When I worked in Highgate library many years ago I remember seeing the works of Dorothy Whipple on the shelves. Little old ladies used to come in and borrow them telling me they were such 'nice' stories. A mini skirted, superior teenager at the time I smiled sweetly and turned my nose up at their choice. Oh the arrogance of youth.
Years later I read Someone at a Distance when it was republished by Persephone Books and what did I 
find? Not nice at all. A manipulative nasty little French girl worms her way into a family and steals the husband and wrecks the marriage purely out of hurt pride as she had been rejected back in her small village in France. The fall out and the effect on the children and family are brilliantly portrayed in a timeless way, no difference in modern day divorce and break up. This was Dorothy Whipple's last book and she was bitterly disappointed with its reception. Books like this, in the late 1950's were going out of fashion, the decade of 'cool' and 'swnging' was nearly with us and her time had past. How mistaken we all were. Her books are as immediate today as they were then.
They Knew Mr Knight tells of a family embroiled with a rich, smooth financier, the Mr Knight of the title. The reader knows from the beginning that he is not to be trusted and that something awful is just waiting round the corner. Mr Knight = Robert Maxwell.
In They Were Sisters we have the story of an abusive marriage, mentally abusive rather than physical, but with the same result, reducing one of the sisters to alcoholism and despair and alienating his children by his cruelty and spite.
In High Wages (sadly still out of print) Jane is a young ambitious draper's assistant in a provincial town who has initiative and drive and determines to make something of her life and sets up in business of her own.
The latest Whipple reprint is The Closed Door and other stories which I read straight through last week. 
Now I know full well that one should not read short stories one after the other like this, but really that is like giving me a box of chocolates and telling me I can only have one a day. No way Jose. They are all gone pretty quickly and so it was with this collection. I am not a fan of the short story genre, I like to get my teeth stuck into something solid but Dorothy Whipple's unerring instinct for homing in on what at first sight seems the commonplace and ordinary, and then twisting it round kept me absorbed until the final page.
"Ernest and Alice Hart had not expected or wished for children and, after ten years of uneventful matrimony, they viewed the birth of a daughter with dismay"
How about that for an opener? You read on and think what an unpleasant and unfeeling pair they are and how badlythey treat their daughter Stella, but they can't help it, they are just unloving, rather stupid selfish people. Stella leads a lonely narrow life only enlivened when she goes to school and meets Lucy Wood who becomes her life long friend. It is Lucy who will not give up on Stella and eventually rescues her from her lonely existence.
In The Rose we have a young frivolous second wife Elsie who suspects her husband of having an affair when she follows him one day after finding him secreting a rose under his hat. She follows him and finds out what the rose was for. Far worse than an affair. She cannot fight this.
The Handbag - the discovery by a quiet neglected wife that her husband has a mistress and the way she takes revenge upon him. Family Crisis - another neglected quiet woman, this time a daughter, runs away from her boring existence and elopes with a worthless salesman.
For me the gem of the collection was Saturday Afternoon. Each weekend George Thorpe goes out on a Saturday afternoon. His wife and daughter more or less force this on him, they like their peaceful afternoons together in front of the fire with a box of chocolates. This is a routine that has gone on for years and then one afternoon while he is out, a policeman turns up on the door step asking for him......
The one thing all these stories have in common is the despair of a quiet overlooked person within a family, whether it be husband, wife or daughter and the life that they make for themselves to break out of this stifling straight jacket. They all have a domestic setting with its daily routines and irritations but they are never boring and never unsurprising. Dorothy Whipple has an acute eye and a wonderful knack of lifting the commonplace into the realm of the extraordinary. She has been likened to Jane Austen with her books rooted in domesticity and small town life and I can see why this comparison has been made. I don't think Jane would mind at all.
Since my discovery of the wonderful Mrs Whipple I have been collecting her out of print books and have most of them on my shelves. Because of the Lockwoods, High Wages and Greenbanks all await and let us hope that they too have their day.
To describe all of her books, and this latest collection, as being ' a good read' sounds very patronising but it is not meant to be. That is precisely what they all are. Absorbing, written with an ease and facility that will keep you reading each page, with a fine observation of human frailties, Dorothy Whipple deserves to be more widely read and I apologise for my lack of understanding of her qualities all those teenage years ago.
