Greenbanks - Dorothy Whipple

Greenbanks is the story of the Ashton family. Any novel by Dorothy Whipple is guaranteed to be an absorbing story of family relationships, romance & heartache & Greenbanks is no exception. They're the qualities that have made her Persephone's best-selling author. But, can I say that this is not the most absorbing Whipple I've read? I find that the Whipples I've read fall into two camps. The unputdownable ones like Someone At A Distance, They Were Sisters, They Knew Mr Knight & High Wages & the pleasant but more ho-humish ones like The Priory & Greenbanks.

I enjoyed the relationship between Louisa Ashton & her granddaughter Rachel very much. This is a theme that's mentioned in every review I've read so far. Rachel is about three when the novel begins & 18 at the end. Her relationship with Louisa is the most nurturing one she has. Her mother, Letty, is a disappointed woman. Married to pompous Ambrose & with three sons as well as Rachel to look after, she often seems exhausted. Rachel's schools are chosen not for their academic excellence but for their proximity to Greenbanks so that she can have lunch with her grandmother & stay there as well. Louisa encourages Rachel in her ambitions, but subtly. When Ambrose refuses to allow Rachel to take up her scholarship to Oxford, Louisa is there to support Rachel.

Louisa's marriage wasn't particularly happy either. Her husband, Robert, was a philanderer & is killed in a carriage accident while driving out with his latest mistress. Her eldest son, Jim, runs the family business but he's an unsympathetic man, thinking about the fortune he hopes to make & the awful young woman, Mabel, that he wants to marry. He has no real sympathy with his mother & is contemptuous of his brother, Charles, his mother's favourite. Charles is charming but feckless & eventually Jim & Ambrose pack him off to South Africa to make a living or disappear altogether - they don't really mind which. The scene where Louisa travels to London to see Charles off is heartbreaking.

The agony was long. The train did not move. Louisa's lips ached intolerably. She was determined not to cry, not to upset him. When the train went out, she could give way, but not before. She began to long for the train to go, to get it over, to let her heart break this iron oppression, and yet when the train began to move, she hurried along with it, and Charles had forcibly to tear his hand from hers.

When Charles returns with no money, a monkey & a parrot, his brother is appalled & soon packs him off to Malaya. Only Louisa is really pleased to see him & her only rebellions against the might of the men of the family are on Charles's behalf. Charles returns from Malaya in 1914 to enlist in the Army & cause his mother more anxiety.

Louisa's daughter, Laura, is another unhappy woman. Engaged to Cecil Bradfield, the love of her life, they quarrel over her green velvet hat, the ridiculous argument turns serious & neither will back down. Laura marries a rich manufacturer from Nottingham out of despair & leads a miserable life of luxury. Her rebellion, when it comes, causes Louisa anguish but when Laura, as always, relies on her mother to help her, Louisa is again the rock on which all her children rely. The loving, supportive relationship of Louisa & Rachel contrasts always with the ungrateful, selfish generation in between.

The most interesting character in the book for me was Kate Barlow. Kate had an affair with a married man, had his child, and, after the baby was taken for adoption, left town to work at poorly paid jobs as companion. After Charles leaves for South Africa, Louisa, who has kept in touch with Kate, decides to ask her to come & live with her. The family are scandalised, of course, & Kate, when she arrives, is quite different to how Louisa expected. Louisa made the offer from friendship & thought that Kate would look on her position as that of a guest. Kate, however, can't leave her past behind. The scandal of her love affair has scarred her character & she can't let anyone forget it. The portrait of this woman is summed up in one phrase, "She was always inadequate at rejoicing." Her presence is a blight on family dinners, her attempt to join a wartime sewing circle is a disaster, she gives no pleasure to anyone & isn't able to receive the gifts of friendship & love that Louisa would happily give her. She is ungracious, prickly & difficult. Even when her life seems about to change for the better, circumstances are against her.

I did enjoy reading Greenbanks. It's absorbing & full of those domestic details of middle-class life of the period that I enjoy. There are characters to love & characters to sneer at. Even then, Dorothy Whipple is too clever to have merely stock characters. Even Ambrose can be pitied at the end of the book as he imagines that his wife & daughter have rejected him. I think it's just that I have such high expectations when it comes to reading Dorothy Whipple that anything less than complete absorption & staying up far too late to finish the book, means that I feel slightly disappointed. There are other reviews of Greenbanks at normblog, Book Snob, & A Year of Actually Reading My Own Books.

One Book, Two Book, Three Book, Four Book...and Five

Simon at Stuck in a Book came up with this lovely meme a little while ago & now he's invited us to do it again. It's a great way to see what everyone else is reading & focus my mind on what I want to read next. So, here goes.

1. The book I'm reading now.

A Lighthearted Quest by Ann Bridge, one of the Bloomsbury Reader e-books I downloaded the other day. As it's an eight book series, I thought I should make a start. I've almost finished it & loved it so I'll be posting about it soon.

2. The last book I finished.

The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley which I loved & posted about here.

3. The next book I want to read.

Now, this is the hard part! As it's almost November, I've put a couple of books about WWI on the tbr pile. I've had these books for over 5 years so I'd like to read them soon. A VAD in France by Olive Dent was first published in 1917 & An Airman's Wife by Aimee McHardy is based on the letters between Aimee & her husband.

However, as it's Halloween, I probably should read a ghost story or two tonight if I'm brave enough. Maybe something by M R James as I have this newly reissued volume of his stories.

4. The last book I bought.

Well, I've been on a bit of a spree lately with e-books & other goodies but I can't go past the new Persephone titles for Autumn/Winter. Dinners for Beginners by Rachel & Margaret Ryan, No Surrender by Constance Maud & the one I'll probably read first, Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple.

5. The last book I was given.

Well, no one gives me books as I'm so hard to buy for. I can't imagine why that would be. Anyway, I've been sent a review copy of Victoria Hislop's new novel, The Thread. So, that will have to count as a gift, which it is in a way.

High wages - Dorothy Whipple

I started reading High Wages yesterday afternoon & finished it at 11.30 last night. What a terrific book. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve never started a Dorothy Whipple & been able to put it down. The book arrived before Christmas but I’d stopped myself from reading it because my online reading group had decided to read it in February & discuss it in March & I didn’t want to read it too early & risk forgetting details. So, I resolutely put it aside until yesterday.

Jane Carter gets a job at Chadwick’s, the drapers in Tidsley, a small Lancashire town. High Wages is the story of Jane’s rise from draper’s assistant, working for a pittance, living in with her stingy employers & dreaming of great things to owning her own shop & being able to realise those ambitions. Jane is a determined young woman. The scene where she confronts Mr Chadwick & forces him to keep her on after his most important customer, Mrs Greenwood, has demanded her dismissal is typical. Jane clearly sets out her worth to Mr Chadwick. She has already transformed the business, pushing staid Mr Chadwick into new areas, showing her talent for fashion by advising customers & modernising the displays. Now, Jane compares Mrs Greenwood’s 30 pounds worth of business a year to all that she has brought to the business. Mr Chadwick is dumbfounded but has to agree with Jane & her job is saved.

There’s so much humour in the book. Dorothy Whipple knew Lancashire well & she draws a fascinating picture of provincial society from 1912 through WWI to the 1920s. The social nuances are beautifully observed. When Jane & the Chadwicks go to the Hospital Ball, the details of clothes - a diamond shirt stud ruins Mr Chadwick’s evening – who Jane dances with, the fact that a tradesman like Mr Chadwick has tickets at all, causes apoplexy among people like the Greenwoods. This is a highly structured society. Dorothy Whipple takes us into the minds of characters from different social levels & shows us how dissatisfied nearly all of them are with their lot. Sylvia Greenwood is beautiful, envied by shopgirls like Jane, but she’s bored, forced by her social position to do little but look decorative. Mrs Briggs has risen from the working class when her husband becomes a partner to Mr Greenwood, the mill owner. She is a disgrace to her husband & upwardly mobile family because she can’t live up to her new circumstances. She prefers to do her own cooking & wear sateen petticoats than live in a house where servants do everything for her. Not until she becomes friends with Jane & helps her achieve the dream of owning her own dress shop does Mrs Briggs feel comfortable with her wealth.

I found it interesting that Jane’s natural self-esteem & ambition are fostered by reading. She meets Wilfrid, a library assistant who is walking out with Maggie, the other assistant at Chadwick’s. Wilfrid fosters her love of reading & soon she’s reading H G Wells’ Ann Veronica under the counter at work & being fired by what Mr Chadwick calls Socialist ideas. I loved Jane’s sense of what is due to herself. She confronts Mr Chadwick when he dishonestly refuses to pay Jane’s commission on a sale she’s made. She outwits Mrs Chadwick’s meanness to have a luxurious cold bath on a Sunday morning. She knows her own worth & I admired that very much. At the end of the book there’s a chance that Jane may give up her hard-won independence. I was so upset at the thought that I couldn’t bear to go to bed not knowing what would happen. That’s the real reason why I was still up at 11.30 propping my eyelids open! That’s why Dorothy Whipple is one of my favourite authors & my favourite Persephone author. She makes me care so much about her characters that I can’t go to bed until I know what’s going to happen to them. I do hope Persephone continue reprinting her books.

There's a copy of High Wages available at Anglophile Books.

The Ladies' Paradise - Emile Zola

The mosaics & ceramics of the friezes were sparkling, the greens & reds of the paintwork were lit up by the fires from the gold so lavishly applied. It was as if the displays, the palaces of gloves & ties, the clusters of ribbons & lace, the tall piles of woollens & calicoes, the variegated flower-beds blossoming with light silks & foulards, were now burning in live embers. The mirrors were resplendent. The display of sunshades, curved like shields, was throwing off metallic glints. In the distance, beyond some long shadows, there were faraway, dazzling departments, teeming with a mob gilded by the sunshine.


This is the Ladies’ Paradise, a new phenomenon in 19th century Paris, a department store. It’s the brainchild of Octave Mouret, the owner-manager, who has built the store up from its origins as a family store owned by his wife’s family into one of the biggest stores in Paris, taking over a whole block & crushing smaller shops in its path. Considering it was published in 1883 this is an incredibly modern novel. It’s about seduction in its many forms, mainly retail seduction. Mouret is the great seducer. In his private life, he takes mistresses; in his professional life, he seduces investors, staff, suppliers & the public with his vision of retail heaven. The novel opens with the arrival of Denise Baudu & her brothers in Paris from the country. They’re orphans & have come to live with their uncle, a shopkeeper. Their uncle’s shop is opposite the Ladies’ Paradise & all the shopkeepers in the neighbourhood are obsessed & appalled by the department store hovering over them, stealing their customers & their staff, disrupting their lives. M Baudu can’t afford to employ Denise so she goes to work at the Paradise. Her career starts badly. She’s badly dressed, persecuted by the other shopgirls, living on the edge of poverty, trying to support her brothers. Zola’s descriptions of the lives of the staff are wonderful. He describes the rivalry, the bitchiness, the jockeying for position & advantage, the long hours & meagre rewards. Denise is eventually sacked, & after hovering on the edge of dire poverty, she reconciles with her uncle & goes back to work at the Paradise with very different results. This time, she’s more experienced, her gentleness & honesty bring her respect & promotion & she catches the eye of Mouret, who finds in her an honest woman who refuses to be corrupted. The novel is full of great set pieces. The grand sale which takes place early in the book is a great gamble for Mouret. He’s set on changing the retail behaviour of Parisian women. He uses many of the techniques we’re very familiar with now. Lots of bargains at the front of the store to lead people in, a lavish display of Oriental rugs & fabrics to dazzle the eye, scattering departments all over the store so customers are drawn further & further in to get what they want (like putting the milk at the back of the supermarket), aggressive sales techniques. The chapter begins in the early morning with the empty store full of anticipation. Mouret walks through the store, making changes, checking stock & staff. The staff grumble about the lack of customers. Anxiety rises, the staff work on commission, what if no one comes? Gradually, the customers come, drawn in past the Oriental bazaar & into the growing frenzy of consumerism & retail madness. The chapter rises to a crescendo of overblown excess, the sale is a success & Mouret’s confidence is justified. The customers are just as well-drawn as the staff. Mouret’s mistress, Madame Desforges, & her friends are helpless in the face of so much luxury. They exhaust themselves with shopping & then, after a break in the buffet, they emerge to shop some more. Zola’s descriptions of laces, velvets, silks & satins are so luscious. Luscious is the word I kept thinking of as I read. The sheer accumulation of detail, whether of desperate poverty or overblown excess, is intoxicating. I loved everything about this novel. Zola is such a compelling writer. I was struck again by the frankness of French novels of this period about sex & the emotional life of the characters. I read Zola’s L’Assommoir a couple of years ago & was just bowled over by it. It’s the story of a laundress & her struggle for a respectable life. She’s gradually consumed by poverty & ill-health & even as I was repelled by the story, I couldn’t stop reading. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. There’s a prequel to The Ladies’ Paradise called Pot Luck which traces Mouret’s early career. That may be my next Zola. If anyone has any other recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

My online reading group is about to read High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, a novel about a shopgirl in the North of England in the 1930s. Some of us are reading The Ladies’ Paradise as a companion read. I’ll be reading High Wages next (maybe with a mystery in between as a change of pace) & I can’t wait to see how it compares with this French confection of luxury. I imagine the atmosphere will be a little more austere!

Reading 4 books at once

This week I’ve started three books plus a new audio book. I’ve had a really busy week at work, the weather has been mostly hot & humid although we had some wonderful thunderstorms on Thursday which blew away the humidity, & I’ve found it hard to concentrate on just one book when I have so many lovely choices. I started the week with Joanna Trollope’s new book, The Other Family. I love Joanna Trollope, I’ve read all her books & I always look forward to a new one. This is the story of Chrissie & her three daughters, a middle class family living in London. Chrissie’s partner, Richie, dies suddenly, &, although Chrissie always felt married & wanted to be married, Richie had left behind a wife & son in the North. He refused to divorce Margaret although he’d had no contact with his first family for over 20 years. Problems arise when Richie’s will is read. Chrissie will have legal & financial difficulties but the real shock is the bequest Richie leaves to Margaret & his son, Scott. Chrissie & her two eldest daughters are spoilt & petulant. Amy, the youngest daughter, is the most sympathetic to Margaret & Scott. She finds some photos of her father’s life in Newcastle & makes contact with Scott. I love the beautifully observed domestic details of Joanna Trollope’s writing & I’m looking forward to the resolution of the tension between the families. I only read about 70pp of this on Monday because when I got home, it was gazumped by a tempting package on the doorstep. But, last night, I picked it up again & I’m more than halfway through. I’m totally absorbed & I think I’ll finish it this afternoon.

The tempting package on Monday contained Lyndall Gordon’s new book on Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns. I’ve had this book on preorder for over a year & I couldn’t resist flicking through it, looking at the photos, index etc. I read a lot of Dickinson’s poetry when I was young & I suddenly found myself remembering lines & phrases. Soon I was looking up all my favourite poems & I started the book in bed that night. It’s a biography of Dickinson but it goes further. It looks at the family feuds that erupted over the poet’s manuscripts & reputation after her death. This is something I know very little about & I’m looking forward to discovering more. Although I love Dickinson’s poetry, I’ve always found it difficult to get an idea of who she was as a woman. The white dresses, the seclusion. Was she pining away from unrequited love? Was she ill? Was she just very clever at creating the life she needed to write? Gordon dismisses the traditional explanation of unrequited love. Her theory is that Dickinson suffered from epilepsy which was a shameful disease in the 19th century, linked to mental instability. It’s a fascinating theory, & I look forward to reading more about it when I get back to Emily.

On Tuesday, I took Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise to read at lunchtime because the other two books were too big for my bag. My online reading group is reading Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages over the next couple of months. It’s the story of a young girl’s life as a shopgirl in the North of England & some of us are reading the Zola as a companion read. It should be quite a contrast as Zola’s novel is about a great department store in Paris. I expect much lushness & extravagance in contrast to the Northern austerity of Whipple. I’ve barely begun the Zola so I’ll say no more at the moment.

My new audio book is Sarah’s Cottage by D E Stevenson. I’ve only discovered Stevenson in the last year or so. There’s a devoted following for this author out there but most of her books are out of print. In the last year or so, this has started to change. Persephone reprinted Miss Buncle’s Book & Bloomsbury reprinted Mrs Tim of the Regiment as part of their wonderful Bloomsbury Group imprint. I’ve also listened to several books on audio. Stevenson writes gentle, domestic stories. Nothing dramatic or thrilling happens except maybe to the emotions of her characters. Sarah’s Cottage is set just after WWII. Sarah & Charles Reid are recently married & starting life together in Scotland in a house they’ve built on land given to them by Sarah’s grandparents. Life in a Scottish village, gentle & very satisfying with just enough plot detail in Sarah’s horrible sister & her neglected daughter, & ideas for Charles’ future career to keep me interested.

Persephone Books

I'm going to write the occasional post about an author or publisher or journal that has changed the way I read. The first one just has to be about Nicola Beauman's Persephone Books. One of the luckiest internet searches I ever did was about 10 years ago. I was looking for the Virago website (turned out there wasn’t one then) & found Persephone Books instead. Nicola Beauman had started Persephone just the year before to reprint the books she wrote about in her book A Very Great Profession, published by Virago in 1983 & reprinted by Persephone last year. Middlebrow novels, books that were sneered at when they were first published by some critics & had fallen out of favour since. Books that were incredibly popular & much loved. Books written mostly by women & mostly in the period 1900-1950. Books that have a less stridently feminist tone than the Feminist novels reprinted by Virago. Domestic novels - & short stories, diaries, letters & non-fiction as well. There were maybe 10 books published when I found Persephone & I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. I ordered my first three, Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes, William : an Englishman by Cecily Hamilton & Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley. I gobbled them up & bought three more, & three more... Now I have them all & a standing order for the new titles. The books themselves are beautiful. I probably don’t even need to describe them as a Persephone has become proverbial for a beautifully designed book, lovely to look at & hold. The plain dove grey covers with cream panels, the endpapers chosen to match the period of the book, the creamy paper, the introductions & afterwords written by distinguished writers & critics. Still, none of this would matter if the contents weren’t so exciting, so unputdownable. Persephone Books has broadened my reading & given me the most pleasure in my reading life over the past 10 years. I’ve discovered Dorothy Whipple (my favourite Persephone author), Susan Glaspell, Marghanita Laski, R C Sherriff, Vere Hodgson & the adult novels of children’s authors Richmal Crompton & Noel Streatfeild. Reading Persephones has led me down many reading paths & introduced me to the online reading group I’ve been a member of for the last five years & couldn’t live without. They also publish the lovely Persephone Classics, their bestsellers with bookshop-friendly covers. I’m half way through reading To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski, reviewed here & here. It’s a fascinating look at a side of the Home Front we don’t often see in books or movies about WWII. Deborah is a total contrast to the noble Cressida in Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country (Persephone). This is certainly not Vere Hodgson’s spirit of the Blitz but all the more interesting for that.