I have become an admirer of Diana Athill through reading four of her books of memoir – and I have a couple more tbr. She is a wonderful teller of tales, her memoirs written with great warmth and honesty. Midsummer Night in the Workhouse was my first experience of Athill’s fiction.

These twelve stories first appeared in the late 1950s or early 1960s, ten of them published with four others under the title An Unavoidable Delay in 1962. This lovely Persephone collection was published in 2011 – with Athill able to write her own preface – she is one of only a few living authors to be published by Persephone. The endpapers taken from a fabric purchased by Diana Athill for her flat in the 1970s.

In this collection Athill writes about young women experiencing the world of love and sex for the first time. Smart, sexy, knowing stories, touched with gentle humour and some well-developed characterisation.

A young girl is enraptured by her first kiss at a dance, with an unexciting young man in The Real Thing which opens the collection. The girl is touchingly young, finds so many situations to be ‘utterly withering’ and unkindly calls her companion Thomas ‘Toofat’ in her head – his last name is Toogood. He is at least old enough to drive a car. In No Laughing Matter another young girl – a university student – who is absolutely smitten with her boyfriend Stephen – has to decide whether it is time to take their relationship to the next level.

“For twelve weeks these anxieties had buzzed like mosquitoes, teasing at the decision, giving her the circles under her eyes and spoiling her appetite. The more formidable they became, the more certain she was that she would do it in spite of them. The decision was harder than she had expected, involved more than the general principle of the thing which, though frightening, was simple. She was suffering for it, and the more she suffered the greater became her exaltation.”
(No Laughing Matter)

Most of these quiet stories are set in England, and the point of view is mainly, though not exclusively that of women. Two stories take place abroad, one in Italy and one in Greece. Although the themes of many of these stories are very similar – they each standalone perfectly – characters are clearly distinct from one another.

Adultery rears its head in a couple of stories – in the first of them, we meet one woman living in boredom with her husband. Her memory, keeping alive, her brief fling with a slight social acquaintance. In, For Rain It Hath a Friendly Sound Kate Beeston is floored by a casual phone call from her former lover she watches her husband in the garden – and recalls the week she spent with David Field when her husband was away. This was one of my favourite stories, for me it had the feel of the kind of story Elizabeth Taylor could have written.

“The name had stabbed her – ‘It’s David Field here’ – so that Kate had reached for something to lean on, but then an odd contentment had come down on her and it had been an effort to understand what he was saying. She had wanted only to listen to the sound of his voice.”
( For Rain It Hath a Friendly Sound)

In the title story, a writer tries desperately to find her writing mojo – at a writing retreat. There are a host of quirky characters installed – including a practised seducer – who all delight in poking fun at the house rules, and the odd little messages pinned up on the communal notice board.

One story told from a male point of view is An Afternoon Off. Tweedy middle-aged Roger Paul, who works for a publisher has rarely had a day off, never taken his full holiday entitlement. One afternoon he decides to not go back to the office – he doesn’t phone them to explain either. He goes to the cinema and has tea with a young woman who he tries not to notice is a bit common and tells him about her boyfriend. He finds it is all a little bit disappointing.

In the final story Buried – a middle aged woman finds herself skulking through the farmyard of her brother’s neighbour. It is a couple of years since Mrs Klein last visited her Colonel brother. Their peculiar adventure gives her chance to recall their childhood, how her elder brother had been everything to her before he went away to school – and gradually life disrupted that early closeness. In this way, she comes to a new understanding of her brother, realising how he became the man he is.

Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is another excellent short story collection from Persephone books. Diana Athill a writer I continue to read with great relish. ( )

Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is a collection of 12 stories, 10 of which were previously published in the collection An Unavoidable Delay. Diana Athill is no stranger to the publishing industry; for decades she worked as an editor for Anddre Deutsch (she makes a cameo appearance in Q’s Legacy).

Athill herself wrote the preface to the Persephone edition, and she says that “the discovery that I could write changed my life for the better in a very profound way, so [the stories] mean a great deal to me.” Nevertheless, Athill never published any other fiction and preferred to remain in the background as an editor, although she did publish several memoirs about her career.

The 12 stories in this collection are all very different from one another but have a lot in common nonetheless. One story is a coming of age story written in the breathless excitement of a teenage girl; another is a bizarre tale about two Englishwomen in holiday in Albania. The title story is about a colony of artists in a manor house. I think these stories display Athill’s talent of telling very believable stories. This is a collection that focuses on the struggles—especially sexual—that her characters, most of them female, face. The interplay between these characters and the people they associated are part of the charm and fascination of this collection of stories. ( )

Last week a friend of mine passed a collection of short stories by Lorrie Moore onto me saying, "I know you have a high tolerance of short stories." I took the book but wasn't entirely sure she was right. I have been known to have a very low tolerance of short story collections! However when the stories are well written, when characters are drawn so accurately we quickly understand them and when there is an underlying mood or theme connecting the stories then I am a fan!

Midsummer Night in the Workhouse passes on all three counts. The writing is accomplished, every line seems just right and the stories' protagonists easy to sympathise with. The majority, though not all, of the stories are centred around young women. They were written by Athill between 1958 and 1973. Athill is, of course, best known for her memoirs and it was difficult to avoid the idea that there was something autobiographical about many of these stories. There is a theme of women with the potential to be strong, creative and passionate and intelligent forces, looking for something to complete them and completely failing to find that within their relationships. As a generalisation, the men in these stories make their partners unhappy not through cruelty but by being weaker, less imaginative and less intelligent than them! I think it is significant that the majority of the stories were written in the sixties just on the cusp of feminism being taken seriously in the seventies. I should add, though, that not all the central characters are women. In An Afternoon Off, reliable Roger, confused by unfamiliar and vague feelings of disatisfaction takes a subversive afternoon off work to do nothing in particular at all!

My favourite stories were the first two about very young women learning about relationships for the first time. My favourite paragraph is at the beginning of Laughing Matter where Jane looking back at her childhood and youth realises that the source of all her youthful passion had not been him but herself!

There had been things not so long ago (or, by Jane's reckoning, years ago) that could become strange and tormenting for no reason: a bonfire throbbing and blazing as though for ever, the flames rushing her eyes up into dizzy night; water folding around the pier of a bridge, into which her inability to flow was suddenly an absurd limitation; an afternoon in summer when she had squatted in a tree, wearing a stolen string of amber beads, and something wonderful had been going to happen-something so wonderful, so imminent, that its not happening had been unbearable. She had suffered the unbearable there in the tree because of the happening which went on keeping itself to itself through a whole hot afternoon. When she was older love was like those things. At first she was not sure whether she was thinking of clothes or a party or men (or a man) because the dazzle of love could be on any of them, not coming out of them but streaming into them from the source in herself out of which the flames and the water and the imminent happening had come. Now, in her first year at university, it was Stephen who received it.

In these stories Athill looks at love, relationships and their limitations at a time when marriage was still widely believed to be all a woman needed. ( )

Diana Athill will celebrate her 94th birthday tomorrow (December 21). Athill retired at the age of 75 after fifty years in publishing, and then went on to write a series of memoirs, one of which (Somewhere Towards The End) won her the 2009 Costa Book Award. She has also written a novel and many short stories. She is one of the most iconic figures in publishing (her response to V.S. Naipaul’s ridiculous comment about women only writing “tosh” was brilliant). Athill’s sharp wit and keen observations inform her latest collection of short stories: Midsummer Night in the Workhouse.

The stories in this collection are connected thematically and revolve around women (mostly young women finding or losing love). In No Laughing Matter, a young woman experiences first love and faces the wrenching decision about whether or not she will lose her virginity. The Real Thing introduces the reader to a woman in her first year of University who is enthralled by her first kiss even though it lacks the passion she had expected.

I stood quite still while Toofat was kissing me – it didn’t take long – and I was doing a lot of things all at once: thinking ‘This is me, being kissed’; remembering Thomas Hardy; noticing the tree with the lights and the green grass outside the windows; listening to the music from the house; smelling the honeysuckle; thinking that I must fix every bit of it in my mind for ever. – from The Real Thing -

Love for the women in Athill’s stories is not always unencumbered – they consider cheating on their spouses, they have one night stands, they get drunk and dream of a life unattached to their husband. One woman has a week long affair and then is haunted by the possibilities for years afterwards as she plods through her predictable marriage. Another woman leaves her husband at a party and walks home alone and drunk – along the way, she appreciates the beauty of a wine glass and the moon in the sky and hopes to remember the feeling of being utterly alone in the world.

I must remember, I must remember how beautiful it is, because now I can see it. It is so still, and the grass has just been cut, and the leaves are being blown, they are just settling together, sometimes, on the air, and the wine glass is standing on the railing, and I am alone. I am me, under the moon, on a summer night, alone. – from An Island -

Perhaps my favorite of the collection is the title story, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, where a writer finds herself at a luxurious retreat battling writer’s block and a charming author whose work is perhaps just ordinary. Cecilia reflects on the other writers at the retreat, and is distracted by Charles Opie, a man whose wife has divorced him because of an affair and who has enjoyed an element of fame associated with his writing. In this story, the sexual tension is played out against the backdrop of a woman’s struggle with her career, self-doubt, and the difficulty of finding inspiration within her life.

The horror in wait at Hetherston, nearest in her room but present everywhere, even after dinner when she talked with the others or pub-crawled with Philip, came from the knowledge of how closely her work connected with her own experience and dread that everything of significance in that experience might have been used up. – from Midsummer Night in the Workhouse -

Athill’s writing is fluid, simple, perceptive and sometimes funny. She is able to capture the internal conflict of her characters with ease, uncovering their insecurities, dreams, joy and despair. I thoroughly enjoyed this delightful collection of stories, slipping into the lives of women who could define a generation. There was a time when a woman was supposed to be proper, not take risks, focus on family instead of career, and be the dutiful wife. Athill’s prose reveals the hidden desires and adventurous spirits of woman who came of age in that era.

Readers who want to be transported by an author who has established herself as one of the best writers of the late twentieth century, will be well rewarded by picking up a copy of Diana Athill’s collection of short stories.

Highly recommended. ( )