Rather less expansively inventive than Gardam's novels, these short
stories again celebrate kinks, clove hitches, and remarkable
stretches of the ties that bind one person to another. In the title
story, a Jane Austen devotee, having inherited never-opened Austen
letters quite probably written to a lover (!), burns them unread,
thereby robbing the world (and a greedy professor) of a prize, but
also paying back "a little of a great debt" to Jane herself. In
another tale, three tottery ex-raj dames of withered fortune,
hooting at tea, are brought up short when it seems that their
deceased and lowly nanny (the "perfect servant") has left a sizable
legacy in return for a child's long-ago kindness. Old obsessions
and possessions have a way of mucking up the present: a marriage
will forever be shadowed by the appearance of an ex-lover to a
young mother at a seaside cottage; and in the rural home of an army
wife, a ghost ruins a happy dream of belonging to an ages-old
"neighborly" community. Firm sets of the heart can be skewed in an
instant: a hip, globe-trotting youth switches affection from a
summer's barefoot love to his father's elegant digs and daily
pleasures; an unwary homosexual, lured into becoming the sole guest
of sexually ambivalent newlyweds, finds a shocking attraction which
sends him on strange and frantic errands. And both love and fear
wear masks: for the wife who "wants pity more than love," a husband
is compelled to pretend adultery; a dotty old couple, by showing
fear behind their maddening obtuseness, inadvertently give hope to
a mourning niece. A few of these vignettes are efficiently breezy
and self-contained - a housewife preparing for her son's arrival
with a Chinese girlfriend ("If she's the Chairman Mao style we'll
not get on") or the lyrical bath song of a house-breaking tramp -
but most of Gardam's eccentric-edged people seem to demand
novelistic space and time for rummaging through all their dark and
bizarre corners. Not prime Gardam, then, but brightly appealing
nonetheless: civilized, slightly offbeat treats for a fairly
special readership. (Kirkus Reviews)
Jane Austen's love life- long the subject of speculation- is
finally, delightfully dealt with in the title story of this
collection. Many of the other stories, like 'The Sidmouth Letters,'
bring together past and present- with sometimes hilarious,
sometimes disturbing, often intensely moving results. With quiet
elegance and devastating accuracy, Jane Gardam probes many and
varied lives. We meet a trio of Kensington widows, mean-spirited
and middle-aged, paying improbable tribute to a long exploited
nanny; we await- with dread- a stranger to tea in an Engliish home;
we witness the mercurial changes that take place in young love, and
we watch as a bohemian, passionate past returns to tempt domestic
bliss.
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