bookshop

Bloomsbury Girls, by Natalie Jenner

by

In 1950s London, Bloomsbury Books is a relic of an earlier age. Offering new and rare books, the store has resisted change for a hundred years, and its stodgy general manager, Herbert Dutton, with his 51 unbreakable rules is determined to keep it that way. However, the three women who work there have other ideas.

Vivien staffs the Fiction department and loathes her one-time lover Alec who heads the department. She wants to introduce more female authors while Alec refuses all but the usual classics like Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ambitious and clever, Vivien provides much of the humor in the book. I especially love the way she comes up with witty and daring names for the people and places in the bookshop, like the Tyrant and the Via Dolorosa.

As Mr. Dutton’s secretary, Grace is the unacknowledged angel of the house. She helps Mr. Dutton manage his workload and tries to keep things on an even keel. She’s an anomaly for the time: a wife and mother who decided to take a job to avoid her abusive, unemployed husband. She cannot leave him because she doesn’t make enough to support herself and the children and fears she’d lose custody of them.  

Despite a brilliant career in Cambridge, a member of the first class of women awarded degrees by the university, Evie’s academic plans are crushed when she is passed over for a less accomplished man who takes credit for her work. At the bookstore she is in charge of cataloging the jumbled collection of rare books on the top floor, but she has an ulterior motive for working at Bloomsbury Books.

All tea-making is done by the three women, in obedience to Rule No. 17: ‘Tea shall be served promptly four times a day.’ Each of the four departments is run by a man, and they, of course, cannot be expected to make their own tea. The exception is Ash, head of the Science Department, who makes his own chai. As an immigrant from India, Ash’s presence brings portents of change and adds another dimension of discrimination.

I selected this story when looking for a light but engaging audiobook for a trip. Not only does it check those boxes, but it also features a few of my favorite things: a bookstore, London, one of my favorite actors as narrator—Juliet Stevenson—and the post-WWII time period. It also offers something I look for and rarely find: people, especially women, functioning in the workplace. Yes, raising children and running a household is work, and there are many stories about that, but little is written about the rewards and difficulties of working in an office (literal or figurative).

Jenner’s story abounds with the kind of rivalries and shifting alliances, the kindnesses and restrictions recognisable to anyone who has worked in an office. They keep the plot roiling and force the characters to show what they are made of. Other characters come and go, including real people of the time, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Daphne du Maurier, and Samuel Beckett.

Of course I hate the use of “girls” in the title applied to women, but it is true to the time period. I was a child then, but I see my parents in these characters. Many of those who survived the worldwide depression and WWII treasured security and stability, like Mr. Dutton and his 51 rules. And after the war many women like my mother had to give up jobs they found rewarding and confine their ambitions to home and family. Thus, I found Grace’s journey and her impulsive decision to work at the bookstore particularly touching.

If you’re looking for a cosy read with a bit of a bite, check this one out. You don’t need to have read Jenner’s previous book The Jane Austen Society which includes some of these characters. In writing this book, she was inspired by rereading 84, Charing Cross Road. She describes Bloomsbury Girls as “Mad Men meets You’ve Got Mail” which is pretty accurate. Of note, Jenner once owned an independent bookshop in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives now.

Can you recommend a story set in a bookshop?

Undue Influence, by Anita Brookner

by

th-1496375370

This third bookshop book, like the last one, starts with the death of the protagonist’s mother. However, no one is throwing Claire out of the London flat—the only home she’s known—and she’s already working in a bookshop. Still, her father having died some years previously, she’s now alone in the world.

Claire is a curiously passive person, though she doesn’t see herself that way. The bookshop where she works is owned by two elderly sisters, Muriel and Hester, but Claire doesn’t sell books. She’s in the basement transcribing the writings of the sisters’ late father for possible publication. Between the sermons and the rather dry articles, she finds herself pleasantly immersed in a more predictable past.

She has one friend, Wiggy, whom she met at the National Gallery and sees occasionally. Although she enjoys her company, Claire thinks Wiggy is too passive. Mistress to a married man, Wiggy almost never leaves her flat in case he drops by. Still, Claire turns to Wiggy now to compensate in part for the loss of her mother’s company.

Before her mother died, Claire used to go on vacations to foreign cathedral towns where she’d dutifully see the sites so she could describe them to her mother. She also indulged in brief affairs that she did not tell her mother about.

It doesn’t seem like much of a life, but Claire’s imagination fills in the gaps. Convinced that she perceives the secret lives of people she’s barely met, she’s often tempted to give them advice or set them straight.

Thus when a quiet good-looking man ventures into the bookshop and is sent by Hester to the basement to find a particular book, Claire pursues an acquaintance with him. She believes she is helping him come out of his shell, but is she influencing him or the other way around?

She’s vulnerable, having been unmoored by her mother’s death, though she doesn’t recognise it. I have seen myself how a death can leave you bereft, not just of the loved one but of the routines that filled your days. Brookner captures that weightlessness, that waiting.

Brookner’s style, with its leisurely pace, subtle shifts, and extensive use of exposition may turn off some modern readers. Claire, as the first-person narrator, tells us this story, with only a few dramatic scenes, whereas we have become used to stories that are almost entirely scenes tied together with a little exposition. But I love the change of pace and the chance to settle fully into the mind of another person.

Like other Brookner novels I’ve read and loved, this story makes me think of the muffled sound of falling snow, so quiet you barely notice until you look out and see how the world has changed.

Have you read a novel by Anita Brookner? Do you have a favorite?