Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein

If Swallows and Amazons is a great book to be reading while the brain is a bit confuzzled, then Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948) probably isn't.  But it came to mind the other day when Dorothy Richardson was mentioned - simply because I'd mixed up who wrote it - but by then I'd pulled it off the shelf, and the fab Picasso cover, combined with the book's brevity, meant I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Every great writer has, I imagine, been called a fraud - and many frauds have been called great writers.  Which is Gertrude Stein?  I haven't read anything else by her, and the introduction to this edition more or less says that Blood on the Dining-Room Floor wasn't a success, but I spent the whole time thinking 'Emperor's New Clothes'.  But then I thought... there are plenty of people who say that about Virginia Woolf's fiction, which I think is sublimely brilliant - so it's just as likely that this novella is brilliant and I simply don't get it.  Here's a sample sentence:

A little come they which they can they will they can be married to a man, a young enough man an old man and a young enough man.

Well, sure, Gertrude, why not?  Not all the novella is that obfuscatory, but it's also far from unique in the narrative.  In theory, I'm not anti experimental writing - but as I get further and further from my undergraduate days, my tolerance for unconventional grammar and deliberately cloaked meaning gets lower and lower.

And what's it about?  Well, the writer of the blurb optimistically calls Blood on the Dining-Room Floor a detective novel, but since it's more or less impossible to work out who any of the characters are, up to and including the person whose blood is on the dining-room floor (a more prominent death in the book is the maybe-sleepwalker who fell out a window), then it can only be called a detective novel in the loosest sense conceivable.

An interesting experiment to read, and it's always possible that my cold-ridden delirium played its part, but... I can't call myself a Stein fan as of yet.  Anybody read this, or any of Stein's more famous work?  Could I be yet persuaded?

Together and Apart - Margaret Kennedy

I think Together and Apart (1936) by Margaret Kennedy might just be the most 1930s novel I have ever read.  Not that it is the best (though it is very good) but that it is somehow quintessentially 1930s, stuffed with all the ingredients I have come to expect - marital politics; sensuality tempered by an intrinsic conservatism; a sense of change which is both progressive and nostalgic; fraught family gatherings; women discovering their voices, but torn between the roles of wife, mother, and independent woman; people explaining their feelings to each other at elaborate length.  Of course, none of these themes are unique to the 1930s, but they recur so often in novels of that decade that, together, they evoke the 1930s for me.  (Before I go any further - thank you Rob, who gave this to me in the Virago Secret Santa back in 2011, making Together and Apart possibly my only black Virago Modern Classic.)

It all starts off with that touchy-for-the-1930s topic of divorce, with Betsy writing to her mother about her proposed separation from her husband, the celebrated librettist Alec, and it's worth quoting at length...

Well now Mother, listen.  I have something to tell you that you won't like at all.  In fact, I'm afraid that it will be a terrible shock and you will hate it at first.  But do try to get used to the idea and bring father round to it.

Alec and I are parting company.  We are going to get a divorce.

I know this will horrify: the more so because I have, perhaps mistakenly, tried very hard to conceal our unhappiness during these last years.  I didn't, naturally, want anybody to know while there was still a chance of keeping things going.  But the fact is, we have been quite miserable, both of us.  We simply are unsuited to one another and unable to get on.  How much of this have you guessed?

Life is so different from what we expected when we first married.  Alec has quite changed, and he needs a different sort of wife.  I never wanted all this money and success.  I married a very nice but quite undistinguished civil servant.  With my money we had quite enough to live on in a comfortable and civilised way.  We had plenty of friends, our little circle, people like ourselves, amusing and well bred, not rich, but decently well off.  Alec says now that they bored him.  But he didn't say so at the time.

Divorce was no longer the great unthinkable, but you don't have to be cynical to detect a hint of false brio in Betsy's assured tone.  The respective mothers leap into action - and they remind me rather of the mothers in Richmal Crompton's Family Roundabout.  Betsy's mother is weak and anxious; Alec's mother is domineering and formidable.  Neither, it turns out, is particularly good at bringing the separated couple back together, and there is rather a sense that they might have inadvertently accelerated the split...

From here, Margaret Kennedy weaves a complex and evolving pattern.  I expected the novel to focus on the married couple, seeing whether or not they could mend their rift, but Kennedy's world is far wider than that.  I might even criticise it for being a little too wide, in that it occasionally seems to lose focus a bit as she tries to encompass a school, four or five households, and the minds and opinions of a dozen or more principal players.

As with the G.B. Stern novel (and because I'm rushing up so many posts!) I don't think it's worth elaborating at length about the plot.  Kennedy shows us the consequences of actions, and movingly depicts the ways in which separation affects everyone - not just the 'think of the children' angle (although this is shown a fair bit, the children are all quite flawed of their own accord) but the married couple themselves.  The split between Betsy and Alec is never final and certain in their minds - both are plagued by regret or, more to the point, uncertainty about their decision (regret would be a form of certainty which neither can reach).  I have never been married, and of course never divorced, but I was still impressed by the nuances in Kennedy's writing...

...with the caveat that this is the 1930s, and I often find that the dialogue in 1930s novels is never quite as nuanced as one might wish.  People do explain their emotions at length, and have oh-gosh-darling moments, but that all adds to the good fun of it all.  My first Margaret Kennedy book was her biography of Jane Austen, and it is interesting to see how her own fiction compares.  Well, of course Austen is better - but you can see where Kennedy learnt a bit about portraying human nature in its complexities, and I think Jane would rather have enjoyed reading this if she'd been around in 1936.

The Cynical Wives Brigade (A Woman of My Age - Nina Bawden)

When Karen mentioned that she'd bought some Nina Bawden books, I commented that I had a few on my shelves, but had never got around to reading her - and, hey presto, a joint readalong of A Woman of My Age (1967) was born.  Karen's already posted her review here, but I have to admit that I have yet to read it - because I wanted to give you my thoughts before I discovered hers.

I didn't know what to expect from Nina Bawden - I've never even read her famous children's books - so I started the novel with more or less a blank canvas. Elizabeth is the heroine (if the term fits... which it doesn't, really) and is in Morocco with her husband of eighteen years, Richard.  The heat is stultifying and their companions a trifle wearying - the obese, overly-friendly Mrs Hobbs and her quiet husband, and the unexpected friend from home, Flora. Unexpected to Elizabeth, anyway...

As their journey across the country continues, the web between these characters gets more and more complex, as secrets are revealed and alliances kindled - but the mainstay of the narrative is Elizabeth's musings on her past life, as her marriage to Richard is slowly documented, and considered in minute detail.  For Elizabeth is nothing if not introspective - she's even introspective about being introspective, which does lead to one amusing line at least:

She peered appraisingly at herself in the mirror, pulling faces as if she were alone, and I was embarrassed by her candour. (Though I have as much interest in my appearance as most women, I feel it is somehow degrading to admit it.  Before we came away, I bought a special cream supposed to restore elasticity to the skin, but I destroyed the wrapper on the jar and the accompanying, incriminating literature, as furtively as I had, when young, removed the cover of a book on sex.)

Before I go further, I should put forward the weak statement that I quite enjoyed A Woman of My Age, because I'm going to harp on about the things I didn't much like.  So, while I do that, please bear in mind that Bawden's writing is always good, her humour (when it comes) is sharp and well-judged, and her characters are generally believable.  There is even some pathos in the account of Elizabeth's ageing relatives, but I shan't comment much on that - because they are pretty incidental.

Elizabeth's age, referred to in the title, is 37.  She has been married for nearly half her life, and is obviously rather dissatisfied.  We know this, because she often tells us.  Sometimes (in this mention of her early married life) it is almost laughably stereotypical:

We were bored with our husbands.  They were sober young men, marking school books, studying, advancing into an adult world of action and responsibility.

This is, I shall admit now, my main problem with the novel - and that which inspired my title to this post.  Elizabeth is a card-carrying, fully-paid-up member of the Cynical Wives Brigade.  You may remember how little I liked Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year - you can read my thoughts here - and a lot of A Woman of My Age is cut from the same cloth. Perhaps it's because I've never been a wife, and because I wasn't around in the 1960s, but I find this gosh-is-my-privileged-life-wonderful-enough unutterably tedious, not to mention the casual adultery that all these characters indulge in.  Adultery seems, at best, a stimulus for another tedious, introspective conversation or contemplation.  Children, as with Drabble's novel, are included simply to show the passage of time, and none of the adult characters seem to have any particularly parental instincts.

Was this a 1960s thing?  Well, Lynne Reid Banks's The L-Shaped Room (1960) is one of my favourite novels, but I can't deny that it is very introspective - but Jane isn't a wife, so she manages to escape the Cynical Wives Brigade.  I haven't read many novels from this decade, but already I get the idea (supported by this novel) that it's full of this type of navel-gazing, morally-lax types.  For someone born in the 1980s, incidentally, there were a couple of moments which are very of-their-time, and rather shocking to me. (Were these views still acceptable in the 1960s?? Both are from Elizabeth's point of view, and neither seem ironic.)

As a result, I drank more than was sensible in my condition: like a lot of women, I always felt more unwell during the first three months of pregnancy than afterwards, and alcohol went to my head very quickly.

and

I was surprised at the violence of his remorse - after all, he had only hit me

I suppose I can't blame Bawden for that, if those were still prevalent opinions and actions in the time.  But what I can blame her for is making an interesting scenario and potentially interesting characters get so dragged down by the dreariness of reading about Elizabeth's self-pity and moping. To do her justice, another character in the novel does accuse her of exactly these faults. I cheered when I read this:

If they are a sample of your usual conversation I'm not surprised that he doesn't listen to you.  You're no more worth listening to than any bored, spoiled young woman, whining because the routine of married life has gone stale on you.  It really is very provoking, to a woman of my generation.  When I was thirty, we didn't have the vote, we had to fight for a place in the world.  Now you've got it, most of you don't bother to use it.  I daresay it's dull, being tied to a house and young children, but it was a life you chose, after all, you were so eager to rush into it that you didn't even take your degree.

I'm always curious when authors incorporate criticisms of their novel or characters into the narrative itself.  Is it a moment of self-awareness, to distance themselves from the voice of the narrator?  Is it the belief that recognising one's faults is the same as correcting them?  Or is simply a moment of regret, for the direction a novel should have taken?

(I should make clear - a lot of the things Elizabeth complains about are probably genuine issues. But complaining does not a novel make.)

And I haven't even mentioned the big twist at the end.  I don't really know what to say about it.

I'm still glad that I read Nina Bawden, and I'll have a look at the other one's on my shelves to see if they're any less frustrating.  Right now I'm off to see what Karen thought... come join me?

Love at Second Sight by Ada Leverson

Whilst rooting around for a 1916 title for A Century of Books (you should have seen me, scrabbling through my books, opening covers, reading publication details, reshelving huffily) I stumbled upon Love At Second Sight by Ada Leverson.  It's the third book in The Little Ottleys, of which I have previously read the first - Love's Shadow - which was rather brilliant.  This is the only time A Century of Books has really rather compromised my reading plans - in that I skipped past the second title in the trilogy (Tenterhooks) straight to the third.  But someone had spoken on The Little Ottleys at a recent conference, and given away the plot, so it wasn't as calamitous as it could have been.

Look away if you don't want to know what happened in the first two novels... but they've (to be very brief) set up the fairly loveless marriage of Edith and Bruce; Edith falls in love with Aylmer Ross, but will not leave her husband, even when he asks for a divorce himself (having run off with another woman); he comes back to her, and everything settles down into what it had been before - which is to say, an amusing, charming, patient woman, and an exasperating man.  Bruce is best summed up by this wonderful quotation from Love's Shadow: "He often wrote letters beginning "Sir, I feel it my duty," to people on subjects that were no earthly concern of his."  As for the lovely Edith, I'll hand over to Leverson to describe her.  An author should show and not tell, as a rule, but all these qualities in Edith have been exemplified in previous books, so it is forgiveable that Leverson wants to let us know what a wonder she is, so that we can get on with the show.

She was a slim, fair, pretty woman, with more vividness and character than usually goes with her type.  Like the boy, she had long-lashed grey eyes, and blonde-cendre hair: her mouth and chin were of the Burne-Jones order, and her charm, which was great but unintentional, and generally unconscious, appealed partly to the senses and partly to the intellect.  She was essentially not one of those women who irritate all their own sex by their power (and still more by their fixed determination) to attract men; she was really and unusually indifferent to general admiration.  Still, that she was not a cold woman, not incapable of passionate feeling, was obvious to any physiognomist; the fully curved lips showed her generous and pleasure-loving temperament, while the softly glancing, intelligent, smiling eyes spoke fastidiousness and discrimination.  Her voice was low and soft, with a vibrating sound in it, and she laughed often and easily, being very ready to see and enjoy the amusing side of life.  But observation and emotion alike were instinctively veiled by a quiet, reposeful manner, so that she made herself further popular by appearing retiring.  Edith Ottley might so easily have been the centre of any group, and yet - she was not!  Women were grateful to her, and in return admitted that she was pretty, unaffected and charming.

Love At Second Sight opens with a scream.  The Ottleys' son Archie has, it seemed, used Madame Frabelle's mandolin as a cricket bat, and she is not best pleased.  And who might Madame Frabelle be, you ask?  The Ottleys want to ask much the same thing.  Their delightfully forgetful and absent-minded friend Lady Conroy introduced them (although later denied ever having heard of her, and in fact asks for an introduction herself) - and Madame Frabelle arrives for a visit.  Which has lengthened itself into many, many weeks.  She is charming, a great listener, given to understanding people - noticing their subtlest of thoughts, predicting their actions, and invariably being wrong about everything.

Indeed Edith did sincerely regard her opinion as very valuable.  She found her so invariably wrong that she was quite a useful guide. She was never quite sure of her own judgement until Madame Frabelle had contradicted it.

Madame Frabelle is determined that Edith is in love with Mr. Mitchell, another of the Ottleys acquaintances.  What neither Madame Frabelle nor Bruce notice is that Edith is in love - with Aylmer, who has returned from fighting in France with a broken leg.  Edith has to face a quandary - whether or not to leave her husband...

As I say, I haven't read Tenterhooks, where a similar story takes place, so I can only contrast this with the first book in the trilogy.  In that (again, c.f. my review here), we see a marriage which is irksome and unequal, but in a comic fashion.  All the will-they-won't-they plot concerns a multitude of other characters, none of whom have stayed in my mind, and the central Ottley marriage is stable, if awful.  Bruce's absurd lack of self-awareness is hilarious, and his terribleness as a husband is darkly humorous - in Love At Second Sight, more is at stake, and more than a punchline is likely to come out of this incompatible couple.

Which is not to say that the novel isn't funny.  It is very amusing, especially when Lady Conroy wanders onto the scene.  Ada Leverson was friends with Oscar Wilde, and his influence is apparent - if anything, rather more so than in Love's Shadow, because she turns to the epigram rather more frequently in Love At Second Sight - par example, 'she was a woman who was never surprised at anything except the obvious and the inevitable'.  Sometimes this clash of serious storyline and comic prose was a little disconcerting - I thought the balance worked better in Love's Shadow - but  this is still a wonderful little book.

Of course, what you should do is get the trilogy and read them in order!  I'll read Tenterhooks one day, and then everything will fall into place properly...

At Mrs. Lippincote's - Elizabeth Taylor

I intended to read At Mrs. Lippincote's (1945) back in January, in its rightful place for Elizabeth Taylor Centenary year, but somehow it didn't happen... and then I went to a wonderful Celebration of Elizabeth Taylor in Reading, and one of the book groups was discussing this title.  I would have written about the day in Reading properly (where I got to meet lots of lovely ladies from the LibraryThing Virago group) but it happened just before Muriel Spark Reading Week, so I had other things to take blog prominence!

Well, better late than never - I'll give you my thoughts on At Mrs. Lippincote's.  The short review is that this is my favourite, of the five or six Elizabeth Taylor novels I've read.  My usual confusion over characters didn't occur, and I didn't even have that tiny this-feels-like-homework response I sometimes get with Taylor.  Instead, I just enjoyed her beautiful writing and intriguing characters, and only had one misgiving - which I'll come to later.

The Mrs. Lippincote of the title has gone to a residency not unlike Mrs. Palfrey's at the Claremont, and has let her house to Roddy Davenant (an RAF airman) and his wife Julia, for the duration of the war.  The idea of living in somebody else's house is a very rich vein for a novelist, and it is mined (can one mine a vein?) beautifully by Taylor.  Mrs. Lippincote is very present through her absence, and the constant possibility of her visitation and judgement.  All her possessions are still in the house, and Julia makes her home amongst them, treading the line between running her family's home and living in a stranger's house.  She looks at an old photo of Mrs. Lippincote's family at an elaborate wedding:

"And now it's all finished," Julia thought.  "They had that lovely day and the soup tureen and meat dishes, servants with frills and streamers, children.  They set out that day as if they were laying the foundations of something.  But it was only something which perished very quickly, the children scattered, the tureen draped with cobwebs, and now the widow, the bride, perhaps at this moment unfolding her napkin alone at a table in a small private hotel down the road."

While Taylor is great at delving into characters and relationships over the course of a novel, she is also fantastic at painting complete portraits with a few imaginative details.  A bit like synedochal snapshots of people's lives.

Roddy's cousin Eleanor is also living with them, and anybody who has read Rebecca West's excellent novella The Return of the Soldier will be familiar with the dynamic of the wife/husband/husband's cousin.  (It is a cousin in The Return of the Soldier too, isn't it?)  Eleanor, indeed, does think that she would make a better wife for Roddy - and she is probably right.  Roddy and Eleanor aren't on the same wavelength - neither are the 'bad guy', but our sympathies are definitely with Julia, who is a wonderful character.

I would be confident that you'd all love Julia, or at least empathise with her, but I've just reminded myself of Claire's review: 'Julia is an odd character and certainly not a very likeable one."  Re-reading her post, I'm starting to change my mind a bit... but I'll stick to my guns and explain why I did love Julia.  She is intelligent and artistic, coping with the dissatisfactions of her life with stoicism and wit.  She hasn't been handed the home or husband that she would ideally choose, but makes the best of the situation she is in - as well as being sensitive and thoughtful about the wider conditions of the country.  When talking to the Wing Commander (Roddy's boss), she argues the point for education for his daughter Felicity:

"They will try to stuff her head with Virgil and Pliny and Greek Irregular Verbs."

"All Greek verbs are irregular," Julia murmured.

"I think it nonsense.  What use will it be to her when she leaves school?  Will it cook her husband's dinner?"

"No, it won't do that, but it will help her to endure doing it, perhaps.  If she is to cook while she is at school, then there will be that thing less for her to learn when she's grown-up: but, if she isn't to learn Greek at school, then she will never learn it afterwards.  And learning Greek at school is like storing honey against the winter."

"But what use is it?" he persisted.

"Men can be educated; women must be trained," she said sorrowfully.

A little heavy-handed perhaps, but a point worth making - and, incidentally, a battle subsequently won (although neither girls nor boys are likely to study Greek irregular verbs now... at least not at the sort of school I attended.)  The Wing Commander is another really intriguing character.  He has all the firmness and professionalism you'd expect of a Wing Commander, but also a literary side which baffles Roddy.  He's a bit awkward with children, but manages to engage Oliver Davenant in a discussion about the Brontes - a theme which runs throughout the novel, potential mad-woman-in-the-attic and everything.  Oh, I've not mentioned Oliver before, have I?  He is Julia's ten year old son, and which of us could fail to greet a fellow bibliophile?

Oliver Davenant did not merely read books.  He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words.  Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine.  The pages had personality.  He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night.  He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window.  Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

He is incredibly sensitive and fairly weak, in a determined-invalid sort of way, but his friendship with Felicity is more or less the only straightforward one in the novel.  Which brings me onto my sticking point with At Mrs. Lippincote's - the ending, which I shan't spoil, is a crisis between two characters which comes rather out of the blue, and doesn't feel very consistent with the rest of the narrative.  At Mrs. Lippincote's, like all the Taylor novels I've read, is more concerned with characters than plot - nothing hugely unbalancing occurs, and the focus is upon the way people live together and communicate.  Until the end, which feels a bit as though Taylor wasn't sure how to conclude a novel, and decided, unfortunately, to end with a bang.

I shall take a leaf out of her book (not literally, that would be vandalism) and end in a manner which I usually do not - with a quotation.  At Mrs. Lippincote's is thoughtful, clever, and perceptive, but it's also often very witty - and I'll finish with a quotation which amused me.

Eleanor, whom he [Oliver] did not really like, set sums for him every morning and corrected them when she came home for tea.  Occasionally, he had a right answer, in much the same manner as when one backs horses a great deal, now and the one of them comes in for a place.

(See all the Elizabeth Taylor Centenary Celebration reviews for this title here.)

Early Young

One of the best books I've read this year was William by E.H. Young - a few of us did a joint read back in February, and I became a confirmed fan of Emily Hilda's, after having previously enjoyed Miss Mole. In a manner not unknown to me, I had stockpiled EHY novels long before I knew whether or not I would like her, and so when I saw that someone at the conference I'm attending this week would be discussing The Misses Mallett (1922), I was able to prepare.

My received understanding about EH Young, from various reviews and from Virago's judicious selection of novels to reprint in the 1980s and 1990s, was that her first three novels were rather mediocre and that The Misses Mallett (also published as The Bridge Dividing) was something of a momentous turning point. After that (so I understood) she wrote nothing but gems. After all, nothing separates those early rural novels from the sophistication of William except one novel: yes, The Misses Mallett.

I had great expectations. And, I'm sorry to say, they rather faltered. The topic showed such promise, especially given my predisposition towards spinster novels of the 1920s. And there are plenty of spinsters around - let me hand you over to my favourite one, Caroline:

"The Malletts don't marry, Henrietta. Look at us, as happy as the day is long, with all the fun and none of the trouble. We've been terrible flirts, Sophia and I. Rose is different, but at least she hasn't married. The three Miss Malletts of Nelson Lodge! Now there are four of us, and you must keep up our reputation."

Caroline, Sophia, and Rose are sisters, Rose being rather younger than the first two - who are drawn rather two-dimensionally, if amusingly. Caroline is fairly feisty, and spends her autumnal years reliving imagined conquests of her youth, and alluding to improprieties which she, in fact, has never had the opportunity to commit. Sophia is mousy and quiet and traipses after Caroline, excusing, correcting, and loving her. They have their own touching dynamic, even if their characters aren't hugely evolved. It is with Rose, and later their feckless brother's daughter Henrietta, that the reader is supposed to sympathise. They are from the same mould - affected intensely by their emotions, but compelled by society to quash their wilder affections, etc. etc. And they're both tangled up with love for the (to my mind) wholly unattractive Francis Sales. He's off the market anyway, married to an invalid wife of the variety who alternates catty remarks with lunges after her smelling salts.

To be honest, much of this plot reminded me of the most unlikely excesses of Thomas Hardy. People fall in love from distances of a hundred metres, flash their eyes all over the place, and emote wildly through woodland and over moors. Here's an excerpt:

She did not love him - how could she? - but he belonged to her; and now, if this piece of gossip turned out to be true, she must share him with another. Jealousy, in its usual sense, she had none as yet, but she forged a chain she was to find herself unable to break. It was her pride to consider herself a hard young person, without spirituality, without sentiment, yet all her personal relationships were to be of the fantastic kind she now experienced, all her obligations such as others would have ignored.

I haven't read anything by Mary Webb et al, but this has to be the sort of thing Stella Gibbons was parodying in Cold Comfort Farm, no? (Which reminds me - review of Stella Gibbons' Westwood coming soon, promise.) I'm being a little cruel to EHY here, perhaps, but only because her later novels are so brilliant. It's somewhat reassuring that she wasn't born with inherent subtlety and style.

I'm skimming over the plot rather, because it's a bit predictable. I've watched enough corny films to know that the Rugged Hero will eventually be passed over for the Male Best Friend. In Henrietta's case, the latter appears in the wonderful character of Charles. He is like a lump of real gold amidst fool's gold - when EH Young went on to write better, much better, novels, she need not have been ashamed of creating Charles. He is a wonderful mixture of the aesthetic and inept. He lives for beauty in music, much in the way that characters in EM Forster might, but he also lacks confidence and is unnervingly self-aware.

Charles blinked, his sign of agitation, but Henrietta did not see. "He's good to look at," Charles muttered. "He knows how to wear his clothes."

"That doesn't matter."

Charles heaved a sigh. "One never knows what matters."

As a hero he defies cliche, and thus is a nod towards the sort of complex characters which Young would later form. It's just a shame that the Misses Mallett themselves, inoffensive though they might be, never really reveal any inspiration on Young's part. A novel about 1920s spinster sisters living together could have been deliciously fun or painfully poignant, or even both, but there are only brief moments when The Misses Mallett could be said to be either. A serviceable novel, certainly, and good enough to pass the time - but unworthy of the pen which would later create William and Miss Mole, and goodness knows whatever other sparkling or clever works.

I'm very glad that this wasn't my first encounter with EH Young, as it might well have also been my last. Instead, I shall chalk this up to experience - and go foraging for one of her later novels next time. Can anybody at all step forward to defend Young and, equally importantly, those Misses Mallett?

Red Pottage

Turns out Burns was onto something when he talked about the best laid schemes ganging aft agley - mine ganged aft agley all over the place. I had intended to devote August to reading through some of the Viragos I have piled in various places - and had even picked a modest six or seven to read. And I managed to finish... one. True, I am most of the way through another, but somehow August ran away from me almost entirely Viragoless. Still, the one I did read ended up being pretty brilliant - step forward Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley.

I can't remember who first put me onto Red Pottage (maybe Lyn?) but I do know that for a long time I kept an eye out for it, and snapped it up when I spotted it in the Bookbarn during this rampage.

The novel was published in 1890, and it couldn't really have been published in any other decade. There are elements of New Woman feminism alongside Lady Audleyesque sensation, and all washed down with wit. There is a certain decadence to the prose which is never over the top, recalling a period where three words could be used where one would have done - because sparseness is not the only approach to literature, and what 'would have done' is a paltry second-best to what 'can be done'. This paragraph, for instance, adds nothing to the plot - but it is a delicious sidetrack which would doubtless have been edited out ten years later.

A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near at hand, fleeing from the still splendour of the sun-fired woods where he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of grey stones and water, where he was a jewelled king.

Virago insist in their blurb that the novel is about Rachel West and Hester Gresley, and 'explores the ways in which two very different women search for fulfilment in a society bound by convention.' I can understand how such a synopsis would cohere with Virago's (admirable) publishing aims, but it does Red Pottage a disservice to summarise it in that manner - for it is really far more complex than that, as well as rather more entertaining.

Preparing for a George Gissing-type melancholy novel (I should mention now that I haven't read anything by George Gissing - or, indeed, Lady Audley's Secret, I'm just throwing around these references with no first-hand knowledge whatsoever) I was surprised when Red Pottage opens with neither Rachel nor Hester, but instead Hugh Scarlett. Scarlett is embroiled in an affair with Lady Newhaven, and Lord Newhaven challenges Scarlett to a duel, of a sort. They each take a taper - the one with the shorter taper must kill himself before the end of five months. Told you this was a sensation novel.

Except it is not simply a sensation novel. There's quite a web running through the interrelations of characters, and it's not long before we meet newly-rich Rachel West, a sensible and social girl who has endured years of poverty. She, in turn, is friends with Hester Gresley who, after having published an extremely successful novel, is now trying to write her second whilst living with her clergyman brother, his jealous wife, and their energetic children. These eight or so characters compose the principal cast - or at least those that are foremost in my mind a few weeks after finishing the novel.

Although the blurb talks about Hester and Rachel being very different, they seemed almost entirely identical figures to me - progressive, but with a firm sense of morals; artistic; loving. My favourite sections of the novel dealt with Hester and her brother's family - she writing away whenever she had spare moments, and he unappreciative and unadvanced, while believing himself to be deficient in nothing. Any topic under the sun would be 'thrashed out' by him, and his judgement he considered final. As for his sense of humour, Cholmondeley pens a particularly delightful paragraph on the topic:

Why does so deep a gulf separate those who have a sense of humour and those who, having none, are compensated by the conviction that they possess it more abundantly. The crevasse seems to extend far inland to the very heights and water-sheds of character. Those who differ on humour will differ on principles. The Gresleys and the Pratts belonged to that large class of our fellow creatures, who, conscious of a genius for adding to the hilarity of our sad planet, discover an irresistible piquancy in putting a woman's hat on a man's head, and in that "verbal romping" which playfully designates a whisky and soda as a gargle, and says "au reservoir" instead of "an revoir."

(Shades of Mapp and Lucia, no?) And yet Cholmondeley is unswervingly fair in her portraits. Red Pottage is no attack on the church - indeed, there is a thread of faith through it which is done honestly and well. Rather, the novel contains (among many other things) an exposure of a certain type of clergyman, who is balanced out by a much more sensitive and sympathetic bishop. Even Rev. James Gresley is not solely a figure to be lambasted - his saving grace is the love he feels towards his children, which in turn is the only sort of love within Hester's own novel which he does not consider overblown.

The conversations between James and Hester are amongst the chief delights of the novel. Jane Austen would not have spoken slightingly of them - some of the exchanges reminded me, in their linguistic delicacy and exactness, of that wonderful scene between Lady Catherine de Burgh and Elizabeth Bennett. Hester's dialogue is always carefully inoffensive, and yet subtly demonstrates how far she is from agreeing with her brother's values and pronouncements. To pick one example out of the air: 'But from your point of view you were right to speak - as - as you have done. I value the affection that prompted it.' I shan't spoil the outcome of the relationship between Hester and her family, but I will mention that it involves one of the most moving deaths I have ever read about - and it is not even the death of a human.

Cholmondeley's constant fairness can confuse, at times - simply because the more sensational aspects of the novel feel as though they require less complex characters. It would be tempting to view Scarlett as a cad and bounder, and a cowardly one at that, but Cholmondeley makes the reader question these assumptions:

But was he a coward? Men not braver than he have earned the Victoria Cross, have given up their lives freely for others. Hugh had it in him to do as well as any man in hot blood, but not in cold.

It would be ridiculous to fault Cholmondeley for creating rounded characters, and I don't intend to do so - only perhaps occasionally (only occasionally) her plot-lines are not quite so well rounded, and the consequent discord is a little unsettling.

I have done little justice to the overlapping and interweaving storylines of the novel, nor the wry humour which so often made me laugh aloud. Cholmondeley is an excellent observer of human nature, and (which is rarer) a generous one. Her generosity does not preclude laughing at traits and actions, but it does forbid pillory or scapegoating. Red Pottage is a rich, moving, funny, and deeply perceptive novel. I may only have managed to finish one Virago Modern Classic this August - but at least the one I finished turned out to be rather brilliant.

Favourite Viragos

Thanks for your lovely comments on yesterday's post! Let's keep the Virago Modern Classic mood going (thanks again Rachel and Carolyn!) Here's a little bit of serendipity for you - I had no idea that suc
h a thing as Google Docs existed until today at work, when my boss asked me to open it. Lo and behold, not only did my Yahoo address automatically set me up with a Google Docs account, but I had three messages (or files or, I suppose, documents) - the third, sent earlier this month, being a complete list of Virago Modern Classics! Thank you, LALindsay, whoever you are - presumably something to do with the VMC group on LibraryThing?

(some of my favourite covers)

It has enabled me to count up all the VMCs I've read - not the ones I own; that's probably about twice this number, but out of 553 VMCs published, I have read a respectable 59. Scroll down to the bottom of this post for the list of those I've read, if you're interested - feel free to ask me about any of them, or tell me which ones I *should* have read that aren't listed. To be honest, quite a few I read in non-VMC editions. I didn't even know the Brontes and Austen had had the Virago treatment. But there are still a fair few on the list that have found their way to me courtesy of Virago - and it is those I'll be choosing from for my favourite VMCs. So, Provincial Lady and myriad Jane Austen novels, even though I love you I'm afraid you shan't be appearing on this list - because I didn't meet you between those distinctive green borders. Fair's fair.

Ok, here are five Virago Modern Classics I love, cherish, and adore. I'm afraid the pictures are of varying sizes; if someone can tell me how to get bigger images of the covers on LibraryThing, that would be much appreciated for future use...


The Love Child - Edith Olivier
(VMC #46)

This one will surprise none of you, I suspect... Olivier's novel, about a lonely spinster who conjures her childhood imaginary friend into life, is short but powerful. Don't be put off by a slightly fey cover - The Love Child is clever, moving, and one I'll be re-reading many times. Well do I remember picking it up on a whim, for mere pence, in the charity shop on Little Clarendon Street (Oxford). For some reason I had no other book with me, or had just finished one, for I immediately went round the corner to a public garden (the one, in fact, pictured) and started it. And was blown away by how good it was.


Mother and Son - Ivy Compton-Burnett
(VMC #394)

I was trying to remember which Virago title was the first I read between those distinctive green spines... without my reading diary to hand, I'm not sure, but it might well have been Mother and Son. My mum loathes Ivy Compton-Burnett, but a lady in our village lent me this, telling me to give Ivy a go. I'm ever grateful to Jay for introducing me to this most divisive of authors - you definitely either love or hate - and her dialogue-packed novels of family intrigue and enjoyably futile, highbrow exchanges.

A Very Great Profession - Nicola Beauman
(VMC #406)

The place where Persephone started, Beauman's very accessible look at many and various middlebrow female authors is bound to have you filling a notebook with ideas for future reads. Chapters are cleverly divided up into topics like 'Surplus Women'; 'Sex'; 'Psychoanalysis' etc. An invaluable resource for anyone even vaguely interested in the sort of books in the VMC line - and now available from Persephone.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead - Barbara Comyns
(VMC #238)

A title I don't shut up about, this Comyns novel is surreal and domestic at the same time, and takes pride of place amongst my slightly quirker taste in novels. But nobody is quite like Comyns - and while I want to thank Virago for bringing her novels to a wider audience, I also want to ask why they've let almost all of them drop off the VMC list? (Ditto The Love Child!)


The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West
(VMC #32)

Probably the best novel I have read associated with war - in this case, as the title suggests, the return of a soldier, and the messy familial and romantic tangles which ensue. Also incredibly sensitive about shell shock and bereavement - all packed into one slim volume.


Hope that has given you some tips for further VMC reading! Do ask about any of those below, should you want to know my opinions.


Viragos I have read:
(in order of VMC-publication)

1. Mr Fortune’s Maggot : Sylvia Townsend Warner
2. The Life and Death of Harriett Frean : May Sinclair
3. The Return of the Soldier : Rebecca West
4. The Third Miss Symons : F.M. Mayor
5. The Vet’s Daughter : Barbara Comyns
6. The Love Child : Edith Olivier
7. The Yellow Wallpaper : Charlotte Perkins Gilman
8. The Professor’s House : Willa Cather
9. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont : Elizabeth Taylor
10. The Little Ottleys : Ada Leverson
11. The Tortoise and the Hare : Elizabeth Jenkins
12. Keynotes and Discords : George Egerton
13. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths : Barbara Comyns
14. All Passion Spent : Vita Sackville-West
15. Angel : Elizabeth Taylor
16. Miss Mole : E.H. Young
17. Diary of a Provincial Lady : E.M. Delafield
18. Sisters by a River : Barbara Comyns
19. No Signposts in the Sea : Vita Sackville-West
20. The Lifted Veil : George Eliot
21. Two Days in Aragon : Molly Keane
22. One Fine Day : Mollie Panter-Downes
23. A Game of Hide and Seek : Elizabeth Taylor
24. The Enchanted April : Elizabeth von Arnim
25. The Skin Chairs : Barbara Comyns
26. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead : Barbara Comyns
27. The Stone Angel : Margaret Laurence
28. The New House : Lettice Cooper
29. Olivia : Dorothy Strachey
30. Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir : Vita Sackville-West
31. The Brontës Went to Woolworths : Rachel Ferguson
32. The Way Things Are : E.M. Delafield
33. Thank Heaven Fasting : E.M. Delafield
34. The Story of an African Farm : Olive Schreiner
35. Mrs Miniver : Jan Struther
36. Emma : Jane Austen
37. Pride and Prejudice : Jane Austen
38. Sense and Sensibility : Jane Austen
39. Persuasion : Jane Austen
40. Mansfield Park : Jane Austen
41. Northanger Abbey : Jane Austen
42. Villette : Charlotte Bronte
43. Wuthering Heights : Emily Bronte
44. Agnes Grey : Anne Bronte
45. Try Anything Twice : Jan Struther
46. Jane Eyre : Charlotte Bronte
47. Ethan Frome : Edith Wharton
48. Crewe Train : Rose Macaulay
49. Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman : Sylvia Townsend Warner
50. Mother and Son : Ivy Compton-Burnett
51. A Very Great Profession : Nicola Beauman
52. I Capture the Castle : Dodie Smith
53. Provincial Daughter : R.M. Dashwood
54. 84 Charing Cross Road : Helene Hanff
55. Rebecca : Daphne du Maurier
56. My Cousin Rachel : Daphne du Maurier
57. The Flight of the Falcon : Daphne du Maurier
58. Loitering with Intent : Muriel Spark
59. Excellent Women : Barbara Pym

Virago Reading Week

I think, sadly, I've read all the VMCs I'll manage this week (total: one) so I'll talk about Virago in general instead! A few bloggers have written about how they discovered the world of Virago, and I thought I'd join in. And tomorrow I'll muse on some of my favourites, time permitting...

I had quite an odd journey to Virago, which started with a little Everyman book called Modern Humour. Putting 'modern' in the title of anything is a risky business, and this volume was published in 1940. I bought it because it featured something by AA Milne that wasn't collected elsewhere, and AAM was my first grown-up literary love (that sounds odd, given his status as a children's writer, but he was also the first writer-for-adults whom I really loved.)

Anyway - included in this volume were two pieces by E.M. Delafield (which, incidentally, you can read here). I'd never heard of Delafield - I didn't even know if 'E.M' was a woman or a man, although the tone of the piece led me correctly to suspect the former - but I loved these pieces. They're actually from As Others Hear Us, which is one of my very favourite books, but at the time I only had Delafield's name - and took myself to Worcestershire's library catalogue. All they had in Pershore Library was a large print edition of The Provincial Lady Goes Further - so that was my induction to the world of Delafield.

Ok, that - and the 4-in-1 Provincial Lady book I subsequently bought - wasn't actually in a Virago edition. The first Virago Modern Classic I read was about six months later: Provincial Daughter by EMD's own daughter, R.M. Dashwood. But it was the Provincial Lady books which gave me a taste for Virago Modern Classics, even before I knew what they were...

Fast-forward about 18 months, and I was a member of an online reading group that, seven years later, I am still a proud member of. They love all things Persephone, but they also enthuse about Virago like nobody's business - which led to me buying those green spines wherever I spotted them at a reasonable price. Elizabeth Taylors flocked to my house. Elizabeth von Arnims gathered on my shelves (and I've still only read one of them.) Many more than I have read have arrived. And aren't the matching green spines something to behold? I will always choose one of those over the latest VMC - whoever chose to get rid of the green spines made one of the worst marketing decisions in the world. (By the by, for the background workings of Virago and their takeover by Little Brown, from being an independent press, is detailed fascinatingly in Simone Murray's Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics).

Thankfully, however, old VMCs turn up in a lot of charity shops, and my collection has grown steadily over the years. Some seem impossible to find; some proliferate. They have provided me with some of my favourite reads - they have also included some I thought dreadful, but the good outweight the bad. Virago don't seem to embody a reading taste in quite the way they used to - perhaps because, when they were an independent press, all VMCs had to pass the taste level of a small group of people - but, looking at those 1980s reprints, all of which were originally published before I was born, and many of which were reprinted before I was born too - I can be confident that I'll find something that will at least intrigue me. Check back tomorrow to see which titles I've loved most over the years... although I suspect you can already guess some of them.

If you've blogged about your introduction to Virago, do let me know - and if you haven't, then tell me about it in the comments here!

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns

It's about time I paid heed to Virago Reading Week, which has been popping up all over the blogosphere this, er, week. Thanks Rachel and Carolyn! I love it when publishers are hailed in this manner - long-term SiaB readers may recall I ran an I Love Hesperus week many moons ago, and of course have enjoyed Persephone readalongs, and cheered from the sidelines for NYRB Classics. As luck would have it - it certainly wasn't my organisational ability - I happened to be halfway through a Virago when the week began, and even my current sluggish reading pace has allowed me to finish off The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns.


Props to Thomas (that's a good American expression, right? As is that 'right?' there.) for his Virago banner, by the way. If you think you recognise those pics, head over here for Thomas' competition.

It's no secret that I love Barbara Comyns - she's probably in my top five favourite authors, certainly top ten - and I'm fast reaching the end of her books. Just two novels to go... so I'm treasuring them as I go, and The Skin Chairs is no exception.

When I first started reading Comyns, I thought her novels were bizarrely different from one another, in terms of style. It's only now, looking back, that I realise I started off with the three most disparate I could have chosen - Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and The Juniper Tree. Having read more of her books, I realise that she does have an identifiable tone - surreal but matter-of-fact; an unnerving but captivating mixture, and one which leads to a very unusual angle on events. As shown most effectively in The Vet's Daughter, but also on occasion in The Skin Chairs, even cruelties are dealt with in this unshockable, even tone. Here's an example:

When she had gone we let Esme's mice loose in the sitting-room, although they didn't seem to enjoy it much, keeping close to the skirting board most of the time. There used to be a girl in our village who was continually beaten by her parents and I remembered she used to walk like that, close to the walls.

Lest you think this is a miserable book, I must add the scolding given to children when they sit on some graves: 'Nanny found us and said that we had no respect for our bottoms or the dead.' There are plenty of laugh-aloud moments.

The Skin Chairs is told in the voice of ten-year-old Frances, one of six children, who must go and stay with her Great-Aunt's family: 'My mother[...] sometimes became tired of us and would dispatch us to any relation who would agree to have one or two of the family to stay.' Shortly after this, and having endured Aunt Lawrence's unwelcoming home, Frances' father dies and the rest of her family move to an unlikeable, small modern house. Relative poverty is a theme throughout Comyns' writing, and she relishes writing of their privations - nightdresses made out of old sheets; 'not being able to play with paint', and so forth.

As with other Comyns novels, not much happens. This one has a little more of a central thread through it than some, in terms of the family's destiny, but Comyns is best at her bizarre hangers-on. Chief amongst these is Mrs. Alexander, with her red-purple hair, turbans, mustard-coloured car, and golden shoes (repainted each evening by her chauffeur.) She keeps monkeys, and cleverly builds a wall after buying a piano, so that the bailiffs can't remove it when she goes into debt. Then there is young widow Vanda, who neglects her baby, but thinks she's doing a good job as the infant never goes short of orange juice. How Comyns thinks of all the tiny details, I can't imagine. So many are bizarre and wonderful - unexpected, but not dwelt upon - and always mentioned so calmly.

The first day at school was not so bad as I expected. The worst part was when most of the girls trooped off into the dining-room and we had to eat our sandwiches in one of the classrooms. The only other occupant was a particularly plain girl wearing a patch plaid blouse and eating a pork pie. She said she adored eating pork pies and ate them in her bath.

And those skin chairs of the title? Yes, they're human skin, and belong to a Major who lives in a large house in the village. They pop up near the beginning of the novel, and reappear every now and then - with some significance, but the true justification for the novel being called The Skin Chairs doesn't rest with that. I think they're the perfect symbol for what Comyns does best: the domestication of the surreal; the macabre passed over with matter-of-fact interest, and no more - there is probably a girl eating a pork pie close by, which will be equally involving.

If you haven't read any Comyns yet, I urge you to do so (The Skin Chairs is going for a penny on Amazon.) The more I read of her, the more I feel sure that she has been unjustly neglected - and is one of the most intriguing novelists of the twentieth-century.

Waters run backwards

The final book I read in 2010 - deftly added to the list I posted a couple of days ago - was Sarah Waters' The Night Watch. This is my third Waters novel, and this year was the year of Third Time Lucky (c.f.: Evelyn Waugh; Muriel Sparks) - but not, as it happened, with Waters. That sounds like one of my shortest reviews, doesn't it? Sorry, folks, but I'm not stopping there... After quite liking Affinity back in 2003 or 2004, I loved The Little Stranger this summer - and if it hadn't been for that frustrating ending, it would have been one of my favourite reads this year. But I had caught the Waters bug, and my post-Christmas read was The Night Watch, only approx. four years after everyone else.

For those who haven't read this already, I'll give you a quick overview. The unusual angle of The Night Watch is that it is told backwards. Events kick off in 1947, and work their way backwards to 1941, stopping off in 1944. That's not as many stepping stones as I expected, when I read various reviews of this novel in 2006, when it was published, and it does rather put the novel between two stools. On the one hand, there are all sorts of clues laid down regarding past events (further on in the narrative); on the other hand, since there are only three sections - and the final one is very short - it feels a bit like Waters didn't let herself experiment quite enough. Al this leads me, if you're not careful, to start talking about sjuzhet and fabula, or histoire and recit, if we're getting all theoretical. Apologies if this is known already, but quick crash course in a bit Russian Formalism: 'fabula' is the chronological series of events; 'sjuzhet' is the way this is arranged in a narrative. So Waters has her sjuzhet all in a twist.

Which all means that Waters could be a little self-conscious when she writes this:

"I go to the cinema," said Kay; "there's nothing funny about that. Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way - people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures. Or perhaps that's just me..."

But, as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself.

There are plenty of characters, and plenty of things going on, in The Night Watch. Sarah Waters being Sarah Waters, quite a lot of the novel is about being a lesbian in wartime (I loved the if-you're-in-the-know reference to 'Quaint Irene' from Mapp and Lucia as the name of a boat) - and four of the central characters are lesbians, who seem to all be in love with each other at various stages of the novel. Well, one of them - Mickey - appears to be immune to the charms of Helen, Julia, and Kay, but they are all embroiled with one another. To be honest, I didn't find any of the female characters particularly well delineated - throw in Viv, Helen's colleague at a sort of post-war dating agency, and they all rather blurred into one. Even Julia's novelistic career didn't help me remember which one was which until we were a hundred or so pages in.

Not so the men. Viv's brother Duncan is doing a menial job in a factory, and has a surprise reunion with Robert Fraser. Duncan's naive, bulky uncertainty and Robert's confident charm are done very well - but the reader has no idea what sort of reunion is taking place. Were they colleagues, comrades-in-arms, or romantically involved? I couldn't possibly tell you, of course...

I'm being a bit critical, so I shall redress the balance - Waters' structure is often done very well. The careful laying of clues, and all manner of mysterious events, lead to plenty of gasp-moments in the second half. Obviously I shan't reveal these, but the secret passing of a ring; curious Uncle Horace; and whispers of infidelity are all clues to watch out for... and lead to satisfying 'oh, right' moments later.

But as with The Little Stranger, which was almost all compelling reading but had a dud 100 pages, The Night Watch is longer than it needs to be, and drags occasionally. At her best, Waters can tear a story along - but at her worst, it feels rather self-indulgent and unedited.

And then... I feel a bit mean, quoting this bit, as it's the worst offender - but:

"What's the matter? Aren't you happy?"

"Happy?" Viv blinked. "I don't know. Is anybody happy? Really happy, I mean? People pretend they are."

"I don't know either," said Helen, after a moment. "Happiness is such a fragile sort of thing these days. It's as though there's only so much to go round."

Do people talk like this? Did people ever talk like this - except in novels? It's the sort of thing 1930s plays are scattered with, but I doubt it ever spilled over into read life...

But I'm only picking all these holes because I'm trying to work out why The Night Watch got shortlisted for all sorts of awards. There is so much to like in Waters' novel, and it was definitely compelling reading much of the time. Writing the narrative backwards is a good idea executed without pretension, but also perhaps without reaching its potential. But somehow, for me, Waters missed the mark. The Little Stranger was very nearly a brilliant novel. The Night Watch was very nearly a very good novel. I've not read all of Waters' novels, but... is she destined to always fall short from her potential? Or am I a lone voice in the wilderness? Fans of Waters - convince me!

A Game of Hide and Seek

I promised a Virago Modern Classic, and a Virago Modern Classic I will deliver. I've already read a couple Elizabeth Taylor novels, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (click on the titles if you fancy reading my thoughts on them, but to summarise - they're very good) and Nicola Beauman's biography of Elizabeth Taylor, but there's plenty of way to go - and when my supervisor told me I should take a look at A Game of Hide and Seek, how could I resist?

The 'game' in question is both literal and metaphorical. The novel opens with Harriet and Vesey (query: is this actually a name?) playing a game of hide-and-seek - and this game follows them throughout the rest of their lives... they chase each other, misunderstanding each other's emotions and failing to say the right thing at the right times, and often saying the wrong thing. Vesey goes to Oxford; Harriet remains behind - and marries somebody else. Later, of course, Vesey reappears - and the same old feelings reappear as well.

I didn't really want to write out the plot of A Game of Hide and Seek because, like so many of the best novels, the plot isn't that important. A thousand novelists have written novels with this plot (for another good one, see EM Delafield's Late and Soon) and explored the emotions that such a recrudescence can have. But few of them will have Elizabeth Taylor's talent.

Confession time: I read the first half of this on the bus to and from London, and wasn't very excited about it. I was tired, I had a headache, I was reading the words but not really getting anything out of it. It was only when I returned, busless, to my reading that I understood what an exceptionally well written novel A Game of Hide and Seek was. Taylor excels at the metaphor which is unusual and yet exactly conveys an image. One of my favourites was this:

Harriet tried to put on a polite and considering look. She loved the music, but could not allow herself to enjoy it among strangers. Sunk too far back in her too large chair, she felt helpless, like a beetle turned on its back; and as if she could never rise again, nor find the right phrases of appreciation.

How many authors would think of that image, of a beetle turned on its back? And yet it works so very well. That is, to my mind, what sets Taylor apart from other authors - and makes it hard to explain exactly why - that she writes the sort of novel that many could write, but concentrates so much on avoiding cliche and finding new life in her characters, that she is on another level. Another example? It's always difficult to 'show' good writing, isn't it? But this is a paragraph I highlighted as being representative - the sort of writing which one has to read slowly, to enjoy it fully.

The fog lay close to the windows. The train seemed to be grovelling its way towards London, but the banks on either side were obscured. Harriet wondered if they were passing open fields or the backs of factories, and she cleaned a space on the window with her glove, but all she could see reflected were her own frightened eyes.

You can just tell that every word is carefully chosen, can't you? This is all sounding a bit earnest, so I'm also going to quote my favourite line from the novel, which is often humorous as well as serious:

"The meat has over-excited them," Harriet thought. She had always heard that it inflamed the baser instincts.

Quite so, Elizabeth, quite so.

I won't go over the top, this isn't the best novel I've ever read - but it is some of the best writing that I've read for a while. If you chose novels for their plot, you might not think too much of A Game of Hide and Seek. If you chose novels for their writing style and characterisation, this may well be something you'll love - and admire. Not often that those two can go hand in hand - but Elizabeth Taylor is the woman for the job.

Try Anything Twice

Good things come to those who wait, we are told, and that's generally how I treat books which come to my shelves. A few leap immediately to hand, read within minutes of arriving, but most are left - like fine wines - to mature. And so it is that Try Anything Twice by Jan Struther, which arrived in October 2007 from lovely Ruth (aka Crafty Person), has finally been read. And it's like a hot cup of tea on a wintery afternoon.

Jan Struther is best known for Mrs. Miniver - which I wrote a bit about back here - the voice of quintessential middle-class Englishness leading up to World War Two. Though she altered dramatically for the film, there was still that kernel of being England's everywoman (within the remit of those with servants and children at boarding school and jolly outings.) Though Try Anything Twice doesn't feature Mrs. M, the voice is instantly recognisable. Published in 1938, the volume collects articles and essays that Jan Struther wrote for Spectator, New Statesman, Punch, and other journals. They're all from that middle-class world, but what an observant world it can be - whether noting the vagaries of updating an address book ('Zazoulian, the little Armenian painter. His pictures are not very good, nor his conversation amusing, and it is eighteen months since you saw him: but a "Z" is a "Z"') or going to a Registry Office to find a nanny (one who is neither a dragon nor a duchess) or the poetic potential of a builder's plans.

As always with short stories or essays or poems - anything where there is no uniform whole - it is near impossible to write a convincing review of Try Anything Twice, especially since I read it over the course of some weeks. Verity's review is worth seeing, by the way, but for now I think the best way to talk about the book is to give you a sample. It's not necessarily the best in the book, but it's fairly representative of the style of Try Anything Twice. All of the book is actually available online, but of course (!) it's better to get hold of the book itself. If you like the following, as they say, you'll like the book. Ladies and Gentlemen; 'With Love From Aunt Hildegarde'

THERE are three ways of choosing presents for other people. The first is to choose something you think they would like; the second, something you would like yourself; the third, something you think they ought to have. Of these methods the first is the wisest but the least common; the second is less wise but more usually followed; while the third is wholly unforgivable and accounts for much of the post-Christmas bitterness from which we are apt to suffer.

My great-aunt Hildegarde is an almost fanatical devotee of the third method. Many people would call her an ideal aunt; that is to say, she gives us presents not only at Christmas but for each of our birthdays and often in between times as well. But her gifts have, so to speak, a sting in the tail; they represent her unspoken criticisms on our habits, customs and whole mode of living. Whenever we see her firm capable handwriting on a parcel, or a box arrives from a shop with one of her cards enclosed, we pause before unpacking it any further, sit back on our haunches and wonder what we've done wrong now.

"I know," says T. "Last time she dined here the spout of the coffee-pot was chipped and it dribbled all down her frock."

"No," I reply, "I know what it is. The menu-card was propped up against the candlestick, and she said how awkward it was the way it kept slipping down."

And when we open it, sure enough, if it isn't a new china coffee-pot it is a pair of menu-holders–contrivances which we particularly dislike, even when they are not made from tooled gun-metal in the form of two hedge-sparrows rampant, regardant and proper.

Once she came to tea with me on a pouring wet day and found nowhere to park her umbrella. The next day a large tubular object arrived. It had vaguely military associations, but it had been so converted and distorted that it was difficult to tell whether it had originally been a large German shell or part of a small field-gun used in the Russo-Japanese War. A third possibility is that it was once a moth-proof travelling container for a Balkan field-marshal's top-boots. At any rate, it takes up a great deal of room in the hall.

And another time, I remember, she wanted to write a note at my desk and was scandalised because there was no proper pen and ink–although, as I explained, I had three fountain-pens, any of which I was willing to lend her. Four days elapsed and I began to breathe more freely. But on the fifth there came a small square parcel containing a silver-mounted ink-pot with my initials irrevocably engraved upon it (which accounted, no doubt, for the delay). Like the umbrella stand, it was a convert; but in this case there was no difficulty in guessing its original function. To make matters quite clear, Aunt Hildegarde had attached a note saying: "I feel sure you will like to have this little memento of poor dear Blackie, on whose back you took your first ride. This is the very hoof which she used to lift so prettily to shake hands. May it bring you lots of inspiration for your little poems!!"

I groaned, filled it with fountain-pen ink and set it fair and square in the middle of my writing-table, where it remains to this day, a constant reminder of the agonies and humiliations of childhood; for it was the self-same hoof with which Blackie once stood for a full five minutes on my toe, I having neither the strength nor the courage to remove her.

I do not wish to look a gift-hoof in the mouth or to seem in any way ungrateful, but the thing is getting on our nerves. Not only are we developing an inferiority complex about our own home but we are becoming self-conscious about entertaining Aunt Hildegarde. We dare not give her grapes, lest she should think that we are hinting at grape-scissors; nor lobster, for fear of invoking a set of silver-plated picks. But however careful we are we cannot think of everything. We did not, for instance, foresee that she would give us an electric clock for Christmas.

It is true that when she came to stay with us a month ago our drawing-room clock was not behaving quite as a good clock should. One day it was a few minutes slow and she missed the weather forecast on the wireless. And another day it ran down altogether and made her late for church. "Your Uncle Julian," she said gently, "used to wind all the clocks in the house every Sunday morning." But this mild fragment of reminiscence did not at all prepare us, though perhaps it should have, for the grey maple rhomboid which now adorns our mantelpiece.

At least, it looks like maple, but it is actually (so the accompanying leaflet informs us) made of steel, which can neither shrink nor warp, neither rust nor tarnish. It runs off the electric mains; it needs no winding; it is guaranteed to keep absolutely perfect time; and ever since it came into the house we have felt acutely ill at ease.

Our old happy-go-lucky days are over. No more can we think comfortingly as we start out rather late for a dinner-party: "Oh, well, perhaps our clock is fast," nor, when we arrive there to find hostess champing and fellow-guests ravenous, can we murmur, "We are dreadfully sorry, but our clock was slow," for our friends have already got to know about our new, our abominable possession. Gone too are sundry minor pleasures, such as listening for the radio Time Signal and leaping up to make a half-minute adjustment; and, better still, squandering pennies in a lordly way by dialling T.I.M.

And gone–worst of all–is the small friendly sound which used to accompany our thoughts, the balanced alternation of tick and tock, like the footsteps of a little dog walking very quickly beside you on the pavement. Time now proceeds for us in a series of hard metallic clicks, one every minute, each identical with the last: it is a large, slow, hopping bird of prey which follows relentlessly behind us. For fifty-nine seconds it stands still; we escape it; we are immortal; and then with a sudden deft leap it catches us up again. Better never to escape; better to have our little trotting dog.

But there is nothing to be done about it. If we did not use the clock, or if we banished it to the dining-room, Aunt Hildegarde would not only think us both mad and decadent–for what sane responsible citizen would not jump at the opportunity of being always certain of the time?–but she would also be terribly hurt. It was touching to see her when she came to tea yesterday, gazing up with reverent eyes at the angular, impersonal, implacable monster on the mantelpiece.

"Your Uncle Julian," she said, "would have found it such a boon."

The vulture took another hop forward.