Harriet Devine's Blog

The Crooked Shore by Martin Edwards (Blog Tour)

I was very pleased to discover that a new addition to the Lake District Mystery series by Martin Edwards was going to be published. It's been nearly six years since the last one - the seventh in the series - came out, and I've read them all, though I don't seem to have reviewed all of them on here. My review of number seven, The Dungeon House, is here, if you're interested.

Admirers of the series won't need telling that it revolves around cold case investigations. The police department that deals with these is headed by DCI Hannah Scarlett. As a young policewoman she was mentored by senior detective Ben Kind, and from the first book onwards she has been the friend, and later the lover, of Ben's son Daniel. Daniel, a historian, writer and TV personality, often has a part to play in the solution of the relevant mystery, and this novel is no exception. It's his on-off relationship with Hannah that gives the stories an added frisson of suspense, with each novel leaving the reader in doubt about how things will end up between them. As I said in my previous review, I see him as looking exactly like Daniel Craig, which is a plus for me.

 The cold case Hannah takes on in The Crooked Shore is that of the disappearance, some twenty years earlier, of teenage Ramona Smith. Her body was never found, but a bloodstained backpack near the beach suggests that she was murdered. And in fact a local man, Gerry Lace, was charged with her murder but acquitted, only to commit suicide by wading into the dangerous quicksand waters on the beach. As the novel opens, a character called Kingsley is on that same beach, and witnesses a young man doing the exact same thing; uncannily, he proves to be Gerry Lacy's son. It's this link that has prompted the re-opening of the case, and an investigation into possible mistakes made by the original detective - who proves to have been Hannah's adored mentor Ben Kind. Naturally this causes her a lot of grief, but the job must come first.In addition to the primary investigation, a  good deal of the action revolves around Tory, an attractive, wealthy, middle-aged woman who lives in an upmarket retirement community in the area. She has two admirers - Kingsley, the man from the beach, who obviously doesn't stand a chance, and Logan, her much younger pianist lover, with whom she is completely besotted. The interweaving of these characters with each other and with the main plot seems complex, but proves to be surprisingly relevant. More than that I can't say without spoilers.

Of course the unique selling point of this series - apart from its attractive main characters and engrossing plots - is the setting in England's beautiful Lake District. It's an area I know well, and each novel skilfully combines real places with invented ones. The Crooked Shore of the title is not a real location, though it's placed on a real coastline, that of Morecambe Bay in the south of Cumbria. It sounded so real to me that I was disappointed to find out that it wasn't. If you've never visited the Lakes, I defy you not to long to go when you read this or any other in the series.

So yes, it's a series, but if you're not familiar with the previous novels you can just as easily read The Crooked Shore as a standalone. However, don't be surprised if you find yourself seeking out the earlier books to learn more about the attractive central characters.

Two New Shiny Reviews

If you're familiar with my reviewing, either on here or on Shiny New Books, you'll have noticed that I have a strong leaning towards reprints, translated fiction especially French, and non-fiction, generally with a literary or theatrical theme. But of course I enjoy some newly published books too, and I've reviewed a couple on Shiny recently.

 The great American novelist Laura Lippman is a huge favourite of mine, and I've reviewed several of her novels here and on Shiny. Each one has been entirely different from the last, but all equally entertaining and skilful. Dream Girl is billed as a psychological thriller, and Lippman describes it in her Afterword as 'my first work of horror'. It certainly includes some tropes of that genre, but it's also witty and perceptive in its depiction of the central character, successful novelist Gerry Anderson. Throughout the novel he's confined to a hospital bed in his posh Baltimore apartment following a fall down the floating staircase. In a lot of pain, he is heavily sedated, which gives his first person narration an increasingly dream-like and confused quality. The novel's title refers to Gerry's hugely successful novel of the same title, and to the fact that that book's main protagonist appears to actually exist and to be attempting to contact him. Great stuff. My full Shiny review is here.

Another review that's just appeared is Tessa MaWatt's The Snow Line. I have to confess I'd never heard of Tessa McWatt, who is evidently a much admired writer. If The Snow Line is anything to go by, I'm not surprised. I was drawn to the novel by the fact that it's set in India, and deals with a journey up into the snow-capped Himalayas. But it's so much more than that. The novel centres around a group of four people who meet at a wedding in the Punjab. Three are young and of Indian heritage, though both live elsewhere for various reasons. The fourth is Jackson, an elderly white man, returning to the country he worked in many years earlier to find a suitable place to scatter the ashes of his beloved wife. Jackson's quest, aided by the other three characters, forms the backbone of the plot, but it's much more than a travel adventure story. It deals sensitively with colonialism and the Indian diaspora, and beautifully depicts the inner life of the 86-year-old Jackson, who lives more and more inside his own memories, good and bad. Excellent novel, and here's my Shiny review. 

The Spoilt Kill by Mary Kelly

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed Mary Kelly's brilliant 1962 novel, Due to a Death. A central character in that novel is the rather mysterious Hedley Nicholson who, we gather, has taken time off whatever his work may be to process events that he has recently experienced. What those were is never revealed in that excellent novel, but in The Spoilt Kill, published the year before and the winner of the CWA Golden Dagger Award, Hedley is centre stage and narrator. We know from the start that he is a private investigator: he's been hired by the head of a long-established pottery firm in Staffordshire to investigate the leakage of their original designs to foreign competitors, who then flood the market with cheap copies. Posing as a writer of a history of the firm, he's allotted an office and given free run of the factory. This much we know about him from the start, and we also learn that he feels his age - he's in his early 40s but has grey hair about which he is very self-conscious - and that he's had a relationship that went wrong. And it soon becomes clear that he likes women - he's strongly attracted to a young woman who works in reception though he would never approach her, and he soon finds himself falling in love with one of the prime suspects. 

The Spoilt Kill, not unlike Due to a Death, begins with the discovery of a body. Here it is discovered floating in a vault full of liquid clay. But the identity, and even the gender, of the dead person is not revealed until much later in the novel. After this opening come two sections: 'What Happened Before' and 'What Happened Afterwards'. In 'Before', of course, Hedley gets to know the factory personnel, all very pleasant people. He soon realises that the most obvious way the designs could have been stolen would be via the designers. They are of course highly valued in the company, but perhaps one of them might welcome a bit of extra money? He soon homes in on the top designer Corinna Wakefield, an attractive, talented, but obviously unhappy young woman. He soon befriends her, initially with a view to spying on her life and her movements. But it doesn't take long before he realises he is falling in love with her. And the more he falls for her, the worse he feels; she's lonely and welcomes his friendship, but he dreads the moment when she will inevitably discover his real purpose in getting to know her. In 'Afterwards', of course, the identity of the victim is revealed and the process of denouement starts moving inexorably forward. I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to say that someone confesses but is shown to be covering up for someone else. The identity of the killer is a sad shock - sad because of the story that lies behind their actions. Sad too is the ending of the novel.

It's impossible not to be mysterious about the plot. But the plot is only part of what Mary Kelly is doing here. The life of the factory is wonderfully evoked, as is the rather grim landscape of the Potteries. Here's what Hedley sees when he looks down in the valley called Etruria, where the Wedgwoods once had their factory:

I stared down into the pit, at the black buildings silhouetted against the flushed sky, buildings, some of them, flickering within, as if a river of liquid gold were rolling through them. Clouds of steam and smoke drifted across the shadowy vale, rosy steam, lit from the fires below. There was a continuous hollow rushing sound, broken by clanks of shunting. An engine, raised on a bank, black and red, like a slide, moved slowly backwards and forwards. The whole pit seemed to breathe as it worked; for though it was past midnight on Saturday, and the Newcastle neighbours’ windows were dark, naked lights on gantries and signals glittered all over Etruria.

It's not too fanciful to see this as a sort of vision of an Inferno, and it seems to reflect Hedley's gloomy and fearful state of mind. Kelly's portrayal of this is wonderfully strong and evocative, as is that of Corinna, about whose life the reader learns more and more as the novel proceeds. This is superb piece of writing, unquestionably worth its Golden Dagger.

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.

Due to a Death by Mary Kelly

I want to grip people by the mystery and to have attention to the last page due to the unsolved secret so that they cannot leave it. That is what I want - to grip them and force them to read to the bitter end. That is why I sometimes try something new. In Due to a Death I first give a tantalising view of the end without telling the secret...

So said Mary Kelly in an interview a few years after this novel was published in 1962. And my goodness did she succeed. I was awake at an unearthly hour, unable to stop reading till I got the the bitter end - and bitter is not a bad word for the conclusion of this truly remarkable novel. I've been a lover of The British Library Crime Classics since they first began, and have read a large number of them, though not always reviewed them. They vary tremendously in style and subject matter, of course; some are quite lighthearted, some quite dark or bleak or scary. But this one, I have to say, is in a class by itself. 

So yes, the novel's opening chapter gives a glimpse of what's going to happen at the end. It's totally mysterious -  a man and a woman (the narrator) are in a car. Something very frightening and disturbing has just happened. Both of them seem to be bleeding from some kind of injuries. A police car appears to have been chasing them, but it overtakes and speeds off. Soon we learn that the body of a young woman has been found on the nearby marsh. Rumours are quickly spreading in the village shop: 'Must have been the usual, then, poor thing'. The narrator knows she must think hard about the events that have led to this situation: 

sift the past for fragments of memory, sharp, coloured, dimensional, like cubes of mosaic, which separately seemed insignificant; put together they took on meaning, formed a picture itself demanding to be explained, like a dream, or rather a nightmare so dreadful I couldn't bear to explain it...

The rest of the novel shows her slowly and painfully doing just that. Agnes, for that is her name, is a young woman married, not very happily, to Tom, an accountant and keen amateur naturalist. They live in a run-down village called Gunfleet, on the edge of the marshes. Their only social life - visits to the local pub, meals, picnics - is shared with Tom's two friends, Tubby and Ian, and their wives and children. Then a mysterious stranger, Hedley Nicholson, appears in the village. Nobody knows who he is or what he is doing there, but he and Agnes become friends of a sort: he takes her out for driving lessons and they have long and intense conversations. His intelligence - and lets face it, his mystery - are a welcome contrast to the rather superficial people she's generally thrown together with. And she soon realises she's getting far too emotionally involved.

But that's only part of what's going on here, though it is also integral. I'm not really sure if this is even a crime novel, though the young woman's death in the first chapter suggest this, but more than anything it's a mystery novel. Mysteries abound, all of them in the end proving to be inextricably bound together. There's the question of Agnes's parentage: brought up in a 'good' orphanage after her single mother's death when she was two, she has received financial support through a local solicitor and, when pressed by Hedley, admits that she suspects it must have come from her unknown father - but why is so anxious not to investigate further? There's Agnes's worry about the real activities of Tom and his two friends - are they really going out on their supposed explorations of the native flora, and if so, why are all three suddenly and inexplicably short of money? Why is Agnes so drawn to the quiet, sensitive Ian, who she longs to protect from his bossy, stingy wife Helen, who makes her husband and children eat the sandwich crusts next morning for breakfast? Mysterious activities go on at the local garage, and Hedley's car gets damaged when apparently being driven by someone else. And, of course, there's the question of what really happened to the girl whose body turns up in a ditch on the marsh. And Agnes, as we come to realise, is not always the most reliable narrator, though Hedley's probing questioning eventually gets to the root of her secrecy.

Due to a Death is a remarkable novel for several reasons. Of course there's the complex and wonderfully planned plotting, and the subtleties of the character development. The grim, bleak landscape of Gunfleet is strikingly evoked: 

From the lay-by there was nothing to be seen of the estuary; only, overhead, a wide marine sky embossed with pearly clouds, and the slow plumes of the cement works' chimneys; through the windscreen, concrete posts and barbed wire half-swamped by chalk-dusted thickets; and behind the fence, breaking the surface of the grey undulations like a bathers' warning, a red rust-pitted disc: Police Advice - Danger, Keep Out.

I somehow managed to miss Mary Kelly's earlier novel, A Spoilt Kill, which won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award (though I'm putting that right very soon). Readers of that novel will know that Hedley is a private detective, but that knowledge is not essential to enjoy this one. Sadly, she stopped writing in the early 1970s, but I hope there will be more of her books to come from Crime Classics. The quality of her writing is exceptional - this really does deserve to be called literary fiction. I'll leave you with a passage of description that I liked a lot:

I walked down to the street that evening, to see if the men were coming. The sky was the colour of sugared almonds, orange, pink and mauve.The old women stood with folded arms at the doors; the old men, smoking, hovered round their runner beans; and between the marigolds sat neutered cats. Woodey's wireless sounded from an open window, some soprano launching emotion into the air. At the end of the street a car started. I could hear the dim throb of the jukebox from The Ship.

Definitely one to read and enjoy.

 

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.

 

Mamma by Diana Tutton on Shiny New Books

It was a great day for me when the British Library announced a new series - 20th Century British Women Writers. This promised to provide exactly the kind of books I enjoy most, and it hasn't disappointed - I've read and loved all of them (well, I wasn't crazy about Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex, but I probably wasn't in the mood for that kind of humour). So I was delighted to be asked to participate in the blog tour for Mamma. I've avoided blog tours for a while, having twice agreed to one and found I hated the book, but I knew I was safe with this one. I'd heard of Diana Tutton and knew of her Guard Your Daughters - now published by Persephone - and read several reviews, but this would be a first for me. And of course I loved it. 

You can read my full Shiny review here, but here's what I said in my opening paragraph:

[This] is the story of a woman who falls in love with her daughter’s husband. However, though I’m sure we all could picture the sort of sensational novel that could have had such a plot line, this is the most delicately nuanced account of a woman struggling with powerfully unexpected and confusing emotions. And, though this situation is obviously central, the novel is about far more than that. It’s about society in the 1950s: family relationships, the generation gap, class divisions, and sexual mores.  It’s immensely readable and extremely enjoyable.

Diana Tutton wrote only three novels - the third one, The Young Ones (1959) is about brother and sister incest and sounds intriguing. She clearly enjoyed challenging subject matter and is an excellent writer. So do read Mamma! 

Woman Reading

Thanks to Rob Spence for this lovely image, which is by the British painter  Gerald Gardiner (1902-1959). Painted in 1935, it's called 'The Artist's Wife, Evelyn, Seated, Reading'. 

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.