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A new era for women--and the Aubrey sisters--dawns in the trilogy that proves "what an extraordinary, and extraordinarily honest, writer Rebecca West was" (The New York Times). They have put down their schoolbooks and put up their hair, but a talented musician and her kin ponder what being a young woman on one's own will entail. Abandoned by their feckless father, Rose and her family must move beyond their comfortable drawing room to discover a world of kind patrons, music teachers, and show more concert hall acclaim, but also domestic strife, anti-Semitism, and social pressure to marry. Set before World War I, Rebecca West's intimate, eloquent family portrait brings to life a time when women recognized their own voices and the joys of living off one's own talents. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
'I saw the life of those days as a flagon of grey glass, filled with salt water, with collected tears'
By sally tarbox TOP 500 REVIEWER on 9 Oct. 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
The second of West's 'Cousin Rosamund' trilogy. Written as a stand-alone novel, although even better if you read its prequel ('The Fountain overflows') first.
Continuing the lives of the Aubrey family after the disappearance of their father; Mary and Rose are now at music college; brother Richard Quin is planning to go to university; disliked elder sister Cordelia is starting a new career. But the First World War is looming...
Probably the best fiction I've ever read, West can paint with words so that you feel you're there. The account of an awkward dinner show more party with family friend Mr Morpurgo and his hostile wife is supreme. And I love her description of self-righteous Cordelia on the eve of her wedding:
'Her new manner...she was still meek, but her meekness was pretentious. Though she was a lamb, it was one which had got itself embroidered on a church banner.'
Exquisitely written, I can't recommend it enough. show less
By sally tarbox TOP 500 REVIEWER on 9 Oct. 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
The second of West's 'Cousin Rosamund' trilogy. Written as a stand-alone novel, although even better if you read its prequel ('The Fountain overflows') first.
Continuing the lives of the Aubrey family after the disappearance of their father; Mary and Rose are now at music college; brother Richard Quin is planning to go to university; disliked elder sister Cordelia is starting a new career. But the First World War is looming...
Probably the best fiction I've ever read, West can paint with words so that you feel you're there. The account of an awkward dinner show more party with family friend Mr Morpurgo and his hostile wife is supreme. And I love her description of self-righteous Cordelia on the eve of her wedding:
'Her new manner...she was still meek, but her meekness was pretentious. Though she was a lamb, it was one which had got itself embroidered on a church banner.'
Exquisitely written, I can't recommend it enough. show less
Having enjoyed The Return of the Soldier, I picked this up in a charity shop, without realising it was the second of a trilogy until after I started reading it. Fortunately, it still works as a standalone book.
This is a coming of age novel, set in in the run up to WW1: "I wanted to make friends... to be part of the general web, to be linked with boys and girls and men and women who were not yet what they would be in the end."
PLOT
Clare Aubrey, a retired concert pianist, has been abandoned by her gambling husband and is raising their teenage children: Cordelia (the oldest and least warm), twins Rose (the narrator) and Mary (both destined to follow in their mother's musical footsteps), and Richard Quinn (charming, bright, wise and still at show more school). Cousin Rosamund and her mother, Constance, live with them, too. They are upper-middle class, and by selling some paintings, on the advice of Mr Morpurgo, family finances are now reasonably secure.
As the family rebuild their lives, they relish small victories such as being able to afford flowers to plant in the garden, "We were able to do the things that other people could do". But as they progress, the shadow of war looms, and "we saw a fungoid bloom of ruin slowly creep across the familiar objects among which we had been reared".
At times, it's a little florid, mannered and self-consciously erudite - like a diluted version of Ivy Compton-Burnett. There is not much plot (though there is a murder), but there is some sharp wit, especially at the expense of the dreadful Mrs Morpurgo.
CLASS
The Aubreys are a little adrift: they have the background, tastes and education of the elite, but not quite the income. The mother has become (or maybe always was) oblivious to many social cues, and their friendships cross boundaries in a way that may have shocked some: Mr Morpurgo is a wealthy and generous Jewish art dealer, but they also regularly stay in a pub on the Thames, where they're related by marriage to the landlord.
This can cause awkwardness: "Like all people brought up in households destitute of manservants, we regarded them as implacable enemies... who could implement their ill-will by means of supernatural powers which enabled them to see through a guest's pretensions."
Appropriate clothing is a potential pitfall, but also a source of wry observation. For a prison visit, a man wore "clothes which suggested he had not made up his mind whether he was going to a funeral or to Ascot."
RADICAL FOR HER TIME
West was a member of the Bloomsbury set, that also included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and E M Forster. They were known for their progressive attitudes to women and relationships amongst other things, and although this is not a radical novel, there are glimpses of this aspect of West's thinking.
She portrays strong, independent women, and although she doesn't suggest all men are feckless or dangerous, the twins do have such fears, which is one reason why they are determined not to marry.
But there are admirable men in the story, with Richard Quin held up as the ideal man - even before he's a man.The fact he dies in the war demonstrates teh futile waste of war. Cousin Rosamund says of Richard Quin "I love him... but it's a shame he has to be a man... what will happen to him in a world where men are so awful?"
Uncle Len is also a reliable chap: a lower middle class a publican who is a quirky and admirable auto-didact, something the Aubreys encourage. It sometimes has amusing consequences, such as when he assumes Darwinism is a new and controversial topic for the doctor and the rector: "he was not making the mistakes of a stupid man, he was guessing like an explorer". For all his good qualities, he's still a bit old-school, wanting to keep the women away from any trouble, though Rose asserts "There was no difference in courage between men and women, if what happened wasn't fit for me it wasn't fit for men to see either".
There is also a lengthy and educational look at perceptions of gypsies.
A child is not a different species, as Victorians sometimes thought, but "an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness".
The mixed feelings of adolescence are probably not as anti-feminist as they first seem, but rather reflect typical mix of fear and excitement, coupled with the limitations women of the time faced. For example, on becoming aware of the attention of men, "We liked this, and did not like it. We wished we were growing up into something other than women."
On the other hand, Clare's advice to a shy, pretty daughter is a little off: "people like young girls who are pretty... when you go to any new place and you feel nervous, just stand there and let people look at you"!
IDENTITY
It's not just in class terms and in the travails of reaching adulthood that characters have identity issues.
Is Clare, married, abandoned, or widowed?
When they leave music college, one of the twins has to change her surname to avoid confusion.
Loss of identity is one of Rose's reasons for fearing marriage.
Uncle Len tries to hide his gypsy background.
One can't help wondering if Mr Morpurgo's collecting of Christian art is, at least in part, a turning aside from his Jewish heritage.
MUSIC
Music is integral to the lives of the main characters, and there is no shying away from the hardships of training: "That was why I had had not childhood and why I had seen so much sunlight through windowpanes". There's always a higher target, but perfection is always just out of reach. They are torn between the desire to succeed and the difficulty of doing so.
When Cordelia gives up professional musicianship, the twins feel they "had so little in common with her that she seemed almost abstract: an inorganic burden like a knapsack."
QUOTES
* "One cannot live slowly as one can play music slowly."
* "Kate wore her wooden look of consequence."
* A butler "spoke with gloating discretion" about an extra guest.
* "Mrs Morpurgo had no secrets, She controlled her words well enough... but as she spoke the truth was blared aloud by the intonation of her commanding voice, the expressions which passed over her face, legible as the words on a poster, and her vigorous movements."
* "She had meant to be nearly, but not quite, intolerable."
* "She had not been abandoned to grief... she had been recovering her faculty for insolent surprise."
* "Her hands clasped before her dark flowing skirts, and a thread in every line of pent up emotion about to burst its dam."
* "There was a faint, sharp sweetness about her, like the taste of raspberries. She wore fussy and frilly clothes and jingling bracelets whit an air of surprised distaste, as if she had been put to sleep by a witch and had awoken to find herself in these trappings."
* "It had been furnished by Maples in the Japanese style, not that the family had any oriental connection, but simply because the backwash of the aesthetic movement had by then reached the suburbs."
* "A Victorian mansion... and within its walls Asia had taken its revenge against colonialism... the drawing room, which really did not look so bad now they had taken out the enormous ivory model of the Taj Mahal."
* Two sisters (not Aubreys) who had been "barmaids, not at the height of their profession. They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride... Listening to Aunt Lily's conversation was like having emptied at one's feet a dustbin full of comic songs and jokes from pantomimes."
* "The river, the grey-green mystery, the mirror which reflects solid objects so steadily but is not solid, the fugitive which remains."
* A mob in a pub: "Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips."
* "Constance was like a statue, not a very good statue, imperfectly Pygmalionised."
* "The plane trees were casting their last crumpled maroon and silver leaves on the pewter pavements, the lights of the passing traffic paid out yellow ribbons of reflection on the shining roadway."
* "She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air."
* "I was overcome by an abstract sense of grief, something like the moan of shingle dragging back to sea between breakers."
* "Waltzes and one-steps and tangoes were exhaled from the porticoes wearing striped awnings like masks, and in the gardens dancers walked on the moon-frosted lawns, the moonlight shining with phantom coldness from the young women's bare shoulders."
* "The silence that had been silting up in the rooms... now filled it as an invisible solid.Now Richard Quin was nowhere but he was everywhere. " show less
This is a coming of age novel, set in in the run up to WW1: "I wanted to make friends... to be part of the general web, to be linked with boys and girls and men and women who were not yet what they would be in the end."
PLOT
Clare Aubrey, a retired concert pianist, has been abandoned by her gambling husband and is raising their teenage children: Cordelia (the oldest and least warm), twins Rose (the narrator) and Mary (both destined to follow in their mother's musical footsteps), and Richard Quinn (charming, bright, wise and still at show more school). Cousin Rosamund and her mother, Constance, live with them, too. They are upper-middle class, and by selling some paintings, on the advice of Mr Morpurgo, family finances are now reasonably secure.
As the family rebuild their lives, they relish small victories such as being able to afford flowers to plant in the garden, "We were able to do the things that other people could do". But as they progress, the shadow of war looms, and "we saw a fungoid bloom of ruin slowly creep across the familiar objects among which we had been reared".
At times, it's a little florid, mannered and self-consciously erudite - like a diluted version of Ivy Compton-Burnett. There is not much plot (though there is a murder), but there is some sharp wit, especially at the expense of the dreadful Mrs Morpurgo.
CLASS
The Aubreys are a little adrift: they have the background, tastes and education of the elite, but not quite the income. The mother has become (or maybe always was) oblivious to many social cues, and their friendships cross boundaries in a way that may have shocked some: Mr Morpurgo is a wealthy and generous Jewish art dealer, but they also regularly stay in a pub on the Thames, where they're related by marriage to the landlord.
This can cause awkwardness: "Like all people brought up in households destitute of manservants, we regarded them as implacable enemies... who could implement their ill-will by means of supernatural powers which enabled them to see through a guest's pretensions."
Appropriate clothing is a potential pitfall, but also a source of wry observation. For a prison visit, a man wore "clothes which suggested he had not made up his mind whether he was going to a funeral or to Ascot."
RADICAL FOR HER TIME
West was a member of the Bloomsbury set, that also included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and E M Forster. They were known for their progressive attitudes to women and relationships amongst other things, and although this is not a radical novel, there are glimpses of this aspect of West's thinking.
She portrays strong, independent women, and although she doesn't suggest all men are feckless or dangerous, the twins do have such fears, which is one reason why they are determined not to marry.
But there are admirable men in the story, with Richard Quin held up as the ideal man - even before he's a man.
Uncle Len is also a reliable chap: a lower middle class a publican who is a quirky and admirable auto-didact, something the Aubreys encourage. It sometimes has amusing consequences, such as when he assumes Darwinism is a new and controversial topic for the doctor and the rector: "he was not making the mistakes of a stupid man, he was guessing like an explorer". For all his good qualities, he's still a bit old-school, wanting to keep the women away from any trouble, though Rose asserts "There was no difference in courage between men and women, if what happened wasn't fit for me it wasn't fit for men to see either".
There is also a lengthy and educational look at perceptions of gypsies.
A child is not a different species, as Victorians sometimes thought, but "an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness".
The mixed feelings of adolescence are probably not as anti-feminist as they first seem, but rather reflect typical mix of fear and excitement, coupled with the limitations women of the time faced. For example, on becoming aware of the attention of men, "We liked this, and did not like it. We wished we were growing up into something other than women."
On the other hand, Clare's advice to a shy, pretty daughter is a little off: "people like young girls who are pretty... when you go to any new place and you feel nervous, just stand there and let people look at you"!
IDENTITY
It's not just in class terms and in the travails of reaching adulthood that characters have identity issues.
Is Clare, married, abandoned, or widowed?
When they leave music college, one of the twins has to change her surname to avoid confusion.
Loss of identity is one of Rose's reasons for fearing marriage.
Uncle Len tries to hide his gypsy background.
One can't help wondering if Mr Morpurgo's collecting of Christian art is, at least in part, a turning aside from his Jewish heritage.
MUSIC
Music is integral to the lives of the main characters, and there is no shying away from the hardships of training: "That was why I had had not childhood and why I had seen so much sunlight through windowpanes". There's always a higher target, but perfection is always just out of reach. They are torn between the desire to succeed and the difficulty of doing so.
When Cordelia gives up professional musicianship, the twins feel they "had so little in common with her that she seemed almost abstract: an inorganic burden like a knapsack."
QUOTES
* "One cannot live slowly as one can play music slowly."
* "Kate wore her wooden look of consequence."
* A butler "spoke with gloating discretion" about an extra guest.
* "Mrs Morpurgo had no secrets, She controlled her words well enough... but as she spoke the truth was blared aloud by the intonation of her commanding voice, the expressions which passed over her face, legible as the words on a poster, and her vigorous movements."
* "She had meant to be nearly, but not quite, intolerable."
* "She had not been abandoned to grief... she had been recovering her faculty for insolent surprise."
* "Her hands clasped before her dark flowing skirts, and a thread in every line of pent up emotion about to burst its dam."
* "There was a faint, sharp sweetness about her, like the taste of raspberries. She wore fussy and frilly clothes and jingling bracelets whit an air of surprised distaste, as if she had been put to sleep by a witch and had awoken to find herself in these trappings."
* "It had been furnished by Maples in the Japanese style, not that the family had any oriental connection, but simply because the backwash of the aesthetic movement had by then reached the suburbs."
* "A Victorian mansion... and within its walls Asia had taken its revenge against colonialism... the drawing room, which really did not look so bad now they had taken out the enormous ivory model of the Taj Mahal."
* Two sisters (not Aubreys) who had been "barmaids, not at the height of their profession. They had wandered in a defeated continent of the vulgar world, where vulgarity had lost its power and its pride... Listening to Aunt Lily's conversation was like having emptied at one's feet a dustbin full of comic songs and jokes from pantomimes."
* "The river, the grey-green mystery, the mirror which reflects solid objects so steadily but is not solid, the fugitive which remains."
* A mob in a pub: "Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips."
* "Constance was like a statue, not a very good statue, imperfectly Pygmalionised."
* "The plane trees were casting their last crumpled maroon and silver leaves on the pewter pavements, the lights of the passing traffic paid out yellow ribbons of reflection on the shining roadway."
* "She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air."
* "I was overcome by an abstract sense of grief, something like the moan of shingle dragging back to sea between breakers."
* "Waltzes and one-steps and tangoes were exhaled from the porticoes wearing striped awnings like masks, and in the gardens dancers walked on the moon-frosted lawns, the moonlight shining with phantom coldness from the young women's bare shoulders."
* "The silence that had been silting up in the rooms... now filled it as an invisible solid.
This Real Night is the second book in Rebecca West’s Aubrey family trilogy; A Saga of the Century (there are editions which publish all three books together). The trilogy begins with The Fountain Overflows . I read that wonderful book back at the end of February while I was on holiday with friends in Iceland, I hadn’t meant to leave it quite so long before catching up with these characters again. This Real Night and Cousin Rosamond were published in the 1980s following Rebecca West’s death, from the manuscripts that she left behind. The third book I know is unfinished – and while part of me does still want to read it – I can’t get excited about an unfinished novel.
This Real Night starts a few years after the events of The show more Fountain Overflows, we find ourselves in the 1900s, in those days before the First World War so changed the world for a generation of young people. Cornelia, Mary and our narrator Rose are now grown up, they discover a freedom to being grown up, happy to throw of the bonds of childhood.
“A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. When one is quite little one labours under just such physical and mental disabilities as might be inflicted by some dreadful accident or disease; but while the maimed and paralysed are pitied because they cannot walk and have to be carried about and cannot explain their needs or think clearly, nobody is sorry for babies, though they are always crying aloud their frustration and hurt pride.”
In the wake of Piers Aubrey’s disappearance, the family fortunes have improved. Clare has a good grip on the purse strings for the first time ever, and the family enjoy the friendship and support of Mr Morpurgo, their father’s friend. The sisters’ beloved younger brother Richard Quin is still at school, he too growing up fast – and considering Oxford in the not too distant future. Cornelia, following the devastation of having to accept that she doesn’t possess the fine musical ability of her mother and two sisters, has become an art dealer’s assistant. Mary and Rose are at music college, desperately trying for artistic perfection.
“Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven.”
Cordelia marries early – and everyone seems to think it for the best. Cordelia is the odd one out in the family, she is rather spikey and can be difficult, though it is sad that she always seems to fall foul of her mother and sisters. Cousin Rosamond decides to train as a nurse, striding out towards independence she remains close to the Aubreys and is especially adored by everyone’s favourite Richard Quin. Rose and Mary begins to notice a little change in Cordelia after her marriage – although their relationship remains strained.
“Our enemy had gone away, had not just left our house, but had vanished. Someone whom, it often seemed, we did not love enough.”
One of the things the Aubrey siblings still enjoy more than anything is their visits to Aunt Lily, who they first knew as children, when her sister was convicted of the murder of her husband. Lily’s daughter was a school friend of Mary and Rose, and although she now lives with her dead father’s family (who prevent her from seeing Aunt Lily) the Aubrey’s retain their old affection for the unfortunate woman. Lily works in The Dog and Duck a small inn on the Thames, taken in by her old friends Aunt Milly and Uncle Len. It is a rough, colourful environment – quite at odds with their more genteel, artistic upbringing, but Mary and Rose particularly love their visits. Here they are exposed to all kinds of new experiences. I love this collection of characters, who Rebecca West portrays realistically but with affection, resisting I felt, the trap of caricature that some writers of a certain class have been known to fall into.
As the world descends into war, change comes to the Aubrey household, there is probably an inevitability to the ending – and Rebecca West’s depiction is delicately poignant.
If I am honest, I think, that The Fountain Overflows is a rather better novel, although I enjoyed this enormously – a chance to meet again familiar old friends. This Real Night probably could be read as a standalone novel but if you did, you would miss an enormous treat. show less
This Real Night starts a few years after the events of The show more Fountain Overflows, we find ourselves in the 1900s, in those days before the First World War so changed the world for a generation of young people. Cornelia, Mary and our narrator Rose are now grown up, they discover a freedom to being grown up, happy to throw of the bonds of childhood.
“A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. When one is quite little one labours under just such physical and mental disabilities as might be inflicted by some dreadful accident or disease; but while the maimed and paralysed are pitied because they cannot walk and have to be carried about and cannot explain their needs or think clearly, nobody is sorry for babies, though they are always crying aloud their frustration and hurt pride.”
In the wake of Piers Aubrey’s disappearance, the family fortunes have improved. Clare has a good grip on the purse strings for the first time ever, and the family enjoy the friendship and support of Mr Morpurgo, their father’s friend. The sisters’ beloved younger brother Richard Quin is still at school, he too growing up fast – and considering Oxford in the not too distant future. Cornelia, following the devastation of having to accept that she doesn’t possess the fine musical ability of her mother and two sisters, has become an art dealer’s assistant. Mary and Rose are at music college, desperately trying for artistic perfection.
“Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven.”
Cordelia marries early – and everyone seems to think it for the best. Cordelia is the odd one out in the family, she is rather spikey and can be difficult, though it is sad that she always seems to fall foul of her mother and sisters. Cousin Rosamond decides to train as a nurse, striding out towards independence she remains close to the Aubreys and is especially adored by everyone’s favourite Richard Quin. Rose and Mary begins to notice a little change in Cordelia after her marriage – although their relationship remains strained.
“Our enemy had gone away, had not just left our house, but had vanished. Someone whom, it often seemed, we did not love enough.”
One of the things the Aubrey siblings still enjoy more than anything is their visits to Aunt Lily, who they first knew as children, when her sister was convicted of the murder of her husband. Lily’s daughter was a school friend of Mary and Rose, and although she now lives with her dead father’s family (who prevent her from seeing Aunt Lily) the Aubrey’s retain their old affection for the unfortunate woman. Lily works in The Dog and Duck a small inn on the Thames, taken in by her old friends Aunt Milly and Uncle Len. It is a rough, colourful environment – quite at odds with their more genteel, artistic upbringing, but Mary and Rose particularly love their visits. Here they are exposed to all kinds of new experiences. I love this collection of characters, who Rebecca West portrays realistically but with affection, resisting I felt, the trap of caricature that some writers of a certain class have been known to fall into.
As the world descends into war, change comes to the Aubrey household, there is probably an inevitability to the ending – and Rebecca West’s depiction is delicately poignant.
If I am honest, I think, that The Fountain Overflows is a rather better novel, although I enjoyed this enormously – a chance to meet again familiar old friends. This Real Night probably could be read as a standalone novel but if you did, you would miss an enormous treat. show less
This Real Night’ was to be the second volume of a trilogy that would tell the story of a century, but the trilogy was never completed. The first book, ‘The Fountain Overflows’ was published in 1956 but this book wasn’t published until 1984, a year after the author’s death and the final, incomplete book was published not long after, with notes suggesting what might have followed.
I loved ‘The Fountain Overflows’ and I was delighted to find that this book picked up the threads of that story not too much further into the future. I was pulled right back …
The Aubrey children have lost their father, who left one day and never came back, but their world is stable, and their mother had been able to sell paintings that she knew show more were real but had led him to believe were copies for significant sums of money.
The musical daughters, Mary and Rose, were moving towards careers as concert pianists, have were studying in musical academies in London. They suffered some setbacks as they stepped out into the world, but there was nothing that really hindered their progress.
Though that is not to say that they were entirely confident.
“Every time we left our pianos the age gave us such assurances that there was to be a new and final establishment of pleasure upon earth. True that when we were at our pianos we knew that this was not true. There is something in the great music that we played which told us that promise will not be kept.”
They were determined to be independent, and unimpressed by the only alternative that might be open to them:
“Indeed marriage was to us a descent into a crypt where, by the tremulous light of smoking torches, there was celebrated a glorious rite of a sacrificial nature. Of course it was beautiful, we saw that. But we meant to stay in the sunlight, and we knew of no end which we could serve by offering ourselves up as a sacrifice.”
Their elder sister, Cordelia, saw the world rather differently. She had been heartbroken when she had been forced to face the fact that she lacked the emotional understanding of music needed to make it a career. She had picked it up and re-set her course in life, hoping for a secure future as the wife of a successful man, and fearing that her unconventional home and her inexplicably absent father would harm her prospects.
I was sorry that her sisters, her mother and her author completely failed to understand Cordelia, that they had no time or sympathy for her. She could be trying, but she really deserved better.
They had much more time for their cousin Rosamund; maybe because shared their desire for independence and was working towards a career as a nurse, and maybe because they understood that she had talents quite unlike their own. She had played chess with their father, she and her mother continued to sew to support themselves ….
The family was completed by their young brother, Richard Quinn, who seemed almost too lovely, bright and charming to be true.
The picture of family life was captivating and rich with detail. Rebecca West wrote beautifully and her writing is full of sentences and expressions to cherish.
Familiar family friends re-appeared; the family’s social circle was small but it cut right across social classes. They often saw Mr Morpurgo, who was both wealthy and generous, and they also regularly visited a riverside pub, where the landlord was an old family friend.
Those friendships allowed Rebecca West to say a great deal about social issues, by means of extended scenes portraying two very different visits.
This book stands alone, but you really should read ‘The Fountain Overflows’ first.
I think that first book is stronger than this one; they are both idiosyncratic and oddly structured, but the first book was more polished, it had a stronger narrative, and I found the characters rather more engaging when they were younger. I can quite believe that Rebecca West hadn’t quite finished with her manuscript when she died.
The ending is perfectly done and heart-breaking. The passing of time has consequences, and the Great War casts a shadow.
This is a story that draws on the authors own life, without being entirely autobiographical; and it does feel authentic. That’s why I feel so attached to this family, why I can love this book for its strengths and forgive it for its weaknesses; and why I want to read the next, unfinished book to find out the future holds for the surviving members of the Aubrey family. show less
I loved ‘The Fountain Overflows’ and I was delighted to find that this book picked up the threads of that story not too much further into the future. I was pulled right back …
The Aubrey children have lost their father, who left one day and never came back, but their world is stable, and their mother had been able to sell paintings that she knew show more were real but had led him to believe were copies for significant sums of money.
The musical daughters, Mary and Rose, were moving towards careers as concert pianists, have were studying in musical academies in London. They suffered some setbacks as they stepped out into the world, but there was nothing that really hindered their progress.
Though that is not to say that they were entirely confident.
“Every time we left our pianos the age gave us such assurances that there was to be a new and final establishment of pleasure upon earth. True that when we were at our pianos we knew that this was not true. There is something in the great music that we played which told us that promise will not be kept.”
They were determined to be independent, and unimpressed by the only alternative that might be open to them:
“Indeed marriage was to us a descent into a crypt where, by the tremulous light of smoking torches, there was celebrated a glorious rite of a sacrificial nature. Of course it was beautiful, we saw that. But we meant to stay in the sunlight, and we knew of no end which we could serve by offering ourselves up as a sacrifice.”
Their elder sister, Cordelia, saw the world rather differently. She had been heartbroken when she had been forced to face the fact that she lacked the emotional understanding of music needed to make it a career. She had picked it up and re-set her course in life, hoping for a secure future as the wife of a successful man, and fearing that her unconventional home and her inexplicably absent father would harm her prospects.
I was sorry that her sisters, her mother and her author completely failed to understand Cordelia, that they had no time or sympathy for her. She could be trying, but she really deserved better.
They had much more time for their cousin Rosamund; maybe because shared their desire for independence and was working towards a career as a nurse, and maybe because they understood that she had talents quite unlike their own. She had played chess with their father, she and her mother continued to sew to support themselves ….
The family was completed by their young brother, Richard Quinn, who seemed almost too lovely, bright and charming to be true.
The picture of family life was captivating and rich with detail. Rebecca West wrote beautifully and her writing is full of sentences and expressions to cherish.
Familiar family friends re-appeared; the family’s social circle was small but it cut right across social classes. They often saw Mr Morpurgo, who was both wealthy and generous, and they also regularly visited a riverside pub, where the landlord was an old family friend.
Those friendships allowed Rebecca West to say a great deal about social issues, by means of extended scenes portraying two very different visits.
This book stands alone, but you really should read ‘The Fountain Overflows’ first.
I think that first book is stronger than this one; they are both idiosyncratic and oddly structured, but the first book was more polished, it had a stronger narrative, and I found the characters rather more engaging when they were younger. I can quite believe that Rebecca West hadn’t quite finished with her manuscript when she died.
The ending is perfectly done and heart-breaking. The passing of time has consequences, and the Great War casts a shadow.
This is a story that draws on the authors own life, without being entirely autobiographical; and it does feel authentic. That’s why I feel so attached to this family, why I can love this book for its strengths and forgive it for its weaknesses; and why I want to read the next, unfinished book to find out the future holds for the surviving members of the Aubrey family. show less
This is just as good as its predecessor "The Fountain Overflows", and I had to read that again straight after. The eccentric but very loving family, the authentic details of life lived as the nineteenth century changed to the twentieth, the intense emotional life, the incredibly vivid characters, all make this an absolute feast for the mind and heart. I wish Rose and Mary had been a little less mean to poor old Cordelia, though....
"Cousin Rosamund" , the third (unfinished) novel, made a lot more sense when I went back and re-read it after this one.
"Cousin Rosamund" , the third (unfinished) novel, made a lot more sense when I went back and re-read it after this one.
Follows the first volume, the Fountain Overflows. This book deals with the advance of WWII.
sad book. would like to know what happened to characters.
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The whole ghostly, unfinishable saga project now - after her own death two years ago - bears striking witness to what an extraordinary, and extraordinarily honest, writer Rebecca West was.
added by christiguc
The major problem of the novel is perhaps the problem that faces all writers who think it enough to present character and atmosphere. In Ulysses Joyce demonstrated that you could show the current of daily life without much of a plot as long as you found a plot-substitute--in his case a complex symbolic structure. This Real Night has none of that: it reads like part of an exceptionally well show more composed memoir whose backbone is nothing more than time (and not the philosophical time of Proust). The book says, This is what it was like to live then if you had talent, sensibility, and a little money.
In her second novel, The Judge, written when she was Well's mistress, during the early days of the Great War, Rebecca West, in Well's view, ruined the structure by not thinking her plot through to the logical finish. In her critical book The Strange Necessity Wells was lampooned for a certain slickness and vulgarity. (This led to the end of the relationship.) Rebecca West needed more of that vulgarity: exquisiteness, like patriotism, is not enough. show less
In her second novel, The Judge, written when she was Well's mistress, during the early days of the Great War, Rebecca West, in Well's view, ruined the structure by not thinking her plot through to the logical finish. In her critical book The Strange Necessity Wells was lampooned for a certain slickness and vulgarity. (This led to the end of the relationship.) Rebecca West needed more of that vulgarity: exquisiteness, like patriotism, is not enough. show less
added by SnootyBaronet
Author Information
48+ Works 8,578 Members
Taking her name from one of Henrik Ibsen's strong-minded women, Rebecca West was a politically and socially active feminist all her long life. She had an intense 10-year affair with H.G. Wells, with whom she had a son. A brilliant and versatile novelist, critic, essayist, and political commentator, West's greatest literary achievement is perhaps show more her travel diary, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1942). Five years in the writing, it is the story of an Easter trip that she and her husband, British banker Henry Maxwell Andrews (whom she had married in 1930), made through Yugoslavia in 1937. A historical narrative with excellent reporting, it is essentially an analysis of Western culture. During World War II, she superintended British broadcast talks to Yugoslavia. Her remarkable reports of the treason trials of Lord Haw and John Amery appeared first in the New Yorker and are included with other stories about traitors in The Meaning of Treason (1947), which was expanded to deal with traitors and defectors since World War II as The New Meaning of Treason (1964). The Birds Fall Down (1966), which was a bestseller, is the story of a young Englishwoman caught in the grip of Russian terrorists. From a true story told to her more than half a century ago by the sister of Ford Madox Ford (who had heard it from her Russian husband), West "created a rich and instructive spy thriller, which contains an immense amount of brilliantly distributed information about the ideologies of the time, the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, the conflicts of customs, belief, and temperament between Russians and Western Europeans, the techniques of espionage and counter-espionage, and the life of exiles in Paris" (New Yorker). Unlike that of her more famous contemporaries, her fiction is stylistically and structurally conventional, but it effectively details the evolution of daily life amid the backdrop of such historical disasters as the world wars. Her critical works include Arnold Bennett Himself, Henry James (1916), Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, and The Court and the Castle (1957), a study of political and religious ideas in imaginative literature. In 1949, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Virago Modern Classics (270)
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- This Real Night
- Original publication date
- 1984
- People/Characters
- Rose Aubrey; Mary Aubrey; Cordelia Aubrey; Clare Aubrey; Mr Morpurgo; Richard Quin Aubrey
- Important places
- London, England, UK
- Important events
- World War I
- First words
- The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
- Quotations
- A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. When one is quite little one labours under just such physical and mental disabilities as might be inflicted by some dreadful acci... (show all)dent or disease; but while the maimed and paralysed are pitied because they cannot walk and have to be carried about and cannot explain their needs or think clearly, nobody is sorry for babies, though they are always crying aloud their frustration and hurt pride. It is true that every year betters one's position and gives one more command over oneself, but that only leads to a trap. One has to live in the adult world at a disadvantage, as member of a subject race who has to admit that there is some reason for his subjection. For grown-ups do know more than children, that cannot be denied; but that is not due to any real superiority, they simply know the lie of the land better, for no other reason than that they have lived longer. It is as if a number of people were set down in a desert, and some had compasses and some had not; and those who had compasses treated those who had not as their inferiors, scolding and mocking them with no regard for the injustice of the conditions, and at the same time guiding them, often kindly, to safely. I still believe childhood to be a horrible state of disequilibrium.
Most of what we brought was commonplace enough: one of Kate's veal and ham pies, made with much grated lemon peel and eggs hard-simmered instead of hard-boiled.
Someone said that all fruit, especially gooseberries, tasted better if one dropped a couple of elderflowers into the sugar and water one was cooking them in, just for two minutes.... But as the Victorians considered elders to... (show all) be the most vulgar of trees, suitable only for the meanest municipal park ... they were not to be found in our genteel suburb.... There the elders had taken over, ... thrusting up their fibrous canes through the gravel ... the flat, greenish-white filigree flowers were appearing among the coarse leaves on the flimsy branches. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Kate and Constance started to their feet and threw up their hands in wonder, and Rosamund, smiling, clasped the relic closer to her breast.
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- Reviews
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- Rating
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- Languages
- 5 — Catalan, English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 14
- ASINs
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