This is one of the weirdest novels I've ever read! I think what really strikes me is what a deeply unpleasant environment the fictional world of the book is, compared to the sweetness and light of the CS! It looks like a conventional double romance, with the folk-dancing heroine and her friend bagging the local doctor and vicar, with some strictures on child-rearing in the background, but set in a world which is (don't know how consciously on EBD's part) claustrophobic and viciously gossipy, full of slander and people passing on false rumours about teachers swearing and being promiscuous. and doctors being drunk, and everyone spying on one another, and there's a real sense of people being vulnerable to other members of a small community to the point of paranoia.
Jean and her aunt are afraid of their own elderly servant, and of the unpleasant vicar's wife, who may refuse to let the local Guide troop use the parish hall because Jean has got her back up; the sensible Mollie is petrified of her landlady to the point where she's afraid to give in her notice and move. Children are mistreated. Morag the servant frightens everyone with her extreme version of Calvinism, while the poorer locals seem to be either slovenly housewives, alcoholic layabouts or minor delinquents.
The fabulously bad Jean and the doctor scenes almost make up for it, though, in their Mills-and-Boon-y way:
Quote:
"Better be a brute than a heartless flirt -- as you are!" He interrupted her, madly.
Jean sprang to her feet. He rose to his. Man and woman, they stood there, rage gleaming in their faces. She was nearly as tall as he and her eyes were almost on a level with his. He almost shrank, appalled at the fury of their green depth. And he was as much startled by the devil she had aroused in him.
"You cad!" She said at length, in low tones of concentrated anger. "I didn't think even you could sink to such depths! Thank heaven, I have learnt what you are!"
Jean sprang to her feet. He rose to his. Man and woman, they stood there, rage gleaming in their faces. She was nearly as tall as he and her eyes were almost on a level with his. He almost shrank, appalled at the fury of their green depth. And he was as much startled by the devil she had aroused in him.
"You cad!" She said at length, in low tones of concentrated anger. "I didn't think even you could sink to such depths! Thank heaven, I have learnt what you are!"
When Jean confesses her love to the doctor, she 'gives him her lips'
and there's a bride who looks 'less like a girl than a human rose' - which sounds like the kind of thing Hilda Annersley would have laughed at Joey for writing! This falls into the 'so bad its good' category for me!
