Women’s fiction and chic lit

‘Miss Carter’s War’ by Sheila Hancock

This novel, and the novel previously reviewed, I found myself reading at much the same time. My eyes drawn to their covers, I’m surprised to notice that both feature images of headless women – what is it with headless women? – both viewed from the side and wearing dresses and red shoes and waiting demurely. Both images do, at least, help to place the action in a certain era – post-war – with all that implies: Feisty women who make it through the war, and what happens next?

I’m intrigued by Sheila Hancock: she seems a woman of many parts, and at the same time nicely elusive and not easy to categorise. Not seeking fame, exactly, but famous because of her abilities to act. And to write. Predictably enough, this novel features a heroine who has won the croix de guerre after her involvement with the resistance in France, coping with all manner of horrors before landing up in England and finding employ as a teacher in a fairly select school for girls. Miss Carter is naturally brilliant, and particularly good at getting overlooked children to engage with their own education.

As with ‘The Railwayman’s Wife’ I feel almost as if the plot is secondary to character study. Miss Carter is interesting, engaging and her portrayal, as a woman trying her best against a difficult system, is sincere. As her own personal education advances through the 1940’s and 1950’s, we meet and also get to know Miss Carter’s supporting cast: the headmistress, severe but with a heart of gold; the only male teacher in the school, who, it turns out, is gay – a big secret to carry at the time; two underachievers in her class whose newly woken academic aspirations slam hard against the social and economic realities they have to endure.

As the novel proceeds through the years, it is an easy and engrossing read, with not a few high-notes of moral indignation. One gets the distinct impression that although Hancock is writing fiction, she writes from bitter experience, which has left her kinder, more tolerant of others, impatient of systems and politics getting in the way of happiness for ordinary folk. Not a bad ambition.

I find myself wanting to use words like ‘obvious’ and ‘a bit naïve’, but there is something in Hancock’s portrayal of the characters that pulls at my heartstrings. For all the plot twists and turns, I do get engrossed with the characters and want the story to end well. It doesn’t, not quite; which causes me to brood and to feel regret, not (in suprising contrast to my previous book review) that the author didn’t give me a ‘happy ending’ but that the characters had to suffer so much.

This story reminds me how precious is our personal dignity, and not to take for granted the freedoms that have been won for the under-represented in society through the years. The gains we now enjoy have often been achieved at great personal cost. If you would like a good read, kindly and thoughtful, Sheila Hancock’s book has a few worthwhile surprises in store.

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‘The Railwayman’s Wife’ by Ashley Hay

My husband bought a copy of ‘The Railwayman’s Wife‘ in an independent bookshop some years ago, and it has languished on our bedroom bookcase, until, in line with my new philosophy of ‘let’s explore what we already own’ my husband chose it for me. Finally, I dipped in.

‘The Railwayman’s Wife’ by Ashley Hay repays close reading: unashamedly literary and reflective, it brims with quiet, beautifully described images that I find very refreshing: I hardly need to visit Australia, I can just absorb the language of this novel and the beauty that Hay conjures so deftly. Though I find I get the best from it when I read slowly, the plot is fairly minimal: man dies, his lovely wife and daughter manage for a while without him somehow, while two possible future mates come into widow’s orbit, one eventually marrying another woman, the other dying a tragic, minimalist death prefigured by unrequited love for the widow.

Sorry, is that a spoiler? You need not regard it as such.

This is a lovely book, one which has opened my eyes afresh to the power of simple words arranged on the page to convey deep and powerful meaning. I do, however, have one major quibble with the way in which the line of the plot unspools. Yes, the book is primarily character-driven, and yes, there is a certain inevitability in the widow at the end of the novel finding herself once more alone, without a man dangling after her who might offer hope of a new life, protection and security. But I’m struggling to take the death of the second man seriously.

Not only does he seemingly almost evaporate somehow in a very artistic fashion that leaves a lot to the imagination, but as anyone with unrequited longings will know, life is not that easily snuffed out. Also, I can’t for the life of me work out why the protagonists are so quiet, why they never actually get round to speaking their minds, daring to tell the truth. Is it the times they live in? The expectations they are hemmed in by? Probably. Yet, for an obviously clever woman, the widow seems remarkably slow on the uptake, and I can’t help just wishing that the plot had unwound with enough fire to keep the key characters alive until the end.

If they had just said what they needed to, found the courage to take the risk of being honest with each other, that would have been enough of a lesson – and dramatic enough – for a satisfying ending. I’m annoyed, somehow, that the plot finishes on a tragic whimper, and in a way that I can hardly credit.

Yes, there is of course the irony of a sad man who has survived so much to arrive home after the Second World War in one piece, only to end his life on a beach… And perhaps we expect too much of our characters to hope that everyone might speak their mind.

But if that was me, and I had survived hell on earth, I would want to run and shout and tell the truth and not waste another minute in quiet, respectful, erroneous introspection. There would have been room, and plenty of credibility, in a conclusion which had gumption in it, smiles and hugs and happy endings.

Just saying.

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‘Grown Ups’ by Marian Keyes

Published and set in 2020, ‘Grown Ups’ by Marian Keyes is the story of an extended family, in which it steadily becomes apparent – to me, at least – that the grown-ups behave with varying degrees of childishness, and the children, with surprising maturity. In this family, the materfamilias Jessie, wife of the eldest brother of three, is energetic, opinionated, and since she does a lot of the decision-making and organising – her husband Johnny acting as her good-natured sidekick to hustle the orders and keep things running along smoothly – the family largely accept her lavish extravagance, her controlling ways, her certitude.

It must be hard to keep any large family on track; but then, I suspect that many of this extended family’s problems are, if not caused, at least exacerbated by the constant – and finally irritating – expectation that they gather all the time and show a jolly united front: birthdays, first communions, anniversaries, Easter and Christmas – no-one is exempt from the expectation that they turn up and hang out together for a few days, getting well fed and progressively drunker and spending their time, at Jessie’s insistence, in the lap of understated luxury, because, after all, it’s a special occasion.

That insistence and the way that it warps the normal, more human responses and everyday rebellions that most of us would hardly notice – will anyone ever get up the courage to utter a simple, “No, thank you, I’m busy,” or “Actually, I can’t, I’m doing something else that weekend”? – naturally acts as a catalyst for a spectacular falling out, which ends with a reality check all round and with life restored to a more sustainable and realistic normality: Life shaken up, love and loyalty tried and tested, so that the weak and arrogant are finally seen in their true colours and the young take their chance to be happy.

(To be continued)

Thanks so much for reading.

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‘The Other Bennet Sister‘ – Concluded

In the second part of my review of ‘The Other Bennet Sister’ by Janice Hadlow, we find Mary Bennet, of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ infamy, in the company of the cheerful Gardiner family.

Faced with their easy kindness and general optimism, Mary Bennet quickly realises that growing up means, rather paradoxically, learning to present a buoyant and kind exterior; and, whatever one’s personal doubts and feelings, consciously making the best of whatever positive attributes one has to one’s credit: a tidy figure, lovely eyes, a kind smile, a willingness to work hard… Twin themes with which I identify quite closely, occasional glimmers of wisdom in the text catching me unexpectedly and leaving me feeling wistful and gratefully wiser: The notion that happiness is a choice comes through loud and clear.

There are many dangers in attempting a work of this nature. Not only the obvious problem of repeats and the realisation that P & P is one of the best-known novels of all time and that its devotees can probably quote large parts of the book. The reach back to more formal language is also fraught with difficulty: how far should a modern re-telling attempt to ape the language, flavour and wit of the original, and to what degree must a modern version use more accessible English?

There is also the problem of plausibility. It has often occurred to me that Mr Collins, in searching for a wife, was looking in entirely the wrong place, and that his helpmeet in life might well have been Mary. And indeed, in TOBS we have a fleeting, mutual regard between Mr Collins and Mary – prompting a jealousy in Charlotte Collins which does, at least, galvanise her to be kinder to her husband – followed by a dance with two younger, far more suitable men in the Gardiners’ entourage, one of whom is, admittedly, not handsome.

It’s a curious twist that Mary, cast as so plain and pedantic and without any fortune to call her own, should now find herself with a choice of two entirely eligible suitors. Does the ugly duckling become the swan, or are the feelings roused in her two vying suitors more likely the consequence of jealousy, the ‘you have it, I want it’ feature of possessiveness? Mary chooses her suitor, and chooses, therefore, her life, buoyed by happiness and by the joy of having, and running, her own home. It hardly occurs to her that in electing to enter the married state she is, in many ways, electing one form of servitude over another. Perhaps a more comfortable one. But it speaks volumes for the aspirations of Georgian and Victorian women that they aspired so ardently to marry, thus exchanging the service they owed to their fathers and brothers, for that which they will offer to their husbands.

All in all, a very creditable novel, painstaking and carefully written and even, dare I say it, educative!

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‘The Other Bennet Sister’ by Janice Hadlow

Though I hesitate to buy books at supermarkets, I picked this up quickly: where else, at the moment, can we buy new books? Needing something to read, ‘The Other Bennet Sister’ looked a safe bet. I love Jane Austen, for her wisdom and her wit, and have read all her books, seen the films… And ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is my favourite.

TOBS is a good book, an interesting story that does very well to graft itself into the original story while keeping some of the original flavour and not being unduly repetitive.

It quickly became apparent to me that, in order for TOBS not to lean too heavily on the work that inspired it, the first part of this retelling is concerned with a reprise of P & P from Mary’s point of view, only then moving forward to what happened after we leave Elizabeth and Jane contemplating their own versions of married bliss. In this, the author does a good job to weave a path for Mary through an earlier narrative which leaves her almost no room, and indeed, casts her as a colourless and unpromising pain in the bahookie.

Managing Mary’s emergence from the low expectations of her family – and indeed, of Jane Austen – while honouring the original story is a significant achievement in itself and must have presented the author with a fair nightmare of checking and double-checking for internal accuracy and consistency. Indeed, so painstaking and careful has this process obviously been, that I can almost hear the author sighing with relief when Mary finally sets out on her own path and a fresh aspect to the story can be crafted without constant reference to what went previously.

Through suitably juvenile reflections and dawning awareness, Mary must concede the unenviable choices facing her: she must marry. And if that proves elusive, she must either live as an object of charity with Jane and their mother who is horrible to her, or become a somewhat unwelcome addition to Lizzy’s blissfully happy household. If all that fails, she can go into servitude as a governess. In realising that her choices are so limited, Mary does finally find a home with the Gardiners, her mother’s brother being a far kinder person to her than Mary’s mother could ever be. From the warmer embrace of her uncle’s home, Mary sits and waits for a miracle.  

(to be continued)

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