The little company (Dark) 191

The little company was a find in Oxfam sometime last year; it took me a while to attempt to read it because it has extremely small type! It took me a while also to get into it once I started reading it, but I was ultimately glad that I had persevered.

The little company is the story of a family, living in Sydney, Australia, and their experiences on the eve of and during the Second World War. However, rather than dealing with how their lives were affected, Dark deals with the intellectual and political issues; it seems that she felt that the everyday continued to be mundane, and the real excitement and change was in the way that people thought about things. Gilbert, the father, a successful novelist, is a diehard socialist and intellectual, as is his sister Marty, and his brother is a Marxist. But this provokes a difference of interest with the rest of his family as his wife and daughters have little concern with political issues. There was quite a lot of political analysis in the book which I struggled with, and would have preferred Dark to concentrate more on the family and their lives which were more appealing to me, but I can see that this was an important novel for taking such a different approach.

It's just been published once by Virago, with an original green cover. Another of Dark's novels, Lantana Lane, which I believe is slightly more well known, is also published as a VMC. 3*

Kinflicks (Alther) 457

I was intrigued by Kinflicks when it arrived from an ebay purchase last year, because the cover is so unusual and unlike any other Virago books. Somehow it didn't entice me - either that or the fact that the book is 576 p. long. But I did enjoy it when I got to it!

Like many books, it combines life in the present with a review of life in the past. The main character Ginny Babcock is at the bedside of her dying mother, and in the third person, we are told about Mrs Babcock and Ginny's time with her. These chapters are interspersed with memories from Ginnie's childhood, or "kinflicks":

"Her mother had always been addcted to home movie-making and had choreographed the upbringing of Ginny and her brothers through the eyepiece of a camera, eternally poised to capture on celluloid those golden moments - the first smile, the first step, the first tooth in, the first tooth out, the first day of school, the first dance, year after tedious year. Mother's Kinflicks, Ginny and her brothers had called them"

It's an entertaining story - Ginny starts off dating a school jock, nearly runs off to get married to him, but both stand each other up (and only discover this years later), falls in love with a motorcycle thug, has a lesbian affair whilst at college, and then gets married to a boring insurance salesman. She has a baby, but motherhood isn't enough, an affair follows....

Just published once by Virago (and it does have a green spine as you can see here.) I'm intrigued to see whether the cover of Alther's other VMC is also so unusual.

Life before man (Atwood) 68 (and The edible woman) 23

Life before man has been sitting on the shelf for a while. And to be honest, it could have stayed there a while longer for me. I can imagine that when it was published it might have been more relevant and popular, but reading it now it just seemed dated and lacking in drive. I'm not surprised that this is one of her lesser known books and despite being published early on by Virago, has only been published once. It's the story of three characters - Elizabeth, Nate and Lesje. Elizabeth and Nate are married; Nate and Lesje are having an affair - and essentially describes their relationships. Not really memorable at all. 2*

As I'm posting about Margaret Atwood I thought I should mention one of her other 6 VMCs which I have read (I have read a lot of her novels actually, but just not the VMC ones - Cat's Eye is a particular favourite, along with Alias Grace) - The edible woman. I picked it up for its fantastic title - it was a much more riveting read about a woman named Marian who is gradually losing her grip on reality. It's got two Virago editions, and I own the later one - I love the quirky mirror picture of the earlier edition though.

The rising tide (Keane)

I haven't hugely enjoyed the Molly Keane novels that I have read before, but The rising tide was recommended to me by Rachel from BookSnob and I have to say that I enjoyed it more than the other ones that I have read, mainly for the insight it gave into life for women living in country houses before the First World War. I'm still not a huge Keane fan - I don't especially enjoy her writing style or particularly what her novels are about.

The Rising Tide tells the story of the family at Garonlea at the start of the twentieth century. The lives of the four daughters is ruled by their mother, Lady Charlotte:

"Pain they endured and accepted.
Endless Chaperonage.
Supervision of their correspondence.
The fact that Mother Knew Best.
That Father says so.
That there is no more to be said on the subject, they accepted.
They accepted their leisure without boredom.
They accepted having occupations found for their leisure"

It was certainly a restricted life. As the book proceeds however, life relaxes, particularly after one of the sons marries Cynthia, who introduces another personality, as strong as that of Lady Charlotte into the household. And of course as time passes and the war happens, society itself changes and becomes less restrictive.

It's been published three times by Virago, and I borrowed the most recent pink edition from the library. 3*.

Tortoise by candlelight; Familiar Passions (Bawden)

Two Bawden books for you today! Firstly, Tortoise by candlelight. Set in the 1960s, this is a book about 14-year old Emmie and her family - her aged grandmother, her restrictive father, her elder and slightly wilder sister Alice, and her younger brother Oliver who seems to need a lot of looking after. In fact, all of the family seem to need Emmie's care and attention. However, the control that this gives her changes when the family gain new neighbours who become involved in their life. As ever, the plot is not as important as the investigation of relationships. Not my favourite Nina Bawden by any means, but certainly enjoyable.

Unusually for Nina Bawden, this VMC has been published twice, including in an original green edition (I've only seen one other of her titles (A little love, a little learning) with an original green cover so far). And I am fortunate enough to have this edition! Both versions have the same picture however. 3*

Secondly, Familiar passions, which is a Bawden that I've been wanting to read for quite some time - it was the book I was most tempted to break my pre-Christmas book-buying ban for, but strangely after I started buying books again I didn't get around to buying it for a while. It turned out to be a typically enjoyable Bawden read. The book opens with Bridie and James celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary in a nice restaurant; an adopted child, Bridie married James aged 19. He was a widower with two children, and Bridie brought them up and had her own child. However, when they get home after the meal, James announces that he wants to leave her. The rest of the book is concerned with the outcome of this statement and Bridie's struggles to find her own identity beyond the marriage and given the circumstances of her adoption. Bridie feels that she needs to at some level reclaim her past in order to have any sort of future. I really enjoyed this one, which has only been published once by Virago in the italicised cover version. 4*

Precious Bane (Webb) 6

Precious Bane has been languishing on my bookshelves for some time as I hadn't particularly enjoyed the other Mary Webb that I had read, Gone to earth. However, I felt it was time to give it a go, and thought it would provide a good contrast to the other VMCs that I've been reading recently. Which it did.

Precious Bane is a rather lovely tale that evokes the countryside of Shropshire in the early 19th century. Although the book tells the story of Prue, a girl with a hare-lip, who only becomes conscious of it being a problem due to the reactions around her, the beauty of the book is in the descriptions of the land, the pastoral scenes, and the depiction of countryside customs, such as hiring fairs and "caking" (playing cards for cake - I like the sound of that!). Prue loves the countryside and this is readily apparent in the writing:

"Sitting there looking into the green trees, with the smell of our hay coming freshly on the breeze, mixed with the scent of wild roses and meadowsweet in the orchard ditch, I hearkened to the blackbirds singing near and far. When they were a long way off you could scarcely disentangle them from all the other birds, for there was a regular charm of them, thrushes and willow-wrens, seven coloured linnets, canbottlins, finches and writing-maisters. It was a weaving of many threads, with one maister-thread of clear gold, a very comfortable thing to hear"

The book is certainly reminiscent of Hardy and the Brontes, but it has a style all of its own.

Mary Webb is an author who was neglected during her lifetime; although she wrote 6 novels she did not achieve any sort of popularity until after her death, when Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister) read Precious Bane and began to publicise it; the Virago edition contains a foreword written by Baldwin.

This was a very early VMC, number 6 in fact, and has been published four times - I especially like the most recent two covers which feature mystical countryside/pastoral images. My copy is the most recent one which has a wonderful turquoise spine. It looks like all of Mary Webb has been included in the VMC list, so there are four more novels to go. Although I did enjoy this one much more than Gone to earth, I feel that a little Mary Webb can go quite a long way. 3.5*

Cotter's England (Stead)

Stead's work is I find quite variable - both in terms of subject matter/plot line, and in terms of setting, and also in terms of whether or not I have enjoyed it. Whilst I loved For love alone and Miss Herbert: suburban wife, I did not really enjoyed Letty Fox, and Cotter's England fell into this category also.

It's a story of working class life in England, set partly in Gateshead, following the Second World War, and uses a single family's experiences to give an insight into this. Nelly, a journalist, is working for a left-wing paper and earning very little; her husband George works for the International Labour Organization - so we learn quite a lot about trade unionism and the labour movement. Nelly's brother Tom is a philanderer. The mix of characters reveals a mixture of hope and aspiration along with the opposite; it presents a multilayered picture of life but not one that really held my attention.

Quite an early VMC, this was published with an original green cover and a later green cover. My copy is the earlier one.