Greenbanks, by Dorothy Whipple

Dorothy Whipple is an author whose books I enjoy very much, but I have the hardest time writing about them! I think it is in part because I feel like I am late in discovering her - that everyone must have read her books already. That's true of other authors that I read, yet I don't have such a block in writing about them. Here again with Greenbanks (as with High Wages and The Priory) I'm struggling with what to say about this story of a home and three generations of the family that owns it, other than I liked it very much. I am still thinking about how the characters' lives carried on after the story ended, and wishing that Dorothy Whipple had written a sequel, set say five or six years later.
 
So I thought I'd share some of my favorite passages. I loved Louisa Ashton, the kind and patient matriarch of the family. She has a special bond with her granddaughter Rachel, who spends a lot of her time at Greenbanks. I think Rachel and her uncle Charles, Louisa's son, are the only people who truly appreciate her. Charles tells her one day, "The only person I find completely satisfying, Mother, is you."

     'Me?' asked Louisa, going quite pink.
     'Mmmm,' said Charles. 'The French have an expression "Bon comme le pain." When I heard it, I thought of you. You're good, like bread; you're essential, you know, Mother. The world couldn't get on without people like you.'
     'Nay, nay,' protested Louisa. 'I'm not half clever enough. Not clever enough for your father, not half clever enough for you children. I've always felt that drawback.'
     'It's better to be wise than clever, and that's what you are, darling. But don't look so bothered. I won't praise you any more.'

One day Rachel wants something to dress her dolls, and Louisa opens up the ottoman in her bedroom.

It was long and stiff, with a high rolled end; no one dreamed of accepting its invitation to recline. . . When Louisa opened it, it let out a smell of time, a faded, shut-up smell of prints and silks and flannels that had been there for years. Rachel leaned into it, drumming her toes on the side, entirely unaware that the ottoman contained an almost complete record of her grandmother's life.

Rachel asks to hold a little box, which belonged to Louisa in her own childhood. She steps over to

a little water-colour drawing of Louisa as a child in short black boots and royal blue frock, clasping the very box Rachel now held in her hands. It gave Rachel a queer feeling to hold the box and look at it in the picture. She felt the little girl with a round face and curls so fair you could hardly see them on the paper could not possibly be her grandmother, but the box was the very same box still. She looked from the box in her hands to the box in the picture for several minutes. Then she handed it back to her grandmother and leaned into the ottoman once more.

I've had that same feeling, looking at a photo of my grandmother as a child in the 1910s. There was no box to connect us across the years, just the family likeness.

Louisa rummages through the layers of her life and her memories, while Rachel watches, unaware of what is passing through her grandmother's mind. Eventually Louisa finds a piece of red bombazine, which satisfies Rachel. This scene reminded me of Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl,  where Polly and the Shaw children spend an afternoon with Grandmother Shaw, digging through her cabinets of treasures. But Mrs. Shaw tells the children stories about what they discover, and her memories are happy ones. Louisa's aren't, for the most part. And in the end, she puts back "a beautifully stitched night-gown and a night-cap with a frilled edge. These were her death clothes..."

Finally, it's always lovely to meet a fellow reader, even a fictional one:

Rachel had a passion for reading, shared by no member of her family . . . But Rachel, surreptitiously visiting the book-cases where her father had all the best books on show, extracted volume after volume of Shakespeare, Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith, Dickens, Scott, Jane Austen, bound Cornhills, bound Punches . . . She skimmed over what she did not understand and got what she wanted from the rest . . . She read the classics with avidity, not knowing them to be classics, but she read with equal avidity St. Hilda's, Brenda Shows the Way, The Hockey Heroine and other school tales lent to her by Judy, who always had books of this kind given to her at Christmas. She read, too, the penny novelettes she found in the kitchen at Greenbanks and at Beech Crescent. She made no discrimination between these literatures; she read and enjoyed them all.

I finally redeemed a book token from Persephone that I have been hoarding, so I'll soon have a copy of Because of the Lockwoods to add to my Dorothy Whipple collection (all in the lovely grey spines).

A bit of a blogging block

I've had Dorothy Whipple's High Wages and Margery Sharp's The Flowering Thorn by my computer for more than a week now. I started a post about High Wages, which is still sitting in the "drafts" folder. At this point it feels deader than Jacob Marley or the proverbial door-nail. I expected to like these books, and I did, very much. I'm giving them both five stars on LibraryThing. For some reason, though, I'm struggling with what to say beyond that - such an odd feeling, because I usually find myself with almost too much to say about books. I enjoyed the characters in both books, the settings, the common theme of young women finding their way in life (in very different ways). But when I try to write more, I just go blank. So for the moment, I am registering my unqualified approval of both books. (I'd like a sequel to High Wages, to see how Jane Carter fares in London. I worry that she won't find it as easy to open a shop there.)

I have been browsing the Persephone list, and I think that Dorothy Whipple's Greenbanks will be my next order. I'm also leaning toward A London Child of the 1870s by Molly Hughes - there are so many to choose from! I haven't heard anything more about an American branch of the shop, but I am still hoping. Until then, the shipping charges will keep me from ordering too many at one time.

Fortunately, it's just writing that's a problem, not reading. I'm deep into Constance Maud's No Surrender, which has added William - An Englishman to my reading list. I can't think of any American novels about the woman's suffrage movement, though Louisa May Alcott endorses in a couple of her books. If you know of any, please let me know!

Someone at a Distance, by Dorothy Whipple

This book was my introduction to Dorothy Whipple.  She is an author I have learned about only recently, from some of my favorite bloggers (including Anbolyn, Jane, and JoAnn).  So I was very pleased when I saw a Persephone edition of this on the library sale cart - for all of $1.

I think the editors did a neat job of summing up the plot in their back-cover blurb:

Someone at a Distance has a deceptively simple plot about a deceived wife and a foolish husband.  Avery North has been contentedly married to Ellen for twenty years, they have two children and live in the rural commuter belt outside London; when his mother advertises for a companion, the French girl who arrives sets her sights on Avery and callously threatens the happy marriage.  Throughout the book Ellen and Avery are so realistically described that it is almost painful to read: this is a deeply involving and perceptive novel by the literary heir to Mrs Gaskell.

Actually, there's a slight inaccuracy there: Mrs. North doesn't advertise but answers an advertisement, in the personal column of The Times: "Young Frenchwoman desires to spend July, August in English home. French conversation. Light domestic duties." 

We are introduced to the Frenchwoman, Louise Lannier, in the next chapter, as she announces her new post to her parents.  We learn something about her life in her small provincial town, and why she wants to leave it behind for England.  As the story develops, it moves back and forth between France and England, between Louise and Mrs. North, Ellen and Avery and their children.  Eventually Louise comes to stay with Ellen and Avery, and it's then that the trouble begins.

I liked Ellen very much from the start, so my sympathies were with her throughout the story.  She is a good person, a loving wife and mother, busy in the home and expressing her love in domestic cares.  Like many middle-class women after the Second World War, she doesn't have help in the home, so she's always rushing around, trying to do too much, but happy in it.  I also liked Anne, their daughter, who lives for school holidays and her horse Roma.  I felt much sympathy for Monsieur and Madame Lannier, who can never do anything right for their difficult daughter but love her all the same.  And there is a little black and white cat, who first appears galloping to meet Avery and Ellen as they drive up to their home.  Cats who gallop around cars often come to a bad end, and as with the rabbits in Monica Dickens' The Fancy, I was always subconsciously waiting for something awful to happen to little Moppet.  (Spoiler alert: nothing does.)  The headmistress at Anne's school has a cat who lolls around in her study, so I think that Dorothy Whipple may have been a cat person.

More serious spoilers follow:

My only quibble with this book is its ending - specifically, the last two pages.  Up til then, I thought it a perfect ending.  Ellen has survived Avery leaving her for Louise, and their eventual divorce.  She has found a new home, with room for Anne and her son Hugh - not to mention Moppet and Roma.  She has friends, and satisfying work.  She has regained her balance and her strength.  The Avery turns up unexpectedly, with Louise, whom he married after the divorce though he doesn't love or even like her.  Ellen realizes that he is miserable with Louise, that he will leave her and return to Ellen, when their children are grown and gone - and she will wait for him.  I was sorry to read that "The painfully achieved repairs to her life were all broken down . . . Now she must start again and it all seemed chaotic and impossible."  I wanted her choose that repaired, new life.  "Creeping into her heart was the realisation that, although she could not be with him, Avery was restored to her."  She chooses that old love instead, and I found that an unsatisfactory ending - but maybe a realistic one.

Now that I've met Dorothy Whipple, I don't want to wait for copies of her books to turn up (particularly when Persephones are so rare in Houston bookstores new or used).  I have already ordered The Priory and They Were Sisters (which I've been anxious to read).  It was only the shipping costs - and a faint protest from my TBR conscience - that kept me from adding High Wages and Greenbanks to the order.