1910s

Love at Second Sight by Ada Leverson

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Whilst rooting around for a 1916 title for A Century of Books (you should have seen me, scrabbling through my books, opening covers, reading publication details, reshelving huffily) I stumbled upon Love At Second Sight by Ada Leverson.  It’s the third book in The Little Ottleys, of which I have previously read the first – Love’s Shadow – which was rather brilliant.  This is the only time A Century of Books has really rather compromised my reading plans – in that I skipped past the second title in the trilogy (Tenterhooks) straight to the third.  But someone had spoken on The Little Ottleys at a recent conference, and given away the plot, so it wasn’t as calamitous as it could have been.

Look away if you don’t want to know what happened in the first two novels… but they’ve (to be very brief) set up the fairly loveless marriage of Edith and Bruce; Edith falls in love with Aylmer Ross, but will not leave her husband, even when he asks for a divorce himself (having run off with another woman); he comes back to her, and everything settles down into what it had been before – which is to say, an amusing, charming, patient woman, and an exasperating man.  Bruce is best summed up by this wonderful quotation from Love’s Shadow: “He often wrote letters beginning “Sir, I feel it my duty,” to people on subjects that were no earthly concern of his.”  As for the lovely Edith, I’ll hand over to Leverson to describe her.  An author should show and not tell, as a rule, but all these qualities in Edith have been exemplified in previous books, so it is forgiveable that Leverson wants to let us know what a wonder she is, so that we can get on with the show.

She was a slim, fair, pretty woman, with more vividness and character than usually goes with her type.  Like the boy, she had long-lashed grey eyes, and blonde-cendre hair: her mouth and chin were of the Burne-Jones order, and her charm, which was great but unintentional, and generally unconscious, appealed partly to the senses and partly to the intellect.  She was essentially not one of those women who irritate all their own sex by their power (and still more by their fixed determination) to attract men; she was really and unusually indifferent to general admiration.  Still, that she was not a cold woman, not incapable of passionate feeling, was obvious to any physiognomist; the fully curved lips showed her generous and pleasure-loving temperament, while the softly glancing, intelligent, smiling eyes spoke fastidiousness and discrimination.  Her voice was low and soft, with a vibrating sound in it, and she laughed often and easily, being very ready to see and enjoy the amusing side of life.  But observation and emotion alike were instinctively veiled by a quiet, reposeful manner, so that she made herself further popular by appearing retiring.  Edith Ottley might so easily have been the centre of any group, and yet – she was not!  Women were grateful to her, and in return admitted that she was pretty, unaffected and charming.

Love At Second Sight opens with a scream.  The Ottleys’ son Archie has, it seemed, used Madame Frabelle’s mandolin as a cricket bat, and she is not best pleased.  And who might Madame Frabelle be, you ask?  The Ottleys want to ask much the same thing.  Their delightfully forgetful and absent-minded friend Lady Conroy introduced them (although later denied ever having heard of her, and in fact asks for an introduction herself) – and Madame Frabelle arrives for a visit.  Which has lengthened itself into many, many weeks.  She is charming, a great listener, given to understanding people – noticing their subtlest of thoughts, predicting their actions, and invariably being wrong about everything.

Indeed Edith did sincerely regard her opinion as very valuable.  She found her so invariably wrong that she was quite a useful guide. She was never quite sure of her own judgement until Madame Frabelle had contradicted it.
Madame Frabelle is determined that Edith is in love with Mr. Mitchell, another of the Ottleys acquaintances.  What neither Madame Frabelle nor Bruce notice is that Edith is in love – with Aylmer, who has returned from fighting in France with a broken leg.  Edith has to face a quandary – whether or not to leave her husband…

As I say, I haven’t read Tenterhooks, where a similar story takes place, so I can only contrast this with the first book in the trilogy.  In that (again, c.f. my review here), we see a marriage which is irksome and unequal, but in a comic fashion.  All the will-they-won’t-they plot concerns a multitude of other characters, none of whom have stayed in my mind, and the central Ottley marriage is stable, if awful.  Bruce’s absurd lack of self-awareness is hilarious, and his terribleness as a husband is darkly humorous – in Love At Second Sight, more is at stake, and more than a punchline is likely to come out of this incompatible couple.

Which is not to say that the novel isn’t funny.  It is very amusing, especially when Lady Conroy wanders onto the scene.  Ada Leverson was friends with Oscar Wilde, and his influence is apparent – if anything, rather more so than in Love’s Shadow, because she turns to the epigram rather more frequently in Love At Second Sight – par example, ‘she was a woman who was never surprised at anything except the obvious and the inevitable’.  Sometimes this clash of serious storyline and comic prose was a little disconcerting – I thought the balance worked better in Love’s Shadow – but  this is still a wonderful little book.

Of course, what you should do is get the trilogy and read them in order!  I’ll read Tenterhooks one day, and then everything will fall into place properly…

A few little reviews…

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It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books… oops, didn’t work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read – but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I’m going to rush through five of them today – books that, for one reason or another, I didn’t want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man – she has only seen his back – and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan’t give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children’s book felt, despite being a hundred years old – a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I’m not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don’t feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me – I’d always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way – my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I’ve just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now…)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published – but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives in the British Library – so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker’s own penned changes.  It’s pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I’m a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn’t read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It’s a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW’s life.  About halfway through I thought, “this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation.”  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I’ll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that’s five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?

When William Came – Saki

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If I mention the author ‘Saki’, you probably think of darkly funny short stories, if you think of anything at all.  If you were around during the brief spate where lots of bloggers were reading The Unbearable Bassington (which is exceptionally good) then perhaps that comes to mind.  What I have yet to see mentioned is his 1913 novel When William Came, which I have just finished.  The ‘William’ in question is Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and the ‘coming’ is his invasion of Britain.  Although such an invasion never took place, of course, Saki is essentially predicting the First World War – a war in which, in 1916, he would be killed.

If you’ve seen Went The Day Well? – a film based on a Graham Greene story about a similar invasion in the Second World War – then you might expect When William Came to have similar resistance and trauma as its keynotes.  In fact, the invasion is over, and much is continuing as ever before.  A lot of British people have fled to the colonies, but those that remain continue their social whirl with much jollity, only some of which is forced.  Cicely Yeovil is the chief socialite here, determined that a small thing like a new monarch and official language won’t prevent her surrounding herself by beautiful young pianists and gossipy older women.

“My heart ought to be like a singing-bird to-day, I suppose,” said Cicely presently.

“Because your good man is coming home?” asked Ronnie.

Cicely nodded.

“He’s expected some time this afternoon, though I’m rather vague as to which train he arrives by.  Rather a stifling day for railway travelling.”

“And is your heart doing the singing-bird business?” asked Ronnie.

“That depends,” said Cicely, “if I may choose the bird.  A missal-thrush would do, perhaps; it sings loudest in stormy weather, I believe.
Cicely’s husband, Murray Yeovil, is returning from lands afar, having picked up only bits and pieces of the news.  He is rather horrified by the response of those known as the fait accompli – who may have considered resistance, fleetingly, but have instead settled down to dinner parties and modern dance.

I don’t know what it says about me, but I much preferred the goings-on of the fait accompli to the anxieties of the patriotic, militaristic types.  My heart leapt within me whenever Joan Mardle appeared – she is described in one of Saki’s characteristically wonderful, brief descriptive entrances:

She cultivated a jovial, almost joyous manner, with a top-dressing of hearty good-will and good-nature which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances; on getting to know her better they hastily rearmed themselves.
Always knowing what will most wound her acquaintances, but delivering these blows with disingenuous innocence, Joan Mardle would be a terrible friend, but is a wonderful character.  I love any b*tchy exchanges in high social circles – here’s another one I loved:

“I should have put on rubies and orange opals for you.  People with our colour of hair always like barbaric display -”

“They don’t,” said Ronnie, “they have chaste cold tastes.  You are absolutely mistaken.”

“Well, I think I ought to know!” protested the dowager; “I’ve lived longer in the world than you have, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Ronnie with devastating truthfulness, “but my hair has been this colour longer than yours has.”
Ouch!  But this is tempered with much more straight-faced reactions to the invasion and the possibility of Britain regaining its independent feet.  Here, for example, is someone arguing the point with Yeovil:

“Remember all the advantages of isolated position that told in our favour while we had the sea dominion is in other hands.  The enemy would not need to mobilize a single army corps or to bring a single battleship into action; a fleet of nimble cruisers and destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to shut out our food supplies.”
In The Unbearable Bassington, Saki ingeniously balanced the comic and tragic, letting tragedy flow as an undercurrent to comedy until the climax of the novel.  In When William Came, I found the combination of insouciance and politics rather disjointed.  Comedy and tragedy are closely aligned, of course.  Anger and resignation could have worked in the same two-sides-of-the-coin way in When William Came, but the social merry-go-round didn’t really work alongside the militaristic angst.  The competing elements (in a very short novel) felt simply too different, and I ended up being a little disappointed.

Having said that, When William Came is worth reading if only for those parts of it I did love.  Nobody writes a social scene quite as bitingly as Saki, and few authors have his economy of words.  Once you’ve exhausted the short stories and The Unbearable Bassington, this is certainly worth reading, if only because we (sadly) have so little of Saki’s work to read.

Not That It Matters – A.A. Milne

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It’s been about a decade since I blitzed most of A.A. Milne’s very many books, and now I’m enjoying revisiting them.  I thought a trip down Milne Memory Lane would be a handy way to cross off 1919 on A Century of Books, so I picked up his collection of humorous essays from that year, Not That It Matters.

The first piece (although they are not in chronological order) starts ‘Sometimes when the printer is waiting for an article which really should have been sent to him the day before, I sit at my desk and wonder if there is any possible subject in the whole world upon which I can possibly find anything to say.’  (The final line in the book, incidentally, is ‘And Isaiah, we may be sure, did not carry a notebook.’  Which gives you some sense of the wide variety Milne covers in this collection.)

Some of the essays are very indicative of their time – from 1910 to 1919, as the essays appeared during that period in The Sphere, The Outlook, and The Star.  I’m not sure ‘Smoking as a Fine Art’ would appear anywhere today, except as a consciously controversial piece, nor could any 21st century essayist take for granted that his reader went for frequent country houseparties, attended Lords, and had strong memories of the First World War.  On the other hand, many of the topics Milne covers would be equally fit for a columnist today, if we still had the type who were allowed to meander through arbitrary topics, without the need to make a rapier political point or a satirical topical comment.  Milne writes on goldfish, daffodils, writing personal diaries, the charm of lunch, intellectual snobbery, and even what property programme presenters would now call ‘kerb appeal’ – but which was simply ‘looking at the outside of a house’ in Milne’s day.

I love Milne’s early work, because it is so joyful and youthful.  In the sketches and short pieces published in The Day’s Play, The Holiday Round and others, ‘The Rabbits’ often re-appear – these are happy, silly 20-somethings called things like Dahlia and (if me) addressed by their surnames.  They play cricket (badly), golf (badly), and indoor party games (badly) on endless and sunny country holidays.  It’s all deliciously insouciant and, if not quite like A.A. Milne (or anybody) really was, great fun to read.  When Milne turns to essays, he can’t include this cast, of course.  And he was in his late thirties when Not That It Matters was published – still young, perhaps, but hardly youthful.  He was a married man, though not a father quite yet, and his tone had changed slightly – from the exuberance which characterised his earliest books, to the calmly witty and jovial tone which was to see out the rest of his career.  Here’s an example, more or less at random, of the style which makes me always so happy to return to Milne:

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” said Keats, not actually picking out celery in so many words, but plainly including it in the general blessings of the autumn.
My main qualm with these essays is that they do often end in rather a forced manner.  He’ll put in a reference that drags everything back to the opening line, or finishes off pat in a slightly different direction.  It doesn’t feel especially natural, and is perhaps indicative of the looming deadlines Milne mentions in the first essay…

As the title suggests, nothing of life-changing importance is addressed in Not That It Matters.  He does not adopt a serious voice at any point – indeed, I cannot think of a time in any of his books where he becomes entirely serious, not even in Peace With Honour, a non-fiction (and excellent) book wherein he put forth his pacifist views.  Even at these moments his weightiest points are served with a waggle of the eyebrows and an amusing image.  That’s how he made his impact.

I do prefer the whimsy of his fictional sketches to the panache of his essays, but it is still a delight and a joy to have Not That It Matters and its ilk waiting on my shelf.  It definitely bears re-reading, and I’ll be going on a cycle through Milne’s many and various books for the rest of life, I imagine.

Tomorrow I’ll type out a whole of one of his essays, ‘A Household Book’, because I think it’ll surprise quite a few people.  And will show to my brother that I was RIGHT about something I’ve been saying to him for a decade.  Ahem.  The essay is in praise of a then-underappreciated book by a famous author… and ends with this paragraph (come back tomorrow to see what it was!):

Well, of course, you will order the book at once.  But I must give you one word of warning.  When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, still less on the genius of ******* *******.  You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself… You may be worthy; I do not know.  But it is you who are on trial.

Very definitely Gone to Earth

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I don’t give up on books very often, although I do it more now than I would have done before I started blogging.  I still feel a bit ungrateful towards the author, who has put months or years into writing a book, if I can’t be bothered to spend a week on it – but I’m coming round to the too-many-books-too-little-time argument.  (Giving up is distinct from putting it to one side and forgetting about it – it has to be a decisive action.)

When I do give up, it’s usually because I think the writing is too bad, or (occasionally) too confusing.  It’s rarely related to subject matter or character – although if I started a gory crime novel, I’m sure I’d stop reading that pretty smartish.

But I’ve never given up on a novel quite so quickly as I did on Tuesday morning.  Because I now have a 40 minute walk into work, I tend to read a book whilst I’m walking.  (Yes, I’m that guy.  Surprised?)   And I was a page and half – yes, 1.5pp. – into Mary Webb’s Gone To Earth before I concluded that I could not read any further.

I’ve read and re-read, and loved and re-loved, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, but I’ve not read any of the authors she was parodying.  Well, I’ve read some Lawrence and Hardy, and they’re on the peripheries of her satire, but I’ve steered clear of that peculiar vogue for rural novels which seized British literature in the early years of the 20th century.  Here is the opening of Gone To Earth, with my thoughts interpolated:

Small, feckless [oh, wasn’t that one of the cows in Cold Comfort Farm?] clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky [always cross out the adjectives first when editing, love] – shepherdless, futile, imponderable [oh… never mind.] – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears. [oh sweet mercy.]

[So, what have we established?  It was a cloudy day.  Right-o.]

It was cold in the Callow [oh, sorry, we’re not done with the weather – as you were] – a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill.  A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles. [Of course it did.  Purple is a very haunting, hinting colour.  Now, for the love of all that is pure, can we move on?]

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph [anyone else feel we’re wandering into heavy-handed metaphor territory?] – only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

[Is there an editor in the world who wouldn’t have rejected this novel by now?]

For as yet spring had no flight, no song, but went like a half-fledged bird, hopping tentatively through the undergrowth. [To summarise: it’s early March.] The bright springing mercury that carpeted the open spaces had only just hung out its pale flowers, and honeysuckle leaves were still tongues of fire.  [I think you’ve made your point, Mary.] Between the larch boles [oh good, more boles] and under the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb [can one wear a beautiful eye?], a brilliance of tint, that few women could have worn without self-consciousness.  Clear-eyed, lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight – a year-old fox, round-headed and velvet-footed.  Then it slid into the shadows.  [A sentence without adjectives or adverbs!  Mary, my dear, are you feeling quite yourself?] A shrill whistle came from the interior of the wood, and the fox bounded towards it.

“Where you bin? [oh, Heaven preserve us.]  You’m stray and lose yourself, certain sure!” [“certain sure?”  REALLY?] said a girl’s voice [or, indeed, ‘said a girl‘], chidingly motherly.  “And if you’m alost [oh no…], I’m alost; so come you whome. [no, ‘whome’ isn’t a typo.  In case you were wondering.  I wish it were.]  The sun’s undering [I wonder if Mary Webb had ever spoken to someone from the countryside?], and there’s bones for supper!” [YUM.]

[I finished off the dialogue spoken by the girl’s voice, but – truth be told – it was at that ‘You’m’ that I made my decision not to read on.  Isn’t this simply everything appalling you ever thought the rural novel might be?  Perhaps it gets better, perhaps I am doing Ms. Webb an injustice.  I, for one, certainly shan’t be finding out.]

 

 

Zella Sees Herself – E.M. Delafield

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This is one of those posts where I’m going to tell you about a book which is impossible to find… so, should this make you desperate to read it, head to your local academic library!  The book in question is Zella Sees Herself (1917) by E.M. Delafield, her first novel (written when she was my age, actually), kindly lent to me by EMD-enthusiast Marie.  Since it can’t be bought for love nor money, I’ll keep my post pretty brief…  Oh, and this is the first 1910s book I’ve read for A Century of Books.

Zella Sees Herself follows Zella de Kervoyou from childhood to early adulthood.  It is what would now be called a coming-of-age novel, yet she comes of age so gradually, and through such shifting stages of maturity, that the term probably doesn’t quite fit.  Her first cause for change comes in the first pages, as her mother dies and she is shipped off to live with relatives.  Indeed, she relocates a few times – my favourite of the various relatives she encounters is Aunt Marianne, one of those incredibly un-self-aware women who prefix tired truisms with “As I always say —” and imagines that everybody has said precisely what she wishes them to say, so she can disregard what they actually think.  (When I say favourite I do, of course, mean favourite to read – not favourite to love.)

We follow Zella through her time at a convent, where she eventually decides to become a nun – and her speedy renunciation of this desire upon leaving the convent.  There is a quick dalliance with society, and finally the need to decide whether or not to accept the first man who proposes to her, unsure of her own feelings.

I’ve whipped through the plot because it is all fairly standard stuff, both for the period and for Delafield herself.  Apparently it was partly autobiographical.  First novels are always fascinating to read, especially when the first was not the best.  Some authors (Edith Olivier, David Garnett) never live up to their first effort; others go on to much greater feats.  Delafield is in the latter camp, which makes it all the more interesting to spot areas in which she would later develop.  There are plenty of hallmarks of Delafield’s later novels – both in theme and style.  Covents crop up a lot in her work, as does the uncertain hunt for a husband.  Aunt Marianne even quotes the title to one of Delafield’s later novels:

Aunt Marianne vanished, but reappeared next moment at the door in order to add, in a slightly Scriptural tone which she would not have employed had she been aware that she was quoting no more sacred authority than the poet Shakespeare:

“Remember, Zella, that one is expressly told to go down upon one’s knees and thank Heaven fasting for a good man’s love.”
Ten points if you spotted it, and another ten if you can name the Shakespeare play from which it derives.

More importantly than these sorts of things, there are elements of Delafield’s style which are beginning to bud.  You can already see plenty of signs of her dryness, irony, and the pleasure she gets in sending up those who have no self-awareness.  As the title wryly suggests, Zella cannot, in fact, see herself.  It’s a theme which is repeated throughout Delafield’s work, used both comically and tragically.  In Zella Sees Herself there is both.  Aunt Marianne is one amongst many who is self-deluded.  Another is Alison St. Craye, a few years older than Zella and a would-be intellectual.  In her case, Delafield uses self-delusion for comedy.  Here’s an example I noted more or less at random:

The debate proved tedious.

A nervous-looking girl in black was voted into the chair, and made a preliminary speech which began and ended with a stammering sentence to the effect that everyone must agree, whatever their individual view of the matter, that the subject of Reincarnation was a very interesting one.

“Hear! hear!”

Alison’s speech was a lengthy one.  Her delivery was slow and over-emphatic; she spoke kindly of Christianity and its doctrines.

Most of the speakers had some personal example, that bore more or less upon the subject, to relate.  One or two adduced strange phenomena experienced by themselves, and a young married woman recounted at some length vivid recollections of ancient Carthage that obsessed her.

Alison shook her head slowly from side to side, with contemptuous disapproval, or nodded it slowly up and down with contemptuous approval.  Lady St. Craye looked interested, and gently clapped each speaker.

Zella thought that she could have made a far more striking and original speech than any of them, but knew herself well enough to be aware that, if she were suddenly called upon to speak, her self-confidence would leave her, and leave her helpless.
For Zella, a lack of self-awareness – and, still more, the pain of dawning self-awareness – is more tragic than comic.  Delafield herself was still young (twenty-six – as I said, my age) and had yet entirely to shake off the earnestness of the youthful author.  Perhaps she never entirely lost it, nor is there any real reason why she should, but I prefer her in poking-fun mode than in exclamatory mode.

For a first novel, this is exceptionally good.  I don’t believe E.M. Delafield was capable of writing a bad novel.  In comparison to later efforts, it clearly falls a bit short – but is incredibly interesting in terms of putting another piece in the jigsaw of EMD’s writing career, and I’m delighted that Marie gave me the chance to read it.

One other person got Stuck into this Book!

“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” – Tanya, 20th Century Vox

Living Alone by Stella Benson

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You’re probably quite used, by now, to my taste for odd books.  My doctoral research into fantastic novels has disproportionately weighted my blog towards ladies turning into foxes, imaginary children coming to life, old ladies being invented by accident etc.  So perhaps you’ll forgive me if another title hoves into view, which somebody mentioned to me in relation to Lolly Willowes, since it’s also about witches.  Living Alone (1919) by Stella Benson, as the post title suggests, is that book.  Before I get any further, I should mention that it is free on Kindle…

For those of you who live in the UK you, like me, might be vaguely familiar with Stella Benson’s name.  I seem to have stumbled across it time and again in secondhand books – usually espying the ‘Benson’ bit, getting excited thinking it was ‘E.F.’, and realising it wasn’t.  For some reason I put Stella Benson in the category of Marie Corelli or Ethel M. Dell – prolific writers who were rather sub-par.  I bought Living Alone as a Dodo Press reprint (original editions being prohibitively expensive) but had no high expectations.  Turns out, while Living Alone ended up being a little too weird for my tastes, Stella Benson is neither a poor writer nor an especially prolific one.  According to a rather scattergun Wikipedia page, she only wrote a dozen or so books – including poetry, short stories, and travel essays alongside novels.

Living Alone was her third novel, and is set during the First World War, although published shortly afterwards.  A note at the beginning states ‘This is not a real book.  It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people.’  That should have set me up for the oddness which follows, but the first section of the book (easily my favourite part) is in the very real, very recognisable world of committees (in this case, one for War Savings).  The assembled characters include, indeed, ‘Three of the women were of the kind that has no life apart from committees.’  They’re the sort of people that E.M. Delafield is so funny about – people who take themselves incredibly seriously, and are unable to see themselves as others see them.  Rather than the insipid romantic drivel I had somehow associated with Stella Benson’s name, her prose is delightfully dry and witty – I would happily have read a whole novel devoted to the committee meeting.  But… a Stranger runs in, and hides under the table.

To anybody except a member of a committee it would have been obvious that the Stranger was of the Cinderella type, and bound to turn out a heroine sooner or later. But perception goes out of committees. The more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of committees you might as well be dead.

The Stranger turns out to be… a witch.  She doesn’t seem to have a name (although this wonderful exchange does take place:)

She grew very red.  “I say, I should be awfully pleased if you would call me Angela.”


It wasn’t her name, but she had noticed that something of this sort is always said when people become motherly and cry.
‘Angela’ lives in a house called Living Alone, a sort of guest-house for eccentrics and those of a reclusive bent.  It is thus perfect for witches.  And it has all manner of curious rules – for example:

Carpets, rugs, mirrors, and any single garment costing more than three guineas, are prohibited.  Any guest proved to have made use of a taxi, or to have travelled anywhere first class, or to have bought cigarettes or sweets costing more than three shillings a hundred or eighteenpence a pound respectively, or to have paid more than three and sixpence (war-tax included) for a seat in any place of entertainment, will be instantly expelled.  Dogs, cats, goldfish, and other superhuman companions are encouraged.

She has a broomstick called Harold, and flies about on this.  At one point she has a battle with a German witch during an air raid.  There isn’t much of a linear plot, and it’s all rather a jumble of mad characters and curiosities.  Some are too unusual to inhabit your average novel (such as another inhabitant of Living Alone, Peony, who speaks with a thick Cockney accent, mostly about a boy she once found in the street) but others would feel at home in Delafield or von Arnim or even Stella’s namesake E.F. Benson.  (Were they related?  I don’t know… but Stella’s aunt was Red Pottage author Mary Cholmondeley).  Lady Arabel (who ‘was virtuous to the same extent as Achilles was invulnerable’) is one such character – she would fit alongside any agitated, eccentric Lady anywhere.

I wish I could explain the narrative to you, but it dash all over the place without any real logic.  The overall impression is more or less surreal.  Certain paragraphs give a sense of this surrealism – for example, this family group observed in an air raid shelter:

It was a group whose relationships were difficult to make out, the ages of many of the children being unnaturally approximate.  There seemed to be at least seven children under three years old, and yet they all bore a strong and regrettable family likeness.  Several of the babies would hardly have been given credit for having reached walking age, yet none had been carried in.  The woman who seemed to imagine herself the mother of this rabble was distributing what looked like hurried final words of advice.  The father with a pensive eye was obviously trying to remember their names, and at intervals whispering to a man apparently twenty years his senior, whom he addressed as Sonny.  It was all very confusing.

Although I loved excerpts like this, I think it offers the key to my ultimate dissatisfaction with Living Alone.  I think novelists are most successful (or at least most pleasing to me!) when they chose either to write of ordinary life in a surreal way (Barbara Comyns, Muriel Spark, Patrick Hamilton) or of surreal events in an ordinary way (my oft-cited Pantheon of Edith Olivier, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Frank Baker, David Garnett.)  By writing of the surreal surreally, Stella Benson makes Living Alone feel rather overdone.  I felt the same with the small amount I read of Douglas Adams, incidentally.  I loved the unbalanced dialogue and exaggerated scenarios when feet were otherwise firmly on the ground – while we were in the world of WW1 committees – but as soon as broomsticks were given names, I wanted the dial turned down.  The writing was still good, but I was getting altitude sickness myself.  (A rather more positive review, and one which seemed to understand the plot better than I did, can be read here.)

I do not mean to say, as one reviewer of Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child did, that I wish her to:

a brilliant future might be predicted for her if it were not for the consideration that the thing is a tour de force, and that it has yet to be discovered what she can do when dealing with lives lived out soberly under the light of the sun and not with a world of fantasy.

I do not wish her narrative to be sober.  I want it to be eccentric and unusual, but I do want it to be outside the world of fantasy.  Lucky for me, it seems Living Alone was a one-off, in terms of topic.  There are plenty of others out there that might well fulfil what I’m hoping to find, and I certainly shan’t leave Stella on the shelf next time I stumble across her… have any of you read anything by Stella Benson?

(If you’re finding comments difficult to process, I’ve been told that Comment Verification letters aren’t displaying properly – click ‘submit’ and they should appear the second time.)

Other books to get Stuck into:

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner – mentioned a couple times above, this 1920s novel about a spinster becoming a witch is never over the top, and, even without the twist, is an exceptionally good domestic novel.


The War Workers by E.M. Delafield – nothing fantastic about this, except the quality!  If talk of WW1 self-important committees got you interested, this satirical novel is perfect.

Christopher and Columbus by Elizabeth von Arnim

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37. Christopher and Columbus by Elizabeth von Arnim

I am very grateful to Erica Brown for giving a paper on Elizabeth von Arnim’s excellent novel Christopher and Columbus (1919) at the conference I attended recently, as it was the incentive I needed to read it.  Not that I needed a lot of incentive – I loved both The Enchanted April and The Caravaners, as clicking on those titles will attest.  The former was very sweet, almost sentimental, in its depiction of the changing powers of a beautiful place; the latter was a bitingly ironic first-person account of an unpleasant, war-mongering German on a caravanning trip in England.  It would be difficult to think of two more different novels coming from the same author, and I wondered where my third von Arnim experience could possibly take me.  As it turned out, right in between the two – Christopher and Columbus is often very cynical, in an incredibly funny way, and yet also very endearing.  And it has twins in it.  So obviously it goes straight onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.  (We’re getting quite close to the end now, aren’t we?)  Prepare yourself for a fairly long review, since I got carried away… 

Christopher and Columbus are, in fact, nineteen year-old twins Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas von Twinkler.  I’ll have to forgive their mother for giving her twins essentially the same name, because she is dead – as the novel begins, these half-German, half-English girls are living with their abhorrant Uncle Arthur and long-suffering Aunt Alice, and war breaks out.  Uncle Arthur can’t stand opening his house up to enemy aliens (even if they are his wife’s relations) and so packs them off on a boat to America, neutral in 1916 when this is set.  They don’t really see themselves as German, as they explain to Mr. Twist, an adorable young man they meet on the boat – and the rich inventor of Twist’s Non-Trickling Teapot.

Anna-Rose watched his face. “It [our surname] isn’t only Twinkler,” she said, speaking very distinctly.  “It’s von Twinkler.”

That’s German,” said Mr. Twist; but his face remained serene.

“Yes. And so are we. That is, we would be if it didn’t happen that we weren’t.”

“I don’t think I quite follow,” said Mr. Twist.

“It is very difficult,” agreed Anna-Rose. “You see, we used to have a German father.”

“But only because our mother married him,” explained Anna-Felicitas. “Else we wouldn’t have.”

“And though she only did it once,” said Anna-Rose, “ages ago, it has dogged our footsteps ever since.”

The most delicious thing about this novel (and it is a very delicious novel) is undoubtedly the twins’ dialogue.  It’s such a delight to read.  I don’t quite know how to describe it – maybe as though it had been translated into German and back again?  But not just that, they both have such a captivatingly unusual outlook on life.  Their logic swirls in circles which dizzy the listener; their conversations would feel at home at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – and yet they are lovely, kind, fundamentally good people – and without being remotely irritating.

Those of you who’ve been reading Stuck-in-a-Book for a while will know I like twin novels – but I also like to judge ’em.  The cardinal sins of putting twins in a book are (a) making them exactly like each other, (b) making them exact opposites of each other, and (c) having them ever be surprised at the fact that they are twins.  You’d be surprised yourself at how often the third of these happens – as though being a twin weren’t something completely ingrained in the characters, and they happened to forget that they looked like their sibling etc.  Personally, I find the idea of not being a twin incredibly weird.  Your sibling doesn’t share your birthday?  Didn’t start school when you did, or have the same bedtime and pocket money?  Very strange. (!)

Sorry, sidetracked.  As I was saying, Elizabeth von Arnim was being put the test – and passed with flying colours.  Well, nearly.  I got irritated by them dressing the same as each other at the age of nineteen (THIS WOULD NOT HAPPEN), but we’ll let that slide.  They are very believable as twins – wrapped up in each other’s worlds, but with their own personalities.  While Mr. Twist may think of them ‘as one person called, generally, Twinklers’, this is not how they see themselves.  Anna-Rose is a little more sensible and also more sensitive; Anna-Felicitas is dreamy and other-worldly and yet often the most tenacious when it comes to arguing a point.  They make such a wonderful duo, and carry the heart of Christopher and Columbus – even if the rest of the novel had been drab and dull (which it is not) they alone would make it a worthwhile vibrant read.

For the majority of the novel they are being hurried from pillar to post.  The ocean voyage takes up a lot of the narrative, as they meet their fellow-passengers pleasant and unpleasant, and most significantly Mr. Twist, who (by the end of the journey) considers them akin to sisters.  Whether or not the good people of 1916 America will share this outlook is more open to debate – he has a particularly tricky time in Clark, at the home of his self-delusional, tyrannical mother and put-upon sister.  Elizabeth von Arnim’s portrait of small-town life hasn’t dated much in a hundred years (although I still love small towns and villages):

It was the habit of Clark to believe the worst.  Clark was very small, and therefore also very virtuous.  Each inhabitant was the careful guardian of his neighbour’s conduct.  Nobody there ever did anything that was wrong; there wasn’t a chance.  But as Nature insists on a balance, the minds of Clark dwelt curiously on evil.  They were minds active in suspicion.  They leapt with an instantaneous agility at the worst conclusions.  Nothing was ever said in Clark, but everything was thought.

But before they arrive in Clark they travel all over America, bad luck meeting them at every turn.  While von Arnim relies heavily on coincidence for the events of this section of the novel (including a very amusing section where a taxi-driver thinks the Annas are dressed for a funeral, when they have no knowledge that their host is dead) it’s all done so endearingly that it doesn’t matter.

Part of the amusement comes from the girls’ unfamiliarity with the brave new not-really-so-neutral world they have entered.  They are not accustomed to the American practice of tipping, nor the absence of afternoon tea, as is evinced after they have been instructed in the art of the former by an insolent hotel employee:

“He might have said thank you,” she said indignantly to Anna-Felicitas, giving a final desperate brushing to the sulphur.

“I expect he’ll come to a bad end,” said Anna-Felicitas soothingly.

They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing such a thing, a solitary cluster in a wilderness of empty tables laid for dinner. It wasn’t the custom much in America, explained Mr. Twist, to have tea, and no preparations were made for it in hotels of that sort. The very waiters, feeling it was a meal to be discouraged, were showing their detachment from it by sitting in a corner oof the room playing dominoes.

It is, in fact, the lack of afternoon tea which spurs them on to their next project.  And, frankly, I can think of no better reason for doing anything.  They decide to set up a tea room called The Open Arms, specialising in expensive afternoon teas.  I shan’t tell you any more of the plot, because there is plenty in the 500 pages to discover for yourself (including an ending which I felt did let down the tone a little), but I did want to mention The Open Arms as a means of introducing you to Mrs. Bilton.  She is the cook hired, ostensibly to cook, but mostly to lend an air of respectability to the endeavour.  Mrs. Bilton is a hilarious creation.  She does nothing but talk.  No interruptions – save screaming in her face – have the least effect on her.  Mrs. Bilton is every talkative older lady you have ever known, multiplied by a thousand.  Mostly she talks about herself, her thoughts, and the varying state of her psyche.

The twins were profoundly bored by her psyche, chiefly because they didn’t know what part of her it was, and it was no use asking for she didn’t answer; but they listened with real interest to her concrete experiences, and especially to the experiences connected with Mr. Bilton.  They particularly wished to ask questions about Mr. Bilton, and find out what he had thought of things.  Mrs. Bilton was lavish in her details of what she had thought herself, but Mr. Bilton’s thoughts remained impenetrable.  It seemed to the twins that he must have thought a lot, and have come to the conclusion that there was much to be said for death.

Oh, how I love E von A’s turn of phrase, which slips so quickly from the merely ironic to the ever so slightly biting.  It is this stream of cynicism which prevents the general ebullience of the twins from ever becoming wearing, and which makes the novel so wonderful.  She really is a brilliant writer, and has been underappreciated – she seems to be remembered (if she as remembered at all) chiefly as a whimsical, fey writer.  But like Austen, her tongue can be as sharp as it is charming.

I’m taking a bit of a risk, putting Christopher and Columbus on my 50 Books list when there are so many other E von A titles I’ve yet to encounter.  Perhaps I will end up preferring one of her others, but I will still believe that this particular novel has been unjustly neglected and want to do my best to create fanfare for it.  I promise you’ll be enchanted by Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas, and probably repeat fragments of their dialogue aloud to anyone who will listen.

And now I turn over to you – which E von A ought I to read next?

Things to get Stuck into:

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough (1942) – I haven’t blogged about this, because I borrowed it and had to return it, but it’s absolutely wonderful as an accompaniment – serendipitously, I read it immediately after the E von A novel.  It’s non-fiction, about a 1920s trip around Europe by two excited, somewhat green American girls.  The transcontinental trip is thus the other way round, but their experiences are equally amusing and eye-opening.  This book is an absolute scream, and would also be loved by fans of the Provincial Lady.

The Unbearable Bassington – Saki

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One of my favourite things about the blogosphere is when lots of people start reading the same neglected author at the same time. I’ve seen it happen with Shirley Jackson, Barbara Comyns, and of course Persephone favourites Dorothy Whipple, Marghanita Laski etc. It’s even more wonderful when it’s a complete coincidence – I had just finished reading The Unbearable Bassington (1912) by Saki, when Hayley posted her review of it here. We even have identical battered Penguin copies. Actually, hers is much less battered than mine… Hayley and I belong to the same online reading group, and our united praise of the novel has sparked off everyone there dusting off their Complete Saki collections, or buying themselves copies. I had seen a cheap Penguin in my local secondhand bookshop, and offered it up for grabs – Elaine (aka Random Jottings) leapt at the chance, kindly reciprocating with E.F. Benson’s The Luck of the Vails – and she has already posted her thoughts here. (I’ve just spotted, as I edit this post, that Lyn’s review has popped up too!) Cut a long story short, we all thought it was great.


And now to cut a short story long. I have loved Saki ever since I stole my parents’ copy of his complete works. (Er, sorry Mum and Dad… did I ever return it?) His short stories are wonderfully sharp, biting and a little macabre at times – but always hilarious. You can read a couple of them on here, if you select Saki from the drop-down author menu in the left-hand column. So I turned to The Unbearable Bassington expecting more of the same… well, there is certainly a lot of one-liners, the litotes which British authors do so well, and a sort of Wildean humour. I liked this line: “As far as remunerative achievement was concerned, Comus copied the insouciance of the field lily with a dangerous fidelity.” (If the Biblical allusion passes you by, click here.) Even the epigraph could have been penned by our Oscar: ‘This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.’ And Comus Bassington could have stepped out of one of Wilde’s works – he is a feckless, money-wasting burden upon his mother Francesca. He absently intends to marry heiress Elaine, but puts no effort into wooing her. Instead, he borrows money from her to waste, and generally lives a hedonistic, slightly sadistic, life. Here he is:
In appearance he exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name. His large green-grey eyes seemed for ever asparkle with goblin mischief and the joy of revelry, and the curved lips might have been those of some wickedly-laughing faun; one almost expected to see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark hair. The chin was firm, but one looked in vain for a redeeming touch of ill-temper in the handsome, half-mocking, half-petulant face. With a strain of sourness in him Comus might have been leavened into something creative and masterful; fate had fashioned him with a certain whimsical charm, and left him all unequipped for the greater purposes of life. Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable character, but in many respects he was adorable; in all respects he was certainly damned.

Francesca is no saint, though. A really interesting discussion could be had as to which Bassington is most appropriately given the epithet ‘unbearable’. Francesca (“if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room”) is dominant on the social scene, which means we see her fierce (but genteel) fighting with everyone else, put-downs delivered with a smile, and constant battling to stay on top (and solvent). Saki’s eye for the viciousness of social interaction is matched only by E.F. Benson’s, and Saki does less to cloak it. It’s all rounded-off with delicious humour, of course, but there’s no getting away from the fact that mother and son are equally selfish – although they care for each other, in a disguised and distorted manner. Here is Francesca’s oh-so-empathetic thoughts about her brother:
In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for limber was limited. Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so frequent in family life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money and a sense of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even its parents could consider worth repeating.

Saki continues in a similar vein for much of the novel, and it is delicious. Lots of social cattiness and social failure, awkwardness when nemeses are sat together at dinner, that sort of thing. If it did not have the bite of his short stories, or quite their brilliance, then it was still certainly very good – the sort of thing a Mapp & Lucia fan would want to read when they’re at their most spiky.

I thought I had a firm grasp on what Saki was doing, and I was enjoying it a lot, until I came to the final chapter. Oh, that final chapter. I shan’t tell you the catalyst, but it is some of the best and saddest writing I have ever read. So, so brilliantly done – not a word overwritten, and not a false emotion. Stunning. At first it felt like it had come out of nowhere, completely out of kilter with the rest of the novel – but it actually had the effect of unveiling my eyes to the rest of The Unbearable Bassington: suddenly I could see that laughter and weeping, joy and sadness, had danced together throughout the whole narrative. Laughter was resolutely winning most of the way – but when it slipped, and weeping rode higher, it was really only the undercurrent of the novel flooding into view.

The Unbearable Bassington really is the most incredible little book. I think I still prefer his exemplary short stories, for their quick and witty impact, but The Unbearable Bassington is spectacular in a different way. Capuchin have recently republished it, and I’m glad that someone has – this is a novel which shouldn’t be neglected, and here’s hoping that the recent spate of reviews across the blogs will encourage a mini Saki-revival…

Howards End by E.M. Forster

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I wrote quite a lot last year about being Third Time Lucky with Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh – after not loving a couple of their novels, I was bowled over by the third I read. Well, ladies and gents, it’s happened again! This time, courtesy of Mr. E.M. Forster. I admired, but didn’t particularly relish reading, A Room With A View and A Passage to India. Both were obviously well written books, but neither quite worked for me, and I found them more of a chore than a pleasure. A reliable friend told me that she’d felt the same way about those novels, but loved Howards End – I couldn’t make myself read it unaided, so persuaded my book group to read alongside me. Plus, having loudly proclaimed my love for Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, it seemed only right that I read the novel which inspired the title.


Well, thank you Sarah for telling me to persevere – I loved Howards End. In outline (and not giving away the huge plot points that my blurb does – BAD Penguin Classics) the novel is about the interaction of the Schlegel and Wilcox families. Impetuous Helen Schlegel and her more cautious, sophisticated (but often equally romantic – in the original sense of the word) sister Margaret first encounter the Wilcoxes on holiday somewhere, I think, but the action of the novel starts as Helen is staying with the Wilcoxes at Howards End. Within a few pages she has written to Margaret to announce herself engaged to Paul Wilcox – by the time their aunt has arrived on the scene, the engagement has been called off, but not before all manner of amusing confusion has taken place – and enough happened to make the families wish to avoid each other in perpetuity.

Naturally, this is not to be. The Schlegels and the Wilcoxes find themselves living opposite one another, and engaging in the same society. The romance between Helen and Paul is quickly put in the background, and their paths cross in all manner of other ways – during which we learn more about all the characters, including Paul’s father Henry Wilcox. Although at one point he is described as having ‘imperishable charm’, in general he is one of the more loathsome characters I’ve ever found within the pages of literature. The sort of man who favours logic over people, and is always able to argue himself rationally out of the most uncaring or selfish actions. Such a frustrating figure – and drawn so well by Forster – since it is almost impossible to fault his arguments, even while everything in you knows they are wrong. Eugh, he is truly horrible.

Woven throughout the novel are Leonard Bast and his, ahem, fiance Jacky. Leonard is a lowly clerk with cultured aspirations; Jacky is somewhat lowlier, and utterly without aspirations of the cultural variety. His life crosses with the Schelegels when Helen accidentally swipes his umbrella at a concert (‘”I do nothing but steal umbrellas! […] What about this umbrella?” She opened it. “No, it’s all gone along the seams. It’s an appalling umbrella. It must be mine.” But it was not.’) Forster is not so crude as to have stock figures, but it can still be said that Bast represents the lower-middle-classes. He is intelligent, and yearns after the outward signs of it; the Schlegels, on the other hand, see his natural affinity for beauty – and hate any affected attempt he makes to cloak himself in learning. The clash of these sensibilities leads to some wonderful exchanges, including (overblown analysis alert) two of the best pages of writing I can remember reading. Jacky – only a rung or two above the oldest profession in the world – gets it into her jealous head that Leonard is with the Schlegels and turns up on their doorstep. At this point they have forgotten who he is, and Helen reports back her conversation with Jacky. That is the genius of the section – which the (otherwise admirable) film misses. What makes it brilliant is that we don’t see Jacky’s explosive accusations – only Helen’s account of them, which reveal both her snobbery and her self-awareness;

“Annie opens the door like a fool, and shows a female straight in on me, with my mouth open. Then we began – very civilly. ‘I want my husband, what I have reason to believe is here.’ No – how unjust one is. She said ‘whom’, not ‘what’. She got it perfectly. So I said, ‘Name, please?’ and she said, ‘Lan, Miss,’ and there we were.”
and
“We chatted pleasantly a little about husbands, and I wondered where hers was too, and advised her to go to the police. She thanked me. We agreed that Mr. Lanoline’s a notty, notty man, and hasn’t no business to go on the lardy-da.”

There’s something about indirect, reported speech that always has the potential to be hilarious…

To reveal the further entanglements of these characters and families would be to reveal too much. They do not – can never – escape one another, though, and their idealistic differences become increasingly difficult to overcome. Characters are rarely in opposition to each other – Forster’s brushstrokes are not that broad. Rather, he creates realistic characters whose opinions sometimes change; whose values are not always sturdy or practicable, and who do not always say exactly what they mean, or what they wish to say.
Lest this all sounds terribly worthy, I should reiterate that Howards End is also really funny – mostly humour derived from the foibles of class and the society. To pick one amusing sentence: ‘He did not kiss her, for the hour was half past twelve, and the car was passing by the stables of Buckingham Palace.’

What makes Howards End so good, in my opinion, is the melee of the characters – and the directions in which their conversations go. So often exchanges take unexpected turns – steering away from novelistic cliche. In doing so, Forster is endlessly perceptive about how people do interact. If, occasionally, he gets a little bogged down in political or societal arguments (‘Only connect’, and suchlike) it must be conceded that these suit his characters, and (unlike some of them) he always puts people ahead of these ideas and ideals. There is much beauty in the way he writes, and endless attention to detail. This is picked more or less at random, but I thought it a lovely paragraph – adding nothing to the plot, but everything to the pleasure of reading the novel:

They drew up opposite a draper’s. Without replying, he turned round in his seat, and contemplated the cloud of dust that they had raised in their passage through the village. It was settling again, but not all into the road from which he had taken it. Some of it had percolated through the open windows, some had whitened the roses and gooseberries of the wayside gardens, while a certain proportion had entered the lungs of the villagers. “I wonder when they’ll learn wisdom and tar the roads,” was his comment. Then a man ran out of the draper’s with a roll of oilcloth, and off they went again.

Throughout most of the novel, Howards End itself remains elusive. We see it at the beginning; we are teased with another visit, where Margaret makes it only as far as the railway station. Like the lighthouse in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, Howards End represents something to be reached and attained, rather than a constant physical presence in the novel. It flits in and out of the novel’s pages, offering something which it eventually completely subverts.

Perhaps I loved it because Forster had his characters on home turf, rather than acting as tourists? I find novels set abroad (unless they’re written by someone from that country) tend to become travel guides, and those are very much not my cup of tea. Or perhaps Howards End is simply more astute and, well, better? I don’t know. I’m just glad that I continued to try Forster – and grateful that he wrote a novel so beautifully and perceptively.

I’d love to hear from any of you who’ve read this, and how you think it compares to other Forster novels. I’d especially like to hear from you if you’ve read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – a reworking of Howards End, I believe – to know whether or not it’s worth bothering with?