This was Bawden's sixth novel, originally published in 1960. It's a wry, satirical account of the effects of the sort of attitudes to class and gender that were prevalent in lower-middle-class England in the immediate post-war period. Lucy is a clever young woman who realises that she should be able to rise beyond the limited world of her suburban, shopkeeping aunt and uncle, but all her efforts to do so go wrong in comically inglorious ways and she finds herself without any obvious reason entering into an unwanted marriage and a passionless extramarital affair, whilst inadvertently hurting the people who really do care about her. This looks superficially like a modern version of any one of a whole list of cautionary nineteenth-century novels about married life, but there's also a sense that the moral of the book is just as tongue-in-cheek as the rest. The apotheosis of the boy-next-door is presented to us in too arbitrary and implausible a way for us really to see him as Lucy's proper destiny: the point seems to be that 1950s England is a world where social mobility is visible to everyone as a possibility, but for most real people the reality will turn out to be two steps forward, one step back.

The social criticism is perhaps a bit crude and not very well worked out, but the observation and comic detail is superbly well done. It's a pity that Bawden's novels for adults aren't better known: she was definitely one of the better writers of her generation, well up there with the Angry Young Men, but probably overlooked because her children's novels were so popular. ( )