38 Young Anne Dorothy Whipple
This is the first novel written by this forgotten author, published in 1927 a well observed account of how different women's lives were a century ago. DW was probably ahead of her time in recognising the huge disparity between how the sexes lived their lives and was clearly rooting for the advancement of women in the early part of the 20th century. She describes women's lives as in the shadow of their menfolk both in the advancement of their less able male siblings and later on in the confines of marriage. In this, Anne of the title, grows up overseen not so much her emotionally distant mother, or often to be exasperated with her father, but the kindly hands on house maid, Emily, who sees Anne through the trials and tribulations of her school years and beyond offering to pay for a secretarial course when family finances have dried up, which proves pivotal to her entry into the working world, at that time so many women of her class sat around in the home doing very little. In the extended family is a vile old bigot of an aunt, who Anne has the misfortune to live with after the death of her father and the ensuing dispersal of the Pritchard family. Old Aunt Orchard is a frightful elderly woman still immersed in the protocols of the Victorian age, whose petty prejudices are often in full flow, particularly when Anne is sent to a catholic convent by her mother for the final years of her school life, often letting her know that she regards all catholics as persona non grata and because, that's where she's been educated and subject to their influences, she won't be leaving her any of her money. There are a number of biographical elements, in that, George Yates, the young man she is to fall in love with, I read is a tribute to the writer's lost love who was killed in The Great War, and whilst George in the book, who claws his way up from the then lower classes, via Grammar School, Oxford and a commission in the Army, is to survive the war, and to become a clandestine love for Anne when, again like the author she, without too much thought, marries a much older man, but with an eye to escaping the auspices of her frightful aunt. The forward to this book is by the Guardian's Lucy Magnan, clearly a devotee of Dorothy Whipple and having read a couple of her books now it's easy to see why.
then do park yourself right here and tell us about it, where I'm sure you'll have a captive audience.