It is relatively rare, for me at least, to discover a novel by an author I have never even heard of and find that I get the most intense pleasure from reading it. But such has been the case with Miss Mole. Emily Hilda Young won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for this novel in 1930, and though I don't know who she was up against I think this was well deserved. This seems to me to be a truly remarkable book.
Miss Mole -- Hannah -- is, I suppose, very much subject to the times in which she lived. Intelligent, witty, perceptive, she is also poor and disadvantaged. Her only means of support is the jobs she has to take as a companion to generally unpleasant old women, from which she frequently gets sacked for insubordination. Her sharp, often cynical, sense of humour has always got her through, but at nearly forty she is keenly aware of the grim future that potentially awaits her when she is too old to get another place. As the novel begins she is living in the city of Radstowe (which EHY based on Bristol) where her rich cousin Lilla also lives, and through Lilla she lands a housekeeping job in the family of a widowed non-conformist minister. The novel tells the story of the effect she has on the family, especially the two young daughters, but also, and more fundamentally, shows her own struggles, small triumphs, narrow escapes, and near disasters. For Hannah's past rears its head and threatens to overthrow all the progress she has painfully made -- will she manage to win through in spite of it? Read it and see!
When I say Hannah is subject to her times, I mean that I hope that today, eighty years after this book was published, she would be able to use her remarkable mind in a more productive way. She could go to university, get trained to do something fulfilling and gainful. No doubt she would still meet men like her employer, who has no idea what sort of person he is really dealing with and would probably be horrified and/or terrified if he had, and there will always be families in which no-one really understands anyone else and most people live in fear of the wrath of the father.
EH Young writes extraordinarily well, though often quite densely, if you know what I mean. Her dialogue is particularly good. I was enthralled all the way through and have already ordered a couple more of EHY's novels. She sounds like a fascinating woman, too -- widowed in the first world war, she lived for the rest of her life with a married clergyman, whose wife apparently didn't mind (she lived there too).
Simon reviewed this the other day -- we are both in the same reading group. And that's really what reading groups are for, introducing you to books you might never otherwise have discovered. Hooray.
