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callmemadamIn 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.
I read Young Mrs Savage years ago in a very tatty old paperback edition. I seemed to remember liking it, which is why I requested a copy. The story is set not long after the Second World War. Dinah Savage is twenty-eight, a widow with four young children. Her husband wasn’t killed in the war but in an accident afterwards, so can’t be mourned as a hero. Apart from permanent tiredness and making-do, Dinah’s problem is that she hasn’t come to terms with the fact that her charming late husband was actually a bit of a shit. Her kindly neighbour looks after her finances. When her beloved brother Dan turns up after seven years away, he and the neighbour discuss what is best for her to do, which seems very patronising to me. Her neighbour’s worry is that she can’t afford to send all those children to boarding school and will have to move somewhere with good day schools. Dan hates to see her looking so pale and thin and has a plan: to go back home to Nannie, who now runs their childhood home as a guest house. What a relief for Dinah: no more housework, shopping and cooking for a while! So follows a delightful time in rural Scotland, being looked after (these old nannies!) and sorting herself out. D E Stevenson excelled at describing that sort of Scottish life and it’s all very enjoyable. Dan’s idea is that they should set up house together in Edinburgh (schools for the children) but could there be a new romance for Dinah? The book was as good as I remembered, partly for the Scottishness but mainly due to Dinah’s psychological struggles, which make it a little deeper than many of Stevenson’s books.
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.
I read Young Mrs Savage years ago in a very tatty old paperback edition. I seemed to remember liking it, which is why I requested a copy. The story is set not long after the Second World War. Dinah Savage is twenty-eight, a widow with four young children. Her husband wasn’t killed in the war but in an accident afterwards, so can’t be mourned as a hero. Apart from permanent tiredness and making-do, Dinah’s problem is that she hasn’t come to terms with the fact that her charming late husband was actually a bit of a shit. Her kindly neighbour looks after her finances. When her beloved brother Dan turns up after seven years away, he and the neighbour discuss what is best for her to do, which seems very patronising to me. Her neighbour’s worry is that she can’t afford to send all those children to boarding school and will have to move somewhere with good day schools. Dan hates to see her looking so pale and thin and has a plan: to go back home to Nannie, who now runs their childhood home as a guest house. What a relief for Dinah: no more housework, shopping and cooking for a while! So follows a delightful time in rural Scotland, being looked after (these old nannies!) and sorting herself out. D E Stevenson excelled at describing that sort of Scottish life and it’s all very enjoyable. Dan’s idea is that they should set up house together in Edinburgh (schools for the children) but could there be a new romance for Dinah? The book was as good as I remembered, partly for the Scottishness but mainly due to Dinah’s psychological struggles, which make it a little deeper than many of Stevenson’s books.
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Date: 2021-12-15 09:40 pm (UTC)