The Camomile by the Scottish author Catherine Carswell was first published in 1922 but it has just been reprinted by British Library in their Women Writers series.
The blurb on the back of this book says: Set in early twentieth-century Glasgow, this effervescent novel is widely considered a fictional counterpart to Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of Ones’s Own’. In fact this book predates that essay by quite a few years.
Ellen Carstairs lives with her brother Ronald and her Aunt Harry who is a keen Christian, but Ellen gets no peace at home to do the writing that she wants to do. She is having to give piano lessons to help out financially, but worse than that her aunt is always coming in and out of her room to chat, and to try to persaude her to go to the very many religious meetings that she attends.
Ellen’s solution to the problem is to rent a room just off Byres Road in Glasgow’s west end, supposedly as a place to teach her pupils but really as a refuge from her aunt, and to get on with her writing, she has great ambition.
The book begins with a letter to her friend Ruby, they had spent time together studying music in Germany, after that it moves on to journal in style. Ellen moves from a not long out of school girl, writing of the crushes she had had on teachers to a young woman contemplating her future and weighing up her options. After a bit of a whirlwind romance and engagement some red flags have been spotted by her and it seems that she’ll have to think again.
This was a bit of a slow start for me but I ended up really loving it, there is some Glaswegian in it but really not much at all and it’s very easily understood I think. There’s quite a bit of humour as Ellen is a close observer of those around her, and the middle class society of Glasgow was quite a rich seam.
The Camomile has an interesting Afterword by Simon Thomas of the blog Stuck in a Book.
I was sent a copy of this book by British Library, for review. I appreciated their Mackintosh – ish book cover design.