Dorothy Whipple

En la Inglaterra de los años treinta, tres hermanas se casan con hombres muy distintos: la sensata Lucy con un hombre pobre y mayor que ella; la insegura Charlotte con un comercial controlador y violento, y la hermosa Vera con un hombre rico y atractivo con quien, sin embargo, se aburre. En una sociedad en la que el matrimonio todavia determinaba el destino de las mujeres de una forma definitiva e inapelable, las tres hermanas seguiran caminos muy diferentes.Publicada en 1943 y adaptada enseguida al cine, Eran hermanas fue una de las novelas mas celebradas de Dorothy Whipple, una escritora imprescindible de la literatura britanica de entreguerras. Esta historia adictiva y magistralmente escrita aborda las relaciones familiares, la situacion de las mujeres de la epoca y como el matrimonio y la maternidad condicionaban todo su futuro.Dorothy Whipple es la Jane Austen del siglo XX. J. B. Priestley

En la Inglaterra de los años treinta, tres hermanas se casan con hombres muy distintos: la sensata Lucy con un hombre pobre y mayor que ella; la insegura Charlotte con un comercial controlador y violento, y la hermosa Vera con un hombre rico y atractivo con quien, sin embargo, se aburre. En una sociedad en la que el matrimonio todavia determinaba el destino de las mujeres de una forma definitiva e inapelable, las tres hermanas seguiran caminos muy diferentes.Publicada en 1943 y adaptada enseguida al cine, Eran hermanas fue una de las novelas mas celebradas de Dorothy Whipple, una escritora imprescindible de la literatura britanica de entreguerras. Esta historia adictiva y magistralmente escrita aborda las relaciones familiares, la situacion de las mujeres de la epoca y como el matrimonio y la maternidad condicionaban todo su futuro.Dorothy Whipple es la Jane Austen del siglo XX. J. B. Priestley

Written in 1953, and reprinted by Persphone Books with a new Preface by Nina Bawden, Someone at a Distance is a quietly gripping story about the destruction of a marriage. Ellen is that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife who loves her life in the English countryside. She tends her garden, dotes on her children, and, when she remembers, visits her cantankerous mother-in-law. This domestic bliss, however, is shattered when her husband, in a moment of weak mid-life vanity, runs off with a French girl.This Fifties novel about a quietly catastrophic love triangle is beautiful and moving, was the headline in The Times under which this review of Someone at a Distance, by Rachel Joyce, appeared: Published in 1953 and set in Englands 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 dont even know?Ellen North is a good woman. She loves her husband, Avery, a London publisher, and her home, her garden and her children. She is kind and considerate. She prefers staying in to going out, and if shes guilty of anything, its an almost naive faith in the simplicity of life. The only blot on the landscape is Averys mother, Mrs North, a woman who likes to complain about how neglected she is. So when Mrs North takes on a young Frenchwoman as a live-in companion, everything seems perfect.But beautiful Louise Lanier is trouble. Jilted by her aristocratic lover because shes a provincial shopkeepers daughter (ie not the sort you marry), Louise has fled to England to lick her wounds. Louise is one of literatures worse narcissists. She is Emma Bovary without the nice bits. When Mrs North dies and makes Louise a beneficiary of her will, Ellen does the "right" thing and invites Louise to stay. Within no time Louise has set her sights on Avery. She doesnt even want Avery. She just wants to feel desired. She just wants what another woman already has...Someone at a Distance is a beautiful and moving story, not just about love, but the lies we tell to protect love. Whipple writes her characters with the kind of understanding that comes from a keen observer of the ordinary. Her style is clear-eyed and precise, superbly elegant and subtle, witty but never showy. Her characters live and breathe and leave little footprints wherever they go; even the minor ones. And its her attention to the small things sentences that are only half-finished, furtive glances, hands that brush one another in passing, the smell of nicotiana on a hot summer night, that make the storytelling so powerful. We see the inevitability of the drama, long before the characters in the middle of it.Described by JB Priestley as "the Jane Austen of the 20th century", Whipple was the bestselling author of nine novels, many short stories and two volumes of memoirs. Her popularity waned when her understated storytelling was replaced by the much louder and pithy voices of the 1960s. (Famously her editor informed her that what the publishing world wanted was more passion, more action.) But for the modern reader, the novel poses a complex question. Who is the true instigator of this love triangle? Is it really that minx, Louise? Is it the man Louise once adored, who rejected her and set her on a path of destruction? Or i...

Lucy, Charlotte et Vera ont grandi dans l’Angleterre du début du XXe siècle. Après le séisme de la Grande Guerre, elles s’installent dans le mariage, et au fil des années 1930, en apparence paisibles

The setting for The Priory is Saunby Priory, a large house somewhere in England which has seen better times: its West Front, built in the thirteenth century for the service of God and the poor, towered above the house that had been raised alongside from its ruins, from its very stones. And because no light showed from any window here, the stranger, visiting Saunby at this hour, would have concluded that the house was empty. But he would have been wrong. There were many people within.This sentence is typical of the opening of a Dorothy Whipple novel. Gently, deceptively gently, but straightforwardly, it sets the scene and draws the reader in. We are shown the two Marwood girls, who are nearly grown-up, their father, the widower Major Marwood, and their aunt; then, as soon as their lives have been described, the Major proposes marriage to a woman much younger than himself - and huge change ensues.It is a classic plot (albeit the stepmother is more disinterested than wicked) and the book has many classic qualities; yet there are no cliches either in situation or outlook, just an extraordinarily well-written and deeply transportative novel by the writer who has been called the twentieth-century Mrs Gaskell. Above all, The Priory is a very subtle novel, so subtle that, as with all Dorothy Whipples books, it is very easy to miss what an excellent writer she is. As Books magazine wrote in August 1939: Because it is so unaffectedly and well written, and because it conveys very effectively a sense of the old house and what is meant to be the various persons connected with it, The Priory carries a punch out of proportion to its otherwise artless-seeming content. Meanwhile Forrest Reid, the Irish novelist and friend of EM Forster, described it in the Spectator as being brilliantly original and convincing. It is fresh, delightful, absorbing, and one accepts it with gratitude as one did the novels read in boyhood.And The Priory makes an interesting companion piece to PB no. 39 Manja, which is also a long novel about families in the inter-war period, also a wonderful, unforgettable read, and also first published in the late summer of 1939 but set against the background of a changing society in Germany, rather than rural Britain.

Persephones second volume of Whipple short stories (the first was The Closed Door and Other Stories) consists of a novella Every Good Deed, originally published separately in 1944, about an adoption gone awry and nine short stories.The point about reading Dorothy Whipple is that there is an intimacy in her writing. But naturally this intimacy does not appeal to everyone. We feel that it appeals to people who like the writer Elizabeth Taylor and yet this is not always the case: we have a friend who adores Elizabeth Taylor but cannot love Dorothy Whipple (yes, there are people).Yet one cannot but suspect that the younger novelist learnt a great deal from Dorothy Whipple. Take the short story in Every Good Deed and Other Storiescalled Boarding House, written in c. 1940. It is about a rather deplorable woman called Mrs Moore who ruins things for everyone else when she arrives at a small hotel because she is bored and lonely. "Its cutlet for cutlet," she thought bitterly. "I cant entertain, so no one entertains me now. To think that I should have to come to a place like this. After the life," she thought, "Ive lived." The last sentence is pure Elizabeth Taylor. A lesser writer would have put After the life Ive lived, she thought. Why it is funnier and so much more expressive to put she thought in the middle of the sentence is a mystery; but it makes all the difference. And why Its cutlet for cutlet is funny is also a mystery, but it certainly is.

Because of theLockwoods by Dorothy Whipple, Persephones bestselling writer, was first published in 1949. It was her penultimate book. As described by novelist Harriet Evans in the preface,Because of the Lockwoods is one of my favourites of [Whipples] novels. The story is deceptively simple: the entanglement of two families in a northern town called Aldworth. One, the Lockwoods, wealthy and powerful, in a position to patronise and help the second family, the poor Hunters, who have been left fatherless with a weak, ineffectual mother. Though the thudding heart of the story draws the reader inexorably along, hoping for the meek to conquer the strong, it is a surprising book in many ways, not least for its subversive portrayal of family the children are often the adults, the parents the untrustworthy, unwise ones, and Whipple makes it clear that what we call today the nuclear family is not the answer to happiness. But what may be most satisfying about the book is how the climax is reached as a result of character. This is twentieth-century British fiction at its very best.Evans continues: If, like me, you are one of the thousands of readers who discovered Dorothy Whipple through Persephones reissues, you know well that feeling of resigned bewilderment suffusing the sigh of satisfaction you utter after finishing one of her novels. Why isnt she better known? Why is she not acclaimed more widely, when so many of her less talented contemporaries are still in print?... For the case does need to be made for Dorothy Whipples entry into the pantheon of great British novelists of the twentieth century.... There is something about the clarity of expression and calm curiosity of Whipples prose which is hugely pleasing. She never employs excess to drive her point home but uses each word carefully and simply. Then there is the readability factor: perhaps that is what mostly damages her reputation, the fact that she is so damned unputdownable. The thinking is the same as it has been for years: shouldnt real literature be hard to read?Here at Persephone Books we all reply in unison: No!

First published in 1943, They Were Sisters is a compulsively readable but often harrowing novel by one of Persephones best writers, who always manages to make the ordinary extraordinary, writes Celia Brayfield in her preface.This is the fourth Dorothy Whipple novel we have republished and, like the others, it is apparently gentle but has a very strong theme, in this case domestic violence. Three sisters marry very different men and the choices they make determine whether they will flourish, be tamed or be repressed. Lucys husband is her beloved companion; Veras husband bores her and she turns elsewhere; and Charlottes husband is a bully who turns a high-spirited naive young girl into a deeply unhappy woman. This is the story of how those marriages shape the sisters lives, the consequences of their decisions, and the sisterly love that hopes to save them from tragedy.In 1945 They Were Sisters was made into a film starring James Mason.

Greenbanks, Persephone Book No. 95, was picked as the Choice of the Book Society in the summer of 1932. Some weeks later, the novelist Hugh Walpole wrote about Greenbanks at length. It had been chosen because of its creation of character. To put it plainly, in Dorothy Whipples picture of a quite ordinary family before and after the war there is some of the best creation of living men and women that we have had for a number of years in the English novel. She is a novelist of true importance.He went on: I believe Greenbanks will be remembered for a long time to come because of the characters of two people in it, the grandmother Louisa and the granddaughter Rachel. In them Dorothy Whipple has performed splendidly the great job of the novelist, which is to increase for us infinitely the population of the living world. Every character in this quiet book is alive. Louisa is an old woman rather muddle-headed, generous, sometimes irresponsible, always governed by the emotions of a loving, anxious heart, which is at the same time never sentimental, who has become as real to me as any of the ladies in Cranford. Rachel is alive from the first instant. She, perhaps, is more of an achievement than Louisa, for kindly dear old women are frequently successful in novels, but a child who is real and charming and quite natural, moving through those difficult years from 10 to 18, cannot be easy to create. This is a quiet and a true book. It is also a beautiful book.The Spectator reviewed Greenbanks at the end of September 1932, after Cold Comfort Farm (of which it preferred the first half). It said: Greenbanks is a pleasant, quiet, delightful domestic book, lifted head and shoulders above the ranks of pleasant, quiet, delightful domestic books by the uncanny accuracy of the portraiture and the lightness and delicacy of its touch. Louisa lives at the house, with her brood gathered more or less around here. Jim and Ambrose, her virtuous and self-satisfied son and son-in-law, make league against Charles, her rolling-stone son, whom she adores. Laura, her daughter, marries the wrong man out of pique. It is all perfectly ordinary and far from undistinguished. The portraits of Laura, Rachel, and Ambrose (particularly Ambrose) are as good as they can be.Greenbanks was Dorothy Whipples third novel after Young Anne (1927) and High Wages (1930). Yet the first mention of it in her diary was despairing: I cannot get on with Greenbanks. Shall I ever have done with it? However, when she handed the book over to her agent, and was so relieved to get rid of the book, she was sorry to see Louisa, Rachel, Kate, Letty, Ambrose all of them, troop silently away. They have finished with me. Quite quickly there was a mostly nice report from her publishers Reader pointing to the very shrewd and natural gift of depicting her middle-class characters etc, etc. Then her English publisher called it much her best work and the former was good and her American publisher wrote: Greenbanks is one of the loveliest books I have read in a long time. When she received Hugh Walpoles Book Society piece, she copied down phrases so that I can turn to it when I fe...

Esta novela, publicada a comienzos de los años 50 y poseedora del encanto de la época, sigue resultando de gran interés en la actualidad. Sus personajes, magistralmente retratados, parecen reales, y los sentimientos que experimentan nunca pasan de moda.