ELAINE HOWIS, Two more novels and a story collection

This post has gotten bumped and bumped again in the past couple of months, and it's really high time I put it out there if I'm ever going to. I actually read these books ages ago, but then I had publishing announcements to make and other posts to share, and I kept putting this one off. So, it's now or never!

As most of you know if you've been following this blog for a while, my reading tends to be rather random and schizophrenic. I've talked before about how long it takes me to get through all of an author's books, even if I'm a big fan. For me, it's sort of like having a lot of friends that you enjoy spending time with now and then for varying reasons. You don't, after all, just move in with one friend at a time and spend every second together until you've completely exhausted everything you could possibly say to each other!

But I don't know what has happened to me in the past year or so that I seem to be tending toward doing just that. Last year, I got obsessed with the wonderful Elizabeth Fair, who was such an exciting find since neither I nor just about anyone else had ever heard of her and she turned out to be great fun. This year, I've already been writing quite a lot about Rachel Ferguson and my obsessive pursuit of all twelve of her novels (for reasons which are now more obvious). And now, having randomly selected an Elaine Howis novel to sample a while back, I've managed, with some difficulty, to get my hands on all of her other books.

Jacket blurb from
All I Want

With limited results, I have to say, but also rather intriguing ones. She wrote only four novels and one story collection in all, and they're all relatively short, so it hasn't been nearly the epic undertaking that my Ferguson reading has been, and I do still have one, her final novel, Demand Me Nothing (1960), left to read, but here's what I've covered so far.

I can safely say that The Lily Pond remains the cream of the crop for me, but perhaps that's just because I read it first. After that, I went back to her debut, All I Want (1956), which is a bit lighter and more humorous, though still undoubtedly with darker undercurrents. It's about an egomaniacal widower who thoroughly believes in his fantasies of himself—which in fact bear little resemblance to the reality—who moves, with his sister and teenage daughter, to an English village in abidance with his fantasy of someday becoming a country gentleman:

Jonathan was determined to be liked. He was quite sure he would be. Loving the human race as a whole, he yet had little experience of it in the piece; and that little had been wasted. For Jonathan was of those who would not listen, who refused to listen, denying the still, small voice of fact and clinging to the louder and clearer one of theory; and his love of humanity had been largely fostered by the private means which had given him the power to get away from it.

Jonathan is an intriguing, exasperating, and often funny character, but in fact it's really the women around him who stand out in this novel, especially Selina, his beleaguered sister.

Selina, sorting books, continued to breathe shortly and evenly, but a little more shortly and evenly than usual. She considered herself to be a restraining influence on her brother. She never had influenced or restrained him, but the influence and restraint were there, ready to be used, to drag him down from the high places and pull him up from the low ones.

If he wanted another drink she would suggest that he had had enough, and ifhe did not want another one she would say that a good stiff peg would be the very thing for him.

There are a dozen or more standout passages about Selina that I could share, and more about the women of the village and about Emma, Jonathan's tortured, artistic daughter, whose feelings about her pedantic and harassing father are problematic to say the least:

Emma knew of the friendship, and she thought it a strange thing, a fantastic thing, that anyone should want to be with Jonathan. She herself, if she were buried under the grass on which his feet trod, would burrow deeper in the concealment and comfort of the kindly earth that asked no questions and cared not whether she knew wheat from barley.

Wow. Not just your typical teenage angst, that.

There are many such striking images and entertaining passages in All I Want, and the kinds of turns of phrase Howis would use so brilliantly in The Lily Pond are to be found here too, but it ultimately felt that Howis was attempting more here than she achieved (or than I was able to grasp, which could well be the case). For instance, there's a central image of a row of treasured poplars that dominate one edge of Jonathan's property, which come to be a source of conflict between him and the villagers, but what exactly the poplars are meant to represent or suggest rather escaped me.

And that same sense of meanings not quite fully conveyed continued through my reading of some of the stories in Dazzle the Native and of Howis's third novel, Almost an Island. There are seventeen stories in Dazzle the Native, most of them quite short and making full use of Howis's striking turns of phrase and catchy metaphors, but also, sadly, most of them strangely unsatisfying. Indeed, some are outright bewildering.

She seems to have a particular fixation on girls and women who stumble into perilous situations (or, in some cases, perhaps just imagine themselves in peril) with understatedly threatening men. There are four stories here with that theme, and a couple more that vary the theme only slightly. She also takes particular pleasure in leaving her stories' endings ambiguous. Now, generally I have a high tolerance for ambiguous endings—I can gleefully interpret endings to mean three different things, and if I can stretch it to four then I'm ecstatic—but I have to say that in all cases here I found the ambiguity merely puzzling and unsatisfying, rather than ripe for interpretation. Here, to show off my own ignorance, are my notes on one such story, "Meet Me at Five":

Young woman meeting a tardy friend at an empty boarding-house, encounters the caretaker's brother, who has (or she thinks he has) a knife. Imagines she will be murdered, but caretaker shows up, steadfastly denying that his brother has a knife and accusing her of overreacting. Then there is an earlier flashback to the woman's childhood, when her governess apparently went mad and was carried off. Thoroughly bewildering.

Even the stories that aren't structured around some central malevolence often felt somehow incomplete to me, but I should hasten to say that there are some surprising high points. My favorite story here (and I am now fantasizing about the possibility of publishing a collection of excellent stories by "lost" authors, because even lesser authors are often able to muster a really excellent story or two, but alas I imagine getting the rights for a whole slew of stories is a headache I'm not quite ready to tackle yet) was "Man and Boy," in which an old gardener attends the estate sale of Miss Marsham, his former employer, who left a legacy to his wife, also a servant, but left nothing to him. He encounters (or thinks he does) the ghost of Miss Marsham, who helps to make up for her oversight. Humor turns up here quite effectively, and it's all done extremely well.

Humor also greatly strengthens "The Artist," which makes light of the artistic sensibility (perhaps some shades of the sophisticates in The Lily Pond here). Miss Patterson has always fancied herself an artist, and finally has a chance to prove it when an aunt dies and leaves her enough money for a cottage in a village called Artists' Paradise. She begins to paint and is condescended to by her fellow artists, who nevertheless take advantage of her hospitality. In the end, due to a misunderstanding, she is awarded first prize at the annual exhibition for her dreadful-sounding painting "Shrimps at Play." The description of the village and the local squire paints a vivid picture:

There were plenty of them, and all, or nearly all, brethren of the brush, for the village took itself and its name in extreme seriousness. The bearded, fringed and sandalled wore these emblems of their calling with exaggeration, and a slight anxiety lest they should be mistaken for the appendages of lesser men. They held annually an exhibition of their own works at which the squire, deceived for half a lifetime by his wife into thinking himself an admirer of the arts, awarded the title of Best Picture of the Year.

And "Poona" is also a high point, the tale of a super-efficient secretary, Miss Summers, who takes an interest in the exotic feel and décor of a house she passes on her way to work. She discovers it is inhabited by a woman, Mrs. Robinson, who has never been to India but is obsessed by all things India and pretends to have an exotic Indian life even while living in south England. The secretary seizes an opportunity to arrange for Mrs. Robinson to go to India as a companion to a friend of the secretary's aunt, and Mrs. Robinson's reaction is extreme and unexpected. The story is striking for its view of colonialism and colonial fantasies, and also features some of Howis's highly effective metaphors.

It's too bad there aren't more stories of the same quality in this collection. Some readers might be fonder of her eerie or ghostly stories than I am, but as for me, I'll stick with re-reading her lighter-hearted tales.

I was optimistic, then, when I approached her third novel, Almost an Island (1958), which promised, from its description, to be Howis at her light-hearted best. Consider the opening lines, which sound rather like the novel could be a charming update of Enchanted April:

'What a ridiculous advertisement,' Henry said. He spoke with Olympian calm, for how was he to know he would have anything to do with it?

The Daily Telegraph, folded neatly, precisely, lay before him; marmalade at one side, coffee at the other. His glance, arrested for a moment, skimmed down the personal column. But he had finished with the paper. There was a train to catch. He handed it to Julia; and immediately its folded neatness, its precision, swelled, became unmanageable. Sheets loosened, drooped, were gathered up, burst asunder, one drifting to the floor and another sprawling, caught by a mere fragment. She hit it smartly in the middle, reducing that part she had all along decided she would read to uneasy submission.

Here it was: 'Wanted for Summer Months, perhaps longer, three people to share an Enchanted House. Almost an Island.'

'Almost an Island?' repeated Henry, in the irritated voice of an accurate man confronted with a grave misstatement. 'Either it is an island or it is not an island. There can be no "almost" about it.'

Julia is a basically contented but rather stifled wife, and the decision to go to the almost-island for a three month holiday while her husband is on a business trip is a half-hearted rebellion again her husband's chilly orderliness. Julia's arrival at the Villa Rose, and her acquaintance with the main tenant, Mamie, and her other renters, also seem promising, as in these thoughts about two of the other guests:

It was not so much that unhappiness dogged Lisa, as that Lisa dogged unhappiness. Encountering the airy stuff of which husbands are not made, the bogus counts, the splendid cads, the disinherited younger sons, Lisa instantly fell in love. Misunderstandings followed. Switzerland, the Highlands, the South of France followed. Followed the Villa Rose.

Lisa was small and appealing and weak. God save me from weak women, Carl had cried. He might have added: and from designing women, and beautiful women, and foolish women—for God saved him from them all; leading him to a small hut at the bottom of the garden where he lived in peace and unhappiness.

Mamie's distinguishing feature is a tremendous narcissism, tied in with a superficial bohemianism and a constant reworking of slights and insults, real and imagined, as a result of which she frequently rearranges prized pieces of furniture and décor—especially a somewhat shopworn hammock, which is moved from one guest's balcony to another's based on who has offended her most and most recently.

In this novel, too, there's a central image that seems intended to evoke deeper meanings than it succeeds in evoking (again, at least for this reader). A goat suddenly appears on the almost-island, having apparently swum across the small lake that surrounds the house. The Italian gardener and handyman sees it as an ominous portent, Mamie prides herself on the fact that the goat won't leave her side, and its sudden disappearance causes Julia sleepless nights of worry about where it has gone. None of which seemed to add very much to the Howis's eccentric plot.

Alas, all the authors listed on the back
cover of Almost an Island are men, but
some of them do sound intriguing

If only the author had allowed herself to use her considerable skills at humor a bit more frequently and toned down the attempts to be literary and profound, I have a feeling I would be enthusiastically raving about her work right now. As it is, her wonderful sense of humor crops up only infrequently, and too much angst and psychologizing overwhelms the novel. To leave it on a high note, however, here's one more lovely example of Howis at her best, from a dramatic scene near the end of the novel in which some of the characters have lost their treasured, measured cool:

They had been reared in the code of the understatement, the playing down of emotion, and Mamie's rebuke at their agitation wounded their pride as much as if they had been caught screaming in a lifeboat or trampling children in the panic of escape. Worse, there was a vulgarity in it, and they set themselves to calmness and a bland ignoring of what they knew to be there.

I may yet get around to reading Howis's fourth and final novel, Demand Me Nothing (1960), but I have to admit it's not at the very top of my list. Alas, not every author I run across can be a giddy discovery, but this is one time when I wish an author were more readily available in order to be able to see what other readers—possibly more in tune with what Howis was trying to do than I apparently am—would make of her. If anyone has read anything of hers, or does in the future, do let me know what you think!

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!

DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE, The "modern" Colmskirk novels (1945-1955)

One of my favorite subgenres of middlebrow fiction is that dedicated to stories about young women finding careers. It's either a surprisingly small genre or I'm just missing out on a lot of the works that fit the genre, but it's always nice to come across one. [Hmmmm, one wonders if a list of such titles would be a possible goal?]

I wrote very briefly about Dorita Fairlie Bruce's The Serendipity Shop (1947) after I read it on our trip to Italy last year. It got me through my jetlag, for which I was very grateful, and I enjoyed it a lot and immediately bought two more of Bruce's Colmskirk novels for my TBR shelves.

The Colmskirk novels, for those who don't already know, and according to the Girls Gone By intros, were a series of nine novels Bruce wrote in the 1930s to 1950s, all set in or around the same Scottish village of Colmskirk. Four of the novels are truly historical in nature, set well before the 20th century, one more—Wild Goose Quest (1945)—is classed as historical by Girls Gone By because it seems to have been written and be set in the 1930s, and four were "modern" (i.e. set in the late 1940s and early 1950s when they were written). The novels all stand on their own and feature different main characters, though there are both some "guest appearances" by characters from one novel in others of the series and occasional loose connections between modern characters and those from the earlier historical volumes. It's a charming concept, and Colmskirk itself (apparently fictional though based on Largs in North Ayrshire) makes one yearn to visit and perhaps even take up residence. (Admittedly, though, I would take up residence just about anywhere in the U.K. at the drop of a hat—if only immigrating were easier…)

The first of my Colmskirk acquisitions after The Serendipity Shop was Wild Goose Quest, which I confess I was a bit luke-warm on. It had such a promising plot—a sort of treasure hunt involving, among other things, a girl who has lost her memory due to a completely far-fetched personal trauma—but just never really took flight for me (no pun intended, should you be familiar with the plot…). It's entertaining enough, however, and if you find yourself interested in the Colmskirk series, then you'll certainly want to check it out.

After that, I was my usual slow self about getting round to the other book I'd picked up, but when I finally did, any reservations that Wild Goose Quest had inspired were promptly dissipated. Triffeny (1950) is about a spoiled girl yearning for an artistic career in London, who finds herself instead discovering a possible future in the family's pottery studio. I've long known (and you've surely figured out by now) that I'm more likely to get excited about novels with women as main characters than I am about stories featuring men. Go figure. But that might have something to do both with my luke-warm response to Goose, which focused more on male characters, and on my eager enjoyment of Triffeny, which has not only a female lead but several important supporting actresses as well. Plus a "finding a career" plot.

The introduction to the Girls Gone By edition of Triffeny notes that the heroine "must be one of the most quickly reformed teenagers in fiction," and it's true that Bruce's portrayal of Triffeny's recovery from being spoiled is rather blithely unconcerned with realism. But then, I wasn't exactly seeking realism when I picked up the book, and you shouldn't be either, but it was a hugely enjoyable read from beginning to end.

After which, naturally, I had to pick up the remaining two modern Colmskirk novels, The Debatable Mound (1953) and The Bartle Bequest (1955). And The Debatable Mound instantly became my favorite of the series so far. (By the way, GGB hasn't reprinted any of the historical volumes from the series yet, though there was a hint that they might be thinking of it. Fingers crossed that they do.)

The Debatable Mound is all about the arrival of an eccentric archaeologist, his children, and their wonderful middle-aged cousin, Miss Pennycuick, to take possession of a house located next to a mysterious ancient mound. He has purchased the house with the specific intent of digging on the mound and determining its history and purpose, but it emerges that the owner of an adjacent house, the crotchety Admiral Majendie, believes that the mound is his property. The subsequent conflicts and the ways in which family members and other characters both complicate and help resolve the issue are the structure on which the plot rests.

But undoubtedly the principal pleasure of the novel for me is Miss Pennycuick herself, who, although she certainly helps to maintain and watch over the family in the absence of the children's dead mother, also has her fair share of spunk, independent thought, and a tell-it-like-it-is sensibility, setting her apart from the standard "maiden aunt/housekeeper" stock character she at first seems to represent. Her personality and spirit inform the entire plot, even if she is not a constant presence. Here, for example, is Miss Pennycuick telling one of the girls about the car she purchased for herself for the move, and her experiences in learning to drive it:

'I believe,' replied Miss Pennycuick, with modest pride, 'I must have a natural flair for driving; it was no trouble to learn—no trouble at all. Only once did I make a really serious mistake, and that was a week ago, when I put my foot on the exhilarator going into the garage, just as my instructor was opening the door.'

'And was he very much exhilarated?' asked Lalage wickedly.

Miss Pennycuick eyed her with severity.

'Nobody was hurt,' she answered coldly, 'and the door was only slightly damaged.

And here, in a scene at the mound excavation site, is her no-nonsense reaction to the unpleasant use to which the site may have been put:

"I have found undeniable traces of their activities to-day. That stone on which you are sitting, Miss Pennycuick, has undoubtedly flowed over with the blood from human sacrifices.'

Cousin Pen settled herself more comfortably on her seat.

'Very disagreeable, indeed,' she assented, 'but it happened a very long time ago and has been well washed by the rains of several thousand years, so I'll just stay where I am.'

Added to such exchanges, her ongoing conflict with the Admiral about his complete inability to recall her name— and his substitution of such alternates as "Pennyfeather" or "Pennyfarthing"—adds humor to each development of the plot. In fact, of the Dorita Fairlie Bruce novels I've read so far, The Debatable Mound is undoubtedly the funniest and the one most obviously infused with high spirits and energy.

Although Bruce is clearly most famous for her school stories, and although even the Colmskirk novels were likely aimed at (or at least marketed to) a readership of teenagers or young adults, in the case of The Debatable Mound I feel like any fan of humorous village stories would get quite a lot of enjoyment from it. This might also be true of The Serendipity Shop and maybe even Triffeny, but The Debatable Mound in particular reminded me just a bit of Miss Buncle's Book or The Stone of Chastity and other village tales that are among my favorites.

All the more disappointing, then, to proceed eagerly to the final modern Colmskirk novel, The Bartle Bequest. Although this novel again features young working women as central characters, as well as some prominent cameos by characters from the earlier novels, and although it certainly has an entertaining enough plot—involving the establishment of a local museum, the young woman who becomes its first curator, the 16-year-old orphan girl she adopts as her companion and household help, and the sleazy young man who nefariously profits from the new curator's misguided trust—I also found it irritating in a couple of ways.

After I mentioned The Serendipity Shop last year, a reader emailed me and mentioned that she had enjoyed the whole series except for the sexism of The Bartle Bequest, and I think I know what she meant. Without giving too much away, let's just say that these novels, which are otherwise so intriguingly concerned with young women finding career fulfillment, mostly end with them giving up those careers in favor of being wives and mothers. Now, I can take that with a grain of salt, since that was indeed the way things often unfolded for many women in the middle decades of the 20th century, and it may even have been an improvement on their grandmothers' lives, where even a year or two of career fulfillment might have been impossible. But somehow, in The Bartle Bequest, it all just seems a bit more condescending and insulting than in other books in the series.

What's more, there's the case of Miss Pennycuick, whose praises I've already sung above and who appears in a supporting role here. When she first appeared in The Bartle Bequest, I was delighted to encounter her again, but that delight dissipated quickly. By the time this novel begins, Miss Pennycuick is a married woman herself, but more importantly, she seems to have had some sort of psychotic break. We learn, for example, that she has developed a sort of superstitious phobia of Egyptian artifacts such as some of the ones in Professor Crawford's home. What? The woman who shrugs off sitting on a stone where human sacrifices have been performed is now so frightened of the headdress of a young Egyptian woman that she can't bear to have it in the house? This seems quite ridiculous, and one wonders if all the overlapping characters didn't just finally get the best of Bruce, so that she forgot how vividly independent and no-nonsense Miss Pennycuick had been in the earlier novel. Regardless, the affection I felt for Miss Pennycuick in TBM was nowhere to be found while reading TBB. And Professor Crawford himself—a kindly, absent-minded father and scholar in the earlier novel—here appears only once, flying into such a rage that the museum curator tries to lure him into the office so she can lock him in and call the police.

Despite my obvious annoyance at these (mis-)characterizations, I do hasten to mention that these two characters appear only briefly in The Bartle Bequest, so for many readers they may not weaken one's reading experience very much. (And of course if you haven't read The Debatable Mound, then you won't mind them at all.) The novel is quite entertaining otherwise, and certainly worth reading if you've enjoyed the other Colmskirk novels. But while I can imagine re-reading The Serendipity Shop and The Debatable Mound, and quite possibly Triffeny as well, I believe I've finished with The Bartle Bequest for good.

I should note, for fans of Bruce's school stories, that the young curator of the museum in this novel is none other that Primula Mary Beaton, who apparently appears briefly in Bruce's Springdale series. At one point, too, Primula mentions her wartime service as a Wren, during which she became friends with Dimsie, the main character of that series. Among the other guest appearances here are Julia Lendrum, who was introduced in The Serendipity Shop and who seems to be quite a mover and shaker in Colmskirk, as she figures prominently in all the subsequent books. Julia's sister Merran, along with her Serendipity Shop, appear briefly, as does Susan from The Debatable Mound, and Triffeny is mentioned but does not appear in person.

On the whole, I'm very happy to have been introduced to the modern Colmskirk novels, even if I have a few reservations about them. Now, of course, I'm curious about the four historical novels from the series—The King's Curate (1930), Mistress Mariner (1932), A Laverock Lilting (1945), and The Bees on Drumwhinnie (1952). As luck would have it, a random Abe Books search has resulted in an affordable copy of A Laverock Lilting setting forth on its merry way toward my overcrowded shelves even as I write this. The other volumes are either virtually nonexistent (the first two) or prohibitively expensive (the last), so here's hoping that Girls Gone By will come through with new editions of all of them.

STELLA GIBBONS, The Charmers (1965)

A few years ago, when I was in the first throes of my obsession with World War II "home front" reading, I came across Stella Gibbons' lovely novel Westwood (1946), set during the later years of the war and making haunting use of London's bombed out ruins and a general mood of exhaustion in its tale of a young woman's infatuation with the lightly bohemian world of a famous painter and his family.

I've since learned that practically everyone else in the universe seems to love Stella Gibbons mainly because of her debut novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), and many readers are more lukewarm about her other work. But at the time I was ambivalent about Westwood for the opposite reason.  I had been lukewarm on Cold Comfort Farm when I read it several years earlier (is this more or less shocking than my passionate dislike of Rebecca, I wonder???), and I was afraid Westwood might be too much like it. As it turned out, I could almost have believed Westwood was by a completely different author. The humor is understated, the character development stronger, and its themes of change and growth and disillusionment are handled with far more subtlety and depth. (BTW, I finally re-read CCF last year and enjoyed it much more than my first go-round, though it's still far from my favorite Gibbons.)

After Westwood, I moved on to The Bachelor (1943), the only other of Gibbons' wartime novels I could track down. Mind you, I read both of these in beat-up, grungy, highly allergy-inducing wartime editions that hailed from dusty library storage vaults.

Happily, in the last few years, Vintage Classics UK has reprinted a dozen or more of Gibbons' best novels, including the afore-mentioned and both of her other wartime novels, The Rich House (1941) and The Matchmaker (1949), which I also really love. Some of these were made available from the likes of Awesome Books and Book Depository, but not all of them are, so when Andy and I were in London a couple of years ago, I scurried into Hatchard's (surely what heaven would look like for me) and stocked up. Amazingly, it was my only real book splurge in London—apart from a quick and costly trip to the lovely Persephone Books shop, of course—but that (like most of this post so far) is beside the point. At any rate, though, it's embarrassing to admit that it has taken me this long to get around to reading one of the books acquired in that splurge.

The Charmers centers around Christine Smith, a single woman in her fifties or perhaps sixties, who has recently been let go from the office job she held for decades and, as the novel opens, is interviewing for a new position as housekeeper for a group of artistic types who are moving to a large house in Hampstead.  They include a famous actor whose jobs and finances are dwindling, an illustrator for a magazine featuring romantic fiction, and a dress designer—all entertaining and well-developed characters, if not always likeable ones.

Original cover, Hodder & Stoughton edition

We learn early on that, until the fairly recent death of her parents, Christine has lived at home in the role—like that of so many other unmarried daughters—of unpaid servant.  We also learn that she is attempting to break free from the restrictiveness and superficiality of "Mortimer Road" (which she repeatedly describes as being obsessed with the latest electrical gadgets, as if toasters and blenders are their religious idols), but remains haunted by its conservative, bourgeois voice:

Alone under the benevolent glow of the lamps, the rather sturdy figure opened her bad and took out a new-looking cigarette-case and a mildly expensive lighter.  The smoke went down into her lungs with the sensation of mingled discomfort and satisfaction that was becoming familiar.  She coughed.

Christine doesn't smoke.  It's such a relief to us, when all the girls do nowadays.

The inward voice was old and contented.  It had made that remark for more than a quarter of a century, following it with remarks about expense and, as time went on, about horrors which might result from the pernicious habit.

And behind the voice of Mortimer Road seems to lurk a more primal figure, represented for Christine by Mrs. Benson, who was her working class landlady at the boarding house she moved to after her parents death.  Gibbons is often concerned with class relations, and the mutual loathing of Christine and Mrs. Benson comes to mean more than just a humorous interlude:

Hadn't every action of the Smiths, ever since she could remember, been taken with the object of leaving Mrs. Benson as far behind as possible?  Hadn't they scrambled up and away from her as fast and as far as they could scram, taking her position down there for granted, never mentioning her but with contempt and hatred and fear?

Christine gets the job as housekeeper, and is indeed "charmed" by her employers' laid-back, lightly bohemian lifestyle—though it's made clear that they are in fact only somewhat less bourgeois than Christine herself.  ("Real artists don’t get themselves up in special clothes," one of them tells another who fancies herself a potter and has purchased special, colorful and highly fashionable smocks for the purpose.)  Still, their attitudes are liberating to her, and she can think gratefully of her escape from Mrs. Benson when looking out over a garden-party the group is throwing:

Lovely, thought Christine, leaning against the frame of the open window, really lovely.  Oh, I am glad she can't see it; she'd say something about being glad she hadn't to wash all that lot up.  I can never be thankful enough for living with nice people.

And yet, the novel is also about how difficult it is to break away from one's past, from the worldview and sensibility from which one has come, and that's what made the novel particularly interesting for me—perhaps especially since I can relate somewhat to Christine's situation.  Gibbons refuses to oversimplify the process, or to imply that one can ever escape completely, and the result is complex and powerful.  But this might also render Christine a less sympathetic or likeable character for some readers.  For example, she innocently hires a young Anglo-African cleaner and then, when the others react to his presence by trotting out both degrading and idealizing stereotypes, she rather too readily seems to accept their views (even while, it is suggested, she may be physically attracted to him).  She is a flawed, conflicted character, trying to free herself but not always successful.

And Gibbons also shows us another reason total escape may be difficult:

[S]he sometimes had a sensation as if every tradition she had ever held was being swept away in a great flood of novelty, that, though it usually carried her along willingly and even pleasurably, must sometimes be resisted if she were not to feel entirely without roots.

Now, while I found Christine's efforts to escape her stultifying past to be the most thought-provoking part of the novel, I don't want to imply that The Charmers is not, first and foremost, a very sharp, funny novel.  Nearly every page is loaded with Gibbons' sly wit, such as this description, from early in the novel, of a contractor doing renovations on the house:

Mr. Ryan, who was comely and carried no transistor set, began a rigmarole in an unintelligible Irish accent which gradually, for lack of hearers who could understand what he was saying, died away.  He walked off, looking sarcastically at a slide-rule.

While I'm not sure exactly how one looks sarcastically at a slide-rule, I couldn't help but laugh at the thought.  (I have been attempting to gaze snidely at the television and peer mordantly at the dishwasher ever since.)  

And here is Gibbons' description of the mood in the house after the dress designer, Miss Marriott, arrives home with the psychosomatic cold she always gets after each new collection is released:

There now settled over the kitchen an atmosphere suggesting that someone desperately ill had arrived at a log-cabin in the middle of a blizzard.

Even some of the book's most serious topics are handled with frequent humor.  For instance, there is an ongoing theme in the novel about the conflict between those who take an interest in world events and those who are indifferent.  The pseudo-intellectual "charmers" pride themselves on their concern for "The Problems," even when it is clearly completely superficial, as in the following conversation about Christine:

"Do you see any signs of her mind getting wider?"

"From time to time.  But only a very little.  She is quite shockingly indifferent to what's going on in the rest of the world.  The whole of India could starve to death this week-end, for all she cares."

"I don't care much myself."

"I know you don't but at least you do feel guilty…"

Surely a very "middlebrow" perspective, that guilt somehow makes one a superior person!  And there's also this passage about trendy critics who demand social concern in popular culture—which Gibbons seems to feel is every bit as superficial as the lip service the charmers pay to it:

And even Agatha Christie, Mr. Meredith said, had come in for a slating from them over the past few years; presumably because she had made a fortune out of not writing plays about The Problems.  The sight of a tennis-racquet on the stage, said James with an unaccustomed flight of fancy, threw those chaps into the sort of state other chaps got into about blood sports or hanging.

All of these themes and concerns work together in surprisingly complex ways, and I feel—as I always do when I really am challenged and intrigued by a book—that a re-reading would bring to light new depths and discords.  For example, I haven't even mentioned Christine's (sort of) love interest, who plays a crucial role, or the ghost of a singer who was part of the charmers' circle of friends but was killed in the war, or "That Day," a crucial experience Christine has had a few months before the novel begins:

And then she had mislaid, rather than lost, her way for perhaps five or seven minutes, and during that time she had come upon a church, an old church, shadowed by the sweeping branches of a cedar burdened in dazzling snow.  The sight of it, and the long curve of a snow-covered wall bordering the graveyard in which it stood, filled her with an unfamiliar, exquisite emotion.

Perhaps it is impossible for people who have often experienced this feeling to conceive the effect it had upon a mind stunned and dimmed for more than half a century by ugly sounds and commonplace sights, and it is true that Christine's visitor had to find its way, and afterwards, for more than a year now, she had thought of the moment as "That Day", and had wanted to have the feeling again.

This spiritual experience seems to inform Christine's growth away from "Mortimer Road," and when the sensation does return, it may signal Christine's outgrowing of the charmers themselves, so that we are left with a sense that her efforts to push against her own biases and limitations will continue.

Gibbons only published three more novels after The Charmers—though she wrote two more after that which she never attempted to publish (and which were the subject of a rather bogus news release last year which treated them as if they were newly discovered—presumably an effort by her heirs to stir up interest in finally publishing them—here's hoping the effort paid off!).  Written 33 years after Cold Comfort Farm, this is the work of a far more mature writer, who portrays the irony and sadness of life with subtlety and depth, and also with the growing spiritual concerns that were characteristic of her late work.  If you only know the earlier novel, I can't urge you enough to try out some of her later work.  While I might recommend starting with The Rich House or Westwood, The Charmers has become a favorite of mine as well, and provides a good sampling of Gibbons', er, charms.