The sea had frightened Mrs. Stevens, and she had never conquered her fear. It frightened her most when it was dead calm. Something within her shuddered at the great smooth, slimy surface, stretching into a nothingness that made her giddy.” De reis naar Bognor en de voorbereidingen hierop zijn een hele onderneming. Alles moet nauwkeurig gepland worden. Er mag niets mislopen.

De Stevensen halen hun voldoening uit routine, niét uit avontuur. Een onverwachte ontmoeting is geen verademing, eerder een verzoeking. Een ongeplande uitnodiging veroorzaakt geen voorpret, maar onderhuidse stress. De bagage bestaat voornamelijk uit mantels der liefde, waarmee kleine akkefietjes discreet worden bedekt. The Fortnight In September. The two weeks when the Stevens family left their South London home for their annual holiday, by the sea in Bognor. Nu, 90 jaar later, werd het voor het eerst vertaald. (Behoorlijk) goed vertaald bovendien. Dat is belangrijk, want dit is geen story-, wel een taal- en sfeerdriven boek. This was my third post in an ad hoc series which all begin The best book for…Some other ideas are … reading in translation; … recommending to book groups; … taking on holiday; … when I am ill in bed; and so on. The first two were:The author writes that Mr. Stevens “had the gift of establishing domestic ‘Occasions’” (p. 18) around special days—such as the night before a trip—so that they become almost ritualistic in nature. Why are these rituals important to him and the rest of the family? What other rituals take place throughout the book? The Fortnight In September is following real people leading ordinary lives. It has a somewhat mundane normality, which almost makes it feel like a non-fiction account. This quaintness and simplistic are what I loved about it!

The foreword to this book is an excerpt from R.C. Sherriff's autobiography, wherein he discusses how he wrote The Fortnight in September. He had had a marvelous success as a playwright with Journey's End: Play, but then he had an idea which he could only turn into a novel: the simple story of a family on their annual seaside holiday. Sherriff groped for the right style, finding that "flowery stuff and highfalutin words" weren't right and seeking a more down-to-earth style which would match his characters. He found that he had to learn to know the Stevens family before he could write about them without looking down or up to them, instead to "walk with them easily, side by side." He had had the idea for his novel at Bognor Regis (as in Journey’s End, and The Hopkins Manuscript, Persephone book no. 57, the physical setting is wonderfully evoked): watching the crowds go by, and wondering what their lives were like at home, he ‘began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea...I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things.’ The Fortnight in September was a very brave book to write because it was not obviously ‘about’ anything except the ‘drama of the undramatic’. And yet the greatness of the novel is that it is about each one of us: all of human life is here in the seemingly simple description of the family’s annual holiday. Thus, for reasons we do not have to explain to regular Persephone readers, this is a book which fits fairly and squarely on the Persephone list.

Only the honeymoon had been lovely: the coming of the children had made the fortnight a burden—sometimes a nightmare. At home the children were hers: they loved her: came to her in everything. At Bognor, somehow they drew away from her—became different. If she paddled, they laughed at her: saying she looked so funny. They never laughed at her at home. Sherriff also wrote prose. A novelised version of Journey's End, co-written with Vernon Bartlett, was published in 1930. [17] His 1939 novel, The Hopkins Manuscript is an H. G. Wells-influenced post-apocalyptic story about an earth devastated because of a collision with the Moon. [18] Its sober language and realistic depiction of an average man coming to terms with a ruined England is said [ citation needed] to have been an influence on later science fiction authors such as John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss. The Fortnight in September, an earlier novel, published in 1931, is a rather more plausible story about a Bognor holiday enjoyed by a lower-middle-class family from Dulwich. [19] It was nominated by Kazuo Ishiguro as a book to 'inspire, uplift and offer escape' in a list compiled by The Guardian during the COVID-19 pandemic, describing it as "just about the most uplifting, life-affirming novel I can think of right now". [20] The Fortnight in September was a very brave book to write because it was not obviously ‘about’ anything except the ‘drama of the undramatic’. And yet the greatness of the novel is that it is about each one of us: all of human life is here in the seemingly simple description of the family’s annual holiday in Bognor. Thus, for reasons we do not have to explain to regular Persephone readers, this is a book which fits fairly and squarely on the Persephone list. But the journey was worst of all; for although the burden should have grown lighter as the children grew up—she had never conquered her dread of Clapham Junction, where they always had to change. The Fortnight in September. 1931. OCLC 246884057. (Reprinted in 2006 by Persephone Books); 2021 pbk reprint. Scribner. 7 September 2021. ISBN 978-1-9821-8478-0.