Miss Granby's Secret

Miss Granby's Secret / Eleanor Farjeon
London: Dean Street Press, 2024, c1941.
338 p.

A rare miss for me from Dean Street Press. Doubly so as I usually love this author's works - I have strong feelings about having her wonderful Martin Pippin novels reissued, for example! 

But this book was a bit of a mess for me. It just went on with the main conceit for far too long, becoming tiresome. That conceit is that Pamela's great aunt Addie, a spinster who was a best-selling author of romantic melodramas, was not as cluelessly innocent as her family had thought. After her death, Pamela is left the secret manuscript of Addie's first novel, a story apparently based in fact. 

This melodramatic manuscript then takes up most of the story, and the arch ridiculousness of it goes on and on. Young Addie doesn't know what "bastard" means, teehee! It continues in this manner for quite a while. 

The conclusion, where we come back to Pamela as she tries to determine what might be true in the story, is written naturally and has more heft. But by this time I couldn't have cared less how much Aunt Addie actually knew about the facts of life. I just wished she could have known something about the facts of writing! 

I think that I was probably in the entirely wrong mood for this. But I was disappointed - Farjeon's magical touch was missing here, making this one a bit of a dud. Perhaps when it was first published there was more cultural context that might have made this more enjoyable - perhaps people even had older relatives they may have connected with characters like Addie. But I don't feel that the appeal has carried through to today, at least not for me.