If there was any reason needed for me to love British Library publishing any more than I do already, being an aficionado of their Classic Crime series, then here is another one. A series of books under the umbrella of The British Library Women Writers. These are novels by female authors who enjoyed popularity in their day but have now disappeared from the public purview.
Persephone books have done sterling work in this area and have published other titles by Mollie Panter-Downes: Minnie’s Room, London War notes and Good Evening Mrs Craven and these sit on my shelves alongside her simply wonderful novel One Fine Day. I have this in the “green” Virago edition and it is a treasured volume.
So I was delighted to see an unknown title by this author coming up on this list – My Husband Simon and my thanks to the British Library for sending me this copy.
I freely admit to being slightly disconcerted by its content and tone. I think I was expecting something a little more akin to the above mentioned titles and this one certainly isn’t and I found it difficult to feel any affection or even liking for the two main protagonists. Indeed the comment made by Jane Austen on Emma that she was going to create a heroine not many would like came to mind on reading the first few pages where we are introduced to Nevis Falconer, a young novelist who has had huge success with her first book but is now struggling to write another as good. I found her grumbling about her charlady slightly offputting:
“Mrs Proutie, my charwoman, had not turned up that morning to get my breakfast…….she was like the geyser, temperamental. I couldn’t rely on her but at least she was cheerful and didn’t steal the gin……I thought of various ways of slinging Proudie out on her ear when she condescended to turn up”
Nevis goes away for the weekend and there she meets Simon. The attraction is immediate.
“He had curiously light eyes with dusty gold lashes. I thought ‘he’s attractive’ I felt angry and helpless as though I knew that my nice orderly little pattern of my life was going to be broken up.”
Simon admits that he has not read her book and tells her that he does not read anything. “I’m practically illiterate”.
It is obvious that despite their overpowering physical response to each other, temperamentally they are not suited. Nevis sees this with a clear eye but after spending a night together they marry. And yes, they are happy, in a wild, bickering kind of way, fighting and making up and making love but it begins to wear Nevis down as she finds that her writing is affected by her marriage.
She despises his lack of intellectual curiosity, he finds her attitude towards anybody who had not read the latest novel or seen the latest play snobbish and infuriating. And yes, she is a snob. She loathes his family and finds them boring and middle class. Nevis sneers at them and is contemptuous of their attitudes.
Oddly enough, she finds a kind of kinship with Gwen who is married to Simon’s boorish brother.
“Gwen would never be intensely happy or intensely miserable. She would never be exalted to the skies or cast down in the darkness of hell as I was alternately exalted and cast down; her life would move graciously in an even climate of content. And I thought ‘this is a very good thing’ and ‘Gwen is cleverer than you are”
Nevis is shocked to the core when Gwen dies in childbirth, she and Simon had thought, briefly, of having a child but after Gwen’s death this is never mentioned again.
Nevis is still struggling with her writing and her American publisher Marcus Chard who has come to London, has contacted her and is acting as her mentor and is ruthlessly critical of her work. He knows that she can do better but sees that her life with Simon is holding her back. He persuades her to come to New York for a few months away from it all and write the book that is in her.
She decides to go and tells Simon
“Are you coming back?
Yes, I’m coming back.
When?
It’s hard to say”
I see”
And he does see. Simon comes to see her off
“I looked up and saw Simon was crying. The tears were running down his face. I kept on saying foolishly ‘I’ll come back, oh my love my darling, I’ll come back.
You’ll never come back”
This is a book that, despite my feelings towards Nevis and Simon, held my attention from page one and I read it through in one afternoon. So different from her others that I had read and rather a surprise. While reading there was a feeling in the back of my mind that I had read another book in the past few years where a heroine was as thoroughly dislikeable and it finally came to me To Bed with Grand Music by Laski which I reviewed here. The main character in this book is despicable and ruthless and without any moral compass at all, and in fairness to Nevis she at least has the self knowledge to look at herself and realise her true nature.
And Simon? In the end he lets her go. I could only feel that she was foolish to throw away the love of a man who would do this for the woman for whom he cares deeply.
More to come in this fascinating series. I cannot wait.
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