The Victorian Chaise Longue
10 best books like The Victorian Chaise Longue (Marghanita Laski): Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary, Miss Ranskill Comes Home, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, The Pumpkin Eater, The Provincial Lady in America, The Priory, William - An Englishman, The Home-Maker, The Hopkins Manuscript
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew...
| Author | Ruby Ferguson |
| ISBN | 1903155436 |
Sometimes the introduction (or foreword) to a book is a pointless bore, but it can also illuminate a book in a particular way that makes the reading experience more enjoyable. Candia McWilliam provides the foreword to this one and I highly recommend that you read it first, as it does set you up for what...
| Author | Barbara Bower |
| ISBN | 1903155363 |
Published in 1946, under her married name, Barbara Bower.
Description: Tells the tale of a woman who goes on a cruise and is swept overboard. She lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she...
| Author | Mollie Panter-Downes |
| ISBN | 0953478076 |
For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes' name was associated with "The New Yorker", for which she wrote a regular 'Letter from London', book reviews and over thirty short stories; of the twenty-one in "Good Evening, Mrs Craven", written between 1939 and 1944, only two had ever been reprinted - these very...
| Author | Penelope Mortimer |
| ISBN | 0747518874 |
4.5 stars rounded up
I must admit I haven’t read anything by Mortimer before and on the evidence of this book I should have. It is about a woman in a downward spiral and is an acerbic and humorous (in a very bleak way) comment on marriage, gender relations and being a woman being controlled by men (husbands...
| Author | E.M. Delafield |
| ISBN | 0897335392 |
I enjoyed this next episode of the doings of the Provincial Lady, though not quite as much as I did the first two volumes. I'm not sure whether this was because the freshness was wearing off the idea, or because her trip to America (she ventures up into Canada as well as to various cities in the US) took us away...
| Author | Dorothy Whipple |
| ISBN | 1903155304 |
The setting for this, the third novel by Dorothy Whipple Persephone have published, is Saunby Priory, a large house somewhere in England which has seen better times. We are shown the two Marwood girls, who are nearly grown-up, their father, the widower Major Marwood, and their aunt; then, as soon as...
| Author | Cicely Hamilton |
| ISBN | 0953478009 |
William was 'written in a rage in 1918; this extraordinary novel... is a passionate assertion of the futility of war' (the Spectator). Its author had been an actress and suffragette; after 1914 she worked at the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont and organised Concerts at the Front. William - an...
| Author | Dorothy Canfield Fisher |
| ISBN | 0897330692 |
Although this novel first appeared in 1924, it deals in an amazingly contemporary manner with the problems of a family in which both husband and wife are oppressed and frustrated by the roles they are expected to play. Evangeline Knapp is the perfect, compulsive housekeeper, while her husband, Lester,...
| Author | R.C. Sherriff |
| ISBN | 1903155487 |
In The Hopkins Manuscript we watch through his eyes as the moon veers off course, draws slowly closer to the earth, and finally crashes into it on May 3rd 1946. Because it falls into the Atlantic much of humanity survives – only to generate new disasters. But this is not science fiction in the mode of H...
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
| Author | Julia Strachey |
| ISBN | 1903155274 |
This was absolute rubbish. Wicked too. The story was that although her wedding was but a few hours off, the bride couldn't make up her mind whether she should get married or run off with a previous lover, a dithering sort of person whose job took him on great adventures abroad. He had just turned up again...
