Reviews of Books
Posted in Fiction, Recommended on Feb 13th, 2012
As you all know, I’m a bit of a Dorothy Whipple fan – see here, here, here and here. I’ve been meaning to read They Knew Mr Knight for ages and then, luckily, a friend had a copy. I liked it, not as much as Because of the Lockwoods , it is a bit too [...]
Posted in Fiction, Recommended on Dec 6th, 2011
This is my favourite Whipple to date. I found this novel compelling reading when and how would Mr Lockwood’s fraud be discovered? What would happen to all of the Hunters? Whipple’s ability to write about ordinary people in an interesting manner is amazing. I find it difficult to understand why she is not more wildly [...]
Posted in Fiction - Light, Recommended on Dec 28th, 2010
Above is an image of the end paper in the Persephone edition This is a novel very much of it’s time – 1930s England. It’s about women and education and the role of women of a particular class at a particular time. None of the women have been educated for anything but marriage and if [...]
Posted in Fiction - Light, Recommended on Aug 16th, 2010
I’m still on my Persephone marathon (and I just bought another three). I think I bought this one because Jane Brocket wrote the preface. Here’s the blurb from Persephone … It is about a girl called Jane who gets a badly-paid job in a draper’s shop in the early years of the last century. Yet [...]
Posted in Fiction - Light, Recommended on Aug 9th, 2010
I’ve been continuing my Persephone reading feast. Someone at a Distance was my free classic. Here’s the blurb … ‘A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love’ commented the Spectator recently about this 1953 novel by Dorothy Whipple, which was ignored fifty years ago because ‘editors are going [...]