Harriet Devine's Blog

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.

 

Woman Reading

The painter of this lovely image is Charlie Mackesey. He was born in Northumbria, England, in 1962.. According to Wikipedia, he is a former atheist who has 'found Jesus' and sees his work as a way to "introduce God to the people he loves". You may have heard of him in another context, as he's the author of a massively best-selling book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. 

Painting the Darkness by Robert Goddard

A man comes back from the dead - or does he? That's the theme of Painting the Darkness,  Robert Goddard's third novel, published in 1989. I first discovered his intelligent, twisty historical mystery novels in the mid-nineties, and read a number of them, though apparently this one passed me by. Twenty-eight novels after his 1986 debut Past Caring, he's still writing, but I'd more or less forgotten about him, and can't remember what reminded me how much I used to enjoy his work. Anyway, I spotted this on Audible, brilliantly read by Michael Kitchen, embarked on it sometime in April, and have only just finished it. It was over 20 hours long, and it was less than two hours from the end when you finally found out whether the protagonist was the real deal or not.

The novel starts in 1882. William Trenchard and his wife Constance have spent a peaceful afternoon in the garden with their little daughter Patience. Mother and daughter have gone inside, and William is enjoying the quiet satisfaction of a happy domestic life. But, only an hour later, his life, 'and that of every occupant of The Limes, St John's Wood, had changed utterly - and forever. An hour was all it took for ten years to overtake them'. A polite, well-dressed man appears outside the garden gate, claiming to be Sir James Davenall, to whom Constance had been engaged eleven years earlier. Everyone had been waiting eagerly for the planned marriage - but one day, with no warning, James had disappeared without trace, and was believed to have committed suicide. though no body was ever found, and nobody could explain why he should have done so. Constance had been heartbroken, but after slowly recovering had agreed to marry Trenchard. She knows he will be a good husband, though her feelings for him are not the same as she had for James. At first, she totally rejects the newcomer as a fraud, but his astonishing knowledge of private matters between the two of them, and his explanation of the reasons for his disappearance, soon convince her that he is indeed her long lost lover. From then on she defends him against all attacks, and realises she is as much in love with him as ever.

Not so the rest of the Davenall family: James's mother, and his younger brother Hugo, who has inherited the Baronetcy, the property and the wealth, totally reject him. His old nanny, however, welcomes him with open arms, and his solicitor cousin Richard, initially sceptical, comes to believe that he is telling the truth. How else could he possibly know so much about some things the family would prefer to stay hidden? But despite these new supporters, Hugo is enraged and determined not to lose the great advantages he's inherited, which have enabled him to live the drunken, dissipated life he enjoys. A court case ensues, which drags on for many weeks. What will be the outcome? And will the real truth be revealed?

The great question to be answered is, of course, how this man can so closely resemble James if he is indeed an imposter. However, the old Baronet Sir Gervaise, father to James and Hugo, was notoriously free with his favours, so perhaps he is a result of one of these casual liaisons? However, attempts to prove this are thwarted at every turn. If there ever was a novel for keeping you guessing, this is surely it. I found my beliefs and loyalties swinging wildly as various pieces of evidence on both sides appeared and were discounted. Whoever James turns out to be, he is a great deal more likeable than the shallow, unpleasant Hugo and his cold, hard mother. I was rooting for James all the way through, and wishing him a happy marriage to the faithful Constance, whose husband is now out of the picture for reasons I won't be explaining to you. But who is the beautiful woman who has been spotted with James a few times? And what part in the story will be played by Prince Napoléon Bonaparte, always known as Pion Pion, the dissolute cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, who glides in and out of the action, not always with honourable motives?

So - this is a very long novel, but I was hanging on every word. I obviously can't tell you what the final part of the novel reveals, but you won't be disappointed. I love stories about returning claimants - The Return of Martin Guerre is one, made into a film with Gerard Depardieu in 1983, with a US version, Somersby, starring Jodie Foster and Richard Gere, ten years later. Then there's Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar, and Daphne du Maurier's brilliant The Scapegoat, both of which I enjoyed enormously.  This one certainly deserves to be on that list.

I enjoyed reacquainting myself with Robert Goddard so much that I've just started another of his novels. I'm a bit apprehensive that I may not enjoy it so much. Have to wait and see.

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China Court by Rumer Godden

Why oh why have I never read this book before? And why is Rumer Godden not as celebrated as she deserves to be? 

I've read a good many of her novels, all of which I have loved, but had never heard of this one till I saw it reviewed recently on someone's blog. And what a lovely book it is. It's the story of a house, told through several generations of the family who inhabit it. But it's not your run of the mill family saga. The stories criss cross and overlap, and it takes time to unravel how an event we may hear about early on actually played out. There's a family tree at the beginning, and at first you may think you'll never keep track of who these people are, but soon they are as familiar to you as the members of your own family. Rather unusually, I'm going to quote the last paragraph of the novel:

'and now the stories seem like tales', says old Mrs Quin when she is very old. 'Perhaps they don't matter', she says, for she is also very tired, 'except to the people  who lived through them. The stories are all different  - of course , each has its time and place - yet they are alike in that, as with every day, they must be lived through from sunrise to sunset, all the hours of the day; and as the day ends, it begins', says Mrs Quin.

Mrs Quin is central to the plot of the novel, and also central in terms of the generations - her husband was the grandson of the first owners, and her granddaughter Tracey is the youngest member of the family. In fact it is Mrs Quin's death that brings Tracey back to China Court. Her flighty mother dumped her there as a child, so Mrs Quin was her surrogate mother for some years until she was whisked off to America. It becomes clear that she is the only descendent who both appreciates the house and loves her grandmother. 

Mrs Quin's own story is something we have to. gather piecemeal. Fairly early on she appears as little Ripsie, a poor neglected child from the village. Her mother is totally unreliable and she has no idea who her father was, though some pretty accurate guessing goes on in the village and in China Court. She's more or less of an age with the two Quin boys, the charming glamorous Borowis and the sturdy, reliable John-Henry. The three become inseparable, though it is Borowis with whom she becomes closest. It does become clear fairly early on that she ended up marrying John-Henry, despite her great love for his older brother - why and how this happens is not revealed until near the end of the story. 

Another plot concerns John-Henry's parents, handsome, rather feckless Jared and his beautiful aristocratic Irish wife, who is always known as Lady Patrick. Deeply in love at first, these two had some kind of serious falling out quite early on, the details of which are mysterious - once again, the whole story finally emerges. But most memorable, and important to the plot, is Eliza, Jared's sister. A little plain, especially compared to her beautiful younger sister, she is highly intelligent, practical and shrewd, but her qualities are dismissed by the family who are so sure that women have no place in any world apart from the home that they pour scorn on any ideas she may have about using her talents for some purpose. She'd like to help Jared run the family business, and would do it far better than he can, but that's out of the question. However, she develops in interest in old books, and teaches herself over time to recognise what is valuable and worth having. Exracts from a 'Book of Hours' which was one of her acquisitions form headpieces to each chapter, which as you can see from the quotation I put at the beginning, is something referred to obliquely there. Eliza's life is obviously a comment on women's lives at the period, but it also forms a thread which will be crucial to the plot at a later stage. Though her life is not what you'd call a happy one, it brings her great satisfaction in her later years and she was probably my favourite character, alongside Mrs Quin and her slowly revealed life story which is also fascinating and thought-provoking.

Altogether this was a wonderfully absorbing read and I was sorry to finish it. As I said at the beginning, though I know Godden has many admirers, she somehow doesn't seem to be in the top rank of mid-20th century writers. One for the BL Women Writers series, maybe?