MOLLY CLAVERING (as Marian Moffatt), Welcome Stranger (1955) (aka Like One of the Family)

Most of you know by now that Dean Street Press has published, as Furrowed Middlebrow books, most of the fiction by Molly Clavering that was published in book form. We are lacking a few of her titles for the very respectable but still frustrating reason that we have so far been unable to get hold of copies of them. I hope we'll be able to rectify that ultimately—fingers crossed! But those who have followed my writings about Clavering closely will know that in addition to her novels published in book form, Molly published at least 24 more novels in The People's Friend, first as serials in the magazine, then reprinted in later years as "pocket novels"--small format magazine issues of about 130 closely-printed pages. These mostly appeared under the name Marian Moffatt.

Now, far be it from me to be obsessive about anything (ahem), but I've been on a quest for years now to track down any or all of these pocket novels. Particularly since we've reprinted Molly's other novels, my search has become even more intense. So, you can imagine how I felt when some of these titles came up on eBay recently—four of them in all, alongside quite a stack of other PF publications that are likely to be of considerably less interest to me. Of course, I spent way too much and acquired the whole heap.

I promptly dived into the one which seemed the most promising, a family story set in a Scottish village and following the effects on the Baxter family–widowed Myna Baxter, her daughters Norma and Barbara, and son Joe—of the arrival at Ivy Lodge of an orphaned cousin, pretty young Sally Forrest. Sally, of course, is sweet and kind and innocent, and becomes fast friends with Barbara as well as attracting the attention of Joe. But Norma, still bitter as a result of an immature engagement to neighbor Eric Johnstone, the breakup of which she blames on his brother Murray, is bitterly jealous of Sally's every move. Sally goes to work at the local wool mill, managed by attractive Ben Lumsden, where Norma is in charge of the secretarial pool, and Sally promptly gets on as her talents in design are recognized. Add to this that every character in the novel seems to be in love with another character, but to assume that that character is in love with someone else, and fireworks are assured.

This all sounds quite like a classic Molly Clavering plot, with ample room for the comedies of errors and local color she does so well. But I was oh so saddened to find that its simply … not. Although it has some of the charms of Clavering's better work, and is plotted well enough that I had no trouble finishing it, there's really almost no trace of the vivid local color that she does so well. The setting is mostly confined to a very drab office environment and the Baxters' home life—even when Sally is lost in the woods during a picnic, we get little but the melodrama and angst of the various characters. There's also, tragically, no real humor, none of the slightly rowdy comedy Molly does so spectacularly well elsewhere, and very little description of the countryside or of day-to-day life in a Scottish village.

Perhaps worse, though, is that Molly here relies far too heavily on the trope of the bitter girl, Norma, who begins to seem genuinely deranged in her pettiness and jealousy, so that it's hard to forgive her even when she (finally) has her inevitable change of heart. Not to mention that Sally in her sweetness is in danger of seeming like a doormat. There's also too much reliance on the endless romantic misunderstandings. Misunderstandings, of course, are a classic plot device, and can be used to great effect for comedic purposes and entertainment value, but here Clavering gets little mileage out of them, and the story just plods along as each boring and implausible new misunderstanding comes along.

This tale was first serialized in The People's Friend in 1955, under the title Like One of the Family, and 1955 was also the year that Molly published the wonderful Dear Hugo in book form. The following year she would release Near Neighbours, one of her very best novels. So she was in her prime as a storyteller when she submitted this one to PF. I can only assume that perhaps PF's guidelines, or perhaps the demands of serialization, proved too limited for Molly's natural talents, but what a disappointment it has been. Imagine if there had been 24 more novels all as good as her books!

But never fear, I will soon be sampling the other three pocket novels I've acquired, though perhaps with less enthusiasm than I approached this one. Where Love Leads was actually published a year earlier (the year Molly published Because of Sam), while With Hands That Heal first appeared (as The New Matron) in 1964, two years after her final book publication, and As Blows the Wind dates from 1971, five years before she apparently stopped writing altogether. Perhaps one of these will pleasantly surprise me?

They're almost here!: New FM titles due June 7th

You all know by now that I'm always a bit giddy about the rollout of a new bunch of Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press. Although our first batch of titles was back in 2016, there's still some part of me that can't quite believe I've really gone from fantasy publishing to the real thing (thanks of course to Rupert at Dean Street Press, who made it all happen). 

But even so, for a sort of literary archaeologist like myself, there is something particularly satisfying about the books we're releasing on June 7th. We've published a whole slew of lost and forgotten authors and books, but rarely have we been privileged to restore to circulation a body of work that was previously so completely and utterly unavailable as the novels of MOLLY CLAVERING. Apart from Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer, which has remained fairly readily available since its wide US release (under the title Mrs. Lorimer's Family) in a People's Book Club edition, and Near Neighbours, which was reprinted by Shirley at Greyladies Books a few years ago, these books have been completely inaccessible to readers outside of a few major libraries for quite a few decades. (And of course, even those two will now be available for the first time in e-book format.)

What's more, as I (very luckily, and with huge thanks to Grant Hurlock, as always) read more and more of her work, Molly Clavering has become a favorite writer, and a perfect comfort read in times of stress. When life was decidedly hectic and trying for a few months there, I was frequently clinging to Molly (I rather feel we're on a first-name basis now) like a lifeboat as I laughed and cheered and vicariously escaped to Scotland while reading these books for the first time. She clearly shares some themes and storylines with her better-known friend and neighbor D. E. Stevenson, but she is very much her own writer—a bit feistier, a bit earthier.  And I can't resist pointing out again that, while I initially assumed that Molly had been influenced by Stevenson's style of writing, the discovery of Molly's novels from the 1920s and 1930s, already in spirited romantic comedy style while DES was still experimenting (not very successfully) with melodrama, suggest that perhaps the reverse is true!

At any rate, I couldn't be more thrilled to be bringing Molly back into circulation and sharing the joy with all of you. And none of this is for a moment to take away from my pleasure at finally getting RUBY FERGUSON's divine Apricot Sky back into print (it has been on my wish list since the beginning of our imprint, but there were some rights vicissitudes to navigate).

So, after that considerable ado, I give you, as one final teaser before the books' release, their full covers. I hope you enjoy!

Well worth a migraine or two: MOLLY CLAVERING, Touch Not the Nettle (1939)

You might recall (well, I kind of hope you recall) that a few weeks ago I announced the nine new Furrowed Middlebrow titles coming from Dean Street Press in June. I’ve reviewed most of the new titles elsewhere, but it’s those I’ve never got round to that haunt me.

In particular, having had the astonishing good fortune of finding a copy of Molly Clavering’s Susan Settles Down on eBay, I have to try to convey the excitement not only of getting, not too many months later, to read Clavering’s other three delightful Scottish comedies from the 1930s--Love Comes Home, Yoked with a Lamb, and Touch Not the Nettle--but also realizing (and letting out a giddy shriek that sent Andy through the roof, no doubt) that the last was a sequel to Susan.

To set the scene a bit, I’ve had a lot of excuses over the years for not getting round to writing about books, but these three did pose their own unique challenges. Without going into detail about the circumstances, and never mind how much indebted I am to the diligent soul who undertook this task, these books actually came to me photographed--meticulously, patiently, heroically, self-sacrificingly snapped, page-by-page, in some sacrosanct library which shall remain nameless (I didn’t ask which one, but the options are very limited), probably in violation of library policies (though I’m not entirely sure why that should be). These photos were carefully quality-checked and then compiled into three staggeringly large PDFs, which I was able, with some difficulty, to read on my Kindle.

Because the photos were presumably taken with at least a certain amount of surreptitiousness, they were shot at an angle, close to the desk they were resting on, meaning the top lines of each page were rather small and the bottom lines were large. But they were all readable, which was the only thing that really mattered, and what’s an occasional migraine in exchange for getting to read a Molly Clavering novel I never thought I’d so much as glimpse? They’re all terrific, but of course the high point was when I first opened Touch Not the Nettle and discovered familiar characters that I could hang around with for another 250 pages!

The most frustrating part of the reading process, actually, was that I’d be completely engrossed and wanting the book to go on forever, but my eyes would reach an absolute saturation point having read about 50 pages this way on any given day, so I would have to stop in media res, yearning for more. Other books, however good, paled by comparison.

Perfectly readable (at first)

Of course none of this is really a good excuse for not making decent notes as I read and being able to write proper reviews, but I’m afraid my enthusiasm for reading the books got away from my blogging instincts. However, I have just unearthed, as I’ve been sorting through the debris of the past few months and trying to get on top of things again, two quotations from Touch Not the Nettle that I had made notes of. Hopefully they’ll give a hint of what my undoubtedly brilliant full-scale review would have contained…

First off, Susan and her friend Peggy are discussing how difficult it is to get good help these days:

“Well, never mind her, Susan dear. There’s no need to worry about superior parlourmaids here,” said Peggy. “I’ve got a new house-tablemaid, like a young cart-horse, and about as destructive. She only came five days ago, and she’s broken something every day. And yesterday I told her she was to wait at lunch, and what do you think she did? Shut the dining room door, pulled out a chair, and sat down on it—to wait! Of course, Oliver began to laugh, and I had to tell her just to go away. She has done one good thing, though, and that was to smash the awful vase that the Miss Pringles gave Oliver and me for a wedding present. She managed that the day before yesterday.”

“Never!” exclaimed Susan. “Not that funerary urn painted with mud-coloured roses and magenta leaves?”

 

Peggy nodded solemnly, her blue eyes dancing. “It was in about seven pieces, so Oliver took them out to the tool-shed and pounded them to dust with a hammer.”

I still laugh when I read that. Subtle psychological humor it ain’t, but how often have I possessed items I would have liked to finish off with a hammer!

Next, if for no other reason I wish Clavering had written a whole series of novels about Susan so that we could have had more memorable visits from the ludicrous but intimidating Miss Pringles:

“Susan! The Miss Pringles!” she hissed, snatching the baby from his perambulator and flying with him into the house as if bloodhounds were at her heels.

The passionate desire for escape at any cost to which Peggy had so spontaneously yielded was a sensation all too frequently felt by acquaintances of the three Miss Pringles on seeing those notable women bearing down upon them. The Miss Pringles never merely arrived or came—their action was that of a small fleet of pirate vessels swooping on some rich prize and cutting it out from its attendant convoy.

Oh dear. One really wants a film adaptation to get a full visual.

But I’ll leave you with a quote from nearly the beginning of the novel, which reminded me that Susan was my kind of character:

“Old age really must be creeping upon me at last,” said Susan. “I find more and more that what I most enjoy is a quiet evening at home by the fire, with a book…"

Naturally, her quiet evening is almost immediately disrupted--by a visit from young Amanda, a relative whose ace pilot husband is missing (and none too sorely missed), complications with the embittered Larry Heriot and his spiteful sister Ruth, difficulties with the aforementioned, formidable Misses Pringle, and much more. Of course, it all works out in the end, but not before some distressing confusion, grave misunderstandings, and rollicking adventures. And in these early novels even more than the later ones, Molly Clavering offers vivid descriptions of scenery and local color throughout.

I’ve really grown quite infatuated with dear Molly, and I can’t wait for folks to get a chance to read more of her come June.

COMING SOON: Nine new Furrowed Middlebrow books from Dean Street Press, available June 2021!

My two favorite times of year are the times I finally get to reveal, after months of excitement on my part, the next set of Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press. It so happens that that time has arrived again!

When I mentioned an upcoming announcement a few weeks ago, I said the new titles would be coming in August. But work has progressed so well that Rupert at DSP has decided the rollout should be in June instead. So even less time to wait than expected, and we already have the covers ready to show you, something we don't usually have finished at announcement time.

My teaser had mentioned that we would be publishing nine titles in all by two different authors, both being reprinted by us for the first time. It's actually one book by the first author, whom many of you will know from a Persephone reprint of a wonderful earlier novel, and eight books by the second, which are so vanishingly rare in their original editions that I'm amazed and grateful to have been able to get hold of them at all.

I had failed to mention that we're very much in Scottish mode for this batch!

Ready or not...

First off, one of my all-time favorite discoveries as a blogger. How RUBY FERGUSON's glorious, hilarious Scottish holiday novel Apricot Sky has not been reprinted ages ago is beyond me, and yet I'm also rather glad as now we get to do it ourselves. I first read and loved Apricot Sky way back before I started blogging, but re-read it and reviewed it here in 2019. It's a perfect escape from worldly cares and ideal for anyone dreaming of a holiday in Scotland with the most charming and funny companions imaginable.

We've adapted the original cover for our new edition.

Second, if you've been reading my blog for a while, you must have already guessed that the author whose books are vanishingly rare (but won't be after June) is none other than MOLLY CLAVERING, currently best-known as the close friend and neighbour of D. E. Stevenson for many years, but soon to be known as a brilliant and delightful storyteller in her own right. 

We're publishing an excellent cross-section of both her early and later works in this batch, including her four novels from the 1930s (originally published under the pseudonym B. Mollett) and four of her later novels from the 1950s. The latter include Mrs Lorimer's Quiet Summer, her best-known book thanks to it's being reprinted in the U.S. by the People's Book Club under the title Mrs Lorimer's Family, and Near Neighbours, first rediscovered and reprinted by the fabulous Greyladies Books in 2015. The former are a striking intro to Clavering's early work, with earthy humour, rural Scottish settings, and wonderful descriptions of the countryside and village life in the 1930s. While she will inevitably be compared to D. E. Stevenson, the earlier novels in particular show her to have very much her own style and sense of (slightly rowdy and solidly down-to-earth) humour.

Original dustjackets for Clavering's books are hard to find (and not always the most enticing), but we have adapted the original cover of Near Neighbours for our new edition.

I owe a debt of gratitude to several people for fueling and enabling what has been a multi-year obsession with tracking down Clavering's work. Clavering's cousin Michael Stewart started me off by providing loads of information about her books, which I consolidated into a post here. The tireless Jerri Chase provided me with information about the 1950s novels as well as photos of dustjackets. Shirley at Greyladies stoked the flames by blazing a trail to do the first reprint of a Molly Clavering title in over 50 years. And, in particular, I have to thank Grant Hurlock (as I have many times before) for making it possible for me to read most of these books. He went above and beyond all his previous achievements in getting hold of them, and their reprinting wouldn't have happened without him.

Hope you're as excited about these new titles as I am!

Another vicarious holiday in Scotland: MOLLY CLAVERING, Because of Sam (1954)

Dustjacket pic courtesy of Jerri Chase

Few things could make for more delightful quarantine reading, on a couple of beautiful spring San Francisco days recently, than one of Molly Clavering's charming if sadly rare Scottish comedies. I owe a debt of gratitude yet again to Grant Hurlock, who made it possible for me to read Because of Sam (and who is also making it possible for me to read other of her books—stay tuned!).

To the extent that most readers think of Molly Clavering at all, they tend to think of her as the close friend and neighbor of D. E. Stevenson. Which is all well and good if it encourages folks to start reading her (or encourages them to want to read her at least, since it's virtually impossible to actually do so), but I've also concluded that, despite obvious similarities in subject matter and storytelling, Clavering has very much her own style. A bit more gruff and to the point than DES in some ways, and indeed a bit less polished and rougher around the edges, but very very charming in its own right. Clavering's heroines have just a little more edge than DES's, and the narrative is more downright as well.

Mollie Maitland, the widowed, middle-aged heroine of Because of Sam, is a case in point. She's been widowed for many years, long enough for her rather surly and demanding daughter Amabel, a toddler when her father died, to be fully grown and pursuing a career. Her husband, Maurice, irresponsible but light-hearted and fun, died only three years into their marriage, and Mollie has long since settled into a happy if slightly impoverished existence at Fernieknowe, her pleasant house on the outskirts of Mennan village in Scotland (apparently not too far from Edinburgh, since Amabel commutes there to work three or four times a week). Although Mollie still thinks of Maurice fondly, we have a distinct impression that her occasional melancholy is more a bit of simple loneliness than it is pining for the long-gone Maurice.

Mollie's relationship with Amabel is complicated by the peculiarities of the will of Maurice's Aunt Euphorbia, which left her money to Amabel instead of to Mollie:

"She said Maurice was shiftless and I was a fool, and though we called Amabel after her—Amabel Euphorbia, you know, such a mouthfull—she only softened enough to send her a christening mug. Plate, not solid silver."

But Mollie doesn't mind her relative poverty very much, and is much loved by her friends and neighbors, including the gossipy Mrs Gray, the kind Mrs Denholm, a shepherd's wife up in the hills who decorates her humble home with photos of the royal family, and the appalling Mrs Noble, a flirt whose husband is overseas. She boards dogs for her neighbors for a bit of spare income, and is often seen ruggedly traipsing over hill and dale to give them proper exercise. And she has the patience of a saint when it comes to Amabel, who often seems to require as careful handling as the dogs do.

Into this contented, quite life comes a bit of very quiet drama. Mollie and Amabel are introduced to Martin Heriot, a bachelor farmer who lives nearby (never mind why they didn't know him before…), and Mollie begins to think that he might be a suitable husband for Amabel. She attempts to facilitate their spending time together as much as possible, which is aided when he asks Mollie to board a black labrador puppy named Sam for his cousin. Also returning to their lives is Mr Ramsay, the solicitor who helped Mollie after Maurice's death, and who takes a personal interest in her situation—even proposing marriage to her not long after she was widowed, certain that she wouldn't be able to manage on her own. He has had some stern words for Amabel now and again, which strangely seem to have some effect, and Amabel imagines, and dreads, that he and Mollie might marry someday. A not-unexpected but nevertheless charming and compulsively readable comedy of errors results.

Molly Clavering

There is nothing original or unique about the plot of Because of Sam. We've certainly read such tales before. But I found it as irresistible as the other Clavering titles I've read. There's something very down home and earthy about her style, so that even telling a perfectly ordinary tale of quiet happy village life, she manages to be engrossing. She's usually not hilarious, merely amusing, but there are exceptions here and there. For example, her description of a meeting of the Women's Rural Institute not only gives a delightful fly-on-the-wall sense of how such meetings really went, but also contains this little tidbit:

Up on the stage the demonstrator began to deal with a large hen, keeping up a running commentary as her fingers nimbly stripped it of its feathers. But Millie, though she tried to listen, and indeed was fascinated by the speed displayed by Miss Robertson, found her attention being constantly distracted. Mrs. Wilson and her neighbour on the other side, evidently a bosom friend, were conversing in sibilant undertones, and Millie could not help hearing at least part of what they said. She realized that they were stripping someone of her reputation feathers.

Obviously, I'm a fan of Clavering, and this is actually the fourth of her novels that I've been lucky enough to read and write about—following the readily available Mrs Lorimer's Family (here), the lovely Near Neighbours, which was reprinted by Greyladies a while back (here), and the vanishingly rare, very very lucky e-Bay find, Susan Settles Down, one of several pseudonymous novels she wrote in the 1920s and 1930s (here). I also did a detailed post about her writings here, and shared some evocative dustjackets and other tidbits courtesy of Jerri Chase here and here. As you see, I've been advocating for Clavering for years now, and hope to continue to do so. So, as I said, more to come!

A vanishingly rare pleasure: MOLLY CLAVERING (writing as B. MOLLETT), Susan Settles Down (1936)

A few years back I wrote a fairly extensive post about Molly Clavering's writings (see here), compiling lots of details kindly provided by one of her cousins. I also wrote about two of her novels—the best known, Mrs Lorimer's Family here, and, a bit later, Near Neighbours here, the latter again thanks to said cousin. Happily, Near Neighbours was reprinted by Greyladies not long after. Then, predictably, I wrote no more about her, because most of her novels, and most especially the early works from the 1920s and 1930s, are simply impossible to track down if you're not in a reading room at the British Library or the Scottish National Library. They just do not come up for sale. Ever. Anywhere.

Except, apparently, this past December, when a random e-Bay search provided me with this treasure, one of four titles Clavering published in the 1930s under the pseudonym B. Mollett (see the first post linked above for more details about her complete bibliography and other pseudonyms). Easily my luckiest find of the year. I felt like I'd unearthed a vein of platinum while strolling through the park. And although it wasn't exactly cheap, it was also not the most expensive book purchase I've ever made. And happily, it was well worth the investment.

Many D. E. Stevenson fans will recall that Clavering was, in later years at least, a friend and neighbor of DES's in Moffat, Scotland. And those who have read Near Neighbours or Mrs Lorimer's Family (originally Mrs Lorimer's Quiet Summer in the UK, but the US edition was chosen by the "People's Book Club", operated by Sears-Robuck, so copies of that edition abound) know that her style has some things in common with DES's—a predilection for Scottish settings, often lightly humorous tales involving families and friends and at least a touch of romance. But I've learned from experience that comparisons to better-known authors often do considerable injustice to their lesser-known cohorts, and that might be particularly true in Clavering's case, since she had already published several novels before DES got properly started (leaving aside—as most fans are willing or even eager to do—the early Peter West).

As Susan Settles Down opens, the titular Susan Parsons has relocated from England with her unmarried brother Oliver to a new home in the Scottish Highlands. Oliver has inherited the house and its accompanying property, and rather than selling it off they've decided to move in. Susan writes to a friend:

"Don't, please, write and tell me that we're mad. I know it already; and even if I didn't, every friend we possess has pointed it out. My spirit is quailing at the prospect of life at Easter Hartrigg, because I know what pitiful figures we shall cut as landowners in a country quite strange to us. Oliver talks blithely of shooting and fishing, and has told me to buy a smelly Harris-tweed suit and clumping brogues and a walking-stick, but these outward semblances won't make country-dwellers out of us. I feel just as the children of Israel must have felt when Moses dragged them into the uncharted perils of the wilderness out of the land of Egypt—a place in which, however unpleasant their lot, they were at least at home!"

The neighbors are welcoming enough, including the local vicar, Mr. Cunningham, and his family, and Jed Armstrong, who "marches with" the Parsons:

"My name's Armstrong. I march with you."

"Oh ... why?" was all that Susan could find to say in reply. Was this some Scottish form of leave-taking ? Apparently not.

"Why?" he stared at her; then a slow smile began to spread over his wind- and weather-beaten countenance. Looking down at Susan who, a tall young woman,  was accustomed to meet the eyes of most men on a level, he explained with an indulgent grin: "I have the place next to Easter Hartrigg."

But things are nevertheless a bit bumpy at first, particularly with a rather disagreeable cook, who rejoices in the name Mrs Bald, and her nincompoop daughter Bernice as their only domestic help:

"I've sometimes wondered," Susan wrote later to Charles Crawley, "how the principals in a Greek tragedy felt towards the messenger who is always popping in with tidings of fresh woe. Now I think I know. If the messenger wore the look of half-terrified delight in bad news which is plainly to be seen in Bernice's protruding eyes, death, instant and painful, would have been his portion. In fact, I really believe that only the lack of a handy weapon prevented me from killing her on the drawing-room hearthrug!"

But, in part due to their growing friendships with Peggy Cunningham and Jed Armstrong, things begin to smooth over after a time, they become involved with local dramas, and of course a bit of romance seeps into the story. And what would a village story be without the judgy local gossips, in this case the three spinster Pringle sisters, whose pompous belief in their own superiority and eagerness to find dirt on their neighbors let them in for dislike and occasional mockery, including regarding their chosen means of conveyance:

A small governess-cart had come into sight over the nearest rise, drawn by a donkey which appeared to have some difficulty in keeping its fore-feet on the ground.

"They'll have that miserable brute going on two legs soon," growled Mr. Armstrong. "And it wouldn't look as much of a donkey as they do, anyway."

There's nothing really remarkable about Clavering's tale, and great literature it certainly ain't. But entertaining it certainly is, and the setting is vividly evoked, the characters entertaining if unsurprising, and the tone pleasantly vibrant and spiced with humour. And for all that Susan Settles Down might sound just the kind of story DES might have written, I'm actually rather delighted to have Clavering's version, which I bet is a bit rowdier and rougher-around-the-edges than DES's would have been. 

I might put it that I'd be delighted to be friends and neighbors with both women, but I rather think I might choose DES for kind, upbeat, heart-to-heart talks and Molly for those times when one feels like hitting the pub and being snarky and whinging about all that's wrong with one's life. Both essential functions for friends to serve. And I feel I can almost see how the dynamic between the two might have gone, with Molly perhaps loosening DES up and making her blush now and again and DES keeping Molly from becoming too disreputable. It must have been a happy mix.

Naturally, this book is even more impossible to lay hands on than most that I write about, but I thought as there is no information about it online I might as well share a bit. Happily, the inimitable Grant Hurlock is making it possible for me to lay hands on three more of Clavering's 1950s novels, about which I am ecstatic and thankful. If only it were possible to get hold of more, it's not out of the question that she would be a fun author to reprint, but alas it's not looking terribly likely. If anyone has any one or more of her other novels and would be willing to lend them, do let me know!

Meanwhile, my reading of this one just makes the others more tantalizing. Which is the way it always works, isn't it?

An embarrassment of riches: more Molly Clavering dustjackets

After I dedicated a post a couple of weeks ago to some lovely Molly Clavering dustjackets sent to me by Jerri Chase—which, let's face it, due to the scarcity of Clavering's books, we're not going to be able to see anywhere else online—I was delighted to receive scans of the dustjackets of three more of Clavering's books. So, to make all of our mouths water even more for books that most of us will never be able to own (at least with original jacket art), I obviously have to share these with you too.

Almost immediately after my last post went up, I got an email from Geraldine Hogg, a fellow D. E. Stevenson discussion list member (an active one, not a perpetual lurker like me), saying that she had two more Clavering books with jackets and would I like her to scan them. Um, yes, please!

Geraldine's titles are Dear Hugo (1955) and Result of the Finals (1957), and she noted that she enjoyed both of them (she said the only Clavering she's read and not enjoyed was Dr. Glasgow's Family from 1960—just FYI for anyone working on starting a collection).

First, here's the rather lovely front and spine of Dear Hugo:

Then, here are the jacket flaps, with a description of the book and an author bio:

And finally, here's the back cover, which has various blurbs about the earlier Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer (ake Mrs. Lorimer's Family) and Because of Sam:

The other book Geraldine has on her shelves (I've asked her if we couldn't arrange housesitting duties for me for extended periods of time—I would certainly be diligent in dusting all of her books—but pesky things like the Atlantic Ocean and my job keep getting in the way) is Result of the Finals. Here's the charming cover:

And here are the flaps, the front with a description of the story and the back with another author bio—but this one has one of the better quality photos of Clavering that I've seen:

And again, there are enticing blurbs for other Clavering novels on the back:

Geraldine also scanned a notice from the beginning of the book, assuring readers that the match portrayed is entirely fictional:

And just to make us all a bit more jealous of Geraldine's collection, she just happened to mention that her copy of Result is signed by the author:

A couple of days after I heard from Geraldine, I also got another email from Jerri, who had recalled that she also had, in her own collection, a copy of the original edition of Near Neighbours, complete with dustjacket, and sent along scans of that one. Here's the front cover:

And the flaps:

And blurbs for other books on the back:

Strange that Spring Adventure is the only Clavering title we've seen so far that advertised other author's work. It looks like Hodder & Stoughton was focused primarily on promoting Clavering's work, while, for better or worse, when she made the shift to Robert Hale they saw her more as one of a pack of romantic authors in their stable (and apparently they didn't see her as that for long, since, as I forgot to mention last time, Spring Adventure was actually the last of Clavering's novels to appear in book form. She continued, as mentioned in my earlier detailed post on her, to publish serialized novels in The People's Friend, but nothing else was published in book form.)

If anyone has copies of any of Clavering's other books with dustjackets, do let me know and we can continue to flesh out our collection! One wonders if any dustjackets even survive for her earliest novels for John Long, or her works from the 30s for Stanley Paul (under the pseudonym B. Mollett)? If any do, they must be extraordinarily rare.

Thanks again to Geraldine and Jerri for sharing these scans!

Some enticing Molly Clavering dustjackets & a couple of biographical tidbits

This is another post that I've been planning to do for months, and I was almost ashamed to go ahead and do it, but who could possibly resist sharing dustjacket art and blurbs from two more of Molly Clavering's impossibly obscure novels, which Jerri Chase, a friend of this blog, shared with me ages ago.

Jerri was in Scotland for a time last year, doing research for the first full-scale biography of novelist D. E. Stevenson—which news will undoubtedly excite Stevenson fans everywhere. As some of you know—from my earlier posts about her if not from other sources—Molly Clavering was Stevenson's neighbor and friend in Moffat, a Scottish Borders town of about 2,500 people (nowadays, according to Wikipedia—perhaps fewer in their time?). It's not entirely surprising, then, that Jerri's research led her to a couple of new tidbits of information about Clavering (see below), as well as to a felicitous opportunity to read both Because of Sam (1954) and Spring Adventure (1962), two of Clavering's books that have virtually ceased to exist outside of national libraries. If her time in Scotland didn't make me jealous enough, the glimpse she got of these rare books would tinge me with green.

She first read Because of Sam, which must have appeared very soon after Clavering's one more readily available title, Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer (reprinted in the U.S. as Mrs. Lorimer's Family), as the cover features blurbs about Mrs Lorimer. Jerri didn't have access to a scanner, but her photos of the book's cover are a huge improvement on what was available before (i.e. nothing). Here's the full cover as photographed by Jerri:

And then I decided to experiment with adjusting the photo a little and focusing on the front cover:

Jerri also sent me the jacket flaps, but the image, while just readable if blown up a bit, may not come through here, so I'm transcribing the text:

Millie Maitland sometimes said that the name of her house should be changed from Fernicknowe to Dog Hall, for though there were large clumps of fern, high banks and a steep, winding drive, the dogs—Millie's boarders—seemed much more noticeable.

She was quite content with her life in the Scots village of Mennan; she was perfectly happy taking her dogs out for walks up the glen, cooking in her old-fashioned oven, even country dancing at the Women's Institute.

There was just one cloud. As Mr. Ramsay had said of Millie's daughter long ago: "Amabel will have more intelligence than heart. If only her clever, capable Amabel were kindlier, less fiercely undomesticated. If only she would marry."

Because of Sam also has an author bio, which I don't think contains any new information, but I'm including it in the interests of completeness:

Molly Clavering was born in Glasgow, but lived in the country from a very early age. After six years' service with the WRNS, she settled in Moffat, Dumfries, where she is now the only woman member of the Moffat Town Council.

Her chief interests are anything to do with the countryside and country life, history, folk lore, Scottish Border traditions and country dancing—and an unclipped black poodle.

Jerri reported that she quite liked Because of Sam, which is set in a Borders village not unlike Moffat, and suggested it to Greyladies as a possible follow-up to their edition of Near Neighbours (fingers crossed!). She was a bit more lukewarm about her other Clavering reading experience, but it's a pleasure to get a glimpse of the cover of Spring Adventure, whether or not the book is likely to be a favorite. Again, here's the full cover from Jerri:

And again, I tried to improve just the front cover a little—you can be the judge of the results:

And here is the description of Spring Adventure from the jacket flaps:

Spring in Touraine, 'the garden of France': blue skies, flowering water meadows, the wide Loire flowing by below the historic Chateaux ... everything is so different from her Cotswold home that Joanna, suffering from the shock and humiliation of being jilted in favour of her friend Rosamond, finds her wilting self-confidence gradually restored, though she is determined to have nothing more to do with men.

Her elderly cousin Nigella, writer of children's books, who has brought Joanna to France, thinks otherwise but says nothing. Young men 'bob up' as Joanna feels, quite unnecessarily, and cousin Nigella encourages them because she finds them useful. When her interest in history leads cousin Nigella into strange places, the young men prove very useful indeed; and in the end one of them provides a fitting climax to Joanna's Spring Adventure.

I would obviously jump at the chance to read any of Clavering's other novels, and am still curious about the quality of the numerous, presumably shorter, novels she serialized in The People's Friend. But alas, my chances of tracking any of them down seem about as low as the chances, recently, that I would win a $1.5 billion lottery jackpot (it didn't happen, needless to say).

As I mentioned above, in the process of her research on Stevenson, Jerri learned a couple of details to help fill in our knowledge of Clavering. Probably most interesting is that she learned that the friendship of Clavering and Stevenson goes back at least to the 1930s, when Stevenson and her family (and presumably Clavering) were living in Glasgow. Jerri noted that Stevenson's diary from those years regularly references visits to "the Claverings" and to "Molly." She speculates that Clavering may have decided to settle in Moffat after the war because of the presence of Stevenson and her family.

The other mentions of Clavering that Jerri came across are smaller but still interesting details. For example, Stevenson's daughter Rosemary recalls that the sight of Clavering in her WRNS uniform early in the war inspired her to change her plan of becoming a "driver" and join the WRNS herself. And Jerri learned that Stevenson's husband served on the Town Council, probably during the same years that Clavering did, so presumably they regularly worked together there.

Finally, Jerri discovered that Stevenson had encouraged Clavering in her writing, giving her a gift of a new typewriter (in addition to the dog I mentioned in an earlier post) and trying to interest her American publishers in Clavering's work (perhaps her influence played a role in the American publication of Mrs. Lorimer?). Molly also helped Stevenson with typing at times, though it's unclear whether she did this as a friendly favor when no other typist was available, if she did it when times were hard and she could use the extra money, or perhaps a combination of the two.

It's nice, particularly with such a little-known author as Clavering, to get a few details here and there to help flesh out the picture of her life and work, so a big thanks to Jerri for the information and photos, and for permission to use them here!

I had intended to include a look at the list of authors on the back cover of Spring Adventure, which—if you strain—you can just make out. But I've rambled long enough for one post, so I'm going to include that in another post instead.