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A Spirit Rises by Sylvia Townsend Warner #SylviaTownsendWarnerReadingWeek

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Helen at A Gallimaufry is hosting another Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, and I think I’ve managed to join in every year – my bookshelves are nothing if not replete with unread STWs. I have rather failed with many of her novels, and gave up on The Flint Anchor a few weeks ago – but I tend to have much greater success with her short stories. I bought most of the available collections in a spree in 2011, and am gradually reading through them – and 1962’s A Spirit Rises is brilliant.

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another.

It’s always hard to write about a short story collection, so I’ll just pick out some of my favourite stories. Right up there was ‘A Dressmaker’, about an older woman who decides to stop being a dependable relative (shades of Laura Willowes!) and set up as an independent dressmaker. She is mostly doing dull, everyday outfits, but finds most fulfilment on the rare occasions when she has been asked to make evening gowns. And then quiet Mrs Benson comes – seeming quite drab, but bringing extravagant fabrics and asking them to be made into fanciful, beautiful pieces. Here is a section of it – best read slowly, enjoying every word choice Warner makes:

Five months later, she reappeared, and once more it was an evening gown she wanted. Winter had done its worst to Mrs Benson, but had not tamed her ambition. She brought billows of glistening white gauze, splashed with vermilion and rose and lemon, together with a wide ribbon of mignonette green for a sash – ‘like an azalea bed’, she remarked. Mary was about to ask if Mrs Benson was fond of gardening – many ladies were, and looked the worse for it – when Mrs Benson went on, ‘And after this, there is something else I’ve been thinking about, something quite different.’

‘A spring tailor-made, Madam?’ Mrs Benson’s daytime appearance made this a natural assumption.

‘For sad evenings.’

The word ‘sad’ had secondary meanings. It can be used for cakes that have failed to rise, for overcast weather. Mary supposed that the next dress she would make for Mrs Benson would for those dusky, clammy evenings when one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl, and she was glad to think that for once Mrs Benson was facing realities. Mrs Benson was doing no such thing. The silk she brought, patterned in arabesques of brown and mulberry and a curious dead slate-blue, was fine as a moth’s underwing. Held against the light, it was almost transparent, like a film of dirty water.

‘You’ll have a slip underneath, of course, Madam. What shade were you thinking of?

But for once, Mrs Benson had not got it all planned and settled. She stared at the stuff as people stare at slowly running water, and said nothing.

Nobody but Warner could have written this. There are so many things I love in it, but ‘those dusky, clammy evenings where one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl’ stands out. Just wonderful.

As another example, here’s the opening paragraph of ‘Randolph’, about a man returning to his sisters after some time away:

The date of the glossy new tear-off calendar was January 1 but from the window behind the writing-table one saw the vaguely smiling sky of a London spring. It was a room on the first floor, square, and rather too high for its floor-space. The folding-doors in the back wall were open, and gave a view of the room behind – once the back drawing-room of a Victorian mansion but now furnished as a bedroom. Both rooms were inhumanly tidy and smelled of moth-powder. Two women came in and began unwrapping the parcels they carried. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m reeled in immediately. She sets up the small world of the short story so quickly. I said earlier that Warner was describing the world in front of her – but often it is a hazy, timeless world. There are few 1960s references – and I suppose many of the stories would have appeared in the New Yorker in the previous decade. Perhaps it was writing for an audience across the ocean that meant Warner didn’t put English culture too front and centre.

When I read a later collection of stories, The Innocent and the Guilty, for Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week a couple of years ago, I found it all a bit vague and abstract. Some of the stories in A Spirit Rises go a different way – it’s the only time I’ve seen Warner use the precision of the unexpected denouement. I’m not sure those perfectly suit her writing style. Better are those like ‘A Dressmaker’ or ‘The Snow Guest’, about an escaped prisoner in a snowy countryside, which end on a stray observation. Something with far-reaching implications, but which is only a moment in a series of moments – not a turning point or a conclusion.

My favourite collection of Warner’s remains Swans on an Autumn River, though this was at least partly because I read them in a castle in Dorset. A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as that book, but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

I Ordered A Table For Six by Noel Streatfeild

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I bought I Ordered a Table for Six (1942) by Noel Streatfeild in a lovely secondhand bookshop in Ironbridge, just a few weeks before the pandemic hit the UK. It feels like another lifetime. It’s certainly been catching my eye ever since then – because isn’t that a wonderful title?

I’ve much less well-versed in Streatfeild’s output than many of you will be, having never read Ballet Shoes or any of her other children’s books. Previously, I’d only read Saplings – the book Persephone published – and was a little lukewarm about it. For my money, I Ordered a Table for Six is rather better – and it’s available from Bello, though I was lucky enough to find this old hardback. Here’s how it starts:

“I shall,” thought Mrs Framley, “give a little party for him.”

Adela Framley had come downstairs to her office. There are few things which are pleasurable in a war, but walking to what had been the breakfast-room, and was now her office, was a daily source of happiness to Mrs Framley. Her route lay through the main passage where the unpacking was done, and through the big dining-room, which was now the work-room. As she passed, women straightened their backs or raised their eyes from needles and sewing-machines and smiled. To everybody in the building she meant a lot. She was Mrs Framley who ran ‘Comforts for the Bombed’. They might say this and that about her for her story was no secret, but during the hours while her workrooms were open she was the organiser and founder and therefore a personage. For nearly four years her sense of inferiority had been so absorbing that the fibre of her nature had shrunk. Since she had founded her comforts fund it was expanding, not to its old shape and size, but enough to give some relief to her contracted nerves.

The ‘him’ in question is Mr Penrose, the patron of this charity that has given Mrs Framley purpose. It provides necessary items to those whose homes have been destroyed by bombing, and is the sort of moment for which women like Adela Framley live. She is the sort of woman who commandeers a village jumble sale and rules it with determination (and an underlying awareness that nobody much likes her) – and ‘Comforts for the Bombed’ has given her the opportunity to do this with an unassailable moral virtue. Though there are talks of subsuming her small division into a wider, better-organised scheme. And most of the legwork is done by Letty – an assistant who is blandly loyal on the surface, and doesn’t much like Adela underneath that.

One of the wartime mysteries is the absence of Adela’s son. I can’t remember how soon in the novel that is revealed, so I shan’t say anything – but there is certainly early doubt that he is away fighting, not answering her letters. And one of the five people invited to the dinner is a friend of this son’s, who is only there in the hope that it could be financially advantageous to him. Adela’s daughter – on the cusp of adulthood – is also coming to London for it, against the advice of the relative she is staying with in the depths of the countryside. A dully suitable man has been invited in the hopes of being an eligible future husband.

The dinner doesn’t take place until towards the end of the book, but there is plenty to engage us before this. Streatfeild gives us richly detailed characters, and isn’t shy about making them unlikeable. Everybody is shades of grey – Adela’s war work being a good example of the different impulses, good and the reverse, that motivate most people. The only thing I found confusing was when we were thrust into the world of another of the dinner guests, and suddenly had whole new places and sets of characters to meet and engage with – it always felt a little severed from what had preceded, even though the different threads come together well at the climactic dinner.

It’s always interesting to read a book so centred in the Second World War that was published while the war was in full flow. I Ordered a Table for Six gives a perspective on the war that I hadn’t seen before, with perhaps the closest being the sections on war work in E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime. There are few characters to warm to, but it feels like a vividly real depiction of a moment in a desperately strange period of recent history – managing to merge a sort of abrasive uncertainty about the future with the ingredients of an early-20th-century domestic novel of middle-class life. I think definitely worth tracking down – just don’t read the full description on the publisher’s website, as it gives away the ending!

BookTube Spin 3: My List

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You might be familiar with Rick’s BookTube Spin – I’ve joined in the previous two rounds, reading The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi and The Adventures of Elizabeth in Ruegen by Elizabeth von Arnim in the first two spins. I only finished the latter yesterday, so review is forthcoming – but I love this way of getting to books that languish on the tbr piles.

For number 3, I’ve decided to go with the Persephone edition! Some of these have been on my shelves for ages. Whichever number Rick pulls out of the spin on 25th June, I’ll read at some point in the next two months…

1 Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley
2 Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller
3 Marjorie Fleming by Oriel Malet
4 Every Eye by Isobel English
5 A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam
6 Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell
7 The Far Cry by Emma Smith
8 The Casino by Margaret Bonham
9 Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper
10 They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
11 The Woman Novelist by Diana Gardner
12 The Expendable Man by Dorothy B Hughes
13 The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby
14 Vain Shadow by Jane Hervey
15 No Surrender by Constance Maud
16 Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins
17 Heat Lightning by Helen Hull
18 The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal
19 Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg
20 Wilfred and Eileen by Jonathan Smith

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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BoardingHouseIn March, I posted my first of four reviews of books that have won the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) – the amazing Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava, which it one of the best books I’ve read this year. The EUPL is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – the video at the bottom of this post explains a bit more. The prize is judged on the original language rather than the translation, but I don’t read Polish so I read The Boarding House in a translation by Tusia Dabrowska (or MJ Dabrowska, on over covers I’ve seen). The novel was an EUPL winner in 2012, though was originally published in 2009.

In the beginning, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The station’s pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air.

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

Luckily, the tracks remained as I’d left them. They run straight ahead, in a decisive gesture, to melt with the horizon, from here barely visible, hidden behind nature, or, to the contrary – to disappear in a hidden tunnel hollowed out in the sky and then begin running again on the other side, in a completely different and unknown world.

The opening paragraphs of The Boarding House start with the opening words of the Bible – or, more aptly for this novel, the Torah. The narrator is Jewish, and the train he is taking is out to a distant Polish boarding house, which once doubled as a sanatorium. He has been there before as a child, when he spent his summers with a grandmother. The people who live there now – like his grandmother before them – are survivors of the Shoah, or Holocaust.

There is a dream-like quality to much of the novel. The narrator listens to the stories of those who live in the boarding house, many of whom seem to live half in the past and half in the present. This is echoed in the way the prose will wind back and forth, and you often find yourselves finishing a scene in a different time and place to where you started. The edges of sections are blurred.

The narrator is himself between times too – recalling his childhood, the inherited stories of the Holocaust, the current need that he taken him back to this place. It’s a novel filled with palimpsests – though also humour, and there is the usual mix of cantankerous characters, gossipy characters, pessimists and optimists stuck in a lengthy dialogue, held together in this boarding house in the middle of nowhere.

It’s an interesting novel, and it interestingly reveals a lot about the legacy of the appalling treatment of Jewish people during the 1930s and ’40s. The dreamlike quality of The Boarding House is both an asset and a drawback, depending on what mood you’re in – it’s hard to grasp anything concrete, or feel like you’re on steady ground as a reader at any point.

And I don’t know if Dabrowska’s translation accurately conveys this quality in the original novel, or if there are places where it isn’t quite working as a translation. As I say, I don’t read or speak Polish – but there were many places where the writing jarred a little for me. ‘This didn’t come across very cleverly’, for instance – that use of ‘cleverly’ doesn’t quite make sense. The narrator refers to a ‘freestanding closet’, rather than a wardrobe. I didn’t quite understand this sentence, even on several attempts: ‘The door creaked, so fearing that it might cause even more of a ruckus that would wake up the entire boarding house, I sneaked through the smallest crack possible.’ That’s a handful of minor instances, but there were several on every page. Perhaps it is there in the original, and is intended to disconcert the reader. I don’t know.

It’s a difficult one. I didn’t love this novel, and I never felt on solid ground reading it. But perhaps that is the point?

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Book cover for 9781529025064It’s summer! Unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, of course. But England is finally getting some sunshine and heat – though it has been raining all day today, but plus ça change. Or pleuvait ça change. That might be my greatest moment ever, so let’s rush on to the book, blog post, and link…

1.) The link – is an oral history of The Devil Wears Prada, because why not. I love this film because I am a human. I did read the book, which is terrible.

2.) The blog post – is a reminder that Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is coming up soon, run by Helen at Gallimaufry. A reminder post went up recently, but I’m linking to the post back in April that gives a bit more detail. I’ve joined in every time, and this time I think I’ll dig out some more short stories.

3.) The book – somebody on Twitter was asking for contemporary funny books, and Sue Teddern replied recommending her own book, Annie Stanley, All at Sea. It isn’t out yet, but that cover is lovely and the description looks like it could be a fun one.

Hope you’re having a good weekend, whatever you are up to!

Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth

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Novels about missing people seem to be a genre in themselves. So many crime novels that I read about (and never read) are about missing children or missing women – massive turn-offs for me, partly because I’ve heard that they tend towards the gruesome, but also because I am fully Team Staunch Book Prize. Which is one of the reasons why I was keen to read Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth (2021 – a new novel!!) – because here it is the man who goes missing. Also it’s a novel by Jenn Ashworth, and I always want to read those.

The narrator is Laurie, a cleaner at a university who has been married to Mark for some time – they initially met at a wedding, where a psychic called Joyce thought they were already a couple. The novel opens with an ordinary scene of the two waking up together – talking about a broken curtain, about staying up too late. Unspokenly considering morning sex, and unspokenly deciding against. Getting up to make a cup of tea.

It’s hard to know how other couples live their lives, but all of this had become utterly ordinary for us. I told the police as much, later. I left for work while he was still in the shower. I don’t know what he was wearing that day. No, he hadn;t seemed unusual in any way that morning. 

The officers – they sent two, a man and a woman who both refused a hot drink and made notes on a tablet instead of in a notebook – seemed frustrated by the fact that no matter how they phrased their questions I had nothing to add – no suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary behaviour on his part – to my account. I didn’t tell them I was pissed off with him, but I am telling you now.

One of the unsettling things about the novel is that we don’t know who’s the ‘you’ that Laurie is speaking to, or even when the ‘now’ is. Mark might not have displayed any out-of-the-ordinary behaviour, but Laurie certainly does. Her emotional reaction to Mark disappearing is subdued. She is speaking directly to us, but holding back from any outburst or breakdown. She doesn’t tell people that Mark has gone missing – whenever his mother Mavis phones, she says he’s in the shower or otherwise unavailable. It’s several weeks before Laurie even contacts the police.

This is nothing as conventional as the unreliable narrator – except inasmuch as every narrator is unreliable. Laurie isn’t really connected with her own thoughts on and responses to this seismic event. Ghosted reminded me often of My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq. Laurie doesn’t unravel in the same way as that wife-of-a-missing-husband, but there is the same eerie inability to conform to anticipated reactions. Laurie certainly isn’t ignoring Mark’s disappearance, but her thoughts about it always skirt around the conventional. Everything in this novel skirts around the conventional, in fact. There is no desperate hunt to find him – but rather a sort of dispassionate paranoia and anxiety.

I know now the reason I was so reluctant to tell her that Mark had left me was because I feared she would blame me for driving her adored son away. Whatever made idea was currently gripping him and sending him across the country, it would be me that had planted it in his mind. My responsibility, at least, to pluck it out before it could take root. My task, as his lover and wife, to make home a sanctuary and a paradise that he could not bear to leave. If he’d found another woman – someone better groomed, more sympathetic, more likely to store colanders in the correct cupboard – well, he couldn’t be blamed for that. And underneath all that, the fear: once Mavis had decided this was all her fault, she would leave me too.

Mark’s isn’t the only disappearance in the novel. A second plot is Laurie’s relationship with her father, whose mind is gradually disappearing – and also his cleaner-turned-helper Olena, who is closer with him than Laurie is. Ashworth shows the shifting and sad relationship between father and daughter with the same subtle complexity that she does everything, pieced together with memories of the past and anxieties about the future. Other threads are Laurie’s obsession with a young girl who was murdered years earlier, tracking down psychic Joyce, and some money that Olena might have stolen. All are wound together naturally and cleverly, never quite going in the way you expect.

And that’s the brilliance of Ashworth’s writing, I think. Her novels are often unsettling and odd, but every moment is plausible. As soon as it happens, it feels exactly right, even as she resists the natural next steps and anticipated reactions. Overall, Ghosted leans towards the ambiguous and uncertain, but in a way that makes any alternative pathway from her initial premise feel unnatural and stilted. It’s another excellent and consistently interesting success from one of the few still-publishing authors whose books I will always look out for.

I is for Isherwood

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

‘I’ was always going to be a tricky letter of the alphabet, wasn’t it? A toss up between Isherwood and Ishiguro, neither of whom I’ve read a lot by. But it does mean that I’m not doing my usual thing of forgetting to include some of their books in the picture! I only have five books by Isherwood.

How many books do I have by Christopher Isherwood?

Look, I just said. Five. I don’t even know how many he wrote, but I have decided to stop buying them until I read a few more.

How many of these have I read?

Two – Mr Norris Changes Trains and Prater Violet. I definitely preferred the second of these, largely because I had a wildly different idea of Isherwood in my head than the German sex clubs of Mr Norris Changes Trains, which I thought would be a charming rural tale, for some reason. Fun story: I was reading Mr Norris Changes Trains on a train and, when I got up to get off at my station, discovered that the woman in front of me had also been reading it. I wish I’d said something, but I had to ‘disembark’ (as they put it) before I ended up in the wilds of Devon.

How did I start reading Christopher Isherwood?

I picked up the Folio Mr Norris Changes Trains first, largely because that print is lovely. I don’t have the Folio case for it, so the print is always on display. And he is the sort of author you see a lot in secondhand bookshops, so it has been pretty easy to pick them up cheaply over time.

General impressions…

Difficult to draw any conclusions from two books, of course – especially since I was pretty lukewarm about one, and really liked Prater Violet. He is one of those writers whose life seems to interest people more than his writing now – is that fair? Anyway, I’m keen to read the others I have – but not yet quite keen enough to get to them. Thank goodness they’re short!

From the ones I have, anything particular you’d recommend?

And I think I’ll have more to say about J :D

British Library Women Writers Blog Tour #FarMoreThanFiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A book haul! After all this time!

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I haven’t done a proper trip to a secondhand bookshop for such a long time. I did pop into Barter Books in Alnwick last August, but my trip to Regents in Wantage this morning really felt like a step back to normality. It’s less than half an hour away from me, and it’s comfortably the best secondhand bookshop in Oxfordshire. There aren’t many, but this would be a great bookshop anywhere – and, what’s more, has a good turnover. So I came away with an impressive little haul…

The Card by Arnold Bennett

I am slowly adding to my stockpile of Bennett novels, and always enjoying them when I get to them – The Card has been on my horizons ever since Kate reviewed it for Vulpes Libris (which led to me defending Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room passionately in response).

The Cheerful Day by Nan Fairbrother

This is apparently the sequel to a memoir about raising a family in the countryside. In The Cheerful Day, they’ve all moved to London – my heart breaks for them at the thought, but the title and the cover make it sound much happier than I’m imagining!

None-Go-By by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick

I enjoyed Cynthia’s Way by Mrs Sidgwick, so was pleased and a bit surprised to find another book by her. This one is one of her best, according to the doubtless honest description inside – about a couple who move to a small cottage to escape their friends and relations.

The Field of Roses by Phyllis Hastings

I’ve always got an eye out for obscure women writers for the British Library series, and so I’m picking up more or less any early- or mid-century women writer I’ve not heard of. It’s a numbers game!

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

Of the books I found, this was the only one I was expressly looking for – though when I found it, I almost left it on the shelf. I didn’t realise it was quite so very, very long. But I’ve heard good things about it – a novel about Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice – so maybe one day I’ll be in the mood for 650 pages.

The Tale of an Empty House and other stories by E.F. Benson

I’ve never read E.F. Benson’s ghost stories, though have heard them mentioned a lot. To be honest, I seldom read ghost stories cos I’m a huge coward – and I don’t even believe in ghosts, so I’m not sure what I’m scared about – but now I have the opportunity, at least.

The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore

This sounds a bit closer to The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne than the most recent Moore I read – and it is his centenary year, after all.

Sprig Muslin by Georgette Heyer

Since I’m the latest convert to the altar of Ms Heyer, I was pretty confident I’d find something in the shop to keep going. I can’t remember if this is one of the books that people recommended here or on Twitter, but I didn’t recognise any of the other titles in the pile on their ‘women’s writing’ shelves. Not quite sure what qualifies books to get onto that single bookcase, but curiously the first book on it was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe…

April Lady by Georgette Heyer

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Complete & Unabridged (April Lady): Amazon.co.uk: Heyer, Georgette, Matheson, Eve: 9780745166322: BooksWhenever Karen and I run a ‘club’ year, somebody reads a Georgette Heyer novel. I don’t know how many she wrote, but my guess would be thousands. And every time I say ‘How on earth have I not yet read anything by Heyer?’

I think it’s partly because of the historical fiction angle, and partly because the name ‘Georgette’ is so odd. It’s certainly not for lack of trust in the legions of people who love her. And, you know what, all those people were right. I still haven’t actually read a physical Heyer novel, but I spent the Bank Holiday weekend stuck on the motorway, listening to an audiobook of April Lady read by Eve Matheson.

April Lady was published in 1957, which places it somewhere in the second half of Heyer’s writing career – it’s one of her Regency novels, and I finished it without having any idea what the title refers to. The main characters are Nell Cardross and her husband, the Earl of Cardross, or Giles. She is young and beautiful, from a relatively unwealthy family, and I do stress the word ‘relatively’. Cardross, on the other hand, has money all over the place – but wants to make sure his wife isn’t too profligate with spending, and doesn’t hide bills from him. This is the gist of the opening scene and, indeed, the entire plot.

There is a curious sort of ‘Gift of the Magi’ theme to the central couple: neither knows how much the other loves them. Giles thinks Nell married him for his money; Nell thinks Giles married her for her looks, and for convenience. Nell’s mother – described as having ‘more hair than wit’ – has told Nell to stay undemonstrative, so as not to annoy her husband, and not to question any extra-marital dalliances he might have.

For her part, Nell discovers an unpaid dressmakers bill for £300. She doesn’t think she can take it to her husband – because she fears his anger, but mostly because she fears it will confirm his belief that she is mercenary.

And so much of April Lady is Nell’s attempts to get her hands on the money without Giles knowing – and without taking the advice of her exuberant, funny, and mildly immoral brother Dysart. (His suggestions include selling her marital jewellery and making fakes, ordering more dresses to keep the dressmaker busy, and even dabbling as a highwayman.)

As I listened, I expected this to be the opening scene to a much more complex plot – but this is what sustains the whole novel. There is a parallel plot with Cardross’s sister Letty. who reminded me a lot of Lydia Bennet with her impetuousness and high drama – she is yearning to marry Mr Allendale before he heads to Brazil, but needs her brother’s permission. These two plots cleverly overlap, but Heyer is brilliant at sustaining this central motivation throughout April Lady, without flagging.

My favourite thing about the novel is how delightful all the characters are. Nell is perhaps a little too straitlaced to be truly entertaining, but I adored her wastrel brother, her impulsive sister-in-law, and her witty, calm husband. He might be the villain of the piece in another writer’s hands, but he reminded me of a kinder Mr Bennet – teasing people, especially his sister, while implacable in his own choices.

And, gosh, this novel is funny. I laughed a lot in the car – my favourite bit being a friend of Letty’s who has rehearsed various dramatic speeches about never giving away Letty’s secret plan, only nobody else seems to give her cues or react as she would like.

Ultimately, of course, all ends well and everything is explained – but not before some misunderstandings and complications come along. I genuinely cared about the happiness of these characters, though never felt a moment’s anxiety that the happy ending might not come.

I’ve used two Austen comparisons already, and I think any comparisons that have been made between Heyer and Austen are justified – at least to an extent. Heyer’s plot is not as keenly plotted as Austen’s, nor her characters in April Lady quite as immortal, but it was a truly wonderful read that exceeded my fairly high expectations. My first Heyer, but definitely not my last.