Something Light

Something Light / Margery Sharp
Open Road Media, 2018, c1960.
250 p.

Moving on from Spinster September reading now, to a story about a semi-spinster, a woman turning thirty who decides it's time for her to get married so sets out to find a suitable husband. 

Louisa Datchett is living in London in the 50s. She's a dog photographer for the most part, but she's also soft-hearted. It seems that men will use her as their assistant, agony aunt, substitute mother, delivery person, salesperson for their weird crafts, or bank, but never really see her as marriage material. She decides to go about this very logically, looking for the rich and/or settled person she decides would be best to connect herself with. 

She starts out on her quest, thinking she's getting somewhere with a rich man - but ends up giving him up to a widow, an old friend of his, out of sympathy. (the funniest part of this one was that he admired Louisa's appetite most of all). 

This gives her the idea of going back to an old friend of her own, from her home town. He's steady, he's dependable, he's gainfully employed... he's not at all interested in settling down. 

Then she finds the perfect family man. She's hired as a housekeeper, in a kind of trial run, to meet his children (adults not too much younger than she is) and see how she fits in. But to Louisa's surprise, "At last, she’d met a man she positively disliked. She was no longer indiscriminately fond of men." This obviously isn't an answer. 

So she goes back to work, but is having a hard time finding gigs. Just as she's depending on margarine sandwiches to get through the day, instead of finding a new man, The Man finds her. To the modern reader, he might not seem a perfect catch, but it's clearly a happy ending, Louisa will have money to live on and a husband who seems to adore her. 

There was a lot of humour in this, alongside some appalling male behaviour which is being sharply pointed out, even if not as directly as it would be now. Louisa's reflections on the life of the single woman are both sad and hilarious, but her chipper take on life breaks down in a scene where she is being taken advantage of by another woman instead of just another sad sack man (which she expects). 

Fortunately her luck holds and the book ends with a happy ending on the horizon. Attentive readers will see this coming, but this is still a lighter read than expected - for a Margery Sharp novel you might even call it frothy! I enjoyed this one a lot, and found the dog photography aspect quite entertaining, while wishing Louisa would have given most of the men in her life a good boot long before she finally does it.