![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In January, the lovely people at Dean Street Press are bringing out eleven new Furrowed Middlebrow titles and they’re all by D E Stevenson. They send me e-books and I got Five Windows and The Fair Miss Fortune. I asked for Young Mrs Savage and they obligingly sent that, too.
Suppose I told you a story about a boy called David. He goes to London to work and seek his fortune. He doesn’t know a soul but soon meets some strange characters. In his spare time, he writes and gets published. Then suddenly he realises that he loves a girl he’s known all his life, only to find that she has been in love with him all the time. ‘Aha’, you might say, ‘David Copperfield!’ Nope, it’s Five Windows by D E Stevenson. This is quite unlike any other book by Stevenson which I’ve read. It’s a first-person narrative, written entirely from a man’s point of view; not her usual style at all. The ‘five windows’ represent the stages of his life: the first the view from his childhood bedroom, the next an Edinburgh window when he stays with his uncle in order to go to school there and so on. Unlike his more famous namesake, this David has a happy childhood in a Scottish village, a son of the manse. Much of the charm of the book lies, as usual, in the depictions of Scottish scenery and delightful Scottish characters. Once David moves to London there is a Dickensian touch about the nicer people he meets. There’s nothing not to like about David. His background has given him a solid moral grounding, he’s hard working and amusing. I really enjoyed the book.
I wrote something about The Fair Miss Fortune here, when it was printed for the first time by Greyladies. It’s a pleasant enough story but the joke wears rather thin by the end of the book and like, all practical jokes, nearly turns very unfunny indeed.
( more )
Suppose I told you a story about a boy called David. He goes to London to work and seek his fortune. He doesn’t know a soul but soon meets some strange characters. In his spare time, he writes and gets published. Then suddenly he realises that he loves a girl he’s known all his life, only to find that she has been in love with him all the time. ‘Aha’, you might say, ‘David Copperfield!’ Nope, it’s Five Windows by D E Stevenson. This is quite unlike any other book by Stevenson which I’ve read. It’s a first-person narrative, written entirely from a man’s point of view; not her usual style at all. The ‘five windows’ represent the stages of his life: the first the view from his childhood bedroom, the next an Edinburgh window when he stays with his uncle in order to go to school there and so on. Unlike his more famous namesake, this David has a happy childhood in a Scottish village, a son of the manse. Much of the charm of the book lies, as usual, in the depictions of Scottish scenery and delightful Scottish characters. Once David moves to London there is a Dickensian touch about the nicer people he meets. There’s nothing not to like about David. His background has given him a solid moral grounding, he’s hard working and amusing. I really enjoyed the book.
I wrote something about The Fair Miss Fortune here, when it was printed for the first time by Greyladies. It’s a pleasant enough story but the joke wears rather thin by the end of the book and like, all practical jokes, nearly turns very unfunny indeed.
( more )
