Tag Archives: Virago Modern Classic

Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons

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Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons was first published in 1938 but my copy is a Virago Modern Classic. This is a really enjoyable read, four stars on Goodreads I’d say. Inevitably though I find myself saying that you shouldn’t expect it to be as funny as Cold Comfort Farm, which truly did have me laughing out loud a lot, wayback when I was a teenager, I don’t know what effect it would have on me now though.

Anyway, in Nightingale Wood Viola has been widowed after just one year of marriage. Her husband Teddy had come from a wealthy family, his parents were appalled that their son had lowered himself to marry a girl who just worked in a shop. Viola ends up moving in with her parents-in-law, Mr amd Mrs Withers and their two almost middle-aged daughters Tina and Madge. Everyone seems to have given up hope of them ever getting married and moving out, so it’s a very strange household which Viola finds herself living in.

Mr Withers is miserably mean with money and he’s amazed to discover that his son died leaving his widow just about penniless, although as Teddy worked for his father and he was paid pennies in wages it’s a mystery how he was supposed to leave money to Viola. She would leave their home, The Eagles, if she could but she has no family of her own to help her.

That makes it all sound pretty depressing but really it isn’t. One of the sisters-in-law is in love with the chauffeur, the other one adores dogs, and the very well off Spring family are always entertaining the rest of the local nobs.

Viola falls for Victor Spring, the very handsome son, but he has been going out with a girl forever. Is there any hope for Viola?

You’ll have noticed that this bears more than a passing resemblence to a fairy tale. But is has a fair share of humour in it too, mostly from Viola, a very likeable character.

As I said, it was published in 1938 and it has the snobbishness and even anti-semitism which you sometimes come across in books from that era. It also mentions the possibility of a coming war, and that scoundrel who would have been crowned King Edward VIII, if we hadn’t got lucky.

The book has an introduction by Sophie Dahl.

Conversation Piece by Molly Keane

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Conversation Piece by Molly Keane, sometimes known as M.J Farrell, was first published in 1932 but my copy is a Virago reprint from 1991. Prior to reading this one I think I had only read Two Days in Aragon by this author and I remember enjoying that one. I enjoyed this one too although it is one of her earliest works when she was really writing about her own life experiences, growing up in Ireland in an Anglo Irish family. Those people occupied a strange place in Irish society, not really liked or accepted by the ‘real’ Irish people but tolerated for what they brought, their wealth and employment for the locals. A love of horses seems to have been their main reason for existing, breeding, racing, doing point-to-points and hunting with them.

This is the story of Oliver who is invited to Pullinstown by his uncle Sir Richard, a widow with a son and daughter, Willow and Dick. The atmosphere is anything but friendly until Oliver’s cousins realise that he is a good horseman, then he is accepted as one of them.

If you like horses and dogs then you’ll probably enjoy this one but if not then you might want to give it a miss as there is an awful lot of horse and dog chat, races and hunts described, but always in an amusing way and considering there are a few hunts described at length, she doesn’t dwell on the end result. They are always trying to get the better of their neighbours in horse sales and of course the neighbours are trying to do exactly the same thing.

To begin with it you could be forgiven for thinking that the family is a cold one and their father remote and uncaring but in reality the relationships are very close.

Keane is best when she is writing the dialogue of the Irish servants, she obviously had a good ear and memory for conversations and as a person brought up in the west of Scotland in a town which had loads of Irish immigrants, most of whom had arrived there in the 1950s, I found it all very authentic – so I did.

Still on the subject of horses – did you ever read Josephine Pullein-Thompson’s books when you were young? I did but I had completely forgotten about her until I noticed that her obituary was in the Guardian today, she was 90. Apparently she also wrote detective novels and a gothic novel under the name Josephine Mann. You can read her obituary here.

The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby

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The Land of Green Ginger was first published in 1927. It begins in South Africa where Joanna Burton is living with her parents but after their deaths she has to leave for England to live with some aunts and can only dream of returning to South Africa when she’s older. It’s set mainly in rural Yorkshire where Joanna, her husband Teddy Leigh and their two small daughters have settled after the end of the First World War.

Teddy had proposed to Joanna before he went off to the trenches, and full of love/lust/excitement? Joanna had accepted his offer of marriage. She thinks they’ll have a charmed life but her friend Rachel predicts doom and gloom and when Teddy returns from the trenches with his health broken it’s left to Joanna to keep their farm going and try to make ends meet.

I found this to be quite a depressing book. I must admit that when I was reading it I was under the impression that Winifred Holtby had died of TB and I thought to myself – how could she possibly write a book about a man dying of TB too? But it turns out that Holtby died of Bright’s disease.

The book does have some similarities to what has been going on all over the UK over the last few years, with a large number of men being brought in to rural Yorkshire where they are helping to plant trees. It doesn’t go down too well with the locals, particularly the men who are in need of work and are not at all happy about the foreign men who have caused trouble in the pub and amongst the local women. All very topical, but a bit bleak all round. I feel in need of something a bit more upbeat now.

Love by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Love cover

Love by Elizabeth von Arnim is the book which I got in this month’s Classics Club Spin. I’m quite late in getting around to writing about it, but you know what it’s like, sometimes life just gets in the way of what you really want to be doing!

I really enjoyed this book although it is quite a sad read because Elizabeth von Arnim was writing about her own experience of having a relationship with a much younger man, which ended badly. This book was first published in 1925.

Catherine was obsessed with a play called The Immortal Hour which has been playing at King’s Cross. She had seen it umpteen times and eventually she strikes up a friendship with Christopher who shares her obsession. Christopher had noticed Catherine long before she was aware of him. He was drawn to her petite figure and beauty and took her to be a young woman who didn’t have much money as she always wore the same clothes. He wasn’t to know that Catherine had a married daughter and she was only hard up because her late husband had been so afraid that if he died she would attract fortune hunters that he decided to leave everything to his daughter, and left his wife to struggle along on a very small annual allowance. It didn’t seem to occur to him that his daughter would eventually become heir to his large fortune and in turn would be the target of fortune hunters, particularly one local vicar!

By the time Christopher saw Catherine in the cruel light of day he was already in love with her and was just shocked at how tired she was looking. As you would expect Catherine is charmed when she realises that he thinks she is much younger than she is and her happiness means that people see only laughter lines, not the age wrinkles which are really there.

So begins a battle with gravity and time and Catherine ends up spending time and money on the artistry of a marvellous make-up woman to try to be worthy of her younger man.

When Catherine’s son-in-law, who is a clergyman, finds out about her friendship with Christopher he is absolutely appalled, but Catherine points out to him that her daughter is actually over 30 years younger than he is. Surely he should be the last person to complain about an age gap between a couple, but he doesn’t see it that way.

This novel is all about hypocrisy, what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, but somehow often isn’t. The relationship between Catherine’s daughter Virginia and her husband Stephen is really much worse as Stephen had dodged marriage over the years, much to his mother’s chagrin, but she wasn’t to know that her son had been eyeing up young Virginia since she was in short socks! Nowadays we would say he had been grooming her and he married her as soon as she turned 18, Catherine could have been bloody minded and made him wait until her daughter turned 21, hoping that by that time she had seen sense and wasn’t so enamoured by what she obviously saw as a father figure, something which she lacked due to her own father’s early death.

Well, I don’t know about you but I feel that when the age gap between a couple is so large that one of them is old enough to be the parent of the other, then it is distinctly weird, and the few such relationships which I’ve had experience of viewing from a distance have definitely been paternalistic/maternalistic. But I suppose if that’s what makes them happy then who am I to complain.

Mind you, although I never had a daughter I must admit that if I had had one then if a man old enough to be her father had come sniffing around after her – I would have beaten him off with a brush!

Another great read from Elizabeth von Arnim.

Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther

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I’m back – after a few days away, due mainly to life getting in the way and specifically to idiots viewing our house.

Anyway, the only thing keeping me semi-sane at the moment is reading and I’m behind with blogposts. A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Mrs Miniver. It’s one of those books that just seems to have always been there, probably more because of the film than the book. Anyway I realised that I had never read the book, nor even seen the film although I’ve probably seen some clips from it.

The first thing that struck me when I read the blurb on the back of this Virago is that as Jan Struther was of Scottish heritage then this one would be fine for Peggy Ann’s Read Scotland 2014 Challenge. Her father was Henry Torrens Anstruther, an Edinburgh advocate and Liberal MP for St Andrews. Jan Struther was the pen name of Joyce Anstruther, she dropped the -An- of the surname as her mother was also a writer using the name Anstruther. Jan married Anthony Maxtone Graham which is of course another weel-kent Scottish surname.

‘Mrs Miniver’ was originally a column which was published in The Times, beginning shortly before the start of World War II. She was asked to write the column by Peter Fleming, brother of Ian Fleming, it’s funny how all those bookish people are linked one way or another. Jan Struther obviously based the Miniver family on her own. Mrs Miniver’s family is described as being middle class but I think upper middle is nearer the mark as in 1939 you had to be pretty well off to be able to afford a car and indeed a cottage in Kent as well as a house in Chelsea. Nowadays you would have to be a multi-millionaire to afford that life-style of course!

Having said that Mrs Miniver did write about things which everyone was experiencing, like getting gas masks and going out in a black-out for the first time (inky), driving to Scotland ( and I must say if you’ve never done that then it’s high time that you did), visiting Highland Games, at the end of which Mrs Miniver writes: The music began to quicken intolerably for the final steps: and Mrs Miniver saw the rest through a mist. For I defy anyone, she said in self-defence, to watch a sword-dance through to the end without developing a great-grandmother called Gillespie.

First published in book form in 1939 and later in film, which I believe is quite different from the book, but Churchill credited it with doing more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships. It’s a fun but informative read.

Julius by Daphne du Maurier

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This book was first published as The Progress of Julius in 1933. It’s the story of Julius Levy who was born in France, the product of a mixed marriage between a French Christian woman and an Algerian Jewish man. Life hasn’t been easy for Julius and his parents and after a traumatic incident Julius and his father have to travel to Algeria to escape the French police.

The young Julius takes after his maternal side of the family business wise anyway and ambition rules his life. He’s determined to make money and when he does get money he holds on to it, never using it to make life easier for himself. Every pound a prisoner – as we say!

Eventually he makes his way to London and starts building his business empire and it became a very big one.

I did enjoy this book, which is surprising really as Julius isn’t a very likeable character, in fact I think nowadays he would be described as having some kind of mental problem like autism or Asperger’s.

Although Julius was written in 1932, a time when things were just beginning to get fairly scary for the Jews of mainland Europe and let’s face it there were people in Britain too who were anti-semitic, there’s really nothing to upset anyone of tender feelings.

I kept thinking of Lyons Corner Houses all the time I was reading about Julius’ empire building because it reminded me so much of that tea-room restaurant chain which became a British institution. The first one was opened in 1894 and the last closed in 1981. I wonder if du Maurier used them as inspiration for Julius. They were a family run Jewish business, in fact Nigella Lawson is related to them.

Julius was Daphne du Maurier’s third book to be published, she was 26 years old when she wrote it.

The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield

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The Diary of a Provincial Lady cover

E.M. Delafield is one of those authors who until very recently I wouldn’t have dreamt of reading, and it’s all thanks to book bloggers that I am now.

This one was first published in 1930 but my copy is a Virago with an introduction by Jilly Cooper. Despite the fact that the book is over 80 years old the whole thing is immediately recognisable, the situations and characters are just the sort of thing that I find myself getting involved in, (minus the servants problem) exasperating things, but when you read about them happening to other people it’s all so funny.

The diary starts off on November 7th and the Provincial Lady – we are never told her name, is struggling with her indoor bulbs and bowls and wondering where she should put them, cellar or attic. Joan Kyler and I were both doing that not so long ago, and there’s about 5,000 miles between us. In fact the whole diary is a sequence of events which are common to most of us, especially if you have children or cats. The cats have unexpected kittens, the children generously give you measles, although in my case it was chicken-pox at the age of 35, toes to scalp!

Thankfully I haven’t had the experience of having to pawn jewellery to pay bills, but then I suspect that a pawnbroker wouldn’t be interested in my rings. On the other hand I have always resisted the temptation to take myself off to the south of France! In that respect it did remind me of Elizabeth’s German Garden (which is mentioned in the book) when Elizabeth merrily orders two hundred rose bushes whilst the household finances are obviously very precarious.

Robert, the husband is such a typical awkward and maddening one, but then he has his moments, although few, when he’s worth his weight in gold. This is a comfort read if ever there was one, something for the times when you can’t bear to watch the news any more. A good laugh!

My copy of the book has a cover which has been designed by Cath Kidston. I know she’s all the rage and it does fit in with the feel of the book but I grew up with wallpaper like this on my bedroom in the 1960s and I was mightily glad when it was covered up by an orange dinner plate sized pattern around about 1970. I know, there’s no accounting for it!

A Dedicated Man by Elizabeth Taylor

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A Dedicated Man cover

This is a Virago publication and another one from my 2011 Reading List which I hadn’t realised until I started to read it is actually a book of short stories. I’ve only read novels by Elizabeth Taylor previously and really liked her writing and her short stories are equally good.

It’s usually her cousin Katherine Mansfield who is held up as a great short story writer and I have a copy of her stories which have been reprinted by Folio Books. I used to be in the Folio Book Club mainly because their books are always so beautifully produced. But I would say that Elizabeth Taylor is just as good as her cousin.

In common with Mansfield and Daphne du Maurier quite a lot of the short stories are set at holiday locations and I hadn’t noticed it until now but I suppose it is a good subject for writing about – people watching on holiday.

The blurb on the back says:
‘Like Jane Austen, like Barbara Pym, like Elizabeth Bowen – soul-sisters all – Elizabeth Taylor made it her business to to explore the quirky underside of so-called civilisation.‘ – Anne Tyler

The introduction is by Joanna Kingham, Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter and it also contains an interview of her mother which appeared in her local paper The Bucks Free Press in 1971.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

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I Capture the Castle cover

Dodie Smith began writing this book in 1945 but it’s set in the 1930s and people have been telling me that I should read it for at least 30 years so I put it on my 2011 Reading List to make sure that I got around to it this year at last.

I really enjoyed this book and I wish that I had read it when I was about 17, which happens to be the age of Cassandra Mortmain, the narrator. Although Cassandra is supposedly telling the story through her diary which she speed writes in great detail and using her own version of shorthand, it doesn’t read like a diary to me, which is a plus.

Cassandra lives with her beautiful older sister Rose, their schoolboy brother Thomas, a step-mother called Topaz and their father James Mortmain who had written a very successful book years before but had been unable to write anything else after a traumatic incident. They live a very spartan life as tenants of Godsend Castle which has no electricity or running water and in fact they have very little to eat and virtually no clothes because they have hardly any money and no means of earning any. Rose despairs of ever being able to meet anyone and get a life of her own.

Then the Cottons, who have just inherited the castle and nearby Scoatney Hall arrive and it’s all quite Pride and Prejudice-ish. I have to say that the father, Mortmain did annoy me because he seemed to be unconcerned that his family was starving and they had had to sell everything of value. But I suppose he was supposed to have a problem with depression.

I really liked Cassandra and I know that people have thought that she seemed to be too immature for a 17 year old but I felt that she was just right for a young woman who had led a sheltered life in the country and was the product of genteel poverty. It’s a class thing, if she had been brought up in a working class family she would have been more mature because she would have had to leave school at the age of 14 and earn a living somehow.

Cassandra and Rose were in an even worse position than an Austen or Bronte character because they didn’t have the possibility of becoming a governess, which was the only occupation open to women in their position in the past. They were unemployable.

Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say about the story but I can see why this is such a popular book with people, and Joan, I thought of you when Cassandra mentioned the horror of the butcher shop.

I have to admit that like Rose and Cassandra, I inherited a fur coat from an elderly lady although not something as horrific as a bearskin. It’s actually a vintage mink which is about 60 years old and I’m the third owner of it, or maybe even the fourth. It’s not something that I would ever have bought, but when you think about it, mink are so ghastly to all other animals that I can’t imagine what else they were put here for. It takes up a lot of space but I don’t see the point in destroying it now, it’s a historic artefact to me. Obviously Dodie Smith had a thing about fur as she want on to write 101 Dalmations.

I don’t like the film tie in cover which Virago chose for the book, especially when you think of what the cover could have been like. I think Virago covers have gone down-hill recently, I liked the old ones.