twentieth century fiction

“I suppose we don’t know much except from the books we have read, but at least we want to live.” (Barbara Comyns, A Touch of Mistletoe)

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I’d planned to read Barbara Comyns’ A Touch of Mistletoe (1967) in December for obvious reasons, but I fell behind with my plans as always. Despite the title it’s not a Christmas book at all, and instead it’s got my 2026 reading off to a great start.

A Touch of Mistletoe is thought to be semi-autobiographical, as it follows sisters Vicky and Blanche Green from teenagers in the 1920s, to extreme poverty in the 1930s, through to marriage and motherhood in wartime, ending in the 1950s. Certainly a semi-feral childhood is something Comyns has explored before:

“Our mother rather lost interest in us after the thirst got hold of her and, although our grandfather was vaguely fond of us, he certainly wasn’t interested.”

While their brother Edward seems fairly content in a disengaged way, the sisters are desperate to leave their Warwickshire home. Vicky wants to go to art school, but the solicitor who controls her inheritance from her father does not think this is an appropriate use of funds. Blanche is yet to come of age:

“Blanche could not draw, but she had the very special gift of romantic beauty. She was extremely tall and willowy, with a flowing mass of almost black hair, classical features and a pale moon face, her skin as fine as the skin inside egg shells.”

Comyns is so adept with those arresting similes. Another that struck me later was:

“He looked like an ugly bird who had been given beautiful dogs eyes by mistake”

And:

“He was a great admirer of Cézanne and I did not say that he usually left me feeling rather cold and I thought his paintings looked as if he lived on sour apples.”

Vicky escapes to Amsterdam but finds herself an unpaid housekeeper for a filthy home, looking after bull terriers. (I must admit I skim-read some of the passages to do with the dogs, it was pretty awful.) She escapes, and after briefly returning home where her mother has swopped alcohol for incessant cleaning, the sisters finally get to London.

“It took us months to get used to the insidiousness of London grime and the hard water.”

They live in poverty, sharing a bed in boarding house, along with cockroaches and rats. They very nearly starve entirely, and the descriptions of hunger, inadequate clothing and squalid rooms put me somewhat in mind of Jean Rhys. Unlike Rhys the sisters are less dependant on men for money favours, and Comyns retains a cheeriness all of her own:

“Our bed sitting room was in a large Victorian house in quite a pleasant square with a garden in the centre where lime trees grew. Our room was on the hall floor and was painted a brilliant orange and blue, even the cheap china was orange and blue. The divan cover was a large damask table cloth dyed black. We thought it a wonderful room with its gas fire and ring with a little tin kettle on it.”

A striking detail of this time was their meagre meals: “To avoid spending shillings we used candles; but it was a slow way to cook—about twenty minutes to get an egg to boil.”

The situation doesn’t last forever, as Blanche finds work as a lady’s companion and Vicky falls in love with an art student. The description of married life here is very similar to Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. While Vicky’s husband Gene initially seems just as selfish as Charles in Spoons:

“Our marriage was such a happy one, perhaps partly due to the fact that Gene always had his own way over everything”

It gradually emerges that in fact he is very unwell. I thought the portrayal of serious mental illness – along with their mother’s alcoholism previously – was dealt with without judgement. There are parts of A Touch Of Mistletoe which are of their time and while I don’t think intended to be derogatory, are not language we use now. But the descriptions of Gene are sympathetic, and the outdated treatment he has sounds horrific but is never sensationalised.

Vicky worries about providing for their son Paul:

“He needed so much—good food, fresh air, clothes, education—there was no end to it and all I had to offer was love.”

Yet somehow they muddle through, with the help of kindly friends and neighbours, as well as Marcella, the family’s housekeeper of many years. Throughout it all Comyns retains her signature tone of unnerving guilelessness.

Later, Vicky remarries but her husband Tony also struggles with alcohol. Blanche has also had marriage troubles, and both feel they are entering old age as 40 looms (!)

The experience of London during the war is brilliantly evoked, as it was in Mr Fox, with enormous terrors sitting alongside the surprising smaller details:

“One evening, I think it was our wedding anniversary, we went to a famous restaurant where they had pheasant on the menu, but, when the waiter brought it to our table, it was only Spam pressed into the shape of a bird’s wing.”

A Touch of Mistletoe is longer than other Comyns I’ve read (336 pages) as she usually tends towards novella length, and I wondered if her beguiling, eccentric tone could sustain a longer novel. I needn’t have doubted. It was an absolute joy to spend longer than usual with a captivating writer whose voice is entirely her own.

To end, I can’t think of an appropriate 80s tune, so instead here’s the trailer for a film I saw twice last year, once at my local Odeon and then again with a Q&A with the writers/lead actors and director at the wonderful Prince Charles in December. It’s a gentle, beautifully observed film about grief and regret, friendship and kindness, and it’s got some silly jokes in it too. If you’ve not caught The Ballad of Wallis Island yet I do recommend it:

“A desire to move furniture is a desire for life. “(Celia Fremlin, The Long Shadow)

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I’ve been meaning to read Celia Fremlin for a while, encouraged by JacquiWine’s excellent reviews. Happily, this coincided with my plan to read some Christmas-set golden age/cosy mysteries in December, as The Long Shadow (1975) builds its tension through a haunted group of houseguests throughout the festive period.

I immediately knew I was in for a treat with Fremlin. We join Imogen at the first party she’s attended since her husband died two months ago. We quickly learn that while she is grieving, she also recognises that Ivor was not a pleasant person. There is no sentimentality in her reflections.

“How Ivor would have loved being dead! It was a shame that he was missing it all. How he would have loved to watch the letters pouring in, day after day, by every post, in their tens and in their dozens, each one a tribute to himself.”

She also casts a critical eye over the niceties of solo party attendance:

“She’s a widow, that’s what she is. With wooden detachment, Imogen watched Myrtle’s social aplomb faltering before the task of finding something intriguing to say about Imogen: something at least as amusing as Dutch Elm disease.

She gave it up.”

There’s also some astute observations about the deeply odd ways that the English approach the bereaved:

“Even Edith Hartman from next door had at last stopped popping in with cups of tepid Oxo and soothing stories about people who had died of cancer recently.”

But soon Imogen has more to worry about than navigating social mores, as someone rings in the middle of the night, telling her they know she killed her husband.

Told from Imogen’s point of view, she is clear she didn’t kill him. She has little time to reflect though, as it’s not long before her adult step-children turn up; the somewhat reprobate son Robin, and acquisitive daughter Dot, with her husband Herbert and their two young sons, Vernon and Timmie.

More bafflingly, Robin brings an almost silent girl to the house who wafts around preparing macrobiotic food, and Ivor’s scatty second wife Cynthia flies in from Bermuda to also take up residence. Then someone starts moving Ivor’s papers and updating them, the children have faces visiting them in nightmares and see a man in a Santa costume sat in Ivor’s study, and Imogen begins to wonder if a ghost isn’t part of the company too…

“It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to stay around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house”

As a reader we are meant to be sceptical of ghosts and suspect everyone else, and they certainly act suspiciously! All of the adults seem to be Up To Something but I certainly couldn’t work out what was going on.

The Long Shadow is well-paced at only 242 pages, with a finale that is satisfying and believable. There’s even a final comic twist right at the last sentence. It’s certainly made me keen to read more Fremlin and thankfully Faber have made more reissues available.

Although not heavily Christmas-themed, it’s a great Christmas read with its house full of extended family, things unspoken, and would be easily digested after a dinner of heavier festive fare 😊

To end, two of my favourite folk singers coming together to sing insults at each other in honour of Christmas (please note, they have updated some of Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan’s name-calling, but the language remains decidedly colourful):

“She had adored her husband, and was very fond of her French pepper-mill.” (Margery Sharp, The Foolish Gentlewoman)

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It’s been a busy month trying to get to grips with my new job, but I’m delighted to contribute to Dean Street December, hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home. This reading event provides a lovely end to the reading year, and it encouraged me to get The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp (1948) off the TBR, which Dean Street Press publish as part of their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint.

I really enjoy Margery Sharp’s comic eye, and there’s a perfect example early in this novel in a description of the family’s Sealyham:

“His shaggy eyebrows and meditative gaze gave him an old-gentleman look; he sat there like a retired Colonel, newspaper laid aside, contemplating Socialism.”

The terrier’s family are hodgepodge: widowed fifty-five year old Isabel Brocken, “sentimental, affectionate, uncritical,” and her priggish brother-in-law Simon:

“Mr Brocken was not conceited enough to perceive in himself any compensating charms. To be loved without reason did not flatter him. He put up with Isabel’s affection, as he put up with Isabel, because he had to.”

As well as two younger people staying at the house: Isabel’s nephew Humphrey and her companion Jacqueline, both recovering from the recent war.

This unlikely group live a life of very little strife, ensconced in Isabel’s old family home of Chipping Lodge, sat in a suburb of London which escaped the bombs. (Unlike Simon’s house which is why he finds himself having to tolerate other people, while it is rebuilt.)

Keeping them in domestic order are the self-contained housekeeper Mrs Poole and her teenage daughter Greta.

Their domestic peace is shattered when Isabel invites her old school friend Tilly Cuff to stay indefinitely. The motivation stems from a perceived injustice she did to Tilly years ago, and a plan to make amends. For Tilly does not seem to have thrived:

“No-one ever fell in love with Tilly, not even curates.”

Simon, Humphrey and Jacqueline are horrified. Firstly by Isabel’s plan to leave Tilly all her money, and secondly by Tilly herself:

“Is she to be allowed to beggar herself for the sake of a peculiarly offensive incubus?”

Sharp is always good at villains without caricature, and Tilly is a perfect example. She is manipulative and mendacious, particularly towards Greta Poole. It is Greta and her mother that provide the greatest emotional engagement in the novel: Tilly’s treatment of them shows her to be a real threat, and Simon’s attitude towards them shows him not to be irredeemably hard-hearted.

Yet Tilly is also shown to be vulnerable, lonely and defensive. Although she is powerful in her ability to completely destabilise the entire household, really she has less resources, personal and financial, to draw on than anyone else.

I found The Foolish Gentlewoman to be a surprising page-turner, as I wanted to see how the household would escape Tilly! And yet, things didn’t quite pan out as I expected. Sharp has fun with confounding reader’s expectations:

“To set one’s foot on a tragic stage, and find that the part thrust into one’s hand belonged to a domestic comedy: to read on, and perceive in prospect a crisis after all potentially tragic: to turn the last page upon anticlimax. How inartistic, and yet how life like!”

Yes, anti-climatic in a sense, but wholly satisfying and enjoyable. I particularly liked the happy ending arranged for Simon:

“With no less than five persons had Mr Brocken narrowly escaped, if not intimacy, a degree of acquaintance that would have allowed any one of them to become a nuisance to him.”

A gentle joy made readily available thanks to the excellent Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow.

“Happiness is a very fragile thing.” (Barbara Comyns)

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It was JacquiWine’s review of The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns (1985) last month that encouraged me pick this from the TBR in time for Novellas in November, hosted by hosted by Cathy and Bookish Beck.

I really enjoy Comyns’ individual voice. She can give a sharp edge to stories presented seemingly without guile which works well within the premise here, taking as a starting point the Grimm Brothers fairytale of the same name:

My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister, little Marlinchen,


Gathered together all my bones
Tied them in a silken handkerchief,


Laid them beneath the juniper-tree,
Kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird I am.

Thankfully Comyns writes a less cannibalistic/abusive version but there are fairytale motifs from the story scattered throughout. This gives the novella a somewhat unreal, atemporal quality, although references are made to the 1980s.

The striking opening scene directly draws on the Grimm tale, as Bella Winter (physically similar to Snow White, although she feels highly self-conscious of a facial scar) travels to Richmond in search of a job:

“I noticed a beautiful fair woman standing in the courtyard outside her house like a statute, standing there so still. As I drew nearer I saw that her hands were moving. She was paring an apple out there in the snow and as I passed, looking at her out of the sides of my eyes, the knife slipped, and suddenly there was blood on the snow.”

The affluent woman is Gertrude, married to Bernard.  Bella ultimately gets a job over the river in Twickenham with Mary:

“Her teeth were small and pointed rather as an animal’s, indeed she resembled an animal with her delicate boned face with its merry expression, perhaps a squirrel.”

But this doesn’t prevent Bella becoming more and more entwined in Gertrude and Bernard’s life. It’s not surprising that she is in search of a family. Her mother is cold and judgemental:

“There was one shadow that I kept in the back of my mind as much as possible, and that was my mother. To me she was almost like a wicked fairy, poor woman.”

Bella also left behind a selfish lover Stephen, who was driving when the accident occurred which left her with the scar on her face, for which he blames her.

But Bella has a young daughter Marline, also known as Tommy, who she loves dearly. Tommy is biracial and both she and her mother face racism throughout. However, they build a happy life, living above Mary’s antique/junk shop and transforming a “gritty” back yard into a pretty walled garden.

They regularly cross the river to Gertrude and Bernard’s abundant, if carefully curated, home. Bella enjoys sitting with Gertrude under the titular tree, where territorial magpies build their nest and watch the comings and goings.

It’s hard to say more without venturing into spoilers, but if this is sounding a bit contrived and fey, there are enough prosaic details to ground the story, and humour too:

“I was glad to return to the freedom of the shop and to be queen of my own home—eat cornflakes or baked beans for supper, wear a dressing gown for breakfast and read books that did not improve the mind in bed.”

I also thought there was scepticism regarding relationships between the sexes here, no guarantee of happy-ever-afters. As well as positive portrayals, both Stephen and Bella’s mother are abusive to partners, and Bernard is in an ambiguous Pygmalion role. Families are shown as places of anger and destruction as well as nurturing, and Bella has to chose her people to create a happy life.

The undercurrent of death also stops the story feeling whimsical, and there is a very upsetting death which takes place, precipitating Bella needing inpatient mental health care. Although not gratuitous or gruesome, it is something some readers would want to avoid so if you want to know, DM me!

The introduction to my NYRB edition mentions the ending being abrupt, but I have to disagree. The ending ties up everything as much as it can and I can’t see anywhere further the story could go, having fulfilled its fairytale basis and continued into a pragmatic 1980s conclusion.

To end, a very young Björk making her film debut in an adaptation of the Grimm Tale:

“It was not a bad life, while things happened fast. And they usually did.” (Ursula Parrott, The Ex-Wife)

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When I saw The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929) in my local charity bookshop I snapped it up, remembering JacquiWine’s review. Faber Editions are always reliable too, and it’s great that they’ve brought this back into print (as have McNally in the US.) It evokes a young woman navigating independence during Jazz Age New York so vividly.

Pat is twenty-four when her marriage to Pete falls apart, with extra-marital dalliances on both sides, aided by alcohol and parties.

“In the three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five speakeasies, four night clubs, two operas, and a concert”

These young people are so inexperienced and naïve, and the collapse of their marriage seems inevitable as neither have the first clue how to save it:

“I thought: “I will try to make it up to Pete by being good tempered always, and looking as pretty as possible, and following all his stories, and not being extravagant anymore.” I felt very grown up.”

From my twenty-first century view I wouldn’t want to save a marriage to someone who pushed me through a plate-glass door because he wasn’t happy about the pregnancy he was equally responsible for, but Pat is very attached to her husband and wants him back.

She moves in with her friend Lucia, five years older and also divorced, who tries to persuade Pat of the advantages of their situation:

“‘We are free. Applesauce! Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.’”

We follow Pat as she navigates single life as woman in the Roaring Twenties: working, socialising, happy and unhappy. She is attractive and young, and men are interested in her. Parrott has some wonderful turns of phrase and a way of crafting sentences that is so arresting.

“Hoping sometime to wake and find I had slept beside a lover and friend, I slept to wake beside a stranger exigent, triumphant, or exasperated, or perhaps as bored and polite as I.”

Pat enjoys parties and manages a successful career. She also has genuine friends both male and female, but there is an undercurrent of sadness with some of her male friends who are older than she is, and so fought in the war.

“Kenneth looked as if he would understand about Peter, and the men one kissed cure one of the memory of Peter, and the little hope one cherished about Peter, in spite of judgement and the common sense and the well-meant advice of one’s friends.”

Pat is a fashion copywriter who enjoys spending money and there are some gorgeous descriptions of clothes throughout The Ex-Wife. New York is obviously another love, and this passage made me wonder if it inspired the opening scene of Woody Allen’s Manhattan:

“Sam gave Lucia an Orthophonic Phonograph for a birthday present. Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was almost the only record we ever played on it. We turned that on, about once an hour when we were at home.

‘That tune matches New York,’ Lucia said. ‘The New York we know. It has gaiety and colour and irrelevancy and futility and glamour as beautifully blended as the ingredients in crepes suzette.’

I said, ‘It makes me think of skyscrapers and Harlem and liners sailing and newsboys calling extras.’

‘It makes me think I’m twenty years old and on the way to owning the city,’ Lucia said. ‘Start it over again, will you?’”

Apparently the novel was a scandalous sensation on first appearance and had to be published anonymously. There is much in it that feels very modern and I was surprised that a 1929 novel was so open in discussions of sex, domestic violence and abortions. The difference in grief responses from Pat and Pete regarding their young child felt very real and heartbreaking, despite Parrott not overly exploring it.

There are also some pithy observations about what increased freedom for women at this time really means:

“The principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did, was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity and so on.”

Yet really what makes The Ex-Wife still so readable after nearly a century is the closely-observed characterisation of Pat. She is so endearing: young in many ways, older in others. She is frank about her loneliness and vulnerabilities; unapologetic about her enjoyment of bars, dancing and shopping. She is wise and naïve and she really grows throughout The Ex-Wife.

“Enclose with that decree a complete assortment of young illusions, a beatific confidence, an entertaining lack of common sense, and an innocent expression—and I shall be—just as if I had never married.”

To end, a scene from the film adaptation made just a year later, which won Norma Shearer an Oscar:

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.30

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Mrs Caliban – Rachel Ingalls (1982) 117 pages

Earlier in the month when I reviewed Bear, Cathy mentioned Mrs Caliban. Well, it was just sat there as part of the same Waterstone’s display where I picked up Another Marvellous Thing, and it would take a stronger reader than me to walk away… 😀 It is also part of the lovely Faber Editions series and so a very pleasing thing in itself. By coincidence, Jacqui reviewed her favourite Faber Editions yesterday, including Mrs Caliban, so do check out her post.

In the opening passage of the novella Dorothy’s husband Fred is leaving for work:

 “He remembered that he had wanted to take the paper with him. Dorothy didn’t bother to say that she hadn’t finished with it yet herself. She just went back and brought it to him.”

I thought that was such an immensely clever detail. In so few words Ingalls has conveyed the distance between the couple, Dorothy’s domestic role, her apathy, and her lack of met needs.

Dorothy is a homemaker, but that home is hanging on in appearance only. She has experienced two immense bereavements – her young son Scotty during surgery, and a subsequent miscarriage. It is this grief which has largely contributed to forcing her and Fred apart.

“And so it went on: silences, separateness, the despair thinking out conversations that they knew would be hopeless.”

We quickly learn that unsurprisingly, Dorothy’s mental health may be suffering. She is hearing messages directly addressed to her from the radio:

“She hadn’t thought she was going crazy, not straight away. She believed it was just her own thoughts forcing themselves into the low pitched sounds and their insistent rhythm.”

This affects the reading of the rest of the novella: it is Dorothy’s perception of events, but did it actually happen? This is left ambiguous and works well, because in a sense it doesn’t matter. What does matter is Dorothy’s experience.

When Dorothy hears that “Aquarius the monster man” has escaped from a nearby facility, she isn’t sure if it is a general news alert or one of her personal messages.

“She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six foot seven inch frog like creature shouldered its way into the house”

Again, I thought that was so clever, moving immediately from the small domestic concern to something so fantastical, linking the two together in that immediate moment with the ‘And’.

Dorothy and the creature become friends and almost immediately lovers, with her nicknaming him Larry. He lives in the house and is easy to hide because Dorothy and Fred essentially have separate spheres.

(Incidentally, I’ve seen Dorothy referred to as Dorothy Caliban, including in the Foreword to this edition, but I don’t remember Dorothy and Fred’s surname being mentioned in the story. More than likely I missed it, but I thought the title was a reference to her bond with Larry, a Caliban-type creature, with him ambiguous in the way that Shakespeare’s creation could be too.)

What is interesting is that if Larry is Dorothy’s fantasy, what that fantasy says. He is physically strong and they have a sexual bond, but he is also unfailing polite and respectful, is interested in her, and enjoys helping with domestic tasks. The feminism running through Mrs Caliban is evoked skilfully and is undeniable.

Additionally, if he is Dorothy’s fantasy, Larry is violent towards those who seek to harm him. Although we never see Dorothy especially angry, why wouldn’t she be? Both her children died, her husband runs off having affairs, and she’s left with a house to manage – for whom?

“She had no interests, no marriage to speak of, no children. Now, at last, she had something.”

In case I’ve made this sound very heavy, there is plenty of humour in Mrs Caliban too:

“Most of the time, if she couldn’t explain something to him straight away, he didn’t push it. The last time she’d been stuck was when he said he didn’t understand ‘radical chic’.”

Although ultimately I found it a sad novella. In the same way that The Tempest doesn’t fit easily into particular genres, neither does Mrs Caliban. Like the play with the ‘monstrous’ Caliban, this story can be comedic, tragic, dramatic, and fantastical. Like The Tempest, it features a lot of grief and loss.

Prospero, main protagonist of The Tempest, is a man and a sorcerer, who is able to own his anger and command his environment. Dorothy commands her environment – it is domestic and it is what she is expected to do. But she is denied so much agency, and her relationship with Larry is the start of her claiming some back.

Ingalls is such a skilled writer and Mrs Caliban has enough ambiguity that it can be read a number of ways. Ultimately I read Mrs Caliban as a grief narrative,  where the grieving person starts to find their way in the world again after it has irrevocably changed, but the sadness remains.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.29

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Another Marvellous Thing – Laurie Colwin (1986) 130 pages

Last year a Waterstones opened up a few minutes walk from where I live. I try and ration my visits but you can probably guess how that’s working out 😀 Browsing there was how I found out about Laurie Colwin, who until now had somehow passed me by. I tend to treat jacket blurbs with a mountain of salt, but anyone described as “The Barbara Pym of 1970s New York” (Jonathan Lethem) was going to have me snatching their work from the shelf.

In Another Marvellous Thing Billy and Francis have an affair, despite both being married to other people. Francis is quite a bit older than Billy, though we’re never really told their ages. Both are involved in the field of economics but have wildly different views. They are wildly different in just about every way.

“It would never work. We both know it. She is to relentlessly dour, and too fond of silence. I prefer false cheer to no cheer and I like conversation over dinner no matter what.”

The first chapter is narrated in the first person by Francis, before shifting to a third person narrator for the remainder:

“In movies men have mistresses who soothe and pet them, who are consoling, passionate, and ornamental. But I have a mistress who is mostly grumpy. Traditional things mean nothing to her. She does not flirt, cajole, or wear fancy underwear.”

Despite the bafflement they both have for why they are involved with one another, their affair is rooted in love.

“We are as faithful as the Canada goose, more or less. She is an absolute fact of my life.”

“She did not want to have these feelings: she had been so much happier when she had been unaware she had them.”

Billy and Francis are also markedly different to each other’s spouses:

“Billy, unlike my gregarious party-giving wife, thinks that there is no hell more hellish than the hell of social life.”

“He has the body of a young boy in the air of a genius or someone constantly preoccupied by the intense pressure of a rarified mental life. Together he and Billy look not so much like husband and wife as co-conspirators.”

In other words, they are both much better suited to those they are married to. This means that Another Marvellous Thing avoids the pitfalls of a will-they-won’t-they get together plotline, and instead is more interested in these two disparate characters, and a year or so of their lives together.

“The topic of her dissertation turned Francis glassy-eyed: his passion for Billy did not mitigate his indifference to the medieval wool trade.”

Despite Billy’s interiority keeping her somewhat unknown to Francis, as a reader I loved her character. She was so idiosyncratic and believable, with her refusal to conform to societal expectations:

“‘A vision of radiant loveliness,’ Francis said.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Billy said. ‘The laundry ruined my filmy peignoir.’”

Unlike Francis who is quite equanimous about being unfaithful, Billy feels horribly guilty. Later in the book the affair has finished and the chapters focus on her life afterwards, where we see much more vulnerability than she allowed Francis to witness.

“In one of her snootier moments, my mistress said to me: ‘My furnishings are interior. I care about what I think about.’”

All in all I enjoyed my first experience of Colwin’s writing. There were so many great one-liners and it did feel very New York. But the wit didn’t stop emotional truth being fully realised, particularly with Billy and her husband Grey in the later chapters. I’ll look forward to exploring her further.

“Being in love, he often felt, was like having a bird caught in his hair.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.28

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The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette Leduc (1965, transl. Derek Coltman 1967) 80 pages

I found this novella, only slightly longer than a short story, incredibly moving. It follows the daily life of a frail, impoverished woman, living in a dilapidated attic room in Paris which shakes every few minutes when the Métro passes overhead.

Violette Leduc is not an author I know, but in the Introduction to my edition Deborah Levy describes her novels as “works of genius and also a bit peculiar.” Certainly Leduc has a way of skipping between images and realities that continually pulled me up short. Despite its brevity The Lady and the Little Fox Fur can’t be read quickly; the sentences have to be considered.

“Her coat was turning green with age. So much the better: it was a proof that her verdigris candlesticks in the pawn shop had not abandoned her. When the sun came out, there were two torches to light her way, the sun itself and its reflection in the window of Joris’, the shop that accepted la Semeuse coupons.”

That strange logic about the candlesticks demonstrates the frayed reasoning of The Lady, but also Leduc’s skill in layering images to evoke scenes and draw elements of her story together so clearly.

Her stylistic skill never distances the characters. A long time is spent on the hunger of The Lady, both physical and psychological. She is desperate for food, and she is desperately lonely. Every day she roams around her home city, unseen and disregarded.

“Wheat pancakes, fifty francs. The batter was spreading across the hotplate, the woman was scraping away the drips and making the edges neater with the point of her knife. But she would draw her nourishment later on from the crowd in the Métro: one cannot have everything.”

“They were workmen whose job it was to keep the flagstones level, and they put up with her there because they didn’t know she was there. The bollard she was sitting on had such stability, the place itself was so historic that she became a peasant woman who had ridden in from the Perche country to sell a farmhorse many centuries ago.”

The second part of the novella sees her take out a raggedy fox fur, which she found in rubbish when hunting for an orange to eat, to sell for food.

“There were moments when she had no saliva left to remember with, not even the pale pink water ices that her parents used to eat.”

It is desperation which drives her, as the fox fur provides warmth and companionship. Like a child, she anthropomorphises the inanimate object (as she does bugs in the floorboards and some of her furniture), showering him with kisses and affection.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur could have been unbearably sentimental, but Leduc’s way of writing meant it wasn’t so. The Lady doesn’t pity herself and the portrayal evokes compassion and empathy rather than sympathy. She endures, repeatedly, throughout the challenges of her daily life.

“Happily, she noted, it was still not six o’clock: she was the ribbon in a little girl’s hair, fluttering in the breeze. After six, the wind in Paris grows stronger and disarranges all our principles.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.26

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A Friend from England – Anita Brookner (1987) 172 pages

Anita Brookner is one of those authors I keep meaning to get back to. I was too young when I read Hotel du Lac; when I read Family and Friends for this project back in 2019 I knew the time was right. Despite this, I keep failing to pick her up! Hopefully A Friend from England signals the start of my more consistent reading of this striking and clear-sighted author.

The novella is essentially a character study of Rachel, a typical Brookner heroine.She is solitary and somewhat spiky, with the reader sensing more loneliness that she admits to.

She inherits her financial advisor Oscar from her deceased parents. When Oscar retires after winning a lot of money on the pools, Rachel visits him at home rather than his office.

“All the rooms seemed to repel both light and weather; they were designed to keep one’s thoughts indoors, resigned and melancholy.

[…]

I found it all very cosy. Although their life seemed to depress Oscar and his wife, both of whom had a vaguely disappointed air, I could see myself transformed into just such a virtuous member of just such a successful but melancholy family.”

Rachel starts attending Oscar and his wife Dorrie’s home regularly for dinner, and meets their daughter Heather, who it is clear the family are keen to see married and settled. (There was something oddly old-fashioned about A Friend from England, so much so that I went back to the beginning to double-check I hadn’t missed something about it being set in the early 1960s.)

No-one does a bitchy character summation like Brookner, and here is Rachel’s assessment of Heather:

“I could feel the force of her passive temperament, and I say temperament rather than personality, for there was little personality in evidence.”

Ouch!

Oscar and Dorrie seem keen for the two women to become friends, and Heather regularly drives Rachel home, but remains unknowable. This doesn’t particularly bother Rachel:

“I felt a genuine love for Heather’s parents, while feeling rather little for Heather herself. When I say rather little, I mean that I felt a full complement of boredom, irritation, tolerance, and reluctant affection for her.”

However, then Heather does what everyone expects, and gets engaged. Rachel is unsure of her choice:

“My first impression of Michael Sandberg was that he was blessed with, or consumed by, radiant high spirits. My second impression was that a man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.

[…]

Michael had a sort of sunniness about him which seemed to preclude any baffling depths of character: I thought that was probably just as well, for Heather, despite her shrewdness,  seemed to have very little curiosity and might not have much patience with a difficult or troublesome man.”

The “shrewdness” which Rachel frequently attributes to Heather is a masterstroke by Brookner. As readers we never see any evidence of such a trait. No-one else observes Heather as being shrewd. We are more aware than Rachel that she has proclaimed this motivation to Heather’s behaviour because it makes sense to her. This misjudgement has a significant fallout later.

“I felt a spasm of distaste for her and for all those women like her, women who work for fun and marry for status, and still demand compensation. The only excuse for such women is incurable frivolity. And Heather was not even frivolous.”

[Slight spoilers ahead]

Heather’s marriage does fall apart (again, for a reason I found somewhat out of keeping with its late 1980s setting, unless the reason we’re shown is supposed to be a signifier of a deeper incompatibility.) But it is Rachel who begins to unravel. She has been insistent all along that her solitary life suits her, but this seems grounded in pain and avoidance rather than a life choice which makes her happy and fulfilled.

“The process of thinking does not become me. I feel my face growing longer, my eyes sinking deeper. Thinking, for me, is accompanied by a wave of sadness. Therefore I try to avoid introspection. I long ago decided to live my life on the surface, avoiding entanglements, confrontations, situations that cannot be quickly resolved, friendships that lead to passion.”

When Heather’s subsequent decisions do not fit with Rachel’s judgements of who she is or what she should do, we witness Rachel behaving more and more extremely, despite her distaste for drama. This observant, clever, discerning woman has completely failed to recognise that others could have considered and reached different values and different aspirations from her. The destabilisation which occurs suggests that Rachel wasn’t as secure in her life choices as she liked to believe.

A Friend from England is such a cleverly paced novel. The acerbic, domestic everyday gradually becomes something much darker and more devastating, with all the fault lines set up to fracture from the very beginning.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.25

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Krane’s Café – Cora Sandel (1946, transl. Elizabeth Rokkan 1968) 173 pages

Back in November Kaggsy reviewed some of Cora Sandel’s shorter writings and reminded me that I had Krane’s Café languishing in the TBR. I’m really pleased to have finally got to it, with its sly humour and incisive characterisation.

“There’s a lot to be heard before your ears drop off.”

Set just after the First World War, it opens with Katinka Stordal sitting in the titular café. She is the dressmaker in a small coastal town in northern Norway, and there is a big event coming up. Her orders are piling up, and Mrs Krane, the owner of the café with her husband, is trying to move Katinka on.

“’I’m going, I’m going,’ said Mrs Stordal. She looked up listlessly for a moment, and stayed where she was. It was one of those days when she looks much older than she really is.”

The narrative voice has this slightly bitchy, judgemental tone, which works so well. In implicitly proclaiming an alliance with the attitudes of the townsfolk, she draws attention to their pettiness and their lack of humane understanding.

People come in to try and chivvy Katinka along, with absolutely no interest as to why she is unable to move from the café or has her head in her hands. Their only concern is getting her back to work.

“As usual Mrs Brien was magnificently equal to the situation. ‘Now then, we mustn’t get hysterical, you know. We mustn’t give up. Everyone has worries. I don’t know anyone without worries. This really is naughty of you, Katinka.”

Then a man called Bowler Hat arrives…

“And he went over to Mrs Stordal and said in that low, one might almost be tempted to say melodious voice, if it were not so ridiculous, and offensive and bold into the bargain, ‘May I offer you something? Something you’d fancy? What about a little wine? The wine you’ve just been drinking? And then you can go on listening to me for a while? You mustn’t stop listening yet, you understand so well. I expect you know too how it feels to be lonely?’”

So the situation becomes scandalous. Katinka is in the back room of the café, drinking with a male stranger. She is complaining about her selfish family, her enduring fatigue with life, her lack of choices. Bowler Hat is an unnerving figure and I did wonder at times if he was a representation of the devil.

Mrs Krane feels overwhelmed without her husband to help her manage the situation, and her staff, Larsen and Sønstegård, are thoroughly enjoying the drama while pretending not to.

“Children and drunkards will tell you the truth. Both Larsen and Sønstegård admitted later that at that point they were almost afraid of more customers coming. For it was exciting to listen to Mrs Katinka, who scarcely ever gave you an answer in the normal run of affairs, sitting there giving rein to her tongue. Even though it was so dreadful to hear her gossiping like that about her own children. Throwing them to the wolves, you might almost call it.

And even though it was all a lot of nonsense.

What else could you call it?”

What emerges is a picture of real sadness. Katinka is lonely and disregarded by her family and by the town, while expected to fulfil their expectations of her. She is teased by the town’s children for her drinking, and in this small community no-one really truly acknowledges anyone else’s pain, despite how closely they all live together.

“And surely she couldn’t have thought of going and drowning herself, with all those orders, she the mother of two children besides? Nobody did that sort of thing in this town.

Suddenly it struck Mrs Krane that that sort of thing was just not written up in the paper about people in other places. Grieve the chemist had taken prussic acid in the cellar of his shop, though that had happened a long time ago and he was even scolded at his graveside by Mr Pio the curate […. ] and Iverson the tailor, who had such a spiteful wife, had walked out into the sea until it went over his head, and he never came up again, even though it was ebb tide and the sea was far out.”

In this way Sandel satirises society and its unthinking complacency towards others; the hypocrisy; and the self-interest. Yet unlike some satire, it doesn’t have a bitter edge. The characterisation is compassionate towards Katinka and Mrs Krane; and even Katinka’s daughter. The narrative voice is humorous and by aligning itself with the attitudes of the town, it avoids the superior tone of some satire.

I felt the ending was compassionate, though the town and its inhabitants remain largely unchanged…

“And all of a sudden Katinka shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Here comes the madness, the great, wonderful madness. The liberator from everything, who opens the gates and makes all spacious about you.’”