The Priory

So what if it wraps up a shade too neatly and a bit too nicely? Who cares if people get away with things you'd rather they'd been punished for? And why make a big deal over it, if one of the big crises in the story is "previously pampered girl has to work for little pay and live in a crappy room for a while?"

That's how pleasurable I find it, reading anything (so far) by Dorothy Whipple. This was my favorite to date. I love when a building actually becomes a character, for one thing, and I don't think I've read many books where the sentient characters are quite so human. Meaning, in other words, that no one is spared. We see both the good and the terrible about all of them, and it's all written, as far as I can tell, with absolutely no show more judgement.

Here is the Major, barely three pages into the book: "Half-way up the avenue the Major halted to survey the cricket field, which lay to the left. Empty, with its little black sodden shuttered pavilion, it was typical of winter and he hated winter. He would have liked to blame somebody for winter."

And later, when one of his daughters decides not to bother explaining her point to him: It was no good pusuing such subjects with her father. He made no attempt to see another person's point of view; he simply said it wasn't there, couldn't be there, it was so silly."

Who does not know a person like that?

Anyway, loved this. It's the 40th that Persephone published and the 10th I've read. show less

The Priory centres around a once-grand English stately home in the interwar years, and the lives of the family who live there and some of their servants. This is the first Dorothy Whipple that I've read, and I found this is a book to sink into: part comedy of manners, part low-key melodrama. While some aspects of the book feel a little dated from a 2020s perspective, Whipple showed a deft touch with creating rounded characters and having them respond believably to the changes that buffet them. I particularly liked her keen awareness of how hemmed in a woman's choices were in this time. The ending is perhaps a little pat, and there's no way Whipple could have known what changes a matter of months would bring to the political landscape of show more Europe, but I still enjoyed this and will look out for more of her work. show less

This is another of my recent Persephone book acquisitions and I loved it. [The Priory] is a 1939 British novel about a decaying home and family, the Marwoods of Saunby. Major Marwood is broke but insists upon hosting an expensive cricket tournament every summer. The house is falling apart. He has two beautiful daughters, Christine and Penelope, who have completed isolated themselves and become a fixture of the house. And there's an odd Aunt Victoria who cares only about her painting and neglects any duty toward house or the girls. When Major Marwood makes the decision to marry a local woman, Anthea, life at the house is upended. Christine, the older daughter, falls in love with a man who comes to the cricket tournament which further show more disrupts the quiet life at Saunby. At the same time that the Marwood family is developed, the lives of the servants are explored. In that way it's a familiar upstairs/downstairs story.

This is a plot-driven book that focuses on character and relationship development and I loved it. It was easy and fun to read but provided plenty to think about. It was published in 1939, and has a now unrealistic happy ending as the threat of war diminishes through diplomacy at the end of the book.

This is the first book by Dorothy Whipple that I've read and I'd definitely like to read more. show less

The Marwood family has lived at Saunby for generations, but in recent years the estate has been in decline, due Major Francis Marwood’s astonishingly poor management. In debt up to his ears, he still puts on a two-week cricket tournament every summer, providing housing and meals for the teams. Over the years he has been forced to sell off parcels of land to settle debts. Early in the novel the Major, a widower, remarries, disrupting the lives of his young adult daughters who, inexplicably, have established some measure of independence by continuing to live in the nursery wing of the house. Christine and Penelope never quite accept their stepmother Anthea, and her eventual pregnancy is seen as a further threat. Marriage was their only show more means of escape, and while they made the best choices considering their options, life after Saunby wasn’t easy for either of them.

Dorothy Whipple is best known for highly character-driven novels, and The Priory is no exception. Besides Francis, Anthea, Christine and Penelope, the household also includes Francis’ unmarried sister Victoria, and a host of servants whose interactions among themselves and with the family enhance the novel. The book comes to a close as World War II threatens. The Major’s financial woes are solved in a way that is a bit too tidy, and the general optimism about avoiding war is jarring, leaving one wondering what happened to the family during the war years. show less

I am not sure how I came across this book, it seems to be on a few blogs at the moment, probably sponsored by Virago who have released it recently. My copy was from the stacks below the library where they store all the books not on the shelves and was published in 1975. It would seem that Whipple has had waves of popularity since this was first written in 1939, a time of great change with the country on the verge of war.

There are lots of books where there is a group of people with established dynamics and then someone else joins and completely changes everything, and so it is in this book. The Marwood family consists of Major Marwood, a complete idiot, who does not have the money to live the life of luxury he is used to, with his sister show more the artist and two daughters, Penelope and Christine who confine themselves when not outside in the grounds to the top floor where the three nursery rooms are situated and which they have never moved out of. The Major decides that he can not bear to live in the house with its shoddy housekeeping any longer, no one is there to ensure his fire is lit when he gets home, and so he marries again, his first wife having died many years previously.

And so, in comes Anthea, rather diffident to start off with who unsettles everything especially once she becomes pregnant with the whole book being a treatise to change and marriage with elements of the differences for those that are rich or poor and on growing up.

It was a pity that it was only marriage that moved women about, Anthea reflected. Women moved to men, but otherwise they mostly stayed where they were born.
p241

True for the rich before the war but not so much for everyone else, particularly during the war I imagine where women had to fill the roles left by men.

Whipple's view of men was that they

. . . gave trouble all their lives to women and they start early.
p256

This was shown in the book by Thompson, the groundsman and cricketer, chasing after younger women, by the Major being impossible to live with and by Nicholas, Christine's husband, sleeping with an old female friend. There was even Anthea's baby boy who the nurse deemed to not be as strong as his twin sister and so needed extra looking after. So, what are we saying? Is it women who make men like this?

Marriage does not appear to be a welcome institution on the surface for each of the married couples we encounter.

It was what the french call a 'deception' to Nicholas to find that after marriage, his life was much the same as before, and to Christine to find that hers was so different.
p263

But in the end, they all seem to sort themselves out and return to their marriages apart from the Major and Anthea who go on living their separate lives.

The book is long but feels a little like a soap opera with event after event happening so that you don't notice that you have worked your way through 528 pages. With the marriage of the Major to Anthea, I hoped that it would mean she came in and sorted everything out, brought the family together and found a way to make money as well. Superwoman! What Whipple does do is move us from this expectation to one that is less familiar and must have been extraordinary when it was first written, quite gently, so that you find yourself with Antha and the nurse living up in the nursery, Christine separated from her husband and living with her sister who is also trying to take Christine's daughter away from her and adopt her. Christine ends up in a beauty salon, Nicholas as a fruit drinks seller with his parents worrying about him sat at home and the Major wombling on in his own way.

I did think the ending was a little trite and unfortunately not what happened in real life but this was a wonderful book about the changing, shifting shapes of families. show less

The Priory is a book that GoodReads kept recommending to me and which I kept ignoring.
Well, GoodReads, you win. I read it. I liked it.

The Priory is about a family, consisting of a widower father and his two 19/20-year-old daughters. Over the course of the book everyone decides to get married. And then everyone has problems. Some of them are quite serious.

Normally, I don't like a book where people's personal lives get off track and they fail to communicate or make good decisions. In the end, things are bound to be either sad or else unrealistically resolved for a happy-ever-after.

BUT, in this book, just about everyone gets redemption. They genuinely learn from their mistakes. By the end of the book, I believe in their ability to do show more better and be happier in the future.

Furthermore, by the end of the book, even the characters that I thought were unsympathetic had been ever so slightly altered in aspect. It is a skillful author that can convey to you that even difficult people can be kind when they don't feel threatened, that most people are not horrid all the time, and that it doesn't do to put people in a box and never see them as anything other than what you think they are.

Note: It's a surprisingly PG read for the era it was written in... there's some extramarital stuff. As I said, mistakes are made. show less

This was a *5 read...but I thought the ending was a bit sudden and convenient.
Set in a poorly managed estate: Major Marwood is hopelessly in debt, but shuts his mind to it and carries on blowing money on running cricket events. With him live his two isolated teenage daughters and his eccentric sister. Then one day, he takes it into his head to marry a much younger local woman who's "on the shelf."
Alongside this are the servants: chauffeur Thompson - likeable, a good cricketer ...and something of a womanizer...
Highly entertaiing read.