Martin Kallich (1918–2006)

This is Radclyffe Hall's first published novel (they wrote the Unlit Lamp first, but it was grim so no-one would touch it until they had more fame). It is the story of a mostly sweet, mostly unhappy couple, Hilary and Susan, which Wikipedia describes as a 'lighter social comedy'. They buy a big house in the country, but it eats money and they are not happy and have no idea how to manage it. So they move back to London, where they feel unfulfilled and distracted by frivolities from their passions. They try to chase their callings, to write novels and paint, to the extent that they separate for several years. But the end of the book has them reuniting once more.

It is definitely easy to read and gently amusing in places, but I am not sure it is exactly a social comedy. Even the ending, when Hilary comes back to Susan, is not written as a Happy Ever After. The forge of the novel's title is the concept that everyone is in chains, chains of love, chains of traditions, chains of possessions, and the world is a forge that creates more chains for us the longer we live. And the nature of chains is to be heavy and hard, but it is miserably lonely and worse to have none.

There, doesn't that sound like a laugh a minute social comedy happy ending?… (mehr)