Someone at a Distance (Persephone Classics)

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Some of the turns of phrase which she crafts are beautiful: ‘Wisteria toppled over a high garden wall in dusty mauve cascades’. Truthfully, at first I found Someone at a Distance very difficult to get into – the ‘domestic’ details seemed tiresome to me.

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Whipple draws you into post-War rural England with an artist’s hand, taking you into the lives of the North family with deft, compassionate insight. The closer they get to you, the more guilt they have to feel if they take their sexual interests elsewhere.And despite all the careful insight she provides, she never allows it to feel like she thinks her characters' thoughts and feelings are the most special of all, or some unfathomable whirlpool- she's bracing about making it clear that a thousand people have felt the same before this person or experienced the same, and she expects her characters to buckle down and get through it just like everyone else has.

Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple, Nina Bawden

Louise, seething with resentment at being thrown over by her former lover, rich-boy Paul Devoisy--who has recently made a very bourgeois marriage to a plain and pious town girl with a good dowry--recognizes the new opportunities available to her. But because so many of us have had shame drilled into us, and because shame is just so incredibly painful and easy to avoid, a person might want to stay distant. And not always at the expense of herself--even as a full time wife she still gardened which she enjoyed. Louise, in an era where nothing lay for women other than the promise of ‘blissful domesticity’, is an ambitious young woman who wants more and demands more from her life – yet, the only way she finds to do that is by wrecking people’s lives and breaking her parents’ hearts. The first sentence, with its overtones about the tragecy to come, encapsulatges the novel's quality: 'Widowed, in the house her husband had built with day and night nurseries and a music-room, as if the children would stay there for ever, instead of marrying and going off at the earliest possible moment, old Mrs North yielded one day to a long-felt desire to provide herself with company.As an author, Whipple has an incredible amount to offer; her books provide a marvellously restful solace in our hectic world.