One of a small shelf of old books (of the kind to no doubt be bought by the box-load for a pound or rwo), I found in a lovely, historical hotel room in Tutbury (The Dog and Partridge).
Not at all what I’d normally read, being both fiction and about the coming of age of an Irish girl in the early 20th century, but I found it gripping, its main character Fanny very modern – shockingly so in the 1950s when the edition was published.
The edition is of the Companion Book Club, London, and I can imagine the kind of intellectually aspirational woman who might have subscribed, being trapped already in Betty Freidan’s The Problem with No Name.
For this is about women breaking free – something very hard to do in the 1950s, which was one reason I found it so interesting. The other was that it is almost radical in its occasional but deep treatment of servants (which reflects O’Brien’s radical politics). So:
“In the mirror Lucille considered her mother’s heavy yet still beautiful face, and behind it the weary old face of Seraphine.
Oh Seraphine, she longed to say, go off to bed in God’s name, and forget this old lady and her hairbrushes and her thinning hair. But she knew that to say any such thing was to put Seraphine in an awkward position, and even perhaps to endanger her job. And she knew that Seraphine, having grown old and ill by this tyrannical dressing table, must stay by it – if her nephew was to get through the seminary, if her niece was to have a dowry, if her old father was to be allowed to continue to occupy a cottage much needed by M. de Mellin for a gamekeeper.”
One more female author hugely popular and seriously significant, who “disappeared” and had to be rediscovered.
About