1940s

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

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It’s not quite true to say that I didn’t join in Margery Sharp Day (so ably organised by Fleur Fisher; see her round-up post for more details), because I started Cluny Brown on the day in question. What I did not do was either finish the book or write a review, but I have now done so – encouraged by the dictum that it is better late than never.

Actually, according to the cover of my edition (by the Reprint Society in 1945, a year after the novel was original published) I was joining in Marjorie Sharp Day. Despite getting her name right inside the book and printed on the book itself, the dustjacket spells it incorrectly. What a thing to overlook!

I read my first Sharp, The Foolish Gentlewoman, back in 2002, encouraged by seeing it recommended in the letters of P.G. Wodehouse. In the intervening dozen years I’ve bought quite a few of her novels (this one in 2005), but I needed this encouragement from Fleur Fisher to make the obvious next step and read one of them. And thank goodness I did. Cluny Brown is an absolute delight, and establishes Sharp in my mind not simply as a first rate middlebrow novelist but also (which I had forgotten) a wry and witty one.

Cluny Brown is a young woman whose abiding fault (according, at least, to her guardian Uncle Arn) is not knowing her place. Although he is content and humble to be a plumber, she doesn’t see any reason why she should not take tea at the Ritz, if she can muster together the money. She is not beautiful; she is inordinately plain (which was refreshing), but she has Presence. And that presence disconcerts her uncle; he decides that it would be much for the best if she were taken away from London and put into service. And so she goes to Devon to be a maid.

If this were simply a knockabout comedy about the ineptitude of an inexperienced maid in a large house, that would frankly be enough for me – but there is plenty else going on. Down in that house are Lady Carmel and her hunting-shooting-fishing husband, and (occasionally) their adult son Andrew. He has seen fit to invite a Polish intellectual to live with them during the war, under the impression that is in grave danger throughout Europe. Completing the party (upstairs at least) is Betty, a young lady with whom every young man is in love, and who is divinely unmoved by these attentions.

We must pause for a moment to appreciate the wonder of Lady Carmel. She manages the household beautifully. Everybody thinks her sweet and ineffectual, whereas she is sweet and effectual; never a busybody or ogre, she simply knows how to treat everybody and persuade everybody to behave properly. And she could not be considered the most politically devoted:

Lady Carmel looked troubled. It was the thing to do, just then, at any mention of Europe, and indeed there had been moments, with Andrew still abroad, when she felt very troubled indeed. But now the expression was purely automatic, like looking reverent in church. Picking up a bough of rhododendron she tried its effect in a white crackle jar, and at once her brow cleared.

And she appears again in a quotation I wanted to give to show the humour in Sharp’s writing:

For a moment mother and son stared at each other in mutual surprise. Lady Carmel in particular presented an odd appearance: the lilac in her hand gave her a vaguely allegorical look, like a figure strayed out of a pageant.

You will be getting the impression that the novel is nothing by Lady Carmel wandering about holding plants; in truth, she is quite a minor character, I just happened to love her. The title of the novel is Cluny Brown and it is indisputably she who is the main focus. Cluny is brazenly honest, with an honesty born of ingenuousness rather than anything else. Her answers to questions are often curiously at odds with expectations, and perhaps the reason she does not ‘know her place’ is that she doesn’t really have one. Equally happy in the Ritz and up to her elbows in water fixing somebody’s sink, she is also fluid between the upstairs and downstairs of the Carmels’ house. She is happiest of all with the neighbour’s golden retriever – and begins an engaging relationship with the local chemist – a serious, level-headed, but poetic gentleman.

Sharp takes the maid-with-prospects narrative (which has been around since Pamela and before) and completely changes it. Her charming ingenue is not a beauty or an upper-class girl; she does not hide a cynical soul or a caustic wit. Those elements are as enjoyably present as could be wished, but in the mouths of other characters (and occasionally the narrator); Cluny Brown is not fey or soppy.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time saying what Cluny Brown is not, because that’s the best way of saying that Sharp isn’t quite like any other writer I’ve read. But, basically, any lover of domestic fiction and witty, wry fiction will find them combined beautifully in this novel. Thanks, Fleur Fisher, for encouraging me to pick up my copy.

A ghost story for Christmas…

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….but perhaps the least scary ghost story you will ever read! It’s R.A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) which I read for Shiny New Books. Here’s the beginning of my review…

Nobody loves a good reprint better than I do, and so I was quite excited to see a series from Vintage called ‘Vintage Movie Classics’, wherein they republish the books that were adapted into great films. (This series may only be available in the US; I have to confess that my conversations with Vintage did not entirely illuminate the matter.) I expected to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather, and those sorts of texts – it was a surprise to see entirely books and films I’d never heard of (Back Street, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Cimarron etc.) which doubtless says more about my filmic knowledge than anything else. It was a lovely surprise, though – what better than reprints that will be unknown gems?
The one title I had come across before was R.A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, as I had had my eye on it during doctoral research – and found it too difficult to track down. So I was certainly grateful that a new copy was forthcoming – and The Ghost and Mrs Muir was every bit as enjoyable, silly, and entertaining as I’d have hoped.

Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford

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Apparently I bought Pigeon Pie (1940) by Nancy Mitford in Clun on 15th August 2011. I have no idea where Clun is and no recollection of having gone there, but I suppose I must have done! I read the novel quite a few months ago, so forgive any patchy memory (I’m linking to some great reviews at the end!)

For all my Mitfordmania, I have actually only read one Nancy Mitford novel (The Pursuit of Love); despite very much enjoying it, and having lots of others on hand, I still haven’t actually read any more. So I picked up this purchase from mysterious Clun, and started. The first thing I noticed was the author’s note:

I hope that anybody who is kind enough to read it in a second edition will remember that it was written before Christmas 1939. Published on 6 May 1940 it was an early and unimportant casualty of the real war which was then beginning – Nancy Mitford, Paris, 1951
Well! That’s quite the start, isn’t it? As Nancy warns, this novel is about the phoney war – that bit at the beginning of war where everyone prepared themselves for an onslaught, and not very much happened. And so she is able to be rather casual about the war, in a way that would look rather scandalous even by the time of publication. And the heroine of Pigeon Pie is nothing if not casual. Lady Sophia Garfield is a flippant socialite who has married for money, finds her husband a bore, and lives for the petty squabbles she has with the other doyennes of London society.

I do rather love this compact description of the phoney war:

Rather soon after the war had been declared, it became obvious that nobody intended it to begin. The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides, and until the sides had been picked up the game could not start.

England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy’s Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn’t play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain’s Nanny said she had internal troubles, and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except like Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America, of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.
The things that do begin, in Pigeon Pie, are rather extraordinary. A much-loved singer is killed, and Sophia finds herself swept up in an unlikely espionage and kidnap plot. None of it is treated particularly seriously – it is definitely silly rather than tense, and a wry eye is never far from the narrative. The denouement is just as unlikely as all the rest, and treads an awkward line between satire and failure…

I love Mitford’s tone, and I love her observations about the in-fighting of the upper classes. In another novel, Sophia could have been great fun.  But I’m not sure that Pigeon Pie (for me) is ever more than quite good. And that isn’t particularly because of insensitivity (although that warning was perhaps more pertinent in 1951) but because Mitford is turning her hand to a genre at which she is not an expert.

Others who got Stuck into this book


“The tone is maybe a little uneven, but when the wit works it really does sparkle.” – Jane, Fleur Fisher in Her World


“It feels unreal and flippant; the language makes it seem a little like Enid Blyton for adults.” – Karyn, A Penguin A Week


“A very enjoyable tale, filled with the usual Mitford acerbic wit, ridiculous characters and finely observed minutiae of upper class inter war life.” – Rachel, Book Snob

A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain – A.C. Ward

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Back in April I read A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain (1943) by A.C. Ward, very kindly given to me by the always wonderful Karen/Kaggsy, but I have only just got around to reading it. I can’t remember where this first came up (maybe in person; before her lovely review anyway) but I was extremely happy to be presented with a copy. What a fascinating little book it is, and so perfect for somebody with an interest in the early 20th century.

A.C. Ward has a special place in my heart because of his book The Nineteen-Twenties (published, I think, in 1930 – so a very immediate retrospective). I was reading it at the beginning of my DPhil, just to get a sense of how somebody contemporary might have characterised the period. Lo and behold, he had a chapter on ‘The Refuge of Form and Fantasy’, where he discussed the vogue for the fantastic in the period. Since I’d already decided to write my thesis on this, it was wonderful confirmation that it had been significant in the 1920s – as well as providing an invaluable quotation from a talk by Sylvia Townsend Warner that doesn’t appear to have been quoted anywhere else. Research mad skillz.

Anyway, in A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain Ward does exactly that, whether figuratively or not – he takes the reader on a journey through Britain, showing the literary sites that have been saved from bombing, or those that have been irrevocably changed by war. I can only imagine how poignant and moving this would have been in 1943; it is certainly moving enough now.

Plenty of his narration takes place in London, unsurprisingly – it was undoubtedly the area of Britain most physically affected by war – and in between commemorating Keats in Hampstead and Dickens in Doughty Street, he turns his attention to pre-war Bloomsbury (in a passage, incidentally, which would have been very useful in my first chapter):

After the last war ‘Bloomsbury’ became a synonym for intellectualist inbreeding and highbrow snobbery. But it is as difficult to define (or even to find) the pure ‘Bloomsbury’ type as it is to define or isolate ‘Victorianism.’ There is an old Punch joke, ‘”You can always tell a Kensington girl.” “Yes; but you can’t tell her much.”‘ his, if given an intellectualist twist, might be applied to Bloomsbury in the nineteen-twenties. The authors who wrote and/or published their books in Bloomsbury then were not susceptible to instruction. They instructed. The hallmark of ‘Bloomsbury’ was a tart intellectual arrogance; and in their literary style Bloomsbury writers affected a dryness which was intended to have the vitrue of dry champagne, yet the product was, often, sandy on the palate. The Mother Superior of ‘Bloomsbury’ was Virginia Woolf, but, beside her, the rest were mostly novices lacking a vocation. Her one vice was preciosity; her virtues were legion.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more incisive and concise depiction of the Bloomsbury group.

Along with the text (and I should re-emphasise that he does sweep through other counties, and not just southern ones either) there are two types of illustration – pencil sketches and photographs. The photos are amazing. We see Westminster Abbey with rubble, Milton’s statue knocked off a plinth, Canterbury ruins, etc. A trove of poignant (yes, that word again) images which bring to life a period that even the greatest description inevitably keeps at some distance.

Thanks, Karen, for sending this my way! A unique perspective on wartime Britain that I will really treasure.

Delight – J.B. Priestley

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In 2009 I read a fun book called Modern Delight, in which various authors and others talked about the things that most bring them delight. I mentioned it in a Weekend Miscellany, but don’t think I ever got around to a proper post about it.  It was enjoyable and fun, and for a good cause.  Also published at that point was a reprint of the book that inspired it – Delight (1949) by J.B. Priestley.

Somehow I didn’t get a copy of it then, but when I was in Malvern recently I stumbled across an original edition of Delight and couldn’t resist it – it became my dipping-in-and-out-of book. And (yes, this mini-review writes itself), it was a delight!

I haven’t read any of Priestley’s novels, although I’ve read one play and seen another – and read a fair bit of his journalism as part of my DPhil research. Delight shows quite a different side to him. Basically, it is short pieces on 114 things which delight him. Why this number, I don’t know.

Priestley claims to be an old grumbler (he was actually only in his mid-50s, and would live ’til a month shy of 90) and this was his way of making up to those around him.  And the things that delight him are truly delightful – covering the silly (charades, playing with small children, fantastic theories), the moving (coming home), the scholarly (Shakespeare re-discovered, discovering Vermeer), and the bizarre (mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels).  Above all, they are wonderfully engaging, often very amusing, and show a writer who knew how to put together a book that is at once utterly unnecessary and wholly (yes, again) a delight.  Here’s an excerpt from Delight no.1, about fountains:

And I believe my delight in these magical jets of water, the invention of which does credit to our whole species, is shared by ninety-nine persons out of every hundred.  But where are they, these fountains we love?  We hunger for them and are not fed.  A definite issue could be made out of this, beginning with letters to the Times, continuing with meetings and unanimous resolutions and deputations to Downing Street, and ending if necessary with processions and mass demonstrations and some rather ugly scenes.  What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains?

Well – as someone who once traipsed around Torquay trying to find the precise fountain that my friend had seen in her youth, I can empathise.  But you need not worry about wanting Delight and not finding a copy – there are plenty around, particularly the 2009 reprint.  I can think of a few dozen bloggers and blog readers who would love this… it’s just the sort of gem that deserves to be on a reader’s shelves.

Every Good Deed – Dorothy Whipple

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It wasn’t until I listed Every Good Deed among my purchases at the Bookbarn that I realised how scarce it was – as a couple of commenters pointed out.  That made me feel duty-bound to read it asap, despite having only read some of the Persephone Whipples available (Someone at a Distance, They Knew Mr Knight, Greenbanks, High Wages, and The Closed Door – more than I’d thought, now I come to list them).  Well, judging by Persephone’s love for Dorothy Whipple, I predict that Every Good Deed (1946) will one day join that number – but perhaps they needn’t rush.  It was enjoyable and interesting, but it wasn’t Whipple on top form…

They general idea is that a couple of oldish spinster sisters adopt a child from a local sort of orphanage, and all does not go well.  Susan and Emily Topham are shy, caring, worried about what society thinks of them, and above all not ready for a trickster.  Their cook (Cook, if you will) is a little more worldly-wise, but just barely.  Enter Gwen.

She steals, she talks back, she lies, she is (when a little older) no better than she ought to be.  She abuses their care and runs amok – and runs away.  She’s not even an orphan; her wily mother uses the situation to exact cash from the Topham sisters.

There were hundreds of children who, in the same circumstances, would have responded to their care, would have loved them and been grateful; but by mischance they had hit upon Gwen.
That’s Whipple’s slightly half-hearted attempt to make sure we know Every Good Deed isn’t supposed to be a universal cautionary tale.  The classism of the book did make me a little uneasy, and I’m not sure that sentence saved things…

There are a few more ins and outs in the narrative than this, but not many.  Although I enjoyed reading it, and Whipple is an expert at writing a very readable book, it did feel a lot like a short story which had got a bit long.  There is only one arc of the narrative – subplots not welcome – and the moments of crisis feel like the climaxes of a short story, not multifaceted moments in a novella.  Every Good Deed is only just over a hundred pages long, but I reckon it would have made more sense at, say, forty pages, in one of Whipple’s short story collections.  An enjoyable enough read, but if you’re struggling to find a copy anywhere… well, don’t feel too distraught about it.

As For Me And My House – Sinclair Ross

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Well, I hope you’ll still be having a wander around Shiny New Books, but that won’t (of course) stop me writing reviews here on Stuck-in-a-Book – although they may quieten down a bit when Issue 2 starts to loom!  (Incidentally, we’re keen to get lots of bloggers writing pieces for us – contact me on simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk, or all of us at info[at]shinynewbooks.co.uk if you’re interested.)

And onto a book that I’ve been reading for about six months – As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross, kindly given to me by… someone.  I think Thomas at My Porch – certainly he is a huge fan.  Am I?  Hmm.  I don’t know.  This is one of those cases where I know the book is very good… but I didn’t very much enjoy reading it.

As For Me and My House (1941) takes the form of a woman’s diary from provincial Canada – but Diary of a Provincial Lady this is not.  True, Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife are the central characters – Philip Bentley and his (anonymous?) narrator wife – but that’s where the similarities end.  Basically, the narrator’s life is miserable.  The small town is rude and ungrateful for the hard work her husband does.  He, in turn, has lost his faith and wishes he were a painter.  They are poor, their marriage is rocky, and dissatisfaction soaks every word of the novel.

He’s a failure now, a preacher instead of a painter, and every minute of the day he’s mindful of it.  I’m a failure too, a small-town preacher’s wife instead of what I so faithfully set out to be – but I have to stop deliberately like this to remember.  To have him notice me, speak to me as if I really mattered in his life, after twelve years with him that’s all I want or need.  It arranges my world for me, strengthens and quickens it, makes it immune to all worlds.
Well, as you can see, the writing is beautiful.  There is a deep and emotional richness to the way Ross writes.  I’m not sure it benefited from being in the diary format – it would have worked equally well, and probably rather more convincingly, simply as a first person narrative – but he certainly offers a fully-realised voice.  Just as convincing are the husband and (later) sort-of-adopted son, although I wonder if Ross intends us to believe the narrator to be as perceptive as she seems.

Here’s another beautiful, dispiriting passage:

The sand and dust drifts everywhere.  It’s in the food, the bed-clothes, a film on the book you’re reading before you can turn the page.  In the morning it’s half an inch deep on the window sills.  Half an inch again by noon. Half an inch again by evening.  It begins to make an important place for itself in the routine of the day.  I watch the little drifts form.  If at dusting time they’re not quite high enough I’m disappointed, put off the dusting sometimes half an hour to let them grow.  But if the wind has been high and they have outdrifted themselves, then I look at them incredulous, and feel a strange kind of satisfaction, as if such height were an achievement for which credit was coming to me.
That rather aptly describes how it felt reading the novel.  Melancholy piled on melancholy.  It swept through all the pages, in every sentence, almost in every word.  The more I read, the more I felt outdrifted by it.  I don’t demand novels of unswerving cheeriness, but… surely life isn’t as bad as all this?  (“But a man’s tragedy is himself, not the events that overtake him.”)  It was wearying.  Beautiful, but wearying.

Of course, I read As For Me and My House as someone who has lived in a vicarage for many years, and whose father is still a working vicar (and mother a working vicar’s wife).  I am well aware that it isn’t always easy – that some parishioners can be difficult or aggressive or ungrateful.  In this novel it is the purportedly faith-filled whose hypocrisy stands out; in real life, it is just as likely to be the thoughtless atheist who tells you he’d like the church to burn down, or the teenager who thinks the vicar’s sons are fair game to shout abuse at in the street.  But Ross gives only the tiniest mention (in Mrs Bird) of the positivity that comes with the profession.  The strangers who are kind to you as soon as you arrive in a new village, the people who selflessly give up their time to help with kids’ events and so forth.  There is a world of literature bemoaning the claustrophobia of the small town – which needs to be balanced by how really lovely it is when people all know each other, care for each other, and let nobody go lonely.

Part of this seems like I just wish that Ross had written a different book.  But I think I could have really loved this one if there were a bit more balance – something more to alleviate the melancholy and hopelessness.  As it is, I do admire As or Me and My House.  Ross is unarguably a brilliant writer.  One I’d definitely recommend to sturdier souls.  And maybe my soul will be sturdier next time I try this one.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein

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If Swallows and Amazons is a great book to be reading while the brain is a bit confuzzled, then Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948) probably isn’t.  But it came to mind the other day when Dorothy Richardson was mentioned – simply because I’d mixed up who wrote it – but by then I’d pulled it off the shelf, and the fab Picasso cover, combined with the book’s brevity, meant I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Every great writer has, I imagine, been called a fraud – and many frauds have been called great writers.  Which is Gertrude Stein?  I haven’t read anything else by her, and the introduction to this edition more or less says that Blood on the Dining-Room Floor wasn’t a success, but I spent the whole time thinking ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’.  But then I thought… there are plenty of people who say that about Virginia Woolf’s fiction, which I think is sublimely brilliant – so it’s just as likely that this novella is brilliant and I simply don’t get it.  Here’s a sample sentence:

A little come they which they can they will they can be married to a man, a young enough man an old man and a young enough man.
Well, sure, Gertrude, why not?  Not all the novella is that obfuscatory, but it’s also far from unique in the narrative.  In theory, I’m not anti experimental writing – but as I get further and further from my undergraduate days, my tolerance for unconventional grammar and deliberately cloaked meaning gets lower and lower.

And what’s it about?  Well, the writer of the blurb optimistically calls Blood on the Dining-Room Floor a detective novel, but since it’s more or less impossible to work out who any of the characters are, up to and including the person whose blood is on the dining-room floor (a more prominent death in the book is the maybe-sleepwalker who fell out a window), then it can only be called a detective novel in the loosest sense conceivable.

An interesting experiment to read, and it’s always possible that my cold-ridden delirium played its part, but… I can’t call myself a Stein fan as of yet.  Anybody read this, or any of Stein’s more famous work?  Could I be yet persuaded?

Abbie – Dane Chandos

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A friend from my book group kindly lent me Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos about a million years ago, and I’ve somehow only recently got around to reading it.  I think it looked almost too inviting – it seemed a delicious treat of a book that I didn’t think I quite deserved.  And I thought it might be a sweet, old-fashioned children’s book, which isn’t something for which I’m always in the mood.

Well, I was right and I was wrong.  It isn’t remotely sweet or a children’s book, but it is wonderful.

You (like my friend) are probably aware of my penchant for characterful old ladies in books, and Abbie does not disappoint.  The episodic novel is narrated by Dane (I thought it might even be a sort of autobiography, until I discovered that Dane Chandos was actually the pseudonym for two authors, Peter Lilley and Nigel Millett) who, from his schooldays onwards, has a close and amusing relationship with his Aunt Abbie.

Abbie is composed of interspersed letters and narrative – the letters being from Abbie, who jaunts off around the world (she hires camels in Algeria, haggles in French markets, skis in Switzerland) but always returns to her East Anglian garden.  Gardening is perhaps the least exotic of her hobbies, but it is also her most passionate.  She judges everyone on their gardening abilities, she is willing to steal and deceive for her art, and this piece of dialogue (which I choose more or less at random) is from one of the chapters on gardening:

“Drat the regatta. We’re too late now, anyway.  I have to get those camellias put in.  Now please take care of them, Arthur.  Do not make an impetuous gesture.  Cotoneaster twigs are very delicate.  Prenez garde!  These old gaffers should not be allowed on the roads, especially when there are such handsome almshouses at Upper Dovercourt.”
Abbie is an interesting creation.  Battleaxe types are always a joy to read in some measure, but the author’s (or, in this case, authors’) task is to keep them on the right side of sympathy – or open them entirely to ridicule.  It is that which separates the Lady Catherine de Bourghs from the Miss Hargreaveses of this world.  Abbie is certainly not a figure of fun – much depends on the reader developing the fondness for her that Dane (the character) clearly has for his aunt.  How successful is this?

Well, the negatives.  She is unabashedly xenophobic – but not racist in particular, because every non-British person (indeed, every non-British non-upper-class person) meets with her disdain.  She is quite selfish.  She is rude, abrupt, and tells everyone to ‘Prenez garde!’ all the time.

And the positives.  She is very funny – sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.  She loves her nephew and her husband.  He is called Arthur, is calm and sensible, and balances out her forthright sense of purpose.  He is also, along with Dane, capable of quietening her down. The authors give us enough examples of Abbie being bested (my favourite being in the garden theft incident, by a confident neighbour) that we can afford to like her.

Make no mistake, she would be a horror to know as a person – and her xenophobia is only understandable as a product of her time – but I couldn’t help loving reading about her energetic exploits and astonishing self-confidence.  The more low-key her social battles (arguing with a waiter, or going for a dress-fitting) the more I loved it – things got a bit out of hand with runaway camels and the like. But my taste always leans to the domestic and social minutiae.

Any fan of slightly silly, very funny, early twentieth-century novels will find a lot to like and laugh at in Abbie.  And, even better, I’ve just discovered that there is a sequel, Abbie and Arthur!  Thanks Caroline for lending this to me, sorry it’s taken an age to read it…

Hetty Dorval – Ethel Wilson

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Somehow I’d forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts.  So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year… and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)

Hetty Dorval isn’t really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn’t its narrator – that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby – but she is perhaps its leading figure.  Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty’s beauty and lack of convention:

We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important.  Mrs. Dorval did not ‘make conversation’.  I discovered that she never did.  It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face.  This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.  Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was.  I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure.  Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.
Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman – but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call.  And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.

The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:

But this is not a story of me […] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared.  It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell.  I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance.  Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill.  Take your choice.  But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself.  And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.
It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events.  Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator’s evolving eyes.  The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment – as Hetty’s past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable.  Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral.  That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a ‘conservative’ viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one – or so it seems to me.

Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality – rather, she is depicting one woman’s sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up.  Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply – but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women.  Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic – but somehow it doesn’t feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.

The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions – largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording.  It’s always great to see ‘behind the scenes’, and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.” – Teresa, Shelf Love


“This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains.” – Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books