A welcomed new series from Penguin Books, “The Mermaid collection”, resurrects works of mid-to-late twentieth-century literature, written by women and which, over time, have become unfairly neglected.
Sean Sheehan
The first four novels in this series are a treat. “Lucy Carmichael”, by Margaret Kennedy, sparkles with wit and intelligence in its celebration of an enduring friendship between two women: Lucy and Melissa.
One of them suffers the anguish of being abandoned by the man she loved as she waits in her wedding dress on the day of their intended marriage.
The virtues that keep the women’s friendship strong are resilience, good sense and constancy.
One of them describes herself as “an emotional ascetic…uncommonly easy to live with. I hardly ever have moods. I don’t approve of them. I dote on equanimity”.
She describes her friend as someone “whom everyone likes and nobody remembers”. After the fiasco of the non-marriage, self-healing does not come easily.
“Through a glass darkly”, by Helen McCoy, treads with aplomb a story-telling path between a detective story and a tale of a psychological and possibly supernatural phenomenon.
It starts briskly in Sherlock Holmes fashion with a waiting-to-be-solved mystery when a teacher at a girls’ school loses her job without being given a reason. She was party to events which defy reason and what emerges is the radical realisation that different frames of reference can account for the same event in alarmingly different ways.
Fay Weldon was famous once as an outspoken feminist and prolific writer and “Down among the women” is one of the more than thirty novels written by her.
They are mostly forgotten now, being very much of their time, but this one is worth reading as a reminder of someone who was a larger-than-life, Wife-of-Bath figure who brought feminist issues to her fiction.
The novel’s narrator is as feisty as Weldon’s public image, sweary and provocative, with a wicked humour and jibes to incite incels to apoplexy.
She writes about women with unabashed directness; to be down with them is to be “where the body is something mysterious in its workings, which swells, bleeds and bursts at random; where sex is a strange intermittent animal spasm; where men seduce, make pregnant, betray, desert: where laws are harsh and mysterious, and where the woman goes helpless.”
If Fay Weldon’s prose is past-paced, impromptu jazz, Lettie Cooper’s is a soft and gentle piece for violin. Her novel “Fenny”, is built around a woman who leaves England after the death of her mother whom she self-sacrificingly nursed through her terminal illness.
Young Fenny keeps at bay her feelings about this experience and travels to Florence for a summer job. It is the early 1930s and she remains there, enraptured by the light and colours of Italy, becoming emotionally involved with those she comes to know. By 1937 the rise of Mussolini is making its impact on private lives but Fenny chooses to stay. Unsuspecting and inexperienced Fenny survives the war and learns about life. “Fenny” alone justifies the whole Mermaid series.
The four novels are published by Penguin Books.
.jpg)
