the foolish gentlewoman

The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp (Little Brown, 1948)

Another Sharp novel, not quite as effervescent as Cluny Brown, but a pleasant read indeed.  We’re now in post-war England, in a suburb of London where Mrs. Somebody (I already forget her name) has returned to her grand house of birth after spending most of the war in Bath.  She’s a widow, but her brother-in-law, a curmudgeonly but well- intentioned, and secretly sympathetic man, is living with her while his house in the same town is recovering from having been bombed.  Also living in the house are the housekeeper and her teenage daughter, Mrs. Somebody’s nephew from New Zealand, and her savvy young companion, Miss Brown (I think).  Into this menage comes Tillie Something, a poor orphaned relative of Mrs. Somebody’s who grew up with the family and was treated shabbily as the lumpen bore she was.  Mrs. Somebody has invited her to visit because she feels guilty and responsible for ruining Tillie’s only chance for marriage by withholding a letter from a suitor that she herself fancied.  In a light-hearted way the book examines questions of guilt and reparation and company and loneliness and love.  It very delicately and comically suggests the horrors of genteel women who lack money and husbands, and must earn their keep as “companions.”  A darker, more melancholy book — no happy marriages conclude this book, just people making the best of what life has offered them and muddling through.