The Forbidden Notebook

The Forbidden Notebook / Alba de Céspedes
trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Barcelona: Astra House, 2023, c1952.
210 p.

This novel is a forgotten classic: this new translation has brought it back to the attention of many readers, and I was one of them. I'd heard this being mentioned everywhere, and since it's written as a diary I was especially intrigued - I love epistolary formats. 

But the most shocking thing about this book is how relevant it still is. Valeria Cossati is a housewife in Rome; their household is just hanging on financially, so she's gone out to work. But she's also still responsible for all household duties and chores, including still taking care of her adult children who live at home. Her daughter is chafing to be independent - she's studying law, having an affair, and planning to move out, all choices that contradict expectations. Her son is a man-child, helpless and spoiled, with a younger and docile girlfriend he plans on marrying eventually. And her husband is no longer interested in her sexually or as her own person; he calls her Mama, and is clearly having his own affairs. 

One day Valeria is overcome with the compulsion to buy a small notebook and begins writing her dissatisfactions into it. She uncovers all sorts of feelings she'd been denying for a very long time, and writing them down feels like a transgression. She is always worried about a new hiding spot for her notebook in case anyone should read it. And after all the worry and the writing and the confessions, she has a choice to make - keep writing or resign herself to life.

 

This is a powerful read, full of a quiet fight against patriarchal expectations and limitations. But also a statement about how hard it is for one person to fight alone against all her conditioning and the social mores that fence her in. Her daughter, tougher and younger, might be able to manage it in the years ahead but Valeria has already given in, in some indefinable way. It's the details in this book that really strike me, the descriptions of their home and all its rooms that seem to be claimed by others with nothing left for her, of her more successful friends' lives, of her children and their habits and appearance and behaviours. There's her concern for social niceties and all the shadings of class and propriety that shape her days. And her encounter with an innocuous black notebook that becomes vital to her being. 

I loved this book. The writing style, the characters, the vibe - all so good. So much said in it, and so much to think about. Definitely a great decision to reissue this one now. A must read for lovers of literary fiction about women's lives.

 

A Note in Music

A Note in Music / Rosamond Lehmann
London: Virago, 2001, c1930.
337 p.

Dreamy and imaginative Grace Fairfax is married to Tom, she's 34 and has no children (after a lost pregnancy earlier in their marriage). Her much livelier best friend Norah has 2 sons and is married to Gerald, an annoying, irritable university professor. They live in a northern English town, rather grey and industrial. They are ripe for being dazzled by the arrival of Hugh Miller, charismatic university student, and his lovely sister Claire. 

Hugh and Claire somehow charm both of these couples, and their presence changes the way they all interact. Blustery Tom seems the least affected, but his quiet (and bored) wife falls for all of Hugh's charms, even if Hugh is oblivious to this. Claire vamps Gerald and upsets Norah, even while Norah is also admiring Hugh in a detached way. 

This setup could be edgy in other hands but here it's more melancholy. Hugh doesn't see these older women as women, more as sisters or listeners. But his youth and freedom to shape his own life appeals to them, and opens a window onto another kind of living. And then Hugh and Claire move on, leaving change behind them. Not a lot of change, but an internal shift that is particularly noticeable in Grace. 

Both couples stay together in the end, and somehow these shifts have brought them together more closely rather than broken them up. I believe Grace and Tom's ending, but think that it would be more likely that Norah would have finally left the dour Gerald instead of doubling down on their marriage. 

The plot is pretty slight, the characters are so detached from one another, but the writing is lovely and poetic, with internal dialogues and so much nature description - I liked this quote, which is pretty representative: 

“Some essence of the spirit of the spring day seemed to hover, brooding and shining upon the long, sunny stretch of water. The lake was girdled with trees and bushes, and wild song welled out as if from the throats of hundreds and hundreds of choral branches. The unfolding leaves covered the boughs with a manifold variety of little shapes. Knots, hearts, points, clusters of rosettes, dots and tapers of budding foliage, made up embroideries of infinite complexity in jade, in greenish-silver, in honey-yellow; but some were tinged with a russet flames, haunting the eye with an autumnal prophecy.”

If you're looking for lots of action or character interactions between people who actually communicate, this isn't it. But if you want internal reflection, nostalgia, nature and art, with a fairly vague conclusion, you'll like this one. It sounds like a boring book this way, but it really isn't! I was absorbed in reading this and discovering each isolated character. A melancholy story but well worth reading. 

Thank Heaven Fasting

Thank Heaven Fasting / E.M. Delafield
London: Virago, 1989, c1933.
240 p.

Another book with marriage at its heart, this one is a little bit bleaker than some. It's set in Edwardian England, where young Monica Ingram - only daughter of socially ambitious parents - understands that the only goal of a woman's life is to marry well. 

Young women must be very very careful - reputation is everything. And Monica, with a young and soon faded kind of prettiness, much catch a husband. She has a caller whom she likes, but according to her mother, he is much too young and unimportant for her. And then alas, she gets drawn aside and has her head turned by a rake at a party, being momentarily unguarded. In a moment, her reputation falters. 

Her family takes her away for a while but by next season she sees that the new crop of younger, prettier debutantes have made her life more difficult. She spends a few years festering, with two options appearing on the horizon. One just wants her to listen to his complaints and grumbles, and the other is a froggy looking gentleman of her parents' generation. But needs must, and getting the crumbs of a choice makes Monica happy in the end. As the author notes, Monica "could never, looking backwards, remember a time when she had not known that a woman’s failure or success in life depended entirely on whether or not she succeeded in getting a husband."

This was an interesting read; it shows the utter lack of options for young girls of this class. They have no education, no worldly knowledge at all, no access to money -- marriage is literally the only choice, unless they happen to be a particularly strong natured girl and run off to be a Bohemian. Monica is not that, and she's contrasted with her childhood friends, sisters Frederica and Cecily Marlowe. They have it worse than she does; they are homely and their beautiful mother can't stand them, and makes no effort to help them to a good marriage. Their characters show all the inward neuroticism that arises from their stifled lives. 

This book is a strange mixture, written in that light Delafield tone but full of deadly serious commentary. She reveals, in small details, the stifling world that girls like Monica lived in. The so-called choices open to them are pretty terrible, and to our modern eye, it's almost unbearable to read about their daily round and their disappointed hopes - they have no power to shape or control any of these, and just have to survive them. Despite how lightly the book begins, it's an airless world and a sad ending, from our perspective.

 

Banyan Moon for the Literary Sewing Circle

If you're a reader who is also a maker, you might be interested in joining on the latest round of the Literary Sewing Circle that I run over on my sewing blog! We read a book together and then make something inspired by our read.

This fall our read is Banyan Moon by Thao Thai, a novel covering 3 generations of Vietnamese women living in Florida. The Literary Sewing Circle runs for 5 weeks, plus 2 extra weeks to get your project done,  and anyone can join in. 

Full details are over at Following the Thread now.

Out of the Rain

Out of the Rain / Elizabeth Cadell
Friendly Air Publishing, 2023, c1987.
266 p.

My library had another light Cadell book available on audio so I listened to it right after I finished the last one -- it was quite different, set in a much more recent year. This one feels 70s while the earlier ones felt a bit more 50s/60s somehow. 

Out of the Rain has a single mother, countryside entrepreneurs, and an inheritance scandal to drive the plot. The main character is lawyer Edward Netherford, who lives alone in a service flat and likes his routine. He has 3 obnoxious clients, however, the Brockton siblings, who ask him to retrieve valuable paintings from their late father's second wife which really belong to them. He heads to the country to stay with an old friend and track this second wife down. 

When he arrives one late night, his friend's inn is on fire, and he's sent out to a house that was registered on the local b&b list as all other spots are taken by current displaced guests. This ends up being the heart of the book - neat freak Edward is taken in by the widowed Estelle, her mother, grandfather and three little boys. His mannered city ways are contrasted with Estelle's earthy country views and as always in Cadell's books, the domestic, countrified, traditional way of life is Obviously Much Better. 

There is a bit of a theme going with the Brocktons and mismatched marriages which turn out happily. Edward has to come and go in pursuit of the paintings, and each time stays with Estelle's family and settles in to the general chaos. Somehow he's a natural with fixing things around their house for them, and being a favourite of the three very small children. We can all see where this is going. 

This was a frothy read, mostly forgettable in the end. Not much romance, just quiet hours with Edward adjusting to a view of life so different to his own. There are a few minor subplots, and the Brockton second wife turns out to be an important element in the story (she's a sensible countrywoman who had been the housekeeper). This was okay but the very dated gender roles and hammering home of the idea that lazy country days and a woman's life being subsumed in her children was an ideal state of being didn't really resonate for me at all. I didn't dislike it but don't think I'll search out any more Cadell any time soon. A little bit is enough for now. 

Family Gathering

Family Gathering / Elizabeth Cadell
Friendly Air Publishing, 2018, c1979.
308 p.

I found this book in audio format via my library, and thought I'd check it out -- I've read two books by Cadell before - I quite liked the first and was meh on the second! This one was pretty good though I found there were a number of flaws for a modern reader. It reminds me a bit of the wackiness of a Wodehouse or Waugh novel, in its depiction of an aristocratic country family a bit down on its financial luck but full of eccentrics. 

Natalie Rome is 42 but in this book that is solidly middle aged. She's timid and quiet, but somehow she meets the dashing William and marries him. She's heading to his family seat, Romescourt, to wait for him to return from his deployment. The idea is that she'll stay with his family and find a house for them to live in nearby while she waits. But Natalie has a daughter, Helen, who is a crisp businesswoman in her 20s who loves the city and order. 

Natalie arrives to great chaos; she's picked up from the train station by the spacey Lucille (her new stepdaughter), meets her mother-in-law (a caricature of a country aristocrat who dresses oddly, gardens, talks extremely loudly and doesn't really listen to anyone else, and of course controls life at Romescourt), her father-in-law who loves gardening and doesn't talk much at all, and her new stepson Jeremy, who is also an artist and is presented as quite a catch (spoiler: I couldn't stand him). 

I was enjoying the first half to two thirds of this book - Romescourt and its surrounding houses are a delight, and Lady Rome is a hoot - every time someone does something she doesn't understand, she comments "I don't think they're quite right in the head". I listened to this one on audio, and the reader was hilarious with her characterizations, especially of Lady Rome. 

However, I did find that the story dragged near the end and there were too many crisis points, both with  Lucille's multiple engagments (she's so passive she can't say no) and with the forced romance between Helen and Jeremy. Helen is a confident city girl but is presented as a bossy harridan who needs taking down a peg, and Jeremy is the one to do it -- his behaviour is awful, he's a total jerk, and I didn't believe that Helen would be attracted to him in any way. But they pair up at the end anyhow, maybe because Natalie wants it so much? Definitely of an earlier time. 

So there were some great set pieces in this book and some really amusing characters and moments. But there were also some cringey bits that are very dated and unpalatable to this reader. A mixed bag, but listening to Lady Rome in the first half made this pick worth it ;) 

Four Gardens

Four Gardens / Margery Sharp
London: Dean St Press, 2021, c1935.
228 p.

Another book about a marriage; well, about a woman in a marriage, anyhow. Caroline Chase is a young woman of middle class standing, it's Edwardian England and she's 17, and makes her way into an abandoned garden which she adores. There she meets a rich young man, her age but of a much higher social class. They have a bit of a pash, but of course it will never go anywhere. When she realizes this, the garden is forever ruined for her, and she ends up soon after marrying the dull but dependable clerk Henry Smith. 

Her second garden is the small one in back of their townhouse, in which she barely has time to dig. She now has 2 young children and Henry is working all the time, raising himself up in the shoe factory where he's an office worker. He's so successful, especially as he expands into army boots as the war begins, that he becomes a partner. And their status grows. 

When the children are a bit older, their fortunes allow Henry to provide a large house on the Common, complete with large fancy gardens in which Caroline isn't allowed to potter - they have a gardener. This house belonged to Lady Tregarthan, and Caroline is petrified at first meeting her, when seeing if the house will suit. But Lady T is a doll and they get along splendidly. The Smith children, Leon and Lily, are used to prosperity, and they seem shockingly modern to the staid Caroline, still hanging on to her Edwardian values. The contrast is sharp. Their love affairs and struggles are so important to Caroline, even when she doesn't quite understand them. 

Caroline's fourth garden comes when Henry dies quite suddenly, leaving them nearly broke. They leave the big house - Leon and Lily to their own lives, and Caroline to a small apartment in the town in which she creates a balcony garden all of her own, and finally feels the peace and contentment she had been looking for all her life. Solitude, her own garden, and nobody needing her. Ah, perfection. 

This story is nostalgic, looking back at an earlier era (published in the 30s, it really shows the sudden shift in societal norms between Caroline's generation and that of her children). Caroline is sweet but really put upon, everyone expects her to be there for them and whatever they may need but not much thought is given to Caroline's needs. There are interesting side characters, in particular a whiny friend from her youth who she never quite shakes off, and of course Lady T. And a very obnoxious modernist painter who entangles Lily, but doesn't stick around. 

I thought this was a quieter read, a little less snappy and plot driven than some Sharp stories. Much more a study of a character and of a social setting. And I liked it a lot. Some interesting commentary, and as always, sharp insight into characters and class.