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Cargando... The Priory (1939)por Dorothy Whipple
   Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.   ) siriaeve | Mar 23, 2024 |  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 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. (  ) allthegoodbooks | Mar 17, 2024 | 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. ( ) starbox | Sep 8, 2023 | marievictoire | Mar 16, 2023 | 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 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. (  ) Alishadt | Feb 25, 2023 | sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Pertenece a las series editorialesPersephone (40)
The setting for The Priory is a large house somewhere in England, partly modelled on Newstead Abbey near Nottingham where Dorothy Whipple had a weekend cottage and partly on Parciau, the house on Anglesey where she stayed in 1934. And, as David Conville, who used to stay at Parciau as a child, writes in his Afterword: The Parciau inhabitants in The Priory were hardly disguised. At the beginning of the book we see Saunby Priory: its West Front, built in the thirteenth century for the service of God and the poor, towered above the house that had been raised alongside from its ruins, from its very stones. And because no light showed from any window here, the stranger, visiting Saunby at this hour, would have concluded that the house was empty. But he would have been wrong. There were many people within. The sentence is typical of the opening of a Dorothy Whipple novel. Gently, deceptively gently, but straightforwardly, it sets the scene and draws the reader in. We are shown the two Marwood girls, who are nearly grown-up, their father, the widower Major Marwood, and their aunt. Then, as soon as their lives have been evoked, we see the Major proposing marriage to a woman much younger than himself; and we understand how much will have to change. It is a classic plot (albeit the stepmother is more disinterested than wicked) and the book has many classic qualities; yet there are no clichš either in situation or outlook, just an extraordinarily well-written and absorbing novel by the writer who has been called the twentieth-century Mrs Gaskell. Above all, The Priory is a very subtle novel, so subtle that, as with all Dorothy Whipples books, it is very easy to miss what an excellent writer she is. As Books magazine wrote in August 1939: Because it is so unaffectedly and well-written, and because it conveys very effectively a sense of the old house and what it meant to be the various persons connected with it, The Priory carries a punch out of proportion to its otherwise artless-seeming content. And Forrest Reid, the Irish novelist and friend of EM Forster, described it in the Spectator as being brilliantly original and convincing. It is fresh, delightful, absorbing, and one accepts it with gratitude as one did the novels read in boyhood. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (4.05)
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