(17 July 2013)

The last of that lovely crop from Bello Books, and very bad I feel indeed about having taken so long to read them all! But they’re all read and reviewed now, and I’m very glad of the fine print-on-demand reprint issues Bello is doing.

Now, I have the idea that this is one of the preferred of Vita’s books and I have to say that I personally felt more engaged with “Family History”. Not to say that this is a bad or lesser book, I suppose it’s just a very different one. It’s the convoluted and slightly farm-Gothic (is that a genre? You know what I mean, right – Mary Webb, Cold Comfort Farm … doings and goings on in a rural setting, lots of emotion and repression and large farm-hands and quivering daughters …) tale, framed by the narratives of one young man who’s the main narrator and another who he meets on a retreat in London and who narrates his own story in one section of direct speech and then a number of long letters. By all sorts of machinations of fate and free will, they both end up involved with a Kentish family with Spanish incursions, and then over the course of a decade or two that takes in the First World War, they separately engage with the family, correspond at length about it and, frankly, meddle in the affairs of the simple farming folk with predictably disastrous consequences.

While this is in part a portrait of Violet Trefusis (I think I read somewhere – but where?) and while the countryside of the Weald is a beautifully drawn character, to me the book never quite comes alive as fully as the other books of Vita’s that I’ve read, and doesn’t leap off the page at you. Maybe one issue is that the narrators admire their fellow characters too much – I’m not sure. But even though it’s flawed, still a good read and I’m glad that it’s been republished.

Deaccessioning via Virago Group ( )