"They sinned. Need one say more?": ELEANOR FARJEON, Miss Granby's Secret (1941)

[Another review from my archives which never got published here. This one I was definitely holding off on publicizing until we could confirm rights and move forward on reprinting it. It's one of my all-time favorite discoveries, and I hope someone else will get round to reprinting it soon.] 

How much did Aunt Addie know?

How much did she feel?

I wouldn't usually begin a review with the final two lines of a novel, but in this case they're uniquely appropriate, and not at all a spoiler, since this entire clever, unexpectedly satisfying novel is clearly about—as well as leaving open to each reader's interpretation—just how much Aunt Addie did know.

Aunt Addie is better known to the world at large as Adelaide Granby, the fabulously successful author of 49 volumes of Victorian purple prose—gushing, melodramatic romantic fiction. Upon her death in 1912, flowers and cards pour in, including one particularly lavish set "From Stanislaw", whom her independent-minded, suffragette grand-niece Pamela confidently asserts to have been "darling Aunt Addie's Grande Passion." 

Rather to Pamela's surprise, she also inherits both Aunt Addie's childhood home and a stack of secret papers, which includes both diaries from Aunt Addie's youth and her first novel, written long ago when she was only 16 and inspired by the love of her life, entitled The Bastard of Pinsk. ("Bastard", 16-year-old Adelaide was convinced, referred to "A very noble Hero of Royal Blood"—she is gracious enough to provide a glossary of terms, which also includes "Pimp", "An exquisite Young Gentleman of Fashion", and "Wore", a woman "who has been worn by Life".)

We, the reader, explore these documents along with Pamela, as well as her conversations with Alicia Linton, Adelaide's old governess who aided and abetted her romance, now residing in a Home for Gentlewomen in Surbiton, and Ada Dancey, daughter of Adelaide's maid and butler, who will play an important role in the unraveling of Aunt Addie's secret (if unravelled it be), to try to find the real-life source of Adelaide's romantic sensibility.

Now, despite some very enticing contemporary reviews of this book, when I saw that it included a 200-page novel-within-a-novel, an attempt at a bodice-ripper by a young girl with a clearly limited understanding of just how bodices get ripped, I confess I had a distinct sinking feeling. I don't typically get on well with novels within novels to begin with (even the universally praised Magpie Murders proved too distracting for me), and I feared that the Young Visiters-type humor would wear thin in much less than 200 pages, however intriguing I found the surrounding narrative from Pamela's perspective. But I have to admit that Eleanor Farjeon (well-known for her children's fiction, but rarely acknowledged for her adult novels—more on that below) pulled it off. The Bastard of Pinsk, though certainly containing some wonderful jokes at the expense of poor Adelaide's ignorance (I couldn't stop giggling at the lines "They sinned. Need one say more?" followed by a footnote "Mem: Find out.-A.G.", and the novel ends with three sisters all expecting the departed Bastard's children at any moment—within hours, perhaps, or even after several years!), is actually a rollicking little page-turner, full of drama, secret identities, and plentiful romance. It's quite genuinely entertaining (with perhaps a bit of a satire on Georgette Heyer?), and in the context of the framing plot with Pamela investigating Adelaide's past, it's surprisingly effective.

I don't want to give the impression that the novel is entirely comic, either. Its structure might evoke A. S. Byatt's Possession, while it's perspective is a curious melding of The Young Visiters and Elizabeth Taylor's Angel, with more than a hint of the nostalgia of Ruby Ferguson's Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary. And yet it ends up producing effects all its own—humor at the expense of Addie's teenage romanticism and ignorance is leavened by a surprisingly touching story told in her naïve way; the acidity that Taylor brought to her portrayal of a silly writer of tortured romances is here rendered as a compassionate attempt to understand an oversheltered Victorian girl's experience of love; and the nostalgia for a simpler time that Farjeon must have intended as part of her 1941 novel's appeal (the brief author bio at the end notes that Miss Granby's Secret was written in a bomb shelter in London) is also undercut by the thoroughly modern Pamela's advocacy of progressive causes (initially the Vote, then others once that is achieved) and her gobsmacked horror at how sheltered and smothered Aunt Addie had been. 

I love novels that can't quite be nailed down. This book is sentimental, yet brutally honest, nostalgic for and horrified by the sentiments of the past, romantic and political, hilarious and poignant, all at the same time. I couldn't begin to say what perspective ends up dominant, as I imagine it could well be quite different for different readers. And as to how much Aunt Addie knew and felt, and whether Stanislaw really was a "Grande Passion", each reader will ultimately have to decide that for themselves as well. I could see the novel triggering some fascinating discussions of what makes a love "real" and how much one really needs to know to experience it…

One final quote, from the opening of The Bastard of Pinsk, which I found doubly humorous because, though clearly a joke involving Addie's ignorance of certain words, it might read rather like a news story about any number of contemporary politicians: 

These beauties were the wards and heirs of their great-uncle, Lord Tarletan of Braddon Hall and elsewhere. Lord Tarletan was a well-known lecher in London, where he enjoyed a wide and broad-minded acquaintance covering every class of society, from pimps to M.Ps.

I often seem to find that authors better known for children's books turn out to be surprisingly entertaining authors of novels for grownups. Margery Sharp, E. Nesbit, Ruby Ferguson, Noel Streatfeild, Verily Anderson, just among those we've reprinted, plus the likes of Rumer Godden, Dodie Smith, and doubtless numerous others I'm forgetting, all wrote entertaining novels for adults as well as their often more famous children's books. So I've meant to get round to Farjeon's adult novels for a long time now. She was quite well-known for her children's books (largely, if I'm not mistaken, for younger children), but also published a number of novels, particularly during World War II, for whatever reason. She was also, as many of you may know, the daughter of a major Victorian novelist, Benjamin Farjeon, and the sister of prolific mystery writer Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.

[Sadly, since drafting this review, I've got hold of several more of Farjeon's novels for grownups, and the magic has not yet repeated itself. Secret manages a delicate balance of themes, as mentioned above, but the others I've sampled have tended more toward coyness or cutesyness. This one, however, remains one to treasure.]