The Curate’s Wife (1934) by E.H. Young is the story about newlyweds, Dahlia and Cecil Sproat. They are an odd couple. She is innocently outspoken, and he’s reserved and diplomatic, he’s a curate, and she’s a nonbeliever, she’s local and he’s not, her origins are humble and his are higher. The Sproats are struggling to get to know one another and trying to balance their individual desires and expectations with their partner’s. The Vicar and his wife are another couple of interest: the mild, conciliatory Norman Doubleday and the controlling, spiteful Flora Doubleday. The long married Doubledays aren’t happy together, but they have coexisted in a kind of symbiotic relationship for years with Flora having had the upper hand. It’s an ambitious story that does a good job of describing the difficult road of marriage, its intimacy and isolation, its expectations and realities, our self-involved and limited perspectives, the inequalities in the roles and opportunities of the sexes, and classism. I also enjoyed the occasional interesting observations about life, see a few examples below. There is much greater interiority than event, so some may find it slow paced and desultory at times, but the author knows what she is doing, and the story eventually comes into beautiful focus. I’ve only read two other novels by E. H. Young, but I have enjoyed her insights and outspokenness on issues affecting women’s lives in each of them.
My only criticism is that the author sometimes uses pronouns without always making it obvious which characters she was referring to, but it’s a minor point.
Paused at p 182. To be continued…
Interesting excerpts:
“She thought of her own mother, uneducated and inarticulate, outside the social and moral world of Mrs. Doubleday but incapable of meanness, tolerant, possessed unknowingly of a wisdom derived from the country in which all her days have been spent, where she had seen the seasons come and go, the crops spring up and fall under the reaper, bareness where once there had been woodland and fertility overcoming waste, while the rocks and the shape of the land, the wind and the rain remained the same. It was a training to reduce the sense of personal importance, to show that death for one might be life for another, and she has been willing to sacrifice herself for Jenny. She had not given her action so grand a name, she had not seen, perhaps hardly felt, it was a sacrifice; it was the natural thing to do and she had done it in that spirit.”
p262 Miss Fairweather: “ ‘The difficulty is being young and kind too. When you get to our age if you’re not kind hearted you might as well be dead. I’m going to start myself, in a few years’ time. Yes, I shall fall back on being very kind-hearted before long,’ she said, and with a farewell that sounded weirdly jaunty to Mrs. Doubleday’s already astonished ears…”😁
Father was brought up to it and though he didn’t believe in it, he thought it was beautiful. I suppose he liked the language and then he was interested historically. What I want you to understand is that it just doesn’t touch me anywhere. Can I help it? I don’t see what the church teaches that you don’t know already. Am I missing something? Page 281.
In reference to the bookseller’s label, I have included a link to the Wikipedia entry for the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. They did a great deal for the welfare of women and their families!
Women's Educational and Industrial Union - Wikipedia
Another review:
When I reviewed E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren, I remarked that I preferred Jenny’s sister Dahlia to Jenny. So, I was delighted to find that The C
