Over on Stuck in a Book, Simon is having a "novella weekend", which seems to mean reading as many novellas as he possibly can. I'm not actually joining in for several reasons, one of which is that I'm not in the least attracted to the idea of a novella -- in fact the very word is a real turn-off. It is of course somewhere in between a proper novel and a long short story, and I suppose it has to have a name of its own, but this one sounds so coy, twee, and olde worldie...(sorry, Simon, I don't mean to sneer!). Also, I like books I can get my teeth into, and a hundred or so pages doesn't really do it for me.
However -- I have just read this one and at 160 pages of quite large print in the little old edition I got from the library I guess it definitely qualifies. I read it in just over an hour, and yes, of course, I did enjoy it. Published in 1953, it is the story of Melanie, a rather spoilt and silly young woman whose husband Guy sees her a "a piece of Desden china'. Melanie is suffering from TB and has been confined to bed for months, but is finally going to be allowed to come downstairs and lie on the Victorian chaise longue she bought in a junk shop just before her illness. Once she's cosily tucked in, she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, she is horried to discover that she isn't any longer in her nice little London house -- she has somehow been trasported back to the nineteenth century and, though still confined to the chaise longue, she is now called Milly and is being cared for by someone with "a common voice, a cruel voice, assured and domineering". Once she accepts that this is really happening and not just a horrific nightmare, she tries desperately to make sense of the dreadful life she has somehow landed up in. Clearly Milly has sinned, as there is some awful sexual scandal which is only hinted at by the harsh woman who turns out to be Milly's sister. The house is shabby and smelly, the butter is rancid, and nobody takes any notice of her protestations that she doesn't belong here. Milly also has TB, and Melanie realises that the treatment on offer will kill her rather than cure her, but the doctor laughs at her suggestion that "fresh air and sunlight and milk and rest" will save her. Worst of all, she finds herself having faint memories or intuitions of this world, as if she really has experienced it before. The story ends (yes, sorry, this is a spoiler) with Milly's death, but what happens to Melanie, as her two world start to merge?
She could not know, there was no way to tell, but there they stood, Dr Gregory and Sister Smith and Guy, Adelaide and Mr Charteris and the doctor, and now they dimmed and faded, shimmering in an instant in the fading vision, and at last there was nothing but darkness, and in the darkness the ecstasy, and after the ecstacy, death and life.
Goodness! This is all pretty amazing stuff. Laski, by the way, was a declared atheist, but she wrote two books on what she called ecstasy, which I think consisted of interviews with people who'd experienced it. All jolly interesting.
There's a Persephone edition of this book with an introduction by PD James, and the picture at the top here is the endpaper taken from it.
