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Janet Sandison made her bow in My Friends the Miss Boyds, Jane Duncan's sparkling first novel.Here she is again, now a determined young woman of twenty with a University degree. Taking a job with a cranky Pen-Friend organization, she meets Muriel. Muriel is uncompromisingly plain, but clings like ivy.As the lively narrative unfolds, Muriel's story and Janet's diverge and interlace again, aided by a blushing curate, an eccentric she-dragon and her severely repressed husband, by a shady show more confidence trickster and a suit of armour! show lessTags
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Classic British Humor
41 works; 8 members
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Fiction with Women's Names in the Title
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Author Information
29+ Works 961 Members
Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- My Friend Muriel
- Original publication date
- 1959
- People/Characters
- Janet Sandison; Janet Sandison Alexander; Alexander "Twice" Alexander; Muriel Thornton; Lady Monica Soames; Mrs. Whitley-Rollin (show all 9); Mr. Rollin; Freddie Firmantle; Georgina Firmantle
- Important places
- Clydeside, Glasgow, Scotland, UK; Whiteley House, London, England, UK; London, England, UK; Ballydendran, Scotland, UK (fictional); Kent, England, UK
- Important events
- World War II (1939 | 1945)
- Epigraph
- Love is
a time of enchantment;
in it all days are fair and all fields
green. Youth is blest by it,
old age made benign; the eyes of love see
roses blooming in December,
and sunshine through rain. Verily
i... (show all)s the time of true-love
a time of enchantment -- and
Oh! how eager is woman
to be bewitched! - Dedication
- For the oldest of all my friends,
that great teller of stories,
GEORGE
who used, modestly, to preface his tales
with the words:
'Was I ever telling you about
the time when ---?
It is a foolish kind of st... (show all)ory, but ---' - First words
- Often at night, when i take rather a long time to go to sleep, I think of My Friend Muriel.
- Quotations
- If you are eccentric enough to want a hobby that no one else has yet tried, try taking about five hundred alert and inquiring minds and setting them down in a wood in the middle of Buckinghamshire and give them a year or two ... (show all)to ferment. The results will astonish you. p 170
...in this book, you are seeing Muriel through my eyes and that should cause you to make certain allowances, for I do not set myself up to be the goddess of cold, impartial justice at the Old Bailey. Also, we have plenty of t... (show all)ime. You and I are in this book-reading, book-writing business for fun, I hope, and frankly, it is not a matter of life and death if we never get to Muriel--she was not a Cleopatra or anything. So I am not going to tell you either that I am thus and so. I think that is a very difficult thing for anyone to do, for few people can see themselves as others see them. No. I am not going to say a lot of 'I ams.' I am going to tell you what happened to me, in a brief way, between getting the letter signed 'Muriel Thornton' and actually seeing Muriel in the flesh, for I have always found the 'I am--' suspect and usually my suspicions have been well-founded.
Do you know this stuff called 'umbrage' that people are said to 'take' now and then. I have never taken it myself and have never understood why some people do, for it looks to me like a bundle of greyish-brown stuff, about th... (show all)e size of a bundle of asparagus (but not succulent at all) and, indeed, in texture like the dried herbs you may have seen hanging in a good French kitchen (but not aromatic at all, as the herbs are). When people take it, they take the bundle in both hands and go away into a dark corner where you cannot see them, so I have never been able to find out what they do with it. I once enquired of My Friend Monica (she is a new one on you and very nice, although a little short-tempered), who, although not an umbrage-taker herself any more than I am, had known a number of addicts to it, and she said that it was not this bundle of stuff that I am telling you about at all. No. Monica said she was sure that they got it in bottles of blue ribbed glass from the chemist's shop and that they took it in private, in their bedrooms or in the bathroom, without measuring it with a spoon or anything but just by tilting the bottles to their mouths. That, she said, was very important, this thing of there being no regular, prescribed dose. In the end, after a long discussion which cost over a pound in Dry Martinis at 1939 officers' mess prices, Monica and I decided that the umbrage-takers she had known were more confirmed addicts than those I had known and that her lot were taking the distilled essence, put up in blue bottles, of these bundles I was telling you about. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)But I was wrong. I have never had a nother letter from My Friend Muriel.
- Original language
- English
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 64
- Popularity
- 484,054
- Rating
- (3.87)
- Languages
- English, Finnish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 3
