When I was a young mini skirted teenager I worked at Highgate Library in London. It was an old building, one of the Carnegie Libraries and I loved being there surrounded by books all day. It was a fairly well heeled area and we had a large amount of ‘mature’ ladies who used to come in regularly to change their books. I got to know them all and had some really interesting chats with them.
There were favourite authors whose books went in an out with incredible regularity and one of these was D E Stevenson. “Such nice books” I was told so often and I smiled and agreed while inwardly feeling slightly superior about it all. I flicked through one or two but put them to one side as I found them slight and old fashioned.
Now here I have to mention that at the time Iris Murdoch, Sylvia Plath, Penelope Mortimer, Muriel Spark etc were books that were stocked along with shedloads of modern literature. I have never enjoyed modern literature and this is not something that has crept up on me in old age, I have always felt this way. I tried to read newly published titles and gawd knows I gave the Booker a try, but found them so unrelenting and, frankly, unenjoyable. I have read Margaret Atwood and A S Byatt and other Booker luminaries and can, with a clear eye, acknowledge their brilliance and the quality of the writing. But here is the thing – I finish them and I feel tired. They wear me out and the final seal of approval for me is do I want to read them again? And the answer is always no.
So after years of trying so hard to read worthy literature, along with the Viclit and crime novels that I love, I abandoned all attempts to be An Intellectual and thought sod it, I will read what I want.
And one day, I read a D E Stevenson. And I loved it and then I read another and another and another and I loved them. OK there are a few that are not so good but if you write as many books as she did you are going to have the odd dip now and then.
Well of course by the time I discovered DES all her books were out of print and so I started doing my rummage in second hand book shops. I remember one year going to Hay and coming back with about fifteen titles. Lovely hard backs and paperbacks with sixties covers that bore no resemblance to the content inside.
Persephone Books, the home of so many of my favourite titles, published two; Miss Buncle’s Book and Miss Buncle Married and I have to say that I think they are two of her best and very funny indeed. But still a lack of reprints. Bloomsbury published Mrs Tim of the Regiment but just the one and then came to a grinding halt.
(Covers here are Five Windows, Youngs Mrs Savage on the left and The Blue Sapphire, Winter and Rough Weather and The Musgraves on the right)
And then along comes Dean Street Press. All hail to Dean Street Press who I simply adore. Apart from the DES titles they have so many interesting titles in the Murder and Mystery genre as well but at the moment I am awash with their Stevenson books.
D E Stevenson was Scottish and is a descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson. She was born in Edinburgh and seemed to have had a delightful childhood travelling abroad with her parents to France, Switzerland and Italy, which countries feature in her novels. She married Major James Peploe (nephew to the artist Samuel Peploe) and became an army wife, travelling abroad with him. Her Mrs Tim books are based on her adventures during this period. I shall be writing about Mrs Tim in a future post.
In an autobiographical note published with the Dean Street reprints, the author herself says the following:
“ Sometimes I have been accused of making my characters ‘too nice’. I have been told that my stories are ‘too pleasant’, but the fact is I write of people as I find them and am fond of my fellow human beings. Perhaps I have been fortunate but in all my wanderings I have met very few thoroughly unpleasant people, so I find it difficult to write about them”.
I look back and remember how I used to turn my nose up at the ‘nice’ books she wrote. Makes me realise once again that as a teenager, I knew nothing about anything and this now mature lady apologies for being so dismissive of these delightful books which I can now appreciate. Quite frankly, the way the world appears to me at the moment I have become a great fan of “nice” and we could all do with a lot more of it.
Do nip over to Dean Street Press and give yourself the pleasure of buying one, or two or three and sit back, relax and enjoy.
You know it makes sense.
