Sigh. Not for me. I found the novel too mundane and the heroine uninspired. Dare I say insipid? Dare I say suffering from a paucity of humor? Not for lack of effort on my part! I'm grateful that it is an audio Chirp book because I could let it play on and on from my laptop, allow myself to be interrupted and called away while the narrator continued her workman like job of speaking into empty air, and not have to pick up a tree book, hunt for the right page, and force myself to go on, word by word, with reading the story.

Thankfully, I rarely get "skunked" by a book to this degree. But Sharp's novel did have the deleterious effect of putting me off reading anything for quite a while. Luckily, I have been rescued from the doldrums by a mother lode of excellent Santa Thing books and am excited to get back to my lifetime habit, having shed the clingy cobweb mess of filthy Victorian London and its little suburb of sour downtroddens who writhe in the decaying row houses of Britannia Mews, a neighborhood where everything is downhill from elsewhere.

But, rejoice! A bit like the heroine, I have seen better days again. Only mine are much better among my mini-stack of new gifts to revel within! ( )

I love the way blogs continue to survive the onslaught of mega-umbrella-sites. In this case, I'm thinking of Margery Sharp Day, initiated several years ago by the blog Beyond Eden Rock, and picked up by lots of readers who maintain their own blogs. Each has their own community of followers and commentators.

This year Jane, for the day she put into the calendar, read Britannia Mews and as chance would have it, I picked up a copy (along with several other Sharps) just a couple of days later. I put it at the top of the pile.

It's almost entirely lacking the often acerbic humor of her books, presumably because it was written just after WWII. Instead, there is a story which might almost be a metaphor for the stubbornness without which the UK could not have stood against Hitler, stubbornness without which it is impossible to think of how the world might look now. Adelaide, the chief protagonist, is a young woman with no future she can bear to look towards. She is deprived in the late nineteenth century of the higher education her undeserving brother is permitted. She watches her cousin fall into the sensible marriage that is her only real future and while that is happening, a revolution takes place in her life.

Her painting instructor makes love to her and she instantly is transformed by it. She believes she is in love and nothing - NOTHING - is going to take that away from her. After secret assignations, she announces to her family that she is going to marry this man and elopes with him because it is that or nothing. They go to live in what is at that point, the slum of Brittania Mews. She soon discovers that he is an alcoholic wastrel. Her life is ruined. And yet she displays all the stiff upper lip of the English in WWII. She has made her bed and although it has been made clear to her than she (but not the scoundrel husband) can come 'home' whenever she likes, that is not an option in her mind. When he dies it is still not an option.

After a while she becomes involved with a married man (whose wife is in India and wants nothing to do with him). They live together unmarried for the rest of their lives. That doesn't mean life becomes easy for Adelaide, it isn't. But she remains strong and stubborn. Most importantly she relishes being in control; she'd rather a hard life like that, than an easy life as the doormat of family. Independence is everything to her.

This is clearly no conventional kowtowing-to-the-morals-of-the-time storyline. Adelaide has a niece whom she eventually meets and takes under her wing. The niece - and really, this is a long time after Adelaide's young adulthood - has exactly the same experiences. The utter meaningless of her life insofar as it would be perforce marriage and the running of a house, a loveless union, but no doubt a civilised and practical one. She breaks off her engagement, leaves home, and in a state of profound confusion ends up in the Mews. I don't know if these things sound trivial these days, but there is no doubt that they are brave and far from trivial acts at the time.

So here we have Adelaide, an eloper, living 'in sin' for decades with a married man who takes his wife's name and Dodo her niece living a fulfilling single life - the implication being this will never change, when the book ends. The book sees the women who behave in the 'right' way feeling as if they are losing out to the women who eschew their duty. How unfair! Both Adelaide and Dodo fail to give the filial love which is the only important thing women can do with their lives. Yet it is these two women who carry the book morally. They are true to themselves; though there are moments made to tempt them, they never seriously waver. Sharp makes it quite clear that the women who stay at home and keep house and raise children are not the good women in this story. I thought this was interesting for the period - but maybe that reflects no more than my ignorance.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/britannia-mews-by-margery... ( )

!946. This is my favorite Margery Sharp so far, my fourth. Adelaide is a girl from a moderately well-off family who runs amok. She decides to run off with her drawing instructor whose prospects are not promising. He soon takes to drink and abuses her. They live in Brittania Mews, which was originally built as stables for the nice houses around it and lodging for the servants, but soon became derelict after the horses had gone. There is some murder, blackmail, and miscellaneous shenanigans before she starts a successful puppet theatre in the Mews, of all things, and is part of it gentrifying and becoming quite a fashionable address. She is another of Sharp's queerly independent women, with little contact with her family, just sort of doing her own thing. Indomitable. ( )

Every time I pick up one of Margery Sharp’s books I find both things that are wonderfully familiar and things that make each book feel quite distinctive.

This particular book, that I plucked from the middle of her backlist, sets out the story of one remarkable woman and one London Street. It makes a wonderful entertainment, and, along the way, it says much about how English society changed between the reign of Queen Victoria and the Second World War.

“There had always been this quality about Britannia Mews, that to step into it from Albion Alley was like stepping into a self-contained and separate small world. No one who passed under the archway ever had any doubt as to what sort of place he was entering — in 1865, model stables; in 1880, a slum; in 1900, a respectable working class court. Thus, when an address in a mews came to imply a high degree of fashion, Britannia Mews was unmistakably smart.”

Adelaide was born late in the 19th century, the only daughter of a very well to do family, she was brought up in a fashionable row of London townhouses called Albion Place, and she grew into an inquisitive and independent thinking young woman.

Her family’s carriage and horses were housed nearby in Britannia Mews. There was a row of stable for the horses on one side of an alley, there was a row of coach-houses on the other, and over the coach-houses there was living accommodation for the coachmen and their families. The residents were sensible working class people, who worked hard and took a pride in their homes, but they were worlds apart from the grand residents of Albion Place.

Adelaide loved her life, her home, and her extended family; but she came to realise that she didn’t want the conventional life that her mother was mapping out for her. Maybe that was why, when she found herself alone with her drawing master and he flirted with her quite outrageously, she saw a grand romance and began to plan to elope.

They were married before she learned that Henry Lambert wasn’t the man she thought he was; that he was better at talking about art than creating it; that he flirted with all of his students; that he was dissolute, penniless and saw nothing wrong with living in squalid rented rooms at Britannia Mews.

The Mews had deteriorated into a slum as fewer of the residents of Albion Place thought it necessary to keep their own coach and horses.

“Adelaide was very little of a fool: she had gone into the Mews as thought with her eyes open, prepared for the worst; she would have laughed as much as Henry at the idea of calling or being called on; but she had expected to be able to ignore her surroundings. They were to live in a little world of their own, in a bubble of love and hope, whose elastic, iridescent walls no squalor could penetrate. Within a week she discovered that while she could see and hear, such isolation was impossible.”

Many young women in that position would have allowed their family to rescue them from their dreadful situation, would have wept because they had made such a terrible mistake, but not Adelaide. She picked herself up; she tidied and polished and cleaned; and she did her level best to set her husband on the right track.

That was one battle she couldn’t win, but fighting it changed her life, and she began to change her life. She lost her husband but she found a new love and she found herself at the centre of a rich community of characters at Britannia Mews.

That came about in an extraordinary way. Henry Lambert left behind a valuable legacy: a basket full of exquisite, hand-crafted marionettes that had been his greatest work, that had been his pride and joy. Adelaide hated them, but her new love saw wonderful possibilities.

‘To step under the archway, in 1922, was like stepping into a toy village—a very expensive toy from Hamley’s or Harrods: with a touch of the Russian Ballet about it, as though at any moment a door might fly open upon Petroushka or the Doll, for the colours of the doors, like the colours of the window-curtains, were unusually bright and varied; green, yellow, orange. Outside them stood tubs of begonias, or little clipped bushes. The five dwarf houses facing west were two-storey, with large downstairs rooms converted from old coach-houses; opposite four stables had been thrown into one to make the Puppet Theatre. The Theatre thus dominated the scene, but with a certain sobriety; its paintwork was a dark olive, the sign above the entrance a straightforward piece of lettering…People often said that the theatre made the Mews.’

Adelaide loved it but she missed her old life. She would have loved to live in her parents’ new country house, but she knew that to go home she would have to give up her independence and admit that she had taken the wrong path in life, and she could not bring herself to do that. But she couldn’t quite let go of her family, they couldn’t quite let go of her, and certain members of her family were drawn to the wonderful puppet theatre at Britannia Mews.

The story follows Adelaide, her family, her neighbours and her puppet theatre thorough the Second World War, until she is a very old lady and a younger generation is making new plans for the people and the puppets of Britannia Mews.

That story was compelling, it loses focus a little when the story moves to the next generation, but it picks up again in the war years and for a beautifully pitched final act.

This is a quieter, more serious book than many of Margery Sharp’s, but there are flashes of her wonderful wit, and many moments that have lovely, emotional insight. She acknowledges some people have good reason to not like Adelaide, but I am not one of them. I loved her and I loved her story.

It works because the puppet theatre was a wonderful idea and its realisation was pitch perfect.

It works because it is populated by a wonderful array of characters, who take the story in some interesting and unexpected directions; and it is so cleverly crafted that it reads like a fascinating true story – a tale of people that lived and breathed, a chapter of London’s history – that had been plucked from obscurity to delight a new generation of readers.

I am so glad that I chose this book to read to mark Margery Sharp's birthday. ( )

'The Mews was strictly forbidden territory to both the Culver children', 30 Jun. 2013
By
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This review is from: Britannia Mews (Hardcover)
Started out brilliantly; following stubborn young Adelaide Culver and her elopement with her drawing master to live in the slums of Britannia Mews. The attempts by her well-to-do family to coax her home fail:
'Alice had in fact influenced her - though not in the direction intended. The commiseration in Alice's first manner (which Adelaide had so quickly removed) was a foretaste of the commiseration which lay in wait at Platt's End and Kensington; and sitting there in the beautifully clean tea-room, out of sight and smell of Britannia Mews, Adelaide felt she could more easily bear life with Henry than life in the family bosom...There was also the fact that on imposing on Alice a totally false picture of her marriage, Adelaide had also, for all practical purposes, imposed it on herself.'

After the first section, and its gripping climax, the story introduces new characters, and meanders on up to the Second World War. I found the book became a lot less interesting as it went on. ( )