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Chargement... Alicepar Elizabeth Eliot
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  jillrhudy | Apr 8, 2019 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série éditorialeFurrowed Middlebrow (26)
But the servants Anything might happen to them. They might go in a train to Woolwich and meet the love of their lives, or be murdered almost for the asking. Not that one wanted to be murdered exactly, but there was frustration in being denied the possibility.From an author The Queen called "a humorist of the first order" comes the deliciously dark tale of the strange and woeful young womanhood of Margaret, the narrator of Elizabeth Eliot's debut novel, and her friend Alice, from their final year at boarding-school in the late 1920s until just before World War II.The girls have adventures at school, are presented at court, and experience the vicissitudes of high society and their eccentric, increasingly impoverished families. Alice marries, unhappily, and involves Margaret in her hardships, until she suddenly decides--with fabulous success--to become an actress. And through it all the young women engage in loopy existential ponderings about their fates, gleefully detailing the radical instability of their world. Anxious characters marooned in a world without safe harbour--a tragic circumstance, but, in Eliot's hands, an absolutely hilarious one. Evoking by turn the morbid humour of Barbara Comyns and the high society sorrows of Rachel Ferguson, Alice is very much its own brilliant confection.Furrowed Middlebrow and Dean Street Press also publish three of Eliot's later novels--Henry, Mrs. Martell, and Cecil--all back in print for the first time in more than half a century. They all feature a new introduction by Elizabeth Crawford."Miraculously good . . . delightful and wise and irreproachably understanding" The Bookman"This is surely the most impressive first novel of the year. Elizabeth Eliot is a writer to watch" The Queen"A first novel of singular originality . . . so endearing in spirit that it is hard not to feel for it a kind of personal affection" Daily Telegraph"I can pay her no higher compliment than to say that the nearest thing to it I know in literature are the deliciously malicious books of Elizabeth and Her German Garden." The Sphere"An enticing book" Tatler"Miss Eliot is a superb portrait painter" The Spectator Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823Literature English & Old English literatures English fictionClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.75)
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Margie is the narrator, and she has a roommate at a lousy girls' school named Alice. Alice is prettier and more fragile than Margie, and Margie worries about Alice, who can't seem to get her life together despite money, beauty, and talent. Their good friend, Geoffrey, also worries about Alice, and whether good things or bad things (or bad people) are happening to Alice, Margie and Geoffrey show up and share in her good or bad fortune.
An underlying theme is the irritating presence of old class expectations. Margie and Alice are all for the money--what is left of it--but wriggle their way out of leftover Victorian ideas about what is proper for women of the gentility. The niceties of the century past are like the furniture in the shut-up rooms of country houses that no one can afford to staff or heat any longer; they need to be dust-covered and forgotten. So Margie will study typing and get a job, and Alice will marry and divorce whoever she likes.
As is typical of early 20th century novels, there is fear associated with the new and the modern. In the new century following World War I, the kids must create their own destinies, and some of them, like Alice, do not know how. They have torn down the old expectations, and while some of them manage to get by as happy hedonists, others are lost, waiting for a new life to simply happen to them (as the old gentility did). Alice has a weird painting of a garden between seasons that symbolizes this.
The focus is so much on Alice that the narrator is a bit of a sleeper. When the novel ended, I realized that Margie was always well in control and always took good care of herself throughout all the vicissitudes of whatever-shall-we-do-about-Alice? Likewise, Geoffrey never had any real problems taking care of himself. Alice's two good friends are the stabilizing figures in a novel that flits around, parties, hunts, and sails at a steady Bright Young Things pace. (