the establishment view of the meaning of the war and its value.

In A Perfect Summer, Nicolson had the advantage of diaries and letters which were maintained throughout the period of her narrative, giving her a continuous set of voices to draw on.  In this book, voices appear only briefly, or disappear altogether, often because the writer has died.  This can be seen as a disadvantage in narrative continuity and maintenance of an argument, but is perhaps an advantage in depicting the uncertainty of the times she describes, the suddenness of loss, the fragmentation of identity suffered by so many.  It also helps remind the reader that the cycle of mourning is not a machine that runs in order; some people will be stuck forever in Denial, which some will move backwards and forwards through painful emotional states before reaching the promised land of Acceptance. The discontinuity of voices also speaks of the social divisions between those who sought to restore a pre-war society and those who sought the opportunity for change.  This book is, understandably, much less humorous than its predecessor,but it brings into the light a period heavily overshadowed by the war and the Twenties, and is a careful, nuanced account of the people who lived through this interval between times of more revolutionary change.

Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution by June Rose

Over fifty years after her death, Marie Stopes's name remains synonymous with contraception.  There is a chain of private sexual health clinics in the UK that is still called after her.  Most people will also be aware of her pioneering work in sexual guidance, which first articulated for a mass audience idea that good sexual relations were at the heart of happy marriages, and indicated frankly how these were to be achieved.  This book contextualises her work on sexuality and fertility control among her other achievements and her complex personal life.

Marie's mother, Charlotte Carmichael, was a suffragette and a scholar in her own right, although unable, during her own youth, to undertake formal study at a university.  Charlotte was in some ways a detached mother, with exacting standards that Marie found impossible to satisfy, but committed to the education of her daughters. Affection came more from Marie's father Henry, but her parents' marriage was not harmonious and Henry died when Marie was in her early twenties.  Marie was something of an academic prodigy; she completed her undergraduate degree in Botany and Geology at the University of London in two years, moved to Munich to undertake a PhD, and followed this up with a Doctor of Science again in London; at the time she was the youngest person in Britain to gain this award. Her specialism was paleobotany, in particular the fossils to be found in coal, and this specialism took her down many coal mines and on a research trip to Japan where she undertook long and arduous journeys in search of specimens.

Working in Manchester as a lecturer, with several complex romantic entanglements involving both sexes behind her, Marie began to write poetry and prose with a strongly autobiographical tone.  June Rose quotes enough of her poetry to give the reader a sense that, despite her facility with rhyme and metre, poetry was not really her metier, but at this time she was already working on a text that would eventually become Married Love.  Invited to Canada to study the carboniferous flora of New Brunswick, she met, and within a few days had agreed to marry, Reginald Ruggles Gates, a fellow scientist specialising in genetics.  Their marriage was unsuccessful, both emotionally and successfully, and was eventually annulled, but in its aftermath, and drawing on both her scientific knowledge and her own personal experience of unsuccessful marriage, Marie published Married Love to instant acclaim. Shortly afterwards she married the wealthy Humphrey Roe, who was to support her writing career and her crusading zeal for contraceptive advice with money, time and unconditional affection.

Rose is very good at evoking Marie's immense self-possession and overweening self-confidence.  She had no respect for the boundaries that kept women out of politics and science, and crossed many of them herself, but this was achieved only by maintaining a self-belief that can seem unbearable or ridiculous.  She can also be self-serving, making use of people and organisations while it is of advantage to her, and passing on from them when her need or interest has faded.  This tendency is perhaps at its most acute in her relationship with her son Harry.  Marie had longed for a child for years and, after giving birth to a stillborn baby, was overjoyed at Harry's birth when she was 44.  She was an attentive, if sometimes eccentric, mother. Until he went to boarding school, Harry wore only knitted trousers or kilts, because Marie believed ordinary trousers would damage the development of his genitals.  But when Harry proposed to marry a girl Marie disapproved of, for an entirely petty reason, she cut him out of her life.

The biography is very fair, however, in identifying Marie's achievements and recognising that her less attractive characteristics enabled her to break new ground and contribute hugely to the conditions of women's lives.  Her unbearable self-confidence was necessary to allow her to write, as a woman in the early 20th century, about contraception and women's entitlement to sexual pleasure.  It also allowed her to withstand and to counter criticism from such establishment forces as the Church of England, the Catholic Church and the British Medical Association.  Even if she had been self-deprecating and kind, her enthusiasm for eugenics and the improvement of "the Race" would make today's readers uncomfortable.  However, her books changed many people's lives greatly for the better, helping women take control of their fertility, and heterosexual couples achieve happier sex lives; June Rose includes many letters of thanks from enlightened readers.  Marie's sexual radicalism ended there.  Despite some emotionally charged relationships with women, she characterised homosexuality as a disease, and was at endless pains to demonstrate that her advice and guidance was for married people.

Rose's book is well-crafted and gives a balanced, nuanced reading of Marie's life, her successes and her failures. It presents her as a flawed but determined individual, sometimes using her grandiose ideas to propel her to greater achievements, sometimes going too far and doing damage to her own reputation.  Rose is particularly good at understanding and explaining the rather mystical nature of Marie's attitudes to sex, which led her to announce herself as a prophet and to publish A New Gospel, which she claimed had been dictated to her by God.  If I have one criticism it is that the latter part of Marie's life is given less attention than her early years; but to be fair, her early years are so packed with incident that it would be difficult to summarise.  The book is also very entertaining, particularly when Marie's self-assurance leads to unusually egregious acts of self-promotion.  It also gives a very good introduction to the context for Marie's work, particularly in terms of political, religious and social attitudes to sex and contraception.

Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd

Miss Ranskill comes home, after four years on a desert island, to an England utterly changed by the second World War.  She shared the desert island with Mr Reid, the remarkably capable man Miss Ranskill always calls the Carpenter.  But at the start of the novel, the Carpenter has died and Miss Ranskill must bury him.  Inadvertently, she also buries their only knife, without which survival on the island is impossible.  This decides her to attempt an escape in the boat the Carpenter has built.  Reaching England after no little difficulty, she finds her problems are only just starting.  Lacking an identity card and a ration book, she cannot buy new clothes to replace her decayed tweed suit.  New, incomprehensible terms have invaded the English language. She is also, inconveniently, officially dead.

Miss Ranskill is used to great humorous effect by Barbara Euphan Todd to satirise the more ridiculous aspects of wartime life; I particularly liked her reaction to the painted line round the bath, intended to save water.  Miss Ranskill, in the house she is sharing, has the last of three baths, and simply fills the bath with as much hot water is left, whether it rises above the line or not; otherwise, the fuel that heated the water would have been wasted.  This view, unsurprisingly, is not shared by her housemates; Miss Ranskill has failed to Do Her Bit.  There is also some gentle challenge to the boundaries of the English class system.  Her friendship with the working-class Carpenter is suspected on all sides; even on the island Miss Ranskill knows that she could never bring her friend home to meet her sister: "The man is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring now that you've made a friend of him."  The two friends shared many stories of their home lives on the island, and Miss Ranskill conceives of a mission: she will visit the Carpenter's widow, and give the boat he built to his son.  But her overtures of friendship are as inappropriate in a working-class home as they are in her middle-class one.

The Carpenter and his son point to some unassuming Christian allegory.  Miss Ranskill is always (reasonably enough, I thought) furious whenever anyone hints, with prurient delicacy, at a possible sexual relationship between the two friends on the island, and invests their chaste affections with a strongly spiritual, transcendent quality.  She pursues her mission with the diligence of a pilgrim, and in doing so discovers another that will help her fit less awkwardly into the War Effort.

Satire and allegory are achieved with great subtlety in the book, which is also hugely funny.  I particularly enjoyed Miss Ranskill's schoolfriend Marjorie, now an officious ARP warden and having the time of her life in the war, puzzling over why there had been no black-out on the island: "I should have thought you'd have rigged up some kind of screen ... unless you wanted to be neutral?", and sister Edith's inability to comprehend that the Times had not been available to the castaways.   Miss Ranskill is an endearing heroine, resourceful and assertive, and her passage from bewildered refugee to woman with a plan is rather inspiring.

This is another Persephone retrieval, and one of the best of the Persephones that I've read.  I'll be recommending this, tiresomely and repeatedly, to anyone I think might possibly enjoy it.

That Lady by Kate O'Brien

Apparently, at this year's Hay Literary Festival, Antony Beevor suggested that "novelists ought to mark in bold type the bits they made up".  He might be mollified by Kate O'Brien's forward to That Lady, which states firmly that "what follows is not a historical novel. It is an invention arising from reflection on the curious external story of Ana de Mendoza and Philip II of Spain."  O'Brien extracts from her reflections a novel that deals with a complex blend of political intrigue, love, jealousy, religion, and humour.  

Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli and owner of many other complicated titles, is a widow at the start of the novel, but still probably the most powerful woman in Spain.  Rich in her own right, the friend and confidante of Philip II, she is able to rise above the scurrilous and unfounded rumours which suggest that she is the King's mistress.  Her appearance - she is thin, not traditionally beautiful, old at 35 by the standards of the day , and wears a silk eyepatch following a fencing accident when she was a child - confounds the gossip about her; many believe her virtuous because they find her ugly.  Ana, knowing she is both committing a sin and taking a significant political risk, takes as a lover the King's Secretary of State, Antonio Perez.   It is not long before their affair begins to excite gossip and political intrigue, which adds to the already complex and personal political situation centred around Philip and his government of Spain.   The lovers are denounced by Juan de Escovedo, a political enemy of Philip, who endorses his elimination.  After Escovedo's murder, the King becomes aware of the true nature of Ana's relationship with Perez, and the consequences for the lovers are terrible.

Philip's intransigent desire to punish Ana and Perez is only part of the story.  Buoyed by her wealth and status, Ana is overconfident about her power and her ability to manage Philip.  Perez has similar faith in his invincibility.  Both, eventually, suffer at the hands of an absolute monarch who has no need to invoke the law to imprison and torture.  Ana is a faithful Catholic, and denies herself the consolation of the church while her affair with Antonio continues, but her story shows us that we need to beware of earthly powers as well as heavenly ones.  At the heart of Ana's story is a rather modern theme - the right to a private life.  Ana is a political figure, a landowner, a manager of estates, but she continually asserts that her private relations are nobody else's business; they dishonour nobody, they threaten nobody, because nobody has the right to be interested in them.  This assertion will lead to her imprisonment and eventual death.

It is often said that historical novels are really about the period in which they were written, and in this 1945 work it's possible to read the Spain of Philip II, exhausted by wars, wealthy but unable to feed its people, and struggling to maintain its imperial conquests, as a metaphor for Britain at the end of the Second World War, especially Ana's reaction to the decay of her estates during her house arrest.  Ana is forced to cede the management of her estates to the King's representative: "When Ruy lived and in the six years after his death that I was in nominal charge of Pastrana, this estate and its people were prosperous.  Now it's being run by the government, and I can tell from looking out of that window, walking through my own garden - even if none of the people ever came to see me - that for some reason that no one can quite fix on, that is no longer true."  The fear of the ascendant middle-class bureaucracy so common in novels of the interwar and war years is clearly indicated here.  There are also echoes of Franco's autocratic rule over Spain: Ana's power is not threatened by increasing democracy but by a greater despotism.  But the politics of the novel merge with echoes of fairy tales; Ana is imprisoned and, like the Sleeping Beauty, her house decays and her garden becomes overgrown.

There is also a personal reading of this work: Kate O'Brien based her characterisation of Ana de Mendoza on her friend, E M Delafield.  At first it is somewhat hard to reconcile a one-eyed sixteenth-century Spanish aristocrat with the author of the Provincial Lady, but Ana's unfailing good humour, affection for her friends and (most of) her children, and endurance of suffering are all reminiscent of Delafield's biography.  Kate O'Brien spent a lot of time with Delafield during her last illness, and perhaps her friend's stoicism inspired Ana's:

"Ana was feeling ill that evening, in pain all through her body, but this most exquisitely tragic-comic piece of news, which she refused to accept as more than some travelling man's fantasy, roused her to a mood of mockery that was rejuvenating and even analgesic."

This is a detailed and complex book; the political machinations of the key characters, the back story which must be conveyed to help the reader make sense of the present, and the many dramatic events make it a demanding read, especially for a reader who (like me) knows practically nothing about this era in Spanish history.  But it is a rewarding book, opening up many ideas and images to the reader, who cannot fail to be charmed by Ana, her bravery and her wit, or moved by her eventual decline.

The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons

In this 1950 novel Stella Gibbons explores the little comedies and dramas of life in rural Sussex immediately after the second world war.  Alda Lucie-Brown comes to live at dreary, isolated Pine Cottage with her three daughters, Jenny, Louise and little Meg.  Alda's husband Ronald, a university lecturer, is still on military service abroad, helping with reconstruction work in Germany, and the family has lived a peripatetic life since their home in Ironborough, a prosperous provincial city where both Alda and Ronald have deep roots, was destroyed in the war.  Alda and the girls make friends with their immediate neighbours, the Hoadleys at the nearby farm, and Mr Waite, who keeps battery chickens and is fond of transcendent literature.

Alda is the matchmaker of the title, interfering first in the love life of her old friend Jean.  Jean has reached her early thirties without marrying, although there has been a procession of unsuitable men in her life; her father has recently died, leaving her his profitable kitchenware business.  Alda thinks that Mr Waite, for all that he is gloomy and old-fashioned, will do well for Jean, and develops their acquaintance.  Alda goes on to encourage Sylvia, a would-be actress with dyed hair working as a land girl for the Hoadleys, to consider Fabrio, an Italian prisoner of war also working on the farm, as a potential suitor.  All this is played out against a background of rural life, farm work, riding lessons and a convent school for the girls, with Ronald's occasional visits when on leave.

The underlying theme of the novel seems to be getting people into their rightful place.   Alda, displaced from her native Ironborough, takes a fairly superficial attitude to life at Pine Cottage; she will not be there for long and will not see at close hand the consequences of her matchmaking.  Fabrio is exiled from his impoverished Italian home and sufficiently disconcerted to consider Sylvia as a potential wife, rather than Maria, the girl at home who writes to him every week.  Mr Waite has been somehow deprived of the managerial business position that he grew up expecting to have; marriage to Jean would restore this to him.  The novel valorises people like the Hoadleys, who are in the appropriate setting and making it work for them; and Mr Hoadley's parents, who live, as Mrs Hoadley says, "very rough".  Sylvia and Fabrio's visit to the elder Hoadleys in their patchwork house brings out fastidious disdain in Sylvia, but the narrative is quite approving of their way of life.  Perhaps the strongest condemnation of the effect on place of the wrong sort of person is the description of the decline of the Linga-Longa cafe, once the clean and respectable Blue Plate, now infiltrated by gipsies, lorry-drivers and dirt, and unsuitable for Alda and her daughters.  The novel flirts with the possibility that people may move between cultures through the relationship between Sylvia and Fabrio, but ultimately takes a conservative view of such mobility: people, whatever their background, are better off where their roots are.

In order to fit in the right, appointed place, people must be of the right type; the novel therefore inevitably deals in stereotypes.  The Italian prisoners of war are portrayed as dirty, untrustworthy and over-emotional; Sylvia's semi-bohemian, theatrical and Communist family are described as dirty (again), vulgar and unintelligent; the London friends of Jean's original suitor are hard, fashionable and superficial.  There is a good deal about the grubbiness of Italian peasant life, and the novel sentimentalises their poverty as perfectly appropriate for peasants, indeed much the best thing for them.  This, alongside the general snobbishness which also permeates Nightingale Wood, can make the novel an uneasy read.  Alda, with her golden hair and sparkling hazel eyes, is probably intended to be as attractive a meddler in others' affairs as Flora Poste; although she is probably as interfering as Flora, she lacks Flora's ability to divine what people really want from life, and to give it to them while, serendipitously, getting her own way.
 
The novel's attractive qualities lie in its contingent, happenstance approach to plot; things happen that have no particular bearing on the twin love stories.  Jenny and Louise go to school for the first time, and find it difficult, but no crisis ensues; a storm threatens the harvest, but the neighbours and farmworkers all pull together to get the wheat in before the storm can break - which it never actually does.  Stella Gibbons seems fond of this type of anticlimax and uses it to tease the reader.  There are also lyrical descriptions of the charms of country life in the summer, with picnics and bicycle rides featuring prominently.  Criticising Sylvia's taste in films, the narrator praises films like This Happy Breed and I Know Where I'm Going! which "took a story from everyday life and touched it with poetry"; I suspect this was also the ambition of this novel.

Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947

Marie Belloc Lowndes was a novelist, playwright and (auto)biographer and the sister of Hilaire Belloc; both children spent their early years in France and Marie retained a slight French accent throughout her life.  Their mother, Bessie Parkes Belloc, was also a writer and friend of such literary figures as George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.   She married F S A Lowndes, a journalist on the staff of The Times, and was acquainted with a great many of the artistic, literary and political figures of her time.  This is evidenced by a photograph in the book of her autograph fan, signed by dozens of celebrated people including Oscar Wilde, Edmond de Goncourt, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill.

This book, edited by her daughter Susan Lowndes Marques, comprises a selection of letters and autobiographical pieces.  The diary sections are often, in fact, extended reminiscences of experiences some time in the past, rather than a record of events as they occur, although these also form part of the text, as do letters to Marie Belloc Lowndes from her correspondents.  The autograph fan does not overstate her network of connections: she seems to have known, and usually lunched with, pretty much everybody of significance in early 20th century French and English history.  A prolonged reading of the book, I found, led to a great desire not to see any more names dropped.  But for any student of this period, her reflections and commentary on the politicians and writers of the time are illuminating; there is also a good deal about the characters of the 19th century that she had known personally or through her mother.

A devout Catholic, Marie had a rather sweet if naive tendency to believe that people were usually good at heart. The long section on the Abdication, in which she gives her view of Mrs Simpson as a virtuous woman in love with Mr Simpson, is idiosyncratic to say the least.  This hopeful approach to human nature does not, however, leave her as frequently disappointed with her fellow beings as you might expect, and her letters and diary writings are good-humoured and amusing; even the privations of the Second World War fail to daunt her spirit.  Marie Belloc Lowndes is probably best known now as the author of The Lodger, a crime novel which inspired the silent Hitchcock film of the same name.  Both are worth a look.

The Camomile: An Invention by Catherine Carswell

I picked this up in an Oxfam bookshop in Suffolk because it was a Virago, and, as it turned out to be a diary novel, I bought it.  After studying the piano in Frankfurt, Ellen, a young woman of twenty, has returned to her family home in Edwardian Glasgow, where she is beginning a career as a music teacher.  She lives with her deeply religious Aunt Harry and her brother Ronald who is disabled in some unspecified way, although able to work as an architect,  and to envisage travel to America.  Her diary is actually a protracted letter to her friend Ruby who has also studied in Frankfurt and is now making a living as a teacher in London.  Ellen's mother, now dead, was also a writer of some sort, although the only reference to her output describes her work as 'pamphlets' and Ellen is very disparaging about her talents; her mother's writing is seen by the family as responsible for Ronald's disability, which came about because he was left in wet clothes by their mother while she was working.  Aunt Harry is very suspicious even of diary writing, and Ellen's desire for privacy in which to write and to practice the piano leads her to rent a secret room at a neighbour's house.

Ellen's diary is concerned with establishing her career, the emotional lives of her friends as they begin to marry, and her own desires for marriage and fears of becoming an old maid.  Her spinster exemplars are problematic: Aunt Harry's religious discipline and disapproval irritates Ellen, although she recognises that her aunt's love for her underpins this strictness; her former teacher, Miss Hepburn, moves from emotional eccentricity into madness, and is sent to the asylum.  Ellen eventually becomes engaged to the brother of a school friend. He is back, briefly, from India, but their courtship is not smooth; Ellen's desire is frustrated by the trappings and delays that an engagement at that time provides.  Alongside the narrative of her developing career and love affair runs the story of her friendship with an impoverished scholar: the man she calls Don John haunts the public library and helps inspire her to write more than the diary-letters she sends to Ruby.

Ellen is not really rebellious, but she still runs up against the constraints of acceptable behaviour all the time.  As well as chafing against the limitations placed on expression of her sexuality, she is forced to hide her writing from all but her confidants Ruby and Don John.  Social life in Glasgow can be limited, and offence easily caused; the influence of the church remains strong.  Ellen debates the rightness of her challenge to some of these conventions in her diary; should women write? should they marry? where should the boundaries of class be drawn? how awful would it be to be an old maid? Glasgow is always compared, usually unfavourably, to cosmopolitan Frankfurt, where the expression of sexuality and creativity was more possible, and conventions could be set aside in the pursuit of love and art.  Compared to her literary peers, however, Ellen has a degree of freedom; E M Delafield's young Edwardian women cannot travel about by themselves, make friends that their mothers do not know, or frequent the public library.  This freedom may derive from a difference in class, or the conventions of Scottish life at the time.

Ellen's voice is consistent and she is often humorous; her letters are written to entertain Ruby and to prolong the emotional intimacy of their friendship.  For most of the novel Catherine Carswell avoids the sort of explication which would disrupt the form by telling Ruby things she should already know; however, there are a couple of awkward places where Ellen announces she wishes to tell Ruby more about something previously mentioned in passing, so that back-story can be conveyed.  The ideals and conventions Ellen tests in life and in her diary seem to me to be authentic and very much of their time; this gives the text a slightly dated quality, like reading historical fiction.

Catherine Carswell wrote another novel, Open the Door! which seems worth seeking out, and a number of literary biographies, as well as working as a literary critic.  This role brought her a productive friendship with D H Lawrence, and his influence is detectable in Ellen's musings on female sexuality; Carswell was later to write his biography and completed most of her own autobiography, Lying Awake, published after her death in 1946.

Zella Sees Herself by E M Delafield

Delafield's first novel is a bildungsroman that articulates a young girl's response to a world which very rarely seems real to her.  We first meet Zella de Kervoyou at the age of seven, caught out by her cousins telling tall tales, and obtaining relief by confessing to her mother the lesser crime of taking a chocolate from the dining room.  The main action of the novel takes place after Zella's mother has died, when she is fourteen.  Zella's father Louis is half-French, of a Huguenot family but raised by his Catholic stepmother, the Baronne de Kervoyou, an aristocratic matriarch.  Zella's Aunt Marianne, her mother's sister who takes care of her briefly after her mother's death, is fervently anti-Catholic and combines ignorance and piety to an alarming degree.  To Aunt Marianne's horror, Zella is sent to a convent school, and eventually converts to Catholicism there, but her religious fervour dissipates once she leaves school and her aunt's thoughts turn to finding her a suitable husband.

Zella is an amiable enough character, and the novel seeks to criticise an upbringing which encourages her to adapt her responses to her surroundings, ignoring her own true feelings.  The adults around her, with the exception of her affectionate father, feed this adaptability by seeking to manipulate Zella to form their own model of a dutiful young girl.  Aunt Marianne's no-popery stance is carefully undermined by her ridiculousness and stupidity; even Zella at fourteen knows that Tennyson's poem is not called "In Memorial".  Because Zella is such a poseuse, her responses are an unrealiable guide to her real feelings, and it is sometimes hard to tell if the narrative supports her or not; for example, her desire to convert to Catholicism is strongly expressed, but her faith waivers quickly until a crisis draws her back towards it. Her conversion is strongly ironised by a scene in which she confesses her inability to recognise what is true and real to her cousin James while he wears the robes of a cardinal for a fancy-dress party; but the end of the novel suggests that Zella may come, in time, to understand what is real, and that her faith may help her sustain this.

There are some points of high comedy - the showdown over Zella's education between Aunt Marianne and the Baronne, for example, and the self-absorbed confession of Zella's suitor that he has Loved Another - and Zella's own, usually unspoken, criticisms of others are also consistently amusing.  Zella's tendency to cast herself as the heroine of a novel is exploited by several occasions when life fails to live up to the dramatic requirements of fiction.  Much emphasis is placed on Zella's French ancestry and the effect it has had on her character and morals, which reminded me of Claudine in the St Clare's books, who never would acquire the English sense of honour.  There is also an early satire of a modern young woman in the form of Alison St Craye, who has taken to smoking and Theosophy with great, if superficial, enthusiasm.  Some of the characters verge on caricature; there is much more subtlely in Delafield's later characterisation, which relies less on extreme contrast between characters such as that between Zella and her sensible cousin Muriel.

Delafield's later qualities and themes can be discerned, sometimes in embryo form, in this novel;  deployment of irony and anticlimax, the power and control exercised by older women over younger women, the proper education of girls, and the relationship between religious faith and secular life all figure here. You can buy Zella Sees Herself if you have £150 to spare; otherwise, like me, you'll have to make do with a library copy until somebody reprints it. 

Mrs Harter by E M Delafield

This is an early EMD from 1924, and one in which she experiments, rather successfully, with her narrative technique.  Narrated in the first person by a man, Sir Miles Flower, the novel gives his account of the love affair between Diamond Harter and Bill Patch, which was the main interest of the village of Cross Loman for some months.  Mrs Harter is the daughter of the late local plumber, who married a colonial solicitor and stepped out of her class; but now she has returned from the East to stay, without her husband, in her original home, and disconcerted the carefully arranged hierarchies of the village.  The universally-liked Bill Patch is a writer, lodging with the young widow Nancy Fazackerly and her cantankerous father.  Diamond and Bill's love affair develops through various village social events - a concert in the Drill Hall, a picnic and some amateur theatricals - and Sir Miles recreates the story through his own memories and the accounts of other characters.  Occasionally, too, he allows himself to imagine the scenes between them that went unwitnessed.

Sir Miles is set up from the start as a potentially unreliable narrator. He is disabled following an accident in the First World War, consequently goes out little in the village, and admits that he hardly ever spoke to Mrs Harter; he is not present at many of the events he describes.  His will be an impressionistic portrait, relying on a retelling of reported conversations and, on two occasions, imaginary conversations constructed between Bill and Diamond.  Because the narrative is made up of hearsay from more and less reliable witnesses, the authenticity of its portrayal of Mrs Harter is always questionable.  This unreliable narrative ironically supports a reading of her character as one that is permanently elusive to her neighbours; in the opening chapter, several of the characters play a paper game in which they select adjectives to describe her, but they cannot agree on the words to choose.  There is also an element of voyeurism in Sir Miles’s scrutiny, and particularly in his imaginings of Bill and Diamond’s (extremely chastely described) courtship, which might be read as a critique of the prurient village gossip about the affair.

Using a male narrator seems to free Delafield to criticise more openly her anti-feminist female characters.  Sir Miles’s wife Claire, a satirical portrait of a self-centred and overly emotional woman, despises the opportunities available to her medical student niece Sallie; “Mumma” Kendall exercises a benign tyranny over her unmarried daughters and deplored the activities of the Suffragettes.  Both these characters are ridiculed in the text and used as the butt of jokes.  Sir Miles seems to look rather more favourably than his wife on Sallie, who is an insufferable know-it-all, but his conservatism expresses itself in his critique of her modernity.

The plot sets up many ironies, particularly through the choice of play for the amateur dramatics, which also draws out and makes explicit Mrs Harter’s exoticism and remoteness from the rest of the characters, and the conclusion of the novel provides a rationale for Sir Miles’s forensic approach to narrative construction.  There is also a good deal of high comedy, most of it provided by the oblivious Kendalls and the spirited Nancy Fazackerly.  Unfortunately, Mrs Harter the novel is as elusive as its protagonist, and currently out of print; there are second-hand copies about, however.

The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill

In a narrative moving between the first-person testimony of the murderer, and a third-person narrative with an individual focus in each chapter, Susan Hill develops a range of characters, some of whom will meet their deaths at the killer’s hands.  The central character is Detective Inspector Freya Graffham, new to the small cathedral town of Lafferton.  Freya has recently ended a disastrous marriage but finds herself reborn in Lafferton, taking up singing again, succeeding in her new workplace and developing new friendships.  When two women disappear in quick succession on the Hill, a local beauty spot much used by dog walkers, joggers and the occasional pagans at the Neolithic Wern Stones, Freya leads the investigation.

This is more of a suspense novel than a whodunit; it is clear fairly early on who the murderer is, although there are plenty of feints and red herrings to distract the reader.  The tension is built as we follow the police investigation, and wondering how they, especially Freya, will resolve the mystery.  This is Susan Hill, so the ending is sad, bleak and unredemptive; but also the characterisation is strong and distinctive, the writing beautiful, and the narrative empathetic to all her characters.  It is particularly satisfying to see the unfortunate victims as characters in the round, rather than meeting them only as a body in the library; their engagement with life and their personalities emphasise the tragedy of their deaths. Hill is also skilful in showing how the murderer’s self-justifications unravel as the facts become exposed.

The first of the Simon Serailler series (he is Freya’s boss in this novel, and makes few, but significant, appearances), this novel makes good use of its fictional setting that is strongly evocative of little towns like Salisbury huddled around a cathedral, and of one of the themes of the novel, the relationship between medicine and complementary therapies – a generous term for some of the outright charlatanism practiced by some in the novel.  It’s always nice to start the series of a book knowing there are several volumes ahead of you to enjoy; now I just need to avoid gobbling them all up at once.

The Bridge by Maggie Hemingway

This novel was thoughtfully provided amongst the books in a Suffolk holiday cottage because of its Walberswick location; I enjoy reading books in their geographical setting, so gave it a whirl.  The novel is a fictionalised account of the artist Philip Wilson Steer's time in Walberswick, the setting of many of his paintings (including The Bridge, shown above courtesy of a link to the Tate's collection) and a place where he spent many summers, until the early 1890s when his visits tailed off.  In Victoria's Golden Jubilee year, 1887, the fictional Steer comes to know Isobel, the mother of three young girls, spending her summer at the Suffolk resort while her husband continues to work in London.   Philip is passionately interested in painting, to the exclusion of everything else, until he encounters Isobel and feels himself in love before they have even spoken; Isobel arrives in Walberswick with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, but consoling herself with that "comforting word", duty, when she considers the less attractive aspects of her marriage.  Their relationship, unwittingly brokered by Isobel's little daughter Emma, who craves attention, and fostered by her chaperone Aunt Jude, who likes to see her with friends, grows quickly, and a passionate attachment develops on both sides; however, the climax of their love will be dancing together at a Jubilee fete in Dunwich, once the capital of East Anglia but eroded by the sea over hundreds of years to a handful of cottages today.

The book is very good at evoking the scrutiny under which Isobel and Philip conduct their relationship. They are watched by Isobel's daughters, particularly Emma, who resents their closeness even though she cannot understand it; by Aunt Jude and their social circle in Walberswick; and by their servants and the townspeople.  Isobel comes to feel ever more trapped by all the eyes upon her; Philip feels obliged to offer excuses for leaving the town to his landlady, when he seeks to escape the tension of their unresolved love.  It also presents a strongly hierarchical Victorian society, in which the gentry take a prurient interest in the lives of the working class, by whose difference they define themselves.  After a violent storm, "Mrs Roust and Mrs Arthur moved among the fishermen's wives and, with the insinuation of assistance and sympathetic cluckings and shakings of the head, elicited every detail they could.  They turned through the rubble of these women's lives [...] hoarding their finds to pore over again and again in the warm comfort of their homes."  The child Emma sees the revellers at the fete as "a great crowd [...] red faces and wide open mouths, arms linked together like a string of fat sausages."  Hierarchies are maintained further down the social scale, with Emma routinely oppressed by her older sisters, and Steer's landlady, Mrs Pearce, dominating an ancient servant.

The narrative shifts, in third person, between the viewpoints of several characters, principally Philip, Isobel and Emma.  There was a little too much of Emma for me, but her recognition of her mother's affection for Steer is important for the plot.  I found Isobel's husband Reginald a slightly cardboard character, driven only by money and intensely materialistic.  He is clearly a foil for the passionate and aesthetic Steer, but to some extent they are two sides of the same coin, each relentlessly pursuing his particular vocation.

There is a film of The Bridge and the DVD was also in the cottage, but I failed to get around to watching it - next time.

The Bolter by Frances Osborne

I picked this up second-hand recently and, being a bit of a Mitford completist, thought I'd like to read the story of the model for the Bolter of The Pursuit of Love.  Idina Sackville's life story is certainly fascinating; married five times and separated from her two elder children by the terms of her first divorce, she sought greater freedom as a colonial farmer in Kenya, where she was a key member of the Happy Valley set and married, at least for a while, to Lord Errol.  The story of his sexual peccadilloes and consequent murder have been retold in the book and film White Mischief.  Elegant, alluring and sexually voracious, Idina also made a surprisingly effective farmer and created what sounds like a truly beautiful house and garden - Clouds, high up in the Kenyan mountains with colubus monkeys in the garden and a view across the Great Rift Valley.

Overall, though, I found Osborne's retelling of her life rather limited.  Osborne is Idina's great-granddaughter, and from the age of 13 had absorbed her family's mythology about Idina: that she was a scandalous woman and a wicked mother who abandoned her two little boys for entirely selfish reasons.  In telling the story of Idina's divorce from her first husband, Euan Wallace, Osborne is pretty fair-handed: both had been unfaithful and their marriage, like many others, was irreparably damaged by the First World War.  Both were in their early twenties and prone to seeing life in black and white terms; an older couple might have come to some accommodation, and Idina certainly negotiated open marriages with subsequent husbands that were, at least for a while, successful.  The insistence that Idina should not see her boys came from Euan and Idina accepted this as the best thing for her children.  Osborne has found out how many divorces there were in the immediate post-war years, but doesn't tell us whether this sort of custody arrangement was typical.  Under the prevailing divorce legislation, children were viewed as the property of their father, once over the age of seven, and custody arrangements routinely excluded the divorced mother; even if Idina had been able to take her young sons with her, they would most likely have been returned to their father's care once they were seven.  In its historical context, Idina's behaviour becomes less selfish, less "bad" and more usual.  Euan's decision to spend the year after his divorce working in America, leaving the boys in the care of their governess in Eastbourne, does not attract any authorial criticism.

Idina made contact with both her sons (who were, tragically, killed in World War 2 within a year of each other) as young adults, and appears to have had a reasonable relationship with her daughter Diana, the child of her marriage to Lord Errol; Osborne is careful to explain that it was normal to send children back to England for their schooling and considered unhealthy for them to grow up in the African climate.  Osborne, however, cannot leave Idina-the-bad-mother alone, and closes the book with the following:

 "Sitting here at my desk in my hillside farmhouse overlooking the vast stretch of the Cheshire Plain, I can hear my two small children scampering back indoors.  It is time I stopped writing and went to them."

The parallels with Clouds are obvious, but Idina's circumstances allow Osborne to assert herself as the better mother, achieving the hillside house with the glorious view and keeping her two children.  Possibly she is reassuring herself that she is not just as bad as Idina for spending years of their precious childhood shut away writing this book.  Osborne's monovalent reading of her subject, with no obvious awareness of how this reading has been informed by the biographer's own situation, wastes opportunities to explore other aspects of Idina's life (how did she learn to run a successful dairy farm, for example?) or indeed to celebrate Idina as a woman who found a way, in a deeply conservative section of a conservative society, to live life as she wanted.

To Osborne's credit, the paperback version includes a coda describing Idina's relationship with her stepchildren, the children of her fifth husband Lynx Soltau, who made their home with her at Clouds for eight years and with whom she kept in touch until her death in 1955. Idina's stepdaughter Ann McKay wrote to Frances Osborne after the first edition of the book was published, with warm memories of her time with Idina who, clearly, mothered her and her brother very effectively until well after her marriage to Lynx ended.  This testimony disrupts the reading of Idina as a bad mother that the main narrative articulates, although Osborne attempts to mitigate the bad Idina model by suggesting  that Idina's need for sexual love arises from her frustrated mothering instincts.  Heaven forfend that she should just have liked sex! and presumably it is possible to like sex and also be a good mother, as Idina was to her stepchildren.  It is interesting, however, that nobody had mentioned these children to Osborne during her research; clearly the stereotype of Idina was thoroughly embedded in many memories.

While I've got my hatchet out, I will mention that Osborne is occasionally repetitive.  Do you know that children in the colonies were made to wear a pad to protect their delicate spines from the fierce heat?  I do, because Frances Osborne told me so twice in this book.  She's also over-fond of the device of telling the reader, in the last sentence of a chapter, what is going to happen next: "Having herself bolted twice, Idina would now find out what it felt like to be bolted from" (175).  I'll leave the inelegant phrasing alone, but Joss Errol's bolt is more of a drift,  and anticlimactic.  Idina Sackville deserves not only a more rounded portrayal, but also one that is better written.

The Optimist by E M Delafield

One of EMD's earlier novels, this richly amusing book focuses principally on the generation gap between those who grew up as Victorians, and the modern generation whose values have been shaped by the devastating experience of the first World War.  Appearing for the Victorians is the optimist of the title, Canon Fenwick Morchard.   An elderly clergyman with five grown-up children, he provided a home in the past to Owen Quentillian, whose parents were based in India before the war.  After the war,  Owen returns to stay with the Morchard family at St Gwenllian; he has acquired a house nearby which is being renovated.  Owen has made something of a name for himself as an essayist, and although his principles and ideas are completely opposed to the Canon's, he continues to respect him enough not to argue with him openly.  The Morchard family comprises Lucilla, the eldest, who has been housekeeper and a research assistant to her father since the early death of her mother; Valeria, who has been involved in a fitful romance with a Captain Cuscaden; fey and musical Flora, devoted to her father; and the annoying Adrian, whose war service was only of six months' duration, and is now looking vaguely for a career, having rejected the Church as an option.  David Morchard, the eldest son, has known Owen in the army and is now in India.

The Canon exercises a benign tyrrany over the four children who still live at home, constraining their behaviour with his excessive kindliness and his tendency to interpret any attempt at independence as a personal affront.  The Canon is ghastly, but very funny; his overt emotionalism in a crisis allows Delafield to set up some highly amusing encounters between the Canon and the modern world, as three of the four younger Morchards make tentative attempts to live their own lives.  He is also a frightful hypocrite, expecting far higher standards from other family members (and also Owen) than from Adrian, his youngest and favourite child. 

His tyrrany allows his children to develop some creative ways of expressing their individuality.  Lucilla, who failed to assert her wish to go to college as a younger woman, counsels Valeria against self-sacrifice as a way of life, and goes about her duty calmly, maintaining her love for her father while privately rejecting the majority of his values.  Lucilla's rational self-control and clearsightedness make her the antithesis of her father and explain his continued reliance on her.  Adrian adopts a more direct approach, getting a job on a magazine notorious for its anti-Christian standpoint.  The feeling that 'father would hate it' may check some behaviours but, when his children think it sufficiently important to do so, they defy the Canon openly.  The novel is ambiguous about Flora's eventual decision to enter a convent: the Canon celebrates it, but if it is mainly driven by a need to escape him, he is misguided.  Owen despises it as a rejection of life and a celebration of self-abnegation: but it is Flora's opportunity for self-fulfilment.

The novel can be read as a fairly mild polemic against Victorian parenting values and in favour of children making their own way in life - indeed, this is inevitable in the terms of the novel; the Canon fails to prevent any of his children, except perhaps Lucilla, leading their own lives.  It is also interesting for its depiction of the inevitable clash between the post-war generation and their parents' generation and the transformation of values that has been the effect of the Great War.  All the Canon's daughters feel the need for some sort of work to exploit their skills and energies; Valeria, who undertook war-work away from home, misses it greatly once the war is over, and the novel makes some feminist points about opportunities for women of this class.  The Canon is right up there with Delafield's other, usually female, parental monsters - this novel has much in common with Thank Heaven Fasting in that, and other respects - and the characterisation of the children is well-achieved.  I could have lived without some of the Bright Young Things, but I can see that their mildly scandalous activities were necessary to frighten the Canon into fresh excesses.

There are some facsimile reprints of this novel available as well as second-hand copies in fairly large supply, at least in the UK.  The Great War Fiction blog has also given The Optimist a favourable review - I agree that it deserves a proper reprint.

Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford

I've waited a long time to read this, and in fact had just realised that, in possession of a British Library reader's ticket, I now could get my hands on it - only to find that Penguin were republishing it.  Nancy Mitford didn't want it published in her lifetime, telling Evelyn Waugh in 1951 that "too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as funny or as anything but the worst of taste".  Charlotte Mosley's introduction reminds us of the family row which ensued on its first publication in 1934, with Unity Mitford and Diana Mosley both seriously offended by Nancy's mockery of their political commitments. 

The book casts a satirical eye over the trappings of fascism as practiced by the British Union of Fascists, including its casual violence, vague patriotism, appropriation of national artifacts and passion for uniforms.  Eugenia Malmains, "the largest heiress in England", is the chief proponent of the novel's "Union Jackshirt" movement; as a portrait of Unity Mitford she comes across as both quite mad and quite charming, which seems to be true to life as far as my reading about Unity goes; her charm allows Nancy to expose the ease by which people can be attracted to fascism and the superficial reasons they may have for joining the cause.  Perhaps the best joke in the book is Nancy's creation of Peersmont, a lunatic asylum specialising in the care of insane members of the House of Lords, which incorporates a replica of the Houses of Parliament and allows the Lords to go about their business with no hint that they are, in fact, incarcerated.  Lord Driburgh, an inmate, has an enthusiasm for fascism that satirises similar views expressed by real members of the interwar House of Lords, including, for a time, Nancy's own father.

The pace of the novel is hectic and culminates in a pageant which, unsurprisingly, descends into violence.  Woven around the satires are some rather cynical love stories in which dissipated young men search for heiresses to keep them; Nancy had just married Peter Rodd.  The character of Mrs Case, the local beauty, I found rather pointless; she seems to be there only to create some opposition to the Jackshirts, in the form of her group of aesthetic young hangers-on, not as tame or as feeble as they look.  Fascinating older beauties of this type were a regular feature in Nancy's early novels and presumably she couldn't quite let her go for this one.