As a portrait of a life, it's okay. As a portrait of a marriage, it's depressing.
Caroline looks back over her life and all the changes that have come to her. The first romance with an impossible man, the contented marriage to a sensible husband, the incomprehensible children who grow up in a strange era. She always does her duty, and she never expects to be exquisitely happy, but she considers her life good. To some degree this is fine, but the thing that mars the story is her emotionally distant husband. He's difficult to describe because Caroline finds him affectionate and considerate, but she NEVER, never knows quite what he's thinking. He builds up the family fortunes and moves them to a beautiful new home, but is only ever there to sleep and eat. The strange thing is, one feels that he genuinely loves his wife but he is so repressed that she never knows for sure. She seems okay with that, probably because of her ingrained view of a woman's role, but to a modern reader it's sad.

Partway through, the focus shifts to Caroline's troubles with her children, products of the 1920s and worlds away from her own sense of morality and rightness.

Entertainingly written but in the end disappointed my expectations. ( )

This is a gentle book about a very nice woman, Caroline Smith, a traditional wife and mother with an uncommunicative husband of whom she is quietly fond, and two adult children to whom she is devoted. Caroline is kind, diffident and intelligent, with a great deal of common sense.

The story begins at the turn of the last century, when Caroline Chase is seventeen. She lives in Morton, an outer suburb of London which consists of the town, where the common people live, and the common, where the upper classes live. The town and the common do not mix socially, and never intermarry. When Caroline, from the town, meets Victor, from the common, when both are exploring the garden of an abandoned manor house, she knows that they can't be friends in public but hopes anyway. She marries Henry, a man of her own class, capable and ambitious. Henry's eventual success enables him to move his family to a manor house in the equivalent of the common in a neighbouring suburb. All through the book we see the class system through Caroline's perspective: she knows her place, but is determined to fit in where she has to for the sake of her husband and children.

The stages of Caroline's life are delineated by gardens: the overgrown garden of the abandoned manor; the tiny backyard of the house in the town part of Morton, where she grows vegetables; the beautiful, formal garden at the new manor house, with a gardener who ignores her; the garden with which the book ends.

Nothing much happens in Four Gardens, but the writing is so good, the characters are so well-drawn and the social observations are so acute, that it is well worth reading. ( )

Caroline - the heroine of 'Four Gardens' - would be of the same generation as my grandmother. My mother's mother that is; my mother's mother, that is. My father's mother was a good deal younger.

They were born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, near the end of her reign but not so near the end that they didn't remember her. Their values were formed by that age, and by the Edwardian era that followed, and after that they lived through Great War and the repercussions that reverberated through the twenties, the thirties ....

'Four Gardens' was published in the thirties, and I do hope that my grandmother read it. I loved it, and I am quite sure that she would have loved it too.

Caroline grew up in a country town, the daughter of the town grocer, and the daughter of a widowed mother. She grew up in a world where the social order was clear, and it worked well.

‘People on the Common ‘inhabited large detached houses, employed whole-time gardeners, and drove carriage and pair. People in the Town lived in streets, rows, and crescents, had the gardener half a day a week, and transported themselves on foot, in ‘buses, and occasionally on bicycles.’

Caroline and her mother lived quietly and happily in the town, and so Caroline grew up to be quiet, thoughtful and accepting. Sometimes she wondered what life might hold for her, but she didn't go out and look for it, she just waited quietly for it to happen.

But Caroline did look for gardens. She gazed, rapt, into gardens when she and her mother went out for walks. Most of all she loved the wild, neglected garden of an abandoned manor house. In her seventeenth year she found a way into that garden, and she came to think of it as hers. She met a young man, who thought it was his, and that was her first brush with romance.

Caroline hoped that it would be her happy-ever-after, but it wasn't. He was from the common and she was from the town.

"You shouldn't hate anyone, Carrie."
"Except the wicked," said Caroline promptly.
"But we don't know any wicked, dear," said Mrs. Chase

She mourned for a while, but she accepted that her dream would not come true.

Caroline makes a sensible marriage, to a man who, though he was not the love of the life, was a good man. She was content with her role, as a dutiful wife, a loving mother, and a thoughtful daughter. It was a nice, quiet, sensible life, and when adversity came down the values she had been raised with and her love for her family her gave her the strength she needed to prevail.

And her second garden, a very small garden where she grew vegetables, is where she finds solace.

Time brings changes, and her husband's success gives Caroline a new home; a big grand house on the common. It doesn't change her, but it does change her life. She learns to manage her household, and she finds that Lady Tregarthan, who she feared would be too grand for the likes of her, was a kindred spirit.

"I see you've been cleaning silver," said Lady Tregarthan loudly. "If I'd known I'd have come earlier and lent a hand."
"Well!" said Caroline, quite struck. "Do you like it too?"
"Love it," said Lady Tregarthan. "When I was a small child I used to be allowed, as a Saturday treat, to clean the tops of my mother's scent bottle. That is how we were brought up."

They become the best of friends.

Caroline loves the grounds and the gardens of her new home; but she regrets that the presence of a gardener means that it can never be truly hers.

When her children grow, when her husband dies she needs to find strength again; to set them on the right path, and to meet another change of circumstances.

Caroline's fourth home - and her fourth garden - give her the most happiness. Because she knows that she has played her part - as daughter, wife and mother - and because she found them, she made them, herself.

They where what her first garden had been, in her dreams.

I have to believe that Margery Sharp loved people; that sometimes they saddened her, sometimes they amused her; that maybe, like me, that there were so many people in the world and that they all had their own life stories that might be told.

She clearly loved and Caroline; she blessed her with a lovely inner voice and she gave her story exactly the right tone.

There's gentle wit, wry humour and acute observation in this story of a life well lived.

I wish I could find more words, but sometimes a book is simply so right that the words won't come.

Caroline's story ends in the thirties, but I could so easily believe that she was one of the elegant elderly ladies I remember my mother speaking with after church on Sundays when I was a very small girl. They would have been friends of my grandmother.

Now I'm wondering what their stories might have been .... ( )

Four Gardens by Margery Sharp ~ 1935. This edition: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1935. Hardcover. 297 pages.

My rating: 10/10

In the early years of the 20th Century, Caroline Smith lives the quiet life of a dutiful middle class daughter with her widowed mother. Walks on the Common, occasional tea parties and church bazaars, helping with the housekeeping and pursuing quiet amusements; such is her life. Occasionally Caroline muses about her place in the world, and wistfully thinks of what her future may hold, but all in all she is of an accepting nature.

Caroline’s one weakness is gardens; on her strolls with her mother she peers through gates and quietly and deeply absorbs what she sees. We pick up Caroline’s story during her seventeenth year, as she takes possession of her first garden; the abandoned wilderness of an empty estate house. Caroline finds a secret way in, and there in the garden she has her first innocent encounter with romance.

Time moves on, and that first garden is lost to Caroline, but after some secret mourning she accepts it as something that must be. She marries a good (though not romantic) man, has two children, and does her duty in all of her relationships even though they are not always what she’d hoped for. The second garden, very different from the first, is a balm to Caroline’s sometimes troubled soul, and is the backdrop of her early wifehood and motherhood, darkly overshadowed by the Great War.

Circumstances change for the better; Caroline is presented with a chance at a new life and a rise in her social position; she gracefully takes it all in stride, though she quietly remains the same thoughtful, uncomplaining soul. Her third garden is one in which a didactic gardener holds sway; Caroline secretly mourns her new distance from physical contact and a real relationship with the plants and the soil, but she does the correct thing as always and goes forward into this newer, more luxurious world as staunchly as she faced adversity in her younger days.

The fourth garden is the one Caroline creates for herself when her situation again changes; though the smallest and most makeshift, it is perhaps the most satisfying. Life has come full circle, and there is a strong sense of the fitness of things.

This is a gentle but not sentimental book; Margery Sharp keeps it crisp and interesting by allowing us to hear the ongoing commentary of Caroline’s innermost thoughts. Though I continually call Caroline gentle and accepting (and rightly so), she is also keenly perceptive of both her own and others’ motivations and reactions; her inner voice is wry and quietly witty. We are therefore thoroughly on her side as she copes with difficult social situations, troublesome relationships, a well-meaning but emotionally distant husband, and confusingly complex and progressively minded (but by-and-large loving) children.

Not as full of parody as some of Margery Sharp’s works, Four Gardens is a touch more serious and thought-provoking. Beautifully written; often very funny; occasionally very poignant. By the end, the story has become something of a celebration of the quiet satisfaction of dealing well with the not always exciting commonplace life one is dealt by fate, keeping one’s head up, and carrying on.

Very highly recommended.

***

Updated to add a contemporary review I have just discovered, from the New York Times Saturday Review of Books, February 1, 1936


FOUR GARDENS. Margery Sharp. Putnams. 1935. $2.50.

There is refreshment in this book of Margery Sharp’s, a cool sanity that is infinitely restful. She has by nature something of the Jane Austen touch, springing from a detached, quiet power of observation, a delicious, satirical way of relishing affectation, and a respect for sensible, genuine people.

It is a quiet book, the life-story of a woman to whom very little ever happens, a woman as undistinguished as her name of Caroline Smith. But it is a pleasure to read about her and her great good sense; she is lovable in her simplicity, and because of the gentle, irrepressible spark of humor that she possesses. But for all her simplicity she has maturity and wisdom. There is a note of high comedy, rare enough in these days, in the deftness with which she copes with her two ultra-modem children.

All the details are so right and neat, the shades of social difference in the little English town where Caroline lives shown to such nicety, the varying relationships between people set forth with so much exactness and delicacy, that the book makes delightful reading.

***

Note: Four Gardens may be a bit hard to come across, as it was published early in Margery Sharp’s long career and was eclipsed by her later, much more highly publicised works. A few copies show up on AbeBooks, but be prepared to pay a premium price, $40 into the hundreds, for a hardcover in good condition. There appears to have been at least one reissue in paperback in the 1960s, so there should be reasonably priced editions out there in the used book world for a patient collector to track down. ( )