Somehow, I started following Persephone Books on Instagram. This is a UK “publisher of neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly mid-20th century, in elegant grey editions. A bookshop, too.” Now I want to go to the UK just to go to this bookshop.
The reviews they post of books they’ve chosen to republish are always so compelling I add the novels to my TBR list, but some are hard to find in the U.S.
Fortunately, my library had an old copy of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield, which was superb.
More recently, I was drawn in by the blurb for High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, and bought the kindle edition from Persephone Books:
Persephone Books edition
"High Wages (1930) was Dorothy Whipple's
second novel. It is about a girl called Jane who gets a badly-paid job in a
draper’s shop in the early years of the last century. Yet the title of the book
is based on a Carlyle quotation – ‘Experience doth take dreadfully high wages,
but she teacheth like none other’ – and Jane, having saved some money and been
lent some by a friend, opens her own dress-shop.
As Jane Brocket writes in her Persephone Preface: the novel ‘is a celebration
of the Lancastrian values of hard work and stubbornness, and there could be no
finer setting for a shop-girl-made-good story than the county in which cotton
was king.’"
This sweet old-fashioned novel is
the story of Jane Carter, a young girl who arrives in the small England town of
Tidsley, looking for work. She is clever, pretty, well-spoken, and has a bit of
experience working in a shop, so when she sees an ad in the window of Mr.
Chadwick’s draper’s shop, she applies. And thus, her life story begins.
Jane navigates the world through a career in retail. First, she is the exploited shopgirl working for
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| An old edition with a funner cover |
WWI is seen through the lens of its effects on Tidsley and on small-town commerce. Men go away. Some come back unscathed (like the well-to-do, handsome, but vapid Noel Yarde) while others are changed (the bookish, sensitive librarian Wilfrid). But Jane’s star continues to rise throughout.
In fact, Jane has her life, and her narrow world, well under control, until she falls in love with the wrong man.
The novel contrasts the industry and generosity of the working class compared to the cheapness, greed, and exploitative natures of the employers. The upper class (wealthy professionals and their monied offspring) are shown as lazy, boring, and bored. The story has an almost allegorical feel to it, but isn’t quite a “lesson” novel. It’s a quick, fascinating read. A period piece. And delightful.
