Like South Riding, Anderby Wold is set in Yorkshire and deals with a community struggling with social change.  Mary Robson is a young woman who has married her cousin in order to have the means to pay off the mortgage on her family farm and the skills to keep it running.  Life in Anderby Wold is hard but quiet until David Rossitur, a young handsome social reformer, arrives and begins to shake things up, not least on Mary Robson’s farm.

Anderby Wold is nowhere near as polished and accomplished as South Riding but it is by no means a bad novel; Winifrd Holtby not at her best is still Winifred Holtby after all.  Its focus is narrower, on a few key players rather than each individual in a community, but many of the themes which will be developed and expanded in her later work are present in their nuculaic form here.  There is the same emphasis on the indivdual as part of the community and the differences between individual responsibility and social responsibility.  It’sreally very difficult not to make this sound incredibly dull, but in fact it paints a fascinating picture of a community going through a time of quiet but important change.

One of the things that has impressed me about both Holtby novels that I’ve read so far is her ability to create characters who are neither inherently good nor inherently bad.  Everyone has an opinion that they think is right and good: giving to the poor, workers’ rights and social equality.  It’s difficult to disagree with any of them individually, but each character’s approach towards achieving what is right is somehow at odds with that of the others and therein lies the conflict.  People do bad things, but noone is bad.  There is no villain to boo; instead there is a complicated moral maze which Holtby refuses to guide the reader through.  Instead she happily abandons you there, leaving you to find your own way out, and that for me was the main appeal of Anderby Wold.

Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby.  Published by Virago, 2011, pp. 278.  Originally published in 1923.

Charlotte, the narrator, is a young woman living in nineteenth century Copenhagen, where she supports herself and Fru Schelswig, the fat, base old woman whom everyone assumes is her mother, by working as a prostitute.  When the cold winter drives her to seek further employment, she and Fru Schelswig find themselves working for the disagreeable Fru Krak, cleaning her house from top to bottom with the exception of certain forbidden rooms in the basement.  Convinced there must be something hidden there worth stealing, Charlotte cannot help investigating and discovers a mysterious machine left there by Fru Krak’s vanished husband which will change the course of her life forever as it catapults her, all unknowing, into twenty-first century London.

This is the sort of book for which the term ‘romp’ was invented.  It is light-hearted, witty, filled with adventure and generally great fun to read.  If nothing hugely surprising happens, the plot is sufficiently exciting and the narration more than engaging enough in spite of that to draw the reader in and keep hold of their attention throughout.

Charlotte’s voice is one of the key features which makes the book so enjoyable.  She is self-assured and inclined towards melodrama and exaggeration, but her easy humour transforms this from a narrative style that could have been alienating and tiresome (and I know this all too well after suffering through the horrendous exaggeration of The House in Dormer Forest) into one that is self aware and not afraid to be self mocking.  My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time is rather silly and the book knows it and takes great pleasure in being so.  Charlotte’s habit of referring to the reader directly as ‘dearest‘ and complimenting them frequently is just one example of the book’s playfulness which makes it so much fun.

Although people travelling backwards in time to visit periods in history is a subject often addressed in fiction, the reverse situation depicted in this book is not, and Liz Jensen does a wonderful job of imagining the twenty-first century as seen through the eyes of someone from the past:

But the dream did not end, & could not be escaped from so easily, & indeed it then most swiftly turned nightmarish, for waiting at the black wrought-iron park entrance…stood a shiny black carriage of iron, horseless, on four wheels, that growled like a foul-tempered hippopotamus.  Professor Krak bade us enter it through a door in its side: ‘Our means of transport, ladies,’ he said, & then, in a foreign tongue which I presumed to be English, commenced a rushed conversation with the driver of the vehicle, who was – Lord! I could scarcely believe my eyes! – as black as a coal-scuttle, just like in the illustrations of man-eating cannibals I had seen in the cellar at the orphanage!  But before I could scream in terror & make my escape, the machine roared to life with a smooth lurch & we sped into the pellucid gloaming which in that place seemed to pass for night.

All this is related in a mixture of archaicisms and modern slang which seems peculiarly appropriate to a time traveller.  Simple devices such as the use of ampersand instead of ‘and’ provide continuous reminders that Charlotte is from the past.  Fru Shleswig is also given an effective, distinctive manner of speaking, using a sort of Middle English spelling which implies her ignorance and peasant-like bluntness.

The book isn’t without its faults.  For an adventurous book about time travel, it takes a surprisingly long time in exposition building up to this actually taking place and although it is interesting from the beginning because of the narrator the story could perhaps have benefited from starting a bit sooner.  The pacing of the narrative remains slightly uneven throughout the book, but this is never enough of a problem to affect the enjoyment of reading such a thoroughly entertaining book.  I’ll definitely be reading more by Liz Jensen in the future.

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen.  Published by Bloomsbury, 2006, pp. 311.  Originally published in 2006.

The Sack of Bath was written in 1973 in response to the decisions made by Bath City Council to demolish large swathes of Georgian cottages in order to provide the city with newer houses, better access and improved facilities.  Fergusson acknowledges that the aim itself was admirable but the ways in which they sought to accomplish it were misguided.  With words and pictures he illustrates the ongoing destruction of Bath and issues a heartfelt plea for it to be stopped and more reasonable measures, such as renovation and preservation, be considered instead.

Although The Sack of Bath is just as well written today as it was when it was first published, it lacks the immediacy which it would have had in the 1970′s when the demolition and construction was being carried out.  It is interesting, yes, but in a vague and distant way rather than in an inciting-architectural-rage-and-writing-to-your-local-MP-to-stop-this-sort-of-thing way that I suspect it was intended.  The closest thing that I can liken it to is reading a newspaper article covering some terrible natural disaster and trying to encourage readers to give aid, but doing so nearly forty years after the event when everyone appears to have recovered quite nicely, thank you very much.  It just isn’t the same as reading it when it was relevant.

The problem is that the book is written in such hyperbolic language and strident tones that it implies nothing less than the wholesale destruction of historic Bath, which couldn’t be more different to what any visitor to Bath today will see as they walk around the city.  In fact, the most recent new development is incredibly sympathetic to the aesthetics of the city and blends in beautifully (or as beautifully as modern high street shops ever could) with the historical setting.  Admittedly this is probably at least in part due to the pressure of action such as the publication of The Sack of Bath but there is such a huge gap between this and the city overrun with hideous concrete boxes that you might expect from reading the book that it lost a lot of impact for me.  Clearly this book was influential in its time and I have no doubt that it did a lot of good, but I didn’t find that it quite worked reading it now.

The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson.  Published by Persephone, 2010, pp. 81.  Originally published in 1973.

The House in Dormer Forest follows the fortunes of the Darke family and their servants who live and work in Dormer Old House.  It’s difficult for me to summarise the plot so long after reading the book, but I’ve copied the blurb from the back of the book in my initial post concerning the novel.  Suffice to say that it is dark and oppressive and Stella Gibbons can’t have had much work to do in producing a parody, as the writing is so incredibly overwrought it almost feels like a pastiche to begin with.

Occasionally (very occasionally), her writing is intentionally amusing as Webb reveals her characters to the reader:

“I can’t be thwarted!” grandmother suddenly broke out.  She had a theory that, if crossed, she would die.  She was fond of saying: “I’ve got a weak ‘eart, Rachel!” –dropping her “h” not because she could not aspirate it, but because she did not see why, at her age, any letter of the alphabet should be her master.

I think this perfectly encapsulates grandmother Darke’s (the obvious counterpart of Aunt Ada Doom in Cold Comfort Farm) tyrannical desire to control everything and the manipulation ways in which she does so. 

Sometimes, the language is wild and beautiful, if rather over dramatic:

Dormer, in its cup at the bases of the hills, was always full of damp air and the sound of water.  Besieged by this grievous music — and what is there in nature sadder than the lament of falling water? — she felt as if she had opened the door not to the night and the stream, but on to a future full of doubt and dread, veiled in mist.

Yes, it’s a little bit much, but it’s suitably atmospheric and I think it’s quite effective.  I’m partial to the odd Victorian sensation novel so I am more than willing to forgive melodrama under the right circumstances.  Unfortunately, the majority of the time, the language tends towards being florid to the point of being ridiculous:

Who would ever seek in Amber Darke, so still, of so sad-coloured an exterior, the creature of fire and tears that could feed a man’s heart with faery food and call him into Paradise with songs wild as those of hawks on the untrodden snow-fields?

I appreciate that Webb is trying to emphasise how plain Amber is compared to other more attractive, lively women and therefore unlikely to attract her ideal husband, but really, Mary, is this necessary?  Faery food?  Hawks?  Untrodden fields (which seems an odd place for the hawks to be on; I would have assumed they were in the air as birds of prey hopping along the ground are really quite comedic and not at all wild and romantic as I think Webb is trying to suggest).  Jane Eyre has exactly the same thoughts about being plain and therefore unlikely to attract attention, but Bronte manages to express them without recourse to overblown similes about hawks and fairies, in a way which makes the reader sympathise with Jane rather than giggle at her.  Sadly for Amber, I found her impossible to relate to because her inner life is so ridiculous and extravagant rather than believeable.

The best example of this overwrought style comes when Jasper has gone to a track known ominously (everything in this novel happens ominously) as ‘the Beast Walk’ to think about things:

To climb this path harrowed his soul, made is face even at ten years look quite wizened.  But now, in his young manhood, the dark spell was infinitely stronger.  He drank here of a charm thick as black honey made from purple poison flowers by bees in hell.

Intellectually I know that this is supposed to show Jasper brooding and generally being consumed by dark thoughts; in reality I was too busy pondering why there are bees and flowers in hell, if the bees have committed some terrible sin and are therefore condemned to an eternity of making black honey and what this might be supposed to taste like.  Who on earth imagines a hell which features bees and flowers?  On the whole, I have to conclude that metaphors generally work best if the thing to which you are comparing something else actually exists or at the very least makes sense to your readers.  This is just ridiculous.

I can forgive ridiculous writing if a book has something else to recommend it (as in the case of early gothic novels which I also rather enjoy).  However, the plot of The House in Dormer Forest is one of sheer, unrelenting doom in which no one is ever happy and everyone goes on about it at length.  The atmosphere is suffocatingly dark and claustrophobic, and while this may have been the desired effect I think it needed to be accompanied by better writing so  that the reader could at least have had something to enjoy in the novel.  The only grim humour comes in the form of Sarah, a servant who visits retribution on those who displease her by deliberately breaking their china ornaments and gluing the shards together to form a globe.

As always, my views are entirely subjective and it could be that I’ve missed the point of Webb’s novel entirely.  Search for this book on Amazon UK and you will find the same effusive 5 star review posted no less than twenty-two times, which makes me somewhat dubious about it, but this review from a website featuing the Midlands in literature provides an interesting counterpoint to my own opinions which is much more praise-filled.  The general consensus seems to be that this was by no means Webb’s best novel, so I will continue to read the rest of her books and see if I enjoy those more than I did The House in Dormer Forest.

The House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb.  Published by Virago, 1983, pp. 292.  Originally published in 1920.

The House at Riverton is the story of Grace, once a housemaid at Riverton and later lady’s maid to Hannah Hartford.  Now an elderly lady, she finds herself looking back on her life and the memories of the tragedies that she has tried to forget for so long begin to surface, in part prompted by a visit from a filmmaker who is directing a film about the goings on at Riverton.  But only Grace is left who knows what really happened.

This is a tricky book to review.  I enjoyed it and found the story engaging and the conclusion pleasing.  I raced through it in the time it usually takes to read a books half this size, which is impressive considering the numerous distractions that the book was up against.  Morton conjures up the changing eras well, reflecting the huge shifts in priorities, ideas and societal norms from the pre war years, through the Great War and into the roaring twenties.  Her writing has that sense of nostalgia which always makes me temporarily wish I could live inside the novel, despite that fact that a) I would miss modern technology too much and b) cleraly I would have been a servant, not a fine lady with a country house.  It is an entertaining read and, all in all, a promising debut novel.  However, I had several problems with The House at Riverton which prevented me from finding it a really great book, and it is much easier to put my finger on what these niggles were than on what makes it such a good read, so this is going to come off as a somewhat negative review when I actually really liked the book, I’m looking forward to reading The Forgotten Garden and would reccommend it to people looking for a quick, absorbing read.  It’s a conundrum.

The book starts out with, in my opinion, a huge mistake.  It opens thus:

Last November I had a nightmare.

It was 1924 and I was at Riverton again.  (p. 3)

Naturally, this instantly brings to mind the famous opening line of what is the quintessential English-country-house-with-a-dark-secret novel, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  The  conscious mimicing of such a well known beginning creates a certain set of expectations which, unfortunately, The House at Riverton never quite lives up to.  Yes, it’s a novel in the same genre and yes, it’s good, but Rebecca it isn’t.  Which is a shame, because I don’t think I’d have been quite as disappointed by the novel not quite being what I had hoped if it hadn’t encouraged me itself to set my hopes so high.

Kate Morton writes a good story, but I didn’t necessarily feel that she had it entirely under control at all times.  I’m all for layers in a novel, but here there are were so many strands of mystery and so many Dark Secrets that sometimes it becomes difficult to feel any specific anxiety about any of them.  A Dark Secret will be hinted at, but then abandoned as Morton focuses on one of the other aspects of the book or a different Dark Secret, and while her writing is sufficiently skilful that this is never confusing, it dissipates much of the tension which might have been created.  Instead of worrying about all of these things I found myself unable to worry over much about any of them most of the time.  I felt a vague sense of impending doom thanks to the numerous explicit statements that doom was indeed impending (I really hope this is something that improves; subtelty is key in conjouring up the sort of atmosphere which makes the best gothic country house novels) but I feel the story might have benefitted from a sharper focus to the doom at times.

I also found Morton’s writing style to be not entirely to my tastes.  She has a fondness for using lots of short sentences (it is quite rare for a sentence to have more than two clauses), many of which are predicate sentences which lack a subject for the verb.  She is particularly keen on the single sentence paragraph, usually used at the end of a section or chapter to emphasise the aformentioned impending doom, such as ‘But by then the seed was sown‘ (p. 318).  All of these have their place and can be incredibly effective when employed judiciously, but having the majority of the writing in this style feels jerky and stilted.  I personally would have preferred it had some of these odd little sentences been joined together to make the writing flow more elegantly.  The book is saved, however, by having lots of dialogue which Morton writes extremely well and believeably, and so I only had to wade through the stop-start short sentences occasionally rather than continuously.

My final niggle was the abandoning of the first person narrator when it became inconvenient for the story.  On the whole, I think that the use of Grace as a mouthpiece was excellent: as a servant she is well placed to observe what goes on and people happily talk in front of her (though admittedly I don’t think it would have been quite as free as in the novel) but she is still removed from most of the direct action and so provides an outside perspective for the reader.  This works well for most of the novel, but later the stroy develops in such a way that Grace cannot always be present watching and listening to important events and so these sections are related in the third person.  Morton partially works around this by having Grace explain that other people later told her what happened, but the descriptions of what happened and how people felt and thought are too detailed for this to be believeable.  While I understand the need to work around the limitations of a first person narrator, I wish it could have been accomplished in a different way which hadn’t made me feel as though the author was taking over Grace’s story for a bit and then giving it back to her when it was convenient.

I think that’s the most negative sounding review I’ve ever written for a book to which I’ve given four stars, but these are small things which just prevent the book from achieving its full potential.  I can’t wait to read more of Kate Morton to see if experience has improved on any of these things, but even if not, I bet I’ll still really enjoy the book.

The House at Riverton by Kate Morton.  Published by Pan, 2007, pp. 599.  First published in 2006.

Josie Gray is a thirty-something woman living an idyllic life in the small Lancashire village of Neatslake.  She lives in her grandmother’s old cottage with her childhood sweetheart, Ben, growing and trading for as much of their produce as possible, and supplementing their income with Josie’s weird wedding cakes, her column for the cult magazine Skint Old Northern Woman and Ben’s occasional artwork sales.  When Josie’s oldest friend Libby returns to the village and decides to launch a wedding business in the nearby manor house, Josie becomes drawn in to help.  However, Ben is spending more and more time in London and soon it transpires that he has been less than honest with Josie, leaving her disillusioned.  She vows never to believe in love again, but photographer Noah Sephton seems determined to change her mind.

There are no surprises in this book but, to be honest, I didn’t expect any.  The plot was formulaic but then it usually is in this type of book, and that was exactly why I read it when I wasn’t feeling up to much mental exertion.  It’s a book which just requires to relax and enjoy being entertained.  Because entertaining it is, for all I knew what would hapen before I opened the book.  Ashley may follow a preordained plot, but the setting in which she chooses to place it is rather lovely.  I enjoyed reading about Josie’s homely life in the country with her chickens, her bartering and her gardening.  Her kitchen activities, making jams and wines and various cakes and biscuits are particularly appealing and the recipes at the back of the book make this aspect of the novel seem particularly real and important, enabling the reader to follow suit if they so choose.  Baking is something that I love doing, given half a chance, so I was able to relate to that and it engaged my interest.

The society surrounding Josie is also rather sweet and pleasant to read about.  The secondary characters all have individual personalities, from the three eccentric Grace sisters who knit, crochet and embroider for all they’re worth to womanising soap star Rob to Josie’s loyal uncle Harry who takes great delight in outliving his friends.  Although none of them are particularly realistic, they add colour and interest to the story.

If Josie herself were any more dense she would have her own gravitational pull.  Even if this hadn’t been the sort of novel in which it is a truth universally acknowledged that the seemingly perfect boyfriend with whom the heroine begins the book will turn out to be an utter bastard by the halfway mark, I could have guessed that Ben was having an affair long before Josie does.  In fact, she never does manage to guess, despite a number of hints to that effect which are as subtle as being hit with a brick, and eventually has to be told.  Later on in the novel she proves equally dim when new romantic opportunities present themselves.  Had she not been such a likeable character for other reasons she would have been very annoying, but as it stands she is saved by her sweetness and by the charm and wit she displays in the excerpts from her magazine column which begin each chapter.

I’m not exactly sure what Ashley was trying to add by introducing a subplot of potential incest.  It doesn’t add tension because this is clearly the sort of pastel covered book in which everything works out for the best and no one gets hurt (except ex-boyfriends, who get what they deserve, naturally), it isn’t treated sensitively and seems to be a sort of throwaway plot device which is resolved so quickly and effortlessly that it seems pretty pointless.  In fact, I found it rather distasteful and an incongruously serious subject for such a fluffy novel.

Incest aside, I rather enjoyed the distraction from dental pain provided by this light, fun, quick read.  It’s a good, solid example of the genre and a pleasant way to spend a lazy afternoon when you don’t want to think too much.

Wedding Tiers by Trisha Ashley.  Published by Avon, 2009,pp. 414.  First edition.

The first three years of my childhood were spent in a vast Victorian country house in Wiltshire called Clouds.  Built entirely of green sandstone, it boasted forty bedrooms, and a kitchen so far from the dining room that a miniature railway track had to be built to carry food from one place to the other.  Luckily, tepid meals were the norm in those days.

How could I possibly resist such an opening?

In Dawn Chorus Joan Wyndham tells the story of her family, beginning with her great-grandfather, Percy, who built Clouds to be his family home and continuing on through the generations down to her own memories of her childhood and teenage years.  Her life begins in 1921 at the second incarnation of Clouds, the first having burned down before she was born, then is transported to London after her parents separate, where her mother’s friends, a group known as ‘the Souls’ simultaneously entertain and embarrass her with their eccentric antics.  Joan attends a convent school and has a somewhat tempestuous relationship both with religion and the nuns responsible for her education, until she goes to the theatre and sees John Gielgud as Hamlet, whereupon she decides to audition for RADA.

This is a wonderful memoir, not only because the subject matter than it chronicles is so interesting, but also because the evidence on which Joan Wyndham draws is so miraculously complete.  Her relatives seem to have been meticulous record keepers, and so her accounts of their history is littered with diary entries and excerpts from letters which lend a great immediacy to the writing.  Her own letters and diaries are written with remarkable candour and shared with an openness and lack of embarrassment which makes Dawn Chorus a delight to read.  Even though I do not doubt that the selections used have been carefully chosen, Wyndham seems quite happy to display her younger self both at her best and at her worst.  I cannot think of many writers who would share their awkward teenage diaries, rife with overblown emotions and incidents rather forgotten, so willingly with the reading public.

Whatever subject she is talking about, Joan’s diary entries are warm and filled with emotion so that she really leaps off the page and comes to life.  They are often highly amusing, although sometimes not intentionally so, imbued as they are with the seriousness of youth.  At one point, she goes to stay with a family in Paris:

Friday For three days now there has been no paper in the Tante Fannee.  I’ve had to use all the tissue paper from my trunk.  Luckily, I have been asked to dinner by my Romanian relatives in Paris.  They are very grand and rich so I will probably be able to pinch a few rolls of paper to take home with me.

On another occasion, Joan goes on holiday to Wales:

I have become the complete ‘hearty’ down here, striding out in the dew before breakfast in corduroy trousers with a stick, a whistle and two dogs, and then down to the farm to feed the cows and see the newborn calf.  Then back for a breakfast of kidneys, bacon and pickled herring, followed by a few rounds of clock golf, finally taking the rowing-boat out for a cruise around the outlying islands, with binoculars slung round my neck, and no makeup.  Horrible metamorphosis!

On a more genteel note, we also sold produce at the Vicar’s bazaar, raffled teasets at the Conservative fete and made conversation over tomato sandwiches at various county tea parties.  I’ve also been climbing the mountains around Snowdon.  So bleak that nothing grows on them but the sparsest grass, with thin streams running down into the hidden lakes, and sheep lying curled in the rock crevices.  One of the lakes is supposed to be bottomless but I fell into it, so I can positively state that it isn’t; it’s shadowed by red-berried mountain ash.  Mountains almost reconcile one to Wordsworth.

There is a similar brutal and entertaining honesty in the extracts from her family’s writing that she includes.  Take, for example, her mother’s record of Joan’s early development in her Baby’s Progress Book:

Joan is never still for one moment and exhausts all who look after her.  When finally tired out, she sits and twiddles her hair without ceasing.

Hearing Hears more than is good for her.

Smell Good, but has a habit of snorting.

Sight Slight squint.

Taste Greedy

Later on there is no doubt at all of the genuine affection between Joan and her mother, as evidenced by their numerous letters to one another, but her mother’s evident frustration with her young baby and the ruthless way in which she records it is highly entertaining.

This book can become a bit confusing at times, as Joan tends to refer to people by their first names rather than their relationship to her, so it can become easy to lose track of who is who and in which generation.  Nevertheless, this is a fine memoir of life in England for the upper classes between the Wars, and definitely one that should be more widely known (according to LibraryThing only two other people own a copy of this book, so the vast majority are missing out).  Joan Wyndham continued to chronicle her life in several other books, and I enjoyed her style so much that I’m sure it won’t be long before they find their way onto my shelves.

Dawn Chorus by Joan Wyndham.  Published by Virago, 2004, pp. 233.  Originally published in 2004.

The eponymous Nicholas Nickleby travels to London with his mother and sister, Kate, following the death of his father which leaves his family penniless.  There he seeks help from their only remaining relative, Ralph Nickleby, who has no desire to assist Nicholas at all, and quickly packs him off to Yorkshire to take a low-paying job as assistant to the wicked school master Wackford Squeers.  After witnessing the cruelty that goes on at Dotheboys Hall, Nicholas finds himself unable to stop himself intervening as Squeers punishes a particularly wretched boy known as Smike and is forced to flee back to London following his actions.  THere he must once again find work to support his family, while defending his sister from the lecherous advances of Sir Mulberry Hawk and attempting to trace a mysterious lady he has seen.

There is much to be enjoyed in Nicholas Nickleby.  The plot is engaging and its episodic structure, a legacy of publication in installments no doubt, causes it to tear along at an impressive pace, surprising considering the size (not to mention the tiny print) of the volume.  The tone of the writing is often light and comic and it is populated by a whole host of entertaining caricatures, by turns repulsive and delightful, with equally entertaining names.  Who could fail to be intrigued by such intriguing, and indeed revealing, names as Smike, Newman Noggs, Madame Mantalini, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Lord Frederick Verisopht, the brothers Cheeryble and of course, Wackford Squeers?

The problem with Nicholas Nickleby is that, even with my limited experience of Dickens, I was able to guess exactly what would happen to every last character the moment that they were introduced.  This of course is not a problem in and of itself: there are plenty of authors whose books I love who are equally predictable.  So often in literature it is not where and author goes with a book but the way in which they get there that is of interest, and this is something that I didn’t find wholly satisfying with Nicholas Nickleby.  Dickens is by no means a concise writer and is often unnecessarily verbose, particularly when he was grinding the axe of social injustice.  I know that he writes social satire and that his novels were intended to bring the plight of the urban poor to the attention of the masses, but as a reader I think they detract from the story with their length and sentimentalism.

I also found that, much as I enjoy Dickens’ well-written and insightful caricatures, I missed the presence of more developed and believable characters in the novel.  This was particularly apparent with the young female characters, Kate Nickleby and Madeline Bray.  They seem to have no function other than to be good, beautiful and submissive and act as lures for the evil gentlemen and ultimate rewards for their good counterparts.  The two are so similar that they are virtually interchangeable, and I wish that they had at least a few distinguishing features and character traits.  From the amount of times I’ve heard Little Dorrit referred to as ‘Little Doormat’ it would seem that this might be a problem which extends beyond Nicholas Nickleby into Dickens’ other works.  I really hope that isn’t the case.

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens.  Published by Odhams, 1930, pp. 764.  Originally published in serial, 1838-1839.

Alice Hartley is the plump, middle aged wife of a university professor, has a penchant for new age theories, floaty scarves and lots of sex.  When she finds out that her husband is having an affair with one of his students, Alice decides that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander (or vice versa) and promptly drives off in a removal van with one of her husband’s students who has come to collect a desk that he promised to lend the drama group for a play.  Not only do they take the desk, but also every other scrap of furniture in the house.  They are left with nowhere to put it until Michael’s Aunt Sarah dies, leaving him with her country house.  And so begins the establishment of Alice’s growth centre, an alternative, disorganised establishment where sex is free and people are happy.

With the exception of the fact that it still inclused quite a bit of sex, Alice Hartley’s Happiness could not be more different from the usual Philippa Gregory fare.  It’s setting is modern, the characters are all unknowns and the tone is light and amusing.  The plot is utterly absurd, encompassing everything from unexpected resurrections to dolphin assisted births in the local aquarium, but Gregory acknowledges this and runs with it, resulting in a novel which is not afraid to laugh at itself and have fun while doing so.

For all that her historical novels are light, easy reading, I’ve never found Gregory to be an author who exhibits a particularly pronounced sense of humour, so the wry, detached tone of Alice Hartley’s Happiness is rather surprising.  However, it is definitely a welcome surprise; it’s always pleasant to learn that an author suspected of being something of a one trick pony (however enjoyable those tricks may be) is actually rather good at other things too.  Take, for instance, the way she introduces Alice’s husband, Professor Hartley:

 Professor Hartley was at that time in his life when a man demands of himself what is the meaning of life, asking: ‘For what was I born?  And is this all there is?  And what of the great quests which have motivated men through the ages?  Where am I going?  And what is the Nature of Individualism?  Or, more simply: Who am I?’

Like all men who courageously confront great questions of identity and truth, Professor Hartley came to one conclusion.  Unerringly, untiringly he struggled through his boredom and his despair until he found the source of his discontent, the spring of his angst, his own private darkness.  It was all the fault of his wife.

Instantly she conveys how pompous and self-absorbed Professor Hartley is, and the bathos of that last sentence is superb.  The humour is all the more enjoyable because it is so unexpected.  This surprising change of tone is also apparent in her treatment of sex, which is just as abundant as in her historical novels.  However, in this book the sex scenes are silly, improbable and downright funny at times.

If you pick this book up looking for a typical Philippa Gregory novel you are bound to be disappointed.  On the other hand, if you turn to it looking for an entertaining and somewhat ridiculous read then it’s actually rather good, and Philippa Gregory continues to fulfil her role as the author of some perfect guilty pleasure reading.

Alice Hartley’s Happiness by Philippa Gregory.  Published by Harper Collins, 2009, pp. 257.  Originally published in 1992.  Also published under the title Alice Hartley and the Growth Centre.

The eponymous Warden is Mr Septimus Harding, who presides over the twelve bedesmen of Hiram’s Hospital, a local almshouse.  Everyone lives a comfortable, happy life until John Bold, a zealous young reformer who comes courting Mr Harding’s younger daughter, launches a campaign to redistribute the way that the income from the Hospital is apportioned between the bedesmen and the Warden as Bold believes the Warden receives an unfairly large amount.  Soon the press are involved, Mr Harding’s good reputation is tarnished, the bedesmen become increasingly eager for more money and Mr Harding’s son in law Archdeacon Grantley is interfering.  But the biggest problem of all turns out to be Mr Harding himself.

Ever since reading Elizabeth Goudge’s cathedral city books at the prompting of a wonderful English teacher I have been a fan of gentle stories of the clergy in which very little happens, so I was sold on the concept of The Warden before I even began to read it, and I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest.  The story is sweet, charming and amusing, absorbing because of its characters and the way in which it is told rather than for what happens.

By far the most appealing aspect of the book is Trollope himself.  His narratorial style is both distinctive and enjoyable.  I love the way in which he alternates between protesting that he has no control over what happens to the characters as they act entirely of their own volition and assuring the reader not to worry about the characters because he knows exactly what will happen to them and it is nothing bad.  His persona as the narrator come as being genial, jocular and slightly bumbling, like an elderly uncle in a Dickens novel (an impression not helped by his bearded and bespectacled physical appearance), but at the same time it is impossible to forget that as an author he is sharp and intelligent, capable of making keen observations and challenging accepted ideas even though the story itself is very mild.  I enjoyed this so much that I think I’d gladly read him talking about almost anything if this is the style in which he does it.  Thankfully I have lots more Trollope to discover as this impressively prolific author wrote forty-seven novels, as well as a handful of other works.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope, illustrated by Peter Reddick.  Published by the Folio Society, 1976, pp. 234.  Originally published in 1855.