In the past decade or so I've become a fan of numerous British women writers from the middle of the 20th century. Some, like Nancy Mitford, are still pretty well-known; her novel The Pursuit of Love was adapted (not for the first time) by the BBC and aired / streamed in 2021.
But most of the writers I've been enjoying are not that well-known anymore: Elizabeth Cadell, Noel Streatfeild (and her alter ego Susan Scarlett), Betty Smith, D. E. Stevenson, and others. Most of them were working writers, and very prolific. Their books are being re-issued, and are available as e-books at attractively low prices. Cadell is my favorite at the moment because of her humor -- at my age, not many writers make me laugh as she does -- but I've begun buying and reading Stevenson.
Most of these women began publishing before World War II, so their books give a glimpse into life in England just before and during the war. It's a bit eerie to read their (or their characters') experience of what is now history: the 21st century reader knows what will happen, but they don't. I've dipped into one of D. E. Stevenson's series, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment and its sequels. The first book originated as Stevenson's diary, recounting her experiences as an Army wife from 1932 onward. She fictionalized it and it became popular, so she followed Mrs. Tim and her family into the postwar years.
Today I tentatively started Mrs. Tim Carries On, originally published in 1941. The Kindle re-issue opened to an introduction by another writer, which eulogized Stevenson and writers like her. Most of it was unexceptionable until I reached this passage:
The appeal that they have for the contemporary reader lies in the fact that there is no artifice in these books. They are not about dysfunctional people. They are not about psychopathology. There is no gore or sadism in them. The characters speak in sentences and do not resort to constant confrontational exchanges. In other words, these books are far from modern. But therein, perhaps, lies the charm to which Stevenson’s many readers are so quick to respond.
To each his own, but this really isn't true. I'm not sure how he jumped from "no artifice" (all fiction is artifice) to no "dysfunctional people", and the 1930s are definitely modern. It's true that most of these books, including Stevenson's, have little overt sex or violence, but novels set in wartime have mass violence hanging over them, or raging offstage. Mrs. Tim wrote, "Indeed my diary is a sort of escape from the war ... though it is almost impossible to escape from the anxieties which it brings", including air raids -- violent death was part of everyday life in those years for English civilians, no less than English soldiers. Most of these books featured varying amounts of romance, but explicit eroticism was forestalled by legal censorship as well as by genre conventions. For all that, Mrs. Tim's four children were not virgin births, though some readers will consider stories about large families "clean" as long as they can pretend that no bodily fluids were exchanged to produce them.
Besides, books like these were and are a publishing niche. The same readers who turned to them for a soothing draught of wholesome family life (some of Mrs. Tim's wackier escapades remind me of I Love Lucy) might on another day pick up a murder mystery full of psychopathology and sadism, or a gothic like Daphne DuMaurier's 1938 best-seller Rebecca. (Would Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre count as "modern"? Or Shakespeare? Their characters "speak in sentences" too.) One popular genre that I find rather weird is the "cozy" mystery, which takes place in small towns that suffer inventively spectacular murders as often as the series authors can turn them out. That's not what I consider cozy, but ...
Perhaps you're wondering what disingenuous clown wrote the introduction that annoyed me so much. So was I, until I reached the end and found the writer's name: Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, along with numerous other feel-good series. It made a kind of sense: McCall Smith has progressively toned down the "mystery" elements of Precious Ramotswe's investigations as he's ground out the tomes, and his other series are even less eventful - but also less interesting to me. I still read the Precious Ramotswe books as they are published, but it seems to me that the characters are increasingly becoming one-dimensional collections of tics. A bit more "artifice," like Western civilization, would be a good idea. Stevenson, Mitford, Cadell, Streatfield do this sort of thing much better.
