New Year's Eve Ball, and a Virago favourite

The Misses Mallett by EH Young

[AKA The Bridge Dividing]

published 1922

[excerpt] While the ladies were having tea, Susan was busy in their bedrooms laying out their gowns, and Henrietta, chancing to pass the open door, peeped in. The bed was spread with the rose-pink and apricot dresses of their choice, with petticoats of corresponding hues, with silken stockings and long gloves and fans; and on the mound made by the pillows two pairs of very high-heeled slippers pointed their narrow toes. It might have been the room of two young girls, and, before she fluttered down to tea, Henrietta took another glance at the mass of yellow tulle on her own bed…

At 8 o’clock the four Miss Malletts assembled in the drawing room. Caroline was magnificent. Old lace veiled the shimmering satin of her gown and made it possible to wear the family emeralds… She was magnificent, and terrible…

They had all managed to express themselves: Caroline in the superb attempt at overcoming her age, and Sophia in the softness of her apparel; Rose in filmy black and pearls round her firm throat, gently proud and distant; and Henrietta was like some delicately gaudy insect, dancing hither and thither, advancing and withdrawing…

comments: EH Young was a successful middlebrow, ‘women’s’ author in her day, and Virago reprinted many of her books in the 1980s. (It’s always a mystery to me why the Virago decision-makers were so prejudiced against Dorothy Whipple – they were open that they would never ‘descend’ to her, though to the modern eye there isn’t a cigarette paper to slide between Whipple and many of the Virago standards.)

Anyway – Young had an interesting private life herself, and wrote novels about people’s lives, mostly in Bristol. She’s good on the intricacies of love, has three-dimensional characters and although the settings and families may seem familiar, she has a line in unexpected events and ways of looking at life.

The Misses Mallett consist of two sisters, a younger half-sister, and a niece (daughter of their wayward and now deceased brother). They all live together in considerable comfort – no money worries for the older Misses Mallett, although they are not super-rich or aristocratic. Just ladylike. (And it is a refreshing change for books of this kind and era that money doesn't feature much). There is a neighbour who is rather an attractive and well-off man – nicely poised as a possible beau? The book follows them through several years, and it is somewhat hard to place in timing, because there is no mention ever of the First World War, which you would expect to feature. So turn of the century then?

There are some lovely turns of phrase – Rose, out and about in the area where she has spent her life, says ‘For me the whole countryside is scattered with little broken bits of love’.  

She and Henrietta are still young enough to hope for more from life.

The aging older sisters, Caroline and Sophia are so strange and endearing and unimagineable – they share (almost) everything, even sleep in the same bed, and are sliding into old age while remaining childlike in some ways. ‘The Malletts don’t marry’ says Sophia.

(This reminded me of an obscure much-loved book, Randell Jarratt’s 1954 Pictures from an Institution. One of my favourite lines from it is ‘She had never married, neither had her mother, her grandmother, any of the Battersons – one felt that’)

But maybe Rose or Henrietta will break out – their relationship is complex and very well-done. It is genuinely unclear how the marriage plot will work out…

Henrietta has an admirer called Charles, and he is very well-drawn as being wholesome and good, but incredibly annoying, and someone nowadays we would be busy diagnosing as on the spectrum.

It’s an interesting read, always threatening to become too melodramatic, but then pulling back, as when Henrietta is ‘rather impressed by the depth of her own thoughts’.

And of course a New Year’s Eve ball is something that we will always enjoy round here (last year’s was in George Eliot’s Silas Marner).

There will be quite dramatic goings-on here, and there is a hostess character who is, hilariously, getting quite concerned that her social events are having bad effects…

Mrs Batty was cured of giving parties. It was after her ball that X died, and it was after her garden-party  that Y finally collapsed…. Mrs Batty felt that the largest and most expensive wreath procurable could not approach the expression of her grief. It was no good talking to Mr Batty about it; he would only say he had been against the ball and garden-party from the first…’

Fashion illustrations showing clothes by Madeleine Cheruit, from Wikimedia Commons.

Two more dresses from Georges Barbier