1920s

Paying Guests by E.F. Benson – #1929Club

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I suspect E.F. Benson is like toffee – a little is a total delight, but you wouldn’t want to have too many in a row. It’s been a few years since I last picked up an EFB, and so I absolutely loved heading to Paying Guests for the 1929 Club.

Though the novel is called Paying Guests, the people in this book are very much living in a boarding house. ‘Paying guests’ or ‘PGs’ was a polite fiction that people used in the period to make the arrangement seem more genteel – often it would be just one or two people staying as paying guests in the home of people they knew, at least tangentially. Here, the residents are a mix of long- and short-term, mostly longer, and they aren’t likely to go anywhere any time soon.

The boarding house is run by two widowed sisters, one quite fluttery and inclined to panic, the other less invested and more inclined to enjoy seeing the worst in people. Their residents include retired Colonel Chase who nightly shares his triumphs in walking or cycling; Mr Kemp the hypochondriac and his daughter Florence who is permitted no will of her own; Miss Howard the amateur artist and musician who performs ‘improvisations’ that she has practised for many hours beforehand; Miss Bliss who is at Dolton Spa to take the waters but insists that Mind will heal her – and a handful of others, less prominent.

Like a lot of Benson novels, the joy mostly comes from the combination of people who have nothing to do but gossip about each other and try to come out top in a relatively amiable, never-ending tussle for dignity. Some have their eyes on something outside of this community – marriage, perhaps – but most have resigned themselves to staying exactly where they are. Or perhaps ‘resigned’ is not the right word – they are perfectly content with their minor gripes, antipathies, observations. It could be a much sadder novel if you didn’t suspect that most of the characters wouldn’t change a thing.

The biggest plot point in Paying Guests is probably Miss Howard’s exhibition of her paintings. Which is described with Benson’s typically merciless observation of the way a certain sort of person speaks:

“Are you going into town?”

“Yes. I’ve got to see about my little pickies being framed. Just fancy! I’m going to hold a little teeny picture-exhibition of some of my rubbishy sketches. So rash! But nobody would give me peace until I promised to.

This was approximately though not precisely true: Miss Howard had told the group in the lounge that Mrs Bowen had said that everyone was longing for her to do so, and the group in the lounge had all said “Oh, you must!” again and again and again. She had to yield.

“So frightened about it,” said Miss Howard, “I shall certainly leave Bolton the day before it opens, so as not to hear all the unkind things you say about it.”

The fate of this exhibition is probably the highest stakes in Paying Guests, and I did find it as compelling as much more dramatic plots in other novels.

The other element of the book I really loved was Miss Bliss and her Mind. Benson doesn’t use the term Christian Scientist, but she is certainly something of that ilk – trying to persuade everybody that their illnesses are illusory, and that even lost objects can be found with sufficient application to Mind. She herself is clearly severely unwell, but finds plenty of excuses to explain this away. Again, in another novelist’s hands this could have been desperately sad – but, in Benson’s, it is deeply funny.

I still have a few other 1929 titles on the go, but I think this is going to be my favourite 1929 Club read. Sheer fun.

 

No Love by David Garnett #1929Club

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Considering I wrote about David Garnett substantially in my doctorate thesis, it is a bit embarrassing how few of his novels I’ve read. In my defence, I wrote about his first books (Lady Into Fox and The Man in the Zoo), so his later books were less relevant – but I must have bought No Love more than ten years ago and had it waiting on my shelves. (The picture above is borrowed from Barb’s review.)

Garnett was particularly prolific in the 1920s, after his bestselling 1922 debut, and he’d already written another six or seven books by the time No Love came out in 1929. It helps that all his early books are so short. This one starts with an arresting line…

When in 1885 Roger Lydiate, the second son of the Bishop of Warrington, and himself a young curate, became engaged to Miss Cross, the marriage was looked on with almost universal disapprobation.

Roger and Alice are on honeymoon in the south of England when they head out by boat to Tinder Island – a location that I think is made up, though it might be a real place with a new name.

“Let us land here,” said Alice, and she was not disappointed when they found themselves wandering through an immense orchard of flowering plum trees. The petals were falling, and when the young people passed out of the first orchard into the one beyond it, they would have seemed to our eyes like a newly wedded couple standing on the church steps, though the thought did not come to them, since confetti was not used in England in the eighties.

It doesn’t take long for them to decide to live there, and Garnett writes (at this stage of No Love) with a sort of fairy tale tone that makes spontaneous, life-changing decisions feel par for the course. The practicalities of being the only inhabitants of an island are dealt with, but rather swiftly. A little work on the land and they are good to go in Tinder Hall – the island’s only, ancient house. They have a daughter, Mabel, and five years later a son called Benedict.

But before long they need more money – and so they sell a section to Captain Keltie, who is much wealthier, after he and his wife fall in love with the island after a serendipitous visit. They build an enormous faux-Elizabethan house.

From the first its size had alarmed the Lydiates; it was its size indeed which had led Roger to fear that it might ultimately be meant to serve as a training college for Dr Barnado’s boys. The house was far larger than seemed reasonable for a family of three. On the ground floor there were hall, dining-room, drawing-room, morning-room, library, billiard-room, conservatory, kitchen and offices; whilst upstairs two bathrooms, a nursery, and twelve bedrooms seemed to show that the Kelties intended to entertain largely.

At first, the Captain Keltie, his wife and their son Simon show no signs of moving into the completed home – but, once they do, the dynamics of the island shift forever. And the lives of the two families are equally changed. No Love follows what happens over the next few decades – on the island, and away.

Garnett often writes about love and tempestuous love affairs, and there are a fair few in this novel despite its title, but I think he is much more interesting on other topics. The friendship between Simon and Benedict is a case in point – we see how two young boys fall into adventures and risks together, but how the disparity in their wealth and their temperaments changes the friendship over the years. Their living arrangements mean they have something of the closeness of family but without its permanence. It’s a relationship that seems to linger even as the two get older and have no especial wish for it to continue – they can’t quite escape this quasi-brotherhood.

As mentioned, I am less interested when Garnett writes about romantic love – but some of his insights into the way characters love were certainly well done. For example…

He distrusted any happiness which came as easily as her love, suspecting it to be a snare to entrap him. All through life he had fought, and his enthusiasms had been met with mockery and he had learnt that the value of anything was proportional to the opposition it provoked; and instinctively he believed that since this was unopposed it could not be love.

I enjoyed reading No Love – Garnett has a natural lightness and gentle dryness to his prose that works best, in my opinion, when he is using it to approach slightly eccentric or unusual characters and situations. Particularly in the first half of No Love, there is plenty of opportunity for this. It works less well when he is trying to be searing or a little sordid. But, being 1929, nothing is too close to the bone – and I found a lot to enjoy here. It’s no Lady Into Fox, but that was a tour de force that would have been impossible and needless to replicate.

The Optimist by E.M. Delafield

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E.M. Delafield is right up there with my favourite authors, but there are still some of her books on my shelves that I’ve had for the best part of 20 years. I recently took down The Optimist (1922), one of Delafield’s earlier novels and one I haven’t seen an awful lot of discussion about.

Owen Quintillian is a boy when he first spends time with the Morchard family – led by the calm dictator Canon Morchard, and accompanied by three of his young daughters (Lucilla, Flora, Valeria) and and one young son (Adrian), with another son David away at school. Canon Morchard acts as a tutor for Owen, but really this is a substitute family. Adrian is naughty and wilful, Valeria and Flora are romantic and emotional, and Lucilla is sternly obedient. Owen is perhaps the least categorisable; he is the onlooker, and almost takes the role of the reader.

I was reminded a lot of May Sinclair’s Anne Severn and the Fieldings, both in this section and in the rest of the novel – Owen, like Anne, is the only child who is both insider and outsider in the new community. He is expected to live by the rules of the household and understand its different mores and characters, but there is also a tacit understanding that he is a temporary participant.

Years later, when Owen has spent two years fighting in the war and a period recovering from shell shock in hospital, he returns to the Morchard family. Each child has grown, but the traits that were there before are still recognisable. Lucilla is still obedient, though with a weariness that wasn’t there before. The other sisters have romantic entanglements that include Owen in disastrous ways. Adrian and David are more enigmatic, being away at war – with everything that entails for the waiting family.

But the most dominant character – the ‘optimist’ of the title, mostly relating to patriotism and pro-war sentiment – is the Canon. He is a fascinating portrait of a domineering man slowly squeezing life out of his family, but not in a violent or ogreish way. Rather, as George Simmers wrote in his excellent review on Great War Fiction back in 2007, ‘Morchard is revealed as a monster of selfishness, manipulating his family by a form of moral blackmail – they are terrified of inspiring the pain he expresses when they cross him in the slightest particular.’

In fact, I will quote the same passage George used to illustrate this point:

“Valeria!” The Canon’s voice, subdued but distinct, came to them from without. “My dear, go to your room. This is not right, You are acting in defiance of my known wishes, although, no doubt, thoughtlessly. Bid your sister goodnight and go.”

Val did not even wait to carry out the first half of the Canon’s injunction. She caught up her brush and comb and left the room.

“Are my wishes so little to you, Valeria? Said her father, standing on the stairs. “It costs so small an act of self-sacrifice to be faithful to that which is least.”

“I’m sorry, father. We both forgot the time.”

“Thoughtless Valeria! Are you always to be my madcap daughter?”

His tone was very fond, and he kissed her and blessed her once more.

Valeria went to her own room.

She sat upon the side of her bed and cried a little.

His edicts always come from a firm moral code – one that sees himself as instructor and protector of the household. He is not just hurt but astonished if anybody contradicts or disobeys him, or even has a contrary opinion to him – there is one instance, later in the novel, where Lucilla must use long-learned manipulation to do what she believes is right, and he believes is wrong. In the Canon’s defence, he holds himself to the same high standards as everyone else, and repents and apologises if he contravenes them.

Owen is trying to establish himself as a writer, particularly one in revolt to most standards of Victorian behaviour, belief, and society. There is a clash here, when the Canon reads Owen’s magazine article on ‘The Myth of Self-Sacrifice’. While the narrative is largely on Owen’s side, it seems, there is also the suggestion that Owen’s views can be as self-indulgent and blinkered as the Canon’s, albeit from a different direction.

It’s a fascinating portrait of a family, and Owen is an excellent device for being both inside and outside the circle – it is only as The Optimist develops that we start to see more of Owen’s own character and flaws, and question some of the assumptions he has made about members of the family (and which we may have unquestioningly followed along with).

This is one of Delafield’s more serious novels but, being Delafield, there is a lightness of touch and an ironic sensibility that is never too far away. This sentence is quintessential Delafield, who always seems to return to the topic of self-(un)awareness in everything she writes:

Lucilla, for her consolation, reflected that few people are capable of distinguishing accurately between what they actually say, and what they subsequently wish themselves to have said, when reporting a conversation.

In George Simmer’s review, he concluded that The Optimist is ‘one of the most thought-provoking novels of the 1920s’ and among Delafield’s best. I think it is certainly one that would merit re-reading and thinking more deeply about. It is not among my favourite of Delafield’s, perhaps because that occasional lightness of tone isn’t reflected in the plot or characters and I prefer her in slightly more comic mode, with slightly more heightened characters – but I think there’s a very good argument that The Optimist is one of her most intriguing and complex novels.

The White Riband by F. Tennyson Jesse – #NovNov Day 15

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A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse has just come out as a British Library Women Writers title, and I think it’s probably the book for which she is best known – but it is far from her only book. I have two or three others on the shelves, including The White Riband from 1921. Even for a novella, it is extremely short – 121 pages in my edition, but with not many more than a hundred words per page.

I couldn’t work out quite when it was set – it might be contemporary, but it has a feeling of being rather older, and is set up like an eighteenth-century story with chapters labelled ‘In which Loveday sees one magpie’ and similar. The ‘heroine’ is, indeed, Loveday – a young and impoverished girl, whose local reputation has been permanently coloured by her parents not being born. Being conceived before marriage is a common trait in the community, but the parents are expected to marry – ideally before the baby is born. Loveday’s misfortune is twofold: that her father is foreign, and that he is dead. And the mother, of course, is more damaged by the gossip. As Tennyson Jesse amusingly puts it, ‘the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women about whom other people talk so much’.

Loveday has a chance encounter with a wealthy and beautiful young woman, Miss Le Pettit, who takes a fancy to Loveday’s striking looks. She suggests that they could dance together at the Flora dance – a local custom that everybody attends. And with her artistic eye, Miss La Pettit envisages Loveday’s red lips and dark hair being set off by being dressed entirely in white.

Loveday was left with that most dangerous of all passions – the passion for an idea. Though she was ignorant of the fact, it was not Miss Le Pettit she adored, it was beauty; not silk underskirts that rustled in her ear, but the music of the spheres; a new ideal she saw not in the angelic visitant, but in herself. She, too, would be all white and dazzling, was accounted worthy to follow in the same steps, were it but in those of a dance. She made the common mistake of a lover – she imagined she was in love with another human being, while in reality she was in love with those feelings in herself which that other had evoked. 

She becomes beset with the idea of getting hold of a white sash, to accompany the slightly yellowed white dress that had once been destined for her mother’s wedding. She doesn’t have long to secure what she wants, and her quest takes over most of the rest of the story.

It is, of course, a very slight novella. It could probably have been a short story, given the scope – but I do think the novella length suits the emotional weight of the character and plot. And probably it wouldn’t have had the same effect if it had been substantially longer or shorter.

The White Riband is simple and rather poignant, and I really liked it. There are hints of the empathetic author who wrote A Pin To See The Peepshow, similarly examining the limits of women’s lives and seeing how their emotional life can overflow these imposed boundaries. The canvas is much smaller, but I think the portrait is equally compelling.

The Poor Man by Stella Benson – #NovNov Day 9

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I first read Stella Benson when I was writing about witches for my DPhil – Living Alone is perhaps her best known novel, and is certainly well known in particular academic circles. I was so beguiled by her quirky worldview and witty writing style – and so I was delighted when Michael Walmer started reprinting her novels. He has done The Poor Man, I only just realise, though my copy is a paperback from the 1940s. The novel was originally published in 1922.

The poor man of the title is Edward Williams – a Briton in California, overlooked and ignored by all. He is self-pitying and feeble, and on the outskirts of a society made up of fashionable bohemian types who speak authoritatively and often stupidly about any manner of art. There is a glorious scene where he hosts a party at which each guest submits a poem anonymously – they are read in turn, mocked and disparaged by everyone except the poet in each case. The only one which meets with wide approval turns out to be a letter that had been submitted by mistake. And how could anyone resist this portrait of Rhoda:

Rhoda Romero never asked people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.

You either love this sort of thing or you do not – and I emphatically do. In all the novels I’ve read by Benson, she has that cutting authorial voice undermining all her characters – including her ‘hero’. Edward falls for a woman called Emily – self-assured and impressive, though not obviously besotted with Edward.

She doesn’t hang around when he has a sudden illness – unclear exactly what – which requires immediate operation on his brain and some time of recovery. Indeed, she heads off to China to be the assistant of a noted journalist. And, when recovered, Edward decides he must follow her there.

He doesn’t have any money (the ‘poor’ of the title has multiple applications), and so we enter perhaps my favourite section of The Poor Man: where Edward tries to raise money to travel to China. And the most glorious way in which he tries to do this is with ‘a company that seemed inexplicably anxious that young America should become acquainted with the works of Milton’ – albeit in prose because poetry is ‘unhealthy for children, unmanly for Our Boys’. I have been giggling about the ‘inexplicably anxious’ line most of the day. Just perfect.

Edward does eventually get to China, and so the adventure continues, but that’s probably enough of the plot for now. The main thing with Benson’s writing in the exuberant ridiculousness of the prose, particularly the way that everyone’s intentions and impressions of themselves are consistently proved to be absurd and false. I loved The Poor Man, and I think it’s a shame that such an astonishing tour de force ever fell out of print. Thank goodness Michael Walmer is restoring her works steadily, and fingers crossed he is going to bring us the next of her books soon…

British Library Women Writers 11: The Love Child by Edith Olivier

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When the British Library Women Writers series was first suggested, one of the titles I thought about first was The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier. Not only is it one of my favourite novels, – novellas? – it was one of the key texts in my DPhil on middlebrow, fantastic novels. I’ve read it many times, and have pressed it into many people’s hands. I’ve written about it on here more than once. But it wasn’t in print, and I really wanted it to be.

Or… was it in print? While you wouldn’t have been likely to find it in bookshops, there was a print-on-demand version available – along with all the rest of Olivier’s novels. The editions weren’t beautiful, but they were great at making the books available. And yet I really, really wanted it between beautiful British Library covers… luckily I was like the persistent widow of the Bible, and finally the British Library agreed. (It wasn’t quite like that, of course, but I am delighted that The Love Child made it!) It was possible because Olivier died more than 70 years ago, and so the novel is out of copyright.

The Love Child was Olivier’s first novel, written when she was in her 50s – she described the idea as coming to her in the middle of the night, and feverishly writing the beginning in her bed. And that idea is this: what if an imaginary friend became real?

What makes this such a 1920s novel is that the heroine is an unmarried woman who feels herself on the shelf in her 30s – and, with so many men lost at war, she has far fewer options for marriage. While many women have always been happy without marriage and children, Agatha Bodenham is not one of those women. Not having a child is clearly an aching gap in her life.

As the story begins, she is mourning her mother – her final close family connection. Agatha starts thinking about Clarissa, her childhood imaginary friend – whom had been a wonderful (if illusory) companion until a governess poured scorn on her. She remembers the joy of playing with her, and starts to do so again.

Then one day, when Agatha was quietly sitting on the white seat at the end of the green walk, darning a black woollen stocking to wear in church the next day, and for once more absorbed in darning than in dreaming – then, all of a sudden, Clarissa came and sat on the seat beside her. She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven.

Clarissa has materialised! From here, The Love Child looks at the delight of this miracle – but, as time goes on, the problems that come with it. Clarissa is increasingly visible to others, and Agatha has to deal with that. And, as she grows earlier, Clarissa begins to yearn for independence herself…

This is a short masterpiece, far better than anything else Olivier wrote. It’s sophisticated and complete, and I think ranks as one of the most perfect novellas of the 20th century. As it’s so short, this new British Library edition also includes a selection of excerpts from Olivier’s autobiography, Without Knowing Mr Walkley, which I think is a really helpful addition to the book. And, of course, my afterword – which is largely about the introduction of the first adoption law in the UK, referred to in the novel.

If you haven’t read this gem before, I very much recommend it! And don’t miss the different posts about the series appearing across blogs, YouTube and Instagram during the ongoing #FarMoreThanFiction blog tour (of which this is, I suppose, an unofficial entry!)

None-Go-By by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick

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In Mrs Alfred Sidgwick’s 1923 novel, None-Go-By is the fanciful title of the Cornish cottage that Mary and Thomas decide to move to, to escape the hustle and bustle of relatives, friends and neighbours and their lives in London. Mary is our narrator, and describes how their lives have been taken over by the demands made by others – and this is intended to be something of an escape.

The cottage was so small that Thomas and I never quite got over the impression of living in a doll’s house; but, if Thomas was careful, he could stand upright in the rooms. He is a thin, tallish man with a saint-like expression that he thinks must have come on him gradually through being married to me; and even when he is out at elbows he has a way of looking presentable. What he ought to have done was entertain Mrs Lomax while I escaped upstairs and made myself tidy; but on the wrong occasion Thomas will often act with disconcerting suddenness. In this case he threw open the door of the room that contained our visitor, and there we were confronting each other. My first thought was that the room could hardly contain anything else. However, we squeezed in.

Thomas writes books with titles like The Physiological Correlate of the Instinctive Process. Mary doesn’t pretend to understand his work, but has her own interests – including less niche books and gardening. The novel opens amusingly, and the tone reminded me rather of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield – justifiably a classic, and perhaps a touchstone for a certain sort of middle-class, middlebrow humour that I love from the period.

As is perhaps inevitable in a comic novel where a couple are trying to avoid demanding relatives and neighbours, they are continually inundated with both. There is a succession of nephews, nieces, and the like who come with their all-important personal problems or a need to be distracted. A niece has left her husband, or so she believes; a young nephew floods the garden while supposedly convalescing after illness. Each comes with their own trials that Mary, as narrator, relates as comedies rather than tragedies. There is no genuine pathos in None-Go-By, nor is there intended to be.

Mary and Thomas get to know the neighbours, of whom or two are not objectionable. A snobbish character tries to hector them into keeping certain company; another unpleasant character thinks they aren’t artistic enough to remain where they are. The stakes remain low because Mary doesn’t take anything too seriously – the reader can’t really feel genuine emotions when the characters don’t seem to.

I quite enjoyed reading None-Go-By, but I did have a couple of pretty big reservations that stopped me loving the book – as I’d thought I might, when I started it. The first is hinted above – relatives and friends come and go, neighbours are introduced and sidelined, and it gives the novel a really episodic feel. We don’t really get to know a visitor until their little crisis is resolved and they’re on their way. It all emphasises the fact that Mary and Thomas can’t truly escape the maelstrom of their lives, but I found it meant the novel lost something in the way of momentum.

The other thing was Thomas. Jane wrote a very enthusiastic review of None-Go-By seven years ago, and in it she writes ‘I had to smile at gentle marital bickering between Thomas and Mary; for all that each tried to have the last word it was clear that they were two very different people who loved each other and accepted each others little foibles.’ They certainly bicker, but I have to say I found Thomas too infuriating to smile at it. Where the Provincial Lady’s husband Robert is oblivious, Thomas is astonishingly selfish and thoughtless. He often blames Mary for the chaos he causes, disregards her expressed wishes, and never thinks of anything except his own contentedness. Mary does rather roll her eyes and move on, but I think Sidgwick overplayed the card of ‘aren’t husbands absent-minded?’. It was hard to see why Mary would even want to remain married to him.

So – I started off really loving this novel, and thought it could be a real winner. And I ended up a little disappointed.

This is my second novel by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, and I enjoyed Cynthia’s Way – and there is enough that I liked in the tone of this novel that I’m keen to read more by her. There was just some elements to this one that jarred, while also feeling a little drab. But I feel curiously confident that there will be a book waiting for me among her output that will hit the sweet spot and become a cherished favourite. Now I just have to keep exploring…

Anne Severn and the Fieldings by May Sinclair

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It’s not the first time I’ve said it, but there is always such a sense of achievement in reading a book that has been on the shelves for a long time. Particularly if it turns out to be a good’un. I bought Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) back in 2009 and it has been patiently waiting for me ever since.

Anne Severn had come again to the Fieldings. This time it was because her mother was dead.

She hadn’t been in the house five minutes before she asked “Where’s Jerrold?”

“Fancy,” they said, “her remembering.”

And Jerrold had put his head in at the door and gone out again when he saw her there in her black frock; and somehow she had known he was afraid to come in because her mother was dead.

Anne is ten years old, and has been a regular visitor to the Fielding family. She has a cautious, fragile connection to the three brothers – who are different from one another, but not in the ‘ticking boxes of different types’ that often happens in novels about young siblings. Jerrold is kind, wise, and almost parental; Eliot is sporty and intelligent and confident; Colin is the youngest and quite anxious. As for their parents – Mr Fielding is a bit distant and very well-meaning, and Mrs Fielding is the opposite of these things. She needs Anne to need her. She is overly attached, and uses emotions as weapons.

As the novel progresses, Anne spends most of her time as part of this family that isn’t related to her, but has sort of adopted her. It’s worth noting that the novel was published a few years before adoption was legally formalised in the UK, and the opening is set a decade or two earlier still. She grows older and Sinclair develops a convincing heroine – loving, uncertain of herself, a combination of spontaneity and regret. Her moral decisions are very interesting for the period. Early in the novel, she says she would do anything for somebody she loved. This prophecy comes true before the end of the novel. The relationships she has with the three brothers in turn, and that with their mother, are all drawn interestingly and convincingly. Sinclair shows us the different facets of one individual that come out in three different friendships, which are indeed quite different, despite all being under the same roof.

Anne Severn and the Fieldings reminded me a lot of The Tree of Heaven – in the sense of showing the important events of the early twentieth century through the lens of one family unit. While they naturally consider themselves of utmost importance, we also get a good sweep of the period – particularly the war.

I found the whole novel involving and psychologically interesting, but it’s the war sections that are the jewel in the crown. Anne goes to the front, working as a nurse. Colin goes too, despite everyone saying that he is too ‘highly-strung’ for it – and, indeed, he suffers appalling shell-shock – or PTSD as we would call it now. Sinclair avoids tropes of ‘our brave troops’ – and, if the actual fighting is a little sanitised, the psychological impact of trauma is dealt with clear-sightedly.

I think Anne Severn and the Fieldings might be better than The Tree of Heaven, though perhaps too similar for me to nominate for the British Library Women Writers series, at least just yet. It’s a novel to luxuriate in, nothing moving quickly but everything capturing the attention. The only thing that prevents it becoming an all-time favourite for me is Sinclair’s tendency towards melodrama, which rather spoils the effect at times. The dialogue, in heightened moments, feels a bit like a b-movie. It’s unsurprising for the era, perhaps, but it’s at odds with the nuanced understanding of human relationships that Sinclair is rightly known for.

Sinclair is in danger of being remembered for coining ‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary technique, one or two novels, and not much else – but if her prolific output holds other books as enjoyable and rewarding as Anne Severn and the Fieldings, then it’s time to get digging.

The Privet Hedge by J.E. Buckrose

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A few weeks ago, I decided to do a mystery book haul – picking four books I knew absolutely nothing about, from mid-century female authors I’d never heard of, to see if I could find some hidden gems. It’s all part of scoping out for future British Library Women Writers titles – hard work, but someone has to do it(!!) If I were canny, I’d find a way to write these off in my taxes, but I don’t understand at all what that means. It is embarrassing how financially illiterate I am.

ANYWAY. Of the four, I decided to start with The Privet Hedge by J.E Buckrose, from 1922, depending whom you ask. The reason I chose this one to start with is because it opens with a description of a house, and books-about-houses are among my favourite things. Here’s the first paragraph:

At the far end of Thorhaven towards the north was a little square house surrounded by a privet hedge. It had a green door under a sort of wooden canopy with two flat windows on either side, and seemed to stand there defying the rows and rows of terraces, avenues and meanish semi-detached villas which were creeping up to it. Behind lay the flat fields under a wide sky just as they had lain for centuries, with the gulls screaming across them inland from the mud cliffs, and so the cottage formed a sort of outpost, facing along the hordes of jerry-built houses which threatened to sweep on and surround it.

In this house live Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, as the narrative tends to refer to them. They are sisters, past middle age, who have always lived with each other except for the brief two years while Mrs Bradford was married. Quickly widowed, she returned to their life together – and, though a gentler soul than her sister in many ways, also always makes clear her sense of superiority from having once been married. She gives the impression of having lived an awful lot of life in those couple of years, and it is a superiority that Miss Ethel recognises and accepts.

Those ‘jerry-built houses’ of the opening paragraph are causing a change. A distant relative of theirs owns the land separating their little house from the encroaching housing estates – and he has just sold it for development. Swathes of housing estates on greenbelt land in villages feels like a very contemporary concern, but it was clearly equally pressing in the 1920s. The sisters, particularly Miss Ethel, are horrified that new houses might crowd in the other side of their privacy-ensuring privet hedge – blocking out the view and destroying their tranquillity.

If that weren’t all, their maid has also just left to get married. Luckily her younger relative Caroline has been put up for the role. She is a teenager, recently out of school, and has been ‘promised’ to Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford ever since their maid announced she was leaving. But Caroline has a last-minute change of heart. Like many young women of her generation and class, domestic service no longer looked so promising. “I’d starve before I’d ask permission to go to the pillar-box, and spend my nights in that old kitchen by myself,” she says. Instead, she can earn money by manning the box on the promenade – for Thorhaven is a seaside town.

In the end she compromises by working there and helping out the sisters, though not as a live-in maid. It’s a really interesting look at the new job prospects of the 1920s for a certain type of young woman – and I particularly enjoyed all the details of life by the coast, and the society that lives there together out of season (and moves out of their house during season, to get some tourist income). Caroline’s main story is something of a love triangle, though, between the reliable but dull Wilf – and a man who is engaged to another woman. I tend not to find romance storylines very interesting in books, and this one did lean a bit into love-at-first-sight territory. It isn’t badly handled, but for me it was the least interesting element of an otherwise very interesting novel.

What helps The Privet Hedge rise above other novels of its type is Buckroses’s writing. The initial scene-setting paragraphs are rather lovely, showing a good eye for detail that brings the town and its inhabitants alive. Here is a dance scene, for instance:

Still the evening came with no sign of rain; the band stationed at the edge of the green played cheerful dances with a will, and it was no fault of theirs that the music sounded so lost and futile amid the roaring of the sea – rather as if a penny whistle were to be played in a cathedral while the organ was bombing out solemn music among the springing arches. Perhaps the visitors and the Thorhaven people felt something of this themselves, for they put no real zest into their attempts at carnival, but they danced rather grimly in the cold wind, with little tussocks in the grass catching their toes and the fairy lamps which edged the lawn blowing out one after the other.

Overall, I really liked The Privet Hedge. If it had predominantly been about Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, I would have wholeheartedly loved it – but as the novel progresses, their story becomes less prominent than Caroline’s. I suppose that was the market for this sort of book at the time – and it’s certainly enjoyable. But the older couple of sisters, anxiously watching modernity come literally and figuratively closer to their door, is what really sold this novel to me – and they are its greatest success.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley

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For #ReadIndies month, I had to pick up one of the many unread British Library Crime Classics I have on my shelf. Or, more precisely, piled high on top of a bookcase. Quite a lot of people have recommended The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) by Anthony Berkeley as one of the best ones, and I’ve had it for yonks.

It’s a great premise for a detective novel. Roger Sheringham, who apparently appears in other Berkeley novels, has assembled a group of people to help him solve a murder. I did have to make notes about who they all were, because he does a slightly unhelpful thing of telling you about them before he tells you their names – but it includes a dramatist, a detective novelist, an avant-garde writer, a solicitor, and a sort of timorous nobody.

The police have given up the case as lost. Can the Crime Club help? The dead person is Joan Bendix – poisoned, as the title suggests, by chocolates. The chocolates in question were given to her by her husband, but only because he bumped into Sir Eustace. He received them in the post, purporting to be from the chocolatiers, looking for a sponser. He rejects them – handing them to Graham Bendix. Later that night, both Bendixes – Bendices? – eat some chocolates, but Joan eats more. By the end of the evening, she is dead.

The brilliant thing about The Poisoned Chocolates Case is that each chapter gives a different solution, as the group take it in turns to present their detection and their conclusion. And, of course, the person they’re accusing of murder.

A couple of pretty unlikely solutions are given in the first chapters – but I have to admit that the third culprit/solution was the one I’d guessed from the outset. Oops! In the later chapters, Berkeley is very good at giving extremely convincing deductions – and then, in the next chapter, revealing why they were false conclusions and how the characters take false steps. Berkeley is clearly enjoying teasing the genre and exposing the tricks that detective novelists play. How often they use false syllogisms to make the denouement convincing. All of that.

Which does mean that the novel’s final solution is arguably no more convincing than any of the others – and the two extras at the end, contributing in the 70s by Christianna Brand and for this edition by Martin Edwards, are certainly not the most convincing – but it’s one of those rare detective novels where the satisfaction doesn’t come from the solution. It comes from seeing behind the curtain, at the construction of detection.