The Bloomsbury Group

From time to time I get sent a book by one of my lovely blog readers who also works for Bloomsbury Publishers (hello Bloomsbury! And hello other publishers who read this blog. You could send me stuff too, if you liked.) I don't always like the books that I get sent, in which case I keep schtum about them - I may as well just say in big letters I THINK I WRITE BETTER THAN THIS, which is emphatically not cool - but other times I do like the books, so the decision to write about them is very easy, and sometimes I sort of like and sort of dislike them, which is trickier, but I have decided to try my hand at "the mixed review" and so step forward two books from the Bloomsbury Group list at Bloomsbury, 'Henrietta's War' by Joyce Denys, and 'The Brontes Went to Woolworths' by Rachel Ferguson. Both of the authors are dead by now, which makes being critical about the books rather easier.

The Bloomsbury Group is Bloomsbury's take on Persephone Books, a list which - as someone pithily described it to me - might have been Celia Johnson's bedside reading in Brief Encounter. In other words, lost early-20th century novels, female-oriented, intelligent but none too demanding. (Incidentally, from a Googling point of view, naming your imprint The Bloomsbury Group is not very helpful, as, inevitably, the first six million search results are all about Virginia Woolf, who was both intelligent and very demanding in every way.) There's a whole bunch of them with pretty matching covers in cheerful pastel shades, as per above.

Of the two I read, both had a fair bit of charm. 'Henrietta's War' was the more inconsequential, a collection of wartime columns featuring pleasantly illustrated, uplifting anecdotes from the Home Front, written in the form of letters from a middle-aged woman to her friend who is away at war. Fun, with barely a hint of wartime darkness, and nothing that EM Delafield didn't do far better in her Provincial Lady books. This isn't really Bloomsbury's fault, as EM Delafield isn't in the least bit forgotten, and thus can't be rediscovered and reissued in a cheerful pastel cover, and one must read something when one has exhausted one's supply of Delafield. Don't, I beg you, read this in preference to Delafield, but if you have a soft spot for wartime anecdotes and are something of a completeist, you will enjoy this.

'The Brontes Went to Woolworths' is an altogether stranger beast. Written and set in the 1930s, it's the story of an impossibly over-imaginative family of mother and three daughters, father sadly deceased. They keep themselves cheerful with invented stories about various London figures who they pretend are their friends, but their cocooned fantasy existence is threatened, in order of weirdness, firstly by their new, genuine friendship with one of their imaginary friends Judge Toddington; secondly by the encroaching, jealous misery of the youngest sister's governess; and thirdly by the ghosts of the Brontes, who turn up towards the end of the book for no good reason that I could tell, and have very little to do with Woolworths. It's distinctly odd and structurally the book is all over the place and makes almost no sense. On the other hand it's brilliantly atmospheric about the 1930s, lively and honest and quite revealing about the class system, the role of women, the problem of sex, and all kinds of other topics you might be surprised to find in a book so apparently light and slight. It also invokes the aching nostalgia that always comes when reading books written between the wars, when the author thinks that the worst is over and has no sense of the darkness to come. I recommend this one more strongly, as a bizarre but enjoyable period piece, particularly if you already have an interest in this historical era.

Overall I'm not sure either book was strong enough to get me seeking out more books from the Bloomsbury Group range, but it's a good idea, and the books are well-priced (£5.99) and very appealingly produced, making particularly nice gifts, so hopefully some of the other titles in the range live up to the presentation more convincingly.