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Mirror in Darkness #2
Love in Winter
Six years after the Great War, a promising writerHervey Russellis frustrated by her career and her marriage to an unloving man. Her desperate longing for a new beginning finds an outlet when she encounters her war-damaged cousin Nicholas, who until this meeting has thought his life was over. Love in Winter forms the second part of the Mirror in Darkness trilogy, and its heroine is the author's autobiographical shadow.
406 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1935
About the author
Storm Jameson
79 books23 followersMargaret Storm Jameson was an English writer, known for her 45 novels, and criticism.
Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.
From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.
A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.
Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.
From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.
A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.
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November 24, 2015
A lot of good stuff here, though my own personal lack of patience with love stories meant it did not work as well as it could have. What is excellent, however, is the exploration of post war English society. Imagine, for example, being an 18 year old girl, just starting a relationship in 1914 when your fella is called up. He returns 4 years later completely changed by the experience. Today these things could be talked about between you, perhaps, but then...So what do you do? How do you deal with it? With him?
Anyway...If you are interested in reading her I would say try Company Parade and see how you go.
Please take the time to read the following, which will hopefully suggest why Jameson should be on your reading-radar (from http://www.cambridgescholars.com/down...) :
Jameson has suffered from the tendency in feminist scholarship to focus solely on female writing for its representation of women’s lives and to ignore their political work except in terms of their feminism, which, as Janet Montefiore has noted, “is only indirectly relevant to hunger marches and the Popular Front” (20). To Jameson it was self-evident that the cause of women was inextricable from that of social reform. In The Pot Boils, florists on strike are more important than literary lionesses, posturing in their salons, and winning the vote takes second place to releasing women from domestic drudgery, to fight for work and wages alongside men. There are self-possessed women’s voices in that novel, especially among the young, but she draws best the monstrous psychological deformations that threatened the women of her generation, phallic mothers or martyrs, products of the ancillary roles assigned them. Yet despite the sarcasm she reserved for some of her fictional feminists, and the army of contemptible women she created, a closer look at her career reveals a continuous interest in the politics of gender. An emancipated woman herself, she was eloquent from the start about the conflict of domestic and marital obligations. As the heroine of The Pot Boils, Athenais, cries with characteristic vehemence: “You must see that you can’t shove women back, no matter how you coax and abuse. You’ll have to make your plans for a re-made society on the basis of feminine labour alongside masculine."
In the 1920s, she was a fresh, exhilarating voice on the London scene, “the eminent author and feminist,” according to the by-line to “Nothing Wrong with Modern Woman,” her second article in the Daily Mirror, where in 1927 she helped prepare readers for the arrival of the flapper vote. In “Problem of Sex in Public Life,” printed alongside an advertisement for a Silk Stocking Competition, with a model in camisole and French knickers, she had discussed robustly the problems of men and women working together. Two months later, in “Nothing Wrong with Modern Woman,” she put right those who criticised Modern Woman for lack of brain and shortness of skirt: “For an era [man] has had a free hand. He has made an unholy mess of things. Nothing can excuse him for his cities and his trousers.” Later, in an essay on “Man the Helpmate,”written for Mabel Ulrich, she would poke fun at a society in which for Mrs Brown “there was only one way to hold her husband in the manly pose—this was to lean on him. She leaned. He remained upright”
By the middle of the 1930s, the association of Jameson’s name with steamy novels of passion (The Pitiful Wife, 1923) had been replaced by a reputation for innovatory novels of socialist commitment. The Mirror in Darkness trilogy (Company Parade, Love in Winter and None Turn Back), explored the tangles of politics and personal ambition through which Britain stumbled from 1918 to the General Strike. The trilogy, together with the two books that picked up its characters and themes after the war (Before the Crossing, The Black Laurel), explored the limits set to ordinary people’s ability to take hold of their own lives.
The world dances to the tune of William Gary, the man of inherited wealth, made impotent by a wartime shell. He pays the scientists who make poison gases. He pulls the strings of the army, business, and industry. His money breaks unions and buys off working-class leaders. Under his rule, corrupt politicians, former radicals, survive and prosper. Yet somehow, values endure to the next generation. If individual weaknesses can break organisations, individuals still remain. Though she worked for it in her time, Jameson had few illusions about the Labour Party, or middle-class initiatives such as Fabianism, which turned the poor into the faceless object of managerial planning, “a wretched lay figure on which a thousand itching brains and fingers satisfy their need to interfere and rule” (The Pot Boils, 126). The empowerment of individuals, not the machine, was where she thought socialism should begin.
Jameson was easily nudged out of a literary canon shaped by first-generation modernist insistence on the necessity of taking literature out of history and cutting it off from its political moorings. Far from attempting to transcend history, her novels are immersed in their time. Her characters refuse to be separated from the private, domestic world that shaped them and display a lucid awareness of the fact that this world was in turn shaped by its historical moment. While T. S. Eliot and T. E. Hulme insisted on the purity of art, which successfully disconnected modernism from modernity, Jameson boldly stated that “the so-called pure novelist never could express an age and our age last of all. Life, at the level on which the great novelist must approach it, is full of impurities” (The Writer’s Situation, 61).
The definition of formal experimentation as the disjunction of language has caused critics to ignore the range of formal innovations in Jameson’s novels. Thus, though attempting to reclaim Jameson as a modernist, and praising her work for its “aesthetic wholeness,” which “interconnects intellect and emotion, and prizes social inclusiveness,” Bonnie Wilde Cunningham argues that Jameson “rejects stylistic experimentation” (618). Only recently have commentators begun to notice that Jameson’s social concerns, rather than preventing her from engaging in stylistic experimentation, fostered subtle formal innovations.
Jennifer Birkett has pointed to how Jameson’s familiarity with French culture, in particular with Proust and Stendhal, shaped her style (“Beginning Again,” 6). Not only in the novels set in France that she wrote in the late 1930s and 1940s, but as early as in The Pot Boils, Jameson’s stylistic experiments in the use of historical memory to “reinvent a common culture” produced “a politicised version of the Proustian project” (“Beginning Again,” 10). The subtleties of the distinctive form of stylised realism that she gradually evolved expose the parochial aspect of orthodox definitions of modernist experimentation.
As early as 1922, reviewing The Clash, Rebecca West begrudgingly acknowledged Jameson’s “curious emotional clairvoyance which would make her novels worth reading” (213). Indeed, in an age like ours in which “collateral damage” stands for killed human beings, Jameson must seem nothing less than prophetic in her claim that the political preference for phrases such as “training camps” over “concentration camps” is not a harmless linguistic choice. It indicates a murderous divorce of words from reality (see for example “Between the Wars” and In the Second Year). But Jameson’s clairvoyance, far from ensuring her place in the literary canon, only enabled her to foresee her own dismissal and was, indeed, to a great extent responsible for it. Having made her novels first a forum for the analysis of the way in which the Treaty of Versailles had spawned another war, then for the dissection of the motivations of fascism, and finally, for the threat of nuclear annihilation, she was accused of suffering from war obsession. One hundred and sixty wars later, as the twenty-first century has again plunged into war, the accusation sounds not only hollow but irresponsible. As we try to define the modernity of the twentieth century, we cannot ignore the linking of will to violence and technological expertise that made it the bloodiest in the history of the world. Jameson’s contribution to exposing the deadly combination represents a participation in “modern literature’s sometimes heroic, often doomed, and always troubled attempts to speak the unspeakabilities of its age” (Norris, 509) that can no longer be ignored.
Anyway...If you are interested in reading her I would say try Company Parade and see how you go.
Please take the time to read the following, which will hopefully suggest why Jameson should be on your reading-radar (from http://www.cambridgescholars.com/down...) :
Jameson has suffered from the tendency in feminist scholarship to focus solely on female writing for its representation of women’s lives and to ignore their political work except in terms of their feminism, which, as Janet Montefiore has noted, “is only indirectly relevant to hunger marches and the Popular Front” (20). To Jameson it was self-evident that the cause of women was inextricable from that of social reform. In The Pot Boils, florists on strike are more important than literary lionesses, posturing in their salons, and winning the vote takes second place to releasing women from domestic drudgery, to fight for work and wages alongside men. There are self-possessed women’s voices in that novel, especially among the young, but she draws best the monstrous psychological deformations that threatened the women of her generation, phallic mothers or martyrs, products of the ancillary roles assigned them. Yet despite the sarcasm she reserved for some of her fictional feminists, and the army of contemptible women she created, a closer look at her career reveals a continuous interest in the politics of gender. An emancipated woman herself, she was eloquent from the start about the conflict of domestic and marital obligations. As the heroine of The Pot Boils, Athenais, cries with characteristic vehemence: “You must see that you can’t shove women back, no matter how you coax and abuse. You’ll have to make your plans for a re-made society on the basis of feminine labour alongside masculine."
In the 1920s, she was a fresh, exhilarating voice on the London scene, “the eminent author and feminist,” according to the by-line to “Nothing Wrong with Modern Woman,” her second article in the Daily Mirror, where in 1927 she helped prepare readers for the arrival of the flapper vote. In “Problem of Sex in Public Life,” printed alongside an advertisement for a Silk Stocking Competition, with a model in camisole and French knickers, she had discussed robustly the problems of men and women working together. Two months later, in “Nothing Wrong with Modern Woman,” she put right those who criticised Modern Woman for lack of brain and shortness of skirt: “For an era [man] has had a free hand. He has made an unholy mess of things. Nothing can excuse him for his cities and his trousers.” Later, in an essay on “Man the Helpmate,”written for Mabel Ulrich, she would poke fun at a society in which for Mrs Brown “there was only one way to hold her husband in the manly pose—this was to lean on him. She leaned. He remained upright”
By the middle of the 1930s, the association of Jameson’s name with steamy novels of passion (The Pitiful Wife, 1923) had been replaced by a reputation for innovatory novels of socialist commitment. The Mirror in Darkness trilogy (Company Parade, Love in Winter and None Turn Back), explored the tangles of politics and personal ambition through which Britain stumbled from 1918 to the General Strike. The trilogy, together with the two books that picked up its characters and themes after the war (Before the Crossing, The Black Laurel), explored the limits set to ordinary people’s ability to take hold of their own lives.
The world dances to the tune of William Gary, the man of inherited wealth, made impotent by a wartime shell. He pays the scientists who make poison gases. He pulls the strings of the army, business, and industry. His money breaks unions and buys off working-class leaders. Under his rule, corrupt politicians, former radicals, survive and prosper. Yet somehow, values endure to the next generation. If individual weaknesses can break organisations, individuals still remain. Though she worked for it in her time, Jameson had few illusions about the Labour Party, or middle-class initiatives such as Fabianism, which turned the poor into the faceless object of managerial planning, “a wretched lay figure on which a thousand itching brains and fingers satisfy their need to interfere and rule” (The Pot Boils, 126). The empowerment of individuals, not the machine, was where she thought socialism should begin.
Jameson was easily nudged out of a literary canon shaped by first-generation modernist insistence on the necessity of taking literature out of history and cutting it off from its political moorings. Far from attempting to transcend history, her novels are immersed in their time. Her characters refuse to be separated from the private, domestic world that shaped them and display a lucid awareness of the fact that this world was in turn shaped by its historical moment. While T. S. Eliot and T. E. Hulme insisted on the purity of art, which successfully disconnected modernism from modernity, Jameson boldly stated that “the so-called pure novelist never could express an age and our age last of all. Life, at the level on which the great novelist must approach it, is full of impurities” (The Writer’s Situation, 61).
The definition of formal experimentation as the disjunction of language has caused critics to ignore the range of formal innovations in Jameson’s novels. Thus, though attempting to reclaim Jameson as a modernist, and praising her work for its “aesthetic wholeness,” which “interconnects intellect and emotion, and prizes social inclusiveness,” Bonnie Wilde Cunningham argues that Jameson “rejects stylistic experimentation” (618). Only recently have commentators begun to notice that Jameson’s social concerns, rather than preventing her from engaging in stylistic experimentation, fostered subtle formal innovations.
Jennifer Birkett has pointed to how Jameson’s familiarity with French culture, in particular with Proust and Stendhal, shaped her style (“Beginning Again,” 6). Not only in the novels set in France that she wrote in the late 1930s and 1940s, but as early as in The Pot Boils, Jameson’s stylistic experiments in the use of historical memory to “reinvent a common culture” produced “a politicised version of the Proustian project” (“Beginning Again,” 10). The subtleties of the distinctive form of stylised realism that she gradually evolved expose the parochial aspect of orthodox definitions of modernist experimentation.
As early as 1922, reviewing The Clash, Rebecca West begrudgingly acknowledged Jameson’s “curious emotional clairvoyance which would make her novels worth reading” (213). Indeed, in an age like ours in which “collateral damage” stands for killed human beings, Jameson must seem nothing less than prophetic in her claim that the political preference for phrases such as “training camps” over “concentration camps” is not a harmless linguistic choice. It indicates a murderous divorce of words from reality (see for example “Between the Wars” and In the Second Year). But Jameson’s clairvoyance, far from ensuring her place in the literary canon, only enabled her to foresee her own dismissal and was, indeed, to a great extent responsible for it. Having made her novels first a forum for the analysis of the way in which the Treaty of Versailles had spawned another war, then for the dissection of the motivations of fascism, and finally, for the threat of nuclear annihilation, she was accused of suffering from war obsession. One hundred and sixty wars later, as the twenty-first century has again plunged into war, the accusation sounds not only hollow but irresponsible. As we try to define the modernity of the twentieth century, we cannot ignore the linking of will to violence and technological expertise that made it the bloodiest in the history of the world. Jameson’s contribution to exposing the deadly combination represents a participation in “modern literature’s sometimes heroic, often doomed, and always troubled attempts to speak the unspeakabilities of its age” (Norris, 509) that can no longer be ignored.
January 24, 2023
This is the second book in a trilogy following the live of Hervey Russell, an aspiring writer/novelist her feckless husband Penn, her now-lover Nicholas Roxby, and a cast of characters that was part of her world. In this book the time period is circa 1925 with people who have and people who have not in part as a consequence of World War One and its consequences/aftermath for the nations involved in that calamity. The novel started out OK but then got progressively more (to me) boring, and (to me) the quality of writing went from good to something less than that. I went in with high expectations and left just glad to be over with reading this huge tome (~400 pages). I highly doubt I will read the third book in the trilogy ‘None Turn Back’ in part because of this book and my impression of it, but also by what I remember was a review from a GoodReads reader who said although they thought the writing was very good in the first two books of the trilogy that the third one was sub-par.
Jameson used a technique that I tend not to like if used to excess, and that is she tells us what a character is thinking. What I did not like was when there were several people in a certain scene in the book and she told us over and over again what each person was thinking and what they were saying and it just got annoying. I didn’t give a damn what every character was thinking.
Plus she had a character feeling sad and then feeling calm or happy in the blink of an eye. Sudden mood shifts. Again, this is OK if used in small doses but her main character Hervey’s mood and attitude towards people she knew would fluctuate wildly...it just got to be too much for me.
Plus, Hervey’s stated chief goal in life was to be with her son, Richard, and provide a good life for him. For most of the book she was absent in his life, leaving other relatives to care for him. And she left him in the care of others in the first book in the trilogy when he was three years old and here he was seven at the beginning of this book and nine at its end. Hey Hervey, you’re running out of time to be good to him! Mother of the Year is not an award she would garner...
Gee, I guess I am venting my spleen.
This trilogy is thought to be semi-autobiographical in nature.
Jameson wrote some 45 novels in her lifetime.... very prolific to be sure,
Reviews:
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2021/...
• https://katewebb.wordpress.com/2010/0...
Jameson used a technique that I tend not to like if used to excess, and that is she tells us what a character is thinking. What I did not like was when there were several people in a certain scene in the book and she told us over and over again what each person was thinking and what they were saying and it just got annoying. I didn’t give a damn what every character was thinking.
Plus she had a character feeling sad and then feeling calm or happy in the blink of an eye. Sudden mood shifts. Again, this is OK if used in small doses but her main character Hervey’s mood and attitude towards people she knew would fluctuate wildly...it just got to be too much for me.
Plus, Hervey’s stated chief goal in life was to be with her son, Richard, and provide a good life for him. For most of the book she was absent in his life, leaving other relatives to care for him. And she left him in the care of others in the first book in the trilogy when he was three years old and here he was seven at the beginning of this book and nine at its end. Hey Hervey, you’re running out of time to be good to him! Mother of the Year is not an award she would garner...
Gee, I guess I am venting my spleen.
This trilogy is thought to be semi-autobiographical in nature.
Jameson wrote some 45 novels in her lifetime.... very prolific to be sure,
Reviews:
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2021/...
• https://katewebb.wordpress.com/2010/0...
December 11, 2020
My fascination for Storm Jameson largely lies in the fact that she is from Whitby, my family’s ancestral home. I’m afraid her obscurity these days extends all the way to her home town. When I visited recently, I asked the erudite owner of an art gallery where in town she had grown up and he looked at me with knit brows and confessed he had no idea who I was talking about.
And perhaps that obscurity in not undeserved. She wrote ambitious, messy novels of varying success from the mid-20’s to the mid-40’s. Her style is by no means polished and she sometimes lacks clarity in her sentences (so many unclear pronouns!). The Capuchin edition of the novel did not help this; there is almost a typo per page.
Many of Jameson’s books have the same themes and obsessions—broken down love, the decline of her grandmother’s Victorian ship-building company, capitalism’s battle with socialism, men and women’s seeming inability to communicate with each other, the loneliness of women—and she does all of this well, just not so well all jumbled together in a 400 page novel. In Love in Winter the protagonist, Hervey, is writing a long novel. Towards the end of the book her editor notes, “My chief feeling is that you are doing something for which you are not fitted. I don’t know why you have chosen…to be dry and violent in the same moment. Your natural romanticism suited you better.” She knows what’s wrong here and has written her own review.
My goodness what faint praise I have given poor Storm so far. What I like about this novel is the way she weaves the disastrous impact of the Great War into her love stories--not only its impact on men (two of which are impotent as a result), but also on women, who come out of the War more competent and vigorous than most of the soldiers. The political and the personal are interwoven with skill, and characters jump from the page with a simple descriptive precision that is Dickensian. So while I found a lot to criticize in this book, I was never bored by it. I will continue to read and root for my favorite Whitby author.
And perhaps that obscurity in not undeserved. She wrote ambitious, messy novels of varying success from the mid-20’s to the mid-40’s. Her style is by no means polished and she sometimes lacks clarity in her sentences (so many unclear pronouns!). The Capuchin edition of the novel did not help this; there is almost a typo per page.
Many of Jameson’s books have the same themes and obsessions—broken down love, the decline of her grandmother’s Victorian ship-building company, capitalism’s battle with socialism, men and women’s seeming inability to communicate with each other, the loneliness of women—and she does all of this well, just not so well all jumbled together in a 400 page novel. In Love in Winter the protagonist, Hervey, is writing a long novel. Towards the end of the book her editor notes, “My chief feeling is that you are doing something for which you are not fitted. I don’t know why you have chosen…to be dry and violent in the same moment. Your natural romanticism suited you better.” She knows what’s wrong here and has written her own review.
My goodness what faint praise I have given poor Storm so far. What I like about this novel is the way she weaves the disastrous impact of the Great War into her love stories--not only its impact on men (two of which are impotent as a result), but also on women, who come out of the War more competent and vigorous than most of the soldiers. The political and the personal are interwoven with skill, and characters jump from the page with a simple descriptive precision that is Dickensian. So while I found a lot to criticize in this book, I was never bored by it. I will continue to read and root for my favorite Whitby author.
January 2, 2021
"Amore a prima vista" di Margaret Storm Jameson
Secondo capitolo della trilogia "Lo specchio nel buio".
Londra, 1924. Hervey, la protagonista, è ancora in cerca di un'affermazione, un riconoscimento dei propri talenti, un miglioramento della condizione di vita per sé, e, soprattutto per il figlio Richard.
Hervey, mentre lavora, scrive, si barcamena e dibatte in una Londra faticosa e, a volte, ostile, si innamora. L'incontro con il cugino Nicholas cambia la sua vita e le sue priorità.
Ancora una volta una scrittura, a mio parere, modernissima e raffinata. All'interno del romanzo troviamo approfondimenti sociali ed economici molto interessanti.
Il periodo storico è complesso e faticoso e la scrittrice ci immerge, abilmente, nelle problematiche dell'epoca attraverso le vicissitudini dei tanti personaggi.
Secondo capitolo della trilogia "Lo specchio nel buio".
Londra, 1924. Hervey, la protagonista, è ancora in cerca di un'affermazione, un riconoscimento dei propri talenti, un miglioramento della condizione di vita per sé, e, soprattutto per il figlio Richard.
Hervey, mentre lavora, scrive, si barcamena e dibatte in una Londra faticosa e, a volte, ostile, si innamora. L'incontro con il cugino Nicholas cambia la sua vita e le sue priorità.
Ancora una volta una scrittura, a mio parere, modernissima e raffinata. All'interno del romanzo troviamo approfondimenti sociali ed economici molto interessanti.
Il periodo storico è complesso e faticoso e la scrittrice ci immerge, abilmente, nelle problematiche dell'epoca attraverso le vicissitudini dei tanti personaggi.
June 3, 2013
I could imagine Hervey, and maybe any person, with longing that another might understand that
‘My heart is just like the sea,
Having storms and ebb and flow,
And many beautiful pearls
Rest in its depths’
I enjoyed the book very much and read it slightly more slowly than normal, perhaps savouring the story and its many insightful tidbits. I found it to be a complicated story and a complicated love story. I am keen though to read part three of the trilogy (None Turn Back) of which Love in Winter is the second. I fear Hervey’s (and presumably the author’s) warning that I don’t trust Heaven to punish me fairly, that she will pay for her happiness. So Love In Winter – and maybe all of Jameson’s books – have us on this edge: that tragedy is just around the corner.
I suppose it was heartbreaking to see bad choices, decisions and utterances being made – mostly based on arrogance, self-centeredness, insensitivity or just being plain silly. It seemed William Gary was the only character who had it all together, who lived and spoke consistently to the way he believed. Ms Jameson might be displeased, but then again maybe not: villains like Gary who was perceived by others as ranging from an 18th century statesman, a Walpole, to a rat with strong cruelly sharp teeth, seem to see things much more clearly than the rest of us who seem intent on blundering and muddling through.
I reached a point in my reading when I thought that while it was a good story with lots of interesting characters it didn’t seem tight enough, sufficiently coherent, that it was unnecessarily dark and that that it evoked a sense of hopelessness. But somehow it redeemed itself and my liking for it was renewed (and rewarded), because it was in every way a “ ‘true book’ .. that recorded every item in the tale of mistakes, joys, cruelties and simple meanness that makes up our dealing one with others.”
Whereas Hervey’s good friend T.S. – and in this deliberate act of his remaining an uncommitted bystander one realized, perhaps cruelly, that he and Evelyn (his wife) deserved one another – ‘as though he were watching (in Georgina with whom he was in love) the destruction of some delicate fine object, the only one in existence’, Hervey was instead willing, in love, to do whatever necessary to make Nicholas happy. So I ended up liking Hervey Russell (and Storm Jameson, as the work seemed almost autobiographical) and the book very much.
Edwin
‘My heart is just like the sea,
Having storms and ebb and flow,
And many beautiful pearls
Rest in its depths’
I enjoyed the book very much and read it slightly more slowly than normal, perhaps savouring the story and its many insightful tidbits. I found it to be a complicated story and a complicated love story. I am keen though to read part three of the trilogy (None Turn Back) of which Love in Winter is the second. I fear Hervey’s (and presumably the author’s) warning that I don’t trust Heaven to punish me fairly, that she will pay for her happiness. So Love In Winter – and maybe all of Jameson’s books – have us on this edge: that tragedy is just around the corner.
I suppose it was heartbreaking to see bad choices, decisions and utterances being made – mostly based on arrogance, self-centeredness, insensitivity or just being plain silly. It seemed William Gary was the only character who had it all together, who lived and spoke consistently to the way he believed. Ms Jameson might be displeased, but then again maybe not: villains like Gary who was perceived by others as ranging from an 18th century statesman, a Walpole, to a rat with strong cruelly sharp teeth, seem to see things much more clearly than the rest of us who seem intent on blundering and muddling through.
I reached a point in my reading when I thought that while it was a good story with lots of interesting characters it didn’t seem tight enough, sufficiently coherent, that it was unnecessarily dark and that that it evoked a sense of hopelessness. But somehow it redeemed itself and my liking for it was renewed (and rewarded), because it was in every way a “ ‘true book’ .. that recorded every item in the tale of mistakes, joys, cruelties and simple meanness that makes up our dealing one with others.”
Whereas Hervey’s good friend T.S. – and in this deliberate act of his remaining an uncommitted bystander one realized, perhaps cruelly, that he and Evelyn (his wife) deserved one another – ‘as though he were watching (in Georgina with whom he was in love) the destruction of some delicate fine object, the only one in existence’, Hervey was instead willing, in love, to do whatever necessary to make Nicholas happy. So I ended up liking Hervey Russell (and Storm Jameson, as the work seemed almost autobiographical) and the book very much.
Edwin
June 19, 2021
Complessivamente mi è piaciuto, ma avrei un appunto da fare sullo sviluppo di Hervey.
Hervey, tesoro mio, non ti serve un uomo per essere felice. Quindi adesso che ti sei finalmente liberata di Penn, per quale motivo ti stai gettando tra le braccia di Nicholas che ti ripete per tutto il libro che non può darti quello che vuoi e che se ne va per giorni senza dirti una parola?
Io non capisco.
Viene continuamente detto che Hervey è d'acciaio, ma poi quando si tratta di questioni di cuore si fa sballottare di qua e di là da persone che non vogliono quello che vuole lei (vedi il figlio Richard, che lei dice essere l'unica persona importante però alla fine abbandona sempre).
Come potete capire, i capitoli dedicati ad Hervey non sono stato il punto forte del libro secondo me.
Molto interessanti invece sono i capitoli dedicati agli altri personaggi che ci fanno vedere da diversi punti di vista come sta andando avanti la politica dell'Inghilterra del primo dopoguerra: il socialismo divaga tra i lavoratori, ma non trova sbocco in politica, come del resto succede a tutto ciò che è radicale. Soprattutto è interessante la parabole di Louis Earlham, che è proprio l'emblema di questo percorso.
In generale ho finito il libro con un senso di insoddisfazione, dovuto soprattutto all'insoddisfazione che i personaggi stessi provano. Non la considero una cosa negativa perché penso che l'autrice avesse proprio questo scopo.
Hervey, tesoro mio, non ti serve un uomo per essere felice. Quindi adesso che ti sei finalmente liberata di Penn, per quale motivo ti stai gettando tra le braccia di Nicholas che ti ripete per tutto il libro che non può darti quello che vuoi e che se ne va per giorni senza dirti una parola?
Io non capisco.
Viene continuamente detto che Hervey è d'acciaio, ma poi quando si tratta di questioni di cuore si fa sballottare di qua e di là da persone che non vogliono quello che vuole lei (vedi il figlio Richard, che lei dice essere l'unica persona importante però alla fine abbandona sempre).
Come potete capire, i capitoli dedicati ad Hervey non sono stato il punto forte del libro secondo me.
Molto interessanti invece sono i capitoli dedicati agli altri personaggi che ci fanno vedere da diversi punti di vista come sta andando avanti la politica dell'Inghilterra del primo dopoguerra: il socialismo divaga tra i lavoratori, ma non trova sbocco in politica, come del resto succede a tutto ciò che è radicale. Soprattutto è interessante la parabole di Louis Earlham, che è proprio l'emblema di questo percorso.
In generale ho finito il libro con un senso di insoddisfazione, dovuto soprattutto all'insoddisfazione che i personaggi stessi provano. Non la considero una cosa negativa perché penso che l'autrice avesse proprio questo scopo.
October 1, 2022
The second of the trilogy in which the main character is Hervey Russell. The setting now is 1924 and Hervey is still struggling to manage a career, trying to build up her reputation as an author, while also juggling care for her young son. Still married she embarks on a relationship with her cousin who is also married and the story moves forward as characters come and go through the ensuing drama.
While the love story did not engage as much as the narrative in the first volume what I love most about this series is the politics is fundamental to the book and the picture of society in which inequality is rife with big business continuing to exploit for profit while using a very powerful media. Seems nothing has changed in 100 years. The history is epitomised by the reference to the Zinoviev letter that as a forged document brought an end to the first labour government.
This is a country in which the impact of the war also looms large and it isxa fascinating piece of social history.
And I also am intrigued by the author's own biography as a significant, if little known, novelist of the 20th century.
While the love story did not engage as much as the narrative in the first volume what I love most about this series is the politics is fundamental to the book and the picture of society in which inequality is rife with big business continuing to exploit for profit while using a very powerful media. Seems nothing has changed in 100 years. The history is epitomised by the reference to the Zinoviev letter that as a forged document brought an end to the first labour government.
This is a country in which the impact of the war also looms large and it isxa fascinating piece of social history.
And I also am intrigued by the author's own biography as a significant, if little known, novelist of the 20th century.
September 18, 2020
Conciliare famiglia e lavoro non è mai facile, soprattutto per le donne che si trovano spesso a dover scegliere tra carriera e figli. Si tratta quindi di un’annosa questione che è sempre esistita, come testimonia anche il secondo romanzo della trilogia “Lo specchio nel buio” di Margaret Storm Jameson, “Amore a prima vista”, tradotto da Velia Februari per Fazi.
Dopo il primo volume “Company Parade”, torniamo a Londra dove Hervey è alle prese con la sua carriera: lavora per Evelyn Lamb e allo stesso tempo porta avanti il suo progetto di scrittura, entrando sempre di più a far parte di quel mondo. Tuttavia, se forte è l’ambizione e il desiderio di farsi strada, è pur vero che sentimenti contrastanti nascono nella protagonista quando deve allontanarsi dal figlio Richard.
Recensione completa su: https://cocktaildilibri.globewanderin...
Dopo il primo volume “Company Parade”, torniamo a Londra dove Hervey è alle prese con la sua carriera: lavora per Evelyn Lamb e allo stesso tempo porta avanti il suo progetto di scrittura, entrando sempre di più a far parte di quel mondo. Tuttavia, se forte è l’ambizione e il desiderio di farsi strada, è pur vero che sentimenti contrastanti nascono nella protagonista quando deve allontanarsi dal figlio Richard.
Recensione completa su: https://cocktaildilibri.globewanderin...
October 4, 2013
Slow going, and complicated, but well worth the read.
October 10, 2020
jameson must be one of the weakest of her contemporaries ... neither litrary nor entertaining ... she fails to engage me that I dont care about the story or characters
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