I'm very excited to be involved in another blog tour for the British Library's Women Writers series today as it's one of my favourite series and the books are so beautifully put together. It's always a fun day when I get book post from this series, and I'm very grateful for my gifted copies of the three new titles which have been released in October and November, The Love Child by Edith Oliver, Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs, and Which Way? by Theodora Benson. The fourth title in this instalment, A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse has had some printing delays but is still due to publish on November 11th.
Originally published in 1931, Which Way? was Benson's fourth novel. These days, her work is hard to find, but at the time she was writing she was both prolific and popular, as the interesting contextual and biographical information at the start of the book states. I love these little snippets of background research, because they really help to place the book and author in their time, as many of these authors are ones we may not have heard of before.
In the story, the reader returns three times to one specific point in the life of the heroine, Claudia. She is deciding where to spend a weekend and choosing between three different invitations, each of which leads her life somewhere dramatically different. Through these three choices, different aspects of life as a woman in the 1930s are explored.
It took me a few chapters to get immersed in what was going on in the story, but I ended up really loving this book. It's very unusual and I don't think I've read anything quite like it before (although I definitely am going to be re-watching Sliding Doors since finishing it!), but because we kept returning to the same starting point, certain aspects of the story became very familiar, and I felt that I was able to get more familiar with Claudia herself than if this had been a traditional linear narrative. The stories that Theodora Benson chose to tell about Claudia's life weren't quite the ones I expected, and I found it really refreshing to read some variations on the theme of acceptable ways to be a woman in 1930 something.
A lot of the novels in this series inhabit a very similar sort of world - often they include upper class families, and young women who either are trying to get married, accidentally happen to get married, or think they don't want to get married, and regularly they include a fair amount of respectability politics (or lots of chat about what's socially acceptable in the circles that the characters move in). This to me is a fascinating bit of social history, because were I to have lived in that time I'm pretty sure these are not the circles my family would have been moving in, so I find it really interesting to delve into stories of how the other half lives!
Which Way? is made up of a lot of different social engagements, weekends at the country homes of friends and weekends visiting parents (at the family's country home). The decision about where to spend the weekend has a heavy impact on which friends remain in Claudia's life, and how much time she spends at social events and visiting family, and the way that this is explored is very well done.
Eventually I was left with a slight feeling of frustration because all three of the possible lives for Claudia involved quite a few of the same situations which I wanted her to be able to avoid (in a kind of 'do better next time' way, which is silly because obviously she's not actually living each of these lives), but alas she didn't. In the end, though, Which Way? is a very interesting concept, executed very well by a talented author and I'm very glad to have read it.
Find lots more thoughts, reviews and information about the latest releases in the Women Writers series but catching up with the rest of the blog tour! All of the titles in the series so far can be bought from the British Library's shop and you can find the entire series here.
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