Persephone

A House in the Country

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

We recently chatted about how titles can influence the way in which we read a novel – I loved all of your contributions, and encourage anyone who hasn’t to read the comments to this post, all fascinating. Well, the book I want to write about tonight has a title that is somehow both very appealing and entirely unrevealing: A House in the Country (1944 – set in 1942) by Jocelyn Playfair. It was the second Persephone book that I started during Persephone Reading Weekend, but didn’t finish until a little while later. It had been on my shelf for years; I loved the gentle, rural title, but knew nothing whatsoever about its contents.

Having read it, I can now say that my expectations were wildly misplaced – and yet I loved the novel, for reasons quite different from those anticipated. A House in the Country is not a cosy paean to countryside ways, but a deep, moving, and surprisingly controversial novel.


Cressida Chance (wonderful name) lives in the house of the title, and has started taking paying guests. The idea of paying guests completely foreign now, but it must have been an ingenious way for people to get a bit of extra money without demeaning themselves – and to provide houses for those who needed them during war. If someone were to make a list of things which would attract me to a novel, having big old houses at their centre would definitely make the list. Here’s Cressida’s, from the viewpoint of John Greenacre, who is arriving to be one of the said paying guests:
He half turned away from the view of the house. As he did so the sun caught every pane in the high, evenly spaced windows of the lovely front and spread warmth over the old red bricks so that the house glowed like a jewel against the dark trees behind.
I’m rather captivated, don’t know about you. But the most captivating thing about the novel is Cressida herself. She is a wonderful heroine, and I’m not quite sure how to put her personality into words. She is sensible but not dull; strong-feeling but not excessively passionate; loving but neither dependent nor demanding; caring but not sentimental. She seems to have just enough of all virtues to be attractive, and not enough to become irritating. Her feet are certainly made of clay. She is a remarkable creation.

Cressida is undoubtedly the beacon of Playfair’s novel. Against her fully-realised, exquisitely drawn character, it did feel as though others rather faded into one another. With the exception of Tori, that is – ‘a little beetle of a man’ from war-torn Europe, who has seen and suffered much. Other than him, the rest of the cast didn’t really come alive, and seemed mostly there to provide occasional colour and interest, rather than pathos. But Playfair doesn’t really need more than her main players to make an impression.

I tell a lie, Miss Ambleside is a great addition to the mix. Her type is familiar, and the target of much delicious caustic humor in novels of the period. Miss Ambleside is one of those people who constantly feel martyred, incapable of seeing how insignificant their sufferings are:
Miss Ambleside’s life in London had never been far from the normal. During the blitz she had done a great deal of visiting in the country. And now Miss Ambleside’s gloom drove her to consider the possible advantages of living in London again. One could open one’s house in the country, but then there would be the trouble of servants. It was all very difficult and trying. Perhaps dear Cressida would keep one a little longer, until one could see which way things were going. But in that case one would lose one’s hair appointment, and getting another was always problematical. There were difficulties, it seemed, whichever course one decided upon.
Those of you who don’t fancy sizable chunks of quotation, look away now – because what I find most fascinating about novels from this period is their perspective on the war. Plenty of historical novels try and deduce this from a distance, but there is nothing quite like reading the views which were expressed there and then, whether in fact or fiction. So here are another couple of excerpts, the first from Cressida’s viewpoint, and the second from a man in active service, returning to England. They offer competing, but novelistically equally valid, perspectives on the effects of war at home – and demonstrate Playfair’s sophistication. She hasn’t got simply one view to hammer home.
People talked a lot about the various hells of war; the dust and heat in the desert, the steam and exhaustion of the tropics, the ice terror of the sea, the nerve-shattering clash of actual battle anywhere. But there was another sort of hell; the hell of impatience. Living in England, surrounded by normal people, living near-normal lives, trying to do a job that seemed to have no end and no purpose, a life of exercises and long journeys in lorries from one English village to another, without even an air raid to give reality to what felt like merely an irritating and prolonged succession of manoeuvres. Much better, she thought, to be right away from England, where the spectre of pre-war life was not always hovering in the background, constantly reminding one of normality, making it impossible to cut oneself off and become really a part of the machine humanity had to become in order to fight this latest form of war.

* * *

Charles could not have said in so many words what it was he had expected to find in England. Perhaps he had not quite imagined that the entire countryside would be a blackened ruin, that people would be picking their way nervously between yawning bomb craters and darting into underground holes as soon as daylight began to fade. Perhaps he had not quite expected to see on every face the hard lines of heroism and stark, but controlled, fear. But England had been for three years described in terms of heroism, in outsize headlines. It had been loudly called the war-torn, the noble, the indomitable, the last outpost of civilisation. Surely it was natural to suppose that all this hyperbole must have a visible cause. But it was certainly difficult to detect in the stolid, well-fed faces of the English people any sign of undue heroism, or any indication that they were making a brave struggle to support life on insufficient food and unremitting hard labour under the constant fear of death. Here and there, it was true, there were ruined and burnt-out buildings. But there were always burnt-out buildings to be seen from railway-trains, and these ruins looked as if they had quite gently decayed under the slow wear of time rather than been blasted asunder with savage violence in a few seconds. Even the thousands of broken windows merely suggested small boys with stones rather than death-dealing splinters of steel and iron.
Decades of talking about the war, and people’s stoicism, and the bravery of the home front has built up a picture for those of us not alive then. And, of course, it has much truth to it. But a passage like that I’ve just typed seems, to me, so much more vivid and truthful – a fascinating angle on expectation, reality, and wartime confusion.

What is difficult to remember, when reading novels of this period, is that neither author nor reader knew who would win the war. Published in 1944, it was still possible (or at least not impossible) that England would be occupied by the Nazis. Propaganda of the Brave British Soldier was doubtless still indefatigable. And this makes Playfair all the more brave in her extremely honest, often critical discussions of warfare. Characters suggest that war is futile; that few soldiers know why they are fighting, and that ideals are far below blind obedience, when it comes to motive.
We are always being told the German people don’t want war, the English don’t want war; no one wants war. And yet we have war. We have war because we have been herded, they’ve been formed into masses, they’ve been taught to obey without question, to fight and die without hesitation. But men have not been taught to take the advice Christ gave them when He said “Know thyself.”One can only imagine what a brave stance this was to offer in 1944.

A House in the Country is not without its faults. The major one is that which so many ’20s-’40s novels stumble into, and is certainly seen in more than one Persephone and Virago title (much as we love ’em – and we do, of course): it is too earnest. That’s probably a sign of the times, more than anything. Nowadays we don’t like to take things *too* seriously, at least in our fiction – that’s not to say that serious topics aren’t addresses, but that they’re always laced with humour. Plenty of contemporary novelists did know this – you won’t find earnestness in the pages of the Provincial Lady, and yet she does hit home time and again. I’m not saying the novel should have avoided all its pontificating moments – they are often done thoughtfully and thoroughly, but… when you get to another speech about honour or why men choose to fight, etc. etc., you can’t help wish a little that Playfair had spread her delightful humour more evenly into every corner.

And this, despite its more serious and even harrowing moments, is a very funny novel. Playfair has something of Delafield’s wry analysis of character, and is not above a thread or two of Wodehousian humour now and then. I liked odd touches like this:
As always, the moment Cressida crossed the threshold, the dogs appeared from apparently nowhere, their extreme empressement obviously assumed partly out of excitement, and partly to give an impression of not having been on one of the spare beds.I haven’t even mentioned the other story threading through the novel; that of Charles Valery in the wreckage of a destroyed ship, surviving alone at sea, and eventually making his way back to Cressida’s house (which is actually his own). These sections, naturally given his solitude, take mostly the form of his thoughts – they aren’t intended to have the humour or sparkle seen elsewhere in the novel, but they are involving and thought-provoking. Of course, these separate strands of the novel come together, but not in the way which you might expect…

All in all, A House in the Country is another Persephone triumph (and one with a very good, informative Preface). It’s not one of their books which is much mentioned in the blogosphere, but I think it should be. I have read few novels with so intriguing an angle on wartime living, and – as I have said – Cressida is a wonderful character. This isn’t the novel I was expecting, when I pulled the title off the shelf, and it certainly isn’t as relaxing a read as I’d anticipated – but I’m happy to say that it is a better one, and significantly more thought-provoking.

From Tiny Acorns

StuckinaBook All , , 20 Comments


I’ve been looking forward to Persephone Reading Weekend for ages, so apologies that I’m joining in quite late in the day – yesterday I was so tired that I went to bed at 8.30pm. The fact that I was still awake at 2am was not fun… nor did I read much of this book during those hours (my eyes always give up before the rest of my mind/body does) but it was a quiet day today, so read the rest of it – ‘it’ being Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. (And aren’t the endpapers beautiful?)

I bought Saplings (1947) in 2004, I think, and somehow it has languished on my shelves since then. It even came on holiday with me once, but didn’t get as far as being read – no real reason for this neglect. Perhaps because I haven’t read any of Streatfeild’s books for children? Perhaps simply because it came in over my 300pp bench-mark for ideal reads. But it finally came down from my bookcase, and I can report back.

I’ve got to confess – the first few pages didn’t win me over. It would be nice to be completely positive during an Appreciation Weekend, but I’m afraid I’m going to pick a few holes in Streatfeild’s work – although overall I was very impressed. Let’s get that out there now, so that this doesn’t feel too complainy a review. But those first few pages – we’re on a beach with the Wiltshire family. Laurel, Tony, Kim, and Tuesday (yes, Tuesday – has this ever been a name?) are messing about, playing, and doing things like this:
Kim was singing to a tune of his own, ‘The sea, the sea, the lovely sea.’ His happiness was given a sharp edge by fright. The day was going to be very scrumptious. Dad and Mum were here, and there was going to be a picnic and prawning; but first there’d be the bathe and Dad would make him swim to the raft.Oh. This felt very much like Streatfeild hadn’t taken off her children’s-writer hat, and was merely giving adult novel writing a go. My heart sank a little.

When the focus switches around to their parents Alex and Lena, however, things started to improve. Alex is a hands-on father, always conscious of what his children might be feeling, and doing his best to help them grow up properly and well-disciplined without being thwarted or unhappy. He is one of the best fathers I’ve come across in literature – rather better than E.H. Young’s William, I’d say – and still fairly convincing. His major fault, in my eyes, is sending the children to boarding school. Lena, on the other hand, is not of a maternal disposition, and misses being her husband’s sole object of affection. Through the eyes of the holiday governess Ruth, this is how Lena comes across:
On other counts Lena was not so good. She never even pretended the children came first. But did that matter? Was that not out-balanced by the perfect love always before the children’s eyes? Ruth, helping herself to peas, knew one of her more noticeably amused flicks was crossing her eyes. Was it perfect love the children saw? Certainly Lena loved Alex, but perfect love in her philosophy was an ill-balanced affair, almost all body, the merest whiff of soul.It is in her allusions to Lena’s various, ahem, appetites that Streatfeild most prominently demonstrates that this is not a children’s book. (P.134 made me gasp a little…) But alongside this we do get the bread and butter of children’s lives – the four children are well-drawn, and certainly have formed and individual characters. Kim the show-off, who craves attention but can’t control the way in which he seeks it; Laurel the dependable eldest sibling, but fraught on her own; Tuesday who wishes only to have her family around her; Tony who asks such pertinent questions, and worries too much. All painted convincingly with Streatfeild’s brush – but still it feels a little like one is reading a children’s book with longer words… There’s even a Nanny of the indomitable variety.


But things are about to change. I shan’t spoil the big event which changes the course of the novel, but suffice to say that a tragedy occurs to alter the lives of all concerned. And it’s from here that Streatfeild comes into her own – we follow the children to their various schools as they cope with this tragedy in their various ways. They come home for holidays, and we see the reunions then. In the background is always the war – rarely creeping nearer than the background, but certainly getting no further away.

Somewhere towards the last third of the novel Laurel, Tony, Kim, and Tuesday are split up for the holiday and must each spend time with a different Aunt. There were definite overtones of Richmal Crompton’s Matty and the Dearingroydes here – snapshots of various intriguing or eccentric family units. It should have been a different novel, really – they just came flitting past, and were gone before you could grasp hold of them. I’d happily read many more chapters, for instance, about the vicarage family where loving vicar’s wife Sylvia lovingly makes up holy reasons to excuse her children doing things their father might find worrying. Since Streatfeild is, like me, a vicarage child, it would be fascinating. Structure isn’t Streatfeild’s strong suit – Saplings seems to explode somewhat, proliferating with characters and going off at tangents, right until the final pages.

Structure may not be her trump card, but there is still a lot to love in the novel. Chief amongst these is the way in which she demonstrates the damage done to families and children by war. A lot of this damage would have been done by separating them from each other and their parents in their schooling, but war still has its undeniable effects. There is a rather silly Afterword from Dr. Jeremy Holmes, a Psychiatrist who reads Saplings through the lens of child psychology. In doing so, he completely ignores the fun that Streatfeild pokes at this field – it is no coincidence that the Aunt who makes generalisations about child psychology is the only one who has no children of her own. Despite this misreading, it is true that Streatfeild is insightful into the child’s mindset – although she would never, I am sure, have labelled this insight psychology.

Perhaps it is unfortunate for Saplings’ sake that I have read so many good books this year. One can’t help think how much better E.H. Young creates family dynamics; how much more insightfully Barbara Comyns gives the voice and mind of children; how much more poignant Marilynne Robinson can be. Comparisons, as Mrs. Malaprop intended to say, are odious – and on its own merits, Saplings is a fantastic read. It’s engaging, occasionally moving, and certainly enjoyable. Maybe seven years on my shelf had built up its potential too greatly for me? I shall learn not to lament the novel Saplings was not, and heartily enjoy the novel that it is.

Little Boy Lost

StuckinaBook All , , , 16 Comments

Well, I’m still heading back to healthiness (though still not eating much – could be a cheap day out tomorrow!) and have managed to finish another Persephone. This is the one which lots of people raved about last year, and which made it to the top of my Persephone Must Read List. Oh, and it’s short. Step forward Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski.


Like Miss Ranskill Comes Home, this novel is from the late-1940s – but while Todd’s novel offers an unusual perspective on the war, Laski turns her eye to the chaos of the post-war world. Hilary – whose wife Lisa was killed by the Gestapo – is visited by another underground activist and told that his (Hilary’s) son is missing. Hilary has only seen his son once, the day after he was born. The rest of the novel follows Hilary to Paris as he tries to track down his son, and work out whether or not the boy he finds (Jean) is indeed his son.

Hilary is fairly taciturn, self-absorbed, and not particularly alert to the feelings of others – but he is someone still a very sympathetic character; even for someone like me who doesn’t have children and can’t tap into the desperation of his search. It doesn’t hurt, on the sympathy front, that Hilary is described as:

a fast reader and dreaded nothing more than to be stranded without print. He would read anything sooner than nothing, fragments of sporting news torn up in a lavatory, a motor journal on a hotel table, an out-of-date evening paper picked up in a bus. He would covetously eye the books held by strangers in trains, forcing them into conversation until he could offer his own read book in exchange for something new. But if, by ill-luck, he was reduced to reading nothing but haphazard chance finds that offered his mind only the bare fact of being print, he would become dreary, unhappy, uneasy, like a gourmet who suffers from indigestion after eating bad food.

That description could make me forgive Hilary a lot – even, almost, when he starts criticising Winnie-the-Pooh as unreadable. I can only assume Laski hadn’t read it of late, otherwise my opinion of her has gone down a lot….

Although the plot is fairly simple, its handling is beautifully subtle, especially as the novel progresses. Some of the earlier scenes are closer to thriller than ‘literary fiction’, for want of a better word – in that they seem to be about plot rather than character. But once Hilary has found Jean, their parallel emotional journeys are drawn brilliantly well. Hilary is reluctant to become attached to a child who might not be his; Jean is unused to any special attention, but is wary of accepting it with its unpredictability. It’s all done quite beautifully.

With all this subtlety, it is such a shame that Laski crams in a ridiculous last-minute character and accompanying quandary. I shan’t reveal too much, but it comes down to Hilary having to decide between lust and love, but the lust aspect is insultingly unconvincing and the character representing it seems the afterthought to an afterthought.

Putting this aside (and the novel would have been so much better without it) Little Boy Lost is an exceptional novel, and I’m very grateful to all those who waved flags for it last year. Now, should I go and add another tick to the poll?

Back on track…

StuckinaBook All , , 9 Comments

Thank you for all your messages of sympathy – I am feeling very drained, but much better. But – to add insult to injury – my laptop chose yesterday to die. Few people understand computers less than I do, so I shall be begging my friend to ‘have a look at it’ (somehow I feel a stern glance from someone who Knows What He’s Doing will cause the computer to work). My housemate has kindly lent me her laptop, but it’s got the world’s teeniest tiniest keyboard. That’s all right for her, because she is herself teeny and tiny, but it will lead to me making all manner of typos, methinks…

I have not been entirely inactive during Persephone Reading Week. I’m not, perhaps, quite as far as I’d hoped to be – but I have managed to re-read Miss Ranskill Comes Home (1946) by Barbara Euphan Todd. I know, I know, re-reading when there are so many Persephones I’ve yet to read – but my book group are discussing the novel this month (and I didn’t even suggest it!) and I felt like revisiting.


Miss Ranskill Comes Home was the third Persephone book I read, after Family Roundabout and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and it’s just over six years since I read it. Is it as good as I remember? In a word: yes.

Miss Nona Ranskill is returning to England after four years on a desert island. If that sounds far-fetched, then run with it anyway – somehow Todd is able to make you accept the situation and see what happens. She had fallen overboard, whilst trying to rescue a hat (which she didn’t much like anyway) and was washed up on the island – where ‘the Carpenter’, also known as Reid, had been for some time already. The novel opens with Miss Ranskill having a makeshift funeral for the Carpenter, so we never meet him firsthand, but his voice permeates Miss R’s mind and his kind and sympathetic voice recurs throughout the novel.

And so Miss Ranskill heads off in the boat the Carpenter had made, and is eventually rescued and brought back to England. The desert island idea, though interesting, is really just a way of having Miss Ranskill turn up at home in the middle of the Second World War without any idea that it is going on. For this is the main gist of the novel: how surreal and foreign the war seems to one not in the know.

The first person she re-encounters is a school-friend Marjorie, who seems never to have heard of Nona’s ‘death’, and is described as ‘her development being arrested midway through the last term in the sixth form’. She reminds me a little of the women in E.M. Delafield’s The War Workers, who are selfish in their ‘self-sacrifice’, although Marjorie is probably just caught up in the excitement of regulations and hierarchies – able to relive her school days through them. And of course, these are all mysterious to Miss Ranskill. She doesn’t understand rationing or black-out curtains; ‘prohibited area’ or air raid sirens. Having anticipated coming home for so long, she is disturbed to find home so very different.

And alongside all this, of course, Miss R is comparing everything to her island experience. I liked the odd unexpected touch Todd threw in, such as:

A flash of red in a draper’s window caught her eye and she stopped to look. The sight of a jersey-suit in soft vermilion made her realise how much she had missed all the red shades of the world and how tired she was of blue and grey.I think Miss Ranskill Comes Home was a very brave book to publish in 1946, in its unusual perspective on a very recent war: it refers to soldiers as ‘hired assassins’, for instance. And yet, the novel was apparently extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. And has it translated to the 21st century? Possibly it is even more appropriate now. For people like me, whose parents weren’t alive in the Second World War, our only knowledge of it can be second-hand. We experience some of Miss Ranskill’s confusion, as she encounters wartime England, and perhaps feel ourselves equally uncertain and alien. While Todd’s 1946 readership would have been amused by Miss Ranskill’s cluelessness, as the years continue the reader can empathise more and more with her uneasiness.

Miss Ranskill Comes Home was chosen for book group after a discussion between myself and another member as to whether or not any of the Persephone books were out-and-out funny. This seemed to me to be the biggest dividing line between Persephone and the Bloomsbury Group reprints – both are excellent, but the latter is, in general, much funnier. And I think that’s probably still true for me – Miss Ranskill has plenty of comedy, but it is comedy heavily dosed with pathos and even a tinge of the tragic. Certain scenes, such as that where Miss R tries and fails to give a speech to a local society on Life on a Desert Island, are painful to read in their awkward sadness. But the novel still manages to have plenty of light-hearted moments alongside – all the rush of emotion of encountering a ‘brave new world’, I suppose.

And, which is more important, there are some very cute kittens. Now, that’s the kind of hard-nosed reviewing you’ve come to expect, isn’t it?

“Experience doth take dreadfully high wages…”

StuckinaBook All , , 10 Comments

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On the off chance that you’ll have me back, after Mel and Dark Puss have proved me completely dispensable over the past month, I’m going to turn my hand to another book review! And this time it’s a Persephone book, which always curries favour. I am getting a little ahead of myself, what with Persephone Reading Week coming up around the corner, but I thought it would cheating to review this then, since I actually finished it in the middle of March.

Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages (1930) is the latest Whipple novel to be published by Persephone and the third that I’ve read – the other two being the very wonderful Someone at a Distance and the pretty wonderful They Knew Mr. Knight. [edit: I forgot that I’ve also read Greenbanks, but don’t remember much about it…] High Wages focuses on Jane Carter, who takes a job working for Mr. Chadwick who runs a draper’s shop in Tidsley. She’s doing it on account of a stepmother, but we don’t think about her much after the first chapter, and she only really acts as a catalyst for what follows. Jane enters the politics of a small town and a small shop, dealing with the meanness of her employers, the lovesickness of her colleague Maggie, and the quiet friendship of poor-wife-made-good Mrs. Briggs.
Persephone’s write-up of the novel is very interesting, far more than just description of the book, and I recommend you give it a read by clicking here. They include this thought:She is not, of course, a ‘great’ writer. You could not take one of her sentences, as you can with, say, Mollie Panter-Downes, and hold it up to the light. But she is serviceable, perceptive and humane.I agree on all counts – while Whipple’s prose is a cut above a lot of her contemporaries (and almost everything I flick through in the bookshop now) she isn’t a notable stylist. She even veers towards the saccharine or predictable on occasion in this novel (though not in the other two I’ve read) – I definitely blame the romance plot, which High Wages could have done without, and would have been a better novel for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Whipple’s publisher leant on her to include it… but it just got a little silly towards the end. (Query: is it possible to write the dialogue of people desperately and recklessly in love without sounding like a mediocre soap opera? Then again, I’m quite fond of mediocre soap operas…)


That aside, there is plenty to love. How could you not like a book with the following sentiment? :Oh, the comfort of that first cup of tea! The warmth and life it put into you! They held their hands round the cups to warm them and their eyes looked less heavily on the bleak kitchen.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Jane.

‘We have another cup of tea, said Maggie’The day-to-day runnings of the shop make excellent material for a novel, and that’s what I enjoyed most in High Wages – the hierarchies in the shop and those of the customers, and how Jane negotiates them. Such is the minutiae that Whipple does so well, and so perceptively.

An interesting sideplot is the maid Lily and her abusive husband. That sounds very gritty, but Whipple has a way of taking gritty plots and making them pretty cosy… And I do have a weakness for dialect-driven, unselfconscious servants in interwar novels – the best being Nellie in another Persephone, Cheerful Weather For The Wedding. For a taste of Nellie, click here – otherwise, back to Lily:

Lily arrived. She whimpered as she lit the fire, and as Jane reappeared at intervals in the kitchen, she told her Bob wasn’t like a husband at all.

‘Aren’t you going to love me a bit I says to ‘im this morning, and ‘e says with such a nasty look, “To ‘ell with you and your love.” Just like that.’

And when she tried to kiss him good-bye, he’d thrown a plate at her.

‘Whatever do you want to kiss him for?’ asked Jane, squeezing out the wash-leather for the shop-door glass. ‘Throw a plate back at him, my goodness.’

She thought she herself would make short work of such a husband.

‘No…’ Lily shook her head as she dipped the bald brush into the blacklead. ‘I couldn’t do that. Bad as ‘e is, I love ‘im. Besides, it’s me as ‘as to pay for the plate.’
Well, quite.

Throughout High Wages there is fairly strong divide between rich-bad-people and the ‘onest-‘umble-poor. Mrs. Briggs bridges the divide – in that she’s rich, but always harks back to the simpler times before her husband (whose name I forgot, but which I presume is Alfred or Albert; this sort of man is always called one of the two) got rich. I did find that all a little tedious… but that’s a small quibble. And is really mentioned as way of bringing up rich-bad-Sylvia, and this amusing description of her:
Sylvia, poor child, hadn’t a grain of humour in her composition. Not what he called humour. She didn’t like Punch. That was his test. She laughed at hats sometimes, but he couldn’t remember that she ever laughed at anything else.
All in all, High Wages is an enjoyable novel, though not one I think Persephone would have reprinted had it been Whipple’s only novel. I recommend you start with Someone at a Distance, if you’ve never read a Whipple novel before – but High Wages doesn’t do any damage to the credentials of Persephone’s most popular discovery.

Persephone Week: The End

StuckinaBook All , , 12 Comments

Apparently Persephone Week finished on Friday… but here at Stuck-in-a-Book we’re going to keep it going right until the end of the week. No Weekend Miscellany this weekend, then, but instead the final two Persephones will be proffered. (And maybe even a redux tomorrow). No, I didn’t manage to read six (though I’m quite pleased with four), but today you’re going to hear about Lettice Delmer by Susan Miles and, more excitingly, see the product of Our Vicar’s Wife’s interaction with Good Things in England by Florence White (which is also coming out in November as a Persephone Classic, with a really beautiful cover, below)


Right – Lettice Delmer, my first novel in verse, and the only one which Persephone have published. [Edit: Sorry, I forgot, Amours du Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough is another one.] Not in rhyming verse, at least most of the time, but in blank verse. (If you need a brush up on what blank verse is, have a look here.) I bought this in a secondhand bookshop a while ago and, to be honest, I might not have bought it otherwise – like a lot of people, I suspect, the concept of a novel in verse was a little off-putting. Me more than most, since I’ve always struggled with reading poetry – probably because I read quite quickly, and poetry really needs to be read slowly, or even aloud.

But, nothing daunted, I gave Lettice Delmer (1958) a go for Persephone Reading Week. If I’m ever going to read it, thought I, now is the time. The Publisher’s Note writes that it is ‘a novel, i.e. narrative with plot, characterisation and psychological insight, where the verse form is readable, not too intrusive – but essential.’ Lettice Delmer is the privileged daughter of extremely charitable parents, who are always seeking to help others for the sake of Christ. She herself is uncertain at the welcome her parents give to Flora Tort and her young son Derrick. Flora was a patient at a Special Hospital (a euphemistic title) and her son is rather an unpredictable, savage creature – at first. The rest of this novel looks at the Delmer household; Lettice’s leaving of it, and her subsequent life of difficulties, weaknesses, loves, losses and spiritual journey. The secondary depiction of a Christian girl struggling to communicate with God, and seeking further depth in her relationship with Christ, was very honest, moving, and genuine.


The Persephone edition has a Plot Summary section at the end, giving summaries of each 10-20 pages – I occasionally flicked to it to clarify a point or two, but largely didn’t find I needed it. Its inclusion does speak volumes about an anticipated readerly response – you can’t imagine a plot summary at the end of a novel, can you? It is true that, now and then, I’d miss a pivotal event – perhaps because I read verse a little too fast, and the nature of its lay-out, with dialogue incorporated into stanzas alongside everything else, means that it’s trickier to make significant points stand out. But this didn’t happen very often, and in general, I didn’t find the verse format a problem.

I suppose that’s the central part of this review, in terms of whether or not I’ll convince others to give Lettice Delmer a try – was I able to read it? For the first thirty pages, I thought I wouldn’t be able to. It was tricky, I get stumbling, and realising I hadn’t taken in anything on the page – but then it clicked. Something suddenly worked – and, though every time I picked the novel up it would take a few lines before it clicked again, I was immersed more quickly each time.

But, of course, unobtrusive wouldn’t be good enough. If a verse format did nothing but disappear into the background, it would be pointless. Of course, Susan Miles uses it to much better effect. Difficult to pin down what the verse *does* achieve: it is more of an atmosphere than anything specific. A subtle beauty and poignancy is lent to the pages, an almost ethereal quality. The verse enables Miles to discuss hard-hitting topics such as death, suicide, abortion, and depression without this feeling at all like a gratuitously gritty novel – they are serious topics, dealt with seriously, but almost through a glass darkly.


The lines I really want to quote give away a big spoiler. So I’m going to post them in white, and you can decide whether or not to read them. Below that are two other quotations, little moments in Lettice Delmer which were illuminating examples of how the verse can be used to accurately reveal a character. The last shows just how well this book fits into the Persephone canon.

He lets the subtle Tempter’s guiding hand
direct his footsteps to the sea-dashed brink.
Not till the waters close above his head
does any plea for mercy stir in him.

* * *

“It’s want of confidence, I truly think,
that keeps him so resentful.
I’ve watched poor Flora hold a stick – quite low –
and try to make him jump.
It seemed as if he were afraid to raise
both feet at once in case when they came down
the earth would not be there!”

* * *

For Lettice insists scratchily
that aching to be in the war is a whim that merits contempt.
“You are doing far better serving at home humbly
than seeking false glory, it seems to me, Hulbert,
out on the battlefield,
for unmarked, unpraised, wholly unheroic home service
is, to my mind, self-satisfying or not self-satisfying,
much more admirable than a soldier’s blatant offering.”

To conclude, I thought I’d find Lettice Delmer impossible to read – but I was pleasantly surprised. Though it won’t become one of my favourite Persephones, the novel has a lyrical beauty for which it is worth acclimatising yourself to the unusual form. Do have a step outside your comfort zone, and give this novel a try.

Onto the second Persephone title of the post:


Our Vicar’s Wife had a flick through Good Things in England, (in its Persephone Originals edition) trying to decide what to make – the first thing she found was something involving a pig’s head, and thought not. Which is nice for me, because I’m vegetarian. Instead, she opted for gingerbread. ‘Eliza Acton’s Gingerbread’, no less, appropriately enough a recipe submitted from a Rectory. Here Mum is, holding her offering (doesn’t she look nice?)


And this is what it looked like when sliced up…. it’s even nicer than it looks. The yummiest gingerbread I’ve ever eaten, and a fitting end to Persephone Reading/Eating Week. Mmmm.

Persephone Week 3: The Runaway

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I don’t know about you, but I’m really enjoying Persephone Reading Week. Do keep popping over to Paperback Reader and The B Files to catch up on what’s going on across the interweb, and I do hope you’ve felt encouraged to pick up your own Persephone book. Our Vicar’s Wife has promised to cook something from her copy of Good Things in England by Florence White, to celebrate the week, so hopefully I’ll be able to treat you to a picture of whatever it is, later in the week.


I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep up to one Persephone a day, since I was out at the theatre tonight (seeing Spike Milligan’s Hitler: My Part in His Downfall – for free, because I’m under 26 – hurrah!) But I was speedy, and the book was quick, so I can add Elizabeth Ann Hart’s The Runaway to my list for the week. A children’s novel originally published in 1872, and reprinted in 1936 with over sixty wood-cuts specially made by the sublime Gwen Raverat, The Runaway has become one of my very favourite Persephones.

Both text and illustrations are quite, quite wonderful. It’s impossible to imagine them separated, and I pity the children between 1872 and 1936 who had to make do without – but more do I pity myself and all other children who didn’t get this read aloud to them in their infancy. The protagonist is Clarice, an imaginative fifteen year old (who acts more like a modern day ten year old – whether that is a sign of the times, or simply Clarice alone, I’m not sure) who regrets that her father is not the army, and in the opening line, redolent of Emma, is described: ‘Clarice Clavering – young, ardent, and happy -‘. Longing for adventure, she finds it in the form of Olga, hidden amongst the thicket. The eponymous Runaway, she persuades Clarice to allow her to hide in the house. The plot is about whether or not Olga will be discovered; whether or not she is telling the truth about her origins; what the consequences of her running away will be for all.

But, for me, the plot is less significant than the lively characters. Clarice is a fairly typical good, obedient Victorian child, but without the slightly sickening edge that certain members of the March family have for me(…) Her spirited eagerness for adventure set her apart from her less attractive compatriots. And then there is Olga! What a delight – airy, impetuous, irrepressible, and vibrant, she reminded of nothing so much as Clarissa from Edith Olivier’s The Love Child. And anybody au fait with my 50 Books You Must Read will realise what a compliment that is.


Had the text been printed alone, this would be a lovely book – but Gwen Raverat’s wood-cuts take it to the next level. I didn’t really know what wood-cuts were before I started reading Persephone Books six years ago, but now I love them. Often featured in the early Persephone Quarterlies, an article by Pat Jaffe in PQ 4 speaks of the ‘bookish, talented, visual twentieth-century women [who] have taken such delight in the intimate, intricate craft they were at last allowed to learn.’ Each of Raverat’s must have taken so long, and they are enchanting. Not twee (though personally I never find a touch of twee goes amiss) but as spirited as Olga herself.

Any parents or grandparents out there, I do encourage you to get a copy of this for your child. If you catch them at the right age, I suspect The Runaway will become a favourite for years to come. And, like all the very best children’s books, it’s one which you’ll have to buy a copy of for yourself too.

Persephone Week 2: Minnie’s Room

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Still on track so far… today I read the second collection of Mollie Panter-Downes’ short stories published by Persephone Books – Minnie’s Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. It’s infernally difficult to write about a collection of short stories, for so many themes are explored, so many characters introduced, that summaries would rival the collection itself for length. Instead you must try and find some sort of cohesion, in vision or style… which is equally difficult. I’ll set the tone for my thoughts on Minnie’s Room, though – Panter-Downes is very, very good.


I was equally blessed and cursed that the first short stories I read were by Katherine Mansfield. Starting with the best does mean that all subsequent short story perusals have felt slightly sub-standard. Mansfield makes the art look so effortless – and every other short story writer doesn’t quite make the grade. Panter-Downes is no different, but she comes perhaps closer than anyone else yet.

The stories in Minnie’s Room appeared in the New Yorker and publication ranges from 1947 to 1965. I haven’t read her wartime stories, published by Persephone in Good Evening, Mrs. Craven, so I can’t comment on whether peacetime changed Panter-Downes’ tone, but it is fairly consistent across these two decades. Like the best short story writers, she is concerned with the minutiae of life, examining ostensibly insignificant events and the interplay of human relationships. With these she is never heavy-handed; there is a much-needed lightness of touch in the revelations falling upon her characters. My favourite story of the collection is ‘What are the Wild Waves Saying?’ which is framed through a woman’s recollections of a childhood holiday, seeing a young married couple being nothing like she expected. The denouement, in other hands, wouldn’t have worked – but Panter-Downes’ pen is gentle enough to make it memorable rather than mawkish.

Another story, ‘The Willoughbys’, relates well to yesterday’s Persephone, Princes in the Land: here the situation is reversed, with upper-class girl falling in love with lower-class man (and not remotely like Lady Chatterley, of course). Only a writer of Panter-Downes’ subtlety could reveal how little both families appreciate the union, and the complicated feelings of indignant surprise and confliction which the four parents have on discussing the match.

Nicola Beauman has often held Mollie Panter-Downes up as an example of great writing, both in her Persephone volumes and in the classic post-war novel One Fine Day (which is published by Virago). It is easy to see why Panter-Downes is held in such esteem. I especially liked her use of observant details or revealing similes:

Norah, who had determined to keep the house going at any cost, visited employment agencies and explained the Sotherns’ need to unimpressed women presiding over dog-eared ledgers that had a disconcerting look of being theatrical props, full of false names.

(‘Minnie’s Room’)

London seemed wrapped from end to end in fog. The city was as mottled and dun-coloured as the board covers of some dirty old volume that opened here and there to disclose a thrilling illustration

(‘Intimations of Morality’)

In terms of themes, the publishers’ introduction notes that many of the stories have middle-class characters striving to live their pre-war life. Another strand I noticed was the idea of faces revealing truth: The woman murmured something, and her head rolled over on the pillow so that her eyes stared into mine, and deep in the sockets I saw a flicker of something resembling a smile, like the dim light of a house one had thought was empty. I was too awed to smile back.

(‘Intimations of Mortality’)

Time and time again faces and eyes suddenly disclose traits or truths previously hidden – and that is, perhaps, as apt a metaphor as any for what Panter-Downes does with the short story. In amongst narratives of ordinary people, often conducting ordinary lives, we suddenly find ourselves face-to-face with a character and, cleverly, subtly, Panter-Downes unveils a previously unsuspected angle to the story – and, often, to the world.

Persephone Week 1: Princes in the Land

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Right – Day One of the Persephone Week is finished, and so far I’m on track. I’ve read one book: Princes in the Land (1938) by Joanna Cannan. I think I’m supposed to link back to a central page, but I wasn’t sure which, so instead I’ll link back to two Persephone-related quizzes (with prizes!) on Claire’s and Verity’s respective blogs.

Since I’m hoping to read about six books this week, which requires a lot of reading, the reviews of them will be quite short. Hopefully enough for you to decide whether or not you want to investigate further the Persephone Books I’m reviewing…


I’ve been looking forward to reading Princes in the Land for quite a while, not least because it is often compared to one of my favourite Persephone Books, Elizabeth Cambridge’s Hostages to Fortune. Both are set in Oxfordshire; both concern the role of a mother, realising that her children and husband are not exactly what she expected. But where Cambridge’s heroine is pragmatic, wise, and selfless, Cannan’s is rather different. Having read Danielle’s recent review, and the blurb on the Persephone website, I wonder whether others have had different responses to the book… my views will become clear.

The novel opens with Patricia and Angela travelling with their mother, to live with the grandfather in their ancestral mansion. Patricia is travel-sick and miserable – no glamorous introduction to a ‘angular, freckled’ girl; a disappointment to their mother. Their mother ‘had been brought up to ring bells and now had no bells to ring’ (an example of Cannan’s concise, accurate summations of character) – as a poor relative, she must return to her father-in-law’s house, after the death of her husband. We speed through Patricia’s childhood here, and enter stage left a husband: Hugh. They meet in a train carriage, and have soon (after one or two incidents of note) married and set up house.

And the bulk of the novel follows this nuclear family of Patricia and Hugh, and their three children – August, Giles, and Nicola. For the most part, it chronicles Patricia’s illusions about them; the way her children form characters which are anathema to her. They don’t become murderers or drunks, but in her eyes a rejection of horses, an embracing of evangelical Christianity, a lower-middle-class villa, are all akin to her children beating orphans to death. It was here that Princes in the Land differed from Hostages to Fortune – where Catherine selflessly allows her children to follow their own paths, and sees them as acceptable, Patricia views any lifestyle other than her own ideal as dreadful. She has made sacrifices to her marriage, and initially seems an admirable character through and through – but by the end she appears increasingly selfish and unkind. This is mostly exemplified through her dissatisfaction with daughter-in-law Gwen. Her crimes are of the variety of saying ‘Pardon?’; using doilies; wanting to call her daughter Daphne. Patricia says at one point, without any evidence of irony, ‘Goodness knows I’m not snobbish.’ Does Cannan, somehow, agree with her? Can she be that blind? Patricia makes Nancy Mitford seem positively egalitarian. And, unlike Nancy Mitford, this horsey-huntin’-say-glass-not-mirror persona is presented without a shred of self-aware humour.

Which is odd, because Cannan writes quite wittily at times. For example, in describing Angela’s husband Victor – he is:

‘a pink young man with china-blue eyes and hair as golden as Angela’s, who could and did express all life was to him and all his reactions to it in the two simple sentences, “Hellish, eh?” and “Ripping, what?”‘
I suppose, in the end, I didn’t know where I stood with Princes in the Land. I don’t believe in judging a novel by the likeability of its characters, and Cannan can certainly write engagingly, sometimes amusingly, and in a domestic vein so familiar and welcome to Persephone fans. But I cannot sympathise with the character – her themes of a mother’s sacrifice, watching children grow, are ones I usually love, but the stance we seem encouraged to agree with is so prejudiced and, dare I add, proud. Though this only becomes concrete towards the end of the novel – before this, Cannan does show the family’s interlocking relationships from various, more generous angles… as I say, I’m not sure where I stand with the novel. It is certainly well written, and I’m glad I’ve read it, but… my overriding response is a desire to re-read Hostages to Fortune.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

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Nicola Beauman, of Persephone Books, very kindly sent me a copy of her book The Other Elizabeth Taylor months and months ago, and I’ve been reading it gradually for most of that time. I finished it quite a while ago now, and have been meaning to write about it for a long time – but I wanted to ponder it, and give the book a proper response. As Persephone Reading Week kicks off on Monday, it seemed a good way to whet appetites. I shouldn’t think there will be much confusion on this site, but I’ll make clear from the start: we’re talking about Elizabeth Taylor the novelist (who wrote books I’ve chatted about such as Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont) rather than Elizabeth Taylor the actress, who has – as far as I’m aware – warranted no mention yet at Stuck-in-a-Book.
The Other Elizabeth Taylor is the first (and maybe last?) Persephone Life, a biography which Beauman wrote over the course of fifteen years. As one might expect of a biography, it runs from 3rd July 1912 when Betty Coles was born, to 19th November 1975 when Elizabeth Taylor died – but the focus of the biography is largely twofold. Her writing and her relationships. If, like me, you find an author’s writing life of paramount significance, there is plenty in this biography to satisfy. Though writing from 1940s – 1970s, there is a sense in which Elizabeth Taylor’s novels fit with the spirit of the 1920s and ’30s. To quote Jocelyn Brooke, cited in The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Taylor is

in the best sense old-fashioned; that is to say, she writes an elegant, witty prose, has a decent respect for the Queen’s English, and is not obsessed by crime, violence, madness or homosexuality.

As well as looking at the situations and inspirations for Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, the biography has a great deal of information about her short stories – both the ones published and those which weren’t. This does lead to quite a lot of little plot summaries, but I appreciate the effort of a biography to be comprehensive – and the practical process of writing is always the most fascinating part of an author’s biography, to me. These sections also furthered my interest in William Maxwell, the novelist Cornflower introduced me to, in his capacity of New Yorker editor. Their relationship is fascinating – Maxwell was capable of being both friend and professional. He recognised her talent, spoke of ‘the excitement, the bliss, of reading’ one of her stories, but continued to turn down some of her stories throughout the rest of her writing career. How strong their bond must have been to survive that – especially to a woman who took criticism so much to heart.

It is these sections of the biography which Beauman really brings to life: Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship with other authors. Though the biography often remarks with surprise that Taylor chose a middle-class, almost provincial life, instead of the hustle and bustle of London (whereas I can never understand why anybody would choose London over the countryside – the former seems so much more isolated than the latter!) she had several significant literary friendships. The most influential seems to have been with Elizabeth Bowen, who was not shy of offering praise: ‘This is a case of the genius which I do know you have’. The most interesting to me is Ivy Compton-Burnett, and I have already gone and bought Robert Liddell’s Elizabeth and Ivy based on Beauman’s mentions of it.

I said the biography had dual focuses; the big discovery in Beauman’s research, and the main reason the book was delayed until after Taylor’s husband’s death, was the relationship between Taylor and Ray Russell. Hundreds of his letters have emerged, and Beauman interviewed Russell. Though Taylor’s marriage seems more or less undisrupted by this ongoing relationship, which lost any mutual romance quite early on, it remains something to shake the image of Elizabeth Taylor as a model middle-class wife. Though perhaps the biographer’s biggest claim to breaking new territory, it was this section of the book which interested me least. It might alter her reputation and character – but I didn’t know anything about her extant reputation or character before I started reading the biography. It was enough to earn Beauman the antagonism of Taylor’s children, though. I would be unable to write this review without mentioning the striking footnote which every review has mentioned: ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter has commented [concerning a section on David Blakeley]: “Most of what Nicola has written is untrue and the rest hurtful to many people”‘. The Acknowledgements add that they are ‘alas “very angry and distressed” about the book and have asked to be disassociated from it.’ I don’t know how to respond to either their fierce rejection of the book (one can only imagine how hurtful that has been to its author) nor the very honest publication of their opinion – the ethics of biography is a whole other topic, one which Elaine touches on interestingly in her review of The Other Elizabeth Taylor.

I think the key to appreciating The Other Elizabeth Taylor and Nicola Beauman’s writing is to recognise that she approaches biography predominantly as a reader, rather than a writer. That is not to say that her research is not impeccable – the heart Beauman brings to the project means the research is likely to be all the more scrupulous. But the book is not scholarly in the way that, say Hermione Lee’s biographies are scholarly – opinion is permitted, informalities allowed. Discussions of books will lead into a more personal point – indeed, the writing is almost always personal. In discussing a situation in Taylor’s life which is reflected in her novel Blaming, Beauman writes:

Whether she was as much to blame as she believed no one can say; we have all written letters saying ‘I am sorry’, failed our friends when they needed us. If she was to blame for her small lapse – then we are to blame, everyday, for similar failures.

It is an approach I like, it is one which fits in with the ethos of Persephone. In the pen of another biographer there might have been fewer evaluative comments; fewer emotive responses, but perhaps that is not the brand of biographer appropriate for Elizabeth Taylor. This is an appreciation as much as a biography. Like any reader, Beauman isn’t always sure how to esteem the writer. Alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Beauman uses the word ‘genius’, but elsewhere debates why Taylor is not a ‘great’ writer. The Other Elizabeth Taylor is, subtly, probably unintentionally, also an exploration of Nicola Beauman’s decades-long relationship with the writer through her books. Accepted on this level, Beauman has pushed the boundaries of biography, and written a book which should be recognised as – in its own way – experimental rather than simply informal. I do not believe Beauman set out to challenge the perimeters of biography – but I do think there is a case for suggesting that she has done so.

Perhaps one can see why Taylor’s children complained. I dare say any book about one’s own parents must cause offence somehow – especially about someone so ardently private as Elizabeth Taylor. The vitriol of Taylors Junior can’t really have poured oil on troubled waters, though, and they have done Beauman a huge disservice in their assessment of the biography. The Other Elizabeth Taylor is a warm, original, caring portrait of the middle-class literary highflier; the wealthy socialist; the domestic career woman; the determinedly private woman whose life is so very interesting, despite her contest protestations that it was not.