Company parade (Storm Jameson)

I didn't especially enjoy my first encounter with Storm Jameson; Women without men, but as part of this challenge, I have to be willing to give some authors several chances as I plan to read all of the Virago Modern Classics, there is no escape! And this is a good thing; whilst I have yet to find a Molly Keane novel that I have really enjoyed, I'm happy to report that Company Parade was a much better read than Women without men.

This novel centres on the character of Hervey, a young woman who comes to London just after the end of the First World War to make her fortune. We learn in due course that she is married, and her husband Penn is in the airforce. We learn also that she has a young son, at home in Yorkshire with her mother, called Richard, who is one of the reasons behind her trip to London to get a job. Penn is difficult to like, seemingly unwilling to look after his wife and child.

Hervey quickly settles down into the job she finds, writing advertisements, although she has also written a novel which is about to be published. She moves out of the hotel where she first stayed into an attic room. She mades friends with Delia, the lady on the first floor, and other friends both at work and outside it.

This book was intended to be the first one in a longish series of books about the same characters under the banner title "Mirror in darkness"; in the event Jameson only wrote two more, Love in winter and None turn back, both of which are published by Virago, and I will be interested to see how she develops the characters and storylines from this volume. This one has just been published once with an original green cover, which I own.

Women against men (Jameson)

I picked Women against men up in Oxfam, intrigued by the title. I hadn't read any Storm Jameson before so that was another good reason.

The book turned out to be three novellas.

The first one, Delicate Monster, was my favourite. It told the story of two women who had been friends since childhood who were both writers; the narrator had had little success with her work and forced to work first at a university and then as a publisher's reader, her friend was a bestselling author. It seemed that they only maintained their friendship for the purpose of despising each other, which wasn't a terribly nice premise, but it was interesting witnessing the women growing up, and from what I read in the introduction, it sounded like it had been quite influenced by Jameson's life as an academic. Their relationship suddenly broke down when the narrator's friend has an affair with her husband.

The second is called A single heart about a woman cheating on her husband as a result of boredom with her marriage.

In the third, A day off, we witness a woman who has lived off men all her life, suddenly wondering what she will do now that she is facing middle age and is alone.

Overall my feeling of Women against men was that it was not a feminist book as I thought the title implied - rahter it seemed that Jameson didn't really like women very much. I'll be interested to see if this conclusion is bourne out by Jameson's other novels, in particular Company Parade which I've heard quite a bit about.

It's just been published the once by Virago.