📚The Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group - All welcome to join📚

[Antarcticant]

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group, where we will be reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day.

The best introduction to the 'rather dated' concept would be to read the wonderful thread which inspired this group:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4596284-rather-dated?reply=119670989

To summarise, a number of posters expressed disappointment that literature of the 20th Century is often dismissed as 'rather dated' because society has moved on from many of the values and lifestyles described.

We decided to create a reading group where the literary merits of such fiction can be appreciated, with any 'rather dated' elements being a point of interest rather than a reason to dismiss a novel.

We will be reading one book a month. Our first book, for September, will be the book that inspired the original thread:

The Road to Lichfield by Penelope Lively

Please do join the thread whether you want to take part in the discussion or just place mark to follow it.

Fellow Rather Dated people, please add anything important I might have missed!

(With huge thanks to ImJustMadAboutSaffron for the original thread and idea )

💯 Howard’s End.

There's always one

<whispers> it's a joke

That whisper was to @JaneyGee btw

As originator of the early threads of this series I'd hoped that the quotes around 'Rather Dated' made it clear we don't actually agree with the concept. I suppose it's the problem with long threads that people don't see the first, explanatory post.

Anyway, off to reread Enchanted April

You’d think the fact there’s book group celebrating these novels would be a clue…

It's the perfumistas on S&B raving about 'Old Lady' perfumes. It's about women reclaiming the insults used against them. Interesting that @JaneyGee only used male examples in her list of historic greats.

As a lapsed perfumista from that thread, I understand the love for old lady perfume. There are some magnificent scents. I tend to associate Mitsouko with my DM, but it remains a glorious scent. From the 1930s, there are some overlooked and forgotten novelists. Anne Bridge, anyone?

Who beat E M Forster to the then big literary prize in about 1934. I have the books, and the reference but would need to find it again.

The Hawthornden?

If it was the Hawthornden, then Wikipedia says it was James Hilton for Lost Horizon (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthornden_Prize)

I may have got the year wrong, but Anne Bridge definitely won over the better novelist sometime in that period. And I think (pretty sure) it was E M Forster.

For Peking Picnic?

Off the top of my head, I don't recall. Peking Picnic was her first novel (about 1929 I think). It was heavily based on her own experience of being a Colonial Service wife. I personally liked The Ginger Griffin and Illyrian Spring best of her novels. But I have always found her an interesting lively character. In her youth, pre-marriage, she was taken very seriously as a climber. And she seems to have been in love with George Mallory who died attempting Everest. As Mrs Owen O'Malley she was the Ambassador's wife to Free Poland in London during ww2. Fascinating clever woman. One of the people I would want around a fantasy dinner party table.

I recall reading a political memoir by Rainer Barzel (Not sure of spelling but a prominent German political journalist). He recounts sitting next to her at a diplomatic dinner party as a young man (she would have been in her 50s) and being encouraged by her to talk about his experiences in China. He was mortified when he found out that she had written so well about the KMT era.

@frustratedacademic , it's a long time since I was actively borrowing books from the library stacks and this is the first opportunity I've had to discuss the topic. My mum was a huge fan, so I read all of Ann Bridge's fiction (including the detective/sailing) stories as a teenager, and then the biographical stuff in my 40s... which is now 30 years ago. Writing this, I feel old. I thought, in my 40s, that she deserved a retrospective TV dramatised biography. But even her daughters would now be 80-ish.

Her book about her husband's disgrace as Ambassador to Mexico, and her fight to clear his name (over buying some silver serving trays) is like most of her books - out of print. It's on Kindle though.

Thank you @XingMing. That is all so fascinating. I love this thread; I feel I've learnt so much along the way.

Perhaps we can have an Ann Bridge book after The Enchanted April? Happy to take any suggestions.

The only ones that enough of us will find are reprints. Peking Picnic is the most likely candidate. Personally, I like Illyrian Spring but apart from a Virago edition from the early 80s, it's hard to find.

Just checked and there seem to be quite a few copies of Illyrian Spring on eBay. I think I'll order it, whether we end up choosing it as the next book or not.

I read The Enchanted April for a book group about 4 or 5 years ago. Loved it! In so many different ways!

Just checked with my mum and she has some Anne Bridge. I'm going to read some on holiday with her in a couple of weeks

I hope you enjoy them @TragicMuse.

A brief word of warning: her political views tend to mirror those of her class at the time, which I didn't entirely grasp when I read them first. There are (fairly brief) references that would be considered anti-Semitic slights and other "lapses".

I have from memory, Peking Picnic, Illyrian Spring, The Ginger Griffin, The Dark Moment (early modern Turkey and the rise of Kemal Ataturk), Frontier Passage (refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War into SW France) and some of the Julia Probyn stories, which are much lighter.

And it was the Atlantic Monthly's fiction prize that she won... worth $10,000 which must have come in handy as diplomats were expected to have a private income, and the O'Malleys did not. Her husband had joined the Colonial Service which rarely served overseas, but the two services were merged, and he was sent to China. Her autobiography, Facts and Fictions, is fascinating.

Apologies if all this is tmi.

Thank you XingMing, I'd never actually heard of Ann Bridge, so that's quite a discovery, especially as I have quite a few Chinese students, so it's lovely having the opportunity to learn more about the culture, albeit through a very specific lens.

Other ideas for future reading: what s about Muriel Spark (not The Prime... necessarily)?