Chatterton Square

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I do not accept copies of newly written books for review, since most of the authors that interest me are currently dead. E.H Young is a fabulous Virago author – and Chatterton Square – her final novel proved to be a fantastic pick for my third All Virago/All August read of the month. I wasn't sure when I started this if I was going to like it but by the time I had got half way through it I was really enjoying it.

I was surprised by this book, as I didn't really know anything about EH Young and expected it to be fairly frivolous.One of those books that would have sunk into oblivion if Virago didn't have to trawl through history reprinting every forgotten female author. His own wife and younger daughter continually insult him, and hardly with great subtlety or wit, but he's such a buffoon that he never notices.

But once it because apparent that Bertha resented her husband for the way he treated her and had always treated her (like she was his possession and she was there to cater to his every whim and fancy and to listen to him blather on and he could give a damn if she had an opinion on something because he was smarter than her and he was a man and she a woman), then E.

H. Young’s other novels, and although it is centered on one of her most memorable characters, Rosamund Frazer, it is both more important and more compelling than any of her previous novels because of the decade which has intervened between it and her others.

I'm much better off as I am and I'm coming to the conclusion that the happiest people are the ones who have missed everything they thought they wanted. James Fraser and Flora Blackett are students at the same university and have developed a mild flirtation, and middle daughter Rhoda has begun borrowing books from Miss Spanner. It was also a bit frustrating because there is a lot that is unresolved -- if you want your endings neat and tidy, you won't like the end of this book, but since it's set on the eve of WWII, it would be unrealistic to expect anything else. For those of us who have so many choices, it is an interesting reminder of what life didn't offer single women in other eras. The only criticisms I would make are that the oblique political and personal references are perhaps a little too oblique for modern tastes - I didn't quite get what was going on for two of the background characters, one of whom doesn't even make a direct appearance.

The way Young draws this marriage is truly astonishing – in the minutely observed ways each behaves, and the vividly real dynamic that emerges.