Tag: Persephone Press reprints

Review 2322: A Well Full of Leaves

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Laura is from a poor family, but lack of money isn’t the problem so much as lack of love. Her father earns very little and is often drunk. Her mother constantly complains, offers no affection to her children, and tells them they are ungrateful.

At the opening of the novel, Anda, the oldest at 16, is beautiful but selfish. Robert, at 14, loves reading about history but has been made to quit school for a job as a clerk. Both pick on Steve, the youngest at 11, who deeply feels the lack of affection. Only Laura, who is 12 or 13, seems to care about him, and she has learned to adapt to their circumstances by losing herself in the tiny details of life, to enjoy living. She tries to teach her outlook to Steve, but he just becomes more bitter.

A crisis comes when Steve is 14. Although he is the best student of Greek in school and has a good chance at university, their mother tells him she removed him from school so he can work. This is just meanness, because Anda is leaving home, and Robert and Laura are working, so the household is better off than it ever has been. After a huge family fight, Steve burns all his books.

The novel begins to be about the relationship between Laura and Steve. Steve becomes a famous actor with a very bad reputation. He has many affairs but says he loves only Laura. Once their father dies, Laura goes to live with Steve. The real crisis comes when Laura falls in love.

Although I agree with a lot of Laura’s ideas, Myers expresses them far too often and in a florid writing style that seems to belong to the early Romantics. Sometimes, I had no idea what she was talking about and other times, I didn’t want to think about it enough to figure it out. Parts of the novel are absolutely fraught in tone, especially at the end.

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Review 2308: One Afternoon

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One afternoon Anna Goodhart, a widow in her mid-thirties with three daughters, runs into Charlie, a young actor whom she met years ago at some event of her husband’s. He invites her to a party. She agrees to go but almost backs out. However, she goes and they soon begin an affair. Although she doesn’t expect it to last, she is wild with joy and makes no secret of their relationship.

This is the story about a woman who begins to rebuild her own life after her husband’s death, to realize things about her marriage, and to identify what she wants her life to be. Although attitudes had begun to change for women in 1974 when this book was published, it reads like a much more modern novel. I was surprised how the people in Anna’s life, with a couple of exceptions, take her affair and her subsequent decisions.

This is a lovely book filled with mostly kind people. It explores memory and how it tangles with reality as well as the complexities of love.

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Review 2289: Heat Lightning

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Amy travels back to her childhood home in Michigan from New York ostensibly to recover from surgery but really to think about the situation with her husband, Geoffrey. There is tension among her relatives. The Westovers are a wealthy family, but it is 1930. Her father Alfred’s farm machinery factory doesn’t have many orders, but his brother DeWitt made some bad investments and is asking him for help.

Amy’s cousin Tom is drinking too much and soon has a more serious problem. Her redoubtable grandmother is managing her fortune but is dealing with requests for help from Tom and DeWitt.

Amy watches everyone’s interactions carefully, because she is looking for some inspiration. She feels that her generation has no code for behavior and is trying to formulate its own. She doesn’t know how she feels about Geoff and is looking for guidance in her parents’ loving interactions.

Although a lot of this novel is about family interactions, some of the dinner conversations are about scientific discoveries that came earlier than I expected, for example, about entropy. On the other hand, the idea of race expressed in the novel is not scientifically based (or perhaps language is not carefully used). Amy, for example, considers the European immigrant working class characters to be of a different race than her family and friends. They’re Italians and Swedes.

A distressing topic for modern audiences is what the family should do with Curly, the mentally disabled gardener.

Overall, I found this a thoughtful and interesting look at family dynamics.

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Review 2272: The Other Day

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The Other Day is Dorothy Whipple’s charming memoir of her childhood in Blackburn, starting when she was very young until she was about 12. She clearly has a vivid memory of such things as her inability to understand when someone was teasing her, the ways she misunderstood things, and her great ideas based on childish misconceptions.

Her experiences of school were especially unfortunate. She was hopeless at mathematics, and her math teacher at her first school ridiculed her mercilessly until she “cheated” by claiming to get two answers right on a quiz. Later, she was entered into a convent school and became confused about what she was told about religion.

Most of her stories, whether happy or not, reflect a happy childhood, especially when the family later takes a cottage. Her memories reflect a lot of humor even though she seems to have been a serious child.

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Review 1781: Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

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A woman feels as if some evacuees have taken over her home. The Red Cross sewing party is enlivened by arguments between the good-natured Mrs. Peters and the bloodthirsty Mrs. Twistle. A woman bravely faces her husband’s deployment and then is devastated to find he hasn’t left yet and she has to face it all over again. A couple finally gets rid of their evacuees only to have an acquaintance ask for room in their house. A man who has been working in a ministry feels guilty about not joining up.

These are a few of the stories about ordinary people during World War II that Mollie Panter-Downes published in the New Yorker. They are slice-of-life stories, although most of them have an upper-class perspective, of changing social conditions, of changes in everyday life, of people keeping a stiff upper lip.

I was surprised to learn from the Afterword that Panter-Downes, a prolific British journalist, short story writer, and novelist, was much better known in the United States than in Britain because she published almost everything in the New Yorker. So, even though she wrote hundreds of short stories, her legacy was almost lost in her native country.

Ordered by when they were written, this collection provides an insightful look, beautifully written, at the lives of ordinary people during the war.

One Fine Day

My Husband Simon

To Bed with Grand Music

Review 1757: To Bed with Grand Music

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To Bed with Grand Music opens with Deborah Robertson in bed with her husband Graham swearing perfect fidelity before his deployment to Cairo during World War II. Graham more honestly doesn’t promise that but says he won’t sleep with anyone that matters. At first, Deborah contents herself at home, but when, in her boredom, she begins snapping at her little son, Timmy, her mother suggests she get a job.

Her mother is thinking about a job nearby in Winchester, but Deborah makes arrangements to visit a friend in London, Madeleine, and see about a job there. Intending to go home on the evening train, she ends up getting drunk and spending the night with a man.

Shocked at herself, Deborah is determined to stay home, but she has a talent for convincing herself that what she wants to do is right, so it’s not too long before she turns down a job in Winchester only to take a lower-paying one in London. From there, she begins a career of connecting with men of increasingly higher rank.

Deborah is definitely an antihero. She starts out selfish and nervous and becomes deceitful, amoral, and avaricious as she goes on. Her faint motherly instincts become almost nonexistent. This is an insightful, sardonic character study of a particular type of woman.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue

A Fugue in Time

Vanity Fair

Review 1734: Effi Briest

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Effi Briest is sort of a German version of Madame Bovary. It seems that the last half of the 19th century was a big time for novels about unfaithful wives. However, whereas Anna Karenina was a call for improvement in women’s rights on this issue, Effi Briest seems to accept the unfairness of the laws and societal mores. Nevertheless, I liked this novel more than Madame Bovary, which is more of a character study of a stupid woman.

Effi is only sixteen when the Baron von Instetten, an old suitor of her mother, comes calling. Within an hour, he proposes marriage and is accepted. The Baron is a civil servant, and after their marriage, he takes her home to a seaside village in upper Pomerania. The house is dark and depressing and reputedly haunted. Society is limited, and Effi, who is a gay person who likes to enjoy herself, finds only one congenial inhabitant, the local chemist. The women she has to socialize with are commonplace or spiteful. Effi feels neglected and unhappy.

After the birth of her daughter, the Crampases arrive. Major Crampas is an old schoolfriend of the Baron and a known womanizer. (I wonder if his name’s resemblance to Krampus is a coincidence, considering the Germanic origins of that character.) Although she tries to avoid it, Effi is drawn into an affair with him. When her husband gets a posting to Berlin, though, she is happy to leave and put it behind her. But it is not behind her at all.

I liked the character of Effi very much, but she is the only one in this novel who is fully drawn. The others just seem like placeholders for their actions, except for Rollo the dog. Also, the harsh reactions of everyone when they find out about the affair, even though it is long over with, seem even more extreme than Karenin’s in Anna Karenina.

Even though this novel is 20 years more recent than Anna Karenina, having been published in 1895, it has a much more rigid and judgmental message despite Effi being a sympathetic character. As a person, I liked Effi better than silly Emma Bovary or naïve Anna Karenina, but I found the novel a bit punitive. Fontane was reacting in it to a story he heard of a similar event in which he was struck by the lack of surprise or dismay expressed by society at the harsh treatment of the woman involved, so he is combining an approach to our sympathy with Realism in this novel.

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Review 1706: Milton Place

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Milton Place is sort of an update of King Lear—set in the 1950’s. It is partially drawn from de Waal’s experience and is one of two novels published posthumously.

Mr. Barlow, the elderly owner of Milton Place, receives a letter one morning from Anita Seiler. She is the daughter of a girl he fell in love with long ago in Austria, but unfortunately he was already engaged. Anita tells him that she no longer has ties in Austria and would like to come to England, asking him to recommend her to someone for work. He writes back inviting her to stay.

His daughter Emily is a busybody who thinks it’s time he sold Milton Place and moved somewhere smaller where he can be more comfortable. It’s true that the place is cold and shabby, but Mr. Barlow is comfortable in the few rooms he uses and loves his garden. However, Emily is already setting out on a plan to have the county request the house for a home for unwed mothers. When Emily hears about the new house guest, she is certain that Anita is after her father’s money.

Anita and Mr. Barlow get along beautifully, and he wants her to stay. She feels uncomfortable staying as a visitor, so she begins cleaning all the vacant rooms and making the house more cheerful.

Things change, though, with the arrival of Tony, Mr. Barlow’s beloved grandson, on break from university.

One plot line of this novel bothered me a bit. I want to be a little mysterious about it, but my difficulty hinges on how adult an 18-year-old boy is. I admit there is probably a difference of opinion on this, that clearly in the novel there is, and that this idea changes over time. That is, an 18-year-old of either sex is now considered less of an adult than they would have been then, and then less than 50 years before.

This caused a problem for me, but I found the novel beautifully written and affecting.

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King Lear

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Review 1702: The Two Mrs. Abbotts

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The Two Mrs. Abbotts is the third Miss Buncle book. Barbara Buncle is, of course, one of the Mrs. Abbotts, and the other one is Jerry, the wife of Barbara’s husband’s nephew. It is 1942, and Sam, Jerry’s husband, is serving in Egypt. Jerry has allowed an army unit bivouacked on her property to use her kitchen.

The novel begins with a pleasant coincidence, for the dreaded Red Cross lecturer that Barbara is supposed to host turns out to be Sarah, an old friend. Sarah accompanies Barbara to a charity bazaar where the famous author Janetta Walters is appearing. Barbara’s husband is Walters’ publisher, but he doesn’t much like her books.

This novel has a rather meandering plot that checks in with old friends and introduces new ones. There are some funny scenes with Barbara’s children, Simon and Fay, and the novel spends some time with Markie, Jerry’s old governess turned housekeeper. However, much of the novel deals with what happens after a young man pressed into attending tea with Janetta Walters tells her he doesn’t like her books, but he’s sure she could write good ones.

The Buncle books are good fun, with appealing characters, humor, and a lot of fluff.

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Review 1669: Young Anne

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Young Anne is Dorothy Whipple’s first novel but unfortunately is the last one I’ll be reviewing, because I’ve read and reviewed them all. Like many first novels, it is at least somewhat autobiographical.

We meet Anne at age five and see her again at eleven and eighteen before the bulk of the novel when she is an adult, but these ages are enough to get to know her. At five, she is prone to misunderstand her parents. Her father is severely critical of her while he spoils his oldest son. He is a martinet, and Anne becomes defiant of him as she grows older. Her mother doesn’t care about anything happening in the household.

As Anne gets older, she becomes quite naughty, but she is sent away to school because she laughs at her father while he is singing. This is shortly after she destroys her father’s copy of Boswell and knocks all the berries off a holly bush while getting carried away playing schoolteacher.

As a young woman, Anne loses her father, and the household is broken up. She is sent to live with her Aunt Orchard, who constantly complains about her ingratitude. Her only comfort is the maid, Emily, who has always been her staunch supporter and follows her to work in Aunt Orchard’s house. That and her friendships with Mildred and Mildred’s cousin George.

I found the character of Anne very appealing as she, in her straightforward way, has trouble navigating in society. Some of the scenes, especially with Mildred’s kind but social-climbing mother or the one where Aunt Orchard reveals her true self to the rector, are quite funny. This novel seemed true to life and was sometimes very touching. I liked it a lot.

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