Book review by George S: Sorry, but this won’t be an entirely objective review, because I didn’t so much read this book as wallow in it. Over the years I have seen three good stage productions of the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein Showboat, as well as the 1936 and 1951 films. Reading the novel (the first … Continue reading
Tagged with romance …
Madam, Will You Talk? (1955) by Mary Stewart (another review)
Will you accept of the key of my heart To bind us together and to never never part? Madam, will you walk? Madam, will you talk with me? No, I won’t accept of the key of your heart To bind us together and to never never part. Neither will I walk, Neither will I talk … Continue reading
Mary Stewart’s The Ivy Tree (1961) – another review
Book review by Alice C: A strange, unexpected tale. Unexpected in that I’d never read any Mary Stewart before and I’d expected a rural love story (boring) but instead I got a Russian Doll of twists and turns, plots within plots, mistaken identity, impersonation, attempted murder, death by horse and beyond..
The Ivy Tree (1961) by Mary Stewart
Book review by Frances S: The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart was first published in 1961, slightly later than the usual Reading 1900-1950 period but otherwise well qualified for the Popular Fiction canon. I recently came across, in a totally different context, a current online entry by literary agent Caroline Wood. Wood says that she … Continue reading
Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart (1956)
Book review by Mary P: This was Mary Stewart’s second novel. It is written in the first person, so throughout we have the viewpoint of Gianetta. She is a model, divorced, and making her own living in London. Feeling under pressure her family suggest that she takes a holiday at a hotel in Skye. When … Continue reading
Mary Stewart – My Brother Michael (1959)
Book review by Jane Varley: ‘The contemporary thriller at its very best’, wrote the Guardian. ‘The result of my own visits to Greece and the impact of that wonderful country on a mind steeped in the classics, My Brother Michael was my love affair with Greece.’ Mary Stewart When I was in the first flush … Continue reading
The Secret Kingdom (1938) by Walter Greenwood
Book review by Chris Hopkins. Walter Greenwood’s father was a hairdresser and by the time he married Elizabeth Matilda Walter he had opened his own hairdresser’s shop (‘Tom’s Hairdressing Saloon’) at 56 Ellor Street, Salford (the premises are pictured in the frontispiece to Greenwood’s memoir, There Was A Time, 1967 and also on the Salford University … Continue reading
Helen of Four Gates (1917) by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s previous novel, Miss Nobody (1913), had not been a commercial success, and that may be one of the reasons why her new publisher, Herbert Jenkins, chose to issue this one anonymously as by ‘An Ex Mill Girl’. Some reviewers found the pseudonym confusing; it suggested that they would be reading an account … Continue reading
The Man in Grey – a Regency Romance (1941), by Eleanor Smith
It’s tosh and I loved it. Bath gentility, Almack’s assemblies, gauzy frocks, curricles and phaetons, two aristocrats in a marriage of convenience, her lover and his mistress. I can’t help feeling that Georgette Heyer would have arranged matters very differently. The cynical, bored Marquis of Rohan, the Man in Grey, would have met not the … Continue reading
Pomfret Towers (1938) by Angela Thirkell
This is a comic novel about a group of families in Barsetshire – the imaginary county that Angela Thirkell took over from Anthony Trollope. Much of it happens during an eventful weekend party at Pomfret Towers, home of Lord Pomfret, whose rudeness is a constant source of embarrassment to others and delight for the reader. … Continue reading
Reading 1900-1950 