Day two of NADIM and I’m delighted that Simon at Stuck in a Book will be reading a book a day for the month too!

The Victorian Chaise-Longue – Marghanita Laski (1953) 99 pages

It’s been years since I read the very powerful Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, and I kept meaning to get back to her. The Victorian Chaise-Longue is a short tale of domestic terror, and would appeal to anyone who is a fan of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, or The Yellow Wallpaper.

It opens with Melanie who has recently given birth, and is now recovering from tuberculosis, being patronised by her doctor and her husband.

“‘Now listen to me,’ he said. ‘Because you’ve managed to be a good obedient girl so far, we’ve been able to conquer what might have been a very nasty little flare up, and if you let yourself get perfectly well and we keep a steady eye on you, there’s no reason why anything of the sort should ever occur again.’”

And…

“‘How clever you are, darling,’ said Melanie adoringly. ‘You make me feel so silly compared with you.’

‘But I like you silly,’ said Guy, and so he does, thought Dr. Gregory, watching them. But Melanie isn’t the fool he thinks her, not by a long chalk, she’s simply the purely feminine creature who makes herself into anything her man wants her to be.”

So as you can see, the horror is there from page one 😀

They decide that Melanie could do with a change of view, and so she lies down on the titular furniture, which she had found in a junk shop before she became unwell. It’s heavy and ugly, but she had been taken by it; she had also experienced a memory which wasn’t hers when looking at it, which she quickly brushed aside.

When she wakes up, she is still on the chaise-longue, but in a different room and a different era, with a harsh woman who calls her Milly not Melly. At first she believes herself to be dreaming, but:

“It was real, that touch of flesh. There was no conceivable atmosphere of dream of which that touch of rough dry flesh could be a part.”

Melanie is trapped there, feeling even more unwell, cared for by the woman who turns out to be Milly’s sister Adelaide, and a stereotyped housemaid.

Milly is in some sort of disgrace, incurring her sister’s barely concealed wrath. As she tries to piece together what has happened, Melanie recognises parallels with her own life:

“Sin changes, you know, like fashion.”

I mentioned at the beginning Daphne du Maurier and the feminist classic by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Victorian Chaise Longue perhaps suffers by these comparisons. It’s not quite as horrifyingly unnerving as du Maurier’s stories, or as overt in its wider themes as The Yellow Wallpaper. But it is an engaging, quick read, which doesn’t offer trite answers to Melanie’s predicament or the wider issue of women’s bodies so often being constrained by forces more powerful than they are.