Tag Archives: women writers

#BookReview ‘Poor Caroline’ by Winifred Holtby #historical

2 Replies

I can’t help but think this novel would be helped by a better title. Poor Caroline is such a negative sounding title for this, the fourth novel by Yorkshire author Winifred Holtby. From the first page, it is clear this is a fond but sharp satire of the inter-war years showing how the expectations of people can on the surface appear aligned but in reality are self-serving. Winifred HoltbyCaroline Denton-Smyth, honorary secretary of the Christian Cinema Company, works hard in the belief that her company is doing good. But the people on the board of directors each have their own reason for being involved with the company, reasons that are not admitted and which diverge hugely from Caroline’s intentions. One hopes to leverage connections with the chairman to gain entrance for his son to Eton. Another wishes to sell his new type of film. Caroline has so many ideas but little success. At the age of 72 she has no money and is dependent on loans from long-suffering relatives. But she is always hopeful. This is the story of Caroline, her fellow directors, and the Christian Cinema Company. Holtby tells the story of each person in turn so the full picture, and the extent of Caroline’s folly, becomes evident. You can’t help but feel simultaneously sorry for her and exasperated with her inability to see the truth.
It is a while before we meet the eponymous heroine. First we learn of her death, as some distant relatives return from her funeral. In her will, Caroline left bequests of money she didn’t have. “Oh, you can’t alter people like Caroline. She always thought she knew better than anyone. She was always going to do something extraordinary.”
Two scenes in particular stayed with me. The description of the odious Clifton Roderick Johnson’s screenwriting class is a classic. He spits instructions to his paltry four students. ‘They did not know, and indeed Mr Johnson hardly knew, that their lecturer who spoke so confidently of technique, cuts, drama and royalties had himself been able to sell for performance only one scenario and a set of captions.’ And the storm at film inventor Hugh Macafee’s derelict warehouse when he continues to work despite the efforts of two fellow directors to evacuate him before a wall collapses.
This novel requires patience, to allow the author time to draw the full scenario so the true manipulations, fraud, dissembling and love, can unfold.

Click the title to read my review of ANDERBY WOLD, also by Winifred Holtby.

If you like this, try:-
‘Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day’ by Winifred Watson
‘Curtain Call’ by Anthony Quinn
‘Highland Fling’ by Nancy Mitford

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview POOR CAROLINE by Winifred Holtby https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3nn via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Blue Flower’ by Penelope Fitzgerald #historical

1 Reply

If ever there is a book to persevere with, to have patience with, and to go back and re-read again, it is The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. When I bought it, I didn’t realize it was the last novel by the Booker prize winner; published five years before her death in 2000 aged 83. For someone about to read it, it can seem a trifle intimidating. Penelope FitzgeraldSet in 18th century Germany, Fitzgerald tells her imagining of the teenage story of real German poet and philosopher Fritz von Hardenberg, later called Novalis. He is a young man so self-contained, so absorbed in his thoughts, that I wondered where the drama would arise. But it does, because he falls in love.
The Blue Flower is a short novel, 223 pages. The chapters are concise [mostly only two or three pages each] and this encouraged me to ‘just read another’ and so, gradually, almost without realizing, I fell into the story. Fitzgerald recreates this particular time in German history with a delicacy that, despite the language and sometimes confusing names, makes the people become real.
It is 1794 and Fritz, an idealistic and passionate student of philosophy and writer of poems, stays with some family friends and meets their youngest daughter, Sophie von Kühn. Love is instant for Fritz and, despite a little bemusement on the part of Sophie, and astonishment by his siblings and friends, he proves himself constant.
It is the sort of novel that, when you are reading it you ‘get’ it but afterwards, when trying to describe it to someone else, you struggle to grasp it. I still do not really understand the meaning of the blue flower. But although the deeper meaning may elude me, there are passages I love. Particularly the opening chapter when a guest arrives at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse; it is washday, the annual occasion for washing personal and household linen, and his arrival effects an introduction to the household. This starts a juxtaposition which runs throughout the novel, of the ordinary everyday mundanity of life alongside Fritz’s poetic sensibilities. He calls twelve-year old Sophie his Philosophy, his guardian spirit. Knowing he must wait for her, he trains as an official in the salt mines and Fitzgerald treats us to some of the practicalities and science of this industry.
This is not a lazy read. Be prepared to invest something into it yourself. Fitzgerald does not put it all onto the page, she expects the reader to think, to research, to work it out, as she did when writing. If each book is the visible bit of an iceberg above the waterline, with the research submerged, The Blue Flower is the snowball on top of the iceberg.

Read my review of OFFSHORE, also by Penelope Fitzgerald.

If you like this, try this:-
‘The Ballroom’ by Anna Hope
‘The Past’ by Tessa Hadley
‘Gone are the Leaves’ by Anne Donovan

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BLUE FLOWER by Penelope Fitzgerald https://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Zr via @SandraDanby