Guest review by Jude Hayland: THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett

 

"A masterpiece that has long been overlooked as Bennett appears to have slipped out of bookish fashion."

Initially a short story writer for women’s magazines, Jude Hayland was published extensively both in the UK and internationally for many years. After completing an M.A. with distinction in Creative and Critical Writing, she switched to writing full length fiction and has now written four novels with a fifth close to completion. Her genre is best described as book group fiction, concerned with the complexities of families and relationships, although her fifth is something of a departure with a setting in London during WW2. She also blogs on all matters writerly, runs creative writing workshops and particularly enjoys sharing her near lifelong reading and writing experiences through talks to U3a and similar groups.

No wonder Arnold Bennett despised the literati of his day and avoided their company - a victim of their snobbery and Virginia Woolf’s outright mockery of his writing, he remained disdainful his whole life of the elitism he found amongst his contemporaries.

Yet he was extremely successful financially and extraordinarily prolific. Between 1892 and 1931, he wrote 34 novels, endless articles and reviews, short stories, plays and wrote a daily journal. He also spent some years as an editor at Woman Magazine which, he claimed, helped him to learn a great deal about the secret nature of women as well as about ‘frocks and household management.’

I agree with him. Bennett’s ability to explore the emotions and complexities of his female characters, to portray them with acute sensitivity and insight is, for me, one of the highlights of his novels.

The Old Wives’ Tale was published in 1908 and I first read it at the age of 20, prescribed reading for the Modern Fiction course of my English Lit degree. I loved it then – for its narrative, spanning the second half of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th, the carefully evoked settings of provincial Bursley in the Potteries and Paris, and the host of vividly and sympathetically drawn characters.

But coming back to the novel, decades later, is to find, of course, so very much more.

Bennett sets his protagonists against the backdrop of key social and political moments in both Bursley and Paris and such events certainly play an overarching role. But it is really the effect of time itself upon human lives that is his subject, the inevitable yet bewildering rapid passing of time – something that was of no particular interest when I read the novel at the age of 20 but decades on, resounds starkly.

Constance and Sophia Baines, sisters appropriately defined by their names, grow up in the family drapers’ shop in the square in Bursley with conflicting desires for their lives. Constance, biddable, acquiescent, anticipates a predicable path whilst Sophia, restless, rebellious, seeks something far beyond such a prescribed existence. Rashly eloping with the handsome travelling salesman, Gerald Scales, she is soon living with him somewhat precariously in Paris.

Bennett himself was living in Paris when he wrote the novel which was inspired, as he states in his journal, by an encounter with a solitary middle-aged woman, inordinately stout and with pendent cheeks in a Parisian restaurant. Initially repulsed by her, he consequently became curious about what lay in her past to bring her to that moment – she was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful …her case is a tragedy.

The novel is structured in four parts, namely Mrs Baines, Constance, Sophia, whilst the fourth entitled What Life Is reunites the sisters towards the end of their lives after many years estranged and is intensely poignant as the two women confront the disparity between their adolescent hopes and the realities that time has wrought. ‘And what have I lived for? What is the meaning of it?’ The riddle of life itself was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow, Bennett tells us of the once impulsive and ardent Sophia.

To me, The Old Wives’ Tale is a masterpiece that has long been overlooked as Bennett appears to have slipped out of bookish fashion. Yet it tells the story of two women (three including the matriarchal Mrs Baines) who discover their own strength and resilience when the lives they had anticipated take very different turns, a theme as relevant now as when the novel was published in 1908. Both sisters find themselves victims of circumstance, of domestic as well as political change and twists of fate. Sophia does more than simply survive the Siege of Paris and the Commune of 1870 and prospers, discovering a stalwart, astute mentality to replace her youthful fecklessness whilst Constance, wishing only for the predictability of Bursley and the drapers’ shop, is forced to confront events that threaten such prosaic stability.

But then this is a realist novel. Bennett believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and the concerns of his novels are the concerns of ordinary lives perpetually shadowed by the extraordinary. As Sophia observes towards the end of her life, humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses and The Old Wives’ Tale catches this very simple yet startling truth.

The literary cliques and elites that Bennett so despised might have scorned his concern with the mundane and commonplace, but, like the greatest and most enduring of writers, his strength lies in his ability to portray such lives with empathy and conviction.

The Old Wives’ Tale is a memorable and masterful example of his craft.

The Old Wives' Tale is published by Penguin Classics. 

The Legacy of Mr Jarvis by Jude Hayland is published by Matador.

THE CHOICE by Michael Arditti, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"A work which skilfully combines many of Arditti’s strengths as a writer in one engrossing story."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and seven novels for adults, the latest of which (under the pseudonym Hope Adams) is Dangerous Women, published by Michael Joseph. She lives in Cambridge.

Michael Arditti is a difficult writer to pin down. His religiously-themed epics (The Anointed, Of Men and Angels) stand alongside traditional novels such as Widows and Orphans, which are about real people, usually in testing and desperate situations. I reviewed his short historical novel The Young Pretender on this blog last year.

Now we have a work which skilfully combines many of Arditti’s strengths as a writer in one engrossing story. He has a deep understanding both of religion and the way faith operates in the human heart and also of the bureaucracy of the Anglican Church. He knows an enormous amount about art and he’s informed and compassionate about current debates, many of which appear in this book.

He addresses one of these above all: can you separate a morally dubious artist from his work? As reviews of The Choice appeared in the papers, in the real world a man was arrested for damaging Eric Gill's statue, Ariel, on Broadcasting House in London.

Gill’s story shadows this book and one of the main strands of the plot concerns a work of art in a village church. Should it be preserved and lauded if its creator has behaved appallingly
throughout his life? Surrounding this central moral dilemma (whose roots lie in the past) is the story of Clarissa, a woman priest, who has to deal with shocking and distressing problems both personal and professional from the very first pages. The novel unfolds in several time frames and Clarissa appears both as young girl and as she grows older. Her struggle to be accepted into the Church as a priest is another important strand in the novel. She’s a brilliant creation and we’re rooting for her from beginning to end.

As for the “you can only write from a woman’s point of view if you’re a woman “ argument, Arditti demonstrates exactly what nonsense that is.

While I was reading it, I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful drama it would make, over several episodes. If only producers both on television and on the streaming services would turn away from adapting classics for a while and eschew superheroes who’d be more at home in a computer game, they could put something like The Choice on our screens instead. Nicola Walker was in my mind as I read, but there are many other actors who'd be excellent in the part.

Meanwhile in the immortal words of Fay Weldon, “the book abides." l loved it and urge you to read it.

The Choice is published by Arcadia Books.

See Adèle's review of The Young Pretender

Michael Arditti was our sixth birthday guest last year and chose The Rector's Daughter by F M Mayor.

Who will be our seventh birthday guest this year, on 24th July? Watch this space!

Guest review by Nick Manns: BILLY NO-MATES by Max Dickins

 

 " ... he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester.

‘Our friends are curators and co-authors of our life stories. They have a voice in much of what we’re doing, in our characters and in many of the memories that we make together.’ So said Professor William Rawlings in a recent Radio 4 programme called To Absent Friends.

‘Absent friends’ would have been a good title for Max Dickins’s book, because it focuses on the fact that in Western society most 30-something men have vanishingly few close friends – just under half in a recent large-scale survey said they had no male friend with whom they could share their worries or seek advice. In the UK, three in four suicides are male. Suicide is the biggest cause of male death in the under-45 age group. Compared with women, men fare badly once involuntarily separated from a life partner. Three-quarters of the public funerals in Britain each year – roughly 4,000 – are for men.

But Dickins didn’t start from this end of the telescope, and nor is his book written in shades of black. Part autobiography; part dissertation and part comedy script, it hurtles through the lanes and byways of the strange and lonely world of (straight) men, asking the right questions, taking part in activities (think Louis Theroux) – and brimming with compassion and good humour. In the right hands, this book can spark conversations and change lives.

So much for the blurb. Billy No-Mates is a quest – a journey of discovery – and it begins with a problem. Dickins confides to his two (female) flatmates that he’s going to ask his long-term girlfriend (Naomi) if she’ll marry him. One of his cohabitees asks, ‘Tell us then – who are you thinking for best man?’

This becomes the blue touch paper for what follows. Working at glacial speed, Dickins writes down the names of (very few) candidates on Post-its and sticks them on his bedroom wall. Standing back and surveying his work, he describes his list as ‘a cemetery of friendships’ – and promptly Googles ‘Getting married – no best man’. To his astonishment (and to this reader’s), he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem.

One of the academics he consults – an American psychologist – is very direct:

‘You don’t have any friends to call your best man because of the culture in which you were raised. It doesn’t have anything to do with who you are naturally. How you feel now is not the way you were born. What happened to you, Max? What specifically got in the way?’

This response comes down firmly on one side of the nature/nurture divide. But it isn’t the only view. Some evolutionary psychologists posit a genetic disposition, that men’s social isolation reflects a pre-historic division of labour (hunter-gatherer). Women looking after hearth and home; big butch men building alliances and killing creatures (and each other). The problem with this way of thinking is that it lets men off a shed-load of hooks (‘Can’t clean the bathroom darling, I’ve not got the right genes’). It’s also pretty depressing (kill me now).

Thankfully, that’s not the only game in town. Dickins discovers that pre-school boys are more emotionally expressive – both in range and intensity – than little girls. But once they start school (‘shades of the prison house’ and all that) they slowly but surely change: boys ‘start to behave like boys and girls start to behave like girls.’ And boys learn to stifle emotions: they stuff them away because tender feelings aren’t for public display. They start to invest in their future of isolation. Boys’ friendships grow thinner and noticeably cooler from the age of 16 and by the time they’re 30, many men are so caught up in the responsibilities of romantic relationships, family commitments and work, that old friendships wither and die.

This isn’t the same for women. Dickins reports on numerous studies that suggest women are better at maintaining (and deepening) their relationships. They have more freedom to acknowledge and express feelings without the risk of the usual male put-downs (‘Shut up you wuss’). They invest more time on keeping in touch; friendship is seen as a valuable component of who they are.

Taking stock of all this, Dickins is characteristically upfront: ‘Somewhere along the way I’d let work dominate my identity. I had let a vague notion of “my career” crowd out almost everything else. I was working all the time, often way past the point of being productive. I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t working: I didn’t know what to do. Ambition was not just a healthy part of my ‘self’ – there was nothing else there at all. I wasn’t so much a human being, as a human doing.’

Many men will recognise themselves from Dickins’s account. They know that male response to experience is carefully policed; that expressing feelings can invite either an awkward silence or a move to shift a conversation onto something more congenial. Men keep the lock turned on each other’s lives.

But acknowledging a problem isn't the same as fixing it and in the second half of the book, armed with research findings and with a modicum of self-knowledge, Dickins starts to do some field work: society becomes his lab. Does he have the capacity to revive old friendships? Can he make new friends? What support is there out there?

To make new friends, a psychologist suggests that rowing might be a good place to start, yet when he arrives for his first session, he discovers that his co-rowers are all fifty-something women, which wasn’t really part of the plan. He joins a male choir (apparently a sure-fire way of making friends) and finds the experience powerfully satisfying. Attending a stag weekend is repulsive (for all the usual reasons) and organising a weekly five-a-side football match ends in failure. But he finds a men’s group rewarding.

Although he had gone to the group full of preconceptions – expecting that it would be run by ‘an old bloke known as White Falcon who would be wanging on about the rejuvenating power of eating tiger hearts’, it was nothing like that. It was a strictly no-banter zone: a place where men of all ages and ethnicities could discuss issues that concerned them. The watchword, Dickins writes, was ‘responsibility’. The men worked together to find solutions to problems ‘that men tend to push on to the women in their lives’ – the ‘emotional labour’ that is mysteriously absent from the obligations recited in conventional marriage ceremonies.

Although he goes on to recount other experiences (a day with a woman from RentAFriend; an absorbing interview with a man who peopled his house with sex dolls), the men’s group seems to offer a way to help attendees reconnect with buried bits of themselves. Kenny – the convenor of the group – says of men: ‘Showing off: we’re good at that, but showing up? That’s a new thing. A different sort of energy.’

Soooh, what did Dickins learn – and did he find a best man? To answer the last question first – yes, he did – but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened on the great day (no spoilers). And as for learning, it is obvious that Dickins has the capacity for prolonged introspection and a powerful desire to fix what he regards as broken. He does the research and explores options but at the end of it all, the role models live within his domestic sphere. He writes of his flatmates: ‘It was how they showed up that was crucial. Unafraid to show emotion, nor to disclose information about themselves. Through their approach and example, the space that (they) created allowed me to express the full breadth of myself. To rediscover the bits of me that I had hidden until I couldn’t see myself any more. This was full-fat friendship.’

Billy No-Mates is published by Canongate.

More of Nick's reviews:

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

The Antidote - Happiness for People who can't stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkmann

Guest review by Alison MacLeod: THE FLAMES by Sophie Haydock

 

"Haydock explores both the exhilaration and the pain of life lived outside society’s norms..."

Photograph: Kate MacLeod

Alison MacLeod has written four novels and two story collections, including Unexploded, which was Man-Booker longlisted, and Tenderness. A Book of 2021 for The Spectator and The New York Times, Tenderness is the story of the creation and unexpected aftermath of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Alison is Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester, where she lectured for 30 years in literature and creative writing. Find out more from her website. 

A painting – like a song, film or dream – is notoriously difficult to convey in words. On the page, it can easily elude the translation across forms. How can a writer evoke the live force of a painting, as we first experience it, across time, on a canvas or in a frame? In this accomplished first novel, Sophie Haydock plunges us into the heat and complexity of Egon Schiele’s art, and offers a remarkable sense of what Schiele’s sister, in Haydock’s story, calls ‘the magic in his fingertips’.

The Flames is the story of a rare and provocative talent cut short by illness; Schiele was just 28 in 1918 when he died of ‘Spanish flu’. But, more than this, it’s a tantalising story of life itself – of life seized and spent by each of its main characters. Haydock explores both the exhilaration and the pain of life lived outside society’s norms.

We are taken to Austria in the early years of the twentieth century. Here, Haydock reveals Egon Schiele, boy and man, largely through the stories and shifting perspectives of his four principal models: his younger sister Gertrude; his ‘muse’, Wally Neuzil (or Vally, as she is here); his wife Edith; and his sister-in-law Adele. Through their eyes, in an inspired story-collage, we discover Schiele’s childhood and his early compulsion to draw. We witness the harrowing descent of his stationmaster father, raging and ill with syphilis, and the poignant aftermath of his death for the Schiele family. Liberation for Egon comes with art school and the influence of his mentor, Gustav Klimt.

A fifth young woman, Eva, will meet the elderly, down-and-out Adele in flash-forward scenes set in 1968, when Eva looks back on the stories of all four women with the appraising eyes of modernity. She is perhaps a stand-in for Haydock herself as she comes face to face with the four women on the walls of a major Viennese exhibition, where she tries to unravel the enigma of each model. It’s a tribute to Haydock’s talent and the depth of her writing that her model-by-model approach never feels exercise-like or schematic. On the contrary, her rendering of the model-as-muse scenario is vivid and intriguingly ambivalent.

Who or what is a muse? A sought-after commodity? A powerhouse of energy transmitted to canvas? An object offered up for the male gaze? Haydock triumphs in nuanced, visceral evocations of the experience of modelling – possibly the best I’ve ever read. She reveals the weary spines, contorted limbs, cold hands, bared thighs and exposed breasts. She evokes, with precision and force, the queasy mixture of sacrifice and self-possession; objectification and intimacy.

The story of Egon’s sister, Gerti Schiele, is compelling. Haydock’s imagining of the incestuous element between sister and brother is restrained, layered and impressively unsensational. Indeed, her handling of it is so skilful I felt she might have dared slightly more in the development of this storyline. Instead, as Egon outgrows his sister, the characterisation of Gertie is flattened somewhat into minor displays of jealousy, and I wondered if something stranger or darker in this material was perhaps short-circuited.

The story of Vally is delivered with subtlety and grit, and she’s a beguilingly memorable character. In her story, too, the dark seams of controversial events – namely, a stint in jail for Schiele and unsavoury accusations – might have been mined a little more, to take us closer to Schiele’s flaws or contradictions. This said, the story of Egon and Vally is tender, fresh and involving – and was my personal favourite.

Throughout The Flames, the period detail is lovingly rendered, a quality that shines above all in the stories of Adele and Edith Harms. I thoroughly enjoyed the window on Secessionist Vienna, with its rigid etiquette, illicit outlets, and battles between commerce and art. At times perhaps, the sisterly relationship between Adele and Edith veers a touch unsteadily between bourgeois predictability and high drama but, in Edith’s story, something radical ultimately emerges. Under the day-to-day pressures of married life, Egon Schiele’s boundless charm and sensitivity give way. He becomes more objectionable to the reader, but more powerful as a character, with sharper, darker contours. We watch uncomfortably as he instructs Edith, his new wife, to masturbate as she poses naked for him. On another canvas, disturbingly, he immortalises her as a stiff, puppet-like figure.

Story by story, woman by woman, The Flames is kindled by mystery, desire, and Haydock’s own resonant prose. It’s an absorbing encounter with Schiele’s struggle, art and intimates, and it reminds us that his work still has the power to startle today, with its uncanny modernity and unselfconscious sexuality. In this auspicious debut, Sophie Haydock brings a striking sense of Schiele’s life and talent, blazing, to the page.

The Flames is published by Transworld.

Alison MacLeod's Tenderness is reviewed here by Jane Rogers.

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: THE ENCHANTED APRIL by Elizabeth von Arnim

 

"If that advert had been a real and current one I would have applied immediately!"

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

The month of April in England comes in for both praise and disfavour. Robert Browning yearned for it while abroad, though where are the green shoots of the elms these days? T. S. Eliot had it the cruellest month, and looking at the frosted magnolias near my house I do have a certain sympathy for that point of view. But in truth, who could not love the Spring, with its birdsong and all those brave early flowers? We can always sow more seed if we’ve been caught out by a late frost. Some plants, like my winter lettuces, and those courageous tulips can stand up to all that April can throw at our gardens.

However, it is not an English April that Elizabeth von Arnim wishes to eulogise in her novel. On the contrary, her character, Mrs Wilkins, shopping on a wet London day, wishes to escape it. She had not suffered a long, Covid-19 winter, as have we, but she was not altogether happy, and sheltering from the sooty London rain she read this advertisement in The Times.

To Those Who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine. Small medieval Italian castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z,Box 1,000, The Times

To be honest, if that advert had been a real and current one I would have applied immediately!

The novel was written in 1922, when servants were more common. At the same time, the idea of a married woman, travelling unaccompanied by her husband, to a place so far from home, to have a month’s holiday without him, well! That would have been somewhat unusual in 1922. Would Mrs Wilkins have dared to book the castle if a slight acquaintance had not agreed, along with two other women, to share the castle and its costs? Good for them say I! And so it turned out to be, in various, unsuspected ways.

This is a very funny book, but also poignant, sympathetic and at times thought provoking. It is also a wonderful way of making a virtual escape from the pandemic and drifting up to the castle gardens, overlooking the sea. There, we can lie back in the past, in our sun loungers with a glass of wine, and enjoy the fragrances, and the slow passing of time demonstrated by flowers going over, only to make room for different buds to appear.

"All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring."

I guess the author was very keen on gardens. She evokes the parade of flowering plants so beautifully I could almost smell their delicious aromas. The very names made me wish I were there. Judas tree, peach trees, freesias, irises, roses (oh the petals!) tamarisk, daphnes, lilies, fig trees, plums, olives and as she puts it, modest weigela. I can feel that wonderful warm breeze on my skin with the plum blossom falling, this very moment.

Of course a fine description of plants and place doesn’t make a novel. The author causes her characters to work hard in the plot, and she paints each one with care and humour. Nothing earth-shattering happens. The days pass, jockeying for position occurs. Each woman has their own way of managing their lives, some perhaps better than others. Stray men come and go, food is served and wine drunk. Manners are mostly preserved. As the month of April comes to a close I found myself wishing they could stay longer, so that I could stay too. This is a novel I will shelve, and take down during a particularly nasty storm on a February weekend. Ah!…balm for the soul!

There is a film, which I have not seen, but was well reviewed. I shall seek it out. I wonder if the scent of flowers is evoked successfully on film? It certainly is within these fine pages.

The Enchanted April is published by Alma Classics Evergreen (the edition shown) and also by Penguin Modern Classics.

Cynthia Jefferies' The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne is published by Allison and Busby.

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: THE WOMEN OF TROY by Pat Barker

 

"Pat Barker doesn’t let the reader off the hook, doesn’t put a gloss on things. This is what war does, she tells us. This is how it is."

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill, and is a contributor to The History Girls.

One of the joys of Christmas is that, in my family, we’re very big on giving books for presents. One year this all went horribly wrong, when nearly every book one of us had loving selected had also been lovingly selected by someone else, so at least half of them had to be exchanged – but this year all was well, and this book was part of my haul.

It follows on from Pat Barker’s first book about the Trojan War, The Silence of the Girls, which I had not read before reading this one, though I have now. It’s perfectly possible to read the second one without having read its predecessor – partly, I suppose, because the legend on which both books are based is very familiar: but also because Briseis, the narrator, naturally refers to the past as she takes up her story.

I write books for children, and I think, if I was setting out to write one about the Trojan War and its aftermath, I would seek out a child character – who would need to have some agency: to be a hero in some measure – to make things better. But this retelling concerns war in all its horror and savagery: it’s a bleak tale with few shafts of light. There are certainly heroes, but they all have the capacity for horrifying violence and unthinking cruelty. And, incidentally, the only children in this narrative are girls – because when the Greeks finally conquered the Trojans by means of Odysseus’ wooden horse, they slaughtered the boys. They even, Briseis tells us, killed pregnant women in case the children in their wombs were boys.

Briseis had been a queen, captured when her city was laid waste by the Greeks almost as a sideshow to the main war against the Trojans. When we read retellings of the Greek legends, what we remember and enjoy are the exploits of the famous heroes. Pat Barker, through Briseis, lays bare the brutal treatment of the vanquished by the victors. The Trojan men are almost all slaughtered, while the women are raped and led into slavery. Briseis is relatively fortunate: as a high status captive, she is made available to be a trophy for one of the ‘heroes’. She is chosen by Achilles. In some books, this could have been the prelude to a romance, but there is no romance here. She is a commodity, no more. She only finally receives any consideration when she becomes pregnant with Achilles’ child, and is given in marriage to one of his friends: Achilles knows he is going to die, and knows also that his slave girl could easily be given after his death as a plaything for the ordinary soldiers. Because she bears his son, he doesn’t want that to happen – but only because of that, not because of any tender feelings towards Briseis herself.

The story takes place in the Greek camp on the shores of Troy. The Greeks want to go home, but the winds are against them, and they cannot leave. There is no beauty in this place: it’s windswept and desolate. “On the shoreline, there were stinking heaps of bladderwrack studded with dead creatures, thousands of them…The sea was murdering its children.”

There is another dead creature on this beach. It is the body of Priam, the King of Troy and one of the few characters in this story who retains nobility – until, that is, he is dishonoured by his killer, Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who drags Priam’s body behind his chariot every day round the walls of Troy, and refuses to allow it to be cremated. One of the Trojan women is determined to put a stop to this, and buries the body, to the fury of Pyrrhus. In a bewildered way he observes that there are only two Trojans in the camp, a priest called Calchas and one of Hector’s brothers, and that neither of these would have defied him in this way, so who can have defied him so flagrantly? He is quite oblivious to the women: they are slaves, and they are women – they simply don’t count. They are invisible to him.

But Briseis renders herself visible to us, because she tells us her story, and those of the other women in the camp: Helen, Cassandra, Andromache – but also the women of lower status, who nevertheless have their own stories, their own individual tragedies. She is courageous and she is kind: I look forward to reading the next book, which I suspect will bring her happiness in some degree.

It’s a wonderful book but a bleak read, harsh in many ways. The language reflects this. Pat Barker doesn’t let the reader off the hook, doesn’t put a gloss on things. This is what war does, she tells us. This is how it is.

How it still is, in many parts of the world.

The Women of Troy is published by Hamish Hamilton

See also: Circe by Madeline Miller, reviewed by Judith Lennox

Guest review by Jane Russ: WIDOWLAND by C J Carey

"Widowland asks you to reconsider your life and where you would fit into this nightmare."

 

Jane Russ is writer and series editor for the UK Nature series of books from Graffeg publishing. The books are not only about the physiology of the animal or bird but about myth, legend, art and literature too. Jane's sixth book, The Native Pony Book, came out in July and joins her others about hares, foxes, owls, red squirrels and robins in this very successful series.

A dystopic, feminist tale chillingly told.

It is 1953, Hitler won the war thirteen years ago and Edward and Wallis are within weeks of being crowned. England is a rundown outpost of Europe, with anything worth having being sent to the mainland. There is an overall feel of the shabby and the rundown.

In the early days after the war, the general populace do not take the ‘take-over’ lying down but the new regime is quick to establish that all transgressions will be dealt with promptly and firmly. If you are caught pulling down an Alliance flag, you will be hanged from the flagpole. Gilead reimagined in the UK.

A rigid individual classification code is in place. Created in Germany this caste system is imposed on the female population in all the subjugated lands of the Empire. At fourteen, all females are called for classification, with ‘Nordic type’ being the highest caste - ASA Female Class I (a). Naturally as time passes, the official titles are overtaken by the shorthand used in everyday life. All the names came from the Leader’s (Fuhrer's) female family members: Gelis are the top, the most perfect specimens. Klaras are fertile women, Lenis are professional women, Paulas are teachers, nurses and carers. Magdas are factory and shop workers, whilst Gretls are domestic and kitchen staff. At the very bottom of this female pyramid are Friedas, the widows and spinsters, over 50, without children and without a man to serve. There is nobody below a Frieda, they are literally the lowest of the low.

Naturally women moved around in these classifications as their fortunes ebbed and flowed. This ebb and flow showed in their general health and well-being too as benefits like better food and clothing were based on the caste classification. Where each group could shop, what they could wear, what rations they were allocated, every last thing was designated and administered by the Woman’s Service throughout the country. A Geli, whose work and general quality of life put her at the top of the ladder, had all the best of what was available and even, depending on who she knew, sometimes more than that.

The heroine of Widowland is Rose, a Geli. The state has decreed that any hint that the past was better than where you are now is to be outlawed. To this end Rose has the unenviable job of editing women of distinction, determination and strength out of books like Jane Eyre and even fairytales. Whilst this is of itself a vile thought, it is not what this book is about. (We should note here that some American states are, as we speak, outlawing books that do not fit their ultra-Conservative, ultra male dominated, racist, anti-Semitic take on what America should be. A vile thought indeed.)

Widowland asks you to reconsider your life and where you would fit into this nightmare, I have found it has really stayed with me as a concept. It is also about the awakening of the understanding that however much one is indoctrinated, the core human concept of right and wrong is much harder to eradicate. The populace are kept ignorant of the lives of other classifications. Everyone can spy on everyone and a Geli will not have a friend who is a Leni and certainly not a Gretl, and as far as Friedas are concerned, they know only other Friedas and are not considered as worthwhile by any other level of female.

Rose gets pulled into a secret assignment to find out who is writing graffiti on important buildings such as the British Museum and others across the country, all near libraries. The graffiti reads, Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it and there will be an end to the blind obedience. This is a quote from Mary Wollstonecraft, (never shy and retiring in her attitude to the position of woman in society) and Rose recognises it. The only lead on who is perpetrating this heretical street painting spreading across the country, is that it is coming from the Widowlands, the derelict and tumbledown areas of large conurbations where the Friedas live. There have been several incidents in Oxford so Rose is tasked with infiltrating the Widowlands there. The Alliance Leader is due to arrive from Germany in two weeks for the coronation and this has to be a thing of the past by then.

Rose’s cover is that she is gleaning information for a book being written by the Protector of Britain about the Folklore and family history of the indigenous peoples. On her trip to Oxford she is confronted with a world so outside her lived experience that she finds it hard to interview the Friedas she has been sent to meet. The house they live in is a broken slum, with no saving graces, except that Rose recognises that they have made it seem like a home. After about an hour and without preamble three men enter and, as if it were possible, wreck the tiny house even more from top to bottom. Every piece of repaired china is smashed, every sagging chair is slashed and, even though recognised as a Geli, Rose is powerfully manhandled and slammed against the wall. Having completed their destruction in a few short minutes, they leave without explaining or commenting.

This event starts the chain of events that will lead to the exhilarating climax of the novel. Several interesting and well drawn characters fill out the story on the way and we are drawn along in a whirlwind of emotions.

If you are female, the lives of the women in this book will ask questions of your understanding of what it takes to be one. If you are male it will show you where male supremacy could lead (and where America is heading at the moment?) Widowland is the heart of darkness in this all too believable tale of female segregation and subordination. Although set in 1953, this is a novel that deals with issues very relevant to the life of woman today.

Widowland is published by Quercus. C J Carey is the pseudonym of Jane Thynne.

Guest review by Jon Appleton: THE WEEKEND by Charlotte Wood

 

" ... And yet the hunger remains, the appetite for life. What’s the best you can hope for? That’s what The Weekend is about. A hungry novel."  

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor living in London. He is a regular contributor to Writers Review.

‘Nobody wants you when you’re old. You have to shore things up before this point. You have to face up to the future, to the worst possibilities, you have to prepare yourself. Anticipate, adapt, accept.’

You might argue that reaching your eighth decade precludes you from having to learn and harness jargonistic alliterative slogans. (Although strictly speaking this is assonance, right?) But events such as the loss of a partner, a child, a friend can prove so destabilising that you’re reduced, in some respects, to learning your A, B, C all over again.

That’s where we find long-time friends Jude, the restaurateur, Wendy, the academic and Adele, the actress, in the aftermath of their close friend Sylvie’s death. The three women are spending a hot Australian Christmas at Sylvie’s home (in the absence of Sylvie’s partner) to clear it for sale and the conclusion of a chapter of their lives.

More oppressive than a dead friend is the inclinator, the platform that elevates – infantilises? passengers and baggage from the ground level to house level. Oh, and Wendy’s poor, dear dog Finn, who soils himself and inconveniences fastidious Jude but is perhaps all Wendy has left of Sylvie. His life so far beyond comfort and opportunity that it surely would better be ended with mercy and kindness. Gulp.

As the women set about their tasks, they engage and remember and rewrite history. They pride themselves on the sophistication of their inner lives and scorn those who lack such vivid interiors.

They might be old but they have expectations. You might not want lost looks, lost love, men or sex, The Weekend argues. What you really want, reasonably, is work. And money. Others might think you’re past it, somehow an encumbrance or liability, but these women know you can still make certain demands. You can trust a lived-in body, you know how it works – ‘you left it alone and it sorted itself out’.

So demanding of the world beyond them, and yet, a lot of the time it seems the best they can offer each other is tolerance or forbearance. Except, of course, when push comes to shove, as it does at the brisk ending. But if you can’t be brisk in old age, when can you?

Charlotte Wood is an Australian writer whose reputation is enhanced with each new publication; The Weekend, her last-but-one novel, was published here with a splash last year and deservedly so.

You’ll learn a lot about contemporary Australian life. You’ll understand where Australia has emerged from. (The surnames alone – Wendy Steegmuller, Adele Antoniades - are telling.) But interestingly, the cultural references are British – no mention of the Miles Franklin Award, instead the Booker Prize. The women reference the Mamas and the Papas from their youth, not The Seekers.

There’s always been a tension in Australia that anyone with ambition is punching above their weight – ‘the tall poppy syndrome’, it was called. How much worse is it for the high-flyers now diminished in old age, by themselves, by others, by society?

And yet the hunger remains, the appetite for life. What’s the best you can hope for? That’s what The Weekend is about. A hungry novel. I loved it and recommend it. So will you.

The Weekend is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

More recent choices by Jon:

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

GIRL,WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardine Evaristo, reviewed by Celia Rees

"An extraordinary tour de force ... daringly written, intricately crafted"

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - now Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, published in 2020 and now in paperback as Miss Graham's War. 

Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Ambitious in form, scope and subject matter, Bernadine Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other was joint 2019 Booker Prize winner and rightly so.

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and gives voice to twelve predominantly black women. The reader adapts surprisingly quickly to writing without conventional punctuation and capitalisation, a style which Evaristo has dubbed 'fusion fiction'. It lends a swift, lyrical quality to the prose and allows space for the distinct voices of these women, who are all very different in age, class, sexual orientation, cultural, historical, geographical background but who happen to be women of colour in Britain today. By following the stories of her twelve central characters, Evaristo brings into sharp focus the extraordinary diversity of those routinely grouped together by British society as BAME and explores key issues of race, gender and sexuality along the way.

Their stories are woven together in complex and often unpredictable ways, eliding and colliding, intersecting and glancing off each other. This gives a novel, with no conventional story as such, great energy. Evaristo brings the whole together by the framing device of the opening night of a play at the National Theatre. The playwright is Amma, who has struggled on the fringes of the radical Arts scene for many years but who is now a successful black, feminist, lesbian playwright. Many of the characters are present at the performance and at the after party that concludes the novel. They don't necessarily know or recognise each other but they are nevertheless connected in ways known only to the author and her reader.

The book is an extraordinary tour de force. Daringly written, intricately crafted, the lives she describes interwoven in multidimensional patterns of experience and emotions: joy, sorrow, anguish, pain and love are all here.

Evaristo says: "I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel – the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about women as well."

I would suggest she has achieved just that. She has done what she set out to do and done it brilliantly.

Girl, Woman, Other is published by Penguin

Guest review by Jon Appleton: THE BISCUIT FACTORY GIRLS by Elsie Mason

 "As the nights draw in, there will be plenty of readers seeking total immersion and escapism in saga-length novels, especially those with the promise of further volumes to come."

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

As the nights draw in, there will be plenty of readers seeking total immersion and escapism in saga-length novels, especially those with the promise of further volumes to come. I can heartily recommend Elsie Mason’s The Biscuit Factory Girls.

The cosy cover image is essential to the genre and it’s true that for the first part of the book, the comforting scent of baking biscuits permeates the air which the employees of Wight’s Biscuit Factory in the north-east live and breathe. The latest recruit is newlywed Irene Farley, who joins her sisters-in-law Beryl and Megan working to make the biscuits that will offer a little comfort to the men on the front line of the Second World War which rages all around them.

But the story gets a lot darker, and fast. (This is an incredibly pacey novel.) Irene – a former land girl from Norfolk – has known handsome airman Tom Farley for just three months before she leaves her parents and sisters to join him, his three brothers, sisters-in-law. This memorable family has been led by the indomitable Ma Ada since the early death of her good-for-nothing husband.

Throughout the novel, Irene is forced to question the wisdom of her actions. First the prospect that she doesn’t belong amongst the Farleys, their extended family and neighbours, all living cheek by jowl in the Sixteen Streets – ‘where everyone’s watching each other’s comings and goings and there’s gossip about everyone’ – near the shipyards of Tyneside. Second, the mounting fear that her presence is somehow jinxing the safety and happiness of the Farley clan.

Of course, for Irene there also looms the threat of losing her new husband in the war, a threat which compounds the anxiety of her unexpected pregnancy.

As the weeks pass, with work and the occasional treat punctuating the constant threat of the nightly bombing raids, Irene settles into life and forms important, unconventional friendships – with beautiful Bella, daughter of the Italian ice-cream parlour owner and Arthur, rule-abiding usher by day and someone utterly different by night. But most demanding of all is her relationship with her sister-in-law, Megan, who resents Irene from the start. As the story develops, she unravels the stories of Megan and her husband Bob and can understand better why their marriage has become so corrosive. A great pleasure of the book is unfurling such stories within the story.

There are moments of scandal, of elation, of tension, of triumph. There’s even a thread of vivid queer glamour bursting through the leaden winter and the rubble which adds a welcome vein of colour. There’s a great deal of love, too, waiting to ripen and as we race to the end we eagerly wonder what lies in store for these characters in Elsie Mason’s next book.

The Biscuit Factory Girls is published by Orion. 

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI by Jung Chang

"...what an accessible writer Chang is ... scrupulous in her research but brings the story alive by her vibrant style."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in November 2018. Her second title The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne came out in November 2019 and is set during the English Civil Wars.

At the end of Jung Chang’s biography of the Empress Cixi, Chang says “looking back over the many horrific decades after Cixi’s demise, one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.”

In modern China Cixi is not admired but Chang has done much painstaking research and has a different story to tell. Cixi was born in 1835. At 16 she was chosen to be a concubine of the Emperor Xianfeng, who was 19. Cixi had caught the young emperor’s eye and was one of several accepted. She was very ambitious, interested in politics and highly intelligent but the life she undertook was not for the faint-hearted and she was not chosen to be the Empress, but was ranked on the sixth of eight rungs for concubines.

Enclosed in the harem she became friends with the girl chosen to be empress. Having lost the Opium war against the British, the country was now obliged to accept imports of damaging opium, made in India and a valuable export for the British although it was banned in the UK. There was also the largest peasant rebellion in Chinese history, due to terrible famine. Cixi had opinions about all this, but voicing them could have led to her execution.

The emperor was frail and it was of great moment when Cixi gave birth to his first son. She was elevated to just below Empress Zhen in rank. When the Emperor died in 1861 his only son was five and the country was in a terrible situation. The Emperor had a closed door policy, but Cixi could see that this was making China weaker. Extraordinarily, with Empress Zhen supporting her she overthrew the regents in a bloodless coup and as Empress Dowager, she became the ruler of China, sitting behind the yellow silk screen behind the throne.

The story of the rule of Cixi must place her as one of the greatest female rulers in history. During her long life she steered this vast country from a medieval state to a modern one, introducing the telegraph, trains, modern education and governance and a more humane legal system. She fought wars, revolt, betrayal and made some mistakes. But she loved her country and believed in its people. European nations and Japan took brutal advantage while China slowly embraced the 19thC. Britain has little to be proud of at this time, with a few individual exceptions.

Anyone who has read Wild Swans will know what an accessible writer Chang is. She is scrupulous in her research but brings the story alive by her vibrant style. Just shy of 500 pages, I found the book almost unputdownable. China today is a superpower, and it seems the present ruler Xi is determined to be as absolute as Cixi, and to rule for life. But where Cixi wished her nation to become a democracy, Xi shows no sign of giving his people similar freedoms. I found myself wondering what the Empress Dowager would think if she could see her country now.

Empress Dowager Cixi is published by Vintage.

A SINGLE THREAD by Tracy Chevalier, reviewed by Adele Geras

"I'm not going to spoil the pleasure of new readers by outlining the plot, but this is not a 'breakneck speed' sort of book. Take your time with it. Look at the details ..."

Adele Geras has written many books for children and young adults and six novels for adults, the latest of which is Love or Nearest Offer, published by Quercus in paperback. She lives in Cambridge.A historical novel for adults will be published by Michael Joseph in June 2020 under a pseudonym yet to be publicly revealed.

I've been a fan of Tracy Chevalier's work since her wonderful novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, swept all before it twenty years ago. She's written many novels but the ones I like best seem to be, when I list them in my head, the ones where needlework of some kind plays an important part. The Lady and the Unicorn is about the miraculous tapestries of the same name now to be seen in the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The Last Runaway is about patchwork and quilting, which is another of Chevalier's interests. I've also read her book The Sleep Quilt which is all about the fascinating exhibition of prisoners' work which she curated together with the charity Fine Cell Work.

Fine Cell Work teaches prisoners to sew and embroider. It's part of the process of rehabilitation for sometimes very violent and troubled men. I have a small lavender pillow embroidered with a poppy which I bought in the exhibition and it sits on my bed all the time. I mention this charity not only because I'm always eager to draw it to people's attention but also because it's relevant to Chevalier's new book which demonstrates most beautifully the power of stitching to mend and heal.

My own relationship with sewing and embroidery is chequered to say the least. That's much too polite. I'm useless. I give my trousers to an alteration shop to be turned up. In the Junior House at my boarding school, we all had to embroider things like traycloths while our Housemistress read aloud to us from books like Brother Dusty Feet by Rosemary Sutcliff. The pattern was printed on the fabric and at the beginning, I had visions of perfectly even stitches, executed in shining silky thread. The reality was very different. To be precise, it was a mess. I cannot embroider neatly. The back of my work was always a tangled jungle of silks. Ghastly is too good a word for what I produced.

But I love the idea of embroidery. In fact, it's been an obsession of mine since childhood. I adore it. I'm mad about the Bayeux tapestry which is an embroidery and not a tapestry at all. I've written many poems about sewing and embroidery, It appears in some of my own books and most recently, I've written on the History Girls blog about an exhibition of embroidery at Ely Cathedral. Here is a link to that.

Then a proof of A Single Thread arrived in my house, and of course I read it at once, and I loved it. It embodies in its story the notion that sewing, particularly in the company of others, is soothing, calming, and helpful to anyone whose emotions are in turmoil.

Violet Speedwell is one of the 'surplus women' whose fiancés and boyfriends, husband and lovers, have been killed in the Great War. She moves from living with her mother (a very particular kind of monster) in Southampton to living on her own in a boarding-house in Winchester. She is both escaping and recovering. Her lover is dead and her mother is somewhere else, and Violet has taken a job in an office. She has almost no money. She lives on practically no food at all. Then one day she sees the beautiful needlepoint-covered kneelers in the Cathedral, all hand stitched, and she meets 'the broderers'. The true story of these women, under the guidance of Louisa Pesel, is woven into the fiction Chevalier has created. You can, she tells us in an afterword, still see these kneelers in the Cathedral and use them yourself. Pesel was a real person and the novel places her slightly to the side of the main narrative, but still very important in the book as a factual anchor to the fiction Chevalier has created.

The fiction is Violet's story. How she comes out of the shade and blooms in the warmth of shared work and a very unusual romance. I'm not going to spoil the pleasure of new readers by outlining the plot, but this is not a 'breakneck speed' sort of book. Take your time with it. Look at the details. Learn about bell-ringing, which is vital to the story. Enjoy the glimpses of life in the Cathedral. Follow Violet's progress to the end, stitch by stitch by stitch. It's a very satisfying book and if I had to describe it, I'd say it was the sort of novel which, if it hadn't been written this year, feels like the books published by the excellent Persephone Books in elegant dove-grey covers. Lovers of these volumes know exactly what I mean. If anyone doesn't know them, I recommend a trip to the Persephone Books website or shop. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy following The Single Thread as much as I did.

A Single Thread is published by Borough Press.

Guest review by Harriet Evans: LOLLY WILLOWES by Sylvia Townsend Warner

 "To my mind one of the great English novels of the 20th century..." 

Harriet Evans is the Sunday Times bestselling author of eleven novels. Her last book, The Wildflowers, was a Richard and Judy Book Club selection and a Kindle No.1 bestseller. She lives in London with her family and enjoys sloe gin, feminism, Game of Thrones, and anything illustrated by Shirley Hughes. She is on Twitter @HarrietEvans. Her new novel, The Garden of Lost and Found, is published on 18th April.

I hardly feel qualified to write a review of a book as good as this; but if it means one more person reads this criminally neglected novel then so much the better.

Twitter is a good place for writers, if you know to mute or block accounts that will needlessly rile you when a long day alone at the computer stretches ahead of you (why follow Piers Morgan if you don’t have to? Why?) I have found a lovely community on Twitter by curating my timeline so that I see mainly tweets from people who like talking about good books and in particular books by women, which was how the great Lissa Evans came to recommend Lolly Willowes to me.

Two facts: there are more women writers published today than men, and more women buy and read books than men, yet there is still a huge imbalance in the reception and influence of books by women. (Ask the man next to you at dinner who knows everything about modern literature if he’s read Anne Tyler.) The books we write need to be boxed into a genre, filed neatly away. Historical fiction. Romantic fiction. Chicklit. And this packaging is now being applied restrospectively to authors like Nancy Mitford and Dodie Smith. It means books like Lolly Willowes will be rediscovered, but in a cosy ‘vintage’ way, and not given the attention that is their due.

All this is to say that Lolly Willowes is to my mind one of the great English novels of the 20th century and it is shameful that its reputation hasn’t endured. My copy is a gorgeous new edition from Virago with a brilliant illustration which you see here of a cat and an English village (and a top-notch introduction from Sarah Waters). But I think the type is a shade too fluffy for how complex a book it is. Still, it gets across the very great enjoyment to be had from this story of female emancipation, witchcraft, family and mansplaining. (Yes, it really is about all those things!)

It is the story of Laura Willowes who in 1902, upon the death of her beloved father for whom she has been keeping house in Somerset, moves in with her brother and sister-in-law in London to assume the role of devoted unmarried sister and helpmeet. Time moves on (it is one of Townsend Warner’s many skills as a novelist that the rapid passage of time is dealt with so gracefully) until after the Great War when Laura, buying a bunch of perfect chrysanthemums in a Bayswater grocer’s one evening, is suddenly overcome with the absolute conviction that she must live where they came from.

‘They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the autumn of her country imagination. She stood very still to make quite sure of her sensations. Then: "Where do they come from?" she asked.

"From near Chenies, ma’am, in Buckinghamshire."'

One of the joys of the novel is how certain the quiet, dreamy Laura is of what she wants in life and how tough and deep is her intelligence (during the war she helps by doing up parcels at the Post Office four times a week. ‘She did them up so well that no-one thought of offering her a change of work’ – the experience of millions like her.) After establishing in one of the novel’s most enjoyable scenes that her brother has mishandled her inheritance so that she has no means of living independently, she demands quite briskly that he reinvest in something that pays a tiny dividend and moves to Deep Mop, a village in the Chilterns where all is not quite what it seems…

I am going to be bold and not say what happens when Laura moves to Deep Mop, other than that it is wonderful, wild and really weird. Townsend Warner is in total control of her material throughout and that gives one a dizzying sense of excitement as the plot hurtles forwards. There is a delicious depth of detail to the writing (‘A hot ginny churchyard smell’ is one of many descriptions of the English countryside perfect in its evocation of place.) The Mitfordian English social commentary is spot-on and the knowledge of what is to come makes rereading it an absolute hoot. But, also, it gets across its graceful point about the worth and inner life of British womanhood in the last century devastatingly well. I would not trust someone who didn’t love this book. It’s a good test. Please, I beg you, if you haven’t read it, try Lolly Willowes.

Lolly Willowes is published by Virago.

SUFFRAGETTES IN FICTION: a round-up by Linda Newbery

A round-up of recent titles and reissues - adult and young adult fiction

Linda Newbery's own contributions to suffragette fiction for young readers are  GIRLS FOR THE VOTE, published by Usborne, and UNTIL WE WIN, Barrington Stoke.  

Perhaps it's surprising that there hasn't been more fiction set during the women's suffrage campaign - offering, as it does, strong roles for women with ample opportunity to show determination and physical courage and to defy expectations. The current centenary - 100 years since the Representation of the People Act granted the vote to women of property-owning women of 30 and over - has seen new publications, but my first choice, Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn, first appeared in 2011. I've shown the original hardback jacket here, as the paperback goes for romantic appeal, not even showing the suffragette colours or drawing attention to the theme.

I found this a really absorbing read, excellent on period detail and attitudes to women's roles, especially for ambitious women like main character Constance who wants to be a surgeon but whose family's limited finances are directed to her brother. She's poised to marry professional cricketer Will, but they fundamentally disagree over her campaigning activities and her refusal to promise to obey as part of her marriage vows. Constance goes to Holloway Prison and endures force-feeding but withdraws from the suffragette movement in horror when some of its more extreme supporters begin to use bombs, endangering life. Later, working as a wartime nurse, she goes beyond her role when she intervenes to save a life, at the risk of jeopardising her own career. Characters are strongly and sympathetically drawn, especially Andrew Tamberlain, a famed cricketer at the end of his career. A friend of Will's, he's introduced as a minor character but later becomes a significant ally to Constance, his fate interweaving with theirs in quite unexpected ways. By the end, accompanying them, you'll feel as if you've been on an epic journey.

All three of these novels take us to prison and through the ordeal of force-feeding. In Ajay Close's A Petrol Scented Spring I almost felt I'd been through it myself, so graphic are her descriptions. In a Perth prison, Dr Edward Watson is one of the few doctors willing to force-feed hunger strikers. Such invasive brutality may seem the unlikeliest start to a seduction, but Dr Watson finds himself increasingly drawn to Arabella, the defiant woman he tortures daily; he engages her in conversation, fascinated by her implacable will. The narrative, moving back and forth in time, is shared between Arabella and Donella, Dr Watson's wife, who marries him in 1916 in ignorance of his prison activities. Ajay Close's writing is animated and assured, with occasional humour alongside the grittier details.

In Jon Walters' Nevertheless She Persisted, Nancy doesn't shrink from detonating bombs. One of a pair of sisters, both sexually abused by their father, she takes up work at Holloway as a warden. But, fascinated by glamorous detainee Daisy Divine, an actress known as 'The Duchess', she's soon passing notes between prisoners and eventually finds herself on the wrong side of the cell door after adventures involving subterfuge, disguise, safe houses and the procurement of explosives. Sister Clara, meanwhile, ponders marriage to the too-conventional Ted at the cost of giving up a career in which her ability has been recognised. This novel stops short of the outbreak of war but leaves Nancy relishing the new freedom she's found in her activism and by dressing in men's clothes.

Young adult fiction has seen some excellent new publications this year and last, plus a welcome reissue. Sally Nicholls' Things a Bright Girl Can Do  is a substantial novel interweaving the stories of three young women - Evelyn, May and Nell - and introducing a range of attitudes and class backgrounds. Most suffragette fiction centres on the WSPU, but here's a wider view that identifies the differences between the various organisations. Evelyn joins the WSPU while May, a Quaker and staunch pacifist, favours the East London Federation of suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst's campaign against sweatshops and for fair conditions for working women as well as for the vote. Her new friend / lover Nell, from a poorer background, takes up work in a munitions factory for reasons May fails to understand: Nell is trying to support her large family. We follow all three characters through the war and beyond, to the point where new opportunities open up for them.

Sheena Wilkinson's Star by Star is set in Ireland in 1918, but sweeps both back to the war and forward to the new opportunities opening up for capable young women like Stella. Daughter of a campaigner who died in the flu epidemic that follows the war, she's excited by the forthcoming election and determined that no one eligible should miss their chance to vote. Sent to Ulster to live and work at her aunt's boarding house, she befriends a stricken army Captain - thus Wilkinson deftly takes the  reader back to the war years - and makes a discovery about the father she's never known. Readers will strongly identify with the resourceful, well-intentioned Stella and with the practical and moral dilemmas she faces, and will hope that she finds a role to suit her talents.

Julie Hearn writes with freshness and vivacity in Hazel, one of three novels that form an attractive family saga over three generations (though each can be read alone). The dashingly-named Hazel Mull-Dare is the daughter of Ivy, the pre-Raphaelite beauty and painter's model who was titular heroine of the previous book. Here we start with the dramatic death of Emily Wilding Davison in a novel that looks at various manifestations of power, privilege and emancipation.

Teenage fiction as involving and immediate as these three captivating novels will leave young readers in no doubt of the importance of voting as soon as they're of age - even if current political upheavals haven't already convinced them of that.

Finally, here's one for my ever-increasing reading pile: Old Baggage, set in 1928 when the vote was extended to all women but looking back to the suffragette years. It's by the versatile Lissa Evans, who was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal this year with her children's book Wed Wabbit. If anyone's read it, do please leave comments below - also on any other suffragette fiction you'd like to recommend.

Adult fiction:
A Petrol Scented Spring is published by Sandstone Press.
Half of the Human Race is published by Vintage.
Nevertheless She Persisted is published by David Fickling Books.
Old Baggage is published by Doubleday.

Young adult fiction:
Hazel is published by Oxford University Press.
Star by Star is published by Little Island.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do is published by Andersen.

Since this post appeared, Lissa Evans' Old Baggage has been reviewed by Pippa Goodhart.