Rediscovering Edith Templeton: Summer in the Country (1950)

I don't remember now where I came across my Hogarth Press paperback copy of Edith Templeton's first novel, Summer in the Country (1950, published in the US as The Proper Bohemians, which seems to have confused whoever created her Wikipedia page). I know that I read it in late 2009, just as I was starting to expand my horizons, post grad school, into lesser known women authors. It was then a bit more than a year before I proceeded to her second and third novels, Living on Yesterday (1951) and The Island of Desire (1952), also in pleasant Hogarth Press editions from the 1980s. And finally, it was two more years until, just on the verge of beginning this blog (which explains why I've never written in any depth about her before), I tracked down her hard-to-find fourth novel, This Charming Pastime (1955), which Hogarth had declined to reissue. Later on in the 1950s, Templeton began publishing stories in The New Yorker, some of which were gathered in the 2002 collection The Darts of Cupid, which received considerable acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

That Templeton's earlier fiction has remained sadly in obscurity is surely at least in part due to her activities in the intervening decades. In 1966, she published, under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook, an erotic novel called Gordon, which appears to have been a precursor to Fifty Shades of Grey, about the pleasures of female subservience to a dominant male. The book, published by the famous Olympia Press in Paris, gained some notoriety, and was finally reprinted under Templeton's own name in 2003. After 1966, it appears that Templeton, apart from her periodical fiction, fell silent until 1992, when she tried her hand at a mystery novel, Murder in Estoril, which appears to have rehashed some of the sadomasochistic themes first explored in Gordon, and which seems to have had little success.

Edith Templeton, from the jacket of
The Surprise of Cremona

It's perhaps a little bit odd that Random House, having succeeded very nicely with Darts of Cupid, and deciding to proceed with reprinting Gordon, didn't see fit at that point to reprint Templeton's earlier fiction, but it appears that they were very much focused on marketing her as an erotic author and titillating readers with the books' covers, so perhaps the earlier works didn't fit their marketing scheme. And indeed, what a contrast! One has to assume that her obscurity is partly due to the fact that not many publishers could readily consider issuing all of her books in one group, since those most loved by one reader may well be unsatisfactory to another.

A recent sort-through and weeding-out of my bookcases, combined with the extra time allotted to me by COVID-19, brought Templeton back to mind. The three Hogarth paperbacks have held pride of place on an upper shelf of my bookcases since I first read them, but I realized I had forgotten just about everything about them except that they were something special. Glancing through them, I couldn't resist diving in, beginning logically with the first.

I remembered loving Summer in the Country in particular, and that it dealt with an eccentric family in Bohemia, but I certainly didn't recall how shockingly brilliant it was—or indeed just how shocking it is, period. It's an absolutely unique sort of animal, I think—rather like if a Barbara Pym novel had had an illicit love child with one of Dostoevsky's! That might be difficult to imagine, but it should make clear just how unique the book is.

At first, the reader is likely to feel more or less at home, apart perhaps from the setting on a large estate in the countryside outside of Prague. Here resides a splintered family of large landowners now reduced to genteel poverty, led by Tony Birk and Ida Birk-Borovec, a brother and sister, both widowed, Tony a sort of entertaining blowhard who tells it like it is but perhaps has a darker side, and Ida rather patient and practical and philosophical about the pains of life. She sees things as they are, but doesn't always feel it worthwhile to argue about them.

Rounding out the Birk household are Ida's children, a widowed daughter Alice, whose frustrations at her fate have left her preachy and self-righteous, and unmarried Bettine, who never wants to marry (having seen the examples around her), despite Alice's constant bullying. They can still afford to have servants, including Prochazka, the elderly coachman, prone to falling asleep while driving the carriage, and Emma the efficient and all-seeing German maid. Oh, and I've forgotten (as they themselves generally do) Louise, the widowed sister of Tony and Ida, who lives on their estate, having been bought out of her share years before, but to whom they do not speak—as Tony tells a visitor:

Looks like a servant, but worse than a servant, if you know what I mean. Our maids wear black and white aprons. But she wears a black apron, black alpaca. You can't miss it. That's my sister Louise. … Well, we don't talk to her; family matters—you know how it is. But she comes up to the castle year after year and stays there in summer. She is so mean that she will not pay for holidays.

So far so good. The English country comedy transported to Bohemia, one might think. But read on.

Original cover of the 1950 edition

The visitor is Raoul Marek, a sort of fop from Prague, who met the family in town (they also have a town house, despite their financial state—they are property rich and cash poor) and was invited to stay, perhaps as a potential match for poor Bettine. As the novel opens, Tony is leaving to pick Marek up from the station, so our introduction to the eccentricities of the menage is largely through Marek's eyes. Imagine being shown around your host's home and having the following exchange:

'Still, this is a nice and sunny room you've got; it used to be a nursery once.'

'Is that why the windows are barred, Mr. Birk? Very wise, I think. Very good idea, with small children.'

'Lord no. I had that grille put in years before, on the doctor's advice. This was my wife's bedroom, you see. She was melancholic. Always talked of committing suicide. I always said it was stupid to make all this fuss to guard her. If people want to kill themselves, let them, if it gets as bad as that. And it didn't stop her, of course. She took an overdose of sleeping drugs in the end.'

'How terrible for you, Mr. Birk.'

'Well, I don't know. We've all got to die, you know; can't live for ever. Now come and look at the view. Don't get that in Prague, do you, eh?'

Though sometimes the startling revelations are for the reader alone, and Marek remains oblivious, as here a few pages later:

They were discussing the illness of one of the kitchenmaids. Mrs. Birk-Borovec had been nursing her for the past three days, giving her drugs and applying poultices. Now she had recovered.

'Mr. Marek, don't you think that mama is a saint?' asked Alice. 'She did simply everything for the girl. She is wonderful that way, you know.'

'Not at all, Alice,' said her mother dryly. 'If you don't stand over them they don't take their medicine. That's all there is to it.'

'My God, she is businesslike,' thought the young man. It did not occur to him that there was the contrast between two ways of living. Alice, the younger generation, had already been reared in town and was inclined to view everything with a sentimental eye. The old lady had been born and brought up on the estate, and she knew that it is no act of charity if the farmer helps the cow to calve, or ministers to the sprained ankle of his helper. Animals and people alike have to be kept fit.

The test of whether you find this novel as delightful as I do might well be whether you laugh out loud at these two passages or gasp in horror. Not quite a cheerful English drawing-room comedy (as much as I adore those too). This comedy is very much of the "red in tooth and claw" category. But the real story is only just beginning, and gains momentum with the arrival at the estate of Alice's married daughter Margot, who has, we discover, been to all intents and purposes sold off to a wealthy businessman, Oscar Ritter, in exchange for the essential influx of cash to turn the fortunes of the Birk estate around.

One may come to feel, as I did, that Oscar, a needy, unbearable prig who finds everyone terribly lacking except himself ("The old lady raised her eyes and looked at him. An old Army joke, beloved by her brother, flitted through her mind. The whole squadron was out of step; only our Jamie wasn't."), may simply have married the wrong member of the family. Alice the self-righteous martyr might have found him right up her alley, but Margot is much more free and easy—perhaps the only really likable character in the novel. She and Oscar had planned to visit the family together, but Oscar has been held up on business, so rather than waiting devotedly at his side, Margot has come ahead without him. The dangerous element of this is that she is threatening to refuse to go back to him, which in turn threatens the future of the estate that depends so much on his investments. How this tension plays out among this extraordinary, unforgettable cast of characters is brilliantly executed—in fact, amazingly so for a first novel. I've certainly remembered why, more than a decade ago, I felt this was one of the best "lost" novels I'd come across.

If you won't accept my word for it, however, I have someone to back me up. The Hogarth reprints contained new introductions by no lesser figure than Anita Brookner, who certainly knew good fiction when she saw it and who compared Templeton's work to that of Turgenev, Jean Rhys, and Theodor Fontane (whose Effi Briest is a Persephone reprint). She goes on:

Yet although these novels are essentially novels of manners, they are also something more, for running beneath the social comedy, so beautifully conducted by all the principal players, there lie acts of madness, of revenge, and of revolt, resorted to in extreme moments, but—and this is the singular thing—never regretted. It is the strange completeness of these acts, and the density of the context in which they are committed, that give Edith Templeton's novels their unusual savour.

Turgenev, Jean Rhys, Fontane: I would add Schnitzler, for that dash of Viennese concentration on intrigue. All these strains add up to a world of great complexity and apparent simplicity, a world in which everything is foreign and everything has enormous style.

How could you resist? Well, obviously, you shouldn't. Summer in the Country is often hilarious, but also deliciously wry and dark and morbid, and I defy any reader not to gasp in surprise—and, perhaps, in delight, whether they admit it or not—at the ending. It's also rather telling that no one seems to comment on the extraordinary bad luck that's apparent from the fact that just about the entire family is widowed. One may find oneself pausing to consider this when one turns the final page. One might also find oneself inclined to go back and start reading from the beginning.

But I've now turned, rather illogically, to Templeton's fourth novel, This Charming Pastime, to see why it would have been left out of Hogarth's reprints in the 1980s. I think I can already sense why, but that will have to wait for another post. Meanwhile, I've also placed orders for the aforementioned Darts of Cupid and for Templeton's one other published book, which I neglected to mention above: The Surprise of Cremona: One Woman's Adventures in Cremona, Parma, Mantua, Ravenna, Urbino and Arezzo (1954), a highly praised travel book about Templeton's own journey, after her husband's death (widowhood again!), which seems to have become somewhat collectible despite having been reprinted a couple of times. I'm not sure I'll ever be quite desperate enough to sample Gordon or Murder in Estoril, but the travel book and the New Yorker stories sounded too enticing to pass up.

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?