0 The Cynical Wives Brigade (A Woman of My Age - Nina Bawden)

When Karen mentioned that she'd bought some Nina Bawden books, I commented that I had a few on my shelves, but had never got around to reading her - and, hey presto, a joint readalong of A Woman of My Age (1967) was born.  Karen's already posted her review here, but I have to admit that I have yet to read it - because I wanted to give you my thoughts before I discovered hers.

I didn't know what to expect from Nina Bawden - I've never even read her famous children's books - so I started the novel with more or less a blank canvas. Elizabeth is the heroine (if the term fits... which it doesn't, really) and is in Morocco with her husband of eighteen years, Richard.  The heat is stultifying and their companions a trifle wearying - the obese, overly-friendly Mrs Hobbs and her quiet husband, and the unexpected friend from home, Flora. Unexpected to Elizabeth, anyway...

As their journey across the country continues, the web between these characters gets more and more complex, as secrets are revealed and alliances kindled - but the mainstay of the narrative is Elizabeth's musings on her past life, as her marriage to Richard is slowly documented, and considered in minute detail.  For Elizabeth is nothing if not introspective - she's even introspective about being introspective, which does lead to one amusing line at least:

She peered appraisingly at herself in the mirror, pulling faces as if she were alone, and I was embarrassed by her candour. (Though I have as much interest in my appearance as most women, I feel it is somehow degrading to admit it.  Before we came away, I bought a special cream supposed to restore elasticity to the skin, but I destroyed the wrapper on the jar and the accompanying, incriminating literature, as furtively as I had, when young, removed the cover of a book on sex.)

Before I go further, I should put forward the weak statement that I quite enjoyed A Woman of My Age, because I'm going to harp on about the things I didn't much like.  So, while I do that, please bear in mind that Bawden's writing is always good, her humour (when it comes) is sharp and well-judged, and her characters are generally believable.  There is even some pathos in the account of Elizabeth's ageing relatives, but I shan't comment much on that - because they are pretty incidental.

Elizabeth's age, referred to in the title, is 37.  She has been married for nearly half her life, and is obviously rather dissatisfied.  We know this, because she often tells us.  Sometimes (in this mention of her early married life) it is almost laughably stereotypical:

We were bored with our husbands.  They were sober young men, marking school books, studying, advancing into an adult world of action and responsibility.

This is, I shall admit now, my main problem with the novel - and that which inspired my title to this post.  Elizabeth is a card-carrying, fully-paid-up member of the Cynical Wives Brigade.  You may remember how little I liked Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year - you can read my thoughts here - and a lot of A Woman of My Age is cut from the same cloth. Perhaps it's because I've never been a wife, and because I wasn't around in the 1960s, but I find this gosh-is-my-privileged-life-wonderful-enough unutterably tedious, not to mention the casual adultery that all these characters indulge in.  Adultery seems, at best, a stimulus for another tedious, introspective conversation or contemplation.  Children, as with Drabble's novel, are included simply to show the passage of time, and none of the adult characters seem to have any particularly parental instincts.

Was this a 1960s thing?  Well, Lynne Reid Banks's The L-Shaped Room (1960) is one of my favourite novels, but I can't deny that it is very introspective - but Jane isn't a wife, so she manages to escape the Cynical Wives Brigade.  I haven't read many novels from this decade, but already I get the idea (supported by this novel) that it's full of this type of navel-gazing, morally-lax types.  For someone born in the 1980s, incidentally, there were a couple of moments which are very of-their-time, and rather shocking to me. (Were these views still acceptable in the 1960s?? Both are from Elizabeth's point of view, and neither seem ironic.)

As a result, I drank more than was sensible in my condition: like a lot of women, I always felt more unwell during the first three months of pregnancy than afterwards, and alcohol went to my head very quickly.

and

I was surprised at the violence of his remorse - after all, he had only hit me

I suppose I can't blame Bawden for that, if those were still prevalent opinions and actions in the time.  But what I can blame her for is making an interesting scenario and potentially interesting characters get so dragged down by the dreariness of reading about Elizabeth's self-pity and moping. To do her justice, another character in the novel does accuse her of exactly these faults. I cheered when I read this:

If they are a sample of your usual conversation I'm not surprised that he doesn't listen to you.  You're no more worth listening to than any bored, spoiled young woman, whining because the routine of married life has gone stale on you.  It really is very provoking, to a woman of my generation.  When I was thirty, we didn't have the vote, we had to fight for a place in the world.  Now you've got it, most of you don't bother to use it.  I daresay it's dull, being tied to a house and young children, but it was a life you chose, after all, you were so eager to rush into it that you didn't even take your degree.

I'm always curious when authors incorporate criticisms of their novel or characters into the narrative itself.  Is it a moment of self-awareness, to distance themselves from the voice of the narrator?  Is it the belief that recognising one's faults is the same as correcting them?  Or is simply a moment of regret, for the direction a novel should have taken?

(I should make clear - a lot of the things Elizabeth complains about are probably genuine issues. But complaining does not a novel make.)

And I haven't even mentioned the big twist at the end.  I don't really know what to say about it.

I'm still glad that I read Nina Bawden, and I'll have a look at the other one's on my shelves to see if they're any less frustrating.  Right now I'm off to see what Karen thought... come join me?

Detail: The Cynical Wives Brigade (A Woman of My Age - Nina Bawden)

0 Love at Second Sight by Ada Leverson

Whilst rooting around for a 1916 title for A Century of Books (you should have seen me, scrabbling through my books, opening covers, reading publication details, reshelving huffily) I stumbled upon Love At Second Sight by Ada Leverson.  It's the third book in The Little Ottleys, of which I have previously read the first - Love's Shadow - which was rather brilliant.  This is the only time A Century of Books has really rather compromised my reading plans - in that I skipped past the second title in the trilogy (Tenterhooks) straight to the third.  But someone had spoken on The Little Ottleys at a recent conference, and given away the plot, so it wasn't as calamitous as it could have been.

Look away if you don't want to know what happened in the first two novels... but they've (to be very brief) set up the fairly loveless marriage of Edith and Bruce; Edith falls in love with Aylmer Ross, but will not leave her husband, even when he asks for a divorce himself (having run off with another woman); he comes back to her, and everything settles down into what it had been before - which is to say, an amusing, charming, patient woman, and an exasperating man.  Bruce is best summed up by this wonderful quotation from Love's Shadow: "He often wrote letters beginning "Sir, I feel it my duty," to people on subjects that were no earthly concern of his."  As for the lovely Edith, I'll hand over to Leverson to describe her.  An author should show and not tell, as a rule, but all these qualities in Edith have been exemplified in previous books, so it is forgiveable that Leverson wants to let us know what a wonder she is, so that we can get on with the show.

She was a slim, fair, pretty woman, with more vividness and character than usually goes with her type.  Like the boy, she had long-lashed grey eyes, and blonde-cendre hair: her mouth and chin were of the Burne-Jones order, and her charm, which was great but unintentional, and generally unconscious, appealed partly to the senses and partly to the intellect.  She was essentially not one of those women who irritate all their own sex by their power (and still more by their fixed determination) to attract men; she was really and unusually indifferent to general admiration.  Still, that she was not a cold woman, not incapable of passionate feeling, was obvious to any physiognomist; the fully curved lips showed her generous and pleasure-loving temperament, while the softly glancing, intelligent, smiling eyes spoke fastidiousness and discrimination.  Her voice was low and soft, with a vibrating sound in it, and she laughed often and easily, being very ready to see and enjoy the amusing side of life.  But observation and emotion alike were instinctively veiled by a quiet, reposeful manner, so that she made herself further popular by appearing retiring.  Edith Ottley might so easily have been the centre of any group, and yet - she was not!  Women were grateful to her, and in return admitted that she was pretty, unaffected and charming.

Love At Second Sight opens with a scream.  The Ottleys' son Archie has, it seemed, used Madame Frabelle's mandolin as a cricket bat, and she is not best pleased.  And who might Madame Frabelle be, you ask?  The Ottleys want to ask much the same thing.  Their delightfully forgetful and absent-minded friend Lady Conroy introduced them (although later denied ever having heard of her, and in fact asks for an introduction herself) - and Madame Frabelle arrives for a visit.  Which has lengthened itself into many, many weeks.  She is charming, a great listener, given to understanding people - noticing their subtlest of thoughts, predicting their actions, and invariably being wrong about everything.

Indeed Edith did sincerely regard her opinion as very valuable.  She found her so invariably wrong that she was quite a useful guide. She was never quite sure of her own judgement until Madame Frabelle had contradicted it.

Madame Frabelle is determined that Edith is in love with Mr. Mitchell, another of the Ottleys acquaintances.  What neither Madame Frabelle nor Bruce notice is that Edith is in love - with Aylmer, who has returned from fighting in France with a broken leg.  Edith has to face a quandary - whether or not to leave her husband...

As I say, I haven't read Tenterhooks, where a similar story takes place, so I can only contrast this with the first book in the trilogy.  In that (again, c.f. my review here), we see a marriage which is irksome and unequal, but in a comic fashion.  All the will-they-won't-they plot concerns a multitude of other characters, none of whom have stayed in my mind, and the central Ottley marriage is stable, if awful.  Bruce's absurd lack of self-awareness is hilarious, and his terribleness as a husband is darkly humorous - in Love At Second Sight, more is at stake, and more than a punchline is likely to come out of this incompatible couple.

Which is not to say that the novel isn't funny.  It is very amusing, especially when Lady Conroy wanders onto the scene.  Ada Leverson was friends with Oscar Wilde, and his influence is apparent - if anything, rather more so than in Love's Shadow, because she turns to the epigram rather more frequently in Love At Second Sight - par example, 'she was a woman who was never surprised at anything except the obvious and the inevitable'.  Sometimes this clash of serious storyline and comic prose was a little disconcerting - I thought the balance worked better in Love's Shadow - but  this is still a wonderful little book.

Of course, what you should do is get the trilogy and read them in order!  I'll read Tenterhooks one day, and then everything will fall into place properly...

Detail: Love at Second Sight by Ada Leverson

0 At Mrs. Lippincote's - Elizabeth Taylor

I intended to read At Mrs. Lippincote's (1945) back in January, in its rightful place for Elizabeth Taylor Centenary year, but somehow it didn't happen... and then I went to a wonderful Celebration of Elizabeth Taylor in Reading, and one of the book groups was discussing this title.  I would have written about the day in Reading properly (where I got to meet lots of lovely ladies from the LibraryThing Virago group) but it happened just before Muriel Spark Reading Week, so I had other things to take blog prominence!

Well, better late than never - I'll give you my thoughts on At Mrs. Lippincote's.  The short review is that this is my favourite, of the five or six Elizabeth Taylor novels I've read.  My usual confusion over characters didn't occur, and I didn't even have that tiny this-feels-like-homework response I sometimes get with Taylor.  Instead, I just enjoyed her beautiful writing and intriguing characters, and only had one misgiving - which I'll come to later.

The Mrs. Lippincote of the title has gone to a residency not unlike Mrs. Palfrey's at the Claremont, and has let her house to Roddy Davenant (an RAF airman) and his wife Julia, for the duration of the war.  The idea of living in somebody else's house is a very rich vein for a novelist, and it is mined (can one mine a vein?) beautifully by Taylor.  Mrs. Lippincote is very present through her absence, and the constant possibility of her visitation and judgement.  All her possessions are still in the house, and Julia makes her home amongst them, treading the line between running her family's home and living in a stranger's house.  She looks at an old photo of Mrs. Lippincote's family at an elaborate wedding:

"And now it's all finished," Julia thought.  "They had that lovely day and the soup tureen and meat dishes, servants with frills and streamers, children.  They set out that day as if they were laying the foundations of something.  But it was only something which perished very quickly, the children scattered, the tureen draped with cobwebs, and now the widow, the bride, perhaps at this moment unfolding her napkin alone at a table in a small private hotel down the road."

While Taylor is great at delving into characters and relationships over the course of a novel, she is also fantastic at painting complete portraits with a few imaginative details.  A bit like synedochal snapshots of people's lives.

Roddy's cousin Eleanor is also living with them, and anybody who has read Rebecca West's excellent novella The Return of the Soldier will be familiar with the dynamic of the wife/husband/husband's cousin.  (It is a cousin in The Return of the Soldier too, isn't it?)  Eleanor, indeed, does think that she would make a better wife for Roddy - and she is probably right.  Roddy and Eleanor aren't on the same wavelength - neither are the 'bad guy', but our sympathies are definitely with Julia, who is a wonderful character.

I would be confident that you'd all love Julia, or at least empathise with her, but I've just reminded myself of Claire's review: 'Julia is an odd character and certainly not a very likeable one."  Re-reading her post, I'm starting to change my mind a bit... but I'll stick to my guns and explain why I did love Julia.  She is intelligent and artistic, coping with the dissatisfactions of her life with stoicism and wit.  She hasn't been handed the home or husband that she would ideally choose, but makes the best of the situation she is in - as well as being sensitive and thoughtful about the wider conditions of the country.  When talking to the Wing Commander (Roddy's boss), she argues the point for education for his daughter Felicity:

"They will try to stuff her head with Virgil and Pliny and Greek Irregular Verbs."

"All Greek verbs are irregular," Julia murmured.

"I think it nonsense.  What use will it be to her when she leaves school?  Will it cook her husband's dinner?"

"No, it won't do that, but it will help her to endure doing it, perhaps.  If she is to cook while she is at school, then there will be that thing less for her to learn when she's grown-up: but, if she isn't to learn Greek at school, then she will never learn it afterwards.  And learning Greek at school is like storing honey against the winter."

"But what use is it?" he persisted.

"Men can be educated; women must be trained," she said sorrowfully.

A little heavy-handed perhaps, but a point worth making - and, incidentally, a battle subsequently won (although neither girls nor boys are likely to study Greek irregular verbs now... at least not at the sort of school I attended.)  The Wing Commander is another really intriguing character.  He has all the firmness and professionalism you'd expect of a Wing Commander, but also a literary side which baffles Roddy.  He's a bit awkward with children, but manages to engage Oliver Davenant in a discussion about the Brontes - a theme which runs throughout the novel, potential mad-woman-in-the-attic and everything.  Oh, I've not mentioned Oliver before, have I?  He is Julia's ten year old son, and which of us could fail to greet a fellow bibliophile?

Oliver Davenant did not merely read books.  He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words.  Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine.  The pages had personality.  He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night.  He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window.  Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

He is incredibly sensitive and fairly weak, in a determined-invalid sort of way, but his friendship with Felicity is more or less the only straightforward one in the novel.  Which brings me onto my sticking point with At Mrs. Lippincote's - the ending, which I shan't spoil, is a crisis between two characters which comes rather out of the blue, and doesn't feel very consistent with the rest of the narrative.  At Mrs. Lippincote's, like all the Taylor novels I've read, is more concerned with characters than plot - nothing hugely unbalancing occurs, and the focus is upon the way people live together and communicate.  Until the end, which feels a bit as though Taylor wasn't sure how to conclude a novel, and decided, unfortunately, to end with a bang.

I shall take a leaf out of her book (not literally, that would be vandalism) and end in a manner which I usually do not - with a quotation.  At Mrs. Lippincote's is thoughtful, clever, and perceptive, but it's also often very witty - and I'll finish with a quotation which amused me.

Eleanor, whom he [Oliver] did not really like, set sums for him every morning and corrected them when she came home for tea.  Occasionally, he had a right answer, in much the same manner as when one backs horses a great deal, now and the one of them comes in for a place.

(See all the Elizabeth Taylor Centenary Celebration reviews for this title here.)

Detail: At Mrs. Lippincote's - Elizabeth Taylor