Someone at a distance: the book that nearly broke my heart

I started reading this book on the district line in snatched moments; I took it to Rome with me and read a bit there and on the plane. I am not sure when it was that this book started to grip me. At first I was thinking – ok so this is a domestic novel; like lots of Persephones it is almost achingly well written; there is a strong sense of the 1950s; it is very English; it is very restrained.

But somehow, somewhere, it transformed into a heart breaking work of staggering understated power. I cannot believe that when it was published it did not get a single review. It really did nearly break my heart. It also took me rather by surprise.

Its focus is the marriage of Ellen and Avery, an upper middle class, middle aged couple of the Home Counties in the early 1950s. It tells you straight on the back cover, and I am not really giving anything away when I say that their comfortable life is pretty much destroyed by the arrival of Louise; a French lady’s companion. Louise is a sort of serpent character. She is a truly horrible, self serving piece of bitterness and I can’t imagine that she has many fans amongst the reading public. Through her extraordinary personality she provides a relief, against which Avery and Ellen’s marriage is destroyed and then re-made in a tiny way.

Marriage as an idea emerges from the novel in an odd way. I think that Dorothy Whipple must have rather believed in it, without romanticising it at all. In the end, the marriage is destroyed but the underlying relationship is still there, albeit damaged. Whipple manages to keep in focus the true happiness of youth and at the same time, the rubble of separation. This is never clearer than in the following description of old ladies in a rest home: “In the dining room, where the shutters were closed against the night and the lamps on the tables lit under rosy shades, the old ladies waited to be served. They had read the paper, but Ellen couldn’t have come into gentler company. There was no avid curiosity, no malicious speculation, no self congratulation that such a thing couldn’t happen to them, as there might have been amongst younger women. These women were old, time had softened them, they had learnt something from loss, helplessness, loneliness; they knew that almost anything can happen to anybody. They were kinder than when they were young”.

I wonder if women like Ellen still exist? There were moments when I thought her rather timeless, and saw shades of people I know in her incredible reserve. At other times I thought – you know Ellen, there are times for dignity and times for fighting and if you want your husband back, however awful he has been, you should run after him. That however, would not have been “Ellen” at all. She is a real period piece. She is not a doormat; she is an old fashioned wife. As the character Mrs Beard memorably says to Ellen: “We’re not the new sort of women, with University degrees in Economics, like those women who speak on the radio nowadays, girls who can do anything. We’re ordinary women, who married to young to get a training, and we’ve spent the best years of our lives keeping house for our husbands”.

Other opinions can be found at A Striped Armchair, Stuck in a book and Fig and Thistle. The pictures are the Persephone Classic edition, the Persephone endpaper and the author.

Have Book. Can Travel.

Here I am off to the wonderful ROME for a few days of bloggy holiday and some quality time with Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance. What could be nicer?

Why you cannot beat a cream tea and a bunch of bloggers

This post is a quick and inadequate eulogy to a wonderful afternoon spent with the authors of some of my favourite blogs; Simon, Claire, Hayley, Miranda, Donna and Polly. Blogger of honour was of course the inimitable Thomas, owner, author and decorator of My Porch. We all met up at the one and only Persephone Book Shop in Lambs Conduit Street and then repaired to the British Museum for afternoon tea. I am so looking forward to the book that Thomas gave me – The Professor’s House by Willa Cather – which I *think* is my first foray into American literature since childhood. Stateside, here I come....

Brrrrr.... postal bounty in the garden

The Persephone Biannually is much nicer than the bills that usually come through the letter box, and since it comes but twice a year, I like to read it slowly. I started mine today in the garden, wrapped up warm with a cup of a coffee. Recent acquisitions which I can’t wait to get into are Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out (regular readers may recall how head over heels I was about her book Among the Bohemians back in April), and the intriguing Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris.

The World That Was Hers: Hilda Bernstein, my teacher in South African history

When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison after 27 years of incarceration in 1990, I was 7 years old and on the other side of the world. I do remember it though. It was one of those events that was covered in every country and talked of in every place. People of my generation recall the campaign against Apartheid in South Africa, but only in its twilight days – when most of the argument had been won internationally. As a child, political ideas seemed to come to me through a glass darkly, and were formed slightly skew-whiff. Often I had an idea about how I felt about things, but there was a bit of a knowledge gap, particularly in relation to distant lands and afar away cultures.

So, the Persephone Classic, The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein has been a powerful read both emotionally and intellectually – I finally know something about Apartheid South Africa. Hilda Bernstein was a communist and a passionate campaigner against racial segregation. She was born in Britain but her heart seems to have been in Africa. She was white but she rejected her privileged status. She and her husband, Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein were active political dissidents in Johannesburg at a point in its history when dissent was decidedly not allowed.

The World That Was Ours is her memoir of the early 1960s, a period when the Nationalist government in South Africa was at its most Orwellian and rapacious. The Bernstein home is watched day and night, invaded frequently but policemen with seemingly endless arbitrary powers. The Bernsteins are firmly and surely marginalised by legislation; it becomes illegal for them to speak to their closest friends and even at times, each other. Rusty is kept in solitary confinement and put on trial alongside other ANC men, including Nelson Mandela in the kangaroo court of the Rivonia Trial. Miraculously, when the other defendants are sent down for life, Rusty is acquitted and the final act of this memoir is played out. Husband and wife escape South Africa, where they are both hunted people, in a nail biting chase across a barren landscape. They walk across the wilderness until they can hardly move for exhaustion; they are nearly attacked by dogs; they have no idea whom to trust and whom to fear.


The memoir of Hilda Bernstein is far from impartial, but it is a living breathing and extremely chilling window onto her world. I would not call this a political memoir but a personal memoir with a powerful political dimension. Bernstein self defines as a communist and her main reason is that in South Africa the communist party were the only party who were not racist. Bernstein’s communism seems to have been a rather different fish from that considered by another recent read, The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch. For Bernstein, being a communist was about being a humanitarian and her memoir testifies to how easily ideas can mutate across borders and continents. The woman who emerges from these pages is a true idealist. She never, until very near the end, does what is practical. Instead, she does what she thinks is right. Readers may find themselves with mixed feelings at times, because of course; her political life restricted her family life dreadfully. They could not take holidays, they could not go out with their children of an evening, school friends invited for supper would arrive with the police on their tails. Ultimately however, the power of the narrative voice both justifies and fully explains Bernstein. What emerges is a picture of a deeply admirable woman. I fear that I would have strapped on my sandals and run for my life a long time before she did.

The political is knitted together with the domestic and the public, and provides a personal close up on persecution. In this history, coping with challenges strengthens people but also makes them hard and puts them beyond the reach of readjustment. Bernstein deals with this implicitly throughout the book and with remarkable candour in her “afterword”. Her writing is good. She has the confidence of a woman who knows that she can write and is not afraid to break a few rules. The prose is lyrical and almost cinematic. The final sequence in particular, in which Hilda and Rusty fly to safety after a perilous journey is so vivid, that I could almost imagine myself there.

I have peppered this review with pictures of the Persephone edition of the book, the Persephone end paper, and a photograph of the author. Interested readers may also enjoy this excellent review at Books and Chocolate.

Summer of Love: Will she? Won’t she? in Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Who remembers the moment in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Hugh Grant rolls over in bed and asks “who is it this week?” Because as we enter this, the end of the summer, that is how we feel. In a good way, of course. I love weddings. Which is just as well, because we have been to one almost every weekend of the summer and still have one to go. We have been to Serbia (twice), Russia, the Lebanon, Hampshire, London (more than twice) and Oxford. Honourable mention must also be made of one further “not married party” which was no less a meeting of old friends and a celebration of love and commitment (you know who you are)...

And so it was as a self appointed expert, a connoisseur of nuptials, that I picked up the Persephone Classic, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is short, funny and worth-it. It is the narrative of a single day – the wedding day – of Dolly, a middle-class girl of the early 1930s. The action takes place entirely in her family home, which one presumes to be a medium sized manor house or something of that sort. The house is teeming with comic characters – the status conscious, conventionally minded mother of the bride, Mrs Thatcham, to whom appearances mean a lot; The Bridesmaids – clumsy Kitty who is beset with adolescent insecurities and elegant Evelyn who is worried about being cold in church; School boy cousins Tom and Robert, who are locked into a ceaseless argument about emerald green socks (“Go and put your head in a bag” sticks in the mind); The dour anthropologist Joseph Patten, who moons about the house having tense conversations with everyone and trying to find the bride, for what purpose, the reader must enquire on their own account.... There are numerous others; mad old aunts; domestic helps; a Canon, and they all rumble around the place in a sort of country house comedy way – with people walking out of rooms just as others walk in looking for them and so on.

At the heart of this novella there is a rich and slightly painful vein of social satire. Some characters seem to care more about what things look like than how they really are. Others respond to such hypocrisy with savagery - saying things which are designed to shock and upset. This seems to me to be not just the age old clash between the old and the young but also the clash between the conservative, the traditional and the more socially liberated approaches to life which were emerging in the 1920s and 30s. There is a thick layer of repression veiling most of the main characters and there is a lot of swigging from the bottle in dark corners as well.

Which brings me to another theme which seemed to sing out loud and clear, one to which any wedding goer is familiar: continuity. When Dolly fortifies herself with a bottle of rum and faces the music, she does what many women, possibly even her much maligned mother, have done before her. There were times when I felt that Cheerful Weather for the Wedding was like a form of social archaeology. If you remove the top soil of propriety the first layer you come to is rebellion but underneath that runs a thick course of convention and a willingness to do things the way that they have always been done.

The characters are not as whole or as touching as they could be and I did not find myself rooting for anyone but the book is thought provoking. Other opinions can be found at Stuck in a Book, Vintage Reads, Fernham, Nonsuch Book, Novel Insights, The Green Room, My Porch and the marvellously named What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate.

I have included pictures of the (predictably lovely) Persephone cover and end paper and a portrait of the author by Dora Carrington.

Little, Odd, Excellent: The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Maghanita Laski

Marghanita Laski’s strange little book The Victoria Chaise-Longue has got me thinking about eras and about links and divides between generations. Before I even started to read, I noticed that it was first published in 1953, the year that the Queen was crowned and my mother was born. How long ago that sounds. The book itself explores how social mores and the place of women had changed between the Victorian age and the modern world of the early ‘50s. I am thankful to Richard at Richard’s Books for recommending such a muse worthy novella to me.

With only 99 pages, The Victorian Chaise-Longue must surely be the tiniest Persephone there is. I think that I will take a risk and say that it is the most interesting Persephone book that I have read so far. It is a domestic novel but it is not pedestrian. Its a little bit odd, but whatever is wrong with that?

The story focuses on a few hours in the life of Melanie Langdon. Melanie is a young barrister’s wife and she is pretty, spoilt and makes a profession out of being helpless. She is the kind of girl who is always being looked after by somebody, and as the book opens she is in the care of her patrician GP, the mildly lascivious Dr. Gregory. We soon learn that Melanie is recovering from TB, an illness which almost terminated her recent pregnancy and which has kept her apart from her baby son from the moment that he was born.



All very straight forward, or so I thought. Before long, the book changes direction entirely and with the assistance of an antique chaise-longue, Melanie is transported to the Victorian age in which she has become somebody else – a Milly Baines. The reader experiences with Melanie the claustrophobia of entrapment – the prison of knowing oneself to be one person while all others believe one to be somebody else. Gradually, the sorry tale of Milly Baines begins to unravel. Melanie learns, like a detective in a story what her own character has done and how she has been punished.

I never fully understood whether we are to believe that Melanie has become a time traveller, or has been reincarnated and is recalling her previous life, but I don’t think that this matters too much. Now that I have turned the last page, I understand why Richard recommended this book, and why he mentioned it in the same breathe as The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns. Like The Vet’s Daughter, it is not a book about the paranormal, but it uses paranormal ideas to explore very real issues; morality, identity, entrapment, mystery. It borrows from the thriller genre but it s not a thriller – it is suspenseful and dark, but it is not frightening. It is a domestic novel, but it is not an aimless one. Laski uses domestic images to sign post the most powerful of human fears and links. She is not simply a chronicler of days gone by, she seems to raising objections about them too.

Melanie finds her life as Milly impossibly restrictive and frustrating. Milly has advanced TB and can barely move. She is kept in a stuffy airless room and is subject to the care of characters bound to her by duty rather than love. Melanie, whose pre illness days were filled with furniture shopping and relation visiting is horrified that she has somehow been stolen away from her own era and condemned in this way. She comes to realise, as does the reader, that the life paths of Melanie and Milly have not been so very different but that the strictures of their respective societies are. Melanie’s ordinary life events are Milly’s dreadful transgressions and the life of punishment which is so awful for Melanie to experience, is usual for Milly. Will Melanie ever escape? Well, I can’t give that one away; interested parties must read for themselves and I hope that they enjoy it as much as I did.

The illustrations are the rather beautiful Persephone edition and endpaper and the even more beautiful Marghanita Laski. Other opinions can be found at Serendipity; Booksnob; Things mean a lot; A Book a week; Novel Insights; Farm Lane Books; The Genteel Arsenal; Green Road Books; and Fleur Fisher.

Mirror to a million teenagers: Monica Dickens’ Mariana

Oh no! I am feeling like a book blogger who has slept through her alarm, turned her face down into the warm pillow and lazily allowed for the languishing of good books. I have many excuses, but I won’t bore you with them: I am just late in posting. As many of you know Persephone Reading Week is a lovely event co-hosted by Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at The B Files. Despite the fact that it technically ended yesterday, this review of the Persephone Classic Mariana by Monica Dickens is my contribution.

Mariana is an enchanting read. It is a between-the-wars coming-of-age tale that has been rightly compared to I Capture the Castle by Dodi Smith. Mary Shannon is first introduced to the reader as a young married woman tucked away in a remote cottage in the Second World War. The weather outside is dreadful, the telephone lines are down and she does not know whether her husband, who is serving in the war, is alive or dead. At night, tossing and turning, and hopeless of sleep she begins to remember the events of her life from childhood through adolescence and into marriage. This act of remembrance is the subject of the book – it is a recollection story, much like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. We learn swiftly that the young woman who fears that her husband may have been lost in the second world war, lost the father whom she never really knew in the first. Her character and her life seem poised between two great tragedies but her mind is preoccupied with concerns that we all share – love; marriage; family; home.

Mary is a middle class English girl with a good eye for observation and no exceptional talents. She grows up in London with her vivacious and enterprising mother Lily and her louche and charming Uncle Geoff. Her late father’s side of the family are rather more upper class and live on the income from a chain of expensive restaurants. Their country home, the pastoral Charbury is the scene of Mary’s summers, her first brushes with romance, her early adventures and the source of her not inconsiderable sense of social superiority. The dominant love of her early years is her cousin Denys. Denys is handsome, arrogant, bullying and most undeserving of his cousin’s adoration. Like many girls of her class and period, Mary did not quite know what to do with herself in that uncomfortable interlude between school and marriage. As a result of this the reader is treated to her account of her hilariously unsuccessful spell in a drama school, followed by a year of dress making and romancing in Paris, and the events which ultimately lead to her marriage.

The first part of Mariana is far more successful than the second. Mary as a child and young teenager is a character so familiar and so real as to be almost settled on the sofa and reading the book alongside one. Every teenage girl, or woman who has been a teenage girl will recognise her unholy combination of certainty and ignorance, her desperation to be loved by some and her offhandedness with the love granted to her. The unintended humour in her story telling is a tick of growing up that all of us can recognise. Her adventures with her cousin Denys which run the gambit of worship, partnership, conspiracy and disillusion were, for me, the most successful part of the book. It is in developing Mary’s awareness of Denys, that Monica Dickens comes closest to the kind of magic that Dodi Smith achieved in I Capture the Castle. This is rather in contrast to the second half of the book, which I found rather disappointing. I felt that Mary’s later adventures did not ring true and in particular, the ending is hurried and underdeveloped. The “perfect man” when he arrives, moves so fast that one might be tempted to think that he had a train to catch. Many readers have found Mary an unsympathetic girl to share a book with. She is a little snobby, rather insensitive sometimes and displays the casual anti Semitism and class based contempt that was common in the period. However, for me, the imperfections of the girl rather added to the book. Monica Dickens is by no means uncritical of her heroine – part of the message of the book is that she is ordinary, she is of her age, she is not heroic and that is one of Mariana’s great charms.

Although burdened with a dodgy second half, I can well understand why Persephone re-printed this novel and why it has become rather a classic. The fact is that Mariana is a wonderful period piece, full of the sounds and smells and sights of an era. When the rackety Uncle Geoff takes young Mary for dinner at the Cafe Royale at some point in the early 1930s, she provides one of the best descriptions that I have read of this, the most famous of London’s “Bohemian” hang-outs. Similarly, the description of Mary’s ill-fated attendance at Denys’ Oxford College Ball, is quite lovely and reminded me of the description of Eights Week in Brideshead Revisited – it somehow manages to almost burst with unobtrusive period detail.

I am certainly not the only blogger who has enjoyed reading Mariana. I have enjoyed reading reviews by Claire at The Captive Reader, Becky Holmes at A Book A Week, Uncertain Principles at Another Cookie Crumbles, Katherine at A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore, Nicola at Vintage Reads, Carolyn at A Few Of My Favourite Books and Miranda at A Skirmish of Wit.

I have included a picture of the beautiful Persephone cover, as well as a few pictures of Monica Dickens herself.

Election – Shmelection: This is a dove-grey end-papered paradise and a politician-free zone

I am back in the UK very briefly and have found some real treats in my post-bag.

Firstly I was thrilled to receive both Iris Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood from the lovely Bloomsbury Bell, and Marjorie Ann Watts’ collection of short stories Are they funny, are they dead? which was very kindly sent to me by Charles Boyle at CB Editions (see his excellent blog here). Looking forward to both of those.

Secondly, as well all know it is Persephone Reading week and so it seems especially fitting to finally get hold of my copy of The Persephone Biannually, stuffed as it is with interesting articles and vignettes. I was pleased to see so many of my favourite bloggers getting honourable mentions including The B Files, Dovegreyreader, Savidge Reads, Paperback Reader, Desperate Reader, My Porch, The Literary Stew, A Girl Walks into a Bookstore and I Prefer Reading. There were also a couple of other blogs mentioned that were new to me so I am off to investigate those now...

Sad to read that the Persephone shop in Kensington Church Street is closing.

Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at The B Files host Persephone Reading week. I am reading Mariana by Monica Dickens. One book is a measly effort I know, but I hope to write a fairly full review of it to make up for my tardiness. I have also fished around and found a lovely picture of Monica Dickens in preparation.

So, today is shaping up to be something of a Persephone-fest – that is after I have popped out to fulfil my civic duty at the polling station – oh well, better get it over with...

Good evening Mrs Craven: the unexpected triumph of the short story

There was a time when I did not like short stories at all. I found them limiting experiences in which the characters and the themes are never properly developed and all of the substantial parts of a good read are notable by their absence. I very much took the view that reading a short story was a bit like eating custard without crumble. So it is with some surprise and a little embarrassment that I admit that I have now changed my mind. When mastered, the short story form can be as compelling and touching as a novel, and nobody does it better than Mollie Panter-Downes.

“Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes” is a collection of short stories originally published in the New Yorker during the second world war. They are now drawn together in the form of a Persephone Classic. The stories were written and published during the war and their focus is the home front. The constant motif is the middle class British lady - knitting socks for heroes, sitting by the wireless and sharing her home with strangers. The character’s concerns centre on the themes of survival and adaptation. For some of them survival simply means staying alive. For others it is the desperate urge to make a relationship, a family, a home live through the war. Together with the dream of survival comes the constant anxiety that accompanies each page: will my world still exist when the war is over? Will I still have a place at the table? Adaptation to the demands of war comes easier to some than to others. Panter-Downes captures marvellously a nation in the act of trying to adapt – it is only natural that some should succeed where others do not. Although these are heavy themes, she writes lightly and with knowing humour.

The stories to which my mind constantly returns are “Cut Down the Trees” from 1943 and “The Waste of it All” from 1944. In “Cut Down the Trees” Mrs Walsingham, an elderly society lady and her trusty maid Dossie struggle through the war in the company of 40 Canadian soldiers who have been billeted in the old lady’s grand home. While Mrs Walsingham is an adapter, the conservative Dossie is dismayed and not a little heart broken by the disintegration of her upstairs downstairs world. When Mrs Walsingham decides to eat in the kitchen instead of the dining room Dossie’s thoughts were that:

“It was all part and parcel of the unwarranted bad joke, the conspiracy against Dossie’s way of life, which they called a war and which had taken first the menservants and then the girls one by one, which had stopped the central heating, made a jungle of the borders and a pasture of the lawns, marooned the two old women in a gradually decaying house with forty Canadians, and made Mrs. Walsingham stop dressing for dinner”.

The seismic social shifts caused by the war are also explored in “The Waste of it All” where a lonely middle class government worker whose husband is away fighting takes in an unmarried mother and her adorable child. As in “Cut Down the Trees” the path of social change is seen through the lens of personal loss and frustration. Frances, the lady of the house is tormented with worry for her absent husband and their marriage. Her affection for the husbandless Margaret and her beautiful baby Raymond quickly turns to resentment and confusion. Frances begins to feel displaced in her own home and she cannot understand how a girl could reject social norms – could taunt the respectable hand that feeds her. The truth is that the social changes which were taking place would never be reversed. Panter-Downes captures a world that has been lost.

The stories of Mollie Panter-Downes illustrate that everybody has to go on living even when there is a war on. They are vignettes of a society busying itself and trying not to think the worst. They acknowledge that most people managed remarkably well as much as they illustrate how nobody can keep up an act all of the time. Their form does not limit the stories – in fact their shortness lends to their power. With these tales the reader hears a resounding clatter of teacups on saucers, the click click of knitting needles and the slow and monotonous moan of the air raid siren. There is, in short, a wonderful sense of time and place. The “short story” part means that there is a sense of society as well. Thank you Persephone for another classic.