When I bought The Small Room (1961), it was because I thought it might be about a house. I’m a simple man: I love books about houses, particularly if this would end up being about a hitherto undiscovered small room in a house. If anybody knows any books like that, lemme know. Well, The Small Room isn’t that, but I found an awful lot to like in it anyway.
I bought the novel on my first trip to the United States in 2013 – more specifically, in a lovely bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sadly, since then the little town has become renowned for the appalling far-right rally that ended in a woman’s death. At the time, it was simply a day out from DC.
I don’t think I’d read any May Sarton books at the time, but it is now my third – after The Magnificent Spinster and The Education of Harriet Hatfield. While I enjoyed both of them, I found the former less memorable than I’d hoped, and the latter very patchy. The Small Room takes us to a setting that is very distinct and probably a recommendation to many of us: a women’s college in New England.
Lucy Winter – surely a coy nod to Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette? – has just started there, and it is her first teaching job. She is young, idealistic, and keen to make a good impression. More than that, she is keen to be a good teacher – in every sense of the word ‘good’.
The girls arrived, and settled like flocks of garrulous starlings, perpetual chatter and perpetual motion. Lucy, looking down from her office on the fourth floor of one of the oldest buildings, compared the campus to a stage where a complicated ballet was being rehearsed. Small groups flowed together and parted; a girl in a blue blazer ran from one building to another; five or six others arranged themselves under an elm, in unconsciously romantic attitudes, a chorus of nymphs. The effect was enhanced by the freshmen’s required red Eton caps, and by the unrequired but almost universal uniform of short pleated skirts and blazers. Looking down on all this casual, yet intimate life from above, Lucy felt lonely and a little scared.
At the centre of the novel are the actions of one student. She is exemplary and feted, and widely regarded as having a promising future that would reflect well on the college. But when Lucy is marking one of her essays, she discovers that it is plagiarised. She feels she has to inform other members of the faculty – and sets in motion a series of actions that affect everybody in the college.
Lucy is a well-drawn and interesting character, partly because Sarton uses her to show that there are not simple choices between wrong and right, and that people might do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa. The girl who plagiarises is also written really interestingly, and reacts in a way that is both believable and unexpected. What stopped me wholeheartedly loving The Small Room is that these two, and perhaps one or two others, are the only nuanced characters in the novel. It’s not that the others are stereotypes, it’s just that Sarton doesn’t spend enough time delineating them and they all (particularly the other teachers and board members) blur into one amorphous mass.
Sarton does make up for this with beautiful, unpredictable writing. Here is one bit I noted down:
Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.
At the heart of The Small Room is a fascinating dilemma, done well and interestingly – with only a few flaws in the way the cast is put together. I don’t think I’ve yet found my perfect Sarton novel, but I think this is my favourite of the three I’ve read so far.
I found Charlottesville to have an abundance of bookstores old and new when we went there for an impromptu vacation. I’d love to have a reading retreat with other readers somewhere between there and DC and take advantage of both.
What a good idea! I do recall one in Charlottesville with a big and bountiful basement.
For some reason I love to read May Sarton’s journals but not a fan of her fiction. She has published many journals and they are so absorbing to read- mostly about her daily life, her garden, her homes, and her process of writing. If you like journal reading you might try her other books.
Interesting – I have two or three of her journals but haven’t read any, so thanks for the recommendation
Interesting! I love a campus novel so I may have to give this a try, despite its flaws!
I have read very few, but this was a good example!
This sounds excellent. I loved Five Windows by DE Stevenson so much because there was loads of detail about setting up a home (two homes, actually) and that is what I crave – wave a book about houses and setting up home at me and I’m sold!
Lovely! And happily we’d already planned it for the next episode of the podcast :D
I really disliked this one when I read it years ago, I think I must be more of a black and white person and in what is an unfair real world I like people in fiction to get their comeuppance which doesn’t happen in this one – if I’m remembering correctly.
Interesting! Yes, I can see why – I don’t think I mind injustice if it isn’t someone acting cruelly.
Hmm, it must be my Scottish Presbyterian upbringing coming through!
You probably know of these, but A Fugue in Time and China Court by Rumer Godden are about houses, as is A Harp in Lowndes Square by Rachel Ferguson (Furrowed Middlebrow).
Thanks Kay! I know the Fergusons but haven’t read those by Godden – lovely rec.
If you like books about houses you should read some of Sarton’s diaries. Great reads.
Thanks! I do have a couple of them, thankfully.
Echoing the comments of others who have rec’d Sarton’s diaries. She’s one of my MustReadEverything authors. And The Small Room was my first of hers (I love school books). I copied out several passages. If I recall, her memoir with Sea in the title is especially good for place and house. I’ll keep your house thing in mind for other rec’s: we have that in common. You’ve read Lettice Cooper’s The New House, I believe? That’s the one coming to mind in this moment!
MaySarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep is all about her purchase of a ramshackle farmhouse in New Hampshire and subsequent renovation. It is, of course much more than that but as I am not a writer I will spare you any further description. It is still my favorite of her books, though I now must find The Small Room. Just happened on your post and am looking forward to exploring it further. Thank you.
Oh I love that sort of book – thanks Patti! I’ll have to look out for Plant Dreaming Deep.