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 cry of joy would go through this house like a sword: ROSALIND BRACKENBURY, A Day to Remember to Forget (1971)

Electricity in all the corners, the walls thin as rice paper. Nobody could ever be so intrepid as to make love in this house, with its thin, listening walls, its lights flashing on at the top of the stairs, its unhappy people lying awake. A cry of joy would go through this house like a sword.

Regular readers will already know that I almost never accept review copies from publishers. I just do not seem to be capable of reading according to a schedule, and when I try to I almost always fail. This is why I don't participate in blog events related to a specific author, even one I love like Margery Sharp, for example, because knowing that I'm supposed to read a Margery Sharp book and write about it for a certain day (even if that day is six months in the future) will almost certainly render me completely uninterested in reading Margery Sharp for the duration of the six months. Some sort of peculiar perversity, no doubt, and likewise a review copy on my TBR shelves begins to glare accusingly at me from the moment of its arrival until I feel so hostile towards it that I'd like to throw it out the window.

However (thank heavens there's a however, right?), when Michael Walmer emailed a while back about this title, by a British woman writer I had never heard of—though she has been quite prolific and released her latest novel, Without Her, just last year—and noted that the introduction was by none other than Margaret Drabble, who is just about my favorite living author, my resistance was breached. Happily, too, Michael is understanding about the fact that I always get round to reviewing his books two or three months after they're first released!

And indeed, I'm very glad I did accept this book, because although A Day to Remember to Forget is rather different from many of the books I write about here, it proved absolutely extraordinary and lovely, and it should not have been the case that I had never heard of Brackenbury!

The novel begins with Lucy and Philip, a rather free-spirited, slightly hippy-ish young couple who have just decided to buy a house in Norfolk. Their hopes and tensions around this decision are beautifully delineated. (It's funny how some authors can make their characters' inner thoughts and feelings so clear to the reader without any feeling of having to work to interpret or understand—we're simply there inside their heads.) They are supposed to proceed directly to Philip's parents' home, where his family is celebrating his mother's birthday this weekend, but instead they hitchhike to a nearby hotel to spend the night, giving us a clear inkling of their ambivalence.

When they do arrive, all sorts of familial tensions begin to work their way explosively to the surface, sucking in Philip's parents, brother and sister-in-law as well as a lonely elderly neighbor. Tensions between the parents, tensions with the brother (who has always been the responsible one but not the favorite), tensions regarding the neighbor and the tragic death of her husband many years before—it's a bit like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? crossed with, well, Virginia Woolf herself!

It's often rather harrowing, and if it strikes home for you, as it did me, then it's a somewhat difficult read at times, but it's also terribly striking and perceptive, with these glimpses into the minds of various characters that so precisely sum up how grievances and insecurities and slights do take root and grow in all sorts of unexpected and unpredictable ways.  I kept having to stop to mull them over and say, "Yes, that's exactly how that happens. I had never thought of that before." And the writing is beautiful and often reminiscent of Margaret Drabble herself, so those of you who love Drabble as I do should take note. Like Drabble, too, Brackenbury understands all of her characters, so while we think in one passage, "Oh, what an impossible woman!", a few pages on we find ourselves touched by the pain that very impossible woman has been through.

Apart from the quotation at the beginning of this post, which really sums up this dysfunctional home, here are two more to demonstrate. First, Philip's rather impossible mother herself, in the midst of an argument with her husband:

She spoke the words just as they occurred to her, not knowing whether or not they were true. What did it matter what one's weapons were, as long as one defended oneself? When he picked his way so pedantically, like a judge, like a prosecutor, forcing her to give evidence, remember dates, produce an alibi and recognise Exhibit A. He terrified her, and she ran backwards, lashing out. The only way was to hurt him, until he stopped. It was like not knowing if there was enough for dinner in the fridge, like people arriving, like being asked a question in class and not knowing the answer. When the masked men came to the door and banged upon it, they would want an answer, or they would push past her and invade the house.

How often do we argue in just such a way? Saying what will work as a weapon in the moment, regardless of its truth. It seems obvious having read the passage, but not every author realizes such things.

And then, just a striking way of thinking captured in this scene with young Lucy:

She stood still on the edge of the orchard, poised for a moment, staring at the house next door which now gave back no sign of life nor habitation, and wondered what it was like to live there, to peer round a curtain and watch a girl in pink shirt and blue jeans cross a garden alone, and disappear into a small shed among nettles. This was such a familiar sensation, this knowledge, sensuously, of what it was to be the other person. As a child, she had felt it overwhelm her, when she held an animal, a cat perhaps, clutched to her and felt that she, Lucy, was the cat feeling herself held by herself, Lucy, who was the girl.

I'm looking forward to exploring more of Brackenbury's work, and I'm so grateful to Michael Walmer both for sending me a copy and for making this wonderful rediscovery of her work.

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

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!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Eleven new Furrowed Middlebrow books from Dean Street Press, coming January 2021

It's more than a little amazing to me that it's now been just under four years since the first Furrowed Middlebrow books were published by Dean Street Press in October of 2016. With the titles I am just about to announce, we'll be up to a rather staggering 63 titles in all, including some of my favorite books and authors. And of course that's all down to the support and encouragement of (to paraphrase PBS) readers like you!

It's generally my policy, therefore, not to play favorites among the books we've been fortunate enough to be able to reprint—who could choose favorites between the likes of Elizabeth Fair, D. E. Stevenson, Elizabeth Eliot, and Frances Faviell, not to mention Rachel Ferguson, Winifred Peck, or Miss Read?

That said, however, I am beyond ecstatic that in January of 2021, we'll be adding to our list two of my all-time favorite authors, and in both cases we are fortunate enough to be reprinting some of these authors' very best works. Who could they be?

Drum roll please...

That's right. In January we will be welcoming the glittering, sophisticated MARGERY SHARP and the witty, incisive STELLA GIBBONS to the Furrowed Middlebrow family. Woohoo!

And I owe a special thanks to some of you lovely readers. When I first started working with Dean Street Press, both of these amazing authors were being actively re-released, by Open Road Media and Vintage respectively, so I had assumed their work was unavailable to us and moved on to other authors. It was really those of you who suggested them in response to my "Possibly Furrowed Middlebrow" post late last year who brought them back to mind and made it dawn on me that both of those larger publishers, having released a number of the better-known titles by Sharp and Gibbons (along with some rather odd choices and omissions), had petered out and not finished the job. Still unavailable were some of the best and most sought-after works by both authors. Eureka!

So, the specifics. In January, we will be publishing (as usual in both paperback and e-book formats) six currently out-of-print titles from the early years of Margery Sharp's brilliant career. 

There's her marvelous debut (reportedly written in one month while working as a typist, though that's hard to fathom from the delights of reading it), Rhododendron Pie (1930), about an eccentric family of highbrows coming to terms with their distinctly middlebrow sister. I reviewed it here and linked to a couple of other, similarly enthusiastic bloggers. As anyone who has searched for this title (probably in vain) over the past decade will know, copies of Rhododendron Pie sell for sums well into triple digits, but you won't need to mortgage your house to buy our reprint!

Then there's Sharp's rollicking second novel, Fanfare for Tin Trumpets (1932), a sparkling romantic comedy set amongst the more bohemian elements of London society. I reviewed it here.

Moving forward three years, we come to Four Gardens (1935), a somewhat less zany, more poignant tale of a woman's life from the Victorian period until the 1930s, represented symbolically by the four gardens she has occupied in that time. I have a review coming up for it (now posted here), but in the meantime you can take the word of Barb at Leaves & Pages here or Jane from Beyond Eden Rock at her earlier blog here.

Just on the cusp of World War II we come to Harlequin House (1939), another London comedy about a young woman navigating the rough seas between her stodgy military fiancé and her feckless ex-con brother. I reviewed it here and Barb at Leaves & Pages reviewed it here.

Next up, oh be still my heart, possibly my favorite Sharp of all, The Stone of Chastity (1940), a thoroughly daft village comedy about a professor testing an ancient legend about a stone crossing stone in a village stream, reputed to cause unfaithful women to slip and fall. I also have a review of this coming up (now posted here), but in the meantime, way back in 2013 I listed it here as one of 20 books that should have been in print but weren't. Happy to cross yet another title off of that list!

And last but certainly not least of the Margery Sharp novels coming soon is her really wonderful postwar tale, The Foolish Gentlewoman (1948), another of my favorites. Middle-aged widow Isabel Bracken creates discord among friends and relatives when she decides to give up most of her inheritance to an impossible woman whose one chance at romance Isabel once spoiled. I reviewed it here, and I linked to several other bloggers' reviews of it from there.

I don't honestly know if I'm more pleased that we're publishing Sharp or Stella Gibbons, who feels like such a kindred spirit for me, despite the fact that, as I've mentioned before, I find her most famous novel overrated (but so did she, so I think she would forgive me). Cold Comfort Farm I can take or leave, but the five books we're reprinting in January are all among my favorites. Vintage made some lovely choices in their selection of Gibbons novels to reprint (the wartime novels in particular), but they neglected some of Gibbons' funniest, lightest-hearted rainy day reads.

Case in point: The Swiss Summer (1951), which the Guardian compared, in its contemporary review, to The Enchanted April no less! Lucy Cottrell, happily married but worn down by the postwar challenges of food rationing and depressing world affairs, jumps at the chance to spend the summer at an acquaintance's Swiss chalet, where a heap of other guests bring romance, comedy, and poignant moments amidst lush scenery. 

At the end of the same decade comes A Pink Front Door (1959), about a young wife who can't say no. Er, she can't say no to any misfit who needs her help, that is. Watched over disapprovingly by her ex-military father and long-suffering husband (who is always ambivalent about what he'll find when he opens their front door), Daisy Muir tried to solve everyone else's problems and ends up creating quite a few of her own. It's one of Gibbons' most purely funny and perceptive comedies, and I can hardly resist picking it up and starting to read it again right now.

Three years on, we come to The Weather at Tregulla (1962) set in a small town on the Cornish coast, in which Gibbons shows astonishing versatility in inhabiting the perspective of a restless 19-year-old girl, Una Beaumont, whose fondest wish is to escape to London and "the Stage" but who finds herself instead enmeshed in an unfortunate infatuation with a successful but caddish artist. This is Here Be Dragons in a rather more light-hearted mode, and it's an armchair excursion to Cornwall to boot.

I particularly fell in love with jaded, bitter 70-something Maude Barrington, the protagonist of the second-to-last novel published in Gibbons' lifetime, The Snow-Woman (1969). Maude has been a tragic shadow of her old self ever since losing her three brothers in World War I, but as Gibbons' tale begins (with a woman she's only just met giving birth on great aunt Dorothea's sofa, no less), her quiet, lonely life is about to get livelier, and the snow in her heart may begin to melt. For my money, The Snow-Woman is one of Gibbons' most complex, poignant, and yet still very funny novels.

And finally, the last of Stella's novels published in her lifetime, The Woods in Winter (1970), is also about a woman of a certain age rediscovering the joys of life. But here, for contrast, we move from the imperious, well-to-do Maude to the curmudgeonly  and rather witchy charwoman Ivy Gower, who inherits a rural cottage in Buckinghamshire and manages, despite thoroughly anti-social instincts, to have surprising effects on her neighbors. Then a 12-year-old runaway shows up on her doorstep, but that plot twist doesn't follow any of the sappy, predictable trajectories you might expect from a lesser author.

Whew! So there we are. Eleven new titles in all. What do you think?

The Americans: B's (3 of 4)

15 more of the B's from my in-progress American Women Writers list this time around, 10 of them particularly known for their children's fiction, so some of you will recognize a few names here. At least two of these definitely belong on my future pioneers/immigrants/western expansion subject list as well.

Probably the biggest name here is CAROL RYRIE BRINK, still well-known for her perennial bestseller Caddie Woodlawn (1935), about an 11-year-old girl on a farm in frontier Wisconsin. I think I might have read that book when I was very young, but perhaps a re-read is in order. Brink later adapted it as a play, and Magical Melons (1944) is a collection of additional stories about Caddie. Brink also published more than a dozen other volumes of children's fiction, as well as several novels for adults. 

Baby Island (1937) is a comedy about two girls stranded on a Pacific island with four babies (sounds like stark realism to me). Family Grandstand (1952) and Family Sabbatical (1956) are about the children of a college professor and a mystery writer, and is loosely based on Brink's own childhood in St Paul, Minnesota. The Pink Motel (1959) is about the eccentric guests at a Florida hotel. 

Some of Brink's novels for adults have historical settings but darker subject matter. Buffalo Coat (1944) is about doctors in Idaho in the late 19th century. According to Brink's encyclopedia.com entry, The Headland (1955), set in France, is "a curiously flawed novel about five young people to whom World War II brings tragedy." Brink said of Snow in the River (1964), set in a fictionalized version of her hometown of Moscow, Idaho, that it "is probably as near to an autobiography as I shall ever write." Despite that comment, she did also write a short reminiscence, Four Girls on a Homestead (1978).

Then there's ALLENA BEST, known to many of her readers under her pseudonym Erick Berry. She was an illustrator and author of more than 60 children's titles, many historical in theme. She received a Newbery Honor for her 1933 work The Winged Girl of Knossos (1933). Various other books were set in Africa, Scandinavia, or in various periods of American history. Hudson Frontier (1942) is set in an early Dutch settlement, while The Wavering Flame: Connecticut, 1776 (1953) is set at the beginning of the American Revolution. Illustrations of Cynthia (1931) is set at an art school, and Careers of Cynthia (1932) and Cynthia Steps Out (1937) are presumably sequels. Best appears to have used the pseudonym Anne Maxon for a single title, The House That Jill Built (1934) (though its illustrations are still credited to Erick Berry, surely a rare example of an author using two pseudonyms at the same time on the same book). She was married to boys' story writer Herbert Best, and illustrated many of his books as well as her own and some by other authors. Other of her titles include Girls in Africa (1928), Strings to Adventure (1935), Honey of the Nile (1938), Hearth-Stone in the Wilderness (1944), The Little Farm in the Big City (1947), Sybil Ludington's Ride (1952), Stars in My Pocket (1960), When Wagon Trains Rolled to Santa Fe (1966), and The Valiant Little Potter (1973).

Mildred Benson

Until recently, MILDRED BENSON was quite the unsung heroine of children's fiction, despite the fact that some of you, at least, have undoubtedly read one or more of her books. In recent years, it has been revealed that she was the main author behind most of the early Nancy Drew books, published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Benson reportedly wrote more than 20 of the first 30 books in the series (often from outlines created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which owned the series), but did so for flat fees, retaining no copyright, though she and other contributors were eventually granted a share of royalties. She worked on well over 100 children's titles in all, including works for several other series including those featuring Kay Tracey, Penny Parker, and the Dana Girls. 

Mildred Benson in later years

The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives singles out the four-book Ruth Darrow series (1930-1931) for attention. Written under Benson's earlier married name, Mildred Wirt, the series focused on a young woman pilot. According to Scribner, "The aeronautical lore in the books is generally authentic, but the series' greatest strength is its consistent and outspoken advocacy of women's abilities and mechanical competence." Benson was a journalist throughout most of her life, and her life seems to have been an adventurous one: she travelled a lot in Central American, took an interest in archaeology, and was herself a trained pilot. She wrote under a whole slew of additional pseudonyms as well, including Frank Bell, Joan Clark, Don Palmer, Helen Louise Thorndyke, Julia K. Duncan, Alice B. Emerson, and Frances K. Judd.

Early author pic of Margery Bianco

MARGERY BIANCO is best known for her classic children's book The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), but not everyone knows that her first published works (under her maiden name, Margery Williams) were four novels—The Late Returning (1902), Spendthrift Summer (1903), The Price of Youth (1904), and The Thing in the Woods (1913)—the last a horror tale about a werewolf in Pennsylvania, published under the pseudonym Harper Williams. After the success of The Velveteen Rabbit, she focused mainly on children's books, including Poor Cecco (1925), The Little Wooden Doll (1925), The Skin Horse (1927), The House That Grew Smaller (1931), and Green Grows the Garden (1936). Another 1936 title, Winterbound (1936), was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal. 

Two later works—Other People's Houses (1939), about a young woman trying to make a living in New York City, and Bright Morning (1942), described as an autobiographical novel, seem to be for adults or at least older children. She also translated several French works into English, and co-wrote a single play, Out of the Night (1929), described as a mystery comedy. (Bianco is something of an in-between author for this list, as she was born in England, emigrated to the U.S. at age 9, then spent a number of years back in the U.K. and Europe as an adult. She seems to have been a U.S. citizen, however, so in this case I've let that determine where she belongs.)

Another name that will be familiar to some of you is HELEN DORE BOYLSTON, who was a trained nurse herself as well as a children's author. She's best known for her series of books about Sue Barton, based on her own training, which follow their heroine from her days as a student nurse through various stages of her career. Titles are Sue Barton, Student Nurse (1936), Sue Barton, Senior Nurse (1937), Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse (1938), Sue Barton, Rural Nurse (1939), Sue Barton, Superintendent of Nurses (1940), Sue Barton, Neighborhood Nurse (1949), and Sue Barton, Staff Nurse (1952). In the 1940s, she also published a series about a young actress, including Carol Goes Backstage (1941), Carol Plays Summer Stock (1942), Carol on Broadway (1944), and Carol on Tour (1946). 

Boylston worked with the Red Cross during World War I and on into the 1920s, from which came her first published work, "Sister": The War Diary of a Nurse (1927). She also made friends with Rose Wilder Lane (who will appear on this list in due time) during her time in Europe, and a journal of their road trip across Europe was published as Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford in 1983. Fans of her Sue Barton series will certainly want to check out this blog post and the two subsequent posts, which provide details of Boylston's real life, including some of the people and places upon which her books may have been based.

There's a good chance that most readers who know the name MARY BARD know her as the sister of Betty MacDonald (who will also appear on this list eventually) and for three humorous memoirs of her own—The Doctor Wears Three Faces (1949), about meeting and dating her doctor husband, Forty Odd (1952), which continued her story into her forties, and Just Be Yourself (1956), about her experiences as a Brownie leader. But she did also publish three works of fiction for girls—Best Friends (1955), Best Friends in Summer (1960), and Best Friends at School (1961), the first of which was reprinted in 2015.

I might be more interested in ROSE BROWN's memoir, too, than in her fiction. She was the wife of avant-garde author, journalist and publisher Robert Carlton Brown and author of at least four children's books inspired by their time living in Brazil—Amazon Adventures of Two Children (1942), Two Children and Their Jungle Zoo (1948), Two Children of Brazil (1949), and Three on a Raft (1951). She also co-wrote, with her husband, Amazing Amazon (1943), about their trip up the Amazon River.

DOROTHY BIRD published three girls' adventure stories. Granite Harbor (1944) is about a young girl adjusting to her move from Texas to Michigan, near Lake Superior. Mystery at Laughing Water (1946) is about a girl's adventures at summer camp, including solving a mystery dating to the 1820s. And in The Black Opal (1949), a young college girl who aspires to be a journalist attempts to solve a murder mystery from the 1840s. Barb at Leaves & Pages wrote positively about the last here.

Mary Buff

MARY BUFF wrote more than a dozen children's titles, most illustrated by her husband Conrad Buff. Some of these are for younger children, but several appear to be for older readers. Titles include Dancing Cloud, the Navajo Boy (1937), Kobi, a Boy of Switzerland (1939), Peter's Pinto (1949), The Apple and the Arrow (1951), Hah-Nee of the Cliff Dwellers (1956), Forest Folk (1962), and Kemi, an Indian Boy before the White Man Came (1966).

And finally, ELEANOR HOYT BRAINERD published nearly a dozen volumes of fiction, most or all of them aimed at girls or young women. Titles include Elizabeth: A Story of the Oklahoma Run (1902), The Misdemeanors of Nancy (1902), Concerning Belinda (1905), The Personal Conduct of Belinda (1910), Pegeen (1915), How Could You, Jean? (1917), and Our Little Old Lady (1919).

I couldn't trace any relationship between that author and EDITH RATHBONE BRAINERD (and in any case both women married Brainerds, so the relationship would have been slight), but I figured here was as good a place as any to tell the tragic tale of the latter Brainerd. She was author, along with her husband J. Chauncey Corey Brainerd, of around 20 volumes of fiction, much of it first appearing in periodicals. Several of their novels were adapted as early films. Titles include The Sixth Speed (1908), Mister 44 (1916), Too Many Crooks (1918), The Mantle of Silence (1920), The Nervous Wreck (1923), The Brains of the Family (1925), and Let's Go (1930). 

Now the tragic part: Brainerd and her husband were both killed, along with dozens of others, in the roof collapse at the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington DC in January 1922—see the details here. Although I lived in DC for a decade, I had not previously heard of the Knickerbocker collapse. Many of the Brainerds' novels appeared in book form for the first time in the years after their deaths, presumably having only appeared in serialized form in earlier years. There's a fascinating story about the roof collapse here, mentioning several other victims but not the Brainerds.

And then, a few random authors who don't really fit in anywhere else.

Edna Bryner's 1907 Vassar yearbook entry

EDNA BRYNER was the author of two novels—Andy Brandt's Ark (1927), about a young woman who, having escaped an unhappy childhood, returns home to aid her sister, and While the Bridegroom Tarried (1929), a portrait of a man whose constant uncertainty and hesitations haunt his life. She appears to have written no further fiction, but she became a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and, following years of study, published Thirteen Tibetan Tankas (1956), described by her Vassar archives entry as "an important contribution to the study of the rebirth doctrine in Buddhism."

ANNA ROBESON BURR wrote more than two dozen volumes of fiction, non-fiction, and biography. The Jessop Bequest (1907) and The Great House in the Park (1924) both deal with drama and intrigue surrounding inheritance. Palludia (1928) is about the search for an enigmatic artist whose works are suddenly in demand. Other fiction includes Alain of Halfdene (1895), Sir Mark: A Tale of the First Capital (1896), A Cosmopolitan Comedy (1899), The Wine-Press (1905), The House on Smith Square (1923), Wind in the East (1933), and The Bottom of the Matter (1935). She also published non-fiction including The Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study (1909), described as the first critical analysis of memoir as a genre.

Sylvia Chatfield Bates's 1905 Elmira College yearbook entry

SYLVIA CHATFIELD BATES wrote ten volumes of fiction, including one initial story collection, Elmira College Stories (1911), about her own alma mater. Her other titles, about which details are sparse, include Vintage (1916), Golden Answer (1921), That Magic Fire (1928), I Have Touched the Earth (1934), Floor of Heaven (1940), The Weather Breeder (1948), and The Silver Yoke (1951).

Last and perhaps least, LUCILLE BORDEN wrote at least a dozen volumes of fiction informed by her Roman Catholicism. Titles include Gates of Olivet (1922), The Candlestick Makers (1923), Gentleman Riches (1925), From Out Magdala (1927), Sing to the Sun (1933), Starforth (1937), and From the Morning Watch (1943).

Next time around, a handful of mystery writers, a couple of scandalous women, and some authors who focused on social issues and injustice.