📚 "Rather Dated" February: Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance 📚

[frustratedacademic]

📚 "Rather Dated" bookclub choice for February: Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance 📚

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group, where 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.

And this current one for February: Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance. Available second-hand, via the library, or the most excellent Perspehone Books, where you can read the preface by another wonderful writer, Nina Bawden: https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/someone-at-a-distance.

An excerpt from the above site: 'This Fifties novel about a quietly catastrophic love triangle is beautiful and moving,' was the headline in The Times... 'Published in 1953 and set in England’s rural commuter belt, Someone at a Distance is a love triangle with two unlikely protagonists. Who is responsible for changing the course of our lives, the novel asks? Is it ourselves, those closest to us, or can our lives be shaped by people we don’t even know?"

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

Thanks for thread!

Thank you! I'm starting this this afternoon.

Sticking my cover photo on here (as well as general thread):-

I finished it! Just need to gather my thoughts and I’ll be back.

Ooh please can I join? I read this last month! I love books published by Persephone books

I finished a week or so ago and was gripped - I first read it years ago, when Persephone first reprinted it. I did add it to my reviews over on the 50 Books thread but I’ll wait on here till a few more people are ready to join in.

Can't find at my library 😪

Great choice. Probably my favourite Dorothy Whipple.

I have really enjoyed this book!

Ready to discuss when you are Terp ... and everyone

Ooh how exciting, I just discovered ‘High Wages’ and read it twice back to back! I didnt enjoy Greenbanks as much but will look at this.

I very much enjoyed this Dorothy Whipple, and found it difficult to put down. She is a skilled and compelling story-teller, that is certain.

I found myself really loathing Louise, as I suppose was intended, but then I began to wonder if she wasn't a little overdrawn. Could anyone really be as heartless and unfeeling as she seems to be? I wondered if anyone else felt she was almost a pantomime villain? Apart from the manipulation of Avery, and ruthlessness where Ellen is concerned, her attitude towards her parents is awful. She seems devoid of any real feelings, even towards Avery, and only seduces and marries him to prove that she can.

I felt so frustrated by Avery's passivity, and lack of courage. If only he could have admitted his mistake straight away, I felt he could have redeemed himself, even with Anne. Hugh felt a rather one-dimensional character to me, though Anne was well-drawn and convincing. I thought some of the more marginal characters were great - Mrs Beard and Miss Daley were very well done, as were Louise's parents. I loved the confrontation between Louise and Miss Daley at the end, where Miss Daley tells her, "it's as plain as a pikestaff he doesn't want you [...] but you're getting as much out of him as you can, poshing yourself up in fur coats and pearl necklaces"!

The ending was ambiguous, and though it seemed that perhaps Ellen and Avery would end up together again, that this would take a long time, and would depend on Anne's recovery from what had happened.

Overall I really loved this novel, and it has only whetted my appetite for more DW.

I loved this. It’s been my favourite dated novel so far, and I’ve liked them all (perhaps admired rather than liked the Rumer Godden). I’m so pleased to have discovered Dorothy Whipple, I’d never heard of her.
Louise was awful, but I didn’t exactly find her one dimensional. She was like she was because of the affair with Paul, there were little moments when I felt sorry for her. I never at any point in the novel thought she was happy.
Did anyone else get Garden of Eden vibes? I am not sure why, I think it was all the gardening Ellen did, and the description of flowers. So Louise was the serpent, destroying the innocence of the happy marriage. Perhaps symbolic rather than one dimensional, I don’t know.
The treatment of divorce seemed so alien, it was hard for me to get my head around the fact that the book was written in the 50s … although I guess that was a long time ago! (I was born in the 60s; the 50s doesn’t really seem like ancient history but the way the marriage implodes, how shocked everyone is, seemed as I say a million miles from today). And this of course is the most pertinent “rather dated” aspect: Ellen has put all her eggs in one basket, and Avery breaks the basket. I could really feel her shock and horror. Other dated elements that made me smile: Anne going away for school as there can be No Question of her attending locally, the mock cream - a hangover from the war I suppose. I don’t think rationing is specifically mentioned, but Ellen’s delight at there being custard creams in stock tells us there are difficulties.
I found the ending a bit pat, but extremely satisfying. Avery deserved to be miserable, and it was clear he was going to be! It made me think of that bit in Oscar Wilde: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

I was completely gripped by this first time round and was again, but it was such a long time ago (I hadn’t quite realised it was 1999 when Persephone reprinted it!) that I’d forgotten big chunks of it.

The beginning was much longer than I remembered, but of course Whipple was setting the idyllic scene so the eventual destruction of the marriage could be so much more awful. My main thought throughout was how many MN threads the story could supply! She did seed little clues quite well, I felt - eg the story about Avery sulking early in the marriage and refusing to eat his dinner. We could see that he was an immature and ultimately unreliable weakling who’d fall apart and then be too stupidly stubborn and childish to admit he’d been wrong.

I agree to an extent that Louise was horribly awful, but I’m sure there are people whose families look on aghast as they bulldoze their way through life with zero redeeming features. It’s a pity Whipple kind of ruined it in the end - for me, anyway - by dangling the prospect of the wretched Avery somehow ditching Louise and Ellen taking him back. But then, the idea of a strong woman going it alone is a very modern one, and the women in the novel who had to go it alone were all a bit downtrodden and/or slaving away for their livings, whereas Ellen was a lady.

Having said that, I was often very moved by the writing, especially the descriptions of Ellen’s emotional torment. That felt very true and real. And her misery at trying to protect Anne, and watching her innocence and happiness being destroyed.

@StellaOlivetti I think you’d enjoy They Were Sisters….

@Terpsichore thank you! Off to look it up.

Following! This one has been on my list for a while :)

I agree with the feeling of being a bit let down at the thought of her taking Avery back. I thought the part when it was falling apart between Avery and Louise was very well written and it made me so frustrated with him that he stubbornly pushed on when actually it was probably still repairable initially

I did wish Ellen would stop being so polite and tell Louise to shift her arse (I paraphrase) and help with the housework….but again, how many threads do we read on here where women tie themselves in knots because lazy houseguests don’t lift a finger, and they don’t know how to tackle it?

And Avery's lordly assumption that every meal would be beautifully cooked, served and cleared away, as if by magic - ie by his wife - was enraging. That Christmas dinner…….huh. Whipple certainly knew how to press buttons with a (largely female, I suspect) readership! There must have been lots of heads nodding in sympathetic agreement when it was first published.

I'd not thought of the Garden of Eden but that's a brilliant observation. I think that the house and garden are very much set up as an idyll that Louise insidiously destroys. I thought all the gardening also worked to emphasise Ellen's wholesomeness, in contrast to Louise's artifice and worldliness.

I just finished it. I really enjoyed it. I was completely gripped, particularly after the half way point when Avery and Louise were discovered.

I've just read through the comments and I really like the Garden of Eden reference. Louise is described as boneless as she sits with her knees drawn to her chest, sunbathing. Rather like the serpent!

I agree with all points mentioned so far. I think there will be a reunion for Ellen and Avery in the future as well. It's funny that John Bennett was musing that he didn't know Avery that well after all, while I was thinking the same. He was one dimensional. The token fool.

I very much enjoyed this, the first book by Dorothy Whipple that I’ve read. The writing is excellent and carries the reader along effortlessly.

The characters are well rounded and psychologically believable and though they start out as stereotypes straight out of the 1950s – the contented, nurturing, happy homemaker; the loving, enthusiastic pony-loving teenage daughter; the confident, handsome, family centred, provider husband; the lonely, bored mother in law; the publisher with his head in the clouds. And then it is Louise, another stock character, who invades the middle class English home counties idyll and turns such stereotypes on their head.

For Louise is the outsider who creates trouble in the Garden of Eden. Had she been English the contrast with Ellen would not have been so great and the impact less but she is French, the other, an outsider, with “foreign” ways, more concerned with her physical image and appearance and material acquisition than creating, and being a part of, a secure warm family. Louise judged happy people as irritating and boring, and considered it “unintelligent to be happy.”

After Avery’s betrayal, in her anguish, Ellen allows her carefully tended garden to run wild and overgrown, reflecting her own and her family’s raging and uncontrolled emotions. The book’s uncertain ending reflects the overall uncertainty of life, whether this uncertainty is caused by external events or human frailty with far reaching consequences. The author has prepared us for this:

“You know, count no man happy until he’s dead and all that, Avery,’ she said, rising on her elbow. ‘And I really shouldn’t say it until they are grown up, but I do feel, as far as happiness is concerned, that we’ve made a success of our children.’”

It’s as if with those words she has set her family’s fate.

I enjoyed your review, Walkinginthesand.
By putting Anne's needs ahead of her own, Ellen has decided her own fate. There would have been a reconciliation at the end of the story between Ellen and Avery, but it would have upset Anne. And Louise, of course.

I have been thinking if I feel sorry for Louise and I think I really can't scrape up any sympathy other than feeling sorry for a person who goes through life with such venom in their heart, because they will never be happy.

SPOILERS
I agree Fuzzy, Louise will never be happy. However, I do think she is young and young people don't often think about or care about the consequences for others of their actions. She is also deeply hurt, angry and some what bored when she arrives back in England and Avery started giving her attention that she craved. I agree with others that Loiuse is a "snake in the garden of Eden"

However, I also think that Louise and Ellen are two opposites of woman hood. Madonna and Whore - Louise is the alluring temptress, the "bitch queen" leading poor, weak menz from the path of righteousness. Where as, Ellen is the epitomy of motherhood, giving service and succour to her husband and family and others (old women) with no thought for herself. The "Good Wife." Louise is a destroyer and Ellen someone who makes things bloom.
I have zero sympathy for the pampered manchild, Avery. He cared nothing for Ellen or his children's feelings when he pursued their young guest and had not appreciated how much Ellen had enabled his success and comfortable life.

I think it was an interesting twist to have Paul be the "someone at a distance" who appears at the start and whose actions in France, inadvertently cause all the drama in England. I also feel that Ellen looking across at Anne in the distance at the end of the book is also a "someone in the distance" who affects the trajectory of Ellen's life. Anne's feelings must be put foremost (quite rightly) and Ellen's wish to take Avery back put on hold. I think Ellen wanted to take back Avery as he had been so very much the centre of her life for so long and as her friend said "they were not the new sort of women."

I think Ellen should have taken Avery for every penny she could get rather than piously deny herself.

I like Dorothy Whipple books. She has great insight - They Were Sisters is one of my favourites. I think she was very unfairly traduced by Virago who wouldn't publish her, declaring that "we had a limit known as the Whipple line, below which we would not sink."

Hi Sapatsea, I hadn't really thought of the meaning of the title until I read your post. Certainly, Paul dominated Louise's thoughts and became an unhealthy obsession even after moving away from him. She couldn't shake herself free of him and he never knew the influence he had on so many people's lives. Louise was also someone at a distance who wasn't a threat initially, but who gradually wormed her way into the marriage and destroyed it.

The class structure and the social divide in French society was portrayed well, I thought. The concern of the Laniers to get Louise respectably married and for her to marry someone suitable within her class was everything. I enjoyed the reference that Louise made to Emma Bovary, comparing her lot to hers in becoming the wife of a dull man in the provinces, André Petit. Even his name suggests somebody mediocre. If it hadn't been for Mrs North's legacy, she might have married him.

Finished last night. I found it very readable; Whipple’s style is very clear and her plotting is excellent. I thought she was very clever at sewing little seeds that then flowered later in the book, without seeming clunky. As others have mentioned above, Avery’s character flaws are subtly introduced, but I also appreciated the way the hotel and its circumstances made for a realistic job/home at the end.

I thought the characterisation was also excellent, particularly the minor characters such as Miss Beasley, Mrs North the elder (what a lot of MIL threads she could have spawned) and Louise’s parents. The only exception was Louise herself, who seemed a bit too ghastly to be real at times, but maybe I’m just naive.

I was surprised that - apart from problems with food and staff - the recent war impinged so little on the book. It did make me wonder if Amigny would have been quite so set in its ways. (What if André Petit were a resistance hero, and the Devoisys notorious collaborators?) And I found Louise’s constant contrasts between the English and the French very irritating, though to be fair it wasn’t clear that any of the other characters were quite so prejudiced.

I think PPs are quite right about the serpent/Garden of Eden analogy. And Louise doesn’t care for living things: you can tell from her attitude to the cat that she’s a wrong ‘un.

I'm so enjoying reading everyone's reviews. Each one makes me appreciate the novel in a new way.