I know I keep banging on about the 'old' Virago covers, but they are simply wonderful and I think the company is barmy to ditch them. I have just finished reading The Little Ottleys by Ada Leverson, a book of which I knew nothing, and the only reason I now have it is that I spotted a copy languishing in obscurity in a box at a local book sale, was captivated by the cover and bought it. I certainly wasn't going to leave it behind, it deserved to be on a bookshelf even if I never read it.
I knew nothing about the author, but discovered she was a very close friend of Oscar Wilde. He called her his 'Sphinx' and introduced her to all his fashionable friends, the equivalent of today's A list no doubt: Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent, Mrs Patrick Campbell and Max Beerbohm. What a glittering array that must have been....
She sounds a wonderfully warm hearted woman when you read more about her and discover that during Wilde's trial she and her husband took him in and sheltered him. On his release from prison two years later, when he was shunned and ignored by all his previous friends, Ada was the first to visit him and apparently was greeted by Oscar with the words 'Sphinx how marvelous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at seven o'clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been away'
The Little Ottleys is an omnibus edition of three of her stories all featuring a married couple, Edith and Bruce Ottley. On the surface all is light, bright and witty. The Ottleys live in a small, new white flat. Bruce is attached, very tenously it would appear, to the Foreign Office. He is querulous and patronising and irremediably stupid and yet has a superior attitude to all around him. He is invariably wrong about everything but has such a high opinion of himself that he takes no notice of anything that is said to him. Edith, with the sympathetic but unspoken support of her mother in law, learns to handle him and part of the amusement derived from these stories is the ease with which she manages to get her way and organises their lives and those of their children, by the simple expedient of suggesting to Bruce that they do the total opposite of what she really wants, safe in the knowledge that he will immediately oppose her suggestion and tell her to do what she has wanted all along. If there is a woman living who does not understand this strategy I would be very very surprised.
Though the reader will enjoy and laugh while reading this book it is clear that Edith is trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage. She is not actively unhappy and holds Bruce in a vague affection and deems this enough until she meets Aylmer Ross at a dinner party and it is an immediate coup de foudre. The second book. Tenterhooks, shows how Edith deals with this relationship with honour and sticks to her husband who, of course, is totally unworthy of this loyalty and whose own behaviour is pretty shabby. Edith sounds almost too good to be true, but Ada Leverson obviously has great affection for her and instead of finding this nobility insufferable, we come to admire Edith. Ada Leverson's marriage was not a very happy one and it is not hard to imagine that Edith is based on her experiences. How the trilogy ends and a solution found is masterfully done. An immensely funny, benign and comic creation in the person of Madame Frabelle who latches onto the Ottleys and comes to live with them, is the catalyst who brings about a solution to the dilemma . It is farce which averts the upcoming tragedy and ensures that all ends well. Edith Ottley finds happiness and by the time I came to the end of the final story, Love at Second Sight I had grown so fond of her that I was delighted by the outcome.
In some ways the style of writing reminded me of EM Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, writing which is funny and ironic but not laugh out loud. The humour depends on the gentle undercurrents in the text and it can be difficult to demonstrate just why one finds it amusing, but it is.
A great find and now, of course, I shall be on the look out for more books by this author.
