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'...She had the grace of silence, of reflection, to a rare degree. Some people found her frightfully dull, but then imagine what "some people" are, it can be said that their disapproval is a distinction that no fairly admirable person should ever be without...'

from To Lamoir, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen

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'...There is Shih-li-p'u, a village of temples. In one of its temples the stair has crumbled away, but, by climbing the wall, we found in an upper room some restful paintings representing rather overdressed persons on fat piebald horses cutting one another's heads off. The optimistic expressions of the severed heads while still in mid-air was a lesson to us all...'

from Yunnan-II, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

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'His eyes were closed against her beauty, else he had seen the sudden smile that touched her beauty, touched it and was going, going, lurked a while in the depths of her eyes like a very small bird in the ferns of love-in-the-mist, and lo! was gone.'

from The Three-Cornered Moon, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen

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"A laugh was circling among the ladies of whom Adrian was the centre; first low, and as he continued some narration, peals resounded, till those excluded from the fun demanded the cue, and ladies leaned behind gentlemen to take it up, and formed an electric chain of laughter. Each one, as her ear received it, caught up her handkerchief, and laughed, and looked shocked afterwards, or looked shocked and then spouted laughter. The anecdote might have been communicated to the bewildered cavaliers, but coming to a lady of a demurer cast, she looked shocked without laughing, and reproved the female table, in whose breasts it was consigned to burial: but here and there a man's head was seen bent, and a lady's mouth moved, though her face was not turned toward him, and a man's broad laugh was presently heard, while the lady gazed unconsciously before her, and preserved her gravity if she could escape any other lady's eyes; failing in which, handkerchiefs were simultaneously seized, and a second chime arose, till the tickling force subsided to a few chance bursts."

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXVI)

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'We live in a world of generalisations, which the wise never tire of telling the foolish to mistrust, and with which the foolish never tire of pointing the failures of the wise.'

from The Ace of Cads, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen

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'"...that period [...] when science shall have produced an intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate. For what despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge?"'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXIV)

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'"...I see now that the national love of a lord is less subservience than a form of self-love; putting a gold-lace hat on one's image, as it were, to bow to it."'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXIV)

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'"Speech is the small change of Silence."'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXIV)

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'"We are all as God made us," sighed the young gentleman.

"By no means," said the Princess Baba, "for some people are charming and some are not, and what does God know of charm? It is dreadful to lie awake at night thinking that God lacks charm. Yet the word is never so much as mentioned in the Bible."'

from May Fair by Michael Arlen (Prologue)

The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (1891)

This is a really elegant and typical late-Victorian novel. It has the expectable richness of description and breadth of incident; it has the social divisions and indeed comedy; it has the discursive spread. I would lay some emphasis on the elegance. The style is poetically backboned whilst being comfortingly familiar, and has the tonal depth that presents the reader with the feeling of dramatic immersion. Her faults are here, too. She has a tendency toward the hothouse - a feeling of dramatic twisting to serve plot which is, of course, not unfamiliar, and oddly quite re-assuring, but still disserves the highest ambition. Her novels seem to me to be alternating. The first and third are slightly more ascetic, a little quieter and shorter, whereas the second and this one are greater, more spreading pieces that capture a whole group in their society and exigencies. But after all that, whatever it is that draws them together is stronger than that which separates them. The identifiably notable Malet style and the world it creates is rich and enveloping: so much so that characters are beginning to re-appear from the previous novels in subsequent ones - her fictional notion was clearly an all-embracing one. Henry James thought very highly of her; she is certainly a deeply satisfying, rounded tale-teller.

Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby (1937)

This collection of letters were written to 'Rosalind' from 'Celia'. Rosalind was Jean McWilliam and Celia, of course, Winifred Holtby. They met in a WAAC camp at Huchenneville in France toward the end of the Great War, where McWilliam was in command and Holtby her hostel-forewoman. An instant mutual respect and friendship bloomed and they became lifelong correspondents. As, after the war, McWilliam soon became a headmistress in South Africa they saw one another in the flesh very rarely. These letters expose a part of Holtby I hadn't divined in reading her first two novels - her amazonian quality and her political and philosophical savvy. But just in case that sounds rather serious it needs mentioning that the other thing they expose is her light-heartedness and wit. The sun shines and hope echoes through these missives; it's a bright book. She discusses her own novels and those of others with a self-deprecating strength of appreciation; she gives flavourful impressions of life as it was lived by her day to day; she analyses popular politics with insight; she argues lovingly and with even passion when disagreeing with McWilliam. This book also allows deep glimpses into her friendships with Vera Brittain and Stella Benson and her part in those literary times - an influence lost with her early death in 1935.

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'"...Kissing don't last: cookery do!"'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXVIII)

The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (1936)

This is in one sense a phenomenal departure from the previous efforts of this joint author. Both A House is Built and Green Memory are novels set in Australia and among colonial families, involving their businesses, reputations, and generational life (including a few cataclysms). I wonder whether Marjorie Barnard or Flora Eldershaw came to the fore with this one, and imagine a more balanced share in the earlier two. It is one of a fascinating group of novels from the age of sea-travel: Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, V Sackville-West's No Signposts in the Sea and Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools immediately come to mind as examples. This one is quite Woolfian in a sense, with a small group of characters, passengers on a freight ship in a contemporary 30s milieu, on a journey from Antwerp to Fremantle. Their small tragedies and comedies, their prepossessions and social sniping are recorded by the main character, a writer, whose efforts to distil what she imagines as their back-story are included in the novel. For its impressionism, simple poetic description, malicious comedy, and rich rushes of deeper sadness I value this book. Vastly more valuable than its non-existent reputation would imply.

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'The philosophy of the point of view is a great and illuminating philosophy; but it tends somewhat to the promotion of pessimism, showing, as it does, the permanent and surprisingly great gulf fixed between one human mind and another.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book VII, Chapter I)

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'Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection. Once characters have been born they assume a complete life about which everything exists, waiting to be recorded. The whole of art lies in the omissions.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', October 6th 1926 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

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'It is comparatively easy, under certain conditions, to forgive our neighbour his own trespasses; but it is well-nigh impossible to forgive him the trespasses he makes us ourselves commit.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book VI, Chapter IV)

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'Hitherto it had been simply a sentimental dalliance, and gossips had maligned the lady. Just when the gossips grew tired of their slander, and inclined to look upon her charitably, she set about to deserve every word they had said of her; which may instruct us, if you please, that gossips have only to persist in lying to be crowned with verity, or that one has only to endure evil mouths for a period to gain impunity.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXIV)