COVER REVEAL: 11 new Furrowed Middlebrow titles coming January 2021

Only a bit over two months now until the release (see announcement here if you missed it) of the next batch of Furrowed Middlebrow books published by Dean Street Press! These include 11 titles in all from two of my favorite authors, Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons, and I can't wait any longer to reveal our covers to you, which are rather wonderful if I do say so myself.

One reason these covers are standouts is because eight of the eleven cover images are by prominent illustrator Leslie Wood, whose enticing images graced the covers and pages of numerous books for both adults and children. In particular, fans of the Little Red Engine books by Diana Ross will notice that three of the Gibbons covers look familiar. Wood was the artist behind two of the original covers of these books, Gibbons' The Swiss Summer and Sharp's The Foolish Gentlewoman, which we have of course re-used here, so it's lovely to be able to use his beautiful images for other of our titles as well.

Of the other three covers, we've been waiting for years to find the right book on which to use Eric Ravilious' gorgeous boarding house image, so I jumped at the chance to use it for Sharp's Harlequin House. For The Stone of Chastity, we adapted a delightful early cover image, and for Gibbons' A Pink Front Door, Rupert at Dean Street came across a rather breathtaking Hampstead poster.

Before leaving you to peruse at leisure, I must also mention that the brilliant Elizabeth Crawford has provided intros for all eleven titles, with background information and tidbits that will prove fascinating even for long-time Sharp or Gibbons fans. I don't know how she does it, but I'm very glad she does!

And now, the covers. You'll have some extra time to enjoy them on the main blog page, as I'm planning to take a short blog break between now and the books' release in order to work on other projects... 

I hope you love these as much as I do!

Never a dull moment (get it?): MARGERY SHARP, The Stone of Chastity (1940) and Four Gardens (1935)

Back in November of 2013 (it doesn't seem possible that it's been so long), well before I ever dreamed I'd be doing anything more than fantasizing about publishing, I did a post here listing 20 books I felt should be in print but weren't. The post is hopelessly outdated now, and I can very proudly and happily say that it's partly outdated because of me. As of January, when our next batch of Furrowed Middlebrow books are released by Dean Street Press, I will have been responsible for no fewer than eight of those 20 titles being reissued (and it's just possible that I'm not finished yet). Of the remaining 12, at least five more have now been reprinted by other publishers.

And one of my favorites of all of these is undoubtedly Margery Sharp's delightful 1940 novel The Stone of Chastity. Sharp wrote lots of wonderful books, and I've written about a number of them here. I'm pleased as punch, as I've already noted here, that we're publishing six of her criminally neglected early novels in January, but Stone holds a special place in my heart as perhaps the daftest and most purely joyful and silly of all of Sharp's work, and it's truly bizarre that it hasn't been reprinted long before now. In 2018 in the New York Times, scholar and author Perri Klass named Stone, along with better-known Sharp classics Cluny Brown, The Eye of Love, Britannia Mews, and The Nutmeg Tree, as the five titles in her Sharp "starter kit", calling it a "bucolic comic masterpiece." I can't disagree!

"It's in my mind to put an end to this heathen wickedness that's stalking abroad through Gillenham. It's in my mind to terrify that evil man from his morrow's sinful doings."

 

"We'll be going to Old Manor, then?"

 

"Not yet," said Mrs. Pye grimly. "We go first to the village. To rouse the women ... "

The novel opens with Professor Isaac Pounce, freshly arrived in the idyllic country village of Gillenham, along with his sister-in-law, his young nephew Nicholas, and Carmen, his voluptuous assistant, who seems quite well-paid for doing no one is quite sure exactly what. The Professor is in hot pursuit of a legendary Stone of Chastity, reference to which he has stumbled across in an old diary. The stone was one of those placed as stepping stones in the local stream, and the legend went that no unvirtuous woman could cross the stream without losing her balance at this particular stone and getting a dowsing.

Professor Pounce is cold-bloodedly scientific in his approach, but his researches, including a survey distributed to all villagers and a plan to put all the village women to the test and record the results for posterity, arouses not unforeseeably hostility among the more pious-minded locals, particularly the Vicar's wife, who enlists the Boy Scouts to help suppress his efforts, and stern Mrs. Pye, a moralizer who might have given Savonarola a run for his money.

Ultimately, it's aimless young Nicholas, popular at Cambridge but without much ambition since, who must attempt to assuage the villagers' outrage. In the process, his own amorous impulses get directed first in the direction of Carmen, who when not helping his uncle works as a nude model for artists, then toward the Vicar's perky daughter, and finally toward a Bloomsbury composer staying in the village, who enthusiastically volunteers for the Professor's study. We also meet numerous other villagers, both in favor of the professor and against him, though my favorite by far is the unflappable Mrs. Jim, who runs the local pub and commiserates with Nicholas after he sours on the promiscuous Carmen:

"As a matter of fact, I suppose I was a bit of an ass about her…"

 

Mrs. Jim looked at him kindly.

 

"Like stealing jam, ain't it? You feel a bit sickish afterwards."

 

"That's it exactly. Especially … "

 

"Especially," finished Mrs. Jim, "when there's so many others have had their fingers in the same pot." Nicholas felt slightly sick in truth.

 

"You don't know how you could have done it," he said, "afterwards, when you wish you hadn't."

 

"I shouldn't let it worry you," said Mrs. Jim. "I don't suppose it was more than kissing behind doors, and where there's a door handy and a piece like her behind, no young man's to be blamed. Jam's jam."

Of course, the entire concept of women's chastity and society's concern for it is a profoundly misogynistic one, but have no fear, as Sharp has tongue firmly in cheek throughout, and by the end of the novel manages to delightfully undercut the whole concept. One would expect no less.

Although it's complete coincidence that I got round to writing about the two novels in this post at the same time, it's an interesting juxtaposition, for while The Stone of Chastity is probably Sharp's most pure farce, with nary a thing to take seriously from beginning to end, Four Gardens is probably the most restrained and emotional work of Sharp's early career. So get ready to switch gears…

The old names still echoed in her ears, drawing her thoughts back and back, past Lily and Leonard, past Henry, to even shadowier figures yet. Cousin Maggie Platt, who had money in Consols; Ellen Taylor, so fortunately an orphan; and Vincent in the terraced garden, and her own widowed mother, with that striking resemblance (though from the back view only) to Alexandra Princess of Wales…

As Four Gardens opens, we meet happy middle-aged Caroline Smith (née Chase), receiving birthday presents from her children, Lily and Leonard, and her devoted husband Henry. Her reflections on their gifts lead her to reflections about her earlier life, and soon we are back in the village of Morton as young Caroline and her widowed mother make their way towards an evening church service. However, not unusually, we are given to understand, Caroline hesitates and her mother asks her if perhaps she has a headache and should take a walk around the common rather than attend services. Caroline acquiesces, but instead of the common, she makes off to an abandoned house and garden which has caught her imagination. She has a passion and instinct for gardening and a love of the earth.

This lush but neglected and overgrown garden is the first of the four gardens which represent the stages of Caroline's life. This one, along with the young man she meets there, who awakens her romantic feelings but is ultimately of too high a class for her (this is Victorian England, after all!), represents perhaps her naïve, youthful dreams of simple happy endings. Instead, Caroline's life moves ahead, and she marries Henry Smith, who is devoted to her and whom she loves but is not in love with, an ambitious shoe factory assistant. They settle into a quiet little house, have two children, and make their way contentedly, despite the lack of anything more than a tiny garden, which Caroline at any rate has little time to think of.

Of course, ambitious Henry makes good, particularly with the arrival of World War I and the resulting increased demand for boots. Their fortunes rise, and soon Caroline has a much larger home with a lavish garden—this one too large to manage without a gardener, who takes charge of it all and ignores Caroline's suggestions and advice, thereby depriving even such lushness of any deep pleasure for her. She's now in the realm of keeping up appearances and moving in "Society", however uncomfortably. One of the funniest passages in this distinctly un-riotous Sharp novel is that in which Caroline goes to view the house Henry has selected for them, complete with its imposingly regal departing owner: 

She announced herself, rather self-consciously, as Mrs. Henry Smith, and he replied that Mrs. Cornwallis was expecting her. To Caroline, following him through a wide shabby hall, the whole episode was beginning to feel like a nightmare. She was intensely conscious of herself-of her dress, her voice, the way she placed her feet. She felt like a cook-general going to be interviewed.

 

"Mrs. Henry Smith," said the butler contemptuously.

It's hard to imagine that the butler was really contemptuous (or at least that he revealed it in his manner of speaking) but of course it's dead on that Caroline, feeling awkward and out of place, would have perceived that he was.

I can't say anything much about Caroline's fourth garden because I don't want to give away the ups and downs of her story once the flashbacks are through. But suffice it to say it may be the most satisfying of all.

Four Gardens is by far the most sentimental of the Margery Sharp novels I've read, and I have a troubled relationship with sentimentality. But Caroline is such a charmer, tough and sensible beneath her rather passive and insecure exterior, that it was impossible to resist, and I have to confess to having tears in my eyes at more than scene (don't tell anyone). She is anything but a feminist, assuming along with her mother that her husband must always be right, but we do see a progression in her as the story progresses, and her attitude toward Leon and Lal when they are grown and romance in the air shows a plucky openmindedness. It's in these young characters, with their modern attitudes and bohemian sensibilities coming into gentle conflict with Caroline, that we get a taste, in later sections of the book, of more typical Margery Sharp storytelling and a bit of her usual comic relief. 

There's also a lovely, balanced summing-up of Morton's reactions to the outbreak of war:

On August the fifth a booking-clerk at Morton Station, leaving his post to distribute cigarettes among a trainload of Territorials, was arrested as a spy and marched off to the police station. A troop of Boy Scouts, guarding the railway bridge, arrested an ex-colonel and one of the linesmen. An elderly stockbroker, flying a kite for his son on Morton Common, was arrested on the charge of signaling to the enemy. The German Charcuterie, owned by a Welshman named Evans, had its windows broken and its stock scattered in the street.

 

Also on August the fifth the local M.P. and his wife moved out of their house on the Common and handed it over for the use of the Red Cross. Dr. French threw up a now flourishing practice to join the R.A.M.C. Mr. Brodie, the estate-agent, who was forty-five if a day, enlisted in the London Scottish. The youngest Macbeth boy enlisted as a private. Every shop in the High Street was out of khaki wool. A first collection for Belgian refugees brought in seven thousand five hundred and eighty pounds. In this manner—in these manners—Morton confronted the fact of war.

As I mentioned in my announcement post, two of my fellow bloggers have also written enthusiastically, several years ago (I'm late to the party as usual), about Four Gardens—Barb at Leaves and Pages here, and Jane at Fleur in Her World (now at Beyond Eden Rock) here.

So there, two quite different sides of Margery Sharp, both from the first third or so of her career, but both quite delightful and informed by Sharp's incomparable instincts as a storyteller!

Dodging the doldrums: MARGERY SHARP, Fanfare for Tin Trumpets (1932) & Harlequin House (1939)

Oh I do let myself be distracted from my good intentions. Months ago I was starting to renew my humble adoration for Margery Sharp, and posted reviews of her lovely debut, Rhododendron Pie (1930), here, and her postwar delight, The Foolish Gentlewoman (1948), here. Then, as far too often happens in my life, I got distracted. But surely there are darned few authors who are more perfect for escaping from these strange times than dear Margery, and I've been fortunate to be able to make enthusiastic escapes recently into two more of her glittering, witty little worlds.

Fanfare for Tin Trumpets (1932) was the follow-up to Rhododendron Pie, which Sharp was rumored to have written in one month while living in a Paddington flat with two other girls. Presumably, she spent a bit longer on Fanfare, but its plot perhaps reflects a bit of her own experience of starting out, as it deals with a young store clerk, Alistair French, who upon the death of his somewhat distant, unaffectionate father takes his small inheritance and escapes from the humdrum to a flat in London with his friend Henry, in order to Write (Sharp doesn't capitalize the word, but one feels that Alistair would have, at least at this stage).

The two friends take cheap lodgings in Paddington (just imagine!) in a boarding-house, whose other inhabitants include the spunky, starstruck Winnie Parker, often accompanied by her army of admirers, and Winnie's mother, who shares Winnie's passion for films if not her admiration for Garbo ("'Olds 'erself like a sack of potatoes," she elaborated. "You'd think she'd be able to buy a pair of stays out of all them 'undreds a week."), and whose vocal cords can make themselves heard anywhere in the house.

I've only just come across this very early author
photo of Sharp, from the Illustrated London News
when they reviewed Rhododendron Pie

Unsurprisingly, Alistair has considerably difficulty getting any actual writing down, what with the many distractions of London. Among other things, Alistair makes the acquaintance of Miss Tibbald, who invites him to join the unfortunately-named Embryo Club, which exists for the purpose of encouraging young writers, but which, on close examination, seems far more discouraging. And then there's the biggest distraction of all—a lovely young actress named Cressida who is determined to marry only in such a way as to further her career.

One thing that jumped out at me, having recently read Francesca Wade's delightful Square Haunting (I'm sure some of you have read it as well?), was a nicely evocative description of Bloomsbury in the very early 1930s:

Henry meanwhile was becoming more and more wrapped up in the life of the Training College, where he had made many interesting friends. They were all rather prominent people, genuine Bloomsburyites as opposed to the brown-baggers who went home every day on the five-twenty-three. Most of them seemed to live round Torrington Square, in which congenial atmosphere they had built up a queer, acutely self-conscious student life of their own, neatly grafted on to a sound middle-class upbringing and centering round one or two cheap Italian restaurants.

 

…

 

[Alistair] envied them because, however they might appear to the detached observer, they did really and truly feel that they were leading a genuine vie de boheme, and therefore enjoyed themselves as much as any one out of Murger. To defend the League of Nations over sixpennyworth of spaghetti left both body and soul in a state of grand complacency, while the reading of Villon in a gallery queue exalted the spirits like new wine. They also had the sort of love affairs in which each party continued to pay for his or her own meals, and often became engaged in their third term. In short, they were for the most part extremely happy, and Alistair had just received his first disillusionment.

Fanfare for Tin Trumpets is surely as rollicking a good time as anything Margery Sharp wrote. One knows everything will work itself out in the end, but one doesn't always know exactly how Sharp will pull it off. It's delightful good fun all round.

And so, in my own humble opinion, is the slightly later Harlequin House (1939). Some readers have claimed that this novel, written just as political tensions were making clear that war was irrevocably on its way, reflects that anxiety (though there's little or no explicit indication) in a slightly darker-than-usual sensibility. I can't say I noticed any such thing, though undoubtedly Sharp was evolving as an author and some of the works which would soon follow Harlequin House, such as Cluny Brown, Brittania Mews, and The Foolish Gentlewoman, would indeed wrestle a bit more with the fact that real life doesn't always provide cheerful happy endings. Some of that evolution might be reflected here, as opposed to the whole-hearted frivolity of Rhododendron Pie and Fanfare, but to me Harlequin House seems as fundamentally joyful and daft as most of Sharp's other early work.

Here, we first meet Arthur Alfred Partridge, a middle-aged widower with a drab job in a twopenny library at Dortmouth Bay, a seaside resort, and a frustrated sense of romance and adventure. On this day, Mr Partridge has spontaneously decided to play hookie, leaving the library closed and going for an idyllic stroll instead. As a result of this seemingly benign but ultimately fateful rebellion against dullness, Mr Partridge meets first the charming Milly Pickering, and then her irresistible niece Lisbeth Campion, who is, when we first see her, "engaged, as usual, in resisting advances".

Lisbeth is, of course, our heroine, in classic Sharp style—kind and generous to a fault, but not one to always take the moral high ground—and it emerges that Lisbeth has greater worries than her numerous suitors. First and foremost she is gravely worried about her wastrel brother Ronny, who has recently been released from prison after six months, charged with peddling cocaine (he thought it was baking powder, really he did!), and has promptly disappeared. Lisbeth determines to find him and help him, but this is complicated by the fact that her rather stern, upright Army fiancé, Captain Hugh Brocard, expected back from India soon, has forbidden her further contact with the disgraced Ronny.

A gloriously implausible but entirely entertaining sequence of events gets Mr Partridge swept up in Lisbeth's unusual and sometimes misguided efforts to find Ronny and get him safely squared away before her fiancé's return. In the process, the three set up makeshift housekeeping in London and work at odd jobs (some of them very odd indeed) to make ends meet. Along the way, they meet an array of odd and wonderful characters, including Lester Hamilton, a charming young man in the film industry, who finds himself helping the trio (and, in particular, Lisbeth) in their increasingly odd adventures. Of course, when Captain Brocard finally does arrive, things reach a climax…

It's all such good fun that one never minds the implausibility, and Lisbeth is a charmer like so many of Sharp's heroines. The passage mentioned above, in which she's resisting advances as per her norm, continues delightfully, and could surely just as easily be describing Julia from The Nutmeg Tree or Cluny Brown in the novel that bears her name:

She was resisting them without harshness. That was the trouble. The earnest young man at her side meant so little to her that she could not even remember his name; she knew only that for the past two days, ever since he arrived, he had been following at her heel with a gun-dog's perseverance and a gun-dog's good manners; and indeed his whole personality was so amiably canine that Lisbeth could not help feeling it was not his fault: someone had trained him to do it. (In a sense she was right, the trainer being simply the Life Force, or—more classically—Venus Urania, or—more familiarly—Mother Nature. Lisbeth took up a great deal of the Life Force's attention.)

Who could care that Sharp's heroines have much in common when they're as entertaining as that? And both of these novels are packed with Margery Sharp's quintessential joie de vivre, and have proven to be powerful antidotes to the doldrums of a drab and depressing pandemic summer!

A postwar ménage: MARGERY SHARP, The Foolish Gentlewoman (1948)

At, fifty-five Isabel Bracken was still a nice-looking woman. She dated, of course, all her female friends said so—poor Isabel certainly dated; she was rather plump, and wore her faded hair in a kind of neat bird's-nest, but her complexion was pretty and the blue of her eyes scarcely faded at all. The most striking thing about her was her expression, for she nearly always looked pleased; and though this, in 1946, was really but a final proof of her thorough foolishness, some people found her appearance refreshing.

World War II has ended and widowed Isabel Brocken, kind-hearted and generous if (according to her brother-in-law) not the sharpest tool in the shed, is back in her old family home on the outskirts of London after her self-imposed evacuation to Bath. Keeping her company are her nephew Humphrey Garrett from New Zealand, just demobilized from the military, and Jacqueline Brown, just out of the ATS herself, whom Isabel met when she gave her a lift from Bath and promptly invited to live with her ('"One of these days you'll pick up a thug," prophesied Mr. Brocken.") Humphrey and Jacky are well started on a pleasant romance when Simon Brocken himself is added to the mix, finding it convenient to stay with Isabel while his own house is under repair from bomb damage, despite his decidely mixed feelings about her. Also in the house are the Pooles, mother and daughter, selected by Simon to serve as live-in caretakers during the years when the house was vacant—standoffish but living in perfect if unconventional contentment, though it emerges that they are haunted by a dark past.

Most readers will find it difficult not to like Isabel, despite her apparent foolishness. I love Sharp's description of the plentiful pleasures Isabel encountered in day-to-day life:

Sentimental, affectionate, uncritical, Mrs. Bracken so easily attached herself to persons, places, and even objects that after no more than two days in an hotel she had a favourite waiter, a favourite ornament, a favourite view. She had adored her husband, and was very fond of her French pepper-mill. An old watering-can was dear to her because she remembered seeing the gardener use it on her mother's rose-beds, and a new alarm-clock, because it was so nice and bright. She had thus many small sources of pleasure, inoperative perhaps on deeper intellects, which, added together, made a sort of comfortable woolly garment for her mind.

But it's possible that some of those readers will also be given pause when her plans for the future of the house and her own financial resources are revealed. She has, it turns out, made a rare venture to church and heard an inspiring sermon about the need for making amends for one's wrongs. This has led her to recall her treatment of Tilly Cuff, a poor relation ("some sort of second cousin") who had lived with Isabel's family and been treated kindly in a careless sort of way. Since then, Tilly has led a rather sad existence as a lady's companion.

But, Isabel confesses to Simon, Tilly's life might have taken a very different path. Back in 1912, at the end of a visit from a young soldier friend of the Brockens, Isabel had, early one morning, come upon a shy note from the soldier to Tilly, declaring his love. In a moment of weakness, Isabel, in part out of jealousy, destroyed the letter and never mentioned it to Tilly. Now, following the sermon, she is convinced that her act ruined Tilly's one chance at happiness, and she determines, against all of Simon's arguments, to invite Tilly to stay, confess her crime, and make amends by signing over nearly all her money to her.

Where Sharp takes her story from there is a delight, particularly when Tilly arrives and proves to be challenging (to put it nicely) and at times even "malevolent". She puts a damper on Humphrey and Jacky's romance, offers Jacky uncomfortable advice about her position, and threatens to wreak havoc on the Pooles' contentment. She is petty and manipulative, and yet Sharp also shows us to some extent how she has become this way. In fact, it's striking that all of the characters in The Foolish Gentlewoman are imperfect (but likable anyway, most of them).

It's also striking that Sharp cleverly subverts our usual "cozy" expectations of a simple happy ending with everyone living unrealistically ever after. Here, although life certainly shifts for most or all of the characters, ultimately most of them will continue much as they did before, just as so often happens in real life. And one may have to do some pleasant soul-searching to determine whether one agrees with Mr Brocken's assessment of Isabel as foolish and "idiotic". She might (or might not) turn out to be the wisest of all the characters—Sharp leaves it up to us to determine how we think her future will unfold.

It's a terrifically entertaining novel, and a lovely slice of immediate postwar life. I enjoyed this uniquely postwar dialogue between young Greta Poole and Simon:

''I suppose you don't want any bits of bomb?" enquired Greta politely.

"No, thank you," said Mr. Bracken.

"I don't either. I used to collect them; it's funny," said Greta tolerantly, "what you'll do when you're a kid. Now I'm just going to chuck them away."

…

"Some of 'em had the dates on," remarked Greta, returning. "It was Mum's idea; we thought they'd make nice souvenirs, but they got too common."

I can only imagine how many people (me included, probably, however morbid it might be) would love to have such a Blitz souvenir today.

And there's this lovely snippet between Tilly and the Pooles, when she is just beginning to invade their lives by storming into the kitchen, all false cheerfulness, and offering Greta a gift of a pincushion (of all things):

"That's very kind, I'm sure," said Mrs. Poole.

The Pooles had excellent manners. Some one offered you a present; whether you wanted it or not, even before you had seen it, you said they were very kind. (Or some one saved your life in a blitz; the same phrase served.) But one wasn't over-enthusiastic, in either case; all codes of manners having their convention.

And finally, although Simon is hardly the hero of this novel—stodgy, particular, and more than a little curmudgeonly—I rather uneasily recognized myself in this description of him spotting an old acquaintance on the street:

Mr. Bracken did not dislike her; but he walked on. It was his habit to avoid people whenever possible, in case they became a nuisance. For Simon was profoundly convinced that all people became a nuisance sooner or later: logic, and arithmetic, informed him that the fewer people one became involved with, the less danger one ran of being annoyed. Carrying his inviolability like a cup of precious water, Mr. Brocken returned up the hill to Chipping Lodge.

Fortunately, unlike Simon, I have Andy to keep dragging me out of my shell when I start to get too hermetically sealed inside!

This is the second previously unread Margery Sharp novel I've checked off my TBR recently, after reviewing her debut, Rhododendron Pie, here. I'm very much enjoying getting reacquainted with Sharp, and indeed I have more of her books on their way to me. And I'm late to the party with this one—The Foolish Gentlewoman was also reviewed by Ali here, Barb at Leaves & Pages here, and by Liz here.

A battle of the brows: MARGERY SHARP, Rhododendron Pie (1930)

It was indeed very difficult for the Laventie children not to be a little priggish.

Ann Laventie, the youngest of three children of the latest in a long line of anti-social Sussex gentry, doesn't quite fit the mold of her intellectual, elegant, ultra-modern siblings—Dick, an artist, and Elizabeth, a high-brow writer, both surely destined for greatness. Mr Laventie is scholarly and just wealthy enough to focus all his attention on his reading and other highbrow pursuits. Mrs Laventie is loving and patient, disabled since a riding accident years before but stoical and attentive. The family's highest standards are aesthetics, individual freedoms, and distinction, standing out (and above) others. They even readily discuss and accept such concepts as free love. Ann, on the other hand, worries about being plump, is what might now be called a "people person," and as the novel progresses she begins to come to terms with her more traditional beliefs and pleasures.

The initially rather bewildering title of this novel—the delightful Margery Sharp's debut and the most vanishingly rare of her titles, inexplicably never reprinted in the UK or the US since its first edition in 1930—is a symbol of its theme. In a short prologue, we first meet the Laventies when Dick, Elizabeth, and Ann are only children. It is Ann's sixth birthday, and her "birthday pie" is being unveiled, a family tradition which stems from Elizabeth's own sixth birthday, when she had demanded an inedible but aesthetically lovely pie filled with rhododendrons. Never mind how one could possibly create such a pie, not to mention how the blossoms would actually look after having been crammed into a crust. The point is that artistic Elizabeth has initiated the tradition of a beautiful but eccentric and non-functional birthday pie. And as the prologue ends, we see the more pragmatic Ann regretting the fact that she couldn't have had a lovely, edible, apple pie instead.

Despite the markup and watermark, I love this pic of Margery and husband
Geoffrey Castle, snagged from the Baltimore Sun archive a few years ago

The theme comes into sharper focus with the introduction of the disorderly and distinctly middlebrow Gayford family, neighbors who persist in inviting the young Laventies to tea and other gatherings. First, here's Mr Laventie's attitude toward socializing with his neighbors (which I confess rather echoes my own, a fact that perhaps should induce some soul-searching…):

Here it was that Mr. Laventie entertained his kind neighbours of Wetherington, marvelling greatly at their persistence … They never stayed long, however, the record of endurance being held by Miss Medlicott, the Vicar's sister, with a visit of nine minutes. The others were frozen out, as Miss Finn put it, within the first five. She herself held the record at the other end of the scale, and had told Mr. Laventie quite frankly that his colour scheme nauseated her. He could smile even now at the recollection of her thin beaky face and bristling hair as she scuttled down the drive to that preposterous yellow car; and the smile deepened as he thought of all the other backs he had watched from that same window. … Colonel and Mrs. Foster-Brown, red and angry; the local M.P., with his witless, connoisseur-to-connoisseur small-talk of first editions; Lady Spencer and her lank daughters; Sir George Bowman; poor Miss Medlicott, Christian forbearance in every line of that distressing raincoat. If only people would stop selling their houses and lose their taste for visiting the sick it would be quite a peaceful neighbourhood.

I do find it hard not to relate just a little to Mr Laventie, though I am perhaps redeemed a bit by the fact that I also find the gruff Miss Finn, an aunt of the Gayfords who has painted every available surface of her home with just the kind of realistic, pretty flowers surely calculated to make the Laventies cringe, to be pretty irresistible. To digress for a moment, here's a sample of Miss Finn, encountering a guest of the Laventies at the train station:

'Well, if it's Hobden's car,' observed Miss Finn, eyeing Miriam's bright suitcases, 'he'll never get all that in. What possessed you to have them that unwholesome colour?'

Gilbert explained that they were easy to identify.

'Well, I shouldn't like to have them near me on a Channel crossing, that's all.'

Ah, what would literature have been without acerbic spinster aunts!

The Gilbert mentioned in this passage is Gilbert Croy, an artsy filmmaker who comes to stay with the Laventies and romances Ann a bit. But it's the Gayfords who, next to the Laventies, figure most prominently here. There's John Gayford, who clearly adores Ann, and his sister Peggy, who becomes her friend and confidante. And there's the slightly ditsy, lovable Mrs Gayford, as well as the other siblings. All are exasperating to all of the Laventies except Ann, who finds herself drawn to their straightforward pleasure in life.

As the story progresses, the young Laventies spend much of their time in London—Dick with his sculpture (and a bit of womanizing), Elizabeth to her writing, and Ann to her, well, her wavering between different worlds and ways of life. She befriends the lovely, immoral (or perhaps merely unmoral) Delia and admires her unflappable poise, but realizes that Delia's lifestyle, handsome men flocking around her at all times, is not for her.

Of course things must come to a head when Ann comes home with a fiancé deemed completely unsuitable by her siblings and father. She faces fierce resistance, but the climactic scene in which Ann's quiet, self-effacing mother finally takes center stage, is absolutely a thing of beauty. I do love, though, that while there's never really any doubt about who will come out on top, Sharp, and indeed her heroine too, never completely demonizes the Laventies, merely brings them a notch or two down to size. Ann loves her family, and loves some of the unconventional people she meets in London, but her own path is a different one.

If Rhododendron Pie is just a bit rough around the edges, like most first novels, it clearly displays the charm, humor, and bite that Sharp would develop even more beautifully in the next few years. She made me love Ann, of course, but also the Gayfords and even the Laventies. It's a delightful, cheerful, life-affirming novel.

And as with my recent post on Rumer Godden's Gypsy, Gypsy, I really have to thank the "possibly FM" recommendations from you lovely readers for reminding me that I've neglected Margery Sharp for far too long. I can't say yet (because I really don't know, not because I'm being coy) if it's a possibility for us to reprint this and/or other of Sharp's out-of-print works. But copies of this book are scarce and pricy indeed (prices of four copies on Abe Books as of this writing range from $210 to $500 sans dustjacket!), so it would be lovely to have it more widely available.

If you'd like other perspectives on the book, Barb at Leaves and Pages reviewed it a few years back here, complete with a pic of the dustjacket, and Jane at Beyond Eden Rock reviewed it earlier this year here. Spoiler alert: they both loved it too

Reading diary: E. M. CHANNON, MARGERY SHARP

E. M. CHANNON, Little G (1936)

"And you really want to banish me to this beastly village, Cardew?" he inquired, with pathos.

"You can make your own choice, my man. Six months in Challingley, leading the sort of  reasonable life that I've suggested, or a real genuine breakdown, with a real genuine rest-cure in a nursing home to follow."

"Good Lord!" said the Mathematician, in blank horror, with a swift vision of himself quite helpless, at the mercy of innumerable designing young hussies in becoming uniforms.

"I can tell you," said the Doctor, "that I'd be glad enough to change places with you. I've spent more than one holiday in Challingley, and always been sorry to come away. Plenty of people would envy you your luck."

I recently had two weekends in a row lost in reading two cheerful, funny, and distinctly cozy novels. This one was the first, and I was particularly eager to read it because I had just sampled my first school story by E. M. Channon—the genre for which Channon is probably still best known. For those of you who are fans, the school story I read was The Honour of the House (1931), and I enjoyed it very much despite the fact that I never got round to discussing it here. It's funny and smart and sweet and just a little bit edgy all at the same time—characteristics it has in common with Channon's final novel, Little G.

The opening pages, from which the above quote is taken, somehow brought to my mind Elizabeth von Arnim's marvelous Enchanted April, in the sense that both books are about characters getting the opportunity to retreat to holidays most readers would (as the doctor points out) be delighted to experience. John Furnival, a Cambridge mathematics don, obviously isn't quite as enthusiastic about his holiday as the women in von Arnim's novel are about theirs, but both holidays sound glorious to me.

Greyladies unearthed this rare photo of
Channon and have it on their redesigned website

Furnival spends some considerable time interrogating his doctor about the residents of Challingley—particularly about the presence of any young unmarried women, the thought of which sends chills down the confirmed-bachelor's spine. There are three orphaned children who live with their stern aunt Miss Augusta Campion—an almost mythical figure of discipline and responsibility of whom we see no more than a glimpse in the novel, though her reputation precedes her. There's the village vicar and the village doctor, single men obsessed with their gardens. And there's Mrs. Parnell, the still-young widow of the previous vicar, but Furnival's doctor reassures him that Mrs. Parnell has bigger fish to fry than bagging a Cambridge don as a husband.

One wonders, though, if the doctor's failure to mention one more resident of the village—who provides one of the meanings of the novel's title—is intentional, or is she, in the doctor's sensibility, merely part of the novel's backdrop…

Upon his arrival in Challingley, Furnival encounters a charming villageful of characters who are far too friendly for his tastes. Now, I can, truth be told, relate just a bit to Furnival's anti-social instincts, as I tend to love to be left alone with my books too, though it must also be admitted that my books do little to increase my fitness levels, so perhaps the tennis parties and strolls the don keeps getting invited to would be an improvement to my overall health. Furnival resists the villagers' sociality fiercely, but is not always successful, as with this invitation from Mrs. Parnell:

"Come and play tennis tomorrow—half-past three. I hope you've no other engagement. I've just had my court marked out for the first time—have you?"

"Thank you!" Furnival called back, non-committally furious that he could think of no excuse, furious with her for inviting him, furious most of all at the manner of the invitation. If it had been formally written, he could certainly have found means to get out of it; but one cannot shout subterfuges across many intervening yards of green turf—and wild horses would not drag him back now to her perilous neighbourhood...He must trust to luck. Perhaps, mercifully, tomorrow would be wet.

Indeed, the first parties to break down the professor's general misanthropy are not the vicar or the doctor or, indeed, any of the women of the village, but the three downtrodden children who live next door with their terrible Aunt Augusta. The children are one day caught spying on the professor as he wrestles with his books in his garden, and his weakness for children leads him, in an off-guard moment, to make up a story for them out of his mathematics books, with the action revolving around the character of Little G (known to the rest of us as gravity, and the other meaning of the novel's title).

Back cover blurb from Greyladies edition of Little G

Everything proceeds from there much as you can probably imagine. As far as plot developments, there are no very significant surprises to be found here. But Channon handles her tale so charmingly and humorously that readers are unlikely to be looking for a shocking denoument here any more than they would have in reading Enchanted April.

My enjoyment of The Honour of the House and Little G made me want to find out more about Channon's other titles. A biographical essay about Channon by Hilary Clare, co-author of The Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories, can be read here (with a disclaimer that it may be used without permission), and the essay also appears as an introduction to the Greyladies edition of Channon's mystery novel Twice Dead (now out-of-print, though Channon's other mystery, The Chimney Murder, is still available). From that informative essay, which effectively answered every question I had in mind about Channon, I am particularly intrigued by two of her other titles, which both remain challenging to find. Her early novel, Miss King's Profession (1913), deals with women writing, which is always a topic of interest to me. Clare also says of that novel that it "has the underlying teasing irony which is one of E. M. Channon's hallmarks. (It has the other one too: vivid domestic detail.)" I'm sold.

And then, I am also particularly intrigued by Clare's description of Channon's 1926 holiday story, The Surprising Holidays, "where the theme is the lack of domestic capability of an English middle-class family. For a variety of reasons all the servants leave, and coincidentally the father's business is in difficulties so there is no money either. Cooking, cleaning and the baby (a rumbustious toddler) have to be dealt with, and only the presence of a competent cousin from New Zealand saves the day." Sold again.

As I mentioned, neither of these titles are currently very readily available. But there may (??) be hope for the latter, at least. Books to Treasure, an independent publisher, has been doing heroic work reviving girls' school stories by Evelyn Smith, Ethel Talbot, Dorothea Moore, Bessie Marchant, and (you guessed it) E. M. Channon, and has been releasing them not only in physical format but as very reasonably priced e-books. So far, they've released Expelled from St. Madern's (1928) and its sequel, Her Second Chance (1930), as well as another intriguing title, A Fifth-Form Martyr (1935), which Clare describes as Channon's funniest school story. Here's hoping that they may decide to proceed with The Surprising Holidays.

By the way, there is one Channon title currently available in the U.S. from Hathi Trust and Google Books—1912's The Real Mrs. Holyer. Presumably, Miss King's Profession would likewise be out of copyright in the U.S., so hopefully they'll get around to posting that one as well.

At any rate, I doubt if any of these could be more entertaining or charming than Little G, and that one, at least, is readily available from Greyladies.



MARGERY SHARP, The Nutmeg Tree (1937)

This was the other of my recent weekend reads, and I have to preface this by noting that it remains one of the great mysteries of life (right up there with what makes socks vanish in the dryer and why people are interested in the Kardashians) why Margery Sharp's adult novels are still so completely and utterly out of print. As far as I can tell, not one of them is in print in the U.S., and only one, The Eye of Love, appears to be available from Virago in the U.K. Even her children's books—most famously her Rescuers series—are mostly out of print. And publishers are certainly missing out, as Sharp is a popular rediscovery just waiting to happen. Several publishers have led the renaissance of D. E. Stevenson's novels, and the rise of e-books is ushering in the revival of various other authors, so it's high time publishers do the same for Margery Sharp.

It had been a while since I'd read Sharp, and I had almost forgotten just how delightful she is. Somehow I've never managed to write a proper review of one of her books, though I did write a little about The Stone of Chastity, which has always been one of my favorites, here. I've enjoyed several of her other books as well. But now I'm thinking that The Nutmeg Tree, a fortuitous book sale find a couple of months back, may be my new favorite. It proved to be the perfect weekend read—funny, charming, spunky, and mildly transgressive—and I found it impossible to put down (just ask Andy).

This is the tale of Julia, a lovable middle-aged sexpot who has ridden the waves of masculine love and support, but who as the novel opens is distinctly between waves, with furniture repossessors at her door and no certainty from where will come her next meal. In the midst of this turmoil, which Julia characteristically takes cheerfully and with bohemian flair, she receives a letter from her daughter Susan, the product of a short-lived wartime fling with a lieutenant from the Gunners (who then promptly got himself killed), whom Julia has allowed to be left to the tender, upper-crust mercies of her rather posh in-laws. Susan has barely had contact with her mother for most of her life, but now her letters arrives from the blue, inviting Julia to help her sort out her relationship woes, and Julia is thrilled to be bustling off to France to help her daughter with what is surely her primary area of expertise.

Marked-up press photo of Margery Sharp
from the Baltimore Sun archive

For who better to help with romantic issues than Julia, who at one point mulls over her unique qualifications while conversing with a married man:

"I don't say I'm easy," pursued Mr. Rickaby fairly. "I dare say I'm a bit more complicated than most men. I like all sorts of things—good music, you know, and scenery. I've got—well, I suppose I've got ideals. But it takes a woman like you to understand."

Julia nodded. She had often pondered this question of why wives didn't understand when women like herself did; and the only conclusion she had reached was that to understand men—to realize the full value of their good streaks, while pardoning the bad—you had to know so many of them. Then when you came across one fellow who was a soak, for instance, you could nearly always remember another who soaked worse; and he in turn might have qualities of generosity or cleverness which raised him above a third man who was a teetotaller. But to know all that you had to have experience, and wives as a rule hadn't. They knew only one man, where women like Julia knew dozens; but then women like Julia rarely became wives. It was a rotten system, when you came to look at it…

Passages like this one made me realize that, although The Nutmeg Tree certainly has all of the characteristics of a cozy read, it also has a bit of edginess. In fact, it occurred to me that Julia is a rather surprising heroine across the board.

I wonder what readers accustomed to other women writers of the 1930s would have made of Julia. She has not seen her daughter for sixteen years, choosing to leave her to her in-laws because she found herself too stifled in their high class lifestyle (an abandonment from which Dorothy Whipple or E. M. Delafield might well have made a tragic melodrama). She has chosen instead to enjoy her bohemian lifestyle of enjoyable flings and financial ups and downs without wasting more than an occasional casual thought on her offspring:

[O]ne of the worst elements in her boredom was the lack of someone to love. She had her child, indeed, and was very fond of it; but "someone,'' to Julia, meant a man.

Can one imagine such a character appearing at all in a D. E. Stevenson novel, much less as a heroine? And had Agatha Christie included such a woman in one of her novels, she would surely have made her the murder victim. Elizabeth Taylor or Sylvia Townsend Warner might have explored the complexities of her situation, but would likely have felt obliged to make the story a sad one. And Stella Gibbons might have made her likeable but undoubtedly comically self-absorbed and victimized.

What, then, can readers of such authors have made of a novel in which such a character is the thoroughly lovable protagonist, while the abandoned daughter is seen as rather stuffy and prim and drab? Sharp was certainly making the most of the middlebrow reader's interest in bohemian freedom!

What's more, although most readers of Sharp's novels probably wouldn't have been specifically seeking a message of feminine sexual liberation, this novel is one of the only places I can recall in middlebrow fiction where a heroine is allowed to be truly sexual, a woman with desires that are explicitly beyond the romantic, beyond a desire for love and stability and protection, but also—perhaps most importantly—independent of male fantasies of "sexy" women. Julia's attitude toward Fred Genocchio, the best-looking of a family of trapeze and high-wire artists she meets on the boat to France, is about the most blatant sexual objectification of a man I know of anywhere in the fiction of the time. Fred is not a particularly good catch, and there is little to appeal to Julia beyond his profile and the fact that he looks extraordinarily good in tights. 

Of course, there are certainly other novels in which women become involved with undesirable men, and in some of those cases the involvement may stem in some way from her physical desires, but it is almost always veiled beneath a layer of romance—she at least deludes herself that she is falling in love with him, however much it may be lust that causes the delusion. But Julia is refreshingly no-nonsense about her attraction to men. Fred is indubitably not husband material, but he might be quite nice to share a few giddy weeks with.

Mind you, no one reading this novel need feel any obligation to ponder these elements. The Nutmeg Tree a thoroughly enjoyable, rollicking, funny, and—perhaps a bit surprisingly—not entirely predictable romantic jaunt, not a feminist diatribe. But if you're inclined to think about such things, it's also a rather radical and liberating novel for its time. And whichever way you read it, it should damn well be in print and appreciated by a larger audience!