Matthew Dennison

Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel Hammond a conventional heroine — but the former embraces elements of romance, the latter aspects of heroism. The subversion of our expectations of heroism and romance provides the dynamic of Winifred Holtby’s second novel, originally published in 1924. The Crowded Street is a family saga, comedy of manners and roman à clef. It tells the story of Muriel Hammond, from schoolgirl to maturity. The Hammonds inhabit the determinedly genteel Yorkshire village of Marshington, its confines narrow, its mindset small.

In 1958, Daphne du Maurier published a collection of short stories, The Breaking Point. Justine Picardie’s novel Daphne begins the year of the stories’ composition, 1957. Du Maurier, then Britain’s best-selling novelist, struggles with her own breaking point. Newly acquainted with the infidelity of her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, known as Tommy, she oscillates between anger and despair. Tommy succumbs to a nervous breakdown. Daphne’s mood is not lightened by her current literary preoccupation, a biography of Branwell Brontë. In Picardie’s hands, Daphne dreams of rescuing Branwell from critical obscurity by proving him the author, at least in part, of his sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

In a large house in north London, thick with the fug of kosher cooking and unspoken secrets, lives a lopsided family. The Rubins are envied — and enviable, surely? Claudia Rubin is a rabbi. She is also a writer, media personality and, par excellence, mother. She dominates her gentle, disappointed biographer husband Nor- man and their four ill-assorted children: an emotional, intellectual, motherly leviathan. Her standards are exactingly high — ‘For Claudia, good enough has never been good enough’ — but the veneer of family perfection Rabbi Rubin takes pride in sharing with the outside world is built on shaky foundations. The obligations and responsibilities of love have ousted simple affection.

‘Lonely hopelessness’ assails Muriel Cottle. Her life is ‘one long pitfall interrupted by spasms of intense pleasure’ with nothing that is unequivocally happy. But is that all about to change? In Susanna Johnston’s new novel, Muriel finds herself in the sort of scenario that might have resulted had E. F. Benson and Alice Thomas Ellis ever coincided on the set of Midsomer Murders. Muriel Pulls It Off is a high-spirited romp populated by cranks and ghouls. And just for good measure, a member of the Royal Family hitherto unknown to Spectator readers, Princess Mathilda, third daughter of George VI and the Queen Mother, youngest sister of the Queen and Princess Margaret. Although no murder is committed, Muriel, one feels, is sorely tempted.

This is the second time The Fortnight in September has been reviewed in The Spectator. On its first appearance, my predecessor applauded ‘more simple human goodness and understanding … than in anything I have read for years’. The year was 1931. Three-quarters of a century has passed, and what to that earlier reviewer was a study in contemporary ordinariness has become a period piece. But the passage of time and the disappearance of the novel’s mise-en-scène — the interwar world of seaside boarding houses — have not altered its impact. My own verdict and that published in these pages 75 years ago overlap entirely. Mr and Mrs Stevens have three children, a cat and a canary. Mr Stevens is chief invoice clerk in a company of stationers.

‘I am entirely against the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life,’ wrote Kate O’Brien, with just that chilling aloofness that marks out her two heroines in The Land of Spices. Mère Marie-Hélène, Reverend Mother of the convent school of La Compagnie de la Sainte Famille in Mellick (a fictionalised Limerick), and Anna Murphy, her youngest pupil, each form a single deep emotional attachment — Reverend Mother to her father, Anna to her brother Charlie.

At the centre of Rachel Billington’s new novel is love, but this is not in any conventional sense a romantic novel. Claudia, a schoolgirl, falls in love with a man 24 years her senior. He is not a romantic man, though given on occasion to the poetic flights of fancy associated with his chosen occupation, that of would-be writer. He is also married, though this, too, is a union lacking in romance: ‘Of love he did not think. He and Fiona were inextricably bound together. He could not imagine life without her and had no wish to try.’ Claudia, at 16, has few of the attributes of the romantic heroine save her youth and a talent for music: she plays the viola with passionate intensity.

The ordinariness of tragedy, its bread-and-butter nature at odds with Shakespearean grandeur or tabloid-style sensationalism, is the subject of Margaret Forster’s new novel. Is There Anything You Want? examines the lives of seven women in a small town in the north of England. Mrs Hibbert, Edwina, Dot, Chrissie, Ida, Rachel and Sarah are connected through work or illness to the cancer clinic of the local hospital.

There is nothing new about the ‘had-it-all, lost-it-all’ plot. It provides common ground for the story of Adam and Eve and the labyrinthine ramifications of any high-gloss American soap opera. It is also the stuff of Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, a fairytale for adult readers with a sting in its tail, a bite in the telling. Ruby Ferguson’s novel was first published in 1937. It is the story of Lady Victoria Elspeth Rose Grahame-Rooth-Targenet, ‘the happiest little girl in Scotland’ and also its most materially blessed, heir to the ‘dream mansion’ of Keepsfield on the shores of Fife and its park stretching ‘as far as the eye could see, as they always say in books’.

Disney hijacked Margery Sharp. The novelist, who died in 1991, is remembered chiefly for her series of (now animated) children’s books, The Rescuers. Sharp wrote The Eye of Love, one of 26 adult novels, half a century ago. It is a bittersweet comedy that encompasses intimations of tragedy — the ‘wrong’ outcome is never impossible here — and, as its title suggests, elements of romance. But it is not romantic fiction and its principal players fall short of the status of romantic hero and heroine. Miss Diver approaches 40, raven-haired and wraith-like in her thinness. Harry Gibson is stout and down-at-heel, his Kensington-based furriers failing as the Depression bites and it becomes ‘the thing to go shabby’.

‘Lucy could have wished that Florence were not quite so ingenuous. One should not seize on a delicate implication and put a pin through it,’ writes Frances Towers in ‘The Chosen and the Rejected’, one of ten short stories published in 1949, the year after the author’s death, as Tea with Mr Rochester, here reprinted by Persephone. Frances Towers’s writing is full of delicate implications; happily for the reader, each is neatly pinned. Such is the deftness of her touch, her elegant leger- demain, that she conceals the building blocks of her artistry, simply nudging the reader towards recognition of that implication that repeatedly in her stories provides the denouement.