Apologies in advance for a very long review...
20. Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph For some reason, it's taken me a whole month to finish this even though I've really enjoyed it every time I've actually picked it up 
. Apologies to PermanentTemporary who asked me about it on the first thread and hasn't had a reply until now!
The story starts with Albert Sanger, a great composer who is neglected in his homeland and ends up in a remote chalet in the Austrian Alps, living in Bohemian chaos with his current mistress (the beautiful, indolent Linda) and "Sanger's Circus" - the seven children that he has had with various wives and mistresses. When the story opens, the middle four children (who are between 10 and 16) are depicted as unconstrained, uneducated, brilliant, heartless little savages, sharp-tongued and cruelly funny. We would now consider them to be neglected - they are left to run around the mountains in bare feet and motley garb, and the 16 year old, Tony, has been missing for a week at the start of the book and is discovered to have run off to Munich, where she is seduced by her father's impresario, Jacob. This is not quite glossed over, but you get the impression that Kennedy definitely values being interesting over being safe and dull and respectable.
After Sanger dies suddenly, the middle children are "rescued" by their English cousin Florence (niece of the beautiful Evelyn, who ran away from her family to marry Sanger), and history repeats itself when she falls in love with the composer Lewis Dodd, a family friend of the Sangers'. It emerges that 14-year old Tessa Sanger has also been in love with Lewis since early adolescence, and the rest of the novel is taken up with the shifting relationships between Lewis, Florence and Tessa.
This is definitely a novel in two halves - it is quite a shock when the family's carefree existence in the Austrian Tyrol comes to a sudden end and they are forced to realise that bohemianism is all very well but it won't pay the bills for your seven brilliant but barely-civilised children. (It is never quite clear whether Tony's marriage to Jacob is driven by genuine affection, or because he offers security and a way to avoid the horrors of the English boarding school. At one point, Tessa similarly muses about how, if circumstances were different, she would happily go with one of the characters "to get away from school".) Kennedy emphasises their youth by constantly referring to them as "the children" - and they certainly behave in a childish way, greedily eating bulls eye sweets and skinny dipping in the public lake. She also describes several times their "thin", undeveloped bodies (Tessa wears a dress with a sash around "that region where it was to be hoped she might some day have a waist"), so you are left with an uncomfortable clash between their childishness (physical and mental) and their sexual and emotional precocity. Tessa's love for Lewis is presented as pure and innocent (she is the "constant nymph" of the title), but still seems icky when you realise that she is 15 and he is more than twice her age. This is one aspect that definitely hasn't worn well! (I suspect Kennedy realised this at the time because the ending feels rather contrived.)
The novel is really interesting in other ways. Florence tries to avoid the "cultured provincialism" of her background by embracing a kind of sanitised bohemianism - but Lewis feels that house she has made for them is a "silver sty", a pale imitation of the Sangers' house without its heart and passion. He is often impatient and unkind to Florence, and Kennedy doesn't shy away from showing the cruelty and selfishness that are at the heart of many great artists. Through the characters, she also debates what matters most: people or art. Florence is impatient that Lewis and the Sanger children set themselves what she considers to be impossibly high standards for music, even when the rest of their lives are run on slovenly and careless lines; they in their turn are contemptuous of her willingness to compromise on artistic quality for the sake of practicality or social convention. For them, nothing is more important than music.
Like many books of this period, it is marred by casual anti-Semitism (the children call Jacob "Ikey Mo" "on account of his nose and his shin bones" and there are many eye-opening references to the undesirability of having Jews as friends). Much of it feels startlingly modern, however, especially the psychological acuteness and unjudgemental way that Kennedy describes the characters and their thoughts, feelings and actions.
I hope I haven't given away too much of the book in this review - I found it a really interesting, thought-provoking read. I would love to know if anyone else has read it - and if so, what they made of it!