Every Good Deed - Dorothy Whipple

It wasn't until I listed Every Good Deed among my purchases at the Bookbarn that I realised how scarce it was - as a couple of commenters pointed out.  That made me feel duty-bound to read it asap, despite having only read some of the Persephone Whipples available (Someone at a Distance, They Knew Mr Knight, Greenbanks, High Wages, and The Closed Door - more than I'd thought, now I come to list them).  Well, judging by Persephone's love for Dorothy Whipple, I predict that Every Good Deed (1946) will one day join that number - but perhaps they needn't rush.  It was enjoyable and interesting, but it wasn't Whipple on top form...

They general idea is that a couple of oldish spinster sisters adopt a child from a local sort of orphanage, and all does not go well.  Susan and Emily Topham are shy, caring, worried about what society thinks of them, and above all not ready for a trickster.  Their cook (Cook, if you will) is a little more worldly-wise, but just barely.  Enter Gwen.

She steals, she talks back, she lies, she is (when a little older) no better than she ought to be.  She abuses their care and runs amok - and runs away.  She's not even an orphan; her wily mother uses the situation to exact cash from the Topham sisters.

There were hundreds of children who, in the same circumstances, would have responded to their care, would have loved them and been grateful; but by mischance they had hit upon Gwen.

That's Whipple's slightly half-hearted attempt to make sure we know Every Good Deed isn't supposed to be a universal cautionary tale.  The classism of the book did make me a little uneasy, and I'm not sure that sentence saved things...

There are a few more ins and outs in the narrative than this, but not many.  Although I enjoyed reading it, and Whipple is an expert at writing a very readable book, it did feel a lot like a short story which had got a bit long.  There is only one arc of the narrative - subplots not welcome - and the moments of crisis feel like the climaxes of a short story, not multifaceted moments in a novella.  Every Good Deed is only just over a hundred pages long, but I reckon it would have made more sense at, say, forty pages, in one of Whipple's short story collections.  An enjoyable enough read, but if you're struggling to find a copy anywhere... well, don't feel too distraught about it.

"Experience doth take dreadfully high wages..."

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On the off chance that you'll have me back, after Mel and Dark Puss have proved me completely dispensable over the past month, I'm going to turn my hand to another book review! And this time it's a Persephone book, which always curries favour. I am getting a little ahead of myself, what with Persephone Reading Week coming up around the corner, but I thought it would cheating to review this then, since I actually finished it in the middle of March.

Dorothy Whipple's High Wages (1930) is the latest Whipple novel to be published by Persephone and the third that I've read - the other two being the very wonderful Someone at a Distance and the pretty wonderful They Knew Mr. Knight. [edit: I forgot that I've also read Greenbanks, but don't remember much about it...] High Wages focuses on Jane Carter, who takes a job working for Mr. Chadwick who runs a draper's shop in Tidsley. She's doing it on account of a stepmother, but we don't think about her much after the first chapter, and she only really acts as a catalyst for what follows. Jane enters the politics of a small town and a small shop, dealing with the meanness of her employers, the lovesickness of her colleague Maggie, and the quiet friendship of poor-wife-made-good Mrs. Briggs.
Persephone's write-up of the novel is very interesting, far more than just description of the book, and I recommend you give it a read by clicking here. They include this thought:

She is not, of course, a 'great' writer. You could not take one of her sentences, as you can with, say, Mollie Panter-Downes, and hold it up to the light. But she is serviceable, perceptive and humane.

I agree on all counts - while Whipple's prose is a cut above a lot of her contemporaries (and almost everything I flick through in the bookshop now) she isn't a notable stylist. She even veers towards the saccharine or predictable on occasion in this novel (though not in the other two I've read) - I definitely blame the romance plot, which High Wages could have done without, and would have been a better novel for it. I wouldn't be surprised if Whipple's publisher leant on her to include it... but it just got a little silly towards the end. (Query: is it possible to write the dialogue of people desperately and recklessly in love without sounding like a mediocre soap opera? Then again, I'm quite fond of mediocre soap operas...)


That aside, there is plenty to love. How could you not like a book with the following sentiment? :

Oh, the comfort of that first cup of tea! The warmth and life it put into you! They held their hands round the cups to warm them and their eyes looked less heavily on the bleak kitchen.

'What do we do now?' asked Jane.

'We have another cup of tea, said Maggie'

The day-to-day runnings of the shop make excellent material for a novel, and that's what I enjoyed most in High Wages - the hierarchies in the shop and those of the customers, and how Jane negotiates them. Such is the minutiae that Whipple does so well, and so perceptively.

An interesting sideplot is the maid Lily and her abusive husband. That sounds very gritty, but Whipple has a way of taking gritty plots and making them pretty cosy... And I do have a weakness for dialect-driven, unselfconscious servants in interwar novels - the best being Nellie in another Persephone, Cheerful Weather For The Wedding. For a taste of Nellie, click here - otherwise, back to Lily:

Lily arrived. She whimpered as she lit the fire, and as Jane reappeared at intervals in the kitchen, she told her Bob wasn't like a husband at all.

'Aren't you going to love me a bit I says to 'im this morning, and 'e says with such a nasty look, "To 'ell with you and your love." Just like that.'

And when she tried to kiss him good-bye, he'd thrown a plate at her.

'Whatever do you want to kiss him for?' asked Jane, squeezing out the wash-leather for the shop-door glass. 'Throw a plate back at him, my goodness.'

She thought she herself would make short work of such a husband.

'No...' Lily shook her head as she dipped the bald brush into the blacklead. 'I couldn't do that. Bad as 'e is, I love 'im. Besides, it's me as 'as to pay for the plate.'

Well, quite.

Throughout High Wages there is fairly strong divide between rich-bad-people and the 'onest-'umble-poor. Mrs. Briggs bridges the divide - in that she's rich, but always harks back to the simpler times before her husband (whose name I forgot, but which I presume is Alfred or Albert; this sort of man is always called one of the two) got rich. I did find that all a little tedious... but that's a small quibble. And is really mentioned as way of bringing up rich-bad-Sylvia, and this amusing description of her:

Sylvia, poor child, hadn't a grain of humour in her composition. Not what he called humour. She didn't like Punch. That was his test. She laughed at hats sometimes, but he couldn't remember that she ever laughed at anything else.

All in all, High Wages is an enjoyable novel, though not one I think Persephone would have reprinted had it been Whipple's only novel. I recommend you start with Someone at a Distance, if you've never read a Whipple novel before - but High Wages doesn't do any damage to the credentials of Persephone's most popular discovery.

Someone at a Distance

Continuing the week of Persephone Birthday celebrations here at S-i-a-B (and do keep telling us in the previous post about your favourite Persephones and how you found out about them, and put your request in for a chance to win a Persephone book of your choice) - I don't think I've ever talked about one of my favourite Persephone books. Appropriately enough it was one of the first three to be published, so it's now ten years since it came back into print.


Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple was Whipple's last novel, published in 1953 and received no reviews at all. For a once bestselling novelist, this was quite a blow - and, what's worse, it was a wholly undeserved silence. I've only read four of Whipple's books - SaaD, They Knew Mr. Knight, Greenbanks, The Closed Door and other stories, all except Greenbanks published by Persephone - but Someone at a Distance is the best of those. A lot of people agree that it's her best novel, and it should have been treated with fanfares and red carpets.

The plot appears, on the surface, to be conventional. A contentedly married couple, Ellen and Avery, are disrupted when a French companion arrives and runs off with Avery. The narrative moves back and forth across the channel, looking at the dignified devestation of Ellen and the homeland and family of Louise, the French interloper. What starts as a not unusual trio is given enormous depth and believable emotion when we investigate why Louise acts as she does; witness Avery's confusion and attempts to organise his life and mistakes; Ellen's need to look after her two children as well as retain her dignity and integrity. And all the time the reader is asking him/herself - who is the 'someone at a distance'? Whipple sometimes creates some great titles that make you think all the way through the novel, and while I have set views on which character the 'someone' is, others disagree.

I'm a big believer in judging books on their writing, rather than plot - and Whipple is a prose writer par excellence. Not showy or grandiose, but both moving and compulsive - Someone at a Distance is a fairly long book, but I wouldn't be surprised if you read it in one or two sittings. Dorothy Whipple may well be the great undiscovered English novelist - certainly Someone at a Distance is an excellently constructed, sophisticated and emotionally taut novel which should never have been allowed to go out of print.

As well as being one of the first three Persephone Books titles published, Someone at a Distance was one of the first Persephone Classics, and treated to a wider publication and beautiful cover. I love the uniformity of ther Persephone library, but I also think this Persephone Classics cover is the most beautiful cover I've ever seen. And so I had to own both...

I'm sure lots of people here have read Someone at a Distance - thoughts? Who do you think the 'someone' is? If you've not read it, I really encourage you to give Dorothy Whipple a try.

Dorothy Whipple, how I do love thee

Though I now space them out, a new Persephone Books read is always a wonderful treat, and something to be treasured. When I first found out about this publishing company, through their publishing of Richmal Crompton's Family Roundabout, I went on a bit of a rampage, and read lots. Though they cover quite a range of decades, genres, authors, forms - and, yes, some of the writers are even male! - there is something unmistakably Persephone about everything they issue, and thus something unmistakably great. The Closed Door and Other Stories, one of the latest batch of three, was no different. Nicola Beauman, who runs Persephone Books, very kindly sent me this to review when I made ingratiating noises in her direction - and, of course, I loved it.

Most aficiandos of Persephone agree that Dorothy Whipple is one of their major finds. Crompton and EM Delafield were already firm favourites with me, and I was delighted to see them come back into the light of day, but it is Whipple who has been the nicest new face. Though decidedly a domestic-fiction-writer, she demonstrates that this need not mean anything derogatory about writing style. Nicola Beauman has had to fiercely defend Whipple against some critiques over the past few years, mostly from people who, bewilderingly, have been against niche publishing in any shape or form - but just pick up Someone at a Distance or They Knew Mr. Knight and it is indisputable that Whipple needed bringing back into print.

The Closed Door and Other Stories is different from any other Whipple I've read, not least because it's short stories rather than full-length prose. The first story, 'The Closed Door', is easily the longest - 75 or so pages - and the other eight are snapshots of characters' lives. I read them all together at a fast pace, which probably isn't the ideal way to approach short stories, and I must confess I found a lot of them to be quite similar - a daughter (always a daughter) is repressed by her selfish parents who expect her to act like a servant, and dismiss any academic or romantic ambitions the daughter has. I like that Whipple doesn't aggrandise either of these ambitions over the other, but sees both as valid modes of self-expression and fulfilment. Anyway, as you read more of the stories in the collection this scenario becomes very familiar - but each story presents a different ending/solution/irresolution. 'After Tea' is an especially nice contrast. When presented together, the particular culminations grow even more significant, playing off against each other, and become less 'closing', as it were - more problematic, occasionally more triumphant.

Against the stories which fall into this mould, a couple stand out as really beautiful evocations of character and predicament - 'The Rose' and 'Wednesday' particularly. The latter is quite a brave portrait - a divorcee adulteress (though one coerced into it by her husband, we are led to understand) on one of her monthly permitted visits to her children. Agonising and realistic and a painful gem.

In case you hadn't ascertained this yet - The Closed Door is a book definitely worth buying! Just spread the stories out a bit.