WINIFRED PECK, Tranquillity (1944)

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while already know that I’m a fan of Winifred Peck. I’ve reviewed several of her books previously, and her 1940 novel Bewildering Cares was my favorite read of 2014 and has subsequently been released on the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint from Dean Street Press. Her two mysteries, The Warrielaw Jewel and Arrest the Bishop?, have also been released in Dean Street’s Golden Age mystery series.

But it’s been a while now since I found time to continue exploring Peck’s other novels. There are still a dozen or so of her books that I haven’t read, and it was high time I got back to exploring them. The immediate inspiration this time was the most recent issue of The Scribbler (see my post on The Scribbler here), which discussed Tranquillity, 
which, like Bewildering Cares, is set in wartime, though several years later. And what an interesting contrast!

Set in the titular rest home established by sisters Mary, Paula, and Agnes Brown, primarily for the elderly and infirm whom war has deprived of the servants and caretakers who had hitherto made independent living possible, Tranquillity is a surprisingly somber and meditative novel by comparison with the earlier work. There is little plot to speak of—the nurses and staff interact with the patients and each other and have discussions about the war, religion, love, and aging. 

Some readers might find it a bit too uneventful, in fact, and perhaps the religious content a bit more intrusive than in most of Peck’s other work. And if it didn't completely work for me as a novel, I still found it compelling, and the religious discussion seemed completely sincere, perhaps the result of Peck’s own soul-searching in the midst of the war. Regardless, there is no doubt that the cheerful stiff upper lip of Bewildering Cares has given way to a more fatigued and philosophical trudging along. The horrors of the Blitz have taken place between the earlier novel and this one, and if Bewildering Cares was overwhelmingly life-affirming, Tranquillity is in many ways a novel about death.

The novel opens, in fact, with a discussion among Tranquillity staff members about the relative worth of the elderly and infirm as opposed to the young and vibrant, with one nurse (later proved to be a thoroughly dislikeable person for other reasons) suggesting that many of their patients should simply be put down like animals so that the energies of the staff could be more usefully spent. That theme, of the value of the old or disabled, is then revisited in the novel’s closing pages (I won’t spoil it here, but it works fairly well, I thought). I couldn’t help but wonder if this theme—clearly a central one in the novel—wasn’t also a result of Peck’s own soul-searching, not only as a woman in her 60s, but more generally as a noncombatant in wartime.

The following passage, too, about the nurses keeping busy to keep their minds off the war, is perhaps a bit shocking by comparison to the tone of Peck’s earlier work:

For like all women to-day they could only cling to sanity by fixing their minds on their immediate job and trying to find zest and interest in it. When once those eyes of the mind wandered to the world tragedy they were lost: in one moment their surroundings vanished, and they saw men, half-starved, half-drowned, hanging to rafts, their comrades screaming vainly for aid on burning tankers: they saw soldiers roll over in anguish on rocky crags of African hills or crucified on barbed wire in Tunisian deserts: they saw simple, single-hearted boys fasten themselves grinning into the seats of aeroplanes, who would be but charred skeletons by daybreak: they heard the laughter of bombers' crews like the rattling of the dice of Death. From these horizons everyone must tum to work of some mechanical kind, practical duties which would involve that utter fatigue which alone can give peace and sleep.

But if Tranquillity isn’t nearly as cheerful as Bewildering Cares or Peck’s mysteries, it does have a typically varied and vivid cast of characters. The story of the three sisters, for example, and how they came to own Tranquillity, is a typically double-edged Peck tale of independent women coming up against society’s restraints—in this case to ultimately succeed in their own quiet way:

When the World War began Mary was Matron of a famous London hospital; Paula Sister of a maternity hospital, and Agnes Head Sister of a Clinique for Rheumatism, and they held their posts with heroism while the Blitz raged over London. And then one by one had been summoned from work, success and responsibility by calls which not one of this very old-fashioned family thought of disobeying. Mary went home to nurse her mother, struck dumb and helpless with paralysis. Paula was called to an aunt who had aided the family financially for years and was dying by inches of arterio-sclerosis. And finally Agnes had to give up her work to nurse their little-known Cousin George, just because he was so cruel, miserly and dirty that no hired stranger would stay with him. And strange to say, all these Victorian sacrifices really did meet with the reward which would have been theirs in a Victorian novel. Agnes returned from her mother's funeral to find Cousin George at death's door. Paula, ringing up to say that her aunt's long imprisonment was over, heard that Cousin George had died of heart failure (in an attempt to cross the room and put out the gas stove for economy). A week later, in March 1941, the sisters found themselves free of all responsibilities and Agnes the heiress to a property beyond their dreams of magnificence.

Sister Agnes feels an affection for Dr. Lash, but Peggy, the most worldly of the sisters, has also set her sights on him. Then there are the nurses—the terrible Nurse Clegg; Nurse Zedy, “a small, stout, vehement little woman”; “Nurse Prime, a fat, ageing, fluffy blonde, with a terrible capacity for obvious remarks and pointless reminiscences”; “tall, lank, sentimental Nurse Ventnor,” who hails from a maternity hospital; and Nurse Storey, “a pleasant, substantial, middle-aged woman with a pug nose, small dancing eyes, a ready tongue and a great capacity for hard work.”

And this is to say nothing of the patients, which include an aging Colonel, “the ruin of a once smart, soldierly, efficient gentleman,” a kind upper-crust lady who has come to Tranquillity because her servants were all called up, scandalous old Mrs Coppetts, eccentric Professor Alured, recovering from a nervous breakdown after months of obsessive work (and now perhaps to be offered work in a secret government office), Miss Lyon, a passionate social reformer, suffragette, and officer in the WAACs during WWI, now fiercely resisting the decline of her physical powers, and numerous others. With the sad description of Miss Lefever, “so dim-sighted and so deaf that she seemed to pass most of her time in a coma,” we get another taste of Peck’s wry, subtle feminism, her frustration at the limitations of women’s opportunities:

And indeed Miss Lefever's life had been noted for as few virtues as vices. She had worn out her youth in a dull existence with her parents in a dismal mansion in Denmark Hill. She was forty before she had any control of herself or her money at all, and had not the least idea how to begin to enjoy herself when she had finally interred her relatives in another mausoleum in the cemetery. She knew nothing of the careers opening out to women at the end of last century: free to dispose of her life she decided, with health and plenty of money at her command, to enjoy nothing but a Little Ill-health.

There’s surely a touch of Peck’s trademark humor in that paragraph as well, and this is not the only place we find a lighter tone in Tranquillity. But such instances are certainly fewer than in other works. One observation that I enjoyed, uttered by Mrs Arroll though reported to us by Mary, concerns mystery novels (so perhaps Peck was already thinking of returning to that genre?):

She said that if only one had a nose for murder one need never pay rates or taxes, as the first remark of the police officer in command was always that no one must leave the house. If you could stay on in country houses for inquests, and adjourned inquests one after the other, you could manage, she said, without a home at all!

Ultimately, I found Tranquillity to be a touching and rather inspiring portrayal of (mostly) decent, dedicated people carrying on in very dark times. It’s not a perky, "we can take it" type of portrayal, but more of a sad "we’ll do our best for as long as we can" perspective. It’s undoubtedly a bit idealized, intended to be inspirational reading in a particularly difficult period, but it does also face up rather starkly to the realities of death and suffering and old age in a way that not a lot of "light" fiction did at the time. Leave it to dear Winifred to have surprised me yet again with the scope of her quiet observations about life!

I've managed to get my hands on another postwar Peck novel recently, and hopefully I'll get round to that one soon. Frustratingly, however, the one I'd most love to get my grubby little hands on, the follow-up to Bewildering Cares, called A Garden Enclosed, set in a Victorian rectory, seems to have practically ceased to exist. If anyone ever happens across a copy, or if anyone has actually read it, I'd love to hear about it. One for a new Hopeless Wish List, I'm afraid.

No longer a fantasy: the first real-life Furrowed Middlebrow titles (part 2 of 3)

(If you missed the first Furrowed Middlebrow publishing announcement a few days ago, check it out here, and you can also see the new colophon for the series here.)

In my last post, I revealed the first titles being reprinted by the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint this October—three lovely novels by Rachel Ferguson. Now it's time for revelation number two.

On my list of all-time favorite novels—and certainly of novels that I re-read most often—are E. M. Delafield's delightful Provincial Lady novels. Now, as much as I wish I had somehow unearthed a hitherto lost and unpublished volume in that series, alas, such is not the case. But I do have the next best thing...

Like the Provincial Lady, Camilla Lacely, wife of the vicar of Stampfield, a medium-sized town not far from Manchester, decides, in the early days of World War II, to keep a diary detailing the worries, controversies, necessary diplomacies, and inadvertent offenses she must negotiate in the course of one week—from the offense caused to many by the curate's passionately pacifistic sermon (through much of which, alas, Camilla has snoozed, thus adding to her difficulties in discussing it with outraged parishioners) to anxieties about her son, off training with his regiment, not to mention servant woes, worries about friends, and a potential romance in the town. The resulting diary makes up Winifred Peck's hilarious and sometimes touching Bewildering Cares (1940).

I reviewed Cares here. It remains one of my favorite rediscoveries and one I can re-read almost as often as Delafield. Apart from House-Bound (1942), her later World War II novel about a woman learning to make do without household help, which was reprinted by Persephone, none of Peck's novels have been reprinted in recent years. This is particularly bewildering in the case of such a wonderful book as Bewildering Cares, and I'm very pleased that we can now rectify that situation.

Cares is the only Peck title that we'll be reprinting at this point, but those of you who are keeping track know that it's certainly not the only one of her works that I've raved about here. As it happens, even before my inquiry to Dean Street Press led to our current collaboration, I had already emailed them to suggest that they might be interested in Peck's two wonderful mysteries, The Warrielaw Jewel (1933) and Arrest the Bishop? (1947). I reviewed them here and here, and loved them both, so I am thrilled to be able to announce, with Dean Street's blessing, that both will be added to Dean Street's already-impressive list of Golden Age mystery reprints. Some of you already know that Peck's brother, Ronald Knox, was a successful mystery writer himself, but in my opinion Winifred's novels have every bit as much going for them. Dean Street's plan is to release them in October, along with the FM reprint of Bewildering Cares, so there will, happily, be three hitherto-unavailable titles by Peck released all at once!

Just one more announcement still to come, but it's a doozy. I could never say that I've saved the best for last, since I wholeheartedly love all of these books, and they're all wonderful in their own way. But suffice it to say that I think the final announcement might cause the biggest splash, and I'm still amazed and thrilled that we were able to snag this particular author—and one of her titles in particular, which deserves, in my opinion, to be considered an absolute classic of—er—but that would be giving away too much…

Check back in a few days!

Book report: Winifred Peck

I finally got round to reading a book I've been meaning to read for about a year. Too many books, too little time, indeed!

As some of you will recall, I enthusiastically reviewed several of Winifred Peck's novels last year, beginning with The Warrielaw Jewel, the first of only two murder mysteries that Peck published. (With mystery writers being rediscovered and reprinted at a delightful pace in the past few years, it's shocking that no one has got round to these yet, but rest assured I'm doing everything I can to make it happen…) So, why it took me so long to read her other mystery, Arrest the Bishop? (1949), is a mystery even to me.

That earlier novel, as you may recall, was set in Edwardian Edinburgh, while Bishop surely makes some use of Peck's personal experience as the daughter of a bishop and the sister of not one, but two priests (one Catholic, one Anglican). The novel is perhaps not quite a true closed society novel, since it's set at the bishop's palace instead of in a monastery or other religious institution, but with the sometimes chaotic gathering of church figures gathered at the palace for an ordination, it comes close to being one. But because it takes place in a home, however atypical the home may be, the ecclesiastical mood is lightened now and then by domestic details and family drama as well as religious conflict and disruption.

In short, a blackmailing clergyman—who has already been paid off and silenced once a few years before—arrives at the bishop's palace on the eve of the ordination, where several of his blackmail victims (including the bishop himself) are conveniently gathered. That he doesn't remain alive for long after his arrival will surprise no one, but the mystery is worked out in classic Golden Age style and with charming, believable and sometimes hilarious characters. One of the candidates for ordination, Dick Marlin, gets pulled into helping the passionately anti-clergy local inspector, while also, as a long-time friend of the family, becoming involved in the conflicts and dramas surrounding the bishop's two daughters.

The bishop's palace itself proves a wonderfully evocative setting, a monstrosity from which multiple wings and new additions now branch off, resulting in hallways veering in all directions (and allowing, should one so desire, for easy and unexpected entries and exits). The palace itself is intriguing but add in that it's built next to the dramatic ruins of a medieval abbey, and the eerie stage is set:

Bobs lingered at the lattice. Yes, the snow had fallen and transformed the winter night. The moon fell on blanched lawns, and beyond them laid capricious fingers on the ruins of the Guest House and Infirmarium, visible from this side of the house. The walls lay dark and ominous but a white radiance lit up here a broken roof, there a fragile rose window and desolate turret stairway. Behind them the bare trees and shrubs stood like a ghostly concourse of those Carthusian monks who had paced the cloisters to the first Matins of Christmas long ago. There, beyond the frame of the luxurious rose-velvet curtains, far from the sparkling fire and table behind him, lay the true life of endurance, asceticism and world-denial, thought Bobs, fanciful for once.

As in The Warrielaw Jewel, too, and for that matter in some of her other novels, Peck effectively uses the technique of distancing her story in the past, but nevertheless making occasional references to the present. It's a bit more subdued here than in Warrielaw, in which the main character actually discusses the differences in her own perspective now compared to what it was then. Here, we never really learn who the narrator is (unless I overlooked it), but the technique still works pretty well. In this case, the story is set around Christmas of 1920, but Peck highlights, for example, the similarities or distinctions between that postwar period and the post-World War II period in which she was writing the novel.

Occasionally, this is rather subtle. For instance, surely there is a bit of Peck's post-World War II attitude in this passage about the post-World War I attitudes of the bishop's daughters:

Such a very carefully edited story of Judith's affairs had been given her by her parents that Sue, who knew all about it with the simple acceptance of a post-war youth which would never again confuse ignorance with innocence, sometimes forgot how little she was supposed to know. Victorian girls were not allowed to see or touch pitch for fear of defilement. Sue and her contemporaries had learnt to meet it and wash away the stains carefully afterwards.

I have to make my frequent disclaimer that the solution to the mystery here does not strike me as a particular ingenious one. I had more or less guessed the killer and the motive by the time I reached the big reveal. But, per my norm again, I wasn't bothered at all by that, as the cleverness of the puzzle always takes a back seat to the characters and writing for me, but hardcore fans of puzzle-focused mysteries (do any hardcore fans of puzzle-focused mysteries still read this blog, after all the times I have undoubtedly disappointed them?!) may not be impressed.

This is dangerously close now to being a proper review, but I've managed to keep it a bit shorter than my old norm. So I'll sign off for now and save some other recent reading for next time.

WINIFRED PECK, The Skirts of Time (1935)

"Oh, dear," I imagine many of you saying to yourselves, "he's back onto his Winifred Peck obsession."

And indeed I fear that you're right. For not only does this review follow my earlier posts about Peck's wonderfully charming mystery The Warrielaw Jewel and her sweetly hilarious tale of wartime life in a vicarage, Bewildering Cares (both of them eminently worthy of reprinting), but I've actually already finished reading yet another of Peck's novels, and two more are (fingers crossed) meandering their way to my hot little hands via Interlibrary Loan. Obsession indeed.

One thing that has struck me about these first three novels I'm reviewing is Peck's impressive versatility. A delightful mystery, a rollicking novel of domestic life worthy of E. M. Delafield or D. E. Stevenson, and now, of all things, an historical novel tracing several decades of the women's suffrage movement through the lens of one passionate women's rights activist and her three very different sisters.

Honestly, I'm not always a fan of what might be called "issue" novels—those works that try to sum up all the main points of a pressing social concern, either present or historical. I usually find that they err more on the side of being pedantic and forced than on the side of bringing history to life or even bringing much enlightenment about their subjects. So I was a bit worried when I discovered the theme of Peck's novel. But in fact her writing pulled me in from the first few paragraphs.

The story begins in 1860, with Julia, Arabella, Caroline, and Edith Gorne coming to terms with their dictatorial father's death and the realization that he has mismanaged the family's finances and left them more or less impoverished (as literary fathers are so prone to do—someone could make a fictional killing providing sound investment advice to these eternally misguided schmucks). Ironically (or perhaps logically), their father's cruelty over the years has given the sisters the impetus they need to question the harsh assumptions and dictates of their time, which he has rather heartlessly enforced:

Their ideas of the opposite sex were founded wholly on their father, and Julia was a convinced feminist by instinct before she had reached the age of reason. It was old Anthony's misfortune that amongst his few early friends and patrons he numbered the Martineaus and the Nightingales.

Julia dedicates her life to the cause of women's rights—right up to the novel's end just as suffrage is finally achieved in 1918—and she is so passionate about the cause that she is sometimes blinded to the realities of her sisters' less radical lives. Along the way she rubs shoulders with a number of other important figures in the movement, including Frances Buss, Lydia Becker, and Emily Davison as well as the aforementioned Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale. My personal favorite of these prominent cameos is the dramatic appearance of reformer and activist Josephine Butler in one pivotal scene in which she makes a dramatic rescue of two of the sisters.

The formidable crusader Josephine Butler

There are a few times, perhaps, where the pace of the novel slows a bit to make room for an educational or didactic tidbit, and that might take away from some readers' enjoyment. But Peck clearly did her research on (and/or lived through) the circumstances she was portraying, and her delightful prose and ability to create vivid characters and situations outweighed, for me at least, any sluggishness in the plot. And unlike some issue-oriented novels, where the stakes are presented as cut-and-dried—as if there could never have been any significant dispute among sensible people—Peck even fascinatingly describes some of the conflicts within the early women's movement itself. In particular, the scandalous issues dragged to the surface by Butler—in her crusade on behalf of fallen women—violently divided the women fighting for women's rights more generally and threatened to split the movement entirely.

The passage in which Peck describes Butler's neglected legacy is also a good example of one of Peck's greatest strengths—her ability to view not only the impacts of major historical events but also the ways in which those impacts are filtered through the attitudes, mores, and repressions of their time and the times that follow:

Josephine Butler has never perhaps been accorded her due place in the roll of saints and reformers of her period.

In her own day her work of rescue amongst those unhappy filles de joie whom she called the children of God was veiled in the shroud of Victorian modesty. Many men and some women recognized the self-abnegation which inspired her work, but of that work they could never bring themselves to speak to the younger generation. The generation which followed them inherited a vague tradition that a certain Mrs. Butler had devoted her life to some wonderful but unknown work, and by the time that plain speaking and clear thinking had come into fashion, her struggle against the laws of her country was over, her victory almost won.

As it keeps jumping forward in time, the novel effectively presents the changing realities of the sisters' lives. To some extent, you might imagine it as a fictional iteration of Ruth Adam's wonderful history, A Woman's Place (though beginning and ending a few decades earlier). Arabella marries a clergyman and leads a bleak life of unceasing childbirth and poverty, Edith joins the first class of women admitted to Cambridge, and Caroline takes Julia's espousals of women's freedom in a more scandalous direction and becomes a "loose woman."

In my review of The Warrielaw Jewel, I tried to highlight Peck's skill not only at detailed descriptions of domestic life and furnishings, which create a real sense of the presence of times past that I enjoy a lot, but also her way of lending small domestic details a larger meaning. For some reason, I still find myself thinking now and then of the boredom and uselessness evoked in that novel by the elderly aunts' perpetual embroidery work, which Peck turned into a memorable symbol of the limitations of women's lives in an earlier generation.

This strength also shines through in The Skirts of Time. An example: the scene in which Arabella and Julia—who have been alienated for years due to Arabella's conservative husband's horror at Julia's activism—are reunited, and Arabella puts into context, using a clothing-related frame of reference, the very physical differences between her own existence and Julia's:

Was it possible that she, Arabella, had possessed that ease and grace only six years ago, she who for years had barely laid down one burden before she bore another? Her glance took in Julia's trim tight bodice, the easy fall of her full, draped skirt. Little did her sister know of the lacings and unlacings and weary letting-outs of tucks which fell so often to her portion!

Of course, the title of the novel itself, which comes from Tennyson, also highlights another small wardrobe-oriented domestic shift: the varying styles of women's dress which allowed, gradually, for increased freedom and mobility. And, although I can't bring myself to spoil its impact—should anyone be inspired to track down and read this novel (or should a smart publisher decide to reprint it)—by quoting it here, I will certainly always remember the refusal of Arabella's husband to allow her chloroform at the birth of her umpteenth child, despite the fact that the doctor has said she may not survive without it, and Julia's shocking, hilarious, but perfectly characteristic solution to the problem.

One of my favorite parts of the novel is the evocation of Julia's own time at Cambridge, as, despite being much older than the other young women, she follows in her little sister's footsteps. It's presented from the perspective of a descendent of the sisters, looking at old memorabilia (one of many examples of Peck's fascination with the way urgent present events become part of the past), and it's a rather hilarious and yet touching portrayal:

Another relic which aroused laughter was a reproduction of a lithograph from some ephemeral publication of the day entitled: "Lady Undergraduates Undergoing Final Examinations for the Cambridge Tripos". Beneath the picture of a vaulted Gothic hall where fashionable young women sat in high-backed oak chairs at long refectory tables, watched serenely by a row of professors in caps and gowns, Julia had scribbled the words: "The Ideal!" Some friend had appended a sketch entitled "The Reality". It represented cleverly enough the low, dismal dining-room in a Cambridge Inn where the earliest examinations were held. Over the draped mantelpiece hung a picture of Prince Albert regarding a dead stag at Balmoral, flanked by portraits of leading Cambridge worthies; there was a huge sideboard covered with cruet-stands and bottles of every description, and a long table dotted with paper and bottles of ink. At the window stood a little old lady and out of her mouth came a balloon with the words: "He cometh not, she said!" Ten young ladies drooped over the table. "We've been here for two hours now!" said one. "I wish I'd had breakfast instead of hurrying," said another. "Suppose they can't get hold of a paper this year at all!" sighed a third. It was, as Julia explained, only by the charity of the few dons who sympathized with the mad craving of women for University education and examinations that the examination papers could be smuggled to the ladies at all on the day of the great event. Another rough sketch showed the young ladies, heads bent over the table, scribbling violently, the duenna knitting peacefully at a rocking chair by the fire, while through the window was visible the back of a professor in cap and gown ejaculating: "Well, they've got it! I hope they'll like it." Out of that examination, in spite of her disadvantages and the difficulties in the path of women students, Julia emerged with first-class honours.

This passage has a lovely ring of truth about it, which may stem from Peck's own experiences at Oxford around the turn of the century. It makes me look forward to her two memoirs, A Little Learning and Home for the Holidays, in which are to be found, I hope, more such scenes minus the veil of fiction. (For better or worse, I'll probably end up discussing those books here too...)

People always say that a book should be "required reading" for such-and-such an audience, and I always feel cynical about such recommendations. But I have to admit that I'm tempted to use it in this case. I'm not any kind of expert on suffrage novels (though this one has driven me to request a history of the movement from the library). A few years ago, I read Elizabeth Robins' The Convert (1907), written nearly three decades before Peck's novel (and before suffrage was actually achieved, which lends it an immediacy that a retrospective novel can't match) and enjoyed it very much, and I've been meaning to read Persephone's reprint of Constance Maud's No Surrender (1911) ever since it came out. But that may be the extent of my expertise on the subject. From that limited perspective, however, I can honestly say that if you're going to read a novel about the dawning of feminism and the motivations driving it, you could hardly make a more entertaining choice.

One of Julia's last assertions particularly caught my eye:

"The world's all so kind and sentimental now that it loves to rescue victims and put them on pedestals. But no one cares for simple common-sense fair play!"

Reading the news on any given day, I think this assessment might remain as true today.

WINIFRED PECK, Bewildering Cares: A Week in the Life of a Clergyman's Wife (1940)

"And as I am trying to do without a library subscription in Lent," I said, "and there are no evening meetings owing to this blessed black-out, I shall just write down for her what the life of a parson's wife is like. Just one week to show her how everything happens and nothing happens!"

If the title weren't enough to give us a pretty clear idea of the subject matter of this novel, set in the early, limbo days of World War II before the Blitz began, this statement, made by the adorable Camilla Lacely to her husband Arthur, the vicar of Stampfield a medium-sized town in the midlands not too far from Manchester, spells it out for us.

Those of you who read my enthusiastic review of Winifred Peck's early mystery novel The Warrielaw Jewel not long ago will hardly be surprised (knowing also as you do my obsessive nature) that I immediately set about acquiring another of her smart, funny, beautifully observed novels.  Commenting on that review, Lyn suggested that, judging from my enthusiasm, perhaps it would be a new title for my imaginary publishing venture, Furrowed Middlebrow Books, and indeed I am now worried that I may be about to embark on publishing a shiny new imaginary edition of The Complete (and Feloniously Underappreciated) Works of Winifred Peck.

I also mentioned in my earlier post a few of Peck's other novels, including two that seemed surely to be related—They Come, They Go: The Story of an English Rectory (1937) and Bewildering Cares: A Week in the Life of a Clergyman's Wife (1940)—and I immediately placed interlibrary loan requests for both.  That way, I thought, if the latter really was a sequel of sorts to the former, I would have a double-header review all lined up.  Sadly, while my online library account kept assuring me that the status of my request for They Come, They Go was "Awaiting Arrival" (I pictured a welcome party eagerly anticipating, checking their watches, wondering what on earth could have become of it, etc.), the status hadn't changed in more than a week when my self control gave out and I had to dive into Bewildering Cares.  So, no double-header review, alas and alack.  (But I will still report on the other book eventually, assuming that it's much-heralded arrival comes to fruition.)

In some ways, my excitement about these two of Peck's books in particular might seem rather odd.  I am not at all a religious person, but somehow I am completely enamored with the world of vicarages and rectories (though I have to admit I'm not completely sure of the difference), and the generally kind-hearted, dedicated people who live in them and often have a rather thankless calling in providing aid, assistance, and moral support for their communities.  Of course, I'm a little afraid that this enamoration (it should be a word!) may result as much from my viewing of The Vicar of Dibley and Clatterford and my reading of Agatha Christie, Angela Thirkell, and Barbara Pym as from any concrete experience of how vicars and curates and rectors (oh, my!) live in their natural habitats.  But the prevalence of such characters and settings in British fiction and television surely suggests some basis in reality, right?

Oh, for a different photo of Peck, but this seems
to be the only one that's readily available

The novel goes very much (but perhaps not entirely) as you might expect from Camilla's own description.  The main event of the week in question is the controversy swirling around a passionately pacifist sermon delivered by the curate, Mr. Strang.  The outrage and debate gradually runs its course during the week—"It will be a storm in a tea-cup, of course, but then we happen to live in a tea-cup!"—but demands much time and energy (particularly because Camilla inadvertently napped through much of the sermon in question and so rather awkwardly has to avoid all in-depth discussion of it).  There's also anxiety about her son Dick, off training with his regiment, the ill health of one of the residents of the local almshouse, who has become a friend, some slight servant woes (interesting precursors to Peck's House-Bound, published two years later), much concern about the sacrifices and rituals of Lent, and a potential middle-aged romance between the church organist and a woman who runs a local shop—all of which require Camilla's involvement and patience, despite her frequent yearnings for silence and solitude.  I so thoroughly relate to her theory of talkers vs. non-talkers:

Anyhow, the telephone bell rang, and I found Mrs. Pratt asking, in her rich full contralto, if she might come in to tea this afternoon. As Kate will be overjoyed to find that there is a reason for using her best room this afternoon, and as I really like Mrs. Pratt, I was very glad to consent, though I must confess I should have enjoyed a peaceful solitary tea over a new library book better still. Sometimes I feel that Trappist monasteries weren't really founded in any excess of asceticism, but just to fulfil a felt need, a place where the naturally silent might escape from the born talkers. The Church of England is no home for the former class. Scattered through the length and breadth of our unhappy country are those who are quite convinced that the world can be saved by lectures and meetings, discussions and re-unions. To satisfy their lust for speech there must always be an army of patient, silent listeners, seated perpetually in hard rows of chairs enduring the incessant hose-pipe of earnest addresses and talks and sermons.

There's the obvious comparison here—made more obvious by her being mentioned several times in the book as one of Camilla's favorite authors—to E. M. Delafield's Provincial Lady books, but Peck is not so biting in her humor, and she has her serious as well as zany side.  She's not as cynical as Barbara Pym nor as daftly hilarious as Angela Thirkell, who is also mentioned as a favorite, when Camilla yearns for time to dive into Wild Strawberries yet again (she also mentions Winifred Holtby and Dorothy Whipple, so she is clearly a kindred spirit).  I would almost go out on a limb and say that Peck seems to me the more "mature" writer, more polished and also more subtle in the points she gets across.  Hers is a quietly logical, sane, thoughtful, and genuine voice that I could hear in my head all day long without tiring of it.  In fact, I have had to remind myself how many other books I need to be reading, or I might well have slipped back to the beginning of Bewildering Cares and started the whole wonderful experience anew.  (It could still happen...)

Jacket flap description

Even when Peck occasionally explores the real conflicts and dilemmas of religious life in wartime—a retreat leader who asserts that they should not be praying for victory because they cannot know that it's God's will, or how to make appropriate sacrifices for Lent at a time when rationing is already forcing sacrifices enough—she does so in such a charming and interesting way that I ate it all up.  If I had worried at first that it might veer toward preachiness or sentimentality, I needn't have.  In addition to Clarissa's alarming tendency to snooze during sermons or let her mind wander to plans for tomorrow's lunch when she's supposed to be engaged in spiritual reflection, her recollections of her son Dick's skewerings of false piety and prissiness also come into play, as when she reflects on tensions with a village woman:

Perhaps what is really at the root of the trouble is that she hasn't approved of Dick, and Dick has described her as an Anglican pussyface, ever since we left the house together, after a croquet party with two of her gay yet serious Anglican nieces, and Dick declared outside the open windows, with an emphasis which must have been overheard, that he believed even the balls and hoops had been baptized by an Archbishop.

There are two marvellous scenes late in the novel that are among the funniest and most enjoyable I've read in ages.  The first details a day-long Lent observance, in which Clarissa and a group of other women alternate between periods of silent reflection and periods of discussion of religious and moral themes.  I made the mistake of starting this scene while sitting at my desk during a lunch break, and nearly humiliated myself with giggles and guffaws and a few out-and-out snorts.  During one of the periods of silence, the women are supposed to make notes on any enlightening thoughts:

By this time I had acquired a pencil and paper from Mrs. Stead, but all I found on the paper afterwards, I regret to say, was:

(1) A drawing of snowdrops under a cedar tree—quite good;

(2) The Problem of Pain. Incomplete: cf. Saint Paul and parable of sheep and goats—Vic; Redempt.;

(3) A sketch of Mrs. Gage's gown—she always calls them gowns and says her maid makes them for her. This I can well believe, as whatever their material they are of a design which always suggests the fashions of 1910 modified by a study of last year's Vogue and a subtle hint of ecclesiastical vestments.

Then there's a cake and candy sale to aid the church, and Clarissa's reflections on church sales generally and the items therein:

At one of these [tables] Miss Boness severely guarded the collection of woollies, night-dresses and work-bags which go the round of all our Sales, and probably date back in origin to the beginning of the century. These hardy perennials owe their existence to the fact that all Church workers have a Bazaar Drawer in which they thrust the unsaleable goods which they buy, out of sheer pity, from other stall-holders, and out of which they extract articles when they are called upon to send offerings to yet another effort. Dick says that at the bottom of my receptacle he once found a pair of what he calls "frillies", with a portrait of Gladstone stamped on one leg and of Lord Salisbury on the other; but this is sheer libel. As none of the articles here can conceivably be described as cakes or candy, I can only imagine that their owners felt a sort of nostalgia to see them on show once again.

...

At this I had, of course, to add a rather poisonous-looking mauve sugar cake, wrapped up with almost undue anxiety for economy in paper, to my parcel of handkerchiefs, a bag of eggs, and a greyish-white woolly "boudoir-wrap" which by this time could almost find its own way to my bazaar-drawer, I imagine, so often has it returned there to emerge again in the last three years.

If you're not completely charmed by such passages, then I just don't know what to say to you, I'm afraid.  And I'm also deeply sorry, because that means you'll probably also be bored by the inevitable reviews of more Peck novels undoubtedly to come.  But if you are charmed, then you may well be able to track this book down with just a bit of determination.  Happily, it has not completely ceased to exist either in U.S. or U.K. libraries, and copies for sale do not seem to be completely beyond the budgetary pale. 

Or, of course, you could wait for the Furrowed Middlebrow Books edition...

WINIFRED PECK, The Warrielaw Jewel (1933)

Winifred Peck's 1942 novel House-Bound was one of the first Persephone reprints I picked up (soon after D. E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book, which had led me to Persephone in the first place), and I was immediately enamored with its tale of a middle-class woman in wartime Edinburgh who dives in to trying to keep her own house, in the absence of any viable domestic help.  It's not riotous humor, by any means, but charmingly subtle human comedy based on believable characters and true-to-life situations.  Although my first instinct, I recall, was to be rather condescending to poor Rose Fairweather—since of course nowadays we mostly all (at least the folks I hang out with) keep our own houses (though it is also true that I, for one, do not need to clean out a coal-burning stove when I stagger out of bed in the morning), Peck soon made me empathize completely with this delightful character who was really sort of daring and remarkable in her own way, and who approached her steep learning curve with optimism and energy and without whining and moaning about it.  And that was that—I fell in love with Rose and stayed in love with her through a second reading of the novel.

Ever since that time, I've intended to read more of Peck's intriguing body of work.  It includes some quite seductive-sounding titles for a middlebrow addict—and for the treasure hunter in me, they are seductively hard to come by as well.  For instance, there's They Come, They Go: The Story of an English Rectory (1937) and what must surely be its sequel, Bewildering Cares: A Week in the Life of a Clergyman's Wife (1940).  There's Peck's memoir of her early life in A Little Learning, or, A Victorian Childhood (1952).  Plus, there's a whole slew of other novels—perhaps The Skirts of Time (1935) would be a favorite?  Or There Is a Fortress (1945)?  Perhaps Winding Ways (1951)?  I hope to find out someday.

But even when I was doing my initial research on Peck a couple of years ago, I somehow completely missed the fact that she had in fact also written two well-received mystery novels.  It wasn't until I was drafting my Mystery List a few weeks ago that I came across that tantalizing fact, and I immediately and quite spontaneously requested the first of these, The Warrielaw Jewel, from the library.

I'm always saying that I'm surprised that this book or that book has not been reprinted.  It's the recurring refrain of this blog.  But I truly am surprised about this one.  Dating from the Golden Age of mystery writing and set a quarter century earlier in Edwardian Edinburgh, The Warrielaw Jewel is told by the wife of an attorney, who by-the-by becomes a crucial witness in a case that includes mysterious disappearances of jewels and people, as well as wholesale murder.  It's not only a completely competent and rather clever mystery (which, rest assured, I will not spoil here), but also a marvellously evocative portrayal of its place and time:

This story of mine is now I suppose historical. My own children apply the term to that period, so far away from modern youth, when King Edward VII lived, and skirts were long and motors few, and the term Victorian was not yet a reproach. Yet as I look back I see no very profound differences in modern youth and my own upbringing. Before I married I lived with a literary father and artistic mother in Kensington Square, and that life seems to me to have changed but little in essentials. But when, after my marriage, I went to live in Edinburgh, I did feel that I had stepped back definitely into history. I am not speaking of the stricter social and ceremonial proprieties, already undermined by the charming youth of the city. It was not these things which surprised me, but a deeper truth, unimagined by a post-war generation. Edinburgh was not in those days a city, but a fortuitous collection of clans. Beneath a society always charming and interesting on the surface, and delightful to strangers, lurked a history of old hatreds, family quarrels, feuds as old as the Black Douglas. Nor were the clans united internally, except indeed at attack from without. Often already my mother-in-law had placidly dissuaded me from asking relations to meet, on the ground that they did not recognise each other.

The novel's main characters, apart from the narrator, Betty Morrison, and her husband John, are an eccentric family of decayed gentlefolk led by a true domestic dominatrix, Jessica Warrielaw, and her meek martyr of a sister, Mary.  Then there are a small array of other relatives, including Cora and Neil, two cousins who have had just a bit too close a relationship.  Especially in describing the two sisters, Peck does a beautiful job of making vividly real their rather stunted lives.  She's particularly skilled at using descriptions of tangible objects to reveal this, as when the narrator describes Mary's room in the creaky, run-down old mansion:

It had been furnished last, like Jessica's, when the front portion of the house was built, in the style we know so well from Leech's pictures in Punch. But the monumental suite of mahogany and the canopied bed were, like Jessica's, dull and tarnished with years and neglect, and the Axminster carpet almost threadbare. In such rooms as those of the two sisters, all over Scotland in the last half-century, families of daughters grew up to lonely and unhonoured spinsterhood, victims to the traditions and extravagance of the past. Outside, the sun was shining again on the budding trees, and the rooks were calling, but within, youth and spring had passed away irretrievably…

And, just a short while later, Peck uses a stereotypically appropriate "feminine" hobby to show the rather sad, desperate emptiness of Mary's existence:

Incredible as it must seem to this generation, not only the Misses Warrielaw, but many of my own contemporaries spent hours over this peculiarly fatuous form of fancy work. With meticulous care we would pierce holes in white muslin and carefully embroider their edges with white thread till the hole was barely visible. My efforts in that direction had been confined to the corner of one handkerchief, still unfinished, but Miss Mary had been working for years, I imagined, at the large, grimy bedspread laid out before me, punctured inch by inch with embroidered holes.

In a way, the narrator's repeated interest in how different things are now (i.e. in 1933) than they were when the events she describes occurred reminds me a bit of Catherine Aird's A Late Phoenix, another mystery I wrote about fairly recently.  Here, as there, memories of a now-distant way-of-life and set of standards play a crucial role in the mystery, and the changed perceptions of that earlier time are an important concern.  And each little acknowledgement by the narrator of those changed perceptions is packed with wonderful detail of the earlier period, as when she describes how people felt about their automobiles when automobiles were new and exciting possessions:

These were the early days of owner-drivers, and my heart bled for our new, immaculate Albion and its tyres. This generation will never understand the mingled emotions of early motorists, the care and affection we transferred from our horses, the pride of pioneers, and the interest in every other car.

A sentiment she connects up humorously in this comment on the feelings of her and her husband driving away after an evening with the Warrielaws:

Anyone who climbed into our car to-day, and sat, perched over its crude gadgets, in a smell of petrol and an incessant draught, would feel that they had strayed back into the Dark Ages. But upon that evening, I remember, our Albion seemed to me a gay centre of warmth and modernity and civilisation, as we drove homewards and left the gloomy house behind us.

I could quote a dozen more passages that made me smile or pause in my reading to reflect on Peck's vivid images of a time gone by, but I don't want to be giving away anything much about the mystery itself, which, with Betty's charming narration, is too entertaining in its unfolding for me to spoil.  The puzzle, as it's often called, is not the most brilliant I've ever read, but as mysteries go I found it convincing and surprising.  But bear in mind that I have never once guessed "whodunit" when reading a mystery (and sometimes, as I think I've confessed before, I still can't even when reading a mystery for the second or third time!), because I tend to be so much more interested in the characters and settings and descriptions of day-to-day life than I am in who pulled the trigger, tightened the rope, tinkered with the brakes, or flung a poisoned dart across a crowded room without anyone noticing.  So I am perhaps not the best judge.  Your experience may vary, as shady advertisers often put it.  However, if you share my own focus on substance over puzzle, then I can't imagine that you'll be disappointed here.

One rather odd thing about the book, which certainly seems more of a gimmick by the publisher than something Peck herself would have chosen to do: There's a notice on pages 250-251 of the novel (see picture) putting the reader on notice that all of the evidence and clues have now been presented and challenging them to solve the mystery without reading further.  I've never seen such a thing outside of some old children's mysteries I seem to recall reading as a child, but you might either find this notice rather funny and charming or merely a silly distraction, depending on your own readerly predilections.

Needless to say, in response to the publisher's query "Can you do it?" I promptly replied "Certainly not" and went blithely on turning pages, but perhaps you'll be less averse to accepting the challenge?

I have to close with one final, very simple, example of Peck's irresistible domestic humor—one that might almost have been lifted from House-Bound, written nearly a decade later:

I was almost as embarrassed as the two men when Cora began to cry. After all, there are certain things any woman may cry for legitimately, like losing a cook or some teeth or an engagement ring, but not in front of strangers, and not as if her heart was broken.

Of course one might sob at the loss of one's cook.  Just ask Rose Fairweather.