The portrayal of Bloomsbury Girls is
entertaining, although Jenner does labour her points from time to time.
However, she brings her story of a society in transition from rigidity to more
open and tolerant attitudes to a satisfactory conclusion. (Review by Margaret
von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Natalie Jenner had a big success with her first novel, The Jane Austen Society, and in Bloomsbury Girls, she picks up some of the characters and takes their story further, into the bleak post-war years in London where times were hard, particularly for women who found that the job market which had welcomed them during wartime was less appreciative. Society wanted them to go back to their subservient positions.
Evie Stone has graduated from Cambridge, but academia has slammed its doors in her face when it comes to getting a job. So she ends up, with a mission of her own, at Bloomsbury Books, an old-fashioned London bookshop where the other two female employees, Grace and Vivien, are restricted to secretarial work in Grace’s case or to being number two in a department to a less-talented man in Vivien’s.
Jenner’s plot brings in all the nuances of the class, race and gender prejudices of the time as Evie, Grace and Vivien try, in their various ways, to realise their ambitions, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by the men around them, both in the bookshop and beyond. The women are sharply drawn, the men less so, all too often sliding into caricature. The author has also given walk-on parts to real figures of the time including Daphne du Maurier and Peggy Guggenheim and her one-time lover Samuel Beckett, and they give the story quite a bit of life as the main characters interact with them.
It all makes for a lively, if fairly undemanding, read. My main criticism is that the writing is clumsy, often to the point of being irritating. Poor Evie is given a completely unconvincing accent to denote her working class origins and there are a number of other infelicities.
Bookshops and libraries have become a popular topic for fiction recently, authors emphasising the importance of books and reading for obvious reasons. The portrayal of Bloomsbury Girls is entertaining, although Jenner does labour her points from time to time. However, she brings her story of a society in transition from rigidity to more open and tolerant attitudes to a satisfactory conclusion. - Margaret von Klemperer
Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner is published by Allison & Busby: ISBN: 9780749028046
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