The ups and downs of GWENLLIAN MEYRICK: The Disastrous Visit (1956) & Shed No Tear (1961)

"Come along in, Gilbert, and tell Mrs. Blair you're sorry we're late!"

Everyone watched her turn aside at the doorway, which now awaited the entry of her brother. A shadow fell across the little light-painted passage, and a man stood in the doorway. At that moment, the sun slipped finally behind the houses opposite: the warm gold of the indolent summer afternoon drained away, to be replaced by the first chill of the imminent night. The room, suddenly dark, became darker as Gilbert Fell, a dark man in a dark suit, stood there.

This wonderfully portentous (and, presumably, a bit satirical) passage could almost come from a Muriel Spark novel, or even a Barbara Pym. Alas, however, despite some other charming elements, The Disastrous Visit doesn't live up to this potential. Since last August, I've read all six of Gwenllian Meyrick's novels, which typically combine a dash of humor, some light melodrama, likeable and believable characters (particularly women), and much domesticity in a recipe that I've obviously found irresistible despite some ambivalence (see my previous reviews of Meyrick here). Sadly, however, The Disastrous Visit proved to be, for me, the dregs of her work.

Susan Lockhart works in an antique shop, where she is devoted (at least) to her married employee, and has lived for eight years with her widowed father William, a Civil Servant with a genealogy hobby, in a house owned by William's sister-in-law, Bertha Blair, a businesswoman who has been conveniently out of the way in Australia for many years. Susan also occasionally spends time with Robert Neville, a close friend and occasional flirtation.

A bad photo of a terrible cover: is it
just me or does Bertha look rather
like a beekeeper here?

As the novel opens, Susan and her father have just received the news that Bertha is moving back to England to open a new business and will be living with them. She arrives almost immediately after, well before they expect her, and Susan frets about the disruption to their contented lives. And disruption it turns out to be, as Bertha remodels the house, dividing it into three flats, and invites Kitty Fell and her ominous brother Gilbert from the passage above to live in the basement and be partners in her business. At a party, she also spontaneously invites Branwell Swift, a pompously bleak and self-righteous bestselling novelist (and, pseudonymously, magazine romance writer), to take the upstairs flat with his wishy-washy son Adrian.

It seems like The Disastrous Visit couldn't quite decide if it was a comedy about the disconcerting disruptions of an eccentric aunt, or a crime novel, or a romance (though the ending very much comes down on the side of the most gushing, rather embarrassing romance). The attempt at a vaguely suspenseful subplot involving the Fells didn't work at all for me—it reminded me a bit of one of Agatha Christie's late novels about vague conspiracies and vague dastardly deeds. Plus, by comparison with most of Meyrick's other heroines, Susan comes across as a bit shrill and intolerant in her superiority over everyone else, and Bertha is certainly not one of Meyrick's strong women characters, so one of the main strengths of her other novels is completely missing here.

About the only highlight here is Meyrick's implicit commentary on Branwell Swift's style and methods of writing. This passage, for example, surely reflects some of Meyrick's feelings about the grittier types of fiction that had come into fashion in the 1950s:

"I start with a character," said Branwell, warming to his favourite subject, "someone who is maladjusted or mentally twisted or unhappy or perverted. Then I think of another person with a different abnormal characteristic, throw them together, add one or two more characters, and let the book write itself."

"You don't ever write about normal people?"

"Oh, no, my dear girl. Ordinary people are of no interest to intellectuals."

"Nor happy people?"

"Of course not!" Bran well was shocked. "There is nothing to say about them. Besides, I should never get any reviews."

And surely that little comment about not getting reviews must have been a bit of Meyrick's own frustration coming out, as it seems that her books only rarely got significant critical attention.

Fortunately, Shed No Tear, the last of Meyrick's novels (both the last that I hadn't read and the last she published) was far more satisfying. It might not be on a parr with some of the very best of her work, but it was great fun anyway. It has all the elements of a romantic melodrama, which ought to have been irritating and dull for me, but as in most of her books, Meyrick's characters are so well-defined and wholly realistic that it all seems surprisingly fresh. Again Dorothy Whipple came to mind as the closest comparison, though it's not a precise one, but there's a similar sort of surprising depth brought to even very basic, somewhat clichéd plots.

The novel opens at the wedding of Catherine Lane and Hugo Thornton, at which we overhear some of the wedding guests discussing what a mistake Catherine is making. Hugo, it seems, is a slightly shady character, who has been carrying on with a married woman while flirting with other girls. Everyone seems to be in agreement that she should have married Richard Gibson, a young man who's clearly in love with her but also thoroughly cowed by his mother.

After the wedding scene, we flash back to 20-year-old Catherine's first meeting with Hugo, when she first moves to London to attend art school and share a flat with two girlfriends. Hugo is a charmer, who quickly flits from one of Catherine's roommates to Catherine herself, causing bitterness that lingers well into the novel, but Catherine also hears (and ignores) rumors of his married lover. The two marry, quickly have two children, and are blissfully happy. For a time. But of course the "other woman" lingers in the background.

In part the reason that Shed No Tear is so much more entertaining than The Disastrous Visit is that here we do get the interesting women who are such a wonderful characteristic of most of Meyrick's work. There's Catherine's mother, an acclaimed artist who is perpetually absorbed in her own work and disarmingly unconventional in her perspectives, and Milly (Mrs Mills), who was evacuated with two young daughters during World War II and has remained ever since, her daughters long since married and moved away. Milly is Mrs Lane's staunchest ally and protector of her sacred artistry ("Mrs. Lane's a real artist," says Milly. "You see, she's got no conscience"), as well as a sort of second mother to Catherine. To some extent, when we finally meet her near the end of the novel, the ubiquitous Mrs Seymour, the "other woman", also qualifies. All are intriguing women (of a certain age) who think for themselves, are practical and motivated, and do not define themselves by their relationships with men (even when, as with Mrs Seymour, they quite enjoy such relationships). And I have to add that even Catherine, who at first seems like rather a wet dishmop and an unfortunate choice of heroine, finds some surprising strength of will by the end of the novel, and there is some real satisfaction in seeing her development

The ending of this novel is not entirely satisfactory—Meyrick does seem to have trouble with her "happy ever after" endings, which in today's climate aren't always unproblematic. Many readers would likely find it difficult to be completely ecstatic for Catherine here. On the other hand, plot-wise, Meyrick manages to be just a bit surprising in the end, and it's hard not to think that Catherine has come a long way in an intriguing direction. I rather wish Meyrick had revisited her in a subsequent novel to show us where she gets to.

On a sort of side topic, the portrayal of Catherine's mother—like that of Branwell Swift in The Disastrous Visit—is intriguing for what it might suggest about Meyrick's view of creative artists. For her, her work is above virtually all else (though in the end we do see her maternal instincts kick in as well, so she is by no means inhuman). I was entertained by her arguments against Catherine's marriage:

"You are twenty," she said. "You have the makings of a good artist. You have the ability, the temperament. You want to give it all up to become a suburban housewife in a little box of a house."

…

"Perhaps you'd rather I just lived with him then," retorted Catherine. "It's quite an ordinary thing to do nowadays. I'm always hearing of it."

"That certainly might be less disturbing for your work," said Mrs. Lane thoughtfully.

Catherine was shocked. If one of her friends had said it, she would have accepted it as typical of their generation. But mothers were different. Her friends would laugh indulgently at their limited outlook and their old-fashioned approach to life, but she herself envied girls who had such mothers. It gave them stability and something to fight against when they wanted freedom. Catherine had always had freedom. There had never been anything for her to fight against, and she often felt that this was a big gap in her life.

…

Catherine pushed her fingers through her hair restlessly. "At least we're more natural," she said.

"Certainly. But it's not particularly difficult to be natural. Even the most elementary forms of life are quite good at it."

One wonders how Mrs Lane would have coped had Mr Lane not been killed in the war when Catherine was just a baby, and had Milly not come to live with them around the same time—a baby doesn't tend to wait till a painting is finished before demanding its dinner!

And then there's Milly's observation later on in the novel:

Milly sighed. "Seems to me," she said, twisting the gaudy beads round her neck, "that there are two sorts of artists. There are the ones who recognise they've got obligations towards other people—husbands to look after, or wives to support, or children to bring up—and they're always in a state, trying to follow their art and do what they should for other people. The other sort are the lucky ones who don't have a choice to make. Ones like your Mum, who just go straight for their art and never think of anyone else. No worries for them, no cutting themselves in two all the time."

This passage particularly struck me because I can't help wondering if Meyrick was, to some extent, bemoaning the fact that she is not one of those people. She was, I suspect, one of those people for whom continuing with their art is a struggle and a balancing act. And just perhaps this passage gives some insight into why Shed No Tear wound up as Meyrick's final novel, though she lived another 36 years. Against the Stream, her earlier novel, was focused on a woman trying to balance a satisfying career with her family life, so we know she had given it all considerable thought. Perhaps the "cutting themselves in two all the time" finally became too much?

So, that's that as far as my reading of Meyrick goes. Always rather bittersweet when I finish reading an author I like.

One of the things that first attracted me to Meyrick were some of the distinctive dustjackets her publisher created, and I'm happy that my copy of Shed No Tear came complete with a beautifully-preserved example of them, but that's not really the most exciting part. My copy also arrived with Meyrick's signature on the title page, which is a lovely added touch. And, as I'm one of those people who enjoy old inscriptions inside the front cover, I also liked the original gift inscription from 1961.

And on the topic of Meyrick's lovely dustjackets, after I wrote recently about what I can now say is my favorite of her novels, The Morning-Room (see here), Ann, a very kind reader of this blog, sent me a lovely scan of the dustjacket from her copy of the book. 

I had never so much as glimpsed a copy of that book's cover, and it's absolutely gorgeous, even if Ann and I are in agreement that the characters don't quite look like we imagined them (and we're also in agreement in our enjoyment of that novel). Thanks for sending this along, Ann, and for letting me share it here!

The vicissitudes of postwar housekeeping: GWENLLIAN MEYRICK, The Morning-Room (1950)

I've written about Gwenllian Meyrick a couple of times before (see here), and I seem to be working my way through all six of her novels (and wishing there were more). The Morning-Room, her first novel, was the most difficult to get hold of, and ended up winging its way to me from just about the farthest possible spot within the U.S.—the public library of Bangor, Maine. But it was well worth the effort, as this tale of the postwar housing crisis is Meyrick's lightest and most entertaining tale.

It's a bit difficult to situate Meyrick among the other middlebrow authors of the period. The Morning-Room might be described as something of a cross between Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance and Doris Langley Moore's Not at Home, though it is neither so emotionally complex as the former nor so humorous as the latter. The situation of boarders who turn out to be undesirable is also tied up a bit too neatly at the end (and, in the age of #MeToo, not unproblematically). But despite these weaknesses, Meyrick is so lushly domestic in her quiet little novels of nice people having mild difficulties that I, once again, couldn't put it down.

The novel opens in 1946 as 36-year-old Laura Armitage is searching for a new home for her husband Marcus, soon to be demobilized from the war, and their two children, Caroline and Jamie. It begins quite amusingly with a scene which must have echoed in houses all across the UK during these years:

"Seven bedrooms is too many," said Laura Armitage. "Haven't you got anything with four bedrooms on your books?"

Mr. Evans, the house-agent's clerk, was affronted. He looked so pained that Laura went over her words in her mind, in case she had said something indiscreet.

"Four bedrooms?" he repeated.

"Well, I thought about four," she said humbly.

"Everyone wants a house with four bedrooms, Mrs. Armitage. They usually stipulate for modern conveniences: coke boiler; immersion heater; indoor coal-shed; gas and electric points; garden (but not too large); garage. They also demand a house in not too isolated a position, otherwise the daily help will stop coming as soon as the winter starts."

"How very odd!" remarked Laura. "All that is exactly what I was going to tell you I wanted."

Mr. Evans shut his file with a bang. Most of the papers were loose, and fluttered to the floor, and had to be picked up, which was something of an anti-climax to Mr. Evans' indignant gesture. He was a Welshman with a strong sense of the dramatic.

The house in question is known as South Grove, and Mr Evans ultimately plays a fateful role in her decision to take the house after all, seven bedrooms and all. It just happens that he knows of an absolutely ideal housekeeper, Mrs Mason, who is seeking a place with room enough for her daughter Freda, soon to return from her service with the A.T.S., and the house is conveniently divided between the old servant areas (back of the house) and the old front rooms. Mrs Mason indeed seems to be too good to be true, and of course we know what that means… The original jacket blurb, happily glued inside the Bangor Library copy of the book, sums it all up as follows:

[S]lowly and imperceptibly the morning-room, where Mrs. Mason lived, came to dominate Laura's house, Laura's children and even Laura herself. Then Marcus came home to find that he had known Freda when she was in the A.T.S. And the question is: who is going to take possession of the demobbed warrior? The tension mounts as these convincingly ordinary people drift nearer and nearer to the rocks.

Laura becomes casual friends with Mr Evans, despite their contentious first meeting, and he, along with his new wife who knew the Masons from years earlier, not only plays a role in landing Laura with the Masons, but will finally help rid her of them as well. Along the way, we also meet Laura's widowed sister Helen, who has just met a promising new man, and Marcus's sister and mother.

It's all predictable enough—it doesn't hold a candle to Moore's Not at Home in terms of twists and surprises and unexpected results—but it's still thoroughly readable and enjoyable, and here, unlike in most of Meyrick's novels, there are some very funny moments indeed.

Mr Evans is a bit of a closet socialist, and when he takes Laura to meet the two elderly sisters who are the current owners of South Grove and who are ludicrously class-biased even in the midst of their current poverty, sparks nearly fly:

She lowered herself with an obvious effort into her chair. Laura felt that if she offered to help her, she would only be rebuffed. Mr. Evans, not having had an invitation to sit down, was not quite sure if he ought to do so, and remained standing, planning class extinction for the day when he got into power.

And one of my favorite passages from the entire novel is this subtly morbid description of the impractical kitchen of the new house:

The kitchen was the other side of the passage, opposite the scullery and pantry. It was a huge, depressing room with only one window, which looked on to the yard and a high, dense hedge. The cupboards and woodwork were painted chocolate-brown. There was a deep recess in one wall where the range had once stood. In the middle of this recess, like some malevolent black creature, squatted the boiler. There were hooks in the ceiling big enough to hold a rope and a man at the end of it. The top of the table which stood in the middle of the room was spotted and stained.

There are still two Meyrick novels I haven't yet written about here—The Disastrous Visit (1956), which I have now read, and Shed No Tear (1961), which is resting on my bedside table at this very moment, complete with a lovely dustjacket and an additional delightful bonus, which you'll see at some hopefully not too distant time. 

It's a bit of an odd situation for me, because Meyrick is clearly not as strong an author overall as some of my other favorites. She has a tendency (more in other novels than in The Morning-Room) to sink into melodrama, and there's little that's strikingly original or unique about her writing. And yet, somehow, she has become a favorite of mine in her own right. A big part of it must be her rather ordinary and yet totally relatable heroines—flawed but interesting, and even somewhat feminist (for their time). A strange balance, but one that works surprisingly well.

Guilty pleasures?: GWENLLIAN MEYRICK, The Second Wife (1957) & Change of Air (1952)

As a general rule, I'm opposed to the very concept of guilty pleasures when it comes to choice of reading materials. It always seems to me like a way of being a bit pompous and judgmental about an author or genre, even in the guise of making a down-to-earth confession. If you say that murder mysteries or girl's school stories are your "guilty pleasures", it's really a way of assuring your listeners, in a rather Lady Boxe style (see below for why Lady Boxe has leapt to mind), that of course those books are quite beneath one, but one does enjoy slumming it among the philistines every now and then, doesn't one?

Pshaw, I say. Pshaw!

This is particularly on my mind because Gwenllian Meyrick's novels are precisely the type of books people might call guilty pleasures (though I assure you I feel not a qualm about devouring them like candy). If I had to compare Meyrick to a better-known author, it would have to be Dorothy Whipple, who has undoubtedly been called a guilty pleasure now and then as well, and who similarly focuses on domestic drama and soap-opera-ish plots (in the best possible sense of the word). Whipple's characters are probably more thoroughly developed, and her emotional depth is perhaps greater. And yet Meyrick seems to me just as readable. Perhaps she's Whipple Lite, if one could imagine such a thing. Or perhaps she's the sort of author Whipple herself would have read during a seaside holiday (and felt guilty about it?).

More importantly, though, Meyrick's characters and plots seem to tend to be just a bit skewed, a bit surprising, compared to most cozy middlebrow fiction. Both The Second Wife and Change of Air have what might be described as unhappy endings for their most important female characters (not really a spoiler, as these outcomes are foreshadowed from early in each novel), and yet Meyrick manages to shed a different light on them and presents those endings as more or less happy after all. In the first, a delightfully independent, unconventional woman discovers there's more to life than romance, and in the other, a young girl is heartbroken but undoubtedly the wiser and more mature for the experience.

In The Second Wife, the main character is Louise Merton, the middle-aged neighbor who over several years has become a dear friend to the Howard family next door. She's had a rich and varied life, but her cheerful spinsterhood is called into question when Mary Howard is killed in a car accident. In the aftermath, Louise accompanies the family on a planned trip to Austria in Mary's place, to fill the gap for the Howard children—Nicholas, just finishing his National Service, Kay, just out of school, and Robin, who's still at boarding school—only to find herself falling in love with the widowed Inglis. She's heartbroken when he instead proposes to Christina, a much younger woman (of course) they meet while traveling. But if that plot development sounds a bit like a chapter from a romance novel (and it does occasionally read a bit like that—"But why, Louise wanted to cry, must you talk to me about Christina? Haven't you guessed that I love you? What about your old boast that you always knew what I was thinking?"), where Meyrick takes it is distinctly not, for ultimately Louise, no longer under the influence of love's madness, realizes again how content she is on her own. (And the reader, confronted with Inglis's obliviousness and his foolish attempts to regain his youth, is likely to feel that Louise has dodged a bullet.)

It's really the story of a mature, smart, capable woman whose solitary contentment is threatened by love—and how often do we get a story like that? Even more impressively, although Christina is certainly not likeable at first, and Inglis in mid-life crisis mode is merely ridiculous, Meyrick makes them both completely believable, and Christina grows and evolves in interesting ways, so that one can almost believe, by the end, that she and Inglis will have their own happy ending after all—aided, even, by Louise.

The Louise we get at the end of The Second Wife would, by the way, be more or less my first choice for a next door neighbor/friend. It's hard to resist her annoyance with clothes shopping, for example:

In the meantime, she did some shopping for the holiday. She could not bear buying new clothes. She was always suspicious of the young women who would put the dresses over her head, or leave her alone in the cubicle, feeling defenceless and humiliated in her petticoat, while they fetched more. When they assured her something suited her, she distrusted them: when they were indifferent and expressed no opinion, they gave her an inferiority complex. She knew she was difficult to please: flat-chested and flat-hipped, all the pretty modern dresses hung on her as if they were slung over a kitchen airer. Buying clothes was indeed a depressing business.

But happily, once all that love business begins to run its course, we get a glimpse of her back in her element, happily indifferent to the latest fashions:

When she came back, it was March. The dark skies had lifted, spring winds were blowing, and everything had started to grow. Some women hurry to buy a new hat when spring comes: Louise ordered a load of manure for her roses, and awaited its arrival with exactly the same pleasure. It was a little early to prune and manure her roses, but she decided to do it one blowy, bright week-end.

While The Second Wife revels unapologetically in its soap opera qualities, Change of Air, an earlier novel and only the second Meyrick published, is slightly more uneven at times. It perhaps can't quite make up its mind if it wants to be a cheerful holiday comedy or a romantic melodrama. And yet I found it just as compulsively readable because here too Meyrick excels at creating entirely believable, intelligent characters and placing them in realistic but intriguing situations.

Here, the focus is on Joanna Maitland, the sheltered and complacent daughter of a rich businessman:

She was a tall, handsome girl with that look of unimaginative wholesomeness that English boarding-schools often give to girls. She had a bright colour and an expression of health and unbounded self-confidence.

This was hardly surprising, for Joanna was the only child of a rich father, who had conferred upon her not only the benefits of material comforts but also a pleasing belief in herself as a person of some importance.

In the course of a summer spent by the sea on the South Coast, however, with her parents, family friends Elizabeth and James Conway, their children, James's charming writer brother Edmund, and, unexpectedly, her much-admired former English mistress, Sylvia Fanshawe, Joanna's immature complacency is brought crashing down. Love has a way of doing that in Meyrick's novels—even hopeless loves like Joanna's for Edmund, who very soon only has eyes for Sylvia.

There is certainly more comedy in Change of Air than in The Second Wife. Despite her apparent devotion to Joanna's impossible father Herbert, her mother Emma is difficult not to like, particular in this marvelous scene in which she and Elizabeth reminisce about their girlhood:

Emma put down her knitting and suddenly started to laugh.

''Elizabeth, do you remember when you took an egg to the Robinsons' dance and brought it back unbroken? It was in your coat pocket all the time. In those days we never had evening cloaks or fur coats, did we, and always went off to dances with our outdoor coats over our evening dresses."

She paused to take off her sun-glasses, and Elizabeth went on:

"I'd been feeding the hens for mother that afternoon, and as there was an egg in the nest, I popped it into my coat pocket and forgot all about it. After the dance, some young man drove us home in his car—he was rather solemn and inclined to be sentimental about me—"

"I was sitting behind," said Emma, "and I saw him lean lovingly towards you and you put your hand in your pocket, exclaimed, 'Look what I've done!' and produced the egg!"

"And you piped up from the back seat, 'Now we can have scrambled eggs when we get home!'"

"Did we?"

"Oh, yes, with the help of another couple of eggs. But the young man wouldn't stay: he dropped us at our front door, gave us a frightened look, and was off."

This scene is both amusing and a bit poignant, as it makes one feel how much Emma's natural cheerfulness and humour has likely been stifled by her marriage to Herbert. (On the other hand, she seems to genuinely love her selfish, touchy spouse, so clearly there's no accounting for tastes.)

And indeed, all of the women in this novel are quite vivid. Even Mrs Sharp, the landlady of the family's holiday home is entertaining in her sharp dislike for the Y chromosome:

"Don't you like men, Mrs. Sharp?"

"Well, Miss, the only time I can really do with them is when they're miserable or ill. When I see a man grieving or in pain, well, I feel he's just like a child that wants comfort, and I'll do anything for him. If we could only keep all the men miserable or ill, Miss, needing us to look after them, we'd get along quite nicely. But they don't stay ill or sad, they get uppish, Miss, and upset everything with their noisy, silly ways."

With that attitude, it's inevitable that Mrs Sharp is a comfort to Joanna in her hour of heartbreak.

By comparison, Meyrick's men tend to play supporting roles. Though James is rather funny, it's not entirely apparent why Edmund should have captured Joanna's devotion, and Herbert, well, Herbert could be a psychoanalytic case history in himself:

As a boy, he had made up his mind that the way to have power over people was to be rich; with single-minded determination, he had worked to get rich, and he had succeeded; he had become the richest member of his family—it pleased him to be able to send a cheque from time to time to a needy brother or sister who had mocked him in nursery days. In middle age, when he had become prosperous, he had married a docile and admiring schoolgirl, and their daughter gave him the utmost pride and pleasure. But, even so, he was always finding people who could be quite poor and unimportant, yet have fun in front of his very nose without any help from him. It was very irritating.

And before I forget:

"Let's sit in my car," said Mrs. Fanshawe. "We can see Meg just as well from there."

"Oh, grand," said James, "but our shoes are a bit dirty."

"'Get in, get in, never mind muddy boots,'" answered Mrs. Fanshawe, showing that she very properly knew her 'Diary of a Provincial Lady'.

Mrs. Fanshawe, James and Edmund were unanimous in their opinion of the horribleness of Lady Boxe, while Joanna remained grandly aloof.

How could I not be quite enamored of an author who assumes her readers will have read E. M. Delafield?!

It was fun to see, and I'm sharing them in several of the images in this post, a number of critical blurbs about Meyrick's other books, showing how they were received by some critics (admittedly, the higher brow critics seem to be missing, and perhaps never reviewed these books at all). I'm not completely certain of the comparison to Oscar Wilde, but who knows? I haven't read Meyrick's first novel yet, the one referred to in that blurb, so perhaps I have a pleasant surprise ahead of me! 

Meyrick is certainly not a profound literary author. Indeed, she's not even the most polished of cozy middlebrow writers. But I have found her to be great fun in all three of the novels I've read so far. Alas, there are only six in all, but I've already taken appropriate steps to acquire, by hook or by crook, the other three, so you'll certainly hear more about her.

I plan to save my next Meyrick novel for a quiet, lazy weekend, when I can lose myself for hours in her quiet, intelligent domestic world—without the slightest shiver of guilt.

A 1950s career woman: GWENLLIAN MEYRICK, Against the Stream (1953)

"You're taking a job?" exclaimed Mrs. Wilmot to her daughter, Diana Pemberton. "Oh dear, what has happened to make you decide to do such a thing?"

We can be pretty certain from this opening that Diana's efforts to claim a career for herself, now that her children are all at school, aren't going to go swimmingly. It's not terribly hard to predict just how things will go wrong either (indeed, her mother among others fairly accurately predict the way it will go). But though there's nothing very revolutionary or surprising about Against the Stream, it's an entertaining window on a time from which there aren't a lot of portrayals of career women.

Diana's discussion with her mother follows familiar lines, but occasionally sheds some interesting light on postwar domestic life:

"Family life isn't so uncomplex and one-sided now: girls are given the same education as boys, women don't wait on men, they compete with them for jobs. And there's another thing, Mother. For various reasons, home-making has lost a lot of interest for many of us. We live in small houses with small gardens because we can't afford anything bigger, and if we could, we couldn't get the staff. As for the traditional interests of the housewife—preserving—where's the sugar? The linen-cupboard? We can only afford enough to fill a shelf instead of a cupboard. What's our larder? A row of tins. We can't entertain often, it's too expensive; our houses are too small to have visitors for more than a couple of nights, and anyway, what can we give them to eat? Running a home as one's sole interest can be very dull, Mother. One is reduced to the bare bones of home-making—housework, washing, ironing, shopping and cooking monotonous meals with indifferent materials."

Fortunately for Diana, however, a dream job exactly fitting her qualifications and interests more or less falls into her lap. (Some people have all the luck—why hasn't a lucrative job requiring extensive knowledge of British women writers just happened to fall into my lap, dammit?)

Diana and her husband Rupert live in the fictional village of Hirst, outside of Canterbury, a place known primarily for its nearby Roman fort. During the war, a bombing raid brings to light further evidence of the town's history:

For, during the Baedeker raid upon Canterbury, a stray bomb fell upon a furniture depository in Hirst. It was an odd scene next day: the stuffing out of mattresses hung like macabre blossoms in back-garden fruit-trees, the air was white with down out of burst pillows; a bicycle hung by its handlebars from the sign of The Bull and Butcher; brass-ware from Benares littered the entrance to the County Library, and iron bedsteads, twisted into unlikely shapes by fire, reminded one of the obscurer modern sculptures.

The bomb was, of course, unfortunate for the people who had stored their beds, their bicycles, their Benares brass-ware and so on in the wrecked depository, but had dramatic and exciting results, for it revealed what no one had known before—that there had been a Roman town as well as a Roman fort.

As a result, a wealthy resident has financed the creation of a new museum, and guess who (after 14 years of housewifery and with apparently no other work experience at all) is made the first curator? No, it's not terribly plausible (though in all fairness the position is poorly paid and so perhaps only feasible for a woman with other means of support), but it ensures that the reader, at least a reader interested in historical knowledge, will become invested enough in Diana's work, which we get intriguing glimpses of, to then share her frustration at the thought of losing this stimulation.

In some ways, in fact, Meyrick's strategy here is kind of brilliant. Every time the reader becomes excited about her professional successes (she has great ideas for the museum, she makes an important discovery at a construction site, she gains an admirer in a world-renowned scholar in her field), the reader gets pulled up—like Diana herself—by another domestic conflict or misunderstanding. Thus, the reader's experience echoes Diana's, which means that we pull for her and want her to find a way to keep the job. Of course, the risk is that visiting the heroine's frustrations on readers can compromise their pleasure in reading, but by and large I think Meyrick gets away with it.

The novel doesn't have any solutions to these problems, not surprisingly, and although it has a happy ending of sorts, it's an inevitable compromise (and perhaps no more realistic than her getting this plum job in the first place). But it makes for an interesting read, and Diana's mother in particular is a high point. Much is made of Mrs Wilmot's telephone manner. First, we learn that Diana's father used to have the eccentricity of shouting deafeningly into the phone, unable to believe that his voice needn't be modulated according to the distance he wanted it to cover. But her mother's phone manner is even more striking:

At last she heard someone, and her mother's voice said very crossly:

"Yes?"

Mrs. Wilmot had not a good telephone manner: she had been brought up to write well-worded letters at a writing-desk, not to use the telephone. She had never grown used to it, and her discomfort expressed itself in a furious manner of speaking, quite out of keeping with her character. Diana was used to this furious voice, and was not in the least quelled by it as others were apt to be. Indeed, one timid lady had been so upset by the accusing, abrupt "Yes?" that she had replaced the receiver without ever daring to give her name.

"Mother, something's happened, and I want you to help me."

"Whatever is it?" demanded Mrs. Wilmot, sounding extremely angry, but actually longing to be able to help her family.

And sometimes reading this sort of book can put other books from the time into perspective. Diana is required to go to a conference in York and spend the night, and her reaction seems extreme to modern readers used to occasional travel:

It was so unusual for Diana to be going away without either Rupert or the children, that although it was only a matter of one night she found herself becoming quite dramatic about her departure. She hugged the little boys when she said good-bye to them; she walked to the bus-stop with Marian and kissed her lovingly good-bye in full view of several schoolgirls in the bus, much to  arian's discomfiture; she said to Rupert, "You will meet my train tomorrow night, won't you?" as though she was arriving at London Airport after a dash of thousands of miles across five continents. By the time Joyce arrived she was quite strung up, and felt like tearfully imploring her not to desert the children, on the emotional level of Mrs. Micawber's declaration of her own fidelity to Mr. Micawber—which would have surprised Joyce very much.

For me, this scene evoked the Provincial Lady's fretting over her departures for London and, later, America, which I always thought were merely meant as exaggerated and self-deprecatingly humorous. But as PL was making such departures two decades before Diana's, and furthermore was leaving her husband and family for literary pursuits, it becomes a bit easier to see how conflicted she likely would have been.

Going into reading this novel, the sum total of my knowledge of Gwenllian Meyrick was:

1) Born 5 Sept 1908 in Norwich, married Orrell Hamilton Strafford 1934, died Gloucestershire 21 Feb 1997, full name Gwenllian Clara Richmond Meyrick/Strafford.

2) Listed as a teacher on a 1930 passenger list.

3) Author of six novels 1950-1961. The fourth, The Disastrous Visit (1956), was described by a bookseller as "Novel set among an ordinary family in London in the 1950's." I also found a blurb about the last, Shed No Tear (1961): "Catherine, a twenty-year-old art student, married Hugo Thornton knowing that he had been attached to the elegant Mrs. Olivia Seymour, but after a while Hugo begins to tire of family life."

4) Some of the dustjackets of her books are adorable, and her name is distinctly melodious (though I learned from a web search that if her first name is pronounced in traditional Welsh fashion, there is no earthly way I can make the required "ll" sound).

So, there wasn't a lot here to really justify my flagging her to track down her books, but for whatever reason (honestly, it was probably the dustjackets) I've intended to do so for ages. Will I be tracking down more of her novels? I think I might actually. I can't help but wonder if her other novels are as "issue" oriented as this one. If they are, they could be similarly interesting time capsules, and if they're not, it would be interesting to see how entertaining she can make a more conventional plot.

Stay tuned!