Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves by Rachel Malik was published in 2017. I thought that this one would be right up my street but I didn’t love it.

It begins in 1940 and Elsie Boston is preparing a room for her new Land Girl’s arrival. Elsie has been running her farm on her own since her father died and transferred the tenancy to her. She’s been having a tough time getting through the work and the place is looking dilapidated, but Elsie is nervous and unsurprisingly doesn’t really want to share her home with a stranger.

It transpires that the Land Girl Rene Hargreaves has abandoned her children to escape her husband who is a gambler, but she quickly settles into her new life and the two women become close friends, perhaps even more than that.

In some ways it’s an idyllic existence, but when they are visited by an official farm inspector their lives are turned upside down and they have to leave the farm and find work and a home elsewhere. Things get even worse when Rene’s past life catches up with her and they end up having to make space for an elderly man, and Elsie becomes his carer.

I didn’t enjoy this one as much as other readers did, for me it dragged quite a lot. The author was inspired to write this story when she did some research into her grandmother’s life. She seems to have been intrigued by the discovery of what she saw as tantalizing facts, with the possibilty of Elsie and Rene being a couple. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested. There have always been women living together, often for financial reasons, sometimes for romance, very often because the men they would have married had been killed in World War I and there was an imbalance of the sexes.  In my childhood there were plenty of such elderly spinsters around sharing homes.

Whether Elsie and Renee were lovers or just the best of friends was of no interest to me, but Rene leaving her children and never getting in touch with them again meant I could never warm to her, and when Elsie ends up having to do the caring work that should have been Rene’s responsibility – if anyone’s – I disliked her, yes I’m judgemental.

I recall that Angela Thirkell had a couple of lesbian characters back in the 1940s in her Barsetshire series and none of the inhabitants batted an eyelid, after all, there was no law against it due to Queen Victoria refusing to believe there were lesbians around!