Showing posts with label Persephone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Persephone. Show all posts

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Let's have a book on a Saturday; why not

Who can resist a Persephone book? Not me, obviously. In my jetlagged state I bought myself a handful of books (yes I know), including this one: High Wages, by Dorothy Whipple.

The inside cover is the important cover
If you've looked into Persephone Books at all, you'll quickly realize that Dorothy Whipple is a kind of crown jewel of their lineup. A female author popular in her own day but overlooked more recently, she and her work are great examples of the value of republishing the kind of titles Persephone does.

Although I have previously fallen victim to Proserpinian charms, I had not bought anything by Dorothy Whipple, so when I decided that, yes, I definitely needed something grey-covered right now, I thought it was as good a time as any to give her a spin.

High Wages is a great read: entertaining, interesting, and not entirely predictable. It's a story about an ambitious and hard-working young woman who gets some -- but not all -- of the things she wants. The romantic side of the story is in some ways a little bland and unconventional -- one romantic interest is the posh and popular Golden Boy of the town, the other is bookish and sensitive -- but the way it plays out is, I thought, not conventional at all. This is not a book that ends with an unambiguous romantic triumph by any means.

Jane, the main character, is a shop girl with a particular genius for women's clothes, so the story follows her from working in a well-established shop for an insecure and stubbornly old-fashioned businessman to opening her own shop, filled with modern ready-made clothing. There's a lot that's interesting here, in relation to the history of women's clothing as well as women's work (more on this note below). By the end of the novel, though, Jane is questioning the way her life has been devoted to women's clothes: is this all so important, really? Granted, she has a lot else on her mind by then to make her feel a little weary, and she doesn't suddenly become some sort of anti-fashion radical or anything (thank goodness), but I thought this little note of ambivalence was great. It's just an example of how Whipple is able to portray a thoughtful character, not to mention the way people change their thinking over time in subtle and sometimes imperceptible ways.

This is an unmistakably feminist novel which succeeds nevertheless in not beating the reader over the head with feminism (a point which is nicely made in the introduction). Whipple is maybe a touch more subtle than Winifred Holtby but both authors successfully show rather than tell what's wrong. Jane is not only mistreated by her employer, but she encounters some really gross salesmen when she sets up on her own. Just as in another novel you might be really angry along with the main character when someone insults her, here you can just feel the ickyness of some of the situations Jane gets into.

My only minor complaint was that the writing seemed a little "simple" and straightforward at times, like being told a bedtime story. But then I read it when I was jetlagged so maybe it was just my ability to process language that was simplified...

Overall, it was a very enjoyable book and absolutely cram-packed with period detail, some more intentional than others. If you want a good representation of some of the new ideas about love and sex between the wars, here you go. This is another one for my theoretical list of books that could be assigned to a class.

Oh crap, there's only one image in this post. Uh, uh, uh.... Amy, help me!


Thursday, May 10, 2012

Holtby Week, the thrilling conclusion (it's a two-day week)

This is very probably the best feminist novel I've ever read. I wanted to assign it to a group of students, although that's impractical (I prefer the term "ambitious") on several levels.

Mine's the Persephone edition, but you know what that looks like

How can I describe what I loved about this book? It manages to convey what it would actually mean for a girl's whole life to be aimed at marriage, and it does so in such a way as to present several different possible paths. Muriel is a shy, dull girl, socially incompetent, who spends most of her life "at home" on the straight-and-narrow which is supposed to culminate in marriage. It's her mother who drives this, and yet Holtby manages to convey the mother's motivations and mindset in such a way that even as you see how awful and destructive her ideas and actions are, you can understand why she does them. You get a wonderful sense of how Muriel passes her time and how her life progresses; it would be ideal for students. Just like South Riding, this book has wonderful characters and beautiful writing, and it's therefore engrossing even though the heroine is so much less lively than Sarah Burton or the other South Riding main characters.

In the Persephone preface, Marion Shaw writes:
Yet Muriel is not quite right in saying that nobody wrote about someone to whom 'nothing ever happens'. That kind of novel, usually featuring spinsters, had been popular from Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853) through George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893) to contemporary examples such as FM Mayor's The Rector's Daughter (1924). And waiting in the wings, of course, is that most formidable of post-war spinsters, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, who will first appear in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. The Crowded Street thus joins these and other similar novels in making the life of the woman who does not marry of interest; sad, amusing, daunting or mystical, these spinsters are made significant to the reading public.
Assuming that we can take the character's comment as reflecting something on the book she's in -- and granted that I haven't read any of these other books (except the Christie) -- I think this somewhat misses the point. Muriel isn't just a spinster; she's someone who doesn't manage to develop social skills in her marriage-oriented environment. It's not just that she doesn't get married. She doesn't get asked to dance; she doesn't have a romance; she's even hesitant about referring to her best friend from school as her "friend" because, well, Clare never said they were friends in so many words. When she finally escapes to London, Muriel discovers that she has "tastes and inclinations and a personality" -- as long as she was stuck in her home circle, trying to figure out and follow the rules, she was stuck being a kind of non-person in every way, not just a non-wife.

Holtby's point seems to be that a girl like Muriel ought to be given a real education, but more importantly she ought to have opportunities to live away from her mother, to devote her labors to support and benefit herself, and to meet and mix with people outside of the marriage market. This seems very significant to me, given when the book was written; although the marriages in the book have their dark sides (sometimes very dark), Holtby isn't really saying that marriage in itself is a bad thing for women -- which is an important distinction to make, I think, when talking about interwar feminism versus the "second" wave. It's more about giving women the chance to be their own (rounded, educated, individual) person before entering a marriage, however that needs to happen.

Also interesting is that the character who ends up unmarried because her fiance dies isn't a victim of the First World War despite the time period of the novel: the man is hit by a car. I don't know if that's actually significant, but still.

I should note that the book ends on an up-note. I think that's one of the strengths of this book and South Riding: Holtby makes you feel how bad things are but not in that impossibly bleak way that turns the book into blatant polemic. At the same time, she doesn't trivialize the badness by giving an easy solution or making everything all right at the end.

In sum, I strongly recommend this book. I certainly didn't know it when I started out, but I ended up leaving the best of my Persephone purchases for last.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Book review, on location

Here it is, the second of my Persephone buys; in fact, this is the one book I had gone to the store to buy, before I realized I'd be saving money by buying three (saving money!). Read the website description and you might get a sense for why I was eager to read this one; as I've mentioned before I have a special fondness for books about happy people. Greenery Street is, to sum it up in a nutshell, the story of a lovesick young couple, Ian and Felicity Foster, and the early days of their married life. Unlike, I suppose, most Persephone books this one was written by a man -- a point I shall return to shortly.

Greenery Street is based directly on the author's own experience of married life -- to such an extent that apparently Mrs Mackail was fairly embarrassed by it. (I should note that I am taking all my information on this side of the book from the Persephone preface by Rebecca Cohen.) Thus, it is not hard at all to identify the real-life 23 Greenery Street as 23 Walpole Street in Chelsea. Would you like to see pictures? Of course you would.

COTLB exclusive!
There she is, 23 Walpole/Greenery Street. You know who else lived in this house besides the newlywed Mackails? P.G. Wodehouse. Also the lady who wrote Mrs Miniver, but I don't care about her. Wodehouse. One of the attractions of the book is a chance to marvel at how standards have changed since the 1920s -- I won't reiterate the whole preface (go buy the book yerself!), but it is worth noting that the house is now split into flats. And they're almost certainly way too expensive for penniless newlyweds.

But some things haven't changed.
A picture began to form itself in Felicity's mind of two rows of symmetrical doorsteps, of first floor French windows which opened on to diminutive balconies, of a sunny little street with scarlet omnibuses roaring past one end and a vista of trees seen facing the other.
Chelsea Hospital toward one end
I didn't realize I actually got a bus in this photo until I got home - go me!
Mackail describes the young wives standing out on the balconies looking for their husbands to come home, which I could picture perfectly as I scurried around taking photos, hoping I didn't look suspicious.

As a single person (a Single-American?), I thought the novel was cute but I could sense how it might have deeper resonance for married people. It might make a nice anniversary gift for a close friend, but I don't want to commit to that. I don't know anything about picking wedding/anniversary gifts, except for the words of wisdom from my father which I will treasure forever: "Think carefully before you give people knives because you don't want to be complicit in any stabbings."

I suppose what makes it special is that it's a fairly emotional novel about how great marriage is, by a man. If Greenery Street had been written by a woman, it would be entertaining but not much more than that. I don't feel like I'm giving it much of a pass on this count though. Where I am giving it a pass is in that it's so directly autobiographical. The preface makes a pretty irresistible case for the novel being an almost 1:1 account of its author's feelings, if not experiences. Usually I'm a little disappointed to discover that an author has based the events and/or characters of a novel on their own life. I won't lie; when I read that Barbara Pym had worked among anthropologists it took some of the shine off her choice of anthropologist characters in Excellent Women. I freely admit that this is irrational, and I do my best to discount it when weighing up my final analysis of a book, but it's my first reaction. Except with Mackail. Somehow reading about how deeply important his marriage was for him made me all the more interested in "Ian Foster".

Overall: well worth it, and not just because it was wanting this book that led me to find the Persephone store in the first place.