The New House, Bricks and Mortar, Farewell Leicester Square

I have recently read three Persephone Books, which I would like to recommend- The New House by Lettice Cooper, Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton and Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller. I recently did a similar post on the Bloomsbury Festival Cream Tea and Conversation afternoon which you can find here. Persephone Books, on Lambs Conduit Street is a delightful bookshop and publisher focusing on the neglected fiction and non-fiction works by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget.

Betty Miller wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a ‘Dago: Jew: Outsider.’ ‘Yet,’ continued Neal Ascherson, ‘the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.’ ‘A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,’ wrote the Guardian, ‘not the violent prejudice of Mosley’s fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.’

‘All that outwardly happens in The New House,’ writes Jilly Cooper in her Persephone preface, ‘is over one long day a family moves from a large imposing secluded house with beautiful gardens to a small one overlooking a housing estate. But all the characters and their relationships with each other are so lovingly portrayed that one cares passionately what happens even to the unpleasant ones. ‘The New House, first published in 1936, reminds me of my favourite author Chekhov, who so influenced Lettice’s generation of writers. Like him, she had perfect social pitch and could draw an arriviste developer as convincingly as a steely Southern social butterfly.’

‘Helen Ashton has the power of writing about people as though she had known them all her life. One feels that one has lived next door to Martin Lovell ever since the day when he first set up house with Letty in chambers on the north side of Gray’s Inn Square’ wrote the TLS in 1932. Unusually, Bricks and Mortar is about the life of a London architect from the 1890s to the early 1930s; it is, as well, about a ‘very decent, simple, sweet-minded creature’ who realises that his marriage has been a mistake yet makes the best of things: because he has dignity, commonsense and kindness, and is ‘very much in love with his profession’, he has his own special brand of heroism.