Harriet Devine's Blog

A Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell

I've read some great books already this year, but this one will undoubtedly end up on my Best of 2021. How I've managed not to read it before is a bit of a mystery, but it came to my attention just recently because it was featured in Lucy Worsley's documentary Blitz Spirit (which you can see on BBC iPlayer here - well worth watching). I've always known about the Blitz, as my newly married parents had to leave their London flat when it was bombed. But though I knew of it in a general sort of way, Chelsea Concerto brought it home to me in vivid detail that I'll never forget.

Faviell doesn't include year dates in her account, but I learned the background from Lucy Worsley. The Blitz began at 8 pm on 7 September 1940, when Hitler, annoyed that the British were bombing German cities, sent a convoy of 950 planes carrying incendiary and parachute bombs which were aimed at the warehouses in London's East End. 8 hours later, the German planes finally turned home, having destroyed most of their targets and killed 430 people. From that point on it was relentless for the rest of the year - on 29 December, the heaviest night of all, 100,000 incendiaries fell on the city. The Blitz continued on into 1941, until Hitler moved his planes elsewhere. By this time, 44000 people had lost their lives, and many many more had been rendered homeless.

Frances Faviell was an artist. She lived in Chelsea, an area of London which also suffered badly from the bombing because of its proximity to Battersea Power Station, a prime target on the opposite side of the river: 'The little borough was the third most heavily bombed in London. Of her wartime population no less than 2,099 were bomb casulalties, 534 of these being fatal. This meant that roughly one in every fourteen persons were either killed or injured'.

Faviell had signed up as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) worker at the beginning of the war. She had a small amount of nursing experience, so she ended up being assigned to a First Aid Post. Her training consisted of some attachments to London hospitals, where she encountered people from a lower social class for the first time. In the early months of the war, after an initial panic, everything seemed to settle down, and life went on more or less as normal: Faviell continued with her painting, and with dinner and lunch parties and 'a great many weddings', such as that of my parents. Refugees started to flood into London, and she was assigned a group to help house and clothe them - many had left home without even the barest of necessities. They would become her charges for the rest of the war. The news from Europe was bad, and as 1940 progressed, it was possible to watch dogfights between British and German planes in the sky above London: 'It seemed impossible at first to believe these were actual deadly battles and not mock ones as we had watched at aeriel displays at Hendon. It gave one a strange, sick feeling of excitement....It was horrible - but it had a macabre fascination impossible to resist'. Then, on 7 September, the bombing started. By the following morning, the whole East End was ablaze.

Now, after a few days of stunned shock and anger, Faviell and her fellow VADs were precipitated into the middle of the devastation. The bombing on Chelsea began, and many people lost their homes. Among them was a Doctor friend of Faviell's, whose twelve-year-old daughter, the only survivor of the family, was dug out of the ruins after four days, an event which made a tremendous impression on the workers.The relentless bombardment continued, but, as Faviell says:

The Blitz was providing something else besides bombs. it was making people talk to one another. People in shops, in the buses, in the streets often talked to me now. They opened up amazingly about how they thought and what they thought - how they felt and what they felt. They all liked to see the nurses' uniforms - and were loud in praise of the nurse, the firemen and the wardens. But they didn't like the indignity of sleeping in a bunk in a shelter with hundreds of others. The Blitz was doing something else - it was continuing the difficult process already begun before the war of breaking down class barriers.

Everyone was now exhausted and working flat out, including Faviell herself. As a nurse, and trained in anatomy at art school, she was assigned one of the grimmest of tasks - that of assembling the dismembered bodies for burial. '"Proper jigsaw puzzle, ain't it Miss"' as one of the mortuary attendants said to her. She also worked in a hospital that was taking in refugees from the East End, who upset the other patients because of how dirty they were. 'Some of these offenders were ordered to take a bath by the Medical Officer, but these were people who had never seen a bath, let alone taken one'. The experience, for both nurses and patient, was indescribable - one elderly woman was so encrusted with a lifetime of dirt that her body 'literally resembled the bark of a tree'.

But her most dramatic and dangerous experience - dramatised on Lucy Worsley's documentary - was the day when she was asked to help with a man who was trapped under a fallen building. He was in terrible pain, but the workers outside couldn't reach him, as he was stuck at the end of a tunnel. They literally seized on Faviell because of her slim light build, and persuaded her to attempt to reach him with a pad of chloroform. Owing to the narrowness of the shaft that led to the tunnel, she had to strip off down to her underclothes and be lowered in head first: '"Hold the torch in your teeth and grip tight"'. This event - told over several pages - traumatised her so much that she had to be put to bed by her loyal housekeeper Mrs Freeth.

There's more, so much more. The account is a stunningly vivid one, but it gains hugely from Faviell's perspective. It's good to know that in the middle of all this she managed to get married, and gave birth to her son in 1941. She writes extremely well, and looks at the sights and events with the eye of an artist. Certainly if you only ever read one book about London in WW2, this has to be the one.

 

 

 

The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week has come round again. The announcement describes it as the third and last one - I do hope it won't be the last, as I've still got lots left to read by this exceptional author (yes of course I could read them anyway, but I do enjoy the community spirit).

Anyway I knew nothing about this novel before I started it. It was actually recommended recently by a fellow STW admirer, and when I bought it I had completely forgotten about the STW Week. So it was sheer serendipity that I had got it at the perfect time.

The story starts in an unspecified time which we quickly realise must be the early Middle Ages, and this is confirmed by a date that finally appears - 1170. Working backwards I'm guessing the incident that opens the book must be in around 1150. It's a dramatic beginning - a young woman is enjoying a perfect night with her lover when her husband bursts in with a group of friends, kills the lover, beats his wife, and accidentally kills also the old woman who was keeping watch for them. Everyone says he should send his wife to a nunnery, but he doesn't want to part with her dowry, so she lives on, bearing more children. Finally she dies in childbirth, and the husband is overtaken with regret and guilt. In expiation, he founds a nunnery in Oby, one of his distant estates. This becomes the corner that held them - them being a succession of nuns who arrive, sicken and die (or get murdered, or run away) over the course of the next two hundred years. 

The events of two hundred years would seem like a lot to cover in a single novel, and in fact STW takes the reader through a rather breathless fast forward summary of some major events - fires, floods, hornets, an absconding nun, a bishop convicted of carnality with a cow (both were executed) - before coming to rest in 1349, the year the Black Death came to Oby. From here on, the chapters are dated, each generally covering three-year periods, ending in 1382, some 33 years later. A relatively short period, then, and you might think one in which not a great deal could happen to a community of nuns, but how wrong you would be. There are friendships and rivalries, jockeying for position. One nun goes mad, another absconds with a lover, another is deliberately drowned in the fish pond, another is raped and becomes pregnant. Priceless objects are buried in a safe place by a loyal retainer who then dies without telling anyone how to find them. A spire is built on the church and then destroyed, to be rebuilt later. The convent's finances are frequently under threat, and the local bishop has little time for them.  

Is the convent a spiritual place? Few if any of the nuns have entered it by choice. Instead, they have mostly been gifted by their families, having no choice in the matter. Girls as young as twelve arrive as novices and undergo some lessons and training to fit them for the religious life. But it's rare for anyone to have what we would call a real vocation, though there's certainly some piety and of course a great deal of prayer. One nun longs to become an anchoress, to be locked in a tiny room with one window, engaged in endless prayer, but her desire is never fulfilled. And heading the religious life of the convent is the Nun's Priest, Sir Ralph, who is always on hand to hear confessions, take services, and give the last rites. Although he's in many ways a typically lazy, self-indulgent man, he is good-hearted and sensitive, loving nature and music, and one of the few characters who survive through the whole 33 years. However, as the reader knows from the start, Ralph is not a priest at all. Raised in a monastery, and expecting to evolve to the priesthood as his contemporaries were doing, he discovers that owing to his illegitimacy, he can't take holy orders. Arriving one day at the convent hung-over, tired and hungry, he tells the prioress he is a priest to make her feel better, expecting he will only be there for a few days. But one thing leads to another and he stays for the rest of his life, wracked with guilt at deceiving these innocent women, but at the same time often bringing them great comfort.

What, then, is this book really about? STW is too complex and original a writer for there to be an obvious answer. On one level it just looks like a meander through a series of everyday events, with some dramatic interludes. But that seems in many ways to be the point - this tiny microcosm presents a little slice of human life which, though far distant from us in time, represents the way people have always adapted to living together and still do today. Of course it also tells us about the value, or rather lack of it, placed on women's lives at the period: totally at the mercy of their fathers or husbands, they accept their placement in the convent as a natural step, and often welcome it as an alternative to marriage and childbearing. And it interrogates in a gently ironic way the religion still adhered to by many people in the world today.

I'm aware that all this gives little sense of what an exceptionally attractive novel this is. Having finished it I wanted to start all over again - it's crying out for re-reading, perhaps several times. Perhaps when I do I'll be able to do it more justice than I feel I have here. Meanwhile I'm very happy that Helen's STW Week gave me a chance to read and review it.

Tension by E M Delafield

This is one of the two most recent releases from The British Library Women Writers Series (the other was Mamma by Diana Tutton). I have to admit that, though I've dipped into one two of Delafield's novels before, I have never read her enduringly famous Diary of a Provincial Lady. So you could almost describe me as a sceptic rather than a fan, unlike many of the bloggers I follow. Could Tension convert me?

Published in 1920, this was Delafield's sixth novel. Set in the fictional cathedral town of Culmouth, somewhere in Devon, the action centres around an institution called the Commercial and Technical College for the South West of England. As its name suggests, it teaches shorthand and typing to classes of mostly young women, keen to get secretarial work. As the novel begins, the college has just appointed a new Lady Superintendent, a Miss Pauline Marchrose, described by Fuller, the Principal, as being 'almost a lady' as well as 'a thorough woman of business, capable, and hard as nails'. This last epithet will prove to be sadly untrue. What happens to Miss Marchrose will be the central story here, but what happens to her is a direct result of the actions of Edna, Lady Rossiter. She and her husband Sir Julian are patrons of the college, and Edna is proud of her position on the management committee. There's nothing she likes better than patronising those who she sees as her social inferiors, and believes, quite erroneously, that they respond well to her frequent commiserations about their sad, enclosed lives. 

Edna Rossiter is an astonishing fictional creation. A monster of hypocrisy, she believes herself to be an exceptionally sensitive soul, alive to the beauties of nature (the 'Divine Spark'), which she is endlessly trying to impress on anyone she considers to be ignorant of nature's healing properties, generally much to their annoyance. This description of het makes me laugh every time I read it:

Edna Rossiter, in common with the majority of her sex, supposed herself to be a religious woman because she had, from early girlhood, indulged nightly in five minutes spent on her knees beside her bed, her face pressed against the satin quilt, while she thought about herself.
Very soon after her marriage she formed the habit of prolonging the five minutes into ten, or even fifteen, while she consecrated a few vindictively earnest thoughts of forgiveness towards her husband.

She is convinced that her method of dealing with life is informed by the the maxim she is so fond of - 'Is it kind, is it wise, is it true'. Needless to say, her actions bely this in every possible way. The trouble starts when she hears the name of the newly appointed Miss Marchrose. She remembers at once that this was the name of a young woman who, some years ago, jilted her cousin Clarence Ibister, causing him to have some kind of mental breakdown. Long ago though this happened, and Clarence now being happily married to 'a true, pure, sweet loving girl - and one in his own class of life - just a well-bred English maiden', she persuades herself, and attempts to persuade others, that Miss Marchrose will be a malign influence on the morals of the young women she is teaching. Her greatest anxiety is the fact the the young woman is becoming very friendly with a fellow teacher, Mark Easter. Mark is a married man, but his wife has for a long time been incarcerated in a home for 'dipsomaniacs', while he struggles to look after his two undisciplined children on his own. Initially she is concerned as to whether 'Clarence Ibister's jilt' is aware of these facts, but it soon becomes clear that she is, and that is hasn't prevented her from enjoying Mark's company. So Edna quietly sets about creating suspicion and doubt among the rest of the college staff. The fact that she never actually spells out her grounds for suspecting the young woman's integrity only exacerbate the disquiet and tension which increases daily within the college. 

Being an incurable romantic, I was hoping for a happy ending to Miss Marchrose's situation. She's clearly very drawn to Mark, and the two of them obviously enjoy each others' company and spend a great deal of time together. Certainly she would like this to develop into something more. But this is 1920, and despite the younger generation's frequent assertions of their support for Free Love, theory and practice are still very far apart. This is exemplified by the case of Mark's sister Iris, a rather foolish young woman who has just published a novel called 'Why Ben!', a 'Story of the Sexes'. Although the contents of the book are never revealed to the reader, it's clearly a very daring venture. Iris herself, however, is engaged to a Mr Garrett, and once married immediately abandons her belief in Free Love. Morality is still of the utmost importance in this society, and so, to hope for a positive outcome for Miss Marchrose's aspirations is not logical. What she ends up with as an alternative may not seem very romantic, but there's every indication that it may ultimately work out well for her.

Reading this novel over a hundred years since it was first published, it becomes very clear that this is an era in which women get a pretty raw deal. Pauline Marchrose is highly intelligent and competent, and wants to have an independent life but, as she tells the sympathetic Sir Julian, struggling to support herself in London as a young woman had been a gruelling experience:

...the deadly monotony of it - day after day sitting in the clatter of those machines, typing as hard as one could go. Nothing to look forward to, except Saturday afternoon and Sunday,, and then I was dead tired, and I hated my rooms, because they were cheap and ugly and uncomfortable.

Taking up teaching had improved her life immeasurably, and she loves her present job, but will she be able to keep it, given the gossip and distrust surrounding her in the college? It's even possible to feel some compassion for the awful Enid, who Sir Julian married in a sudden outburst of pity, though he has never really loved her and now finds her (quite understandably) boring and embarrassing. As for the men, they don't show up very well either. Both Sir Julian and Mark are pleasant and sympathetic, but essentially too weak to make any real changes to their own rather unsatisfactory lives. 

I asked at the beginning whether Tension would convert me to an admirer of Delafield. On the strength of this novel the answer would be a resounding yes. I was delighted by her ironic wit, and her keenly perceptive view of the society of the day. So I'll be seeking out some more of her novels soon. Very grateful to the British Library for once again coming up with a winner.

 

Double Lives by Helen McCarthy in Shiny New Books

I was very pleased to have the chance to read Helen McCarthy's latest book, which is subtitled 'A History of Working Motherhood'. Women's working lives, especially when juggled with home and motherhood, are certainly a subject worth exploring, and this book promised to be a welcome addition to what's been an unplanned thematic exploration of this issue in 2021: Nell Frizzell's The Panic Years, which looked at the problems faced by young women today in deciding between a career and motherhood, and Carol Dyhouse's Love Lives, which I described as 'an interesting and thorough exploration of the ways in which women’s views of themselves and their function in the world has changed over the generations since WW2'. 

McCarthy's book starts in Victorian Britain and ends in the present day, combining personal accounts, facts about labour pay and conditions, and a survey of social attitudes, to provide a fascinating picture of what has changed – and what has stayed the same. As the child of a working mother who returned to her professional life when I was about three, this was perhaps bound to be of particular interest to me - my mother was lucky enough to have an income sufficient to pay for reliable domestic help, but of course this has not been the case for many women over the ages and remains so for some even today.

Superbly researched and extremely readable, this is an important book in the fields of both social studies and history. It's been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and I hope it wins. Helen is, by the way, the daughter of one of our Shiny reviewers, Elaine Simpson Long. If you want to read my full review, here's the link. 

Miss Browne's Friend by F.M. Mayor

I first encountered Flora Mayor ten years ago, and wrote a very enthusiastic review of her 1924 novel The Rector's Daughter [here]. I went on to read The Squire's Daughter, which I don't seem to have reviewed,  and her first, The Third Miss Symonds (1913) [here]. But all this went on in 2011, and when I'd read these three I assumed that was it, as Mayor's output was notoriously small. However I've since learned that she also wrote some short stories, so it was very pleasing to discover that Mike Walmer had unearthed and reprinted Miss Browne's Friend. This little gem first appeared as a serial in the Free Church Suffrage Times between June 1914 and March 1915.

In almost every village in England a Miss Browne is to be found; in every town several Miss Brownes; in London they must be almost too many to count. We all  know them, spinsters from thirty onwards, who are cheerfully devoting their lives  to be of use and comfort to their families, their friends, their village, their town, and their country. Sometimes these objects of their goodness patronize them, sometimes they laugh at them, and sometimes they writhe a little under the benefits they are receiving; but they could not possibly get on without their Miss Brownes.

Our Miss Browne is one of those who are patronized - she's at the beck and call of her family, who clearly don't appreciate her. So when she sees an article asking people to befriend girls who are in a Rescue Home - 'they are so solitary, poor lasses, not a soul to care for them. Who will take them by the hand?' - she leaps at the chance to do some good. Soon she acquires an appointed 'friend', one Mabel Roberts. On her visit to the home, she is surprised to see how unattractive most of the girls are - though it's never spelled out, they have presumably been rescued from prostitution. But then she spots Mabel, whose 'small, lithe figue, drooping neck, and eyes of a piercing blue might have belonged to the poetic daughter of an earl'. She's delighted to find that Mabel seems sweet-natured and talkative, and before they part she has assured Miss Browne that now she has a friend to care for her, 'I mean to do my very best'.

It's very clear to the reader that Mabel is not all she pretends to be. But Miss Browne is very optimistic that she will do well once she's placed as a domestic, and at first all seems fine - she sends happy, grateful letters to Miss Browne, who feels for the first time that she's not just being taken for granted. But sadly things don't go well, and soon Mabel is looking for another place. Eighteen months later she is sacked from her seventh household. The pattern is always the same: the family is pleased with her at first, and Mabel writes charming letters to Miss Browne, always assuring her how hard she's going to try 'so that you can be proud of me'. But it never lasts.Things go from bad to worse. Mabel tries waitressing, then sewing, and seems to be living far too rackety a life. Miss Browne's final attempt to place her in a suitable environment fails, and sadly things do not end well for her.

In my review of The Rector's Daughter I described it as 'a novel about how hard it is to understand other people, and how many misunderstandings and even tragedies arise from it'. The same could be said about Miss Browne's Friend. Poor, well-meaning Miss Browne tries so hard, but clearly cannot imagine what it's like to be a pretty, lively young woman who wants to enjoy her life but has so few options open to her. She swings between optimism and disappointment, wanting desperately to believe Mabel's loving, grateful letters but all too often upset by hearing what Mabel has been saying and doing behind her back. So this could be a very sad novel, but there's an twist at the end which lifts Miss Browne's mood and should lift the reader's too.

All in all, in just thirty pages, Mayor manages to convey, with tenderness and humour, the unsatisfactoriness of women's lives at the era, whatever social class they belonged to. Hooray for Mike Walmer for finding this and producing such a delightful little book.

 

Affinity by Sarah Waters

There's so much to love and praise in this exceptional novel. I think this must have been the first one by Sarah Waters I read - published in 1999, it was her second, but I didn't come to her debut, Tipping the Velvet, until later. I recently suggested it for my book group, because I had remembered enjoying it, and had a general outline of the plot in my head. But, though I knew it had a twist at the end, I had forgotten what it was. So, after I'd finished it (at 3 am) I was so blown away that I had to skim back through the novel to see if there had been any clues. And yes, there were, but so carefully concealed that you'd never spot them the first time around. Obviously I can't tell you anything about this because it would spoil your enjoyment. But it really confirmed for me what an amazingly skilled writer Sarah Waters is.

The novel is about Margaret, a young woman from a wealthy household who has had some mental problems in the past, culminating in a suicide attempt. This seems to have been partly precipitated by her father's death but also, though this is never spelled out, she clearly has had a relationship with a young women who ended up marrying her brother. Her mother has nursed her back to health, and as the book begins, she has decided to take up prison visiting, hoping she can give some support and comfort to women worse off than herself. So she arranges to visit the large Millbank prison, a huge, gloomy penitentiary on the banks of the Thames. 

Among the women she visits, one in particular catches her interest. This is Selena Dawes, and young woman medium, who is serving a prison sentence for her role in the death of a woman who had taken her in and supported her. Initially just intrigued by Selina's calm and composure, she becomes more and more fascinated by her occupation and all she tells Margaret about her gifts and talents. The two women grow closer and closer, and there's an increasing frisson of sexual attraction which Margaret feels and which she feels sure is reciprocated. Selena tells her that they have an affinity, that they belong together spiritually and physically. Margaret starts to find inexplicable items in her room and it's clear to her that Selena has sent them through the ether. Selena says they are meant to be together for life, and assures Margaret she can use her powers get out of the prison and join her on a one-way journey to Italy. So Margaret starts making preparations....

Sarah Waters is noted for her wonderfully authentic depiction of historical periods. This one, like several of her early novels, is set in the late Victorian period and everything, from the minutiae of everyday life to the prison conditions, not forgetting the language and speech patterns is meticulously accurate and well-researched. By chance I'd just watched a Netflix documentary which had a couple of episodes on mediums, and everything in the novel about Selena's seances and her account of her own powers chimed perfectly with what I'd learned on there. 

It's really hard to talk about this novel without spoilers. Suffice it to say that the road it seems to be going in is shockingly overturned in the final pages. It was a great re-read - just hoping my fellow book club members will have enjoyed it as much as I did.

 

 

Mr Fox by Barbara Comyns

I was so pleased to get a copy of this reprint of a 1984 novel by the amazing Barbara Comyns, which I've just reviewed for Shiny New Books. I first discovered her novels ten years ago, and had a real splurge on them, but this one has been out of print since it first appeared. It was almost certainly written many years earlier: in any case it's set in WW2 and, like many of her novels, has obvious autobiographical elements.

Mr Fox is the story of a young woman who is separated from her unreliable husband. She has a three-year-old daughter, and is struggling to make ends meet. So when Mr Fox, a charming local garage owner and shameless black-marketeer, offers to take care of them both, she accepts that she has no other real choice. Soon war breaks out, and the three of them hurtle from place to place, dodging bombs and landlords and Mr Fox's dissatisfied customers. He's full of creative ideas for making money, and at one time their house is so full of old pianos he's bought with a view to fixing up and selling on that they can hardly move.

If you've already discovered Comyns, you won't need any urging to get hold of this one. If you haven't, then it's really time you did. She is a truly unique writer, and this novel manages to combine wry wit with a remarkable first hand account of life during WW2. And then there's her narrative voice, which Graham Greene described as that of an  ‘innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrences'. I've described the novel in more detail on Shiny - you can read my review here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Girl Reading

At first glance you might not think she was reading, but of course this is the great Helen Keller (1880-1968) who, having become deaf and blind following an illness aged nineteen months, not only learned to read Braille - which she's doing here - but became a world famous writer and lecturer. Many years ago I remember reading her 1903 book, The Story of My Life, which is wonderfully impressive and inspiring - amazingly, it's now available on Kindle UK for 75p.

"Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see."

 

The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning

Back in 1987 I watched with pleasure a BBC TV series called The Fortunes of War. It starred Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, who met during the filming and got married afterwards. I'd never read the books it was based on, so when I was offered a NetGalley version of the first novel in what became a 6-part series I was intrigued enough to download a copy. The series is actually two trilogies, The Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy, and follows the fortunes of a Communist English University lecturer Guy Pringle and his wife Harriet. At the beginning of this first book, it is 1939, and they are newly married. They travel to Rumania where Guy has accepted a job teaching English Literature at a British Council educational institute in Bucharest. 

Told from Harriet's point of view, the novel combines an account of her difficulties in adjusting to this new life in a strange country, to the threat of a German invasion, and, above all to the happy-go-lucky attitude of her new husband, who is delighted to surround himself with numerous hangers-on. One of these is the English-educated White Russian Prince Yakimov, who uses his rather tarnished charm to sponge endlessly off the rest of the expat community. Harriet is appalled when Guy offers to let him stay in their spare room, but as usual his wishes prevail and Harriet has to put up with it. She also has to put up with Sophie, an attractive young Rumanian girl who pursues Guy relentlessly - she's particularly disturbed when she discovers that Sophie had suggested to Guy that he could marry her so that she could get a British passport. 

It's very hard at first for Harriet to find her role in this strange expat community, but she gradually makes friends with some of Guy's colleagues and his friends in the diplomatic service. She finally makes a good woman friend of her own, the beautiful Bella, an English woman with a Rumanian husband. 

The last part of the novel recounts the events surrounding a production of Troilus and Cressida, which Guy decides to stage for the English community and his students. Harriet thinks it's a dreadful idea, but agrees to take the role of Cressida. However soon after rehearsals start, Guy announces that he has replaced her - with Sophie, of course - and Harriet is demoted to the designer. Everyone throws themselves in with amazing enthusiasm - Yakimov, in particular, shows real star quality - and Harriet is amazed and pleased when the one evening performance is a huge success.

Of course all this is taking place as the German army makes inroads in Europe - at first everyone is very optimistic, but the atmosphere changes at the news comes of the annexation of Paris. The British are anxious as it seems likely that they will not be able to stay in Rumania, and indeed the next novels in the trilogy will show Guy and Harriet moving around Eastern Europe, and then, in the Levant trilogy, the Middle East. The historical background makes this an interesting book to read for anyone wanting to know more about the politics of WW2.

Evidently all this is more or less autobiographical, as Manning herself did indeed marry a Communist English Literature lecturer and had what sounds to me a thoroughly unsatisfactory marriage, travelling round all the places that appear in the novels. I couldn't warm to Guy at all, and wished Harriet would stand up to him a bit more (though she does try, without success). She loves him in spite of it all, which I found a bit sad.

The novel is newly reprinted by Cornerstone, out today, 30 July. I'm not sure if they are going to follow up with the rest of the series. Meanwhile you can watch the whole thing on YouTube - well worth it. Here's a link to Episode One.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;          

So wrote Shakespeare either just before or just after the death of his little son Hamnet in 1596. Just before would have been a bit spooky, perhaps, but we'll never know. In any case, this is not something that Maggie O'Farrell refers to in her novel, which is based around Hamnet's death at the age of eleven.

For the second time in as many weeks, I've read a novel based on real people, who happen to be the two most globally celebrated writers in the English language, as well as being particular favourites of mine. Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra came first, and I didn't have all that much luck with that one. Would I do better with William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway? The short answer is yes. 

O'Farrell imagines the circumstances that led up to Hamnet's  death, and the way it affected his family, in particular his mother, who we know as Anne Hathaway, but who is referred to here by the name her father gave in his will, Agnes. William Shakespeare is never mentioned by name in this book. He's there, very much so in the first part of the novel, but only referred to as 'the glove maker's son', 'the Latin tutor', 'the husband', 'the father'. To refuse to name one character and change the name of another is an effective way of distancing the reader from their preconceived ideas. 

O'Farrell takes the known facts, which are notoriously thin on the ground, and builds a wonderfully absorbing and convincing story around them. The cause of Hamnet's death is not known, but it's perfectly possible that he died of the plague, which had hit Stratford at that time. Here, it is his twin sister Judith who falls ill - she's already a delicate child and unlikely to survive. So her brother, a fine strong boy, actually lies in bed next to her, willing the infection to pass from her to him.Which of course it does. 

Naturally, then, the physical presence of the boy disappears from the novel fairly early on. But it is the effect his death has on his mother that is the subject of what follows. The reader knows Agnes well by this time, as she first appears as a young woman, living with her father and stepmother in the countryside outside Stratford (though the town itself is never named). Strong and independent, she avoids the farmhouse as much as possible, preferring to spend her time gathering herbs or hawking with her own kestrel. Then she meets the young man who has been employed as a Latin tutor to her young half-brothers. He is the first person to truly appreciate her for what she is: 'extraordinary to be so close to a creature so emphatically from another element, from wind or sky or perhaps even myth', he thinks. One thing leads to another, and soon Agnes is pregnant. Before much time has passed, a wedding is arranged and soon she is living in Henley Street with her new husband. 

Her in-laws grudgingly accept her, but find her hard to understand. Her knowledge of herbs is much appreciated, but Agnes also has the ability to understand peoples' deepest motives and thought processes, and also to predict future events. She knows her young husband will never be happy with the life his parents want for him, following his father into the glove trade, so when he gets the opportunity to travel to London to help sell his father's gloves, she encourages him to go. She realises that he will find there whatever his true calling in life is to be, even if it means he will no longer be living with his family.

When Judith falls ill, word is sent to London asking her father to return. But by the time he gets the message and manages to travel home, Hamnet has died. Agnes is soon left alone to deal with her grief while her husband returns to his mysterious life in London. She suffers all the agonies any bereaved mother will go through, but her pain is exacerbated by the fact that her ability to predict future events had deserted her in the case of Hamnet's death. And she feels resentful because her husband is apparently untouched by the same grief that has almost paralysed her. It's several years before she comes to understand that he has found his own way of expressing it.

Despite dealing with such an upsetting subject, this is a surprisingly comforting book. Who has not wondered how Shakespeare's wife felt, left on her own when her husband carved out his brilliant career? How did she feel about the women he undoubtedly slept with when he was away? ('It's as if her mother needs London, and all he does there, to rub off before she can accept him back', thinks Judith). Was she happy in the new grand house he had built for her? Why did he leave her his 'second best bed' in his will? And, of course, did she ever see one of his plays? All these questions find an answer here. And, in the final analysis, it seems that despite the separation, the doubts and the pain, this is a relationship strong enough to endure.

Besides being superbly and seamlessly researched - the sights, sounds and smells of the time and place are wonderfully vivid - this novel is a thing of great beauty for the quality of its prose and its superb, deeply moving depiction of parental grief. I'm very glad to have read it.

 

 

 

Miss Austen by Gill Hornby

I'm not sure how I came to miss this when it came out in January. When I spotted it recently on Kindle I snapped it up - who doesn't love Jane Austen, and this book promised to solve one of the great mysteries that have bothered academics for years - why did her older sister Cassandra burn most of her private correspondence after her death? Of course most people accept that the letters revealed personal details about Jane's life which she thought were best concealed. But what could those details have been?

Miss Austen has been a massive success, with everyone from Claire Tomalin to the Daily Mirror proclaiming it be a wonderful book. Well, Gill Hornby has certainly offered a solution - two, really. She does it very ingeniously, by embedding the revelations in the story of Cassandra visiting some old family friends, the Fowles, in her old age. These were indeed real people, who lived in the village of Kintbury (where Gill Hornby herself lives). The Fowles were, in fact, relatives as well as friends. Back in 1797, Cassandra had become engaged to young Tom Fowle, who had been a pupil of her father. To raise money to marry, Tom had sailed to the West Indies as the chaplain to Lord Craven's military expedition, but had died of yellow fever before he could return. The families remained close, and two of Tom's sisters eventually married two of the Austen brothers. 

Moving between the 1840s and the 1790s, the novel intersperses Cassandra's visit with flashbacks to the life of the sisters in the 1790s and 1800s. Basically, Cassandra has heard that, the vicar having died, the vicarage is going to be sold and the sole in habitant, Isabella Fowle, will have to move out. Knowing how much she and Jane had corresponded with the family, she is determined to find and destroy any letters containing sensitive private information. Despite declining health and limited mobility, she does a great job of foraging and succeeds in finding the offending materials, though she is constantly thwarted along the way by the sharp-minded and interfering housekeeper. 

So what was it that Cassandra is so anxious to conceal? Although, as I said, academics have always assumed it was something to do with Jane, we actually discover here that it is as much Cassandra's secret as her sister's that concern her. So, though the letters, we learn that Cassandra had the opportunity for married happiness in the years following Tom's death, but turned it down because she had vowed to him that if he died she would never marry anyone else. But of course Jane figures largely here too, and it is her state of mind at a crucial time in her life that Cassandra feels would reflect badly on her memory. I've already said enough and don't want to add any more spoilers, but I will say that this neatly explains the long gap in her writing life (between the three early novels and the three later ones), and her inability to finish The Watsons.

I wish I could say I loved this novel as much as everyone else seems to have done. I'm not absolutely sure why I didn't. Gill Hornby has done a great job with the historical context, and life in 1840s Kintbury was convincingly evoked. And it certainly illuminates the difficulties faced by single women at the period to carve out satisfying and fulfilling lives for themselves. I think my problem was something to do with the language, especially in the letters supposedly written by Jane and Cassandra. I'm exceptionally fussy when it comes to writers imitating the speech patterns and idioms of the past, and though Gill Hornby had obviously done her homework, there were some instances where I was unhappy with her choices of expressions, which I thought were anachronistic. 

I know at least 99% of people will think this is a ridiculous objection, and I'm rather ashamed to mention it, especially as I'm not giving any examples. I certainly wouldn't want to put you off, and am in danger of doing so anyway as I'm clearly in a minority of one. So read and enjoy if you haven't already done so.