📚 'Rather Dated' January: E.M. Delafield's 'The Messalina of the Suburbs' 📚

29 replies

MotherofPearl · 01/02/2024 10:57

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' book club. This month we are reading and discussing E.M. Delafield’s ‘The Messalina of the Suburbs’. Please do add your thoughts when you are ready.

About the threads:

We are reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day. We are reading one book a month. Spoilers are permitted!

We started the chat thanks to a thread where we kicked off with a discussion of Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield.

Currently we have these separate threads:
November: Anita Brookner, A Start in Life
December: Margaret Drabble: A Summer Bird-Cage
January: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit.
March: Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
April: R.C. Sheriff, The Fortnight in September.
May: Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
June: Margaret Kennedy, The Feast.
July: Mollie Panter-Downes, One Fine Day.
August: Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April.
September: Barbara Pym, An Academic Question.
October: Dorothy Whipple, High Wages.
November: Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September.
December: Monica Dickens, The Fancy.

Link to the main thread:

📚The Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group - All welcome to join📚 www.mumsnet.com/Talk/whatweree_reading/4624300-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join

OP posts:

FuzzyCaoraDhubh · 01/02/2024 20:07

Hello all I read this fairly early on in January and I'm reading it through again to refresh my memory.

I found it an absorbing read but I think the book is below par in terms of what we usually read which is very good to excellent. This book is odd, creepy and sometimes distasteful. I'm thinking here of Doctor Woolley calling Elsie his ('dear little gjrl') and Mr. Williams' telling her that he would look after her as a father would to win her over and take her away. There is a pervasive grimness and grimy-ness (autocorrect is suggesting grimness!) throughout as MotherofPearl has suggested. However, I did read it very quickly and I wanted to know how it ended for Elsie although the book stops short of the real ending.

I was wondering if anybody else thought Elsie was written in an unflattering way. Delafield sets her up to never be more than her physical, sexual self. She seems to have a sexual superpower that is almost comical. One look and they are hooked! I had pity for her that she didn't have any guidance in becoming a woman.

The book also seemed sensationalist to me. The ending was rushed and the last paragraph was badly written. It reminded me of a student scrambling to write a conclusion in an exam. I still think the case of this woman, her lover and the husband is really interesting. This book didn't really do it justice.

BookEngine · 01/02/2024 19:42

Just got a little to finish, on it tonight!

I do love a Becky Sharpe type character, unlikable but circumstances mean survival comes first.

ChessieFL · 01/02/2024 17:01

Thanks for setting the thread up MotherofPearl.

I hadn’t heard about either the book or the real life case before it was mentioned for this thread, and I was intrigued to read it. I have also enjoyed the Provincial Lady series by the same author and while I knew this would be a different kettle of fish I still expected to enjoy it on that basis.

However I found the book a bit disappointing. I was surprised it stopped so abruptly after the arrest - I was expecting to read more about the court case and the public outcry about the final decision.

I also understand that the book wasn’t really accurate with the details. I gather that in reality there wasn’t much of an age gap between Edith and her husband, which makes me wonder what else in the book wasn’t really represented properly. Perhaps I was expecting too much considering it is a novel and therefore never claimed to be a true representation of events.

I agree that there are no likeable characters in the novel. Elsie certainly isn’t written in a sympathetic way.

Original poster

MotherofPearl · 01/02/2024 11:14

Apologies about the formatting in my opening post. Something seems to have gone awry with the margins (probably because I did a lot of copy and paste to get the main text).

I am keen to read everyone's thoughts on this one. On the main thread a few posters hinted at strong feelings!

I thought this was quite absorbing, but not as good as some of the other books we've read on here. The depiction of Elsie/Edith was quite unsympathetic overall, though I thought we were also able to see how at that time, women of her social class didn't have a lot of choices available to them. And by the end, Horace's behaviour was bordering on what we would now characterise as coercive control, so that when Leslie kills him, the reader is quite sympathetic in some ways - though also horrified. The device of the clairvoyant worked quite well to create the sense of foreboding that runs through the novel.

I felt that there was a lot of imagery of dirtiness in the novel. Mrs Palmer's house sounded pretty grimy, and there's that awful description of Elsie's dirty hairbrush. The doctor's wife also kept a dusty, dirty house.

Irene was quite a canny character, I thought. She has much more insight and good sense than Elsie ever realises. And though Mrs Palmer (gurls!) is primarily concerned with self-interest and maintaining petty respectability, at the end her devastation for Elsie is quite evident. I'm not sure though that there are really any likeable characters in the novel. Geraldine is a bore, though you can see that she's been completely ground down by Elsie.

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