These ten short stories are a selection made from three volumes of
stories that Dorothy Whipple published in her lifetime. Five of
them were read on BBC Radio 4 from 22-26 October.Dorothy Whipple's
key theme is 'Live and Let Live'. And what she describes throughout
her short stories are people, and particularly parents, who defy
this maxim. For this reason her work is timeless, like all great
writing. It is irrelevant that Dorothy Whipple's novels were set in
an era when middle-class women expected to have a maid; when fish
knives were used for eating fish; when children did what they were
told. The moral universe she creates has not changed: there are
bullies in every part of society; people try their best but often
fail; they would like to be unselfish but sometimes are greedy.Like
George Eliot, like Mrs Gaskell, like EM Forster, Dorothy Whipple
describes men and women in their social milieu, which in her case
is the inter-war period, and shows them being all- too human. But
her books are not nostalgia reads either, any more than reading
George Eliot or Forster is a nostalgia read, nor are they
old-fashioned or simplistic. Her prose, it is true, is pure,
uncluttered, straightforward, pared down to the bone and never
labours the point; her subtlety is the reason why so many people
generally those who have not read her overlook her excellence. But
the TLS wrote in 1941, about her second volume of stories, After
Tea, 'Nobody is more shrewd than Mrs. Whipple in hitting off
domestic relations or the small foibles of everyday life' and in
1961, after the publication of Wednesday: 'Economy and absence of
fuss these are Mrs. Whipple's outstanding virtues as a
writer.'While Anthony Burgess, notorious for his dislike of 'women
writers', commented in 1961 that 'these stories of the commonplace,
with their commonplace-seeming style, are illuminating and
startling.'Above all, Dorothy Whipple is a storyteller. Persephone
has published four of her novels and each one is a page- turner;
but it is a feat indeed to make a short story into a page-turner
since normally a story is a photograph, an impression, an
atmosphere. The plots are certainly 'quiet' Ernest and Alice
oppress their daughter, a woman is divorced by her husband and only
allowed to see her children on Wednesday afternoons, a man puts
flowers on his late wife's grave but the effect on our empathy for,
and understanding of, her characters is profound. Dorothy Whipple
is a deeply observant and compassionate - and timeless writer; at
last she is being acknowledged as the superb writer she is.
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