WINIFRED LEAR, The Causeway (1948)

I've actually had this book waiting patiently on my shelves for at least the past year, ever since an anonymous commenter on another post mentioned that Lear's second and final novel, Shady Cloister, was set in a girls' school and therefore belonged on my Grownup School Story List. At that point, copies of Shady Cloister were hard to come by, but there was a tantalizing copy of this one going dirt cheap. I see that I even included it in a book shopping post not long after. I can't imagine why it took me so long to finally read it, but better late than never.

Definitely not sure about the
Betty Smith comparison...

It's a wonderfully odd tale set over the course of about two years—from some time in 1938 until well into the Blitz. The story centers around the rectory in Camberwell in southeast London (thank you, Google), wherein the rector is suffering the unusual aftereffects of a stroke. He seems to have few enough resulting physical limitations, but it has left him hostile, occasionally violent, and—perhaps even worse given his profession—completely averse to his former religious beliefs. (In the novel's opening paragraphs, for example, his daughter Davina notices, "scratched upon the door of the medicine chest, probably with a pair of scissors, the comment: INCENSE IS NONSENSE.") Davina, her Aunt K, and the poor curate Lancaster, who seems most to arouse the rector's ire, all suffer along with him, though the arrival of a new boarder, Rick Watson, whom the rector quite likes, helps to take the heat off of them. Matters are further complicated by 21-year-old Toby, whom the older Davina (in her late thirties) loves passionately but hopelessly, only awaiting the day he will fall for a girl his own age and abandon her, and the officious Aunt Mavis, who arrives for an extended visit a bit later on.

Davina and Rick are the novel's central characters, and one feels they are destined to be together if they can only clear up some sizable misunderstandings and work through their respective issues—Davina her hopeless love for Toby, and Rick his terminal insecurity and class-consciousness, which cause him to lie compulsively in order to hide even the most trivial details of his working-class background:

"I'm supposed to be like my father, except that he's taller. Mother's very petite." In fact, the reverse was true, but it had always seemed to him that there was something faintly disreputable about having a very small father and a tall mother.

A friend of Davina's later sums him up, "He's a cross between the ancient mariner and a spaniel that hasn't been treated nicely." Among other things, he is an aspiring writer, and it is only as time passes and he gains confidence in his creative abilities that his compulsive dishonesty begins to abate.

The rector himself remains largely in the background of the novel, like the rocks that make a river boil and gurgle around them. But he seems to be important to Lear's point here. One might suggest that such a set of side effects as the rector experiences would be unusual in a stroke patient, but that doesn't make the plot line any less entertaining and, at the same time, disturbing and distinctly uncozy.

To put it into psychoanalytic terms, Lear seems to be saying that the stroke has wiped out the rector's regulating superego (his "filter", we might call it these days) and left his primal id in charge. But more importantly for the novel, it seems that he, with his sometimes shocking behavior (right off the bat we learn that he has brutally killed Davina's fox-terrier with a whack from his walking stick), comes to symbolize the darkness that we all must somehow process and place in perspective in order to remain sane and capable of love.

[Davina] began to wonder whether this perhaps was the proper perspective and whether, two hours ago, she had been mistaking farce for tragedy. Perhaps the cumulative effect of living was of more importance than the passion of the moment. … It was only in moments as on the landing this evening when something which overpowered her because it seemed to be the stark truth thrust up its ugly head and she felt like the diver who comes unexpectedly face to face with a monster, unspeakably hideous, and tugs madly at the life-line. In an instant he is hauled up and away and soon there is nothing but the innocent lapping of the surface waters and his own exhaustion to disturb him in retrospect because of what he saw.

In the middle of what is largely a cozy, funny novel with likeable, believable, and interesting characters, such darkness is a bit of a surprise, but I think it might be one of Lear's main points here. If most of the novel is a rollicking romantic comedy and a fairly cheerful portrayal of the leadup to World War II and the early days of the Blitz, we nevertheless here and there get reminders of that sea monster under the surface. There is, for example, a ghoulish story that Rick tells later on, to the rector's evident delight, about two sisters keeping their dead mother in her chair for two years after her death. And there's a very brief but disturbingly vivid description of a child's tragic death in a bombing raid. These instances are short and infrequent, but regular enough that their horror, underlying the cheerful comedy and romance unfolding on the novel's surface, must be intentional and meaningful.

At any rate, I found The Causeway to be great fun and hard to put down. Because the two main characters are such unusual and unlikely lovers, and because they are so well developed and complex, one is by no means sure exactly how (or even if) things will work out for the best. But I never doubted I was in capable hands and that Lear would have a few surprises up her sleeve.

I should have learned my lesson by now about comparing unknown authors to other, more famous writers that lots of folks know and love. But if I foolishly allowed myself to be pressed for comparisons regarding Winifred Lear, I think I'd suggest that she might be the love child of Stella Gibbons and Barbara Pym (with just a twist of Diana Tutton's Guard Your Daughters). Her humor is not riotous by any means, but here are two examples that made me laugh.

I have been working out and doing yoga a bit more again in the hopes of not fitting Rick's grandmother's description as I get older:

Grandma Watson was of immense girth. She had grown like a tree, adding a new ring to her outer man each year, and now, at seventy-nine, had become so cumbersome that on her own admission her legs wouldn't stand it and weren't a bit of use for moving about.

And then, much later when the Blitz is already raging, this little snippet about Aunt Mavis in a crowded shelter made me laugh and definitely evokes Pym's acid sarcasm:

"I would willingly offer you my own bed," said Aunt Mavis, half getting out of it to show what it would look like if she did, "but, as it happens, I seem to have got a nasty bit of cold in my throat."

Clearly, having enjoyed this book so much, I shall now have to move forward with Lear's second (and, sadly, final) novel, the aforementioned Shady Cloister. She also published a much later memoir of her own school days, Down the Rabbit Hole (1975). A big thank you to the anonymous commenter who first put her on my radar!

ROMILLY CAVAN, Beneath the Visiting Moon (1940)

One of the novels that many bloggers—including myself—have been most excited about rediscovering in the past few years is the delightful Guard Your Daughters (1953) by Diana Tutton. I actually read it before I ever started blogging, so never quite got around to reviewing it here, but I've mentioned it glowingly, and you can always refer back to the blogger who seems to have blazed the trail in adoration of the novel—Simon at Stuck in a Book, whose 2012 review of it is here. (A quick Google search will reveal numerous other bloggers who have written about it since.)

Most blog posts about this marvelous, funny, yet surprisingly dark and profound novel go on to note, as I have also done myself, how inexplicable it is that the book remains out of print. On this occasion, however, having now had vast experience as a publisher (ha!), I shall no longer note this, as I am, sadly, no longer at all surprised that the book remains out of print. Ahem. What can I say? We tried. Here's hoping for the future, however.

But I hope that it will pique the interest of Guard Your Daughters fans that that book was constantly brought to mind when I was reading this marvelous novel by Romilly Cavan, and I think Beneath the Visiting Moon absolutely deserves to sit on an ideal bookcase right beside the later novel. Now, I know that's a pretty big claim, but Visiting Moon has many of the same attributes—an eccentric, hilarious family dynamic, charming young girls just coming of age and seeking romance, fabulously eccentric supporting characters, and a dark, tragic backdrop that subtly permeates even the most cheerful scenes.

In this case, the tragic backdrop is, in part, the relentless approach of World War II. Mentioned only in passing here and there throughout much of the novel, the story ends just on the eve of war, at Sarah Fontayne's 18th birthday party, with a sense that the festivities are the last that will be experienced for a long while. The sense of hauntedness throughout undoubtedly stems, then, from the instability of world affairs, but it also stems from other, more personal, elements—disappointment and heartbreak, social inability and financial insecurity, and, in some way, people always being the wrong age for what they want.

The cast of characters could, in less capable hands, be dizzying in its array. There's the aforementioned Sarah, her siblings Philly (short for Philadelphia, no less), Christopher, and quirky little Tom, her rather bewildered widowed mother Elisabeth, a neighbor, Julian, and his children Peter and Bronwen (a child prodigy who has already published her first book), local representatives of society and sophistication in the form of Mrs. Oxford, Lady Pansy, and Mrs. Welwyn, and various other friends and neighbors. A film version would have quite an epic cast—and no doubt an epic budget as well—but it all flows so smoothly and develops so naturally that I was never confused about who was who.

At first glance, Beneath the Visiting Moon seems like any other cozy village tale of family life. The Fontaynes have been left in slight financial straits by the death of their father (they can still afford a servant or two, though, of course). The four siblings are shaken when Elisabeth, a loving but rather dizzy woman, meets new neighbor Julian and the two families look like becoming a rather more intellectual version of The Brady Bunch. Sarah becomes hopelessly infatuated with a thirty-something diplomat who travels all over Europe trying to avert catastrophe. Philly endures being painted by a dull local artist. Bronwen pompously but entertainingly deals with the pressures of a literary life (and tries a bit too hard to lose weight). And, in the end, a valiant attempt is made to revive the decaying, long-neglected ballroom of the family home for Sarah's birthday party—perhaps a symbol of a disintegrating way of life having its last hurrah.

Indeed, much of the delightfully daft dialogue, particularly between the two sisters, Sarah and Philly, seems merely cozy (as well as distinctly Tutton-esque), as in this passage only a few pages into the book:

"I wish you wouldn't wear those stockings to go into the village," Sarah said, her entrancing thoughts diverted. "You look like a schoolgirl."

"I ought to be a schoolgirl," Philly said equably.

"It isn't fair to me," Sarah said sternly. "Everyone classes us together; and what do you think I can make of my life if I'm classed as a schoolgirl? And don't ask me"—she paused to stamp her foot—"what I am making of it, because I know the answer is nothing at all." She glared angrily at her younger sister's offending stockings.

Philly would not have dreamed of asking Sarah such a leading and impertinent question. She squeezed Sarah's thin little hand with her own broader stronger one.

"I'd go back and change now," she whispered, "but my only decent pale ones are full of holes."

"What? Oh, stockings ... " Sarah laughed, the tension gone. "You've broken all the bones in my hand."

But just a couple of pages later, one gets this distinctly unusual description of their village:

The place often had a satisfactory depthless look, with light and shadow lying in neat lozenges of effectively thought-out patterns. Times when windowboxes, slung casually from the second-story windows of houses that were shops on their ground floors and residences above, were not the mere artistic whims of nature-loving dwellers, but the very expression of a street made from a child's single-minded design and carried out with the expert aid of scissors and paint-box and glue. Walking, you felt the steep pull of exacting two-dimensional demands. You were flat with the road and the buildings, at one with a paper-flat aspect of life, as if you were no more than sketched in lightly, as brief human interest, on the final architectural design. This point of view, the girls had found, left you with a most pleasing sense of release from the ordinary irksome pressure of daily life.

Coming only on page 8, this description made me wonder if Cavan wasn’t intentionally highlighting the superficiality of the conventions (idyllic village, perky, eccentric characters, light romance) that she is both using and undercutting in the rest of the novel. In this, too, Cavan's novel is reminiscent of Guard Your Daughters (though as Daughters appeared thirteen years after Visiting Moon, perhaps we should say Tutton's book is reminiscent of Cavan's!), and I think Cavan succeeds in capturing the essence of the "uncozy" novel just as well as (perhaps even better than?!) Tutton did.

Looking back through some of the passages I marked in the novel, I'm surprised even now at how many of the most hilarious parts have just a bit of an added edge, a ghostly darkness lurking beneath the cheerful surface. What, for example, of this passage about the elitist Mrs. Oxford's poor undervalued niece:

"Pansy always was difficult. Emily, sit up." She noticed now, as she had noticed previously, that her granddaughter invariably and incomprehensively blushed at the mention of Lady Pansy's name.

Emily sat up, the blush deepening. How tell anyone of the sense of shame brought by that name? How tell anyone that for years you had mistaken a picture of Lady Pansy, in the awesome fashions of her youth, for an authentic portrait of God, and had said your prayers to it accordingly, night after unnumbered night? That great plumed hat and shawl-like robing, and the prominence that Grandmother had given the picture: was it really any wonder that you had gone on praying to Lady Pansy for so long? But now—when the truth had at last come out—it was not only that Lady Pansy no longer seemed to have any real identity. Neither, alas, had God.

Are we merely to laugh at the daft idealizings and misunderstandings of youth, or are we to note that their result in poor Emily has apparently been an agnostic jadedness?

And then, when Sarah decides to move to London and earn her own living, she inspires this rather irrelevent rant from the formidable Lady Pansy herself:

"I shall be going away to a job soon, but not quite yet."

"You won't like it," Lady Pansy said flatly. "I once had a hat shop and you simply couldn't possibly imagine anything more horrid." Her voice rose indignantly. "All the loathsome little receipts and things people expected! And the obscene foundations lying in wait for you all naked in the workroom! And all the terrible trivia of velvet bows and eye-veils and quills! No—for real soul-destroying disillusion, give me a hat shop."

"I'm not going into a hat shop," Sarah said.

"I should hope not." Angrily she sniffed at the exotic mules. "Horrible little raw foundations reminding you every day how hollow life is when you get down to its bare bones."

Hilarious misunderstandings, perhaps, but one wonders if the hollowness of life "when you get down to its bare bones" isn't one of the themes of the novel as well.

I love these passages that may be read as both surface silliness and more disturbing undercurrents, and dark comedy is one of my favorite things in the world. I'm a firm believer that some things are just too dark and disturbing not to joke about. But of course not every reader will necessarily feel the same. Some readers, too, might be disappointed by the way the novel consistently undercuts any traditional kind of happy ending. It's true that it does this, sort of, but I found the slightly melancholy and anticlimactic closing completely appropriate for a story set at such an uneasy time. And on a more personal level for its main character, I think the ending (I won't spoil it except to note the general tone) is thematically appropriate in capturing the almost simultaneous giddiness and angst of being a teenager and facing tremendous change in oneself even while the world is threatening to collapse around you.

Ultimately, Beneath the Visiting Moon is one of my favorite discoveries in a long, long time, and I happen to know that at least one reader has already sampled it too—as a result of an earlier mention I made of it, where I quoted a review and noted how intriguing it sounded. So feel free to chime in with anything I've forgotten or gotten wrong, Faith!

By the way, Visiting Moon is a surprisingly weighty novel in more ways than one—a big tome weighing in at nearly 400 pages. But how I would have loved if it could have gone on for at least another 400!

Sadly, Cavan (real name Isabel Wilson) published only six novels in all, of which this is the last. The others are Heron (1934, aka The Daughters of Richard Heron), To-morrow Is Also a Day (1935), The Splendour Falls (1936), Characters in Order of Appearance (1938), and Mary Cloud (1939). Of course, I was immediately hot on the trail of more of her books, and have just finished reading one of them, which I'll report on as soon as possible (considering the long trip looming in my future). Sadly, too, although interesting, the other novel didn't at all live up to Visiting Moon. Do any of the other four? Hmmm...

Hopeless No More Part 2: RICHMAL CROMPTON, Mrs Frensham Describes a Circle (1942)

I'm completely embarrassed by how long it has taken me to get back around to the five "no longer hopeless" WWII novels generously made available to me by Grant Hurlock. I reported on the first of them—Ruth Adam's highly entertaining mystery novel Murder in the Home Guard—way back in November, and I promised to keep reporting on them "soon."

Um, yeah. Well, who's to say that I didn't intend for "soon" to mean "nearly two months from now"? But as it turns out, I was darn near too late to refer to this one as any kind of hopeless, as Greyladies happily announced a few weeks ago that they will be reprinting it in February. For now, though, it still counts, as I defy you to find a copy of it anywhere until the Greyladies version is released. (Here's hoping that I'll have to race against time to post on the other three before they get reprinted as well—but somehow I doubt if that will happen.)

Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle is a distinctly odd novel—as odd as its name, in fact, which is meant to imply that the title character comes full circle in the course of Crompton's story (though details of how it applies would give away a bit too much of the plot). In some ways, it's very much a cozy read, with an array of entertaining, quirky, likeable (or pleasantly unlikeable) characters, amusing and interesting situations, and—for the most part—ultimate happy endings. And with a wartime home front setting, no less.

On the other hand, there is some very real darkness lurking around the edges, which perhaps qualifies it as the first "uncozy" I've talked about in a while. I've used that concept a few times before to describe novels that have unexpected depths within what at first appears to be pure ice cream for the brain. In fact, although Crompton's style is quite different from that of Elizabeth Goudge, on a couple of occasions Mrs. Frensham reminded me of Goudge's The Castle on the Hill, one of my favorite World War II novels and one which also has considerable unexpected depth.

This was particularly true in Crompton's descriptions of Mrs. Frensham's relationship with her husband. As the novel opens, Mrs. Frensham is more or less completely isolated from friends and even from her daughter Anice, due to her husband Philip's severe mental illness following a breakdown several years before. He is unable to bear the anxiety caused by visitors, even his own daughter, but Mrs. Frensham refuses to allow him to be hospitalized, which would cause him still more trauma. So they live isolated together, and Mrs. Frensham can only make occasional forays into the life of the village.

Clearly, something will happen to change this situation, and there is an air of inevitability, only a short while later, to the random bomb which falls on their cottage, injuring Mrs. Frensham and killing Philip outright. And Mrs. Frensham's reaction to this loss, when she awakes in hospital, is perhaps a bit surprising:

Mrs. Frensham relaxed against the pillow, and a wave of exultant triumph swept through her. Philip was safe. Life couldn't hurt him any more. Life couldn't hurt her any more, either, for it had only been able to hurt her through him. … Her mind was becoming clearer every moment, so clear that she could face the fears that had preyed on her for so long, the fear that she might die before Philip, that they might take him from her again.

…

The feeling of freedom that uplifted her was strange and unexpected. It was as if she had been carrying a heavy burden and were suddenly relieved of it. Her very soul felt lightened. It didn't even seem to matter who won the war, now that Philip wasn't here to be hurt or frightened. Cruelty and evil and suffering could fill the whole world, for all she cared, now that they couldn't touch Philip. …

I was taken aback at first by such a reaction, but having given it some thought I find it an entirely plausible reaction to the intense stress she has dealt with in trying to protect Philip from reality. Possibly even more surprising, though, is that it's not long until she begins to feel Philip as a sort of phantasmatic presence inside her head, one which even occasionally guides her behavior—even encouraging her to intervene in the lives of other characters, or offer advice she wouldn't have thought of giving herself. A rather interesting twist which, of course, has the result of bringing her out of her isolation.

And the other characters are certainly able to use her and her phantom husband's help. After Philip's death, she stays for a time with her daughter, Anice, whose husband is away in the military, and re-acquaints herself with her grandchildren—Peter, who's yearning to join the R.A.F.; Ellen, who is jealous of her younger sister and bitter because she thinks the boy the likes loves someone else; and Pam, who is happy enough apart from Ellen's constant sniping. And then there are the in-laws, led off by Mrs. Tylney, a domestic dominatrix par excellence (a character type I haven't had a chance to mention lately, though it appears to have been quite common in middlebrow women's fiction), and her poor, beaten-down, manipulated husband, Edmund, and two daughters—Paula, who is devastated and even suicidal following a romance with a married man, and Beryl, neurotically phobic about confrontation but engaged to a man Mrs. Tylney feels is unworthy of the family, a combination that obviously spells trouble. Oh, and let's not forget Miss Fraser, Anice's live-in "mother's help," obsessed with an array of petty grievances against all and sundry, who finds an outlet in her war work at the local A.R.P. headquarters.

When I wrote a while back about Crompton's earlier novel, Leadon Hill, I expressed some frustration with how few of the characters were likeable and how (it seemed to me) self-righteous the main character often seemed toward them. By the time she wrote Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle, however, Crompton had obviously improved her technique considerably, and here a good many of the characters are amusing and likeable even in their imperfections, and those who aren't are, for the most part, presented as having reasons for being what they are. We learn that even Mrs. Tylney, the darkest character of all, is haunted by the death of her youngest son, and may be dominating everyone else around her as a result of her feeling of helplessness at his loss. As a result, this seems like a far more mature novel to me, almost as satisfying as Family Roundabout, the novel Persephone chose to reprint, or Crompton's even later novel, Matty and the Dearingroydes, which was also a Greyladies reprint and which I enthusiastically reviewed a while back.

As with most wartime novels, some of my favorite parts of Mrs. Frensham are the glimpses it offers of home front life. I love the notion (mentioned in other books of the time as well) that folks would brag about their brushes with danger:

Anice, going into Medleigh every day to do her shopping, brought back a report of the gossip and doings of the little town. Everyone seemed to take a pride in being exposed, as they thought, to special danger.

"It's the railway they're after. It runs right at the bottom of our garden."

"They're trying to get that gun encampment on the common. We're practically next door to it."

"They're aiming at the gas-works, you know. It's only a stone's-throw from our house."

While a W.A.A.F. girl, travelling in the same bus as Anice, told her with gloomy satisfaction that whenever she and her friend moved to a fresh billet a bomb seemed to fall in the immediate neighbourhood. " Well, it looks as if someone was giving us away," she said. " I mean, a thing like that can't always be chance."

Later on, there's a mention of "bomb snobs" that I found amusing:

"There were two in the Tube when I was going home last night." … "They were each going all-out and it was a case of Greek meets Greek, because one had been through the Coventry raids and the other through the Plymouth raids. The atmosphere became more and more strained and by the end they were barely on speaking terms."

And I always enjoy references to the clever responses of business-owners whose businesses have been damaged:

A bomb had exploded recently in the middle of High Street and most of the shop windows had been broken. Some shopkeepers had had fresh glass put in, others, less optimistic, had had them boarded up, leaving small holes in the middle through which the contents could be seen. There was a certain fascination about these little peepholes, and more passers-by seemed to look into them than at the fuller displays. A hairdresser's window, not yet mended, bore a notice "We are blasted well open"; and a dyer's and cleaner's, "We are still alive and ready to dye for you''.

That last one might even replace "More open than usual" as my favorite sign on a bomb-damaged retail shop.

All in all, then, I'm so glad this novel will be commercially available again and that others won't find it hopeless at all to get their hands on. I hope some of you check it out, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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

DODIE SMITH, A Tale of Two Families (1970)

This is another quite odd but very enjoyable novel (my favorite kind), but it's also true that perhaps it only peripherally fits this blog.  It was published a full ten years after the period I’m focused on here, and Dodie Smith, who wrote both the perennially popular I Capture the Castle (1948) and the classic children’s book The Hundred and One Dalmations (1956), both still widely read today, might not even fit the criteria of being "lesser-known."

But although I Capture the Castle has remained in print, Smith’s other five adult novels, which the ODNB refers to as “increasingly fanciful,” have mostly remained out-of-print—though judging from their price tags on Amazon they remain coveted by Smith fans.  The first three of those—The New Moon with the Old (1963), The Town in Bloom (1965), and It Ends with Revelations (1967), were finally reprinted in the U.K. by Corsair in 2012, but A Tale of Two Families and Smith’s final novel, The Girl in the Candle-Lit Bath (1978), remain out-of-print.  (And the fact that the Corsair editions are currently remaindered in the U.S. may not bode well for those titles staying in print for long either.)  So that portion of Smith’s oeuvre, at least, certainly seems to qualify as "lesser-known."

A quick Google search reveals that several other readers of the book had experiences similar to mine.  The beginning of the novel does read rather like a play (not too surprising, since Smith was also a successful playwright), and it takes a bit of getting into as the numerous characters and the novel’s "fanciful" premise are introduced.  However, once it does get moving, I found it hard to put down.

The basic plot revolves around two sisters—quirkily named May and June—who happen to be married to two brothers, George and Robert.  George is a successful businessman, charismatic and philandering; Robert is an acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful novelist; May channels her frustrations about George’s occasional flings into a sophisticated façade and careful attention to decorating and homemaking; while June is ineffectual but loving—perhaps too much so, as she seems to be in love with George as well as Robert. 

George and May lease the Dower House of a rather run-down country manor, and invite Robert and June to live in the staff cottage nearby.  Meanwhile, two of the couples' children, Corinna and Hugh, double cousins who are having a luke-warm, semi-incestuous, celibate-unto-marriage relationship (with the marriage placed some time vaguely in the future), remain in the family's London flat but put in occasional weekend appearances.  The brothers' father, Baggy, lives with George and May, and the sisters' glamorous septuagenarian mother, Fran, comes for a long visit.  Sarah, the friendly (and attractive, if it weren’t for her terrible voice) daughter of the manor also plays her part.  And I could hardly forget the curiously stunted, compulsively self-absorbed Aunt Mildred, who comes for a devastating visit.

Most of the key events of the novel take place in the gardens around the houses—including a lilac grove through which diverging and confusing paths pass and a wood where a nightingale sings.  The descriptions of the entire setup are calculated to make anyone with fantasies about English country life (such as those I just recently wrote about in relation to Ruth Adam's A House in the Country) drool with envy, but the garden and woods also seem intended to evoke Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden with its almost magical ability to create chaos and bring out hidden desires.  (The fact that Corinna is a budding actress who has recently stolen the show in As You Like It, outshining the lead actress with her Celia, is a clue—and the image of a second-fiddle stealing the show from a star seems like it ought to be symbolic of something, though I haven’t quite figured out what…)

All of which sounds like the perfect setup for a cozy comedy of love troubled, renegotiated, and rediscovered.  And it is.  Sort of.

In a couple of previous reviews, I’ve floated the concept of—for lack of a better term—the “uncozy,” a novel that has all the makings of a cozy little lark, and indeed can be read and enjoyed as nothing more, but which, if you're inclined to dig a little deeper, may actually subvert that coziness and be more disturbing and more profound than one might expect.  I think A Tale of Two Families has a claim to this designation as well, since—if I’m not reading too much into it, as I am admittedly prone to do—it seems to be surprisingly concerned with sex, and under the surface it may be a rather serious and sometimes dark exploration of female sexuality in particular.

The turning point of the novel, after all, hinges upon a fragile, undersized Dalmation puppy (of course—this is Dodie Smith, after all!), who is just, for the first time, "coming into season" as May calls it (Fran, characteristically, scoffs at this euphemism: "'Such a ridiculous expression,' said Fran. 'Sounds as if she's something to eat. My dogs, no doubt vulgarly, just came on heat.'")  Because of her delicate health, a pregnancy now would be potentially deadly, and there is much concern about keeping her under careful watch or carefully locked in a room.  Her escape from the house at the hands of rather disturbingly loony Aunt Mildred, who enjoys rape fantasies and feels that she simply must allow the dog to have her fling (and perhaps even vicariously enjoy it herself!), precipitates several major plot developments. 

Ahem.

In addition, the dog's instinctive urges seem to be paralleled or contrasted with several of the other characters: Corinna, growing restless in her pure, sexless romance with the saintly Hugh, half-heartedly attempts to seduce him and, when that fails, is driven into the arms of a famous middle-aged actor; June briefly gives in to her lust for George despite her very real love of Robert; Fran, it emerges, may have had a fling with Rudolph Valentino in her girlish days and certainly, like Corinna, had a fling with a famous theatre actor before settling down with May and June's father; and George tries halfheartedly to control his indiscriminate lust, musing at one point about how he relishes pinching young girls' butts.  All of them seem—at least in the somewhat magical setting of the lilac garden and woods—to be driven by, or resisting, or perhaps regretting the loss of, their sexual urges.

And then there's terrible Aunt Mildred, only three years younger than Fran, which puts her at around 69 years old, who is not only terminally (and hilariously) negative and condescending:

At the Dower House, Baggy and Robert came out to greet Mildred, Baggy having decided to please Fran by what he thought of as 'doing the civil' and Robert having been asked, by June, to be on hand. Mildred, her blue eyes at their widest, said to Baggy, 'Why, Mr. Clare!' (Baggy afterwards told Fran, 'She seemed amazed that I was still alive.') To Robert she said brightly, 'How's the writing?' somehow making it sound like a hobby, not a profession. Although she favoured the Dower House with a long look she made no comment on it, and that very fact was somehow an adverse comment.

but also seems stuck in a strange infantile obsession with sex—uninterested in actual intimacy, but perversely fascinated with the sex lives of others.  Her attire reflects her childish self-image:

Almost on Fran's heels came Mildred, in pink, frilled mousseline de soie, the waist up under her arms which dangled from little puffed sleeves. The dress reached to her calves and below it were frilled pantalettes and pink dancing sandals with crossed elastics. Ignoring the group now formed by Fran, Robert and June, she tripped over to the lilac grove, stood on tiptoe with her feet close together, and pulled down a spray to smell. The pose perfectly suggested an illustration to some long-ago child's picture book.

And when she mistakenly thinks that Hugh and Sarah have had a passionate interlude, she is thrilled to have a new fantasy:

He would have been surprised to know that what they'd been doing was of no great interest to Mildred. What mattered was what she intended to imagine them doing. At last she had a new toy. She could take it for walks, think about it before she fell asleep. And she felt sure it would be a lasting toy; she tired of some of them so quickly. But Hugh, this splendid new Hugh who had shouted at her, and that dark handsome girl...she would think about them all the coming week and then take them home with her.

One or two reviews of this novel online mentioned that its weak point was its rather Freudian (or, more accurately, pseudo-Freudian) perspective on sexuality.  As something of a Freudian myself, I don't necessarily agree that a Freudian perspective would be a weakness, though the popular version of Freud in play here—as in most popular culture—is patently absurd.  But regardless, it is certainly true that Mildred is presented as a kind of case study.  Various characters theorize about what caused her to become what she is—including George, who, from a typically offensive, seducer's point of view, suggests that "early and frequent rape might have made a different woman of her…"  [!!!]

But it is really Mildred's arrival that gets the novel rolling along entertainingly, and regardless of the causes of her disturbing behavior, her ultimate function here—apart from the fact that other characters' reactions to her are often quite funny—seems to be to act as the catalyst for the novel's crisis and as a sort of warning of one negative extreme of narcissistic sexuality.  Some of her behaviors are echoed, in milder form, in other women in the novel, so that the novel winds up forming almost a spectrum of various forms that women's sexual experience can take. 

And that seems somewhat remarkable to me, because even in 1970 when this novel was published, representations of actual female desire and sexuality (as opposed to idealized romances or tales of women as glamorous sexual objects) seem to have been fairly rare.  So I found myself impressed by Smith's daring and her ability to include an exploration of female desire in what is ultimately a light, highly-readable, very entertaining tale, without it seeming heavy-handed or lurid or in any way preachy.

One of the most likeable characters is Fran, an example of a sexually-liberated "free spirit" (so appropriate to the late 60s/early 70s period in which the novel is set) who has had a glamourous past and is now poignantly coming to terms with her increasing age, in part through her friendship (and maybe a wee bit of flirtation) with poor Baggy, who has a heart condition himself and has more or less resigned himself to doddering old age. 

We first see Fran with Baggy assuring him that she refuses to have rheumatism: "'I'm a bit stiff sometimes but I take no notice of it. Take notice of stiffness and it calls itself rheumatism. Get your mind off it and it goes away.'" But not long after, while returning from shopping to meet Baggy for tea, she has a fainting spell on the street, and when she arrives for tea and goes to the ladies' room, she sees an empty room on the landing and has a vivid flashback to her youthful Bloomsbury flat and an early, torrid romance:

And now she saw the lilac, masses of it in her two Devon pitchers, three jugs she had borrowed from the crone in the basement—and, of all things, a bucket! Masses and masses of long-stemmed white lilac. And now she could smell it and it didn't smell at all like the lilac at the Dower House now in full bloom. And in a flash, she knew why. What she was smelling in memory was the scent she had used in those old Bloomsbury days, a scent called Le Temps de Lilas. It was that scent which had caused him to inundate her with lilac she had been almost hysterical with pleasure when he arrived positively weighed down with it all. He had put it down on the floor and they had sat amongst it, laughing and kissing. And later… That had been the first time, so long remembered, so long forgotten—and now suddenly there.

But only for a moment, perhaps only for a split second. Then she was back in her seventies, a respectable elderly lady whose legs would no longer run. And she would be very, very glad of a cup of tea.

There is a sad and funny sequel to this later when, resisting the realization that her days of glamourous conquest are at an end, Fran sneaks into the garden after dark and repeatedly—but with limited success—attempts to run about.

The various resolutions in the novel are perhaps, like many of its events, a bit Shakespearean.  And like many of Shakespeare's endings, where the fantastic, passionate behavior of characters in the forest are so often reined in by death or marriage, the resolutions here are perhaps not all completely satisfying.  But the overall effect remains one of a highly entertaining farce, albeit with surprisingly profound and serious undertones.

However "fanciful" A Tale of Two Families might indeed be, though, I find it a bit shocking that it has never been reprinted.  Even if it can't stand up to a comparison with I Capture the Castle (and I don't think it can), it can certainly still be an intriguing companion-piece for it, and surely Castle's multitude of fans would find it interesting and entertaining.  Go figure!

MARY BELL, Summer’s Day (1951)

There are few things so enjoyable to me as sitting down with a book of which I have fairly low expectations, only to find that it is fascinating in all sorts of ways I never would have expected.  That's something that doesn't happen often—call me cynical, but I find that my low expectations are quite often confirmed!—but it certainly happened with Mary Bell's Summer's Day, which has now been added to my top shelf of favorite novels—the ones with which I might well try to stagger out of a burning building, or for which I would scrabble in the rubble if the "big one" ever does hit San Francisco.

I was, in fact, all prepared to write only a rather condescending short post about how, really, I could hardly expect a novel about a girls' school to be exactly my cup of tea, but that it did have some mildly amusing high points.  (I would like to say that that I've learned my lesson about pre-judging books, but alas, I find that I learn slowly…)

The novel does take place in and around a girls' school before, during, and immediately after one summer term fairly soon after the end of World War II.  It features a large cast of entirely believable characters, including teachers, staff, students, and students' families, each with faults and charms, most of them likeable enough (though a few are perhaps likeable only with an effort).  The events are ordinary—the frustrations of youth, the disillusionments of maturity, the drudgery of students and teachers alike, unrequited love, infatuation, and even a seduction. 

But three main things make this, for me, much more than a run-of-the-mill read: the author's vivid attention to detail, which makes reading about a teacher preparing to leave her cottage for a new term as riveting as a major plot development; a brilliantly double-edged sense of humor, which can be riotously funny and darkly melancholy, sometimes at the very same time, and which almost always resonates with the realities and histories of the characters involved; and a depth and underlying seriousness that lends real meaning and significance to even trivial events.

Don't believe me?  Here's some of the aforementioned scene of Miss Meadows, a former classics mistress called out of retirement to fill a staffing need created by the war, preparing to leave her home for the term:

Her kitchen was a small, mouldy-smelling shrine dedicated to the evil spirit of a stove which smoked.  The sitting-room with its pseudo Adam fireplace, willow pattern china and Persian carpet was dustier than she would have liked to know, but at sixty-five she did not see dust very well.  The petals from the wild anemones on the piano made a little white drift on its rosewood surface.

I even found myself compulsively noting the very details I usually glide right over in other novels, not being a particularly visual kind of guy (to such an extent that once, attempting to pick out a throw rug at IKEA, I genuinely couldn't remember the color of the carpeting in an apartment I'd occupied for a year!).  And the reason is that, here, the detail is not just scene-setting or pretty background, but includes careful revelation of characters and their pasts.  Combine the above passage with this one, about Miss Meadows' return to her cottage during a holiday:

Letters, housework, mending, gardening, piled together, loomed like a trackless mountain at the back of her mind but she collected a deck-chair and the Iliad and sat down with her feet in the sun.

Taking just those two passages, you have a pretty clear idea of the life and priorities of one of the novel's most likeable characters—perhaps a stand-in for Bell herself, in the sense that Miss Meadows seems to represent balance and sanity and compassion in the midst of characters in greater turmoil.

As for humor, there are a few out-and-out hilarious scenes, such as this one demonstrating the lack of authority the art master, Mr. Walker, possesses over the girls:

After break the Upper Fifth trooped into the studio with much unnecessary noise.  Told to collect drawing-boards, somebody dropped one, and, as if this disaster were catching, twenty-five more clattered to the ground.  Informed that the grouping from the last class would not do for them, they expressed themselves eager to help and rearranged the room with such vigour that not a piece of furniture was still.  In vain Mr. Walker waved his arms and called upon them to desist while they interpreted his frantic mouthings as further exhortations to toil.  When some ten minutes of the period had been wasted they consented to sit down.

But in most cases, the humor has a deeper purpose.  Imagine the average writer managing to be so funny while packing so much detail and such a vivid sense of character into the following passage, in which Jasmine, a rebellious student yearning for life in the real world, waits outside the house mistress' office to be "corrected" for her latest infringement:

Three ill-mannered little girls went past and grinned at her; Jasmine looked coldly over their heads.  Matron, passing with a glance of quiet satisfaction, received a malevolent glare.  Miss Meadows went by with her lips moving, her eyes on the ground; as she put a pile of translations on her table she distinctly remembered seeing someone close at hand.  She looked into the corridor and asked kindly, “Can I do anything for you, dear?”  Jasmine thanked her and shook her head.  Miss Meadows realised she had been tactless and went away looking as if she thought Jasmine was paying a social call.

…

She was engaged in trying to stare the Giaconda out of countenance when Miss Cottingham, who had not, as Jasmine supposed, been keeping her waiting because she had taken a tip from a dictator but because she had been hastily putting three detective stories and nine undarned stockings behind the cushions, opened the door and beckoned her in.

I still laugh every time I see the "malevolent glare,"  and all of this would have been quite enough to make Summer's Day a highly enjoyable novel—perhaps even one of my favorites.  But in fact, Bell's purpose here is more profound than one would expect. 

When I wrote about Dorothy Evelyn Smith's Miss Plum and Miss Penny, I said one of the things I liked most was how Smith sort of subverted the whole concept of a "cozy" novel—injecting a fascinating depth and darkness into what at first appears to be a simple lark about life in an eccentric village.  Although Summer's Day is not as dark in its humor as Smith's book, it does perhaps belong in the same genre—the "uncozy," you might call it.

For ultimately, it seems to me that Bell's novel is a meditation on the largest themes of all: freedom and its limits, love and loss, ambition and frustration, hope vs. compromise—even mortality itself (for it is surely not coincidental that one of the only literary quotes in this highly literary work is of Shakespeare's "Fear no more the heat of the sun" passage).  Perhaps even the title, which seems quite innocuous, may be meant to suggest that a glorious summer day still must end in night.

Take a look at this passage from the opening of the novel, in which the elderly housemaid, Alice, recalls when the current Matron, Miss Bishop, arrived at the school as a student.  Right away, we know that this is more than a simple school comedy or romance:

The father was dead, the old headmistress in her dotage; Alice was quite certain that Miss Bishop herself did not remember it.  The child, in her opinion, had done well to cry, might reasonably have increased her vehemence had she foreseen herself growing into the detached, successful woman who considered it her duty to be calm and cheerful.  Alice wasted no pity on the past self who had witnessed those tears; she had changed from a young pretty parlour-maid to an old and stout one, with little difference in her state beyond an increase in her salary and her blood pressure.

Later on, we meet May Tern, Jasmine's aunt who adopted her when her parents were killed and who is stuck in a loveless marriage with a dull, demanding churchman:

When her doubts as to the wisdom of the union had become a certainty, and she could see the rest of her life stretching in front of her as a desert of dreary acquiescence, the two-year-old girl had been deposited upon her nearest relatives.  Unlike Mrs. Tern, Jasmine appeared to fear no one; from the first she had bawled with a sturdy indifference to her uncle’s comfort which had immediately endeared her to her aunt.  At sixteen she had formed a bond of mutual resistance with that lady, which, if it could not defeat the Reverend Arthur Tern, could usually circumvent him.  Together they preserved a façade of decorous obedience and enjoyed themselves immensely in his absence.

And later in the book, this brief thought from May on her surname (Tern) made me laugh out loud but is also undoubtedly a bit melancholy:

A ridiculous name, she thought, reaching for one of Arthur’s stamped envelopes.  As if I were a worm.  Only of course I never do.

Get it?

The larger themes of the novel are never heavy-handed.  Bell isn't trying to make any kind of big point or pontificate about anything.  Rather, practically every line just resonates naturally with undercurrents of meaning, and that, it seems to me, is what makes a novel great.

But in addition to the grand themes I already mentioned, there may be one more that's rather surprising.

Scholar Edward Said famously wrote a few years back about the colonial subtexts of Jane Austen's novels, pointing out how many of her characters are in some ways identified with or have made their money from imperialist pursuits.  A lot of Austen fans were annoyed by this or thought it was beside the point, but for me it made Austen's novels that much richer and more complex. 

Surprisingly, some of that same kind of content is present here.  Two of the novels' male characters are stationed or working in Africa, and the gardener, Albert, spent time in Algiers during the war and remembers it vividly.  Jasmine and her friend Sophie romanticize the men's work in naïve and idealized ways, as when Tom asks Jasmine to write to him:

“It’s a long way,” she said, imagining her letter embarking at—would it be Southampton?—and cruising off over the Atlantic, a touch of Mediterranean at Gibraltar, the Atlantic again…

“Will you?” asked Tom, hoping she saw him as a rather heroic figure in a topee, scanning the horizon for the mail.

“Oh, yes!” said Jasmine.  Her letter had arrived, it was being taken from the mail bag by—would it be black hands or white?—black, she was certain.  “I should love to,” she said.  Tom received the smile that was intended for the enormous negro who went bounding up the hill with her letter in his hand.

Rather interesting, too, that she winds up placing herself in Tom's position, receiving the very letter she has sent! 

Even Jasmine's mother gets in on the fantasizing in a humorous way, as when she interrupts Tom's talk about the wilds:

“No, dear, don’t,” May interrupted, for it worried her to think of poor Tom surrounded by cannibals and mosquitoes and striding—she was sure he strode—through endless tracts of heat and dust.

Ultimately, I wondered if the elegiac tone of the novel may perhaps apply to the decline of the British Empire as well, since by the time this novel was written most readers would probably have read Jasmine's fantasies of exotic locales with some irony.  They do seem to hark back to a time when the world really was Britain's oyster.

Before concluding this overlong (and gushing) post, I should point out one of the recurring themes of a lot of the books I've mentioned here: the "maleficent malingerer."  In this case, it's Mr. Walker's terrible mother, who pretends to be weak and helpless in order to control every part of her son's life—even stashing money away in an effort to keep him too poor to marry.  But as Mr. Walker begins to experience a romantic interest (no, don't worry, no spoilers here!), she has difficulty maintaining control, as in the following, hilarious passage that perfectly sums up the passive-aggressive's strategies.  Here, she awaits his return home, unaware that he has lost track of time in feminine company:

In the house his mother removed invisible specks of dust from the carpet and reminded herself to tell her son to wipe his feet.  Suddenly she decided to move the piano and having turned it half-round and rucked up the carpet she waited to be found, martyred and helpless, left to struggle with such odds alone.

…

In the house, Mrs. Walker, despairing of an audience, squeezed two tears on to an antimacassar and pushed the piano back against the wall.

Obviously, I could quote from this novel all day long, because there is hardly a line that isn't worth noting.  But this makes the mystery of Mary Bell's identity even more irritating. 

Original dust jacket (from the Greyladies edition)

When Greyladies reprinted Summer's Day a few years ago, they searched for traces of Bell and were unable to find her or her heirs.

It's unusual, if not unheard of, for a writer to appear out of nowhere, write a really accomplished and fascinating novel, and then vanish again.  It's reminds me of Virginia Woolf's famous speculations about Judith Shakespeare, the equally brilliant (fictional, at least as far as we know) sister of the Bard, who, because of the limitations of women's lives, lack of time and privacy, lack of education and opportunity and independence, never fulfilled her promise. 

The only other trace of Mary Bell in the British Library catalogue is a book called Broken Bonds (1946).  This appears to have been a romance (or at least marketed as such), since it appeared in the "New Moon Series" published by William Stevens, an imprint that appears to have been dedicated to very short romance stories (featuring advertisements geared toward women throughout).  It's not certain that this is the same Mary Bell, but it does seem plausible.

Could Bell have written other works as well?  Could she have published under a pseudonym (or could "Mary Bell" have been a pseudonym itself)?  Perhaps we even know of works written by her under a different name?  Or is it that she wrote other books that never found a publisher?  Could there be unpublished manuscripts somewhere, in the attic of a nephew who doesn't even know that Aunt Mary used to always be scribbling on a notepad?  Or did Mary Bell, like so many other women, devote herself to marriage and motherhood, or to a more stable and lucrative career than writing, and never give her creative urges another thought?

Moreover, I wonder, could Bell have had a husband or brother stationed in Africa or the Middle East, or could she herself have lived there?  Her descriptions of being on a ship in harbor in Africa, and of Albert’s forays into the seedier parts of Algiers, are strikingly vivid (and form a sharp and effective contrast with Jasmine's naïve fantasies of these locales).

Is there any chance that we'll ever find answers to such questions?  Alas, perhaps not.  It's rather maddening to the obsessive-compulsive data-gatherer in me, I can tell you!

But at any rate, I am thankful to Greyladies for retrieving this novel from total obscurity and putting some copies into circulation so that I was able to stumble across it recently. It is now out-of-print again, but it's definitely worthy of being retrieved permanently.  Perhaps Persephone or Capuchin or Bloomsbury or some other savvy publisher should jump on it.  It's certainly better than many of the novels that are reprinted time and again.

Can you tell I liked it?  :-)

[If you haven't already, be sure to check out my subsequent post on Mary Bell's identity. The mystery, or part of it at least, has been solved.]