BOOK REVIEW: Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Ready for another book about booksellers and writers? Natalie Jenner’s new historical novel, Bloomsbury Girls, is a delight.

Set in London in late 1949-early 1950, this post-war story follows the fates of three strong women as they cope with the world as it is and try to change it for the better. Vivien Lowry is a strikingly beautiful woman who lost her fiancé to the war. A talented writer, she has taken a job in the fiction department of Bloomsbury books to pay the bills while she secretly pursues her art. Grace Perkins, an abused wife and mother of two young sons, finds temporary escape from an unbearable home life as a secretary to the manager of the store. Evie Stone (first introduced in Jenner’s previous charming novel, The Jane Austen Society) has come to the bookstore after graduating from Cambridge and finding that, despite her very evident talents, the world of academia favors mediocre men over brilliant women. She once again takes up cataloguing rare books, but has a secret, ambitious plan of her own.

The novel brings to life the post-war literary world and explores the limitations on women that are particularly galling after the crucial homefront roles they played during the war. It is the female friendships that drive the story, but each of the women has a love interest as well. The men in the story are not exactly secondary in importance, but their roles are to antagonize or to support the women.

It’s a quiet book, one that I picked up and put down many times before finishing. Nevertheless, it was not one I would have considered giving up on. I wanted to see how the three women would succeed and what that success would look like. 

The novel stands alone very well, but I recommend reading The Jane Austen Society first, both for some backstory and because that book is so wonderful it shouldn’t be missed.