Two new arrivals from Bloomsbury, the latest in the Bloomsbury Group collection of twentieth century gems (I covered the first two here and here). But what has my curious post title got to do with Frank Baker's Miss Hargreaves or Ada Leverson's Love's Shadow? Well, these two books are firm favourites of the equally excellent Stuck-in-a-book and Random Jottings, respectively, and they have the honour to be quoted on the back covers. Simon shares billing with an unnamed reviewer from The Sunday Times, but Elaine has none other than Barry Humphries for company (and he is - I read - a bibliomaniac with a collection of books 25,000 strong, so they would get on well!).
Love's Shadow is "a wry, sparkling comedy of manners", first published in 1908, and I look forward to reading it, but Miss Hargreaves I have read, and I am very pleased it's back in print. Here are my impressions from two years ago:
This is a curious novel but an absolutely delightful one. It is part Ealing comedy and Whitehall farce, part E.M. Delafield's The Diary of a Provincial Lady
, with overtones of E.F.Benson's Mapp and Lucia
, and
a Trollopian setting, and it is the only book I've read which includes
descriptions of organ-playing exciting enough to make me want to find
the nearest loft and learn to play! ("The Doctor, warmly improvising in
B major....enriched the firm prose of the Diapasons with the drama of
the Full Swell" - and there's more in quite visceral mode, too long to
quote here).
The story turns on a character 'invented' by two friends on the spur of the moment in order to enliven a tedious encounter with the sexton of an Irish church. Little did they appreciate as they wove a plausible and well-plenished history for 'Miss Hargreaves' that "creative thought creates" and they would soon be encountering the redoubtable lady in real life. What happens then is both very funny and very moving, slightly batty and anything but commonplace (which Miss H. "abominates", by the way, along with "fuss"), and with its picture of life in and around Cornford Cathedral Close - "She was a very large woman, Mrs. Auty, whose great ambition in life was to run Cornford....Canon Auty, it was said, had first met his wife on a mountain in Switzerland, where he found her presiding over an impending avalanche" - it explores big ideas on a small, contained stage. I have a feeling it's going to linger in the mind.
It did!
