By the ambitious use of her brains and her good looks, Clara Maugham escapes from a dismal home in the north of England to the delights of London and Paris. By the sympathetic use of detailed characterization Margaret Drabble portrays an unusual social climber. What Clara desires, and goes about obtaining, by whatever means necessary, is not social position and prestige, but companionship, compensation for an emotionally sterile childhood. ( )

Clara Maugham hails from drab, economically downtrodden Northam (“the very image of unfertile ground”). Clara—smart, observant, curious—suspects a world of opportunity and adventure awaits her elsewhere, a suspicion that is confirmed during a school trip to Paris. But more than that, she wants to get away from the realm of low expectations and meagre accomplishment into which she was born and for which she seems destined. Her chief aim is to distance herself from her mother, whose defeatist anti-intellectualism embodies everything Clara loathes. Seeking the intellectual and social freedoms that a good education would bring her, she takes a step toward liberation when she wins a scholarship and a spot at a London college, and it is in London during her third year at university, at age twenty-two, that she begins making the social connections that will change her life. At a poetry reading (a sort of event that is alien and mystifying to her), she meets Clelia Denham (daughter of a poet father and novelist mother), and is quickly accepted into the posh, vibrant, charmingly chaotic Denham household as Clelia’s friend and confidant. Margaret Drabble’s fourth novel chronicles Clara’s emotional awakening as she takes her place in this lively world of sparkling conversation and limitless horizons that the Denham’s represent, a world that could not contrast more starkly with the cruelly truncated landscape into which she was born. When she meets Clelia’s handsome brother Gabriel (married and with a child), Clara decides she cannot let the opportunity pass her by, and she maneuvers the situation until a torrid, reckless affair is all but inevitable. Drabble portrays Clara as a risk-taker who often makes calculated decisions of dubious merit without giving much thought to consequences, and her story pivots on the many occasions in which she tosses caution to the wind. Emancipated and self-reliant, she is also tormented by self-doubt and unsure if she is worthy of the happiness she seeks. In the end, Clara is pulled suddenly and unwillingly back to Northam by her mother’s illness, where she is forced to re-assess and begin a reluctant process of reconciliation with her past—though it is not entirely clear how much she has actually learned. Unlike Margaret Drabble’s three previous novels, in which her protagonists are plucky daughters of enlightened privilege, Clara Maugham is anything but, and her journey toward self-awareness is halting and carries more potential for failure. But like the novels that precede it, in Jerusalem the Golden, Drabble has written an absorbing and psychologically persuasive tale of a young, independent, free-thinking woman navigating a tricky pathway to emotional maturity. ( )

I was reading so many fabulous books when I read this. It didn't measure up. ( )

Superb novel about a young woman just out of college moving into and creating a satisfying life. There are many novels about the plain country mouse being dazzled by the worldly city mouse but this may be one of the best.

Clara has grown up in a provincial northern town, the daughter of an ineffectual father and grim unloving mother. Her years in college and move to London lead to new relationships, esp with a charming brother and sister who are part of the kind of wealthy, cultured, literary family that she's always dreamed of. Her embrace of and entry in to this world is a fascinating story and told with the kind of detail that I could just eat up with a spoon.

When the novel switches to Gabriel's story, I felt like it lost a bit of its mojo - he was so much less interesting and anything that increased the distance between the reader and Clara was unwelcome. Still, I found the ending to be truly satisfying - you really can't go home again and reconciliation is simply not always possible. ( )

'she pictured...some truly terrestrial paradise, where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things', 5 Jan 2015

This review is from: Jerusalem the Golden (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Written in the 1960s, this is the story of Clara Maugham, the academic daughter of an upper working-class family in northern England. Always aware that there is a better world out there than the ugly town of her birth, and her grim-faced mother, Clara puts all her energies into escape to university.
Once there, the thought of going home for holidays fills her with dread, especially after meeting the fascinating Denham family - writer parents with apparently wonderful offspring - notably her friend, Clelia, and the utterly charming Gabriel...
Does Clara's full-scale adoption of the Denhams' tastes and beliefs show a certain immaturity? Clara even acknowledges to herself 'she had sought the smartly intense, at the expense of the more solid and dowdy virtues.'
But as she grows up and has to gather her strength to make her life what she wants, she realises they were a means of 'self-advancement' - and through her association she has indeed advanced enough not to be held back by others' claims on her. ( )