Divorce? Of Course by Mary Essex #ABookADayInMay No.30

What a way with titles Mary Essex had! One of Ursula Bloom’s many pennames, she seems to have saved her best titles and best books for when she was writing in Mary Essex mode – though, confusingly, she later used ‘Mary Essex’ to write a series of uninspiring-looking medical romances. ANYway, it was as Mary Essex that she wrote the British Library Women Writers reprint Tea Is So Intoxicating and the brilliantly-named The Amorous Bicycle, as well as books I’ve not been able to find copies of – like Marry To Taste, Domestic Blister, Haircut for Samson, and Eve Didn’t Care.

And naturally I love the title Divorce? Of Course (1945) – a book lent to me by my friend Barbara. The first thing we see is a list of characters, starting with Mr Justice Forrester, Judge. It becomes clear that the list is a bunch of people in a divorce court. The petitioner is Imogen Clark; the respondent is Peter Clark. They have various legal representation and others mentioned.

But the novel starts with Mr Justice Forrester and a domestic matter:

The morning started badly, entirely due to a little altercation on the painful subject of Mr Justice Forrester’s umbrella. Mr. Justice Forrester, having reached that age when faces go melon or nutcracker (his was nutcracker), believed that if he went out without the umbrella, he was not entirely dressed and therefore, to the judicial eye, slightly indecent. His wife, the daughter of a sporting canon, of the hunting, shooting and fishing variety, thought umbrellas were – well, let us draw a veil over that particular word as used by Lady Forrester when very much annoyed.

You can see that Mr JF is not going to simply be a background character. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Mary Essex – that she will always give us humorous and arguably unnecessary details about side characters, which helps build up the world and (more importantly) amuse us. She is very good at little side-swipes and eye rolls.

Imogen and Peter have only been married a short while, but a fight has got out of hand and now they are both trying to divorce each other for deserti0n. One of the lawyers does point out that desertion has to last three years to count, but this is quickly ignored both by the characters and the plot of the novel. It was also a relatively recent addition to divorce law, spearheaded by novelist and MP A.P. Herbert and popularised by his book Holy Deadlock. One of the side characters who hears about the divorce finds it sadly unscandalous:

“Oh!” said Emily, with extreme disappointment, for that really had spoilt it! Emily considered that ever since A.P. Herbert had started messing about with the divorce laws, he had succeeded in making them uncommonly dull, which they had never been before. It was just like Imogen to be aggravating, and get a divorce on something quite harmless, like desertion.

After this set up, we travel back to see a bit of Imogen and Peter’s courtship and hasty wedding. We learn more about their respective parents, and there is plenty of detail to enjoy there – including Peter’s respectable, unaffectionate father and his enjoyably willful mother, and Imogen’s mother who is perennially shocked and shocking. Onwards we go to the scene of their explosive disagreement, which starts when Imogen spends too much on wine for a dinner party – though, as she explains, Peter had asked her to get wine, and hadn’t said how much. Infuriated, he throws an ink pot at her. Subsequent attempts to reconcile from both sides all go amiss, and thus the divorce courts get involved.

In the latter part of Divorce? Of Course, we are back in the divorce court and witness the questioning, cross-examining and so forth. I don’t know how accurate a portrayal of 1940s divorce courts it is, but it is delightful. Among my favourite moments are those where Ivy, a rather unreliable witness as their maid, refuses to repeat some of the words she overhears and has to write them down for the judge. “Oh, I think you might have said that one,” he says at one point.

The plot is thin and the ending predictable, but it’s such fun on the way. Noticeably, for a book published in 1945, the war doesn’t seem to exist and it would have been delicious escapism for her audience. Mary Essex / Ursula Bloom was a really expert middlebrow writer, easily equalling some of the better-known domestic novelists when it comes to verve and wit. Someone should have coached her not to use so many exclamation marks, and there is one character who is unfortunately referred to as a slur for an Italian throughout – those two things aside, I loved spending time in Divorce? Of Course and will keep hunting for more Mary Essex novels.