Tag: E. H. Young

Review 2317: William

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William Nesbitt is a successful ship builder and owner, and at the beginning of this novel, he is contemplating the successes of his life. The only thing he feels he has missed is some romance in life, his wife Kate being a very practical woman. But he experiences romance vicariously, through his favorite daughter, Lydia, whom he views as a source of light.

Kate Nesbitt is a worrier, and she has a sense of impending doom. She also is extremely conventional and I think old-fashioned, even for the time (1925). For example, she disapproves of her daughter Dora going to visit Lydia in London without her husband. Kate has a sense that something is going to go wrong with what she sees as her family’s happy and content existence.

Of course, she is being almost willfully blind. Their son Walter and his wife Violet are content, but their daughter Dora is increasingly discontented with her husband Herbert. Their daughter Mabel and her husband John are self-righteous, and Mabel likes to complain and pretend they are poor when John’s business is going well. Janet, the youngest, unmarried daughter is silent and unhappy. Later, it becomes obvious that she thinks she’s in love with Oliver, Lydia’s husband.

Then, something bad does happen: Lydia leaves Oliver for Henry Wyatt, a writer. William is still accepting of Lydia, thinking she is trying to live her life honestly, but he begins to see that Kate is more rigid and unaccepting than he realized.

This novel is an insightful and nuanced study of how a crisis can affect a family. Since Young ran off with a married man, it’s interesting to speculate how autobiographical this novel may be. I found the novel deeply interesting, with complex characters.

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The Curate’s Wife

Review 2309: The Curate’s Wife

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When I reviewed E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren, I remarked that I preferred Jenny’s sister Dahlia to Jenny. So, I was delighted to find that The Curate’s Wife is about Dahlia (although Jenny’s romantic fate is also involved).

Dahlia has married the curate, Cecil Sproat, on the basis of a friendship in which she feels she can say anything. But very soon, she finds that’s not true when it applies to religion, which has not formed part of her upbringing and which she finds silly. For his part, Cecil is rigid and has been unthinking in his religious beliefs. There is also the problem that Cecil is in love with Dahlia, but the reverse is not true.

Another issue is created by Mrs. Doubleday, the wife of Rector Doubleday, Cecil’s boss. She is an unpleasant woman who already dislikes Cecil and takes a strong dislike to Dahlia. She makes it her business to listen to gossip about the girls’ mother’s inferior social standing and her affair during the war. Their mother foolishly married farmer Thomas Grimshaw at the end of Jenny Wren, hoping that would remove a bar to Jenny’s marriage with Cyril Merriman, but that only made the situation more hopeless. Jenny has gone off to live with Mr. Cumming’s sisters and father and learn about the antique business.

Dahlia begins to feel as if she missed out. After school, she was first isolated on the farm and now is living with a dedicated man doing good works. She has never even been to a party or enjoyed other types of amusements. She begins to fancy herself in love with Simon Tothill, a young man she met at a theater rehearsal.

Just as Dahlia and Cecil are beginning to understand each other, Jenny arrives without warning. She has left the Cummings and expects to live with Dahlia and Cecil. Although Dahlia is happy to see Jenny, she begins to realize just how selfish her sister can be. For his part, Cecil is a little jealous of how close the sisters are.

Dahlia’s problems with Cecil have an interesting parallel in the relationship between the Doubledays. Mr. Doubleday is easy going and tries to avoid trouble but is afraid of his ill-natured wife. Their son is returning after three years of service in Africa, and Mrs. Doubleday wants him all to herself. But she soon makes a mistake in a remark that frees Mr. Doubleday from trying to please her.

This novel takes a complex look at new marriage and the lack of preparation people have for its problems. I didn’t like Jenny any better, but I have been impressed by how far below the surface Young’s novels go.

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Review 2274: The Misses Mallett

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When I read that five years before she wrote this book, E. H. Young ran off with a married man, I had to wonder how much of it was autobiographical. Not that that’s exactly what happens in The Misses Mallett, but you’ll understand why I say this if you read it.

As a young woman, Rose Mallett rejects the proposal of Francis Sales. He is handsome, but she thinks he is sulky and boyish. And he is. Rose lives with her much older half sisters, whom she remembers thinking as a girl were like princesses. Now perhaps they are a little comic, but Rose doesn’t see them that way. Both are meticulously dressed in a style of twenty years before. Caroline, who likes to present a roguish effect but knows nothing about what she suggests, can be magnificent, while Sophia still looks girlish. Rose herself is beautiful in a cool, collected way, and dresses with a stylish severity.

Francis Sales goes away to Canada to learn farming and in a few years comes home with a wife, Christabel. Although Christabel says she wants to be friends, it’s clear she has some idea of Rose that is mistaken. Soon Christabel, in trying to prove her gameness at horse riding when she is actually afraid of horses, is badly injured so that she is a permanent invalid. For this incident she believes Rose had a part she did not play. Still, Rose begins a relationship with Francis that is not an affair but is more than a friendship.

When Rose is about thirty, the sisters’ niece Henrietta comes to live with them. Although the sisters never saw their brother Reginald unless he needed money, they still loved him. He has died, followed shortly by his widow, who rejected their money even though she and Henrietta were living in poverty, Henrietta having kept their lodgings by taking up the cooking for the whole house. When her mother dies, the sisters send for her.

Unfortunately, one of the first people Henrietta sees when she arrives is Francis Sales, who presents a romantic exterior riding his horse. She soon divines that Rose has a relationship with him even though they have lately broken up, and decides she will have him herself. As can be predicted, he’s not hard to get.

Because Henrietta sees Rose as a rival, she doesn’t understand the things Rose does for her. Rose has her flaws, but she isn’t the woman Christabel or Henrietta think she is. It is this misunderstanding that powers the plot of the novel.

I find Young fascinating. Her novels are not at all what I expect for her time, so early in the 20th century (this one is from 1922). Her heroines are complex and interesting. I have no idea what either of the heroines in this book see in Francis Sales, though.

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Jenny Wren

Review 2261: Jenny Wren

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This novel is called Jenny Wren after its main character, Jenny Randall, but I actually preferred her sister, Dahlia. The two sisters are the daughters of a mismatched couple, beautiful but lower-class Louisa and Randall, who is her social superior. Once her husband got over his infatuation, he criticized her actions and her manners and made himself responsible for their daughters’ education. Both have the right accents and manners, but Jenny cares more about what people think than Dahlia does and is ashamed of her mother, particularly because while their father was away at the war (WWI), Louisa had an affair with Thomas Grimshaw, a local farmer.

Now their father has died, and Louisa has sold the farm and purchased a large house in a fashionable neighborhood in Upper Radstowe to open a boarding house. The Dakins next door are friendly to the girls until they mistake Louisa for the cook. Miss Jewel, who also runs a boarding house, is hostile and on the look out for hints of scandal, such as that suggested by Thomas Grimshaw’s visits every Saturday. Louisa isn’t happy to see him, but she sold him the farm and borrowed money from him to buy the house. He’s hoping she will fail and be forced to marry him.

Jenny has dreams of meeting some young upper-class man and falling in love with him, but she sees the very existence of her mother as a threat to this “future.” She is disposed to like Edwin Cummings, their boarder, but looks down on him as worker in a shop. He is an expert on antique furniture and wants to have his own shop, and she is beginning to be friends with him when she meets the son of the local gentry, Cyril Merriman, and falls in love with him. After a misunderstanding, she lets him believe her name is Jenny Wren and is afraid to tell him who she actually is.

In the meantime, Dahlia goes from making fun of Mr. Sproat, the curate, to beginning to like him. However, the family’s second boarder, Miss Morrison, hopes to marry him.

Louisa, who makes several badly misjudged decisions based on wrong assumptions, invites her sister Sarah to stay with them. Sarah turns out to be an unpleasant woman who wants to take the boarding house over from Louisa. To do that, she decides both girls must leave the house and Louisa must marry Grimshaw, and she sets out to bring these outcomes to pass.

The novel concentrates on Jenny, because she undergoes the most personal growth. I found her to be quite foolish at times, and her attitude to her mother made it hard for me to relate to her, but she grows up in the end.

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Review 2216: Classics Club Spin Result! Miss Mole

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I don’t know what readers in 1930 would have thought of Miss Mole—maybe found it a little shocking—but I thought it was delightful. I read it for the latest Classics Club Spin.

Miss Mole is a forty-something spinster of little means. Of yeoman stock, she was well educated but left with little when her parents died. Since then, she’s been working in various genteel, poorly paid positions. When the novel opens, she’s a companion for Mrs. Widdows, but she has difficulty sometimes hiding her true nature under the submissive aspect her employers expect, and she’s fairly sure she’s going to lose her position soon. She goes to tea with Mrs. Spenser-Smith, a prominent citizen in town who is also her cousin. Lillia Spenser-Smith would like her relationship with shabby Miss Mole to remain a secret, so she helps her get a position as housekeeper with the chapel rector Mr. Corder, as she is worried about his two daughters and the incursions of Patsy Withers, who would like to be their stepmother.

Miss Mole finds the Corder household an unhappy one. Corder is an energetic pastor, but at home he expects his family to see no fault in him and he pays no attention to the state of his children. Everything must revolve around him. His oldest daughter Ethel is restless, horsy, and prone to bad temper. She has been supposed to have been running the household but has been paying more attention to her charities. Cousin Wilfred soon appreciates Miss Mole’s sense of humor, but young Ruth is at first mistrusting. Miss Mole decides to help Ruth even though she dislikes Mr. Corder.

Mr. Blankinsop, an acquaintance from Miss Mole’s former lodging, comes to tell Mr. Corder that he is changing churches because he disagrees with him. Although he seemed to want to avoid Miss Mole at the lodging, he begins to seek out her company. She thinks he is in love with a helpless married woman at his lodging.

Energetic Miss Mole does her work well and the Corders’ lives improve, but she has a secret that threatens when a minister of a neighboring chapel, Mr. Pilgrim, appears.

Miss Mole is a great character—intelligent, cynical, but with an ability to find joy in life, coupled with a tendency to lie but also to speak her mind.

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Cluny Brown

Review 1601: Chatterton Square

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Two very different families live across the road from each other on Chatterton Square. Mr. Blackett is self-satisfied and judgmental. He thinks Mrs. Fraser across the way is no better than she should be and is trying to attract him. He doesn’t understand that Rosamund Fraser is teasing him because of his conceit.

Rosamund Fraser is separated from her husband and supporting a household that contains her three sons and two daughters as well as Miss Spanner, a single friend and boarder. She runs her household loosely, and their warm home contrasts starkly with the Blacketts’, where Mr. Blackett is always picking on someone, particularly his daughter, Rhoda.

This novel is about more than two families or even about the three statuses available to women at the time. For, it is set shortly before World War II, when the British government was for appeasement. Mr. Blackett, who somehow managed to avoid serving in the First World War, is all for appeasement. Across the road, Rosamund Fraser believes appeasement is shameful, that you don’t make deals with criminals. Despite her fears for her sons, she feels war is the only honorable way forward.

There is finally the state of Rosamund’s marriage as well as Bertha Blackett’s. Rosamund, having been deserted by Fergus and assented to divorce, feels free to fall in love again, with Piers Lindsay, Bertha Blackett’s cousin. But having asked for a divorce, Fergus fall silent. Bertha has for years been hiding her contempt for her husband by pretending complete subservience to him. But eventually her true self must emerge.

This is an absorbing and ultimately touching novel about a particular time and place. The characters are believable and the women and most of the children sympathetic.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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