Miss Bunting (1945) by Angela Thirkell

(published by Hamish Hamilton) Book review by Hilary Temple. Jane Austen notoriously ‘didn’t mention the war’ in her novels according to some critics – though anyone reading Mansfield Park or Persuasion with any attention finds the international perspective is a given. Thirkell, writing similarly about ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’, uses WWII … Continue reading →

Cheerfulness Breaks In (1940) by Angela Thirkell

Book review by Hilary Temple. (Published by Hamish Hamilton) Cheerfulness Breaks In might seem an odd title for a novel dealing with the outbreak of WWII. Its origin can be found in any dictionary of quotations: in Boswell’s Life of Johnson Oliver Edwards says ‘I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; … Continue reading →

Second review of Joy and Josephine by Monica Dickens (1948)

Book Review by Jane V. The book opens with a kind of prologue. An Irish girl puts her crucifix in the folds of a newborn baby’s blanket and leaves the child in a church porch. Chapter One opens on a train travelling to the West Country soon after WW1. Seated in the carriage are three … Continue reading →

Twenty-Four Hours Leave (1943) by Renee Shann (pen name of Carol Gaye)

By Helen N. This is an American edition (Triangle Books, New York 1944) of a 1943 British novel, which accounts for the cover which has a sketchy picture of a woman in uniform reading a letter. It is very much a “Woman’s book”, in that the story is written from the woman’s point of view, … Continue reading →

Something in My Heart (1944) by Walter Greenwood

Book review posted by Chris Hopkins. Walter Greenwood is, of course, famous as the Salford author of the best remembered thirties depression novel, Love on the Dole, a novel which has had considerable impact, then and since. In fact, he lived for the rest of his life as a professional author, writing new works and … Continue reading →