CATHERINE GAYTON, Those Sinning Girls (1940)

My well-worn copy from the Boston Athenaeum

I was intrigued by Catherine Gayton when I first added her to my Overwhelming List. She seemed to hold some real potential, though her books have been so neglected as to have virtually ceased to exist. From what I could find about her, her handful of historical novels, published in the span of a little over a decade during and after World War II, sounded enticingly like cousins of Georgette Heyer's irresistible historical romances. And when a reader, Grace, mentioned that she had actually tracked one of them down and gave it a thumbs-up, describing it as a sort of middle-class Heyer, I knew I had to try to get my grubby hands on one or more of her books (only a figure of speech, of course—I am nothing if not OCD about hand-washing).

Fortunately for me, the Interlibrary Loan folks at the San Francisco Public Library are heroic in their efforts, and when I finally got around to trying to find a copy, they managed to track down a very worn, bedraggled copy of Gayton's debut from the wonderful Boston Athenaeum, a book described in some contemporary reviews as a novel and in others as a story collection. Easy to see the confusion now, as the book is really a little bit of both. 

Basically, the book is based around the unlikely but entertaining premise that a mid-Victorian, middle-class businessman and his rather puritan wife would agree to allow their four restless daughters (the youngest only 17) to head out into the world for a year to explore and discover—what in much later years might have been called "finding themselves." The four sections, or stories, are devoted to the experiences of each in the big, surprisingly-not-so-bad world. 

It must have been an appealing enough concept for the book's 1940 audience, and indeed it's an appealing enough concept for 2015 (at least for a reader like me), but it rather strains credibility to believe that such would have occurred in 1857. The only explanation offered in the novel is the girls' unlikely bloodline passed down from their oh-so-respectable mother:

From Mary Ann Sinning they inherited Blood; and blood, in their station of life, was difficult either to disguise or to account for.

… Mrs. Sinning was herself of blameless character and entirely hidebound by convention. But her father (who had never bothered to acknowledge this one of many offsprings by farmers' daughters) spent his days in a lively manner; dividing his time between unbridled licence at his estate in Wiltshire and alternate periods of extreme asceticism in a French Carthusian monastery. This odd infusion of fire and brimstone into their otherwise inoffensive blood, explains why Mary, Eliza, Amelia and Deborah Sinning were anxious to try their wings in a sphere unbounded by dusty bookshelves and the quiet streets and gardens of a faded country town. The distressing secret of their mother's birth had been carefully guarded from them, but like all family skeletons, it rattled its bones loudly enough for them to hear, and they relished the existence of a romantic family blot more than all the respectability and substance of being the daughters of Mr. Sinning of Bath.

Of course, numerous young women in 1857 must have felt the urge to try their wings, but for most the urge would have been to no avail. In Gayton's fictional world, however, the Sinning girls' wings do indeed get tried, and with rather implausibly happy-making results. 

Mary, the oldest, with literary ambitions, goes to the Thornes in London—supposedly as governess to the five small Thornes, but really more as a companion to the wild young Miss Thorne, on the verge of her coming out but apparently already rather out as it is. While chasing after her charge, Mary manages to encounter some of the literary elites of the day. Eliza chooses an aristocratic house in Wiltshire, where much is made of the discomforts, including frigid cold and a starvation diet, but is lured away to St. Petersburg and Moscow by a Russian prince with ulterior motives.

Amelia, who dreams of running her own school someday (perhaps a rather surprising aspiration for a young girl in 1857 with little enough education herself), heads to Ravenham in Norfolk, a setting directly out of the Brontës or Ann Radcliffe, complete with abandoned priory rumoured to be haunted by the nuns who were forcibly removed centuries before. Add to that a surly widowed father and the children who have been traumatized by his strictness, and you have the perfect mixture upon which Amelia's incorrigible energy, optimism, and newfangled ideas can work their magic:

Amelia controlled a sudden desire to laugh and looked up for another frank and longer survey of the Ogre of Ravenham Priory. To her surprise and a little to her confusion, she met a straight, uncompromising look in return, from a pair of sunken, melancholy blue eyes that were gazing fixedly at her out of a gaunt, deeply-lined face with a tanned and furrowed skin. Amelia's clear grey eyes were caught and held by that look, until she slowly dropped them, with the colour heightened a little in her cheeks.

Jane Eyre eat your heart out!

And finally, Deborah, the baby of the family at 17, runs away to Paris where's she enslaved as a lady's maid by the terrible Lady Trotter, who uses her to sew all her fineries for high society do's, until she meets a down-to-earth American businessman and his ditzy daughter, in Paris for fashion inspiration to take back with them to their thriving clothing business in New York City.

Jacket description, happily pasted into my library copy

The four young women could practically be taken as representing the major plot lines of 19th century romantic novels, but all of the sections are quite charming and entertaining. Mary's encounters with literary greatness are hard to resist, such as this one:

Mrs. Diggins has many friends in town and took me with her for a call at No. 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea. We found Mrs. Carlyle at tea-drinking and were cordially pressed to join her. Genius was out upon his horse, but I saw his pipes, his books, and his own particular chair, though we dared not penetrate to the garret aloft where he writes, even in his absence. … The wife of Cromwell and Frederick looks frail and sickly, with hollowed cheeks and thin shoulders, but her dark eyes burn with intelligence and her wit, though a trifle caustic, rattles off her tongue with a pretty Lowland burr—

And Gayton's wit and mocking of social elitism is quite effective, particularly in this scene where Deborah talks of her visit to Saratoga Springs, where her fellow visitors believe her to be a Countess:

"Your Mr. Eugene has invited us to stay with him in Louisiana, and that very elderly Mrs. John K. Schuyler asked me to call upon her when we return to New York. So did Mrs. van Binnendyk and the Roosevelts. I told them all I was too busy, as I worked at Gubb's Store."

"Were they surprised that you worked at Gubb's?"

"Oh, not a particle. They asked if I had 'gotten' my ginghams there."

"And you said yes?"

"Of course, Mr. Jones. They were my present from dear old Mr. Gubb. And this Leghorn, Miss Sally and Miss Mamie have copied it. Why, this white cotton parasol with the pink roses—it cost fifty cents, Mr. Jones, from the store here, and Mrs. van Binnendyk bought one just like it, though I know she has a beautiful green silk one. I don't understand it at all. A fifty-cent parasol, Mr. Jones! ... and I only bought it here because I hadn't my real lace one with me. That one was three guineas, that Lady Trotter gave me."

My personal favorite was the section dealing with Amelia's adventures in Ravenham, as Gayton pleasantly satirizes the stereotypes of Gothic tales. But there, as elsewhere, I had one main critique. Since each of the four sections is limited to 50-60 pages, there simply isn't enough room for any of the girls' adventures to fully develop. Each has loads of potential, and makes for enjoyable enough reading, but each only really begins to rollick along when Gayton quickly ties it up and moves on to the next. I wanted them to go on, and to see each of them fleshed out more.

Which, as critiques go, is a rather positive one, I suppose. Clearly, Gayton was a talented storyteller, and created charming (if utterly, utterly implausible) characters and situations. So I remain hopeful that when she later turned her attention to a full-fledged novel, she may have created something really special. If Those Sinning Girls isn't quite that, it's certainly a promising enough beginning.

Reading diary: E. M. CHANNON, MARGERY SHARP

E. M. CHANNON, Little G (1936)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back cover blurb from Greyladies edition of Little G

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

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

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

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

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

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



MARGERY SHARP, The Nutmeg Tree (1937)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LORNA HILL, The Other Miss Perkin (1978)

Since most of you know that this blog hails from beautiful foggy San Francisco, I thought I'd add a note that, although Andy and I were indeed awakened by our special Bay Area alarm clock (i.e. an earthquake) at 3:20 AM this morning, and although it was the largest one I've been in so far (a 6.0), all is well with us and as far as we can tell nothing so much as stirred on our shelves. Sadly, as the epicenter was in the Napa area, there was significant damage there and also several very serious injuries. My thoughts and best wishes go to the folks recovering and cleaning up there.  Now, back to our previously scheduled programming...

I had a wave of good luck a while back finding Greyladies titles at reasonable prices, including several sadly now out-of-print titles.  One of those was this gem of a cozy novel from Lorna Hill, better known for her children’s books, including the “Sadlers Wells” ballet school series and the “Vicarage Family” series.  Late in life, Hill also produced two novels for adults, both published in 1978. 

Yes, I know that 1978 is well after my time period on this blog, but this novel feels like it fits right in nevertheless.  It’s set in the 1950s and seems very much of the mindset and culture of that period.  Hill would have been in her mid-seventies when she wrote it, and so perhaps she was recalling the days when she herself would have been about the titular Miss Perkin’s age.  At any rate, the old-fashioned style and feel of the novel was enough of a selling point for me.

The Other Miss Perkin is an absolutely charming Cinderella story that could sit with head held high (if books had heads that they could hold high, that is) next to Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day on any reader’s bookcase.  The main character is a 40-something orphan who has worked for the eight years since her father's death as an underpaid housekeeper for Linda Anderson, an old school "friend," and her family—husband Harold, daughter Dilys, and son Richard.  We learn right off the bat that she was born to serve:

Miss Perkin was the daughter of a country vicar, the youngest of three children. When her father had first beheld his infant daughter's ugly red face looking up at him from the old wooden cradle, he had exclaimed: "Why, bless my soul! A proper little Martha, if ever there was one!" So Martha she had been christened, and it must be admitted that the name suited her splendidly.

For the most part, she good-naturedly allows the Armstrong family to exploit her because they provide her with the family feeling she lacks elsewhere.  She makes their problems her own, and feels genuine affection for them—particularly Richard, the only one who doesn’t take her utterly for granted.

But—happily for the reader—there is also the “other” Miss Perkin of the novel’s title—the one with a backbone and a strong sense of her own dignity and equality, which is what gives this novel a bit of an edge on some Cinderella tales.  Mind you, it’s about as fluffy and cheerful as a novel can be, and yet Miss Perkin’s sense of her own identity and her strength take it to a higher level and lend it a touch (if perhaps only a touch) of realism.

Hill doesn’t waste much time setting her scene.  Only a few pages into the novel, Miss Perkin receives a shocking phone call informing her she has won first prize in a magazine contest, which she has nearly forgotten entering.  Rather poignantly for a woman who spends all her time in the kitchen or in her tiny bedroom, it’s a home decorating contest, for which Miss Perkin has painstakingly chosen from the pictured decorations to furnish the rooms of a home such as she herself will never (she assumes) possess.  Our heroine is clearly a homemaker-in-waiting!

The contest’s first prize is a trip to New York on a first-class airliner, plus one hundred pounds in spending money.  At first, the beaten-down Martha tells her caller that such a trip would be out of the question for her.  But then, as Linda and Dilys react in their usual self-absorbed ways, that “other” Miss Perkin seems to awaken:

"You don't mean—you can't possibly mean you're thinking of accepting it?" said Mrs. Armstrong, aghast … She certainly didn't relish the thought of her home-help traipsing off to America or somewhere. Whatever would she do without Martha Perkin? Whatever would they all do? Weeks she'd be away no doubt, and Dilys on the brink of an engagement. There'd have to be an engagement-party, she supposed, and no one to clear up the mess afterwards. It was enough to make one's head reel even to think of it. "You can't go, anyway," she added triumphantly. "What would you live on over in America—if that's where you're thinking of going. It costs money, and plenty of it, I've been told, to live over there."

"Yes, it is America," confessed Miss Perkin. "But the money side has all been taken care of. I'm to have one hundred quid—I should say pounds—for expenses. The reporter explained all that to me."

For once in her life, Linda Armstrong was struck dumb with shock.

And suddenly, despite Linda’s warning that perhaps her job would not be waiting for her when she returned, Miss Perkin finds herself rather determined to go, and soon she is on her way, experiencing for the first time the luxury of a first-class train trip to London and then her first-class flight to the U.S.  Along the way, she rather hilariously discovers the pleasures of champagne:

''I'll have another of those, waiter," she said, as the man passed down the gangway with his tray. "They're extra—emely good." Funny, she had meant to say "extraordinarily good" but the other had popped out. The two words were extraordinarily alike. Didn't the waiter think so? Extraordinary, wasn't it? "Couldn't you put it in a tumbler?" she asked him. "It would save a lot of pouring out. Besides, the bubbles tickle my nose. Such a silly little glass!"

And when she determines to use her spending money to travel across the U.S. by train to see the Grand Canyon, and along the way meets widowed, wealthy Mr. Harman, who is tired of the grasping women he meets and charmed by Miss Perkin’s grateful acceptance of his kindness—well, the writing is on the wall, in bold font and perhaps in fluorescent orange.  But the inevitability of the outcome doesn’t detract from its charm, and there are a few unexpected twists.  The necessary complication comes from Mr. Harman’s misunderstanding of her relationship to the Armstrongs—a misunderstanding, that is, of the exact logistics, but a humorously accurate assessment of the family members’ personalities:

Most of the time he was thinking more about Martha Perkin's history than the Grand Canyon's. Her family, for instance. She hadn't told him much about them, but he had put two and two together, and as is so often the case, had added them up wrongly. Harold (her husband) was something in an industrial firm in Whitehaven, which, he gathered, was a small town on the north-west coast of Cumberland, England. She had three children—Dilys, who was learning shorthand and typewriting; Richard, whom she obviously adored, and who was in the car business. Then there was Linda, the eldest. Linda was a bit of a mystery. She clearly didn't have a job. Maybe she was delicate. Between you and me, Mr. Harman didn't think much of Linda—somehow he got the impression that she was a drone, sitting back and manicuring her nails, and letting her mother do all the work. She was beautiful, oh yes. Martha had told Mr. Harman many times how good-looking Linda was, but "handsome is as handsome does," thought he, and he'd like to bet she couldn't hold a candle to her mother—in character, anyway. And as for Harold—his blood boiled at the mere thought of that gentleman.

Re-reading these quotations now makes me rather want to pick up the novel and start it all over again…

There is one small caveat I think I should mention.  Miss Perkin's encounters with African-Americans and American Indians are, for better or worse, predictable enough, with Mr. Harman matter-of-factly dismissing the entire Indian race as lazy and the African-American train waiter speaking in utterly stereotypical Hollywood dialect.  I should add as well, though, that Miss Perkin's own attitude toward these characters—as apparently toward everyone she meets—is one of curiosity and interest rather than hostility or bigotry.  Here is her reaction to the waiter:

“Yo take ma advice, marm. Don' yo go settin' here all de time. Yo go stretch yor legs! There's a wista-dome on dis train, where yo can see most everyt'ing. Yes, marm. Glass all de way round, and dat include de roof. Jest two coaches down de train, marm."

"'All God's children got shoes'," murmured Miss Perkin, feeling she was speaking to Paul Robeson.

"What's dot yo say, marm?"

"Oh, nothing," said Miss Perkin hastily.

Of course, these scenes are not particularly surprising for the time period portrayed, and there certainly doesn’t seem to be any mean-spirited intent, but I do confess that a little of them went a long way with me, and it was fortunate that there is only a very little of them in the novel. 

That said, however, The Other Miss Perkin was so much fun overall that I just had to look a bit more closely at Lorna Hill’s other work.  I have to admit that, from what I've read, the Vicarage Children stories are tempting me quite a lot, but I also checked into Hill's other novel for adults, The Scent of Rosemary, published the same year as Miss Perkin.  Greyladies describes it in their author bio by saying it “draws upon her experiences in hospital.”  I'm not sure whether that's an encouraging description or not, but happily I will soon be able to elaborate on it, as I’ve already snagged a copy of the book, a 1980 paperback reprint in the “Aston Hall Romance” series.

Yes indeed, here I am reading "romance" again...

MABEL ESTHER ALLAN, Return to the West (written 1930s, published 2013)

A while back I spent a weekend being more or less captivated by this strange little novel, but I've had a lot of trouble figuring out how to write about it and how best to explain that captivation (captivity?).

Apparently the earliest surviving fiction by Mabel Esther Allan (best known for her many successful children's books), Return to the West at first seemed certain to be a light, romantic, even rather frivolous story of first love in the Highlands.  But it turned out to pack a bit more of a wallop than I would have expected.  Under it's simple exterior, Return seems to be an understated but surprisingly profound evocation of the emotional turmoil of a young woman who finds love before she's quite ready for it.

Derrin Lennox is 18 and wavering between childhood and adulthood when she comes to Ardglen in the Highlands (based on Glenelg Bay, a setting Allan used in many of her later works). She's on holiday with her rather stodgy, traditional, and perhaps not very happily married parents, and on her first day in Ardglen, Derrin meets a well-known landscape painter, Keith Rossiter.  Rossiter is significantly older than Derrin (it's not spelled out, unless I missed it, but he has had time to establish himself as an artist, and long enough for Derrin to have heard of him in her art classes, which surely makes him, conservatively, at least a decade older?).

But the age difference doesn't prevent Derrin from being swept off her feet, despite—or perhaps in part because of—her parents' disapproval. As Derrin notes, her parents are prone to disapproval:

"The worst of it is," she mused, "that the people mother and father think undesirable are usually the most interesting. All these look terribly desirable. It was always awkward about Nela. She was so awfully clever and had such a lot of ideas, and she just could not remember that there are all sorts of things that are 'unmentionable' at home."

Although her parents are merely sketched out and do not appear frequently in the novel, they do seem to have a rather surly relationship, and this rather cranky coexistence might help explain Derrin's determined resistance to their plans for her future happiness—seeing as how they haven't done such a great job in planning their own.

A few days after Derrin's meeting with Keith, some family friends arrive on their yacht, along with their son Ian, who has long been Derrin's parents' choice for her future husband.  Derrin has always liked Ian—though she has understandably resented having him thrown at her at her opportunity—but having met Keith she now sees Ian as immature and petulant, and she resents his assumption (and that of her parents) that she will marry him.  She has a not-unusual youthful determination to avoid having her life planned out for her, but she is about to learn that life has a way of planning itself out despite youth's best efforts at freedom.

I don't want to give away too much of the story here, since the plot unfolds in a really lovely way and, despite its simplicity, it sometimes achieves an almost mythical tone, which I wouldn't want to spoil. But in order to discuss the novel at all, I really have to mention the central plot complication (which isn't that much of a shocker, but if you really don't want to know, stop reading now).

First, I found one element of Allan's storytelling particularly powerful.  Throughout the novel, Derrin's thoughts and statements reflect a kind of double thinking.  Her feelings are often conflicted, and Allan's prose is adept in showing this youthful uncertainty. Even in the following early passage, in which Derrin has gone, unwillingly, for a sail with Ian on his family's yacht, the conflict is apparent, if subtle:

She sat staring through the streaming panes at the yacht anchored in the bay, dimly visible through the rain and mist. Ian was the complication. Ian with his sulky, boyish mouth and his bombastic manner, his sudden, rather endearing charm.

"I believe," Derrin admitted to herself, "that in time I could have liked him—if mother hadn't said so much in his favour and if I'd never met Keith. But no other man will ever mean anything to me again. I know—I'm sure. Keith's so dear that his darlingness nearly breaks my heart."

Derrin is forever assuring herself of her unquestionable, irrevocable feelings, as she does here, yet her assertions are very often undercut by the details she notices or by her passing thoughts.  Thus, even in stating bluntly that no man could tempt her from Keith, she seems to be revealing—to the reader if not to herself—that Ian just might.  And of course, therein lies the complication...

Mabel Esther Allan

Likewise, there are constant reminders, in the midst of her seemingly mature, stable love for Keith, of her extreme youth and its accompanying restlessness, as here when she goes tobogganing with a village girl several years her junior:

The wind rushed past them; the snow flying from under the runners had a hot sting. Derrin's green eyes blazed. She was a child again, a comrade of Elfreda's. They were completely united by their shared excitement.

And there is a larger conflict in the novel too—between Ardglen and the real, mundane, workaday world.  Derrin and Keith marry and have a lovely daughter, Drina.  They live mainly in London, and for several years they don't make a return visit to Ardglen.  For Derrin, Ardglen is invested with an almost supernatural power to provide happiness and a grounded appreciation for what really matters, while London is presented quite differently.  In London, Derrin finds herself—no doubt like many young married women of the time—somewhat adrift:

She was only twenty-one. Sometimes, in the infrequent moods when she knew youthful longings for crowds of friends, boys and girls laughing and shouting, for complete freedom, she questioned her wisdom in marrying Keith. But always at the thought of life without him her heart contracted in pain. There could be no life without Keith, no happiness any more. He was necessary to her, his every mood, his tenderness, his understanding.

But when Keith was not with her, her boredom grew, fight as she might against it. There was not enough for her to do. The small Sussex house seemed to run itself, the nurse was efficient and Drina was nearly always a picture of shining cleanliness. She read a great deal, and began to take an interest in the lives of painters. She made delicate, embroidered smocks and underwear for Drina, for she was a clever needlewoman.

Here, too, is Derrin's fascinating doublespeak—she questions the wisdom of her marriage and then immediately retracts her questioning, as if her defenses have kicked in and she can't accept what she's just thought.  

And thus is the stage set for Ian's return to the scene:

A man in white was standing by the gate of their house. At the sight of him Derrin's heart leaped in fear. He was tall and broad, with a sun-tanned face and clear blue eyes. In spite of a certain heaviness about the jaw his face was pleasant and attractive. His fair hair was plastered against his head.

I admit that I felt highly ambivalent at this point in the novel, and almost wanted to stop reading.  Ian's reappearance and the events he triggers are a distinctly "uncozy" twist—though the fact that I was worried and annoyed is surely a testament to how Allan had made me care about her characters—perhaps even a testament to her portrayal of Ian himself, who may be an annoyance in the novel but is a charming and never unrealistic or unrelatable one.

Despite my hesitation, I did persist, and I realized I had had too little trust in Allan's abilities.  Even at the very outset of her career, in one of her first writings, she is more subtle and thoughtful in her handling of a difficult situation than many older or more established authors might have been. 

This really is a novel about the intricacies of love and passion, and especially Derrin's own needs and wants—both emotional and sexual, which is perhaps surprising in a novel written in the 1930s. In the end Allan provides a convincing and satisfying ending that doesn't simply erase the ambivalence that has gone before. That, for me, is what lends the novel its lingering, haunting power, and will likely make me re-read it before too long.

I had never read any of Mabel Esther Allan's other works when I picked up Return to the West.  Some of her enormous output of fiction for girls (more than 150 titles in all) has been reprinted by Fidra Books and by Girls Gone By in recent years, however, so it is at least accessible.  Although Allan apparently wrote several adult novels in her youth, before she began to write children's fiction, Return to the West seems to be the only survivor of this period. The introduction to the Greyladies edition of Return to the West is an excerpt from a letter written by Allan to a friend in the 1980s, in which she mentions several other manuscripts now lost or destroyed.  The only adult fiction she published in her lifetime was a mystery novel, Murder at the Flood (1957), written two decades after Return, which Greyladies has also reprinted.  Greyladies has also published two more mysteries, Death Goes to Italy and Death Goes Dancing, which were never published at all in Allan's lifetime.

Since Return to the West is probably now my second favorite Greyladies (next to Mary Bell's Summer's Day, which I've already written about ad nauseum), I immediately placed an order for Murder at the Flood and Death Goes to Italy, and I've picked up the Girls Gone By edition of Margaret Finds a Future (1954).  If these are as enjoyable as I expect them to be, more new acquisitions may have to follow.

In her letter used as the introduction to Return to the West, Allan ends by modestly saying, "Anyway, here it is ... risen from the dead. Maybe it should have stayed dead. But it may interest some people."

Indeed it does.  Though it's hard not to feel a bit of regret for the other novels that preceded it but are now permanently lost...

One of Allan's children's books, which
has been reprinted by Girls Gone By

GEORGETTE HEYER, Bath Tangle (1955)

I've been meaning to get around to sampling a Georgette Heyer novel for at least a couple of years, but it wasn't until I came across this quite lovely hardcover of Bath Tangle on our unexpected trip to San Diego a couple of months ago—and for only about $6 to boot—that I finally took the plunge.  (It's not a valuable edition or anything, just an American reprint from the 1970s, but it's still lovely.)  I recalled being told or reading somewhere that this was one of Heyer's best novels, and the book itself was so seductive (it just felt good in my hands, a concept my fellow book fetishists will surely understand) that I couldn't help jumping right in.  In the end, I had a totally unexpected but rollickingly fun weekend's reading out of it. 

(Although Heyer hardly qualifies as a "lesser-known" author, I can't resist writing a little about the book here.  But as it happens, I have a couple of quite obscure titles winging their way to me via Interlibrary Loan at this moment, so more obscurity will be coming along soon.)

I had expected that my first encounter with Heyer would be one of her mysteries, which have been recommended to me repeatedly.  This was because, somehow, I was never quite sure that a "Regency romance" would be exactly my cup of tea.  But happily it turned out to be exactly the right cup of tea for the moment.

One of Heyer's later novels, Bath Tangle begins intriguingly with two very different young women in mourning.  The younger, Fanny—still quite naïve, inexperienced, and socially insecure—is the widow of the elderly Earl of Spenborough, with whom she shared a short-lived, affectionate, but hardly passionate marriage.  The older is Serena, the Earl's daughter by his first marriage—sophisticated, sharp-witted, always at ease, and indifferent to the gossip she creates at every turn.  The women are close friends, and their situation is immediately interesting because Fanny—though younger and less knowledgeable—is anointed with the respectability of her position as a widow, and is free to act as chaperone or set up her own household, while Serena—far more knowledgeable and far better equipped to take care of herself—is expected to behave as a demure maiden.  Heyer cleverly creates a scenario where the ridiculousness of these social expectations can be frequently highlighted without a trace of heavy-handedness.

The two women set up housekeeping together at the dower house on the Earl's estate (the estate itself having been taken over by the Earl's cousin and his grasping wife), and then, bored, take a house in Bath for a few months.  (Wouldn't we all love to have the leisure to casually take a house in Bath for six months when we happen to be bored?)

The plot is thickened with various well-drawn and entertaining characters.  There's the swarthy (but not terribly attractive?) Marquis of Rotherham, a sharp-tongued, fabulously wealthy Heathcliff-ian figure who was once betrothed to Serena and who has now been made the trustee of her fortune until she marries.  There's Major Kirkby, Serena's love-interest of seven years earlier, whom she was forbidden to marry then due to his poverty, but who has now returned with an unexpectedly inherited estate and money of his own.  There's Serena's aunt, Lady Theresa, with whom she fights but who sounds like someone you'd invite to a cocktail party to keep things lively.  And there's the loathsome Lady Laleham, seeking to make a wealthy marriage for her dim-witted daughter Emily, and Lady Laleham's "dreadfully vulgar" mother, Mrs. Floore, who is hard not to love and who provides a good deal of the novel's comic entertainment.

The plot is as light and fluffy as you might imagine, and it unfolds with a great deal of charm and humor as the romantic winds now and then shift direction.  I'm not going to spoil any of the pleasure of it by going into it here. Suffice it to say that the central attraction is the frequent quarreling between Serena and Rotherham, which surely owes as much to Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing as to Jane Austen.  In fact, Bath Tangle is in itself a quite extensive and entertaining vocabulary lesson, with most of the terms very effective insults which (who knows?) could come in handy someday.  A few examples:

"Sir, you are offensive!" declared Mr. Eaglesham, glaring at him. "I do not hesitate to tell you so!"

"Why should you? I don't hesitate to tell you that you're a muttonhead!"

Or how about:

"I thought he was such a twiddle-poop there wasn't the least harm in letting him go with us to the Gala night."

I'm not even sure I understand what this one means, but I'm certain it's insulting:

"It will be just as well for you if you stop thinking me a bleater, whom you can gull by pitching me your damned gammon!"

In an early scene, a character is "muttering animadversions against pretentious and encroaching old popinjays."  And then there are the ninnyhammers, the pigeon-hearted imbeciles, the marplots, and—my personal favorite—the addle-brained cawkers! 

Apart from the wide array of insults Heyer's vocabulary offers, I had to make Andy look up "ton" and "tonnish" on his cell phone.  Who knew that "ton" can also mean a fashion or trend?!  I thought it was a typo at first.  And I can't wait until the first opportunity (preferably at work) to say that something is "enough to send me into strong convulsions!"

(You can tell I had some fun with this…)

Although the mainstream reviewers quoted on the book's back flap (see pic) were cheerful about Bath Tangle, as a general rule Georgette Heyer and other writers of her ilk—"cozy" writers of rainy day reads, however brilliantly executed their works often are—have never garnered much critical or scholarly attention, even from scholars of the middlebrow such as Nicola Humble.  But that's kind of a shame, because I found that reading this novel in the context of Humble's definitions of the middlebrow was quite a fascinating experience.

I haven't read a lot of historical fiction of any variety, romance or otherwise, but it was striking for me to be reading a work set in the 1810s but to find in it so many of the concerns of its own time period, the 1950s.  For readers facing economically-limited lives in the postwar years, Serena's elegant acceptance of her reduced means (relatively speaking: she can't keep a whole stable of horses, only one—quelle tragédie!) would have made her more relatable, and Fanny's practical ability to manage her household and servants might have been a kind of ideal in itself for women who struggled to do the same.  Even Rotherham, stinking rich though he is, is presented as eschewing the pretensions of the upper class:

"Papa always held to it that with that upbringing, and all the toad-eating and nonsense that surrounded him when he was by far too young to perceive the folly of it, it said a great deal for his  character that he grew up to care so little for pomp and dignity, and of all creatures to dislike most those that flatter him. You will never see Ivo in company with any of the odious hangers-on who fawn on great men, administering all the time to their vanity, you know. He holds such stuff in utter contempt."

And the delightfully "vulgar" Mrs. Floore is undoubtedly a comfortingly lowbrow figure, who even hilariously cuts the Marquis himself down to size when she finally meets him:

"It'll be more to the point if I don't mind him," observed Mrs. Floore, who was clearly in a belligerent mood. "You must excuse me staring at you, my lord, but I never did see such peculiar eyebrows! Now, I shouldn't wonder at it, Emma, my pet, if half the time you thought he was scowling at you it was nothing but the way his eyebrows grow, which he can't help, though, of course, it's a pity."

And if the middlebrow novel tends to flirt with bohemianism—walking the line between what was socially acceptable and what was deliciously outré—then here, too, is the wonderful scene in which Major Kirkby is shocked to come across Serena and Fanny discussing Caroline Lamb's scandalous novel about Lord Byron, Glenarvon (1816).  He is first horrified to learn that it was the Marquis who sent Serena a copy of the book, and they argue about that.  Then just a few minutes later a letter from her Aunt Theresa arrives:

Suddenly Serena uttered a little crow of laughter. "Oh, Hector, you are utterly confounded! No, no, don't look so stiff! It is the funniest thing! My aunt writes to tell me that she is sending me Glenarvon! She says I shall be aux anges over it!"

Not only is Serena sophisticated enough to delight in the scandalous book, but even her stodgier aunt is sharing her delight, and this might have lent Serena just the kind of bohemian glow that middlebrow readers seemed to wholeheartedly embrace.

But although Serena is the novel's ideal heroine—the one in whose shoes the novel's readers would probably most like to imagine themselves (well, I would anyway!)—Fanny is perhaps the more realistic, sympathetic character, a figure closer to the average reader's actual self.  She is a woman making the most of her limitations, and it's hard not to relate to her as well, particularly in the passage where she attempts to explain to the liberated, carefree Serena how a young girl might be forced into a marriage she doesn't want—an explanation that might shed a poignant light on her own marriage to Serena's elderly father:

She saw Fanny shake her head, and fold her lips, and said sharply: "This will not do! If there was any truth in these freakish notions of yours, she need not have accepted his offer!"

Fanny looked up quickly. "Ah, you cannot know—you don't understand, Serena!'"

"Oh, you mean that she dare not disobey her mother? Well, my love, however strictly Lady Laleham may rule her, it is not in her power to force her into a disagreeable marriage. And if she is in such dread of her, she must welcome any chance to escape from her tyranny!"

Fanny gazed at her wonderingly, and then bent over her embroidery again. "I don't think you would ever understand," she said mournfully. "You see, dearest, you grew up under such different circumstances! You never held my lord in awe. Indeed, I was used to think you were his companion rather than his daughter, and I am persuaded neither of you had the least notion of filial obedience! It quite astonished me to hear how he would consult you, and how boldly you maintained your own opinions—and went your own way! I should never have dared to have talked so to my parents, you know. Habits of strict obedience, I think, are not readily overcome. It seems impossible to you that Lady Laleham could force Emily into a distasteful marriage, but it is not impossible. To some girls—to most girls, indeed—the thought of setting up one's own will does not even occur."

First and foremost, however, Bath Tangle is a glorious lark.  If I don't feel compelled to immediately read all of Heyer's other 54 (!!) novels, I nevertheless have no doubt that I'll pick one up the next time I need to lose myself in a smart, funny, utterly entertaining frolic of a novel.  In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Cotillion, written around the same time, has been waiting patiently on my Kindle since the time a year or two ago when the publisher offered it up as a free ebook.  So no doubt the temptation will grow to dive into that one—also considered one of Heyer's best.

And I have promised Tom, a regular reader of the blog and fellow DES-sie, that this Christmas season I will not forget to finally read Heyer's mystery Envious Casca, set at Christmas time and a favorite re-read to get into the Christmas spirit.  (It's probably because of the dysfunctionality of my own family that Christmas and murder seem to go quite logically together!)

I also wonder if any of you brilliant readers have ever gotten your hands on one of Heyer's early, autobiographical novels—Instead of the Thorn (1923), Helen (1928), Pastel (1929), and Barren Corn (1930)—which Heyer reportedly later tried to suppress.  If my information is correct, these are not historical or mysteries, but have contemporary settings and make use of events in Heyer's own life.  It appears that one or more of these may have been reprinted after Heyer's death, but they still aren't easy to track down.  I wonder if they're worth seeking out?