My books of the decade

Somehow, I hadn’t realised that we were coming to the end of a decade – when I say I hadn’t realised, I just hadn’t thought about it. Then, I started seeing people talking about their books of the decade. Oh! I thought. It’s always such fun coming up with a list – even when it meant delving around in the basement area of this blog – looking at the posts that I migrated over from my previous blog in 2012. When I say books of the decade – I don’t mean books published in the last decade – I leave that to other bloggers, because spoiler alert – none of my list were first published in the last decade.

So here they are, one wonderful novel for each year of the last decade – with the book of 2019 to be revealed in due course.

2010 Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann (1932)

2010 was the first time I read this wonderful coming of age novel – I read it again in 2012. Set around 1920 Invitation to the Waltz is the story of a dance, seventeen year old Olivia’s first ever, which she will attend with her beautiful older sister Kate. On the surface there isn’t much to the story at all. Olivia wakes to her seventeenth birthday, is given some marvellous scarlet fabric to have a dress made for the coming ball, a ten shilling note, a diary and an ugly ornament from her little brother. Eventually comes the evening of the party and the awful, exciting anticipation, of a longed for event. The flame coloured fabric that Olivia is given for her birthday has been made into a dress by local seamstress Miss Robinson. The Weather in the Streets which is the sequel to this novel is one I have been meaning to re-read for years.

2011 South Riding by Winifred Holtby (1936)

Set in the fictional South Riding. the story concerns local politics, the different characters and factions associated with a Yorkshire county council. There is a large cast of characters, at the centre of which is Robert Carne, landowner and councillor, Sarah Burton, a new headmistress for the high school, and Mrs Beddows 72 Alderman, and great friend of Carne. Mrs Beddows – seems to be a portrait – at least in part of Winifred Holtby’s mother, herself a local councillor who became (like Mrs Beddows) the first woman Alderman. It is a simply magnificent novel.

2012 A Game of Hide and Seek – Elizabeth Taylor (1951)

2012 was Elizabeth Taylor’s centenary and I (and others) did a lot of Elizabeth Taylor reading. This was the first time I read A Game of Hide and Seek – I read it again in 2016 – and I still declare it to be perfection. It remains my favourite Elizabeth Taylor novel. In this novel Elizabeth Taylor created a delicately poignant love story. I imagine the story was shaped largely by events in Elizabeth Taylor’s own life – and this shows in the writing of domestic disappointment with what feels for the reader, as complete authenticity. Although she remained happily married until she died, and had two children, Elizabeth Taylor did have a relationship with another man during her marriage. It is this relationship which is honestly portrayed in the only biography about Elizabeth Taylor to have been written to date. Nicola Beauman; the author of The Other Elizabeth Taylor considers the character of Harriet – along with that of Julia in At Mrs Lippincote’s to be the characters most like Elizabeth Taylor herself.

2013 Guard Your Daughters – Diana Tutton (1953)

Guard your daughters is a novel about five sisters and an unconventional slightly dysfunctional family at a time just after the Second World War. The Harvey sisters are unschooled and oddly named they have been brought up at quite some distance from the rest of the world. Living with their famous detective writer father, and their fragile mother, they have been one another’s friends – with hardly any experience of people outside their family. Of course, it was Simon at Stuck in a book who caused us all to want to read this one – and I was eventually given a copy by a friend on Librarything. Happily, Persephone have now re-issued this lovely novel.

2014 The Willow Cabin – Pamela Frankau (1949)

The novel opens in 1936; Caroline Seward is a twenty-two year old actress whose talent shows great promise. Living in London with her mother and prosperous step-father; the-spoilers-of the-fun as she calls them – Caroline is ripe for escape. At an after show party Catherine meets Michael Knowle a surgeon in his late thirties, married, though estranged from his wife, and almost instantly Michael becomes the entire focus of her life. Really the novel is about that great love, which is all consuming and portrayed beautifully by Frankau. I know other Frankau fans prefer other of her novels to this one, but something about this novel just got me.

2015 To the North – Elizabeth Bowen (1932)

To the North is definitely one of those perfect novels – I can see that I may use that phrase a little too often. Set mainly in London during the 1920’s To the North explores the lives of two young women, related by marriage. Recently widowed Cecilia Summers and her sister in law Emmeline share a house; they each rely on the presence of the other in the house though they live quite independently of each other. 

2016 Night and Day – Virginia Woolf (1919)

This might be a controversial opinion among Woolf fans, but this might be my favourite Woolf novel (closely followed by To the Lighthouse). It’s probably her most conventional novel, in some ways it could almost have been written by someone else entirely. Still, I loved it, and I continue to be fascinated and challenged by Woolf. Virginia Woolf’s second novel is a social comedy and a love story but also a subtle examination of women’s roles. The narrative, like that of The Voyage Out – is much more conventional than her later modernist novels To the Lighthouse, and Mrs Dalloway. Although a little over four hundred pages it is a novel with a very simple plot – it is however, the complex, changing relationships between the central characters, which give the novel its depth.

2017 Chatterton Square – E H Young (1947)

The setting is Upper Radstowe – the setting of the majority of E H Young’s novels, a thinly disguised Clifton – the genteel, prosperous suburb of Bristol where she herself lived for a time. However, the canvas of this novel like many of her others is far smaller than that, almost the entire story taking place at the titular address.

We are in familiar territory with many of the themes of this novel, those of marriage, provincial life and morality. However, the novel also explores pre-war attitudes, it is the late 1930s and the prospect of another war is at the back of everyone’s mind. Naturally, the possibility of war is contemplated with some pain by those who lived through one war and still bear the scars – either physical or mental. Meanwhile the next generation, face the possibility of having the best years of their lives stolen – and well they know it.

2018 The Montana Stories – Katherine Mansfield (2001)

Technically published in 2001 – these stories were written in 1921 but this collection was only put together by Persephone in 2001. In 1921, Katherine Mansfield, very ill with TB went to stay in a chalet in Montana, Switzerland for her health. This period became one of her most creative periods – and the pieces in this collection are presented chronologically – which is often such an interesting way to read a writer’s work. This collection contains short stories and unfinished fragments – and some extracts from her letters in the editorial notes at the back. The unfinished stories can be a little frustrating – though still beautiful to read. Some of these unfinished pieces end less abruptly and could be seen as having an ambiguous ending – other pieces end more suddenly. Many of the stories in this edition had been previously published in The Spectator – and illustrations that accompanied those stories are reproduced here too. There are stories in this collection I have read a few times in other anthologies, stories like Prelude, At the Bay and The Dolls House that I could read again and again.

2019 – National Provincial by Lettice Cooper (1938). A book of Northern politics and class, reissued by Persephone. Very compelling too.